FFX Was Finally Broken After 20 Years By Speedrunners

The Final Fantasy series is renowned for its popularity and success, with the games selling 161 million units worldwide by June 2021. Speedrunners have taken on various challenges within these games, and in Final Fantasy 10, they've discovered ways to exploit the game's mechanics to speedrun effectively. This includes strategies that have evolved significantly over time, with recent developments in the game's code by the community leading to a deeper understanding of the game's mechanics. A key example is the any% speed run by Care Card VI, which achieved a sub-10 hour completion on PS2. The run involves traveling through Spira, collecting Aeons, and managing stats and equipment to optimize the run. Unexpected elements such as the Blitzball tournament奖品 and random weapon drops add variance to the run. The possibility of obtaining a 'no encounters' ability through a rare item drop from a ghost in the Cavern of Stolen Faith is also discussed, which, despite its low drop rate, can significantly speed up the game if acquired.

The speedrunning community for Final Fantasy 10 has been dedicated to understanding and exploiting the game's random number generator (RNG) to improve run times. Notably, a speedrunner named Karakarin spent a year grinding to achieve a world record using the game's RNG to his advantage. In 2021, runners Gray Fox and Matayama conducted tests on ghost encounter rates, leading to the hypothesis that encounter rates might be 'seeded,' meaning a set value could determine all encounters in a game session. This was further explored by runners like Rossi, who discovered that the PS2 version's RNG seeds behaved differently than those in the HD remaster. Rossi's research led to a method for determining the number of possible seeds and how to influence them, which was a significant breakthrough for the speedrunning community. This understanding of RNG seeds has since been used to manipulate the game's random elements, such as enemy drops and encounter rates, to the runners' benefit.

The manipulation of RNG in Final Fantasy 10 has been taken to a granular level by the speedrunning community. It was discovered that there are 68 different RNG values that affect various aspects of the game, such as enemy drops, encounter formations, and even camera angles. Rossi developed a method to track the first six in-game attacks to predict ghost encounters, which was a significant step in RNG manipulation. Further research led to the creation of tools that could track and predict not just ghost encounters, but also item drops and even critical hits. This level of control over the game's randomness has allowed runners to perform manipulated runs, achieving personal bests and pushing the limits of what's possible in the game.

The community's efforts to understand and manipulate RNG in Final Fantasy 10 have led to the development of advanced tracking tools. Rossi's work on the PS2 version's RNG values was complemented by Crimson Inferno's seed spreadsheet for the remastered version, which allowed runners to identify their current seed and predict outcomes. Tools were developed to track not just ghost encounters but also equipment drops and rare item rolls, with specific RNG values (RNG 10, RNG 12, and RNG 13) identified as key to these processes. The culmination of these efforts resulted in a comprehensive RNG tracker that could predict encounters, drops, and even critical hits for all seeds in the remastered version of the game. This has had a profound impact on the speedrunning community, allowing for more consistent and faster runs.

The Final Fantasy 10 speedrunning community has seen significant advancements in RNG manipulation, leading to faster and more consistent runs. The development of tools to track and manipulate RNG values has transformed the game's inherent randomness into a calculable and predictable element for speedrunners. This has resulted in category separation in the HD remaster console any% category to accommodate seed manipulation. The community's ongoing research and development have pushed the boundaries of what's possible in the game, with runners achieving times that were previously unimaginable. As the understanding of the game's mechanics and RNG deepens, the potential for further breakthroughs in speedrunning remains an exciting prospect for the community.