Final Fantasy Month

One of the people I'm following on Twitch started up a long race with another guy where they're going to play 21 Final Fantasy games one after another and see who can beat them all first. They're pausing their times when they're sleeping so you can compare the different games between the two of them. Cereth, who I watch with some regularity, actively speedruns 5 of the games on the list. Crumps only speedruns 2 of them. So he should be at a big disadvantage... But apparently Cereth hasn't ever played some of the games and is likely to lose a fair amount of time on those. Especially since one of them is Tactics and a lot of people I know have to completely scrap their first run of that game because it encourages you to save the game right before a brutally hard fight. This means there's no way to go power up... So if you can't win with what you have, and if you don't have a backup save... You're screwed!

They're playing Final Fantasy II now, which neither of them have played much in the past, though at least Crumps is casting berserk to be awesome. One of the things mentioned on the stream is how the game actually has no RTA record time... No one speed runs this thing. Not even once just to get their name in lights... And the split software I use has a lot of game names preprogrammed into it. A _lot_ of game names. Including every single Final Fantasy game, except FFII. Poor FFII.

When I played this game in my marathon, way back in 2011, I didn't know what to do to make the game interesting so I decided to try to beat it as fast as I could. I got done in a little under 16 hours, but I spent a lot of time actually learning how the game works. And given that my raising agility post is one of the few that actually gets hits from outside people I know I think I actually have a pretty high level of knowledge about this game. I also didn't abuse the cancel trick in my last playthrough and that's certainly kosher in a speedrun.

What I'm saying is, I think I could really shave the time down to the level where it would be 'easy' to play the game in one sitting. And seeing all these people tuning in to watch these guys play the game makes me think there may be interest from other people in seeing it done.

I set up my PS2 today, and hooked it up to my USB capture card, and tried setting up a stream from it. I think it's pretty obvious from the quality that I'm using just composite cables instead of s-video since I don't have that wire for my PS2. If I actually get anywhere with doing this I'll have to track a better wire down. But what I do have seemed to be fairly clear regardless, so the technical setup is in place. The next step would be planning out a path through the game (including what chests are worth picking up) and then figuring out how twinked out I have to be to plow through that path. And then grind it up!

It feels a little bad to be deviating from my marathon to go do something else, but whatever! Tactics Advance is not the best so I'm in a bit of a rut anyway.