Over the weekend, a Final Fantasy 7 player who goes by the handle CirclMastr got Cloud and Barret to level 99, which isn’t particularly impressive. What’s impressive is that he did it before the game’s first boss battle.
It took roughly 500 hours, by CirclMastr’s count, to pull off this ridiculous accomplishment. He’s been plugging away at his quest for over two years, grinding experience by fighting thousands of low-level random encounters on the catwalks of Midgar’s Sector 1 reactor. “Tedious” might not be a strong enough word, especially considering that he played the game on a PS1, without the benefit of frame-skipping or save states. He streamed some of the run on his Twitch channel, but most of it was solo.
CirclMastr started this journey in January of 2015 out of frustration, he says. He watched another user on a private forum (named Dick Tree — hence the characters’ names) promise to hit level 99 in Final Fantasy 7‘s first reactor only to stop posting updates. So CirclMastr decided to pick up the slack. “I got fed up with waiting and, based on my track record of meaningless accomplishments, decided I could do the whole thing before he could bother to finish,” CirclMastr told me in an email.
Here’s the video from his final stream. If you don’t want to watch an hour’s worth of random encounters, you’re safe to skip to 52:48 for the final battle.
So what’s next for CirclMastr? When I asked, his response was unsurprising: “I’m probably going to start getting Terra to level 99 before Whelk in FF6 on Wednesday.”
Comments
10 responses to “Final Fantasy 7 Player Hits Level 99 In The First Reactor”
So when we all laughed at South Park’s WoW episode this person took it as inspiration.
Man, seriously, what a waste of time. I love playing video games, and my god I’ve wasted some time doing mundane quests and stuff, but there is seriously no accomplishment to this 500 hours.
I once dug a 3×3 railway tunnel one end of the map to the other in the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft.
I was single at the time, and it probably took me about 1/100th of the time that this took…. But I still shake my head when I think of the time wasted.
This…. this is just sad.
I have done some utterly pointless 100% stuff before… such as actually getting the “perfect” score on FFIX’s card game just to unlock… a glitch.
But 2 years just to get 99 on Midgar reactor… I mean more power to the guy for sticking to it I guess?
No, sorry but there is no power in this, just pathetic, pathetic sadness, and a waste of vast amounts of time. 500 hours enjoying a fun game is one thing – this is something else entirely.
No Accomplishment?… how about getting an article written about you on Kotaku
Whilst I don’t really care what people do with their time, I hope he doesn’t get too depressed when he looks back on how much of his life he wasted on such a pointless endeavor. There really is no accomplishment in this, it’s just stupid.
Yeah. Why?
The interesting thing about FF7, is that being at level 99 actually makes several bosses (such as the final sephiroth battles) a great deal harder.
Why would someone waste their time doing such a thing? The fact that he’s proud of himself for such a mundane accomplishment is baffling to me… smh…
After a few levels you could get the same result with a book and a turbo controller if its on ps1
It took me less time as a teenager to grind for 12 or so max KotR for killing Emerald weapon without having to touch the controller. That was an accomplishment. This just seems pointless.