Game:

Final Fantasy VII (1997)

Duration: 12:18

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3

This is the one.

This is definitely one of the hardest segments in the run. First of all, it is rather long, but much more importantly, it comes down almost entirely to luck, elevator luck.

Obviously, taking the elevator CAN be much faster than taking the stairs, however, whether that will be the case is random. Here is what you need to know about the elevator:

You start at floor 6 and need to reach floor 59 (you can't go higher than that). The elevator will ascend by 7 to 15 levels; the chance of going up by any number of levels from 7 to 13 is each 1/8 and the chance of going up by 14 or 15 levels is each 1/16. Depending on what floor the elevator comes to a temporary halt at, you will either have to fight an unescapable battle or see a Shinra employee, which, of course, is the preferable option.

You can find a list of what happens on any floor here: http://ff7.fr/screen/ascenseur.png (It is in French though (just like the entirety of ff7.fr), and in case you don't speak French yet, this might be a good cause to change that since ff7.fr is in my opinion by far the most reliable and comprehensive site to consult in case of an FF7 inquiry. ;] )

Anyway, the best outcome is having to fight only one random battle and running into the Shinra employee 4 times, which will happen (I calculated this myself and found that the 1/1845 chance, which I have read several times, is incorrect) in 3/2^14=3/16384 of all cases. Yeah, that's about 1/5461 or 0.018%. Better just forget about that, for you most certainly won't witness that in less than 10,000 tries or outside of a TAS.

I did this segment probably around 800 times to end up with the outcome you can find in the video. In case you get a nice elevator sequence, you still need to manage to get through around 9 minutes of pointless conversations, quiz time and running around.

I decided to be utterly risk-averse on floor 60 as a very promising earlier attempt ended just there...

On floor 62, a keyword needs to be "guessed" on the first try to get an Elemental materia. As you probably already know, all you have to do is read that one bookshelf and note what it says:
2 Economic... - BEST
1 Results... - KING
1 Breakdown... - BOMB
10 New... - MAKO

Floor 65 is where I make a lot of running mistakes. Still, they hardly amount to 10 seconds and considering how lucky I got with the elevator, I could not care less about them.
Also, floor 65 has a trick, which a certain Speedrun Guide by a certain someone does not mention (but ff7.fr does...): If you put the first Parts of Midgar into the lowermost position in the central room, every chest (apart from the one holding the Keycard 66 for obvious reasons) you try to open will be unlocked. Granted, that does not help to save time, however, if you insert the first Pieces of Midgar into any other position, only one treasure chest will be unlocked and you have to determine which by where you put the last Parts of Midgar, which means you would have to take even more notes/memorize more things.

01:24:51

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