Free Friday: TNF Recap + My Speedrun Is Dying

The Dolphins and Bills traded first quarter touchdowns, then I put my kid to bed and missed the entire second quarter. How the hell am I supposed to deal with this world where James Cook has three touchdowns without even getting to view two of them live? (It does feel like you enter back into a different world after you put your kid to bed, for real.)

Joe Brady’s shift to the running game continued and the Dolphins couldn’t do much about it. The Bills even rested Josh Allen’s legs a bit after Sunday’s fireworks. Meanwhile, the Dolphins spent the first half forgetting that Tyreek Hill existed. He had as many targets as Jonnu Smith at halftime. And instead they appeared jealous of Buffalo’s run game and pounded the rock with De’Von Achane. Ankle injury that had him questionable? Thursday game? No big, Achane had 14 carries at halftime — 29 touches total for the game. (I’m sure someone smarter than me will tell me that the Dolphins were being baited with easy boxes, or that Tua Tagovailoa was under siege. And that’s fine. But you’re down multiple scores! And he played well into the fourth quarter while others rested!)

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Tagovailoa unleashed a Levis-esque pick-six to open third quarter scoring, and then the football world stopped as he essentially ran head-first into Damar Hamlin’s chest and concussed himself on a fourth-down scramble deep in Buffalo territory down 21.

It’s always difficult to cover and … glorify, I think is the word I want … football knowing that someone’s life could change forever on any play. Especially when it is someone like Tagovailoa who has a long history of concussions and basically immediately went into the fencing position.

I dunno man, it sucks. I want the physicality of the sport to remain intact. I also don’t want this to happen. I feel like there’s a lot about the planet I can’t change that I wish would change, and I compartmentalize what I can. But it certainly does suck to watch 20 more game minutes of football while you’re worried about someone’s life being okay.

What we learned about the Dolphins: Injuries have brought back the long-running trope: The Dolphins have no offensive line. Terron Armstead temporarily left the game to get a shoulder harness adjusted on Tagovailoa’s pick-six — then he left for the game later. Robert Jones had a shoulder injury as well. Other than the fact that Skylar Thompson may not be any good — I think it’s too soon to tell but of course he has a late-round reputation to fight uphill against — he was absolutely obliterated by the Bills defense and barely ever had a clean pocket. He took six pressures in 15 dropbacks per NFL Pro. Armstead and Jones’ statuses are also worth monitoring as we wait to see how Tagovailoa’s latest concussion unfolds.

What we learned about the Bills: They’re here to bully you, and it doesn’t always have to be Josh Allen. I think it’s actually kind of a better fit with Sean McDermott’s ethos as a coach anyway, and it certainly looks good to be able to do this against a playoff team from last year. But I don’t know that we’re actually going to understand what the Bills are about until they face a team that can hang points on their defense and can fit the run. Good on them for easily handling the Dolphins. I’m very curious about their next three games against the Jaguars, Ravens, and Texans.

So Your Speedrun Is Slowly Dying

There are a lot of different ways that players engage with video games and streaming. Some people play a lot of games. Some people get famous enough that they play other games only as sponsored content. Some people have a game or two that they really focus on and branch out. I’ve tried to do that at times — especially before responsibilities really piled up for me. But ultimately, what I am is a one-game runner. I run Final Fantasy IV (Americanized as Final Fantasy 2) on the Super Nintendo. And that’s really pretty much it. I did Barkley Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden as a fun side game, held a lightly-contested world record for it for a bit, and got it into a marathon once. I participated in some speedrun tournaments for other games like Earthbound, Final Fantasy VI, and Chrono Trigger. But what I really am as a streamer is the guy who plays Final Fantasy IV.

And what I am witnessing is that I will probably be the last guy playing Final Fantasy IV.

There are two major leaderboards for Final Fantasy IV SNES — Any% No Credit Warp, which lets you beat the game shortly after Dwarf Castle by using the 64-floor glitch, and Any% No64, which has only a very minor skip but allows all the other major glitches. Any% No64 had some movement recently — I beat the world record with the first-ever run that finished in under three hours last February. Yelsraek, who has several Marble Madness records among other achievements under his belt, completed a 3:10:35 last month.

Yelsraek and I are the only two players in either category to have a new time put up in the last two years. That’s not to say we were the only two to play the game. eLmaGus ran it at Questing For Glory. I ran it at RPG Limit Break. TyrantNeptune does PB attempts every once in awhile. I’m sure Aexoden and neerrm have played it at some point in the last two years. But despite this in theory being a golden era for running this game — I came up with an entirely new category this past year — almost nobody is actually running the game anymore.

There are tons of games that will never even get this kind of retrospective, and I understand it. Nobody is mourning the death of the Arcana speedrun. But when you have the popularity that FF4 once had — it and Earthbound are the only RPGs in the top 15 games by total players on Speedrun.com, to name one small measure of what I’m talking about here rather than relying on vague appeals to history — it is still surprising to see the game so neglected. There are plenty of healthy speedrun scenes on the Super Nintendo.

So let me give you the five reasons why, from my perspective, this scene is dying.

1) It’s my fault — the randomizer I theorized is better than the vanilla game

Free Enterprise, a game by b0ardface with initial game design by me, is the thriving FF4 scene at the moment. They have a couple major tournaments every year, a couple of side tournaments, and a discord full of people racing, playing casually, and rolling wacky flags to play with. They are welcoming and it is a great crew of people.

The major problem, and I will dive into pain points in section two of this, is Free Enterprise doesn’t actually act as a funnel to the vanilla speedrun. Free Enterprise is much easier to play. From the major gameplay improvements (random encounters being turned off, character dash speed increased) to the ease and enjoyment of being able to explore the world without limits, it’s simply an experience that brings more joy to more people than playing the regular game.

For my football heads who have come kicking and screaming into this essay: Imagine if we wiped your slate clean, and you were sent to a world where you had a choice of being a fan of the Chiefs or a fan of the Raiders. It’s not easy to be a fan of the Raiders. Their fan base was exiled to Las Vegas, where they have no history. They don’t have a good quarterback. You certainly can be a fan of the Raiders. Nobody is stopping you. They also still play football. But they don’t make it easy on you.

2) It’s the game’s fault — the tools it requires to speedrun optimally are tedious to put together

Every time you turn on Final Fantasy IV and push A on the title screen, the game loads one of 256 encounter seeds. There’s a trick that we do in the speedrun community where we start the game on Seed 92. It is ideal because if you do this, you do not get a single encounter all the way through the first boss fight of the game, saving you upwards of 45 seconds in a speedrun that could be as short as two hours. What it takes to set up Seed 92 is to load a seed on Seed 223, save, and then load that save to the point where you frame-perfectly walk 10 steps, get in the one encounter that shows you that you hit the frame on the title screen correctly, and kill your party.

This can take hours to set up. Getting Seed 223 is an adventure in timing button presses to audio cues or stopwatches. It can take even me, an accomplished player, 20-25 minutes at times to get Seed 92 set up before a run because you need to hit a frame-perfect press. Tedious!

From there, after clipping over Mist, the optimal way to beat the game after resetting to trigger the skip is by following a steproute. The steproute itself can be very good or very bad based on, again, when you hit the A button on the title screen. The optimal seed is Seed 43. If you compare Seed 43 to Seed 69 (nice) — the worst seed in the game — when you hit A on the title screen can be worth as much as two minutes and three seconds optimally. Then we get into how tedious it actually is to walk the walk perfectly, including what counts as a step and what doesn’t — and I’ll save you, casual reader, just know that there’s probably three more paragraphs I could put below just about walking optimally.

Nobody has to do these things to speedrun the game. But there’s an act of ego about speedrunning, I think, that makes people not want to do it if they can’t really reach for the stars. The fact that these things exist in and of itself is intimidating to new players. I’ve seen many would-be runners come in to the FF4 speedrun discord and talk up a storm, maybe get a run or two done at most, and then the act of continuing to get better can feel downright overwhelming. Because, let’s be honest, rarely does anybody want to spend the time it takes to be good if they can’t see instant results. It’s a huge investment. I can practice fighting Gannon in Link To The Past as many times as I want and become very good at it gradually. I have gone as far as practicing hard reset timing to hit the one frame on the screen after mist clip — and take it from me, it made me better at it, but it is painting-a-wall boring. If I weren’t already good at the game, these things would intimidate me too.

3) It’s Square’s fault — they have rereleased the game too many times and the Pixel Remaster is their most accessible remaster yet

The Pixel Remaster, on Steam, Switch, and PS, is not my favorite FF4 remake. I kind of hate using autobattle in speedruns, I think by throwing the established experience leveling out the window they made the game less interesting overall, and the fact that they can just throw a patch out that completely changes the run is depressing. But you cannot deny that it is very accessible and is now the main FF4 speedrun as far as activity. 15 players on the main PC leaderboard, and even more if you include the legacy patch and other systems — all of them playing since this released in 2021. And when it comes to, say, the yearly (or so) Final Fantasy Relay, they have played it in two of the last three years. (And the other was the PC port of the DS remake.) That tells you a lot about the health of that run as compared to SNES.

Final Fantasy IV is kind of a unique game historically because it has so many rereleases. It’s on SNES, but it’s also on Game Boy Advance, Playstation 1, Wonderswan (a real console, I promise), Nintendo DS, Wii Virtual Console, PSP, PC — these are all different versions of the game, by the way. That’s not even getting into the sequel: The After Years and where that appeared.

But not many of those rereleases had been fresh and new while speedrunning was a popularized hobby! So to the extent that there was airspace for our old faithful FF4, this took another bite out of it. That’s something that I see as a fairly common thing today — in Chrono Trigger speedrunning, for example, you’re now just about as likely to see a PC or DS run of the game as a SNES run. The accessibility really does matter a lot.

4) It’s my fault again — none of the top runners play the game that often anymore

After I got the world record in no64 in February, I shifted into heavy preparation mode as my wife and I prepared to usher our first child into the world. I then took a year where I was just taking care of the baby on the day-to-day, which is also why I stepped away from writing for the most part. It’s not just that taking care of a baby is exhausting. (It is, for me, some people find it very exciting — I’m not one of those, I’m just the man who cares about his kid. I found it rewarding, but not fun.) It is that it becomes especially terrible for finding giant blocks of uninterrupted time. If you’ve never had a kid before, they nap a lot when they are young. Those naps can sometimes be as short as 30-40 minutes. So you might get enough time to poop, clean something up, and eat something, and then it’s right back at it.

Given the dynamics at play where I had no help most days, it became practically impossible for me to speedrun. When I ran it at a marathon in May, it was with literally three practice runs to my name. And I was not the only person to mostly disappear. The world record holder in No CW, the_roth, has not streamed live since 2020. I don’t maintain contact with him on a regular basis, but it doesn’t seem like he’s making moves on getting no64 back any time soon. He’s more or less moved on, from what I can tell from the outside.

I don’t say this as a callout (to him or me!), but one thing I truly believe about speedrunning (or randomizer, any kind of race form) is that the players at the very top give everyone else something to aspire to when they play live. They can see what it is like, they can learn what we’re focusing on, they can see inspiring finishes and escapes from terrible situations that would boggle your mind. And that excitement is palpable and feeds directly in to wanting to learn the run, overcoming the barriers, and so forth. You may think this is silly, especially if you don’t watch speedruns, but I can tell you this is real because it is something I’ve felt watching those who came before me. The juice that gets people playing gets generated from the top.

And, well, I probably won’t start messing around with FF4 again for quite a bit. I’m in month two of daycare “freedom” (he gets sick, he’s a child, I am still the emergency contact, etc.) and what I’ve focused on growing first again is my writing because a) I missed it most and b) it makes me more money than speedrunning does. I would love to be the person to keep the ball rolling all the time, I really would. But I know that it is not my time yet, not until the football regular season ends at least.

In the meantime, the streamer in every Summoning Salt video who comes out of nowhere and starts raising their time up the leaderboard? That person just doesn’t exist right now. That is just how it is.

5) It’s time’s fault — the people that grew up with this game are just getting older

And they’re moving to new countries, they’re trapped in the commonalities of our work-obsessed culture, they’re chasing rewards in other areas. In my case it was having a child. The people who grew up playing Final Fantasy IV are no longer young adults, but full-fledged ones that have to make business decisions every day.

I don’t think this is a huge factor for the speedrun becoming a lost religion of sorts, I think it more or less just helps limit the number of people who are both a) interested and b) have the time to hop into it. We’re picking from a smaller pool of potential players. And that pool will probably only continue to flounder.

Post-script

I don’t think the game is dead-dead, and I don’t think I’m willing to commit to never playing it again. I’m definitely going to try to get it into marathons and I definitely still enjoy the rush of having a good pace going into Dark Elf, or timing out a new boss strategy that is slightly faster here or there.

But I look at what I’m going against in trying to get people re-interested and it feels like a big wave I’m up against. I can tell people the community is welcoming, I can tell people that we have a huge list of great resources, I can tell people that other people love watching high-level RPG speedruns. But I can’t make them play FF4.

It was funny to lose Roth in that sense because I felt very personally hurt when he rose up and took my records, and that wasn’t how I should have felt in retrospect. That was a challenge to rise to. I saw it as a mountain that was climbed, not a race that you kept running. And, well, I’d kill to spot someone else in this race.

But all I get to do is seed the thought.

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