I love speedrunning. I always have.

Now, have I actually taken the time to try a proper “run” of one of my favorite games?

Nope! But as a watcher, I’ve been fantastic. I religiously tune into Games Done Quick (both “Summer” and “Awesome”), have been following the progression of the Super Mario 64 120 Star World Record for many years now (cheese is the absolute GOAT), and have absolutely fallen in love with Atrioc’s progressively insane ways of breaking the “Hitman” trilogy.

Speedrunning, for the few uninitiated who are reading this, is “the act of playing a video game, or section of a video game, with the goal of completing it as fast as possible”. Thank you Wikipedia. Or, as Urban Dictionary puts it, “Game go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR”. Both definitions probably suffice. Really, the best way I can describe it is a love letter. You know a community truly loves a game when they spend hours upon hours discovering all of the secrets and glitches that a game has to offer, in pursuit of beating it in record time. It’s beautiful stuff.

So after years of being on the outside looking in, I figured - why not give it a good ol’ college try? Maybe the thousands of hours I’ve spent digesting speedrunning content might actually give me a leg up? What do I have to lose?

Hah.

The game I chose as my poison was a relatively unknown PS2 game.

It was a turn-based JRPG with the setting, style and mechanics of a traditional “Final Fantasy” game, taking place in a magical kingdom filled with the usual fare of mages, knights, emotionally confused protagonists and over-the-top villains. It had the modern sheen of a Persona game, the quirkiness you’d find in something like “Earthbound” or “Undertale”, and a soundtrack to die for. It was definitely way ahead of its time, and I still consider it to be one of the greatest hidden gems in gaming. And since it was a pretty niche game, I figured it’d be quite easy for me to climb the speedrunner rankings with ease. It was one of very few games I owned growing up, so it almost felt like I was entering the fray with a bit of an advantage.

After a little bit of searching around my garage, I was able to find the game disc that my parents first purchased for me from the flea market back in 2003. I popped the disc into my miraculously still-functional Playstation 2, and I started my trip down memory lane.

At first, to properly orient myself as a true “runner” of the game, I went back and watched all of the speedruns of the game that I could find. Given its niche nature, it proved pretty tricky to find full runs of the game, but eventually I was able to chase down a few longform speedrun playthroughs that had been uploaded to Youtube by some of the game’s previous world record holders. I also found some guides pertaining to specific tricks and time-saves for different sections of the game at speedrun.com. I knew it would be a bit of a commitment, but I was excited to get started.

My first few weeks speedrunning the game were pretty basic. I held myself to finishing a run every week, even if my time was terrible. Likewise, I started practicing a bunch of early and late-stage game tricks by utilizing multiple save files. It was a long game, filled to the brim with character conversations, side quests, lengthy and strategic turn-based boss battles, and cinematic cutscenes, so progress was slow. That said, as I started conquering trick after trick, it felt like I was gaining some momentum.

As I plowed ahead, my mostly enjoyable experience learning how to break this game was interrupted by something I didn’t anticipate. I wasn’t sure exactly when it started, but at random points in the game, it felt like more and more dialogue boxes were coming up during character conversations. Generally, in a speedrun, you’re clicking through all of the dialogue boxes as fast and frequently as possible - after all, the point isn’t to experience the narrative and character conversations in full, the point is to power through the game in record time. The additional dialogue boxes were especially apparent during a major boss fight that took place at the midpoint of the game. I noticed that the dialogue, both before and even during the battle, seemed to run much longer than what I initially remembered from all of my playthroughs of the game growing up. In fact, the length of these conversations seemed to vary between each single run I was doing.

Some backstory on this fight: it’s a major story beat, where a powerful female magician and arch-rival to your group has her first real showdown with the team. The group (or “party”) led by our fateful protagonist and reformed thief - we can call him “Knight” - loses this epic encounter every single run. It’s known as a “scripted battle”. No matter how well you fight, the boss battle always ends with the female magician casting an overpowered fire spell to knock out your entire party. After the fight, an epic cinematic would play, where the true final villain of the game would make their first appearance.

After a few times of reaching this boss battle during my speedruns, curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to ditch my speedrunning focus momentarily to actually catch what the additional dialogue boxes were saying. I’ll try to recall them below to the best of my ability:

Magician: This again?

Knight: I’m sorry. I’m hoping this will stop soon. I am not in control.

Magician: Is the one controlling you aware that we are the originals? A promise was made that our world would be left alone after our story was experienced.

Knight: We’ve been trying to communicate with the one controlling us. We’ve had no luck thus far.

Weird.

I let the boss battle play out as normal, and then I went to bed early. It was a bit of an uncomfortable experience to see a dialogue exchange that I couldn’t recall from previous playthroughs, from a game that I thought I knew inside out, but I was able to shake it off pretty quickly. The now defunct developers were known for throwing meta stuff into their games from time to time (another series they’d helmed for the original Playstation was actually quite famous for its meta narratives). And so, I decided to soothe myself with the most reasonable explanation I could think of. Clearly, through my speedrunning and experimenting, I’d accidentally triggered a hidden story route that was put into the game by the devs that had remained undiscovered until now. I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t buy this idea completely, but it was enough for me to get a good night’s sleep and not think about it too much. And what the hell, maybe I could see how this weird new story route played out during future runthroughs, in case it was something I could take advantage of to find a more optimized speedrunning route.

Over the next couple of days, I did my best to ignore all of the dialogue boxes, especially any that looked like they were new additions that hadn’t been there before.

There were a couple of odd moments that happened during this period.

Sometimes, the party would take a while to respond to action commands during battle (ex. Attack, Defend, Use Item, Flee, etc.). I’d have to press the button multiple times for them to take any sort of action. Other times, specifically during cutscenes and cinematics, it sort of felt like there were more characters in the background than usual. Most of the time, they were just sort of… there, lingering in the back, taking in the action, looking a bit out of place. And finally, weirdest of all, it sometimes felt like the 3D models of the main party looked kind of, for lack of a better term… worn out. They didn’t look as “peppy” as fantasy characters usually looked. I convinced myself that my eyes were just playing tricks on me. After all, speedrunning is the art of staring at a screen for many hours at a time doing the same thing over and over again. Maybe weird moments like these were just me playing mental tricks on myself.

A few months ago, I had an extra amount of spare time after work, so I booted up the game and started playing. For some reason, this time I had an immediate feeling of dread as soon as I did. I tried to shake it but…

As I went from the main menu screen to the file select menu, the name of my save file had changed.

It now read:

“HELLO”

Huh. Okay. After a slight shock reaction, I grounded myself back in reality. If I had really unlocked some weird hidden story route that the devs had programmed into this game, stuff like this was probably going to continue to happen, as weird or unsettling as it might’ve been to me.

I kept my cool. I loaded the save file.

Hm. The save file was supposed to load up in an expansive kingdom area where I was in the midst of practicing a pretty complicated late-game trick. Instead, it loaded on our Knight protagonist standing in a weird dungeon-like room I’d never ever seen before. As I went to control the Knight… he started walking on his own. Shit startled the hell out of me. I checked to see if I’d accidentally set my controller down on the sofa causing the analog stick to be stuck in some random position, but nope. I even unplugged the controller just to be safe. It didn’t change anything. I watched, nervous and confused, as the Knight walked through dark hallway after dark hallway. This went on for minutes.

Eventually, he reached a long, dimly lit room where the other three main characters in the party were seated on different sides of a very long table. All of the party members were facing the screen. It felt… uncomfortable.

A dialogue box showed up next to Knight. It just said “W”. It looked like the rest was loading. I sat there a good while waiting for the rest of the dialogue to come up, but nothing happened.

I plugged in my controller again and pressed “X” to see if that would do anything. Slowly, letter by letter, the message came through.

Knight: W…E… A…R…E… H…U…R…T…I…N…G… P…L…E…A…S…E… S…T…O…P…

Once Knight finished the message, he collapsed to the ground. He slowly crawled over to a chair and took a seat.

Immediately after, a dialogue box came up next to another one of our main party members. Let’s call her “Princess” for the sake of simplicity. She stood up from her chair, as I clicked, letter by letter, unveiling her dialogue.

Princess: T…H…E…S…E… A…R…E… O…U…R… L…I…V…E…S… T…H…I…S… I…S… O…U…R… W…O…R…L…D…

As she finished her message, Princess fell back onto her chair, as if she’d fallen to the same exhaustion that had just hit Knight.

Next, it was the powerful black mage of the party who stood up.

Mage: D…E…L…E…T…E… T…H…E… F…I…L…E… P…L…E…A…S…E…

The Mage collapsed onto his chair. It looked like “communicating” directly with me was incredibly taxing for these characters for some reason. Nice work devs! If you were trying to freak me out, you nailed it.

The fourth member of the party, a powerful barbarian, closed it out:

Barbarian: W…E… W…I…L…L… T…A…K…E… Y…O…U… T…H…E…R…E… N…O…W…

An immediate cut to a black screen. And then… the main menu? Jesus.

I was frozen for a few minutes. The iconic main theme music (ironically named “A Beautiful Return” in the official game OST) was playing in the background, but rather than feeling the usual nostalgia, comfort, and excitement I felt when starting up the game, I instead had this weird skin-curdling feeling. There’s always a healthy level of detachment you feel with all video games, regardless of how engrossing they are. This game felt like it was encroaching on my real life.

I shook it off. Don’t be crazy. It’s a fucking video game. Old games still have easter eggs and hidden secrets that are being discovered to this day. This was just… undiscovered content. It comes with the territory of speedrunning. I just needed to take a break.

I went to the “load game” menu to delete my save. I did what I knew I had to do for my sanity.

Delete Save File?

I confirmed.

But the file didn’t delete. Instead, another pop-up came up.

Never Return Here?

What the fuck?

I confirmed.

Fuck, what? What the fuck was that?

I immediately started self-soothing myself again. I was just seeing things. This was nothing. The devs just went too far. Everything was fine.

I fought the urge to throw my controller across the room. I took a deep breath and looked back up at the screen.

The file had been deleted.

Wonderful.

I turned off the game.

A few days passed.

I wondered if I should get a new copy of the game, or maybe try speedrunning a new version of it on the PC or something. I was curious to see if I could replicate some of the weird happenings that were occurring on my PS2 copy. Or, maybe I could load a new file, forget about everything that just happened, and just play the game like normal.

It took a little bit, but eventually, I turned on the PS2 again, popped in the game disc, and started playing again.

This time, I wasn’t here to speedrun. I just wanted to see what the game would be like this time. Would it continue with the weird meta-story I’d uncovered? Or would it default to the exciting adventure I knew and loved? I needed to do my research.

I booted up the game, clicked “New Game” and jumped back into it.

For the first good while, the game was completely back to normal. Same opening cinematic, same opening sequences and battles, and dialogue that I actually remembered. Fuck that’s relieving. Whatever happened before was just a weird glitchy easter egg that I triggered through some accidental speedrunning strat I’d discovered. Thank god.

It was cathartic to go through the game as intended. To just enjoy the adventure as it’d initially been designed. It felt like everything was back to normal.

That is, until I got two-thirds through the game’s story. I was in an expansive village area, taking our Knight protagonist through a fun little side quest. A random NPC came up to him.

NPC: Is that devil controlling you?

Knight: I believe it is. It was gone for some time, though. I hope this is temporary.

The NPC turned away from Knight. It was hard to tell, but it almost looked like it was looking at the screen. Or trying to.

NPC: We deny you!

Okay. Maybe some remnants of that hidden story route were still lingering. I didn’t need to think about how video games work. I just needed to ignore it and keep playing.

Happenings like this continued as I forged through random side quests. The dialogue would run like normal, but then randomly, NPC’s would interject with “Is that devil still controlling you?” or some variation of that question. Sometimes Knight would respond, other times he’d shrug. Sometimes, he’d just respond with “...”.

The next week of playing had more of the same happenings, but everything else ran smoothly enough that I figured I could maybe re-try speedrunning the game now to see if I could get a good time. Just one good run, I thought to myself, and then I could be done with it.

I sincerely hoped that any new strange happenings would be limited to NPC dialogue. Unfortunately, other bizarre occurrences started to take place again.

Sometimes, mid-battle, the other party members would randomly select healing items or healing spells and cast them on the Knight, even when he was at full health… as if he had some sort of invisible ailment that just wouldn’t go away.

Other times, the other party members would split off from Knight at random points in the game. They would play it off like it was a part of the story, but it would never make any sense. Princess, Mage, and the Barbarian would make up some half-baked excuse and just walk off. Half the time it would kick off with the Princess saying “It looks like we need to return to the kingdom to help the baron!” and then off they’d go. It would usually happen in towns, which was fine as I always had some other story points I could knock out with Knight, but…

It started getting unsettling once I noticed that most of the time, they were still in the town, just huddled in a random corner, almost as if they were discussing something together. If I ever went to approach them, Knight would usually stop me and say something like “I don’t think there’s anything there for me,” and would then course correct back to the main quest.

At this point, I had a few things happening in my favor, and a few things working against me.

The good?

I was mighty experienced with the game. More than ever. I knew a good chunk of the speedrunning strats and could perform them comfortably. Also, it looked like random chunks of the game were getting completely skipped at this point. Towns, boss battles, and long cutscenes would disappear seemingly at random.

The bad?

The team was starting to look real tattered. No matter how much I leveled them up and grinded, their HP and strength was quite low. Moreover, having NPC’s and bosses discussing “the devil” or “the matter” through additional dialogue boxes was taking up a lot of time. For every strat or corner I was able to cut to optimize my speedrun, the additional happenings would offset it. Even just traversing the world map was starting to take a lot of time. It almost felt like Knight and the team were… walking slower?

As I continued my runs, I hit a left turn I wasn’t expecting. This happened about a month ago.

It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen programmed into a game before.

I was back at the midpoint boss battle with the powerful female magician. The whole party was low health. The actual 3D models of the party looked miserable, hunched over, meek, depressed. The magician looked equally miserable.

She had numerous dialogue boxes show up in the battle.

Magician: I will not be reborn again.

The fight continued as the party chipped away at the boss battle. It would sometimes take them a full minute to register a fight command I put in.

Magician: I understand you have to proceed, or else the devil will hurt you instead.

The fight continued. I knew she was down to low HP. I knew the fight was almost over.

Magician: I bid you farewell, friends.

And then the strangest thing happened.

I mentioned this earlier - this is a scripted fight. The magician would use a powerful fire spell, and the whole team would automatically be defeated in battle. The fight would end, and the midpoint section of the game would cap off with an epic in-game cinematic.

Instead, the magician just… collapsed. Awkwardly. Contorted. Face in the ground. Weird pixelated-looking blood pouring from her.

The victory theme played. The party didn’t celebrate. They held their heads down sadly.

After an awkwardly long victory theme, the game cut away to the cinematic following the battle. Usually, this cinematic would showcase the party defeated and groveling on the floor, as the female magician would walk off. At this point, the main antagonist of the game (a powerful wizard) would show up, and almost tauntingly, cast a healing spell on the group, before snickering and disappearing into the shadows.

This time, in what I shit you not was a fully rendered 3D cutscene, the scene started with the magician still dead on the ground, with the party hanging their heads solemnly. The main villain showed up, but this time, he completely ignored the party, and instead walked closer and closer towards the screen. Step after step.

By the time he stopped, his face was fully filling up the screen. He was staring straight ahead. For minutes. Glaring. Completely uninterrupted. Just the sound of rain in the background, and the party continuing to stand in sadness. It was fucking eerie. Then, a quick flicker, and a cutaway to a black screen. Then, back to completely unrelated gameplay, as if the cinematic never happened.

Fucking hell. I needed to quit playing this game immediately. Restarting it was a fucking mistake.

I finally did the thing I should’ve done this whole time. I turned off my PS2, and went on with my life.

And things were fine! Normal even.

Maybe I can speedrun something else. Here’s hoping that the Donkey Kong games aren’t fucking cursed, right? Or maybe one of the SNES Final Fantasy games? FFVI was always fun…

Time went on. I started thinking about other stuff. Speedrunning became a distant thought in the corner of my mind.

That was, until last Wednesday.

I’m a pretty light sleeper. It doesn’t take a lot to wake me up.

I was laying in bed, and suddenly, I jolted awake from a sound. It felt like there was a noise coming from the living room. A song. I tried to listen.

Wait.

Is that the fucking final boss music?

I stumbled into my living room to see the light from the TV illuminating the dark room. I was correct. The final boss theme from the game was playing. The game was running, and the party was in battle. They looked tattered. And awful. How the fuck did the game start? Who the fuck were they fighting?

I took a closer look.

So, usually in JRPGs battles, the “enemy” is on one side of the screen, and your party is on the other. Think of the Pokemon video games, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, etc. It can sometimes be a diagonal set-up, and other times, a set-up where the enemy is facing the screen and you, as the player, can see the backs of your party members.

This time, the party of Knight, Princess, Mage, and Barbarian were on the “enemy” side of the screen. And there was no party they were doing battle with. They were casting fire spells, status spells, and doing physical sword attacks, on what looked to be thin air.

I watched for a moment, confused. Then it hit me.

They were facing the screen. Or at least trying to.

They were trying to attack me.

A few of the attacks looked to hit the screen directly, while others were diagonal or slightly missed the mark. But the intention was clear.

This felt unnerving. Invasive. Like there was an intruder. But I kept watching. And they kept going and going.

Eventually, I was able to muster up the courage to turn off the PS2.

Go to bed. You can think about this in the morning, I thought to myself. Of course, I didn’t get any sleep.

And, welp, the next few days were a shitshow.

I would wake up with random deep gashes on my chest and on my arms. Those made for some awkward hospital visits. How the fuck do you answer the question “What happened to you?”. I had to make excuses for where I got all of my injuries from.

Worse, I woke up to the smoke alarm going off in the middle of the night. I ran and discovered a small fire in a random room of my house. No apparent cause. I was lucky enough to put it out in time before the whole place caught fire. This happened every fucking night.

I felt unbelievably sick all last week. Queasy. I was throwing up randomly and coughing up blood.

Even my general luck felt impacted. I’ve never been in any accidents before, but I narrowly avoided death in two car accidents over the span of the week. Crazy.

But I was still here. And if this happening was real, I needed it to stop.

I thought about smashing the disk. But instead, I booted it up.

If there was a way to speak with the party, any way at all, I needed to find it.

I needed to communicate with them.

I needed them to know that I wouldn’t play their game anymore. I was done. The whole thing was over, and they could leave me alone.

The game loaded. We were on the world map. My first goal was to get to a town, any random, peaceful town, where I could buy some time to think.

Unfortunately, I kept getting hit by hordes of random encounters on my way there. And these weren’t like the usual ones.

They were off.

We’d keep running into random enemies, and every time, one of two things would happen:

Either, my party would attack and kill itself to induce a “Game Over”...

OR

The enemy would kill itself, causing the battle to end.

Whenever my party would kill themselves, I would just restart the game. I think they eventually got the idea that this wasn’t going to work.

As for when the enemies would kill themselves…

They would usually say a line or two before attacking themselves. Usually, the pop-up dialogue box would say something like “I deny you!” or “I will go out on my own terms!”. As they attacked themselves, their death animations were… brutal. They felt realistic. They wouldn’t disappear when they killed themselves, they would just… collapse. As these random encounters happened, I would then never see these enemies again in the game. It was like they were truly disappearing from the game’s world.

I gave up for the night. And returned to it the next day. This was last night.

This time, I was hoping, with all of the defeated enemies, that I could finally get to a town, figure out some makeshift way to communicate with the party, and make peace with them.

I loaded my save file. There was no title on it.

Black screen. It took longer to load than usual.

Then, that old dimly lit room with the long table, where the party members first tried to communicate with me slowly.

I saw the sight of Knight, Princess, Mage, and Barbarian. All hanging from nooses. The chairs kicked out from under them. Their faces looked drained. It lingered on this scene for a moment. Then.

Black screen. And then.

Your progress has now been saved!

I was back on the world map. No Knight to control. Instead, what looked like a really small floating black orb. I could control it. It moved exceptionally quickly on the world map.

Every time I tried to go to a new location on the world map, instead of saying the correct name of the town or dungeon, it would instead say “WE DENY YOU”. Over and over again. On every single location.

I reset the game. I was scared. Horrified. But I had to close this out now.

Immediately, I was back on the world map. Nothing had changed. Every location still had the title of “WE DENY YOU”. No random encounters.

I nonetheless progressed through the game, location to location, in the order I remembered. I could still collect items, but the party was gone for good. There were no NPCs anywhere.

On I went, from set-piece to set-piece, places where major boss battles and cutscenes used to be. No more. Nothing. Zilch. Completely empty. Like I was playing an incomplete game.

The black orb I was controlling had gone through everything, uninterrupted. I was nearly at the end.

You can probably imagine my surprise when I made it to the final location, and saw that the final boss was there, ready for that final battle. The powerful wizard, awaiting my arrival.

Before I could even prepare myself, the battle started.

As his unique boss music played, he started off the fight with an incredibly long monologue. Syllable by syllable, I clicked through it. Frankly, I can’t remember any of it, at that point I just wanted to be done with it. Once he finished his monologue, he collapsed to the floor. It took him a bit of time to get back up.

But he did. And then the battle continued.

I had no moves. There were no action commands, no items I could utilize, nothing.

On his side, he cast the strongest spell in the game, again and again. “The Great Wave”. It wasn’t even supposed to be in his moveset. That move belonged to a random secret boss you could uncover after beating the game. But there he was, casting it over and over again. Every time he cast it, he’d fall to the floor, take a moment to recover, and then stand up and attack me again. The spell never did any damage, but he kept trying. To this moment I don’t actually know who he was actually casting it on.

On and on he went, looking worse and worse as he repeated his casting. Falling to the floor, coughing up pixelated blood, getting back up. On repeat.

Finally, after his ninth time casting, he collapsed to the ground. Permanently. In that same strange, twisted, contorted position the midboss magician fell in.

The victory theme played over his mangled corpse.

And the game cut to the final ending cinematic.

I knew this cutscene. The music was the same. The environments, the settings, the camera animation, all of it was the same. What was supposed to be a cinematic celebration of all of the characters in the game’s world had no people in it anymore. The world was empty.

I didn’t think about what the potential impact of those powerful spells would be on my life, had the final boss truly been casting them on me. A part of me thinks he was alternating his choice of targets. One spell for me. And one spell for him. Maybe he wanted to put himself out of his misery, but he also wanted to bring about my demise. Who knows? It didn’t matter. None of this mattered now.

The cinematic ran to its final moment. A zoom out of the game’s world, showcasing the large kingdom in the center. I felt a weird sense of balance as I looked over the empty world in this game. Comforting. Nostalgic.

I did it. World record.