Final Fantasy 14's funniest speedrunning beef is back over a year after it first began, as the feud to be the fastest to jump to the top of Kugane Tower continues.
You might remember that back in 2023, Final Fantasy 14 content creator Pint took to the internet to share their long journey to beat the world record to overcome the Kugane Tower jump puzzle (introduced in the Stormblood expansion) as fast as possible. For five long years, the record – held by a speedrunner known only as Em0_oticon – stood at 43.58 seconds, but after a lot of effort, Pint was able to shave a few milliseconds off and grab the record with a 43.30-second run.
And so, the world record belonged to Pint… for a day. Em0_oticon took no time at all to respond to their challenger, as they snatched back their place on the pedestal in under 24 hours, with a jaw-dropping time of 38.74 seconds.
But what could Pint do to reclaim that fleeting moment of glory? That's exactly what the player has mapped out in their latest video. For a start, splashing some cash was required – starting the game with a new character that could live on the EU servers instead of the US ones meant that the UK-based player had less lag to deal with, which was vital, but required about $60 to be spent on the Jobs to climb the tower as quickly as possible. On top of that, Pint found that they could add the jump command to a Macro (a sequence of commands that can be used with a single button), and spam that button in order to send out a jump on every server tick. This, combined with a 20% speed buff, meant Pint had all the tools possible to beat the tower jumping puzzle in record time.
And that's exactly what they did. With a new time of 38.31 seconds, smashed in just a day, the record had been reclaimed. Except… Pint still isn't the world record holder. It turns out yet another challenger, known as Azura Stargazer, had also been training to take the number one spot, and had already beaten Em0_oticon's time. While Pint's 38.31-second time did briefly become the world record once more, Azura wasn't going to give up that easily. In fact, Azura's most recent run, posted yesterday, was just 34.616 seconds long.
Alas, Pint concedes that they've lost, "but at least I tried," and hey, at least they did reclaim that world record for a little while. Meanwhile, it sounds like it's going to take an actual wizard to beat Azura's new best time, but at this point, nothing is impossible.
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