CharityWatch: TheSpeedGamers tackling Final Fantasy I - XII

by Griffin McElroy on Jul 19th 2009 1:00PM

We know, we know -- another Sunday, another gaming marathon for charity. Still, we figured that the 30 tips pointing us to this particular marathon which we received within the course of ten minutes meant people were interested in it. Still, if you do find yourself annoyed, then you can go screw right off. It's charity, dude.

The fine philanthropic folks over at TheSpeedGamers are spending this entire week completing Final Fantasy I - XII in an attempt to raise at least $20,000 for an autism treatment organization named ACT Today. By our calculations, that's 15,000 random encounters, 1,300 levels-up and about 200 unbearably long, villainous soliloquies over the course of seven days. That's enough to drive even the most hardcore Squeenix supporters insane -- why not go reward their self-abuse with a few bucks for charity?

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Tags: act-today, autism, charity, final-fantasy, marathon, Marathon-Durandal, square-enix, thespeedgamers

Reader Comments (48)

As an aspie (a person with asperger's) myself, to this I say HECK YAH.

a lot of people are going to die...

This is really cool,as a guy who has done this (played through I to XII) I can honestly say it's no joke.

I guess they'll be skipping XI right xD?.

They will be representing FFXI on Friday. One of the longtime members of their site will be playing in a separate feed along side whoever is playing on the 24th (Likely FFXII). Other than that, they will be playing all main numbered Final Fantasy games, no tactics/X-2/other side stories.

No, someone who has a form of Autism is going to actually play through parts of a character on FFXI on Friday on a separate feed from the main one going on right now.

Oh ok,thanks for the info.

I hope this doesn't include FFXI. Might be a long weekend otherwise

What I would do is have a couple guys play FFXI while the others play the remaining 1 through 12 on the consoles.

Then I'd have them regularly check (like every 15 minutes or so) on the guys playing FFXI to see how high up in level they are and what they are doing, so maybe others could join in on the charity work by partying up with him.

they should do a tetris one ALL TETRIS GAMES 999999999999999999 SCORE.

As an individual with Aspergers Syndrome, I have mixed feelings towards organizations that wants to "cure" people they believe to be ill.

I agree, but I think there's nothing wrong with the ones that just try to help.

(Currently I am sending a very dirty look to Autism Speaks)

Even if your state/disorder/whatever you want to call it doesn't affect you as an individual negatively, it may negatively affect people around you, namely loved ones. So a lot of the time, people want to "ameliorate" autism so that autistic people with social disorders can interact with people around them or those with function impairment may operate in society. A lot of the time, parents worry that their children won't have a good quality of life since some have trouble relating to and interacting with others, as well as some functioning impairment. It's quite controversial, though, since, as you mentioned, some autistic people don't believe there's anything wrong with them (and maybe there isn't). But I think autism treatment is only half for the patient, and the other half is for the people who love the patient. I don't know much about these organizations, so I'm only speaking from a clinical psych perspective.

Well said, Saria.

Especially difficult given that the first couple of Final Fantasies were horribly balanced from a gameplay perspective. I had to put down Final Fantasy III because they put the Point of No Return before the final boss way too early, such that you had to do a good bit of grinding after the Point of No Return, but couldn't save, and had to tackle this mean gauntlet of multiple final bosses without being able to really save.

FFXIII can be tough for speed-plays too. I remember one time I was just trying to rush through it and I got to the section where I had to fight Adel and couldn't beat her. She could kill my entire party with one Ultima.

So, I decided I'd go back and level up. Except that you can't leave the section you're in when you fight her (Lunatic Pandora) until you beat her (if you try and go out the entrance it just says "we have to save Rhinoa" and won't let you leave), and of course in that section enemies you defeat only give gil, not XP. So there was no way to level up at all.

It was pretty far into the game to get stuck too. Pretty freaking lame.

Errr, that's FFVIII, not XIII

UGH! FFVIII was an abomination of ridiculous proportions. i spent so many many many many hours on extracting crap from enemies to power up a ridiculous level 100 team to go through ultimecias castle, only to realize like, 2 steps in, i needed 2! groups of 3 people to do the dungeon. Suffice to say, i never bothered going back to level the rest of my team from level 25 to 100, they can get fucked. I never finished FFVIII thanks to that BS and its always bugged me. FFVII and FFX will always remain the best FF games to me (with Tales of Symphonia on GC being better than both!!!)

Yeah, good luck with Final Fantasy II.

Final Fantasy VIII is the worst RPG ever made, ever. The story was so fuck-tarded, that I have tried to beat it thrice over the years; and I literally couldn't bring myself to finish it every time.

What's that? Oh, every main character was raised in the same orphanage; but just forgot because of using magic? Oh? You say that the evil villainess was in fact the one who raised them all for their entire fucking lives, but they forgot that too? WHAT GREAT WRITING.

Terrible, terrible, terrible. I'd rather suffer through the stunning mediocrity of The Last Remnant 100 times than ever touch that game again.

But what do I know, I'm just a big Jerk Face!

OMG I share your pain exactly. FFVIII is what did that to me. When you crash the ship into that tower and you have to fight the witch boss with Rinoa strapped to her chest...The randoms there are super hard, yet they give you almost no EXP, and you're not allowed to leave until you fight the boss battle. I had only used GFs beyond that point, so my actual characters were too low-leveled. I was screwed since you had to keep Rinoa alive and GFs just obliterate everything. So I basically had to restart my whole game, and never finished the second time. :(

Vcize - that makes no sense because leveling in FF8 actually makes enemies harder. What you needed to do is switch up your junctions. Being low level makes the game easier.

And JerkFace is unbelievably bad.

Eggman, I don't know what to tell you, maybe the bosses don't adjust the same because I doubt that a single Ultima killed people's parties that were leveled up.

Doesn't matter what the junctions were or anything like that, a single Ultima whiped out the whole party within a few turns of the fight, not much you can do about that...

lol wow. This is kind of cool. I would shoot myself after FF's I-III and move straight to IV-onward.

FF2 took them like 22 hours @_@

So how's this work exactly? They start a game and complete it that same day? What if they don't finish, do they keep playing while someone else starts the next game? Might make more sense to have all games being played concurrently for the full week so that they can actually finish the games... FF game from start to end credits in 24 hours? Im not even sure that's possible...

FF1 was completed in close to 6 hours, FF2 took 22, FF6 took 5 &1/2 hours. There is obviously no guarantee that they will be able to finish all the games in the week, but they are still on track to do it. They are not overlapping any of the games besides FF11, which will be played on Friday for the last 12 hours of the marathon.

Wow, those are some crazy fast times. I'm guessing that means they're just going from town to boss to town to boss and skipping all side stuff. Still a pretty remarkable feat.

Hmm... with the way FFXI is, they should have started a character on day 1 and then seen how far they could get in the time it takes to beat all the other FF games. With the new level sync system they could probably have gotten pretty far (with the help of some higher level buddys to sync up with and have provide gil/items)

thank god their not playing EVERY Final Fantasy game.

I liked the mario guys better, the guy thats talking right now seems snotty...

He's not *that* bad. :P But there are many different commentators with many varied personalities that will be there in 6 hour shifts.

Heh, that would be hell.
FF7? Gold chocobo, all huge materia, and defeat both Americanized weapons (Ruby and Emerald), not to mention limit breaks.
Then god... there's 10-2. The game that punishes you for skipping a 2 second scene you'll see probably 20 times throughout the game.
Then of course 12... god... to get the ultimate spear you can't open 4 specific chests... FOUR SPECIFIC CHESTS!! To someone who gets struck with OCD when I see treasure in a game, that is torture...

Have fun trying to beat Final Fantasy XI guys. =P

Came in here to say just that, but was disappointed when I read 8 of those comments. :/

I support this.

Can't we do something like this with Joystiq? Where we all chip in to post like a milliion comments in one topic within 2 weeks? Something of that nature?

Well, they could use the Mission 4-2 fight (Dark Lord in the Castle up north) as beating FFXI... That would be the finish of the main story. The rest would all be expansions.

Or just get rank 10 in all 3 cities, finish RotZ, CoP, ToaU, WotG, ACP, beat AV, PW, all the Sky gods, all the big dragons, get lvl 75 in all jobs (fully merited of course), beat Einherjar, Salvage, Nyzul, Limbus, fully ranked in Assault, finish Dynamis, Dynamis Outlands, get (at least 1) Relic weapon, Mythic weapon, as well as AF+1 and Relic Armors, (Did I forget anything?)

Of course, I've been playing for 5+ years now and have only dabbled in most of that.

/EM SARCASM You want that done in a week?! Piece of Cake! While your at it...don't forget the complete armor sets from Dynamis! Doing that might add a couple days though...

Completing the Dark Lord fight (5-2 btw not 4-2) might actually be a good initial 'stopping point' for FF11. With all the leveling assistance available now (Level Sink/Field of Valor/etc) a static party of 6 could make it to 55 (the level cap when the DL fight was introduced), and make it through Zvahl in well under 100hrs if they know wtf they're doing. Hell, nowadays you can SOLO your way to level17 or so in 5hrs. To expect any more might be cruel, but I do also believe that if they're going to pretend to be "speed gamers" they should at least pretend to beat the game (which the DL fight does pretty well).

My guess though, they'll cut off at the first dragon fight (2-3), panning out with a shot of the worst heroine in FF11, Lion.

Oh, and you forgot completely about maxing out craft (100main/60sub, 100main on rest of skills with mules), and obtaining an ebisu rod.

Epic

15,000 random encounters. I'd lose my shit.

Sweet charity. So much better than Autism Now, which treats Autistic people like a disease that must be eradicated.

Correction, I meant to say Autism Speaks is the crappy one. I don't think Autism Now is the name of anyone.

I suppose Autism Now would advocate autism for everyone.

Don't forget that Autism Speaks also bought one of its contemporaries, Cure Autism Now. That's enough for me to have problems with them. (I have Asperger's, and I love my life the way it is)

lol yeah, that was one of the ways in which FF12 was totally retarded, the extremely, impossibly obscure ways in which some treasure (and some of the rare monsters) would spawn. It's pretty much required to have a guide for it, it's like they made the game with the internet in mind.

If you were after a rare monster, it'd go like "kill 125 of this one particular monster on this one particular map, with this particular weather condition, but you have to have been on that map for at least 3 hours, with these three particular party members in your party. Now walk in a perfect circle 65 times, stand on your head and quote shakespeare, and then the rare monster you are after will have a 2% chance of spawning on a random part of the map." Even WITH a walkthrough in front of you it's a pain.

If they're really gonna play FFXI, they should get a bunch of high level white mages and powerlevel the hell out of them...I'd definitely help them with that!

/EM SARCASM You want that done in a week?! Piece of Cake! While your at it...don't forget the complete armor sets from Dynamis! Doing that might add a couple days though...

Sorry for the double post.

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CharityWatch: TheSpeedGamers tackling Final Fantasy I - XII

Reader Comments (48)

Posted: Jul 19th 2009 1:04PM Tre said

Posted: Jul 19th 2009 1:06PM Typicalgamer said

Posted: Jul 19th 2009 1:06PM Mr White said

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Posted: Jul 19th 2009 3:06PM Jerk Face said

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