Speedrunners are terrifying. At the end of last week Pint, a Final Fantasy 14 streamer known for crafting videos with absurd production values, released a video titled "I Destroyed the Oldest World Record in FFXIV." It details a months-long effort to topple the old world record for scaling Kugane Tower, a jumping puzzle in Final Fantasy 14's Stormblood expansion.
It's a fantastic little journey, filled with dramatic sequences, painstaking edits, a compelling narrative and plenty of appropriate Celeste references. It's the longest video he's ever made. By the end, Pint beat the old record of 43.58 seconds with a time of 43.30 seconds, making him the new reigning champion of Kugane tower.
For less than 48 hours.
A little background about Pint's competition: Pydoyks, operating under the pseudonym Em0_oticon, is something of a cryptid and a legend in the speedrunning community. A video by the Lowest Percent channel on Youtube describes him as "one of, if not the best Ocarina of Time speedrunner of his time, before he mysteriously vanished."
"You may have also known Pydo as Shaeden, a legendary Mario: Odyssey speedrunner who dominated the game for months, leaving his competition in the dust, before vanishing once more."
This comes up in Pint's video, too—as about halfway through his journey, he discovers that his mysterious rival Em0_oticon was actually a living legend. One who actually replied to his promise "I will beat this" on a six-year-old video, to which Em0_oticon simply responded "=)", breaking a silence that had lasted half a decade.
Pint ended his triumphant video with a challenge to the world: "My record is yours, if you can take it. Show me what you're made of!" The video was uploaded July 7. On July 8, like some kind of anime antagonist shrugging off their training weights, Em0_oticon returned and smashed Pint's new record of 38.74, shaving off an entire four seconds with some spare change left over. You can see his blisteringly fast run below.
If you know anything about speedrunning, you'll know the faster a time gets, the harder it is to beat it, so cutting down the record by four seconds is massive. Pint responded in a tweet: "Guys my world record was just broken. This guy is fucking incredible," also commenting on the video itself: "GG You absolute legend. I’m genuinely so happy to see this."
One of my favourite things about speedrunning is that, while it's competitive, it's also a collaborative effort. I don't want to downplay Pint's reaction here, he's being a genuinely good sport about it, but that's also customary for the scene—and he has reasons to be proud.
Not only did his efforts pull a vanished legend out of retirement, but that same legend used his strats—wielding classes released in the Shadowbringers and Endwalker expansions, which didn't exist when the world record was set.
Because of both Pint and Pydoyks, Kugane Tower, a silly little jumping puzzle in a much wider game, has now been mastered. Until the next prodigy comes along, of course.
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