Hello everyone it’s Bescape, and welcome
to the Theoretical Longest Speedruns.
It’s been almost four years since EZScape
covered the Top 10 Longest Speedruns, and
today, I’ll be covering even longer speedruns
that would not only require hundreds...but
thousands of hours of playtime.
The longer speedruns in this video are based
on segmented time, not real time...so you’ll
be in for a treat by the time we get to number
one.
I don’t want to spoil anything, so let’s
get right into the video and I hope you all
enjoy.
First up is a True 100% run of Perfect Dark.
On the Xbox Live arcade version of the game,
the normal 100% World Record time is 2 hours
and 4 minutes by Endeavorgaming, and in this
run, a player is required to complete the
game on the Perfect Agent difficulty, unlock
all cheats, and beat The Duel.
The XBLA version is faster than N64, but this
gives us an approximation of how long this
segment would take.
The greatest portion of a True 100% run would
be to get the Perfect rank in Combat Simulator,
which takes 300 hours and this is because
the game forces you to play this long as a
requirement towards Perfect rank.
In order to achieve this rank during that
time, a player would need to accumulate 18,000
kills, use 450,000 rounds of ammo, win 900
games, run a total of 9,000 kilometers, and
more.
It’s reasonable that if you were to play
at max efficiency, you could complete every
single requirement before the time-gated requirement.
Another large portion of the run would be
spent completing all single player challenges,
and then completing them again in 2, 3, and
4 player mode, since the game keeps track
of this.
The current World Record for All Single Player
Challenges is 1 hour, 29 minutes, and 51 seconds
by Big Bossman.
We can just assume it would take a player
this amount of time at minimum for co-op challenges,
so if you multiply Big Bossman’s time by
4, we get slightly above 6 hours for this
section; however this can all be done in 0
time in Combat Simulator, since these are
Combat Simulator challenges.
The rest of the run then requires a player
to complete all device challenges and holo
training challenges, but this would only take
6 minutes, so at least this is the easy part.
So if we add up everything in total, this
entire run would take a minimum of 302 hours.
Before we continue, I'd like to announce once
again that EZScape and I have partnered with
Feeding America to help support covid relief.
For every $1,500 we raise, we will be creating
speedrunning competitions over on EZScape's
second channel.
The two new incentives that I am announcing
today are the Captain Falcon SM64 Romhack,
and Softlock percent from the Gen 1 Pokemon
Games.
If each and every one of you donated just
one dollar, we would absolutely smash our
goal.
There will be a donation link in the description
and in the pinned comment.
Thank you.
This second entry is going to be a quick refresher,
and it’s the 100% run of Baten Kaitos.
This speedrun isn’t quite theoretical since
there is a run on the leaderboards, but it’s
still the longest completed speedrun of all-time,
so I chose to still include it.
To clarify once again, the reason this speedrun
is so long is because of an item called the
Shampoo, which takes 2 weeks, or 336 hours
to evolve; meaning that it’s impossible
for this run to be beaten in any less time
than that.
The reason why this speedrun takes even longer,
is because items pause evolving while at menu,
so you want to have quick menuing throughout
the run.
In addition, the game’s final bosses need
to be defeated, meaning a run will take a
minimum of 338 hours.
Baffan currently has the World Record with
a time of 339 hours, 17 minutes, and 19 seconds.
What’s more interesting about this speedrun,
is that Baffan’s Twitch account was temporarily
banned for 24 hours due to “non-gaming content,”
since he left the game idling all night as
he slept.
In 2016, Twitch had different policies towards
being AFK, mostly because there were no IRL
categories at the time.
Baffan did a new run attempt in September
of 2019 which died at Day 5 because of a mistake,
but as long as he put “Not Playing” on
his dashboard while he was idling, there were
no issues.
Next up is the All Achievements run of Europa
Universalis 4, which would take at minimum
600 hours.
What’s interesting about this game is that
it’s limited by an in-game timer, so you
cannot be sure that each achievement will
be reached before the end of time.
It starts on November 11th, 1444, incrementing
one day at a time and ends on January 2nd,
1821.
Your game will just end here no matter how
the world looks, so there will probably be
a lot of resets during some of the harder
segments.
The gameplay consists of taking control of
one nation and commanding its army, navy,
and all diplomatic actions.
From there on, the future of your nation is
up to you...for the most part.
At first glance, this game looks incredibly
complex and challenging.
A runner of the game, MiklMaar, shared with
me that he played the game for more than 1,500
hours before he managed to do his first world
conquest.
Paradox Studios have ranked the achievements
for this game from “Very Easy” to “Insane,”
but this is ranked purely by difficulty, not
by time to complete.
There’s a total of 310, which means each
achievement takes about 2 hours on average,
but of course, some are significantly longer
than others.
Some of the lengthy ones include The Three
Mountains, which requires you to conquer the
world by starting as the nation of Ryukyu.
The achievement One Faith! requires you to
have all non-wasteland land provinces in the
world be of your religion, and The Great Khan,
requires you to start as Mongolia or Great
Horde, and own the Chinese, Russian, and Persian
regions.
These alone can take anywhere from 15-20 hours
each.
As for the hardest achievements in a speedrun
sense, it would be Eat Your Greens, and True
Heir of Timur, since they have very strict
in-game timer based cut-offs, so you have
to find the perfect balance of optimized and
fast gameplay.
Also if you were to do an All Achievement
run, it has to be on “Ironman,” which
means that you can’t use console commands
to cheat, you can’t use mods and your game
will overwrite your current save every three
months.
So you can’t save before a war and just
load your save file if it went badly.
So for those up to the challenge, MiklMaar
wrote a 61 page route for this run, and I’ll
link it in the description.
Even if you have 0 interest in running the
game, I’d still recommend just looking at
it to see the sheer amount of routing and
detail.
Next up is a 100% run of Harvest Moon: Friends
of Mineral Town, and it’s estimated to be
at least 610 hours long.
50 of these hours would actually be spent
by playing a different Harvest Moon game,
A Wonderful Life.
In this game, there are 49 tasks to do such
as befriending people, fishing, gaining a
certain amount of money and so on.
For each of these 49 tasks, you have to connect
A Wonderful Life to Friends of Mineral Town
with the Gameboy Advance to Gamecube link
cable, and throw an item to the Goddess on
Friends of Mineral Town.
If you connect 49 times after meeting the
requirements on A Wonderful Life, the Goddess
will give you a Seaside Cottage, which is
a requirement for this run.
Another 40 hours would be spent catching all
fish, obtaining all the tools, obtaining all
the recipes and Power Berries, unlocking the
Mountain Cottage, and much more.
The remaining 520 hours is to earn 100 million
gold, which is the exact amount to purchase
the Town House.
Based on calculations, the best way to earn
this much gold is purely by betting on horse
races, which are held on the 18th of Spring
and Fall every year.
When betting on them, you’ll spend around
16k gold each year for medals, which you use
to buy broaches.
They sell for 2k each, and on average, this
earns about a net profit of 135,869 gold per
year.
So to unlock the Town House, 736 years of
time will need to progress in-game.
If you run the game on WiiU VC, which provides
for the fastest load times, the horse races
take about 18 minutes real time to complete,
and in order to get to the next year as quickly
as possible, you will need to sleep in-game
for about 24 minutes and 20 seconds real time.
This means that about 236 hours are spent
betting on horse races, and 284 hours are
spent sleeping.
Imagine finally retiring in a Town House at
the ripe age of over 736 years old.
This list wouldn’t be complete if there
wasn’t an Animal Crossing game on here,
so up next is a 100% run of Animal Crossing:
New Leaf.
The first hurdle in this run would be to pay
off all debts, which relies on a glitch only
present in version 1.0 of the Japanese release
of this game.
The current standing World Record for this
is 1 hour and 32 minutes, but the glitch setup
is inconsistent and can vary wildly.
The next part of the run would be to complete
the museum, which requires a runner to get
every single fish, bug, fossil, and Crazy
Redd painting.
Like other Animal Crossing games, the fish
and bugs are tied to the in-game days, seasons,
and weather, so on average, it’s said that
this alone would take around 11 hours, which
also accounts for the purely RNG fish, bugs,
fossils, and paintings.
The next achievement would be All Shop upgrades,
with the first one being the Nook upgrade.
This requires a runner to pay off the first
debt, spending 12,000 bells or obtaining 15
items from the shop, letting 10 days pass,
spending 25,000 bells and letting another
10 days pass, spending 50,000 bells and letting
21 days pass, then finally spending 100,000
bells and letting 30 days pass.
After this you would need to pass Gracie’s
Fashion Check, where you have to put together
an outfit based on a theme -- a total of four
times.
In addition to this, upgrading the Able Sisters’
fashion shop, the Fortune Teller shop, and
Roost Cafe would likely take around 2-3 hours.
The next achievement would be to obtain All
Furniture.
On the Gamecube version of Animal Crossing,
you’re able to use the secret code system
to effectively obtain all the items.
This isn’t an option in New Leaf, which
means a runner would have to obtain the final
Nook shop upgrade, giving them access to the
greatest amount of items per-day.
A runner would then have to constantly time
travel to refresh the shop and hope that new
items they haven't yet obtained are available.
Since most categories disallow multiplayer,
the only way to complete this would be to
flat out brute-force it.
It’s thought that All Furniture could take
a player anywhere from 55-80 hours.
So far, we’re at about a minimum of 95 hours
for the run, but the final challenge is to
add on a minimum of 500 hours, because of
the Gold Badge that requires 500 hours play-time.
All Gold Badges would be the final challenge
of this run, and if we assume a runner had
a blistering pace, all gold badges could be
obtained before the 500 hour time-gated one.
For all my Desert Bus fans out there, we have
99 playthroughs or Max%, which would take
a player roughly 792 hours to complete.
According to a TASVideos post back in 2009,
the maximum number of points you can get is
99, and you get one point by driving a bus
from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada
in real time at a maximum speed of 45 mph.
Once this is completed, a player will get
an option to make the return trip to Tucson--for
another point, and this decision must be made
within a few seconds or else the game ends.
Each trip takes about 8 hours, and it’s
impossible to tape down a button to go do
something else and have the game end properly.
If the bus veers off the road it will stall
and be towed back to Tucson, also in real
time.
There is also no pausing whatsoever, so you’re
forced to babysit the game indefinitely, which
means that it would be impossible for a single
player to achieve a score of 99, because you
would be required to stay up for 792 hours
straight.
To put this in perspective, the World Record
for the longest time awake without the use
of drugs is 264.4 hours held by Randy Gardner,
which was set back in 1964.
Imagine he played this game back then, he
would’ve only been one third into the run.
Also, the online charity gaming marathon called
Desert Bus For Hope, where volunteers pilot
the game based on the amount of donations
is still popular more than ever.
Their most recent event held in 2019 raised
a record-breaking $864,415 dollars, and the
volunteers bussed for 162 hours.
Next up is Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, which
is an expansion of the original Monster Hunter
Freedom 2, and has more missions, equipment,
and of course, monsters.
A 100% run of the game is completing all quests,
unlocking all awards and titles, and collecting
all max level armor and weapons.
The speedrunning community for this game has
agreed that all 406 quests in the game would
take roughly 200 hours, but for everything
else on top of that, would take an additional
700 hours, so at least 900 in total.
Most quests in the game can be completed anywhere
from 5-30 minutes each, but most of the time
in the run would be spent farming for better
equipment, with item drops for equipment being
RNG.
With the high level weapons and armor, the
plate and gem drops needed to craft them can
be as low as a 2% chance to acquire.
There are also gathering quests that are solely
RNG, so with overall luck taken into account,
the 200 hour benchmark for questing seems
accurate.
As for weapons specifically, upgrading them
can be visualized as a tree.
If we take specifically bows for example,
there’s one called Wild Bow I.
If you upgrade it 7 times, you get the Jungle
Bow II, which would be the most powerful bow
out of the wild bow series.
This process is required for tons of other
weapons such as great swords, long swords,
and hammers to name a few.
The highest level armour in the game is G-level,
and this is subdivided between Blademaster
and Gunner, which basically means Melee and
Ranged armour respectively.
The highest rarity is tier ten, and just like
weapons, there are a lot of them.
Awards take a fair bit of time, and on paper,
the Gold Medal achievement is one of the longest
to grind, since it requires you to complete
all of the 6-8 star rated quests.
Collecting Monster Crowns, which are given
for defeating the smallest size and largest
size of a specific monster would theoretically
take longer because the sizes that a monster
spawns at is RNG.
You can collect these throughout the speedrun,
but if the RNG is bad, there might be a long
grind ahead of you.
As for titles, there are over 400 to unlock,
which range from slaying a certain amount
of specific creatures, to earning 1,000,000
guild points.
To put everything into perspective, there
is a video that was posted back in 2011 of
a player showing off their 100% Guild Card.
In the first few seconds of the video, we
can see their play time, which was almost
1,200 hours.
So in a segmented speedrun, this run could
totally be completed in as little as 900.
Next up is an All Messages run from Super
Smash Bros. Melee.
There are 60 messages in the game which range
from unlocking stages, characters, and game-modes.
But by far, the absolute chad message to unlock
is 1,000,000 VS. mode matches.
I’m not kidding, this is hard-coded in the
game.
The quickest way to complete a single VS.
mode match is by playing on Stamina Mode as
Falco and side-B-ing into the death plane
on the stage Flat Zone.
The way to make this process even faster is
by unlocking the “Random Stage” additional
rule, which is done by unlocking all stages
in the game.
If you choose just Flat Zone to be played
upon hitting start on the character screen,
you’ll skip the stage selection screen and
therefore save a little bit of time between
matches.
At best, a single VS. mode match takes roughly
6.12 seconds, and 1,000,000 of these would
take roughly 1,700 hours.
As for the other 59 messages in the game,
the 250 Trophies message would take the longest,
but nowhere near the VS. mode one.
NCB1221 was the first person to complete an
All Trophies run in 61 hours, but he has since
re-routed the category and the new estimation
is about 24 hours.
You’ll essentially unlock every other message
in the game by additionally completing a near
All Trophies run simultaneously, therefore
bringing the total amount of hours to a minimum
of 1,724.
Now this is where time estimated can start
taking massive leaps.
This is a game called Anti-Idle, and the run
in question is to get Level 9001, complete
all 666 achievements, and get S rank in every
quest.
The core gameplay is a hub-game with 3 currencies
of varying difficulty to obtain, and sub-games
based around popular game tropes that reward
you currency back in the hub-game.
Here we have the button machine and all you
do is click it.
It rewards regular coins, which can be used
to purchase features such as the Arcade, or
the Fishing minigame.
Or there’s the Stadium, where you compete
in races which additionally reward green and
blue coins, which are used to purchase upgrades
and items in the mystery shop respectively.
You can ascend when you hit over Level 9000
in the hub game and there are varying difficulties
unlocked when you start prestiging with the
ascensions.
The real difficulty in the run would undoubtedly
be the S ranks in every quest.
Some S ranks require physical challenge, and
the ability to master arcade games like a
Minesweeper clone and pong.
Others require immense amounts of time in
active gameplay to complete the fastest way,
for example, defeating each of the 500 monsters
in the battle arena 10,000 times for a level
2000 bestiary and taming each of those monsters
as allies.
A full completion would also ascend 1000 times.
TiKevin83 worked with some core Anti-Idle
players to estimate that these Battle Arena
tasks would take a minimum 1,100 hours, and
he’s played the rest of the game to know
that the various other requirements could
easily take another 1,000 hours, bringing
the total time of this speedrun to at least
2,100 hours.
For an even harder challenge, the bestiary
can go an additional 1000 levels to 3000 with
closer to 10,000 hours of play, and a player
named phantomwolf13 is known to have actually
played for more than a year to grind out this
potential category.
For this next entry, I’m nowhere near qualified
to talk about this, so Settled, take it away.
The next speedrun on this list is obtaining
a max cape on the Ultimate Ironman game mode
in Old School Runescape.
In late 2018 I completed my 7,000 hour journey
to achieve just that.
For those unfamiliar, a max cape is earned
by reaching level 99 in all 23 skills; to
put this in perspective, a player could do
this efficiently in less than 2,200 hours
on a normal, unrestricted account.
There’s a few ways to restrict and challenge
yourself in the game, and that’s by choosing
to play as an ironman.
A regular Ironman is not allowed to trade
other players, but Ultimate Ironmen additionally
can’t use the banks in the game.
The challenge of this game mode is to progress
your account while only using the 28 spaces
provided in your inventory whereas a bank
has over 800.
However there are some ways around this, such
as using a looting bag, or death abusing certain
bosses for additional storage.
With this disadvantage, a majority of the
23 skills are suddenly completely changed
from how they’re usually trained.
Just to put one skill in perspective, let’s
take Herblore, which is by far the most challenging
to achieve Level 99 in.
A normal account could achieve Level 99 Herblore
in under 40 hours, given that the player has
enough gold to fund the skill before-hand.
But in this-game mode, you’re basically
training Herblore from your first breath to
your funeral bed.
Since you’re not able to buy necessary herbs
and secondary ingredients, you have to collect
them all yourself, with limited space.
It’s almost impossible to calculate how
long this skill truly takes, even though most
of it can be passively trained through farming,
a majority of Ultimate Ironmen don’t finish
the skill until they’re very close to maxing.
Earlier this year, one of the Jagex moderators
tweeted an image that shows the fastest times
to achieve max total in every game mode on
Runescape, and they can be thought of as the
current records.
The fastest ever unrestricted account to max
all 23 skills took 89 days and 20 hours of
play time, while the fastest ever Ultimate
Ironman took 206 days and 10 hours, just barely
under the 5,000 hour mark, which is a record
currently held by Hauki.
Even though this challenge has been completed,
it’s still theoretical since there hasn’t
been a person who has obtained a max cape
while trying to do it in the most efficient
way possible.
Since the game is constantly evolving, the
time it takes to max only decreases, and for
a while, it was thought that the absolute
minimum play-time to max an ultimate, is probably
around 4,100 hours, but thanks to a few new
in-game updates, and method optimizations
over time, the total time might be less than
4,000 hours now.
Just to put everything in perspective once
again, this game-mode came out on October
13 of 2014, nearly 6 years ago, and there
are only 36 players in the world with a maxed
account.
Thank you Settled, and before we talk about
the number 1 entry on this list, I’d like
to give out an honorable mention.
The honorable mention for today’s video
is the 100% No B-Spec speedrun of Gran Turismo
4.
A run such as this had never been attempted,
but a group of four friends successfully completed
it on April 7th of this year.
This speedrun involves completing every license
test, race, and driving mission without using
B-Spec, a mode where the player coaches an
AI-controlled driver while it races on their
behalf.
If you want to 100% the game without having
to drive for hours at a time, you can put
your B-Spec driver in an overpowered car and
just leave your console on.
This is useful since there are 3 24 hour races
in the game.
So you can either do it on your own and pause
to take breaks, or use B-Spec; which is what
I would see most players doing.
So with a group of four people to tag in and
out, it wasn’t uncommon to see one person
at the wheel for many hours at a time, and
when I say at the wheel, I literally mean
AT THE WHEEL.
There’s actually a Pastebin FAQ that the
runners made which describes their reason
for doing this, which states: “We’re dumb,
we’re quarantined for three weeks, nobody
has ever completed this category before--let
alone routed it--and we figured we might as
well be the first, and we’re all racing
game fans, and they say run the games you
love, right?
This game was all over the Speedrun sub-reddit,
and for good reason, it’s one of the most
interesting speedruns.
This speedrun clocked in at a time of 230
hours, 35 minutes, and 51 seconds.
I’d like to congratulate the runners, Tyler,
Shawn, Jonah, and Paul, you guys are legends.
The final entry for today is a True 100% run
of Yu-Gi-Oh!
Forbidden Memories.
In a standard 100% run, a runner must obtain
689 out of the 722 cards in the game.
There was actually a new 100% World Record
that was set on May 23rd with a time of 72
hours and 34 minutes.
So the question is, how come the other 33
cards aren’t obtained in the run?
To start off, there are two cards that are
impossible to obtain on the non-Japanese version
of the game; Dark Magic Ritual, and Magician
of Black Chaos.
However if you play on the Japanese version
of Forbidden Memories with a Pocketstation,
you can obtain these two cards.
Yet again, another weird version difference
between NTSC and JP.
Now as for the other 31 cards, it would be
absolutely insane to obtain these without
cheating.
Most of these cards require 999,999 starchips
to purchase, but three of those 31 cards have
special exceptions.
A good example would be the card Chakra.
This card itself is unobtainable, but you
can buy the cards you need in order to ritual
summon it, so therefore Chakra technically
does become obtainable if you have max starchips,
just not directly purchasable.
The other two cards are Javelin Beetle, and
Harpie Lady Sisters.
Javelin Beetle can be ritual summoned, and
Harpie Lady Sisters can be obtained through
fusing Harpy Lady, another max starchip card.
Technically you can buy Harpie Lady Sisters
for max starchips, but since the game will
keep track of this card if it’s fusion summoned,
there’s no need to purchase it.
Therefore, a total of 28 cards would need
to be purchased from the shop for max starchips
in a True 100% run.
The fastest way to obtain this many starchips
would be to achieve S-rank on duels, with
each duel awarding 5 starchips.
If we do some quick math, this means that
200,000 duels would need to be completed to
purchase ONE CARD.
On average, one duel takes around 1 minute
to complete, so to purchase one card, it would
take around 3,333 hours.
But let’s say we break the rules of the
standard 100% run and allow for memory card
duplication and trading.
You would be able to effectively purchase
all 28 cards with one set of max starchips.
If this is done, a True 100% run with trading
would take at minimum 3,400 hours.
But let’s say we go balls to the wall and
don’t allow for duplication or trading.
Let’s take 3,333 hours and multiply that
by 28 cards.
Also let’s add in the time of 72 hours for
standard 100%, and we get a whopping total
of 93,396 hours.
This would take a player 3,891.5 days...segmented
time of course.
Let’s say you want to spend the rest of
your life trying to do this legitimately,
and you dedicate 8 hours of your life everyday
to grinding duels.
Since there are 24 hours in a day, the RTA
time would be triple the segmented time.
If a person did this, it would take them a
total of 31.98 years real time.
I’ll see you guys when I’m 55 years old.
Alright this marks the end of the video and
if you enjoyed it, leave a like on it, it
helps us reach recommended.
With an ambitious project like this, I want
to give a big thank you to everyone that provided
me with information for each of these games,
they’re all listed in the description.
I imagine that there are even more theoretical
speedruns that I might have missed, and if
you know of any, leave them down in the comments
section.
This list wasn’t limited to the ones featured,
and I would totally be down to make a part
2 if you guys would like to see it.
If you’re enjoying the content EZScape and
I put out, subscribe to the channel for more
speedrunning related content.
That’s it from me today, thank you all for
watching, and I hope you all have a wonderful
day.
