Final Fantasy VII Speedrun - Segment 17
11I love this segment just as much as I hated making it.
In case anyone cares, this took me more resets than the elevator in the Shinra HQ.
Usually, if one is quite lucky, the Jenova-BIRTH battle takes around 2:30 min, however, I remembered how this battle worked out in a TAS (make more videos, antdgar3) and wondered if the same strategy could be applied in a segmented speedrun. Obviously, in order to do so, I would have to find a way to reliably trigger a Preemptive Attack in the Jenova-BIRTH battle, which I then did.
Here is what you need to know about Preemptive Attacks:
A (random) battle occurs as a Preemptive Attack if and only if the following prerequisites are met:
That battle has a Preemptive Attack flag (only some random battles and even fewer boss battles have these), the battle is initiated after a certain amount of steps (in a field with random encounters) have been completed.
Therefore, in order to get a Preeemptive Attack on Jenova-BIRTH, one needs to make sure that the fight occurs after a certain amount of steps, which is not as difficult as it may seem. All I had to do was to make sure that I reached Jenova-BIRTH while walking/running always the same amount of steps in the two screens inside the ship (only these have random encounters) and finding out which route to Jenova-BIRTH would yield a Preemptive Attack.
In order to accomplish the former, I never freestyled, i.e. I never changed directions while moving but only after coming to a halt. Pay attention to the part from 01:27 to 01:32 to see what I am trying to say. To accomplish the latter, I simply tested several routes, and the one you see in the video is the first I found.
Being able to trigger a Preemptive Attack on Jenova-BIRTH all the time, I "only" still had to reset a few more times (11 weeks worth of resets) to have Cloud get a critical Braver and Jenova-BIRTH use her most agreeable moveset...
Apart from that, the Cargo Ship is running hell: The ladder that leads to Tifa is just ridiculously brutal.
02:31:18
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