History of Symphonia

Ok not so brief history/rambling of the symphonia speedrun from my persective

First notable run was Cosalich with an 8:00:09 basically doing casual strats (lloyd main etc) which was later topped by omegaevolution with cleaner gameplay

at this time the biggest shakeup to ever hit tales speedrunning occured before it was even really a thing. A person going by the name Qwiscot theory crafted several glitches using a walk through walls cheat and found set ups for some of them. This documentation is how the speedrun got introduced to things like ymir skip and paved the way for much of the glitch hunting into the future.

With all of Ymir forest now skippable Cosalich managed to get a new WR almost completely based on the new skips only to later be topped by OmegaEvolution and TheOriginalFanatic who did an extensive reroute of the game based largely on the Regal Combo.

After this there was a lull for awhile until Cosalich decided to "derust" which while never occuring did attract the attention of Me, Dabomstew, HyperResonnance, and HuffleYourPuff.

After asking for the route notes from Cosalich I took to work rewriting the Lloyd centric notes into the Regal strats used in the WR and in doing so started to question things. First of which was the Kratos Skip. While Omega and Fanatic knew about it the lack of a good set up meant that it didn't really save time So I experimented and found a way to make it work. The biggest route change was probably was the introduction of macroing and also the introduction of several rules questions. At this time I was trying jsut about everything to cut out time, one of which was the question of third party controllers and the discovery that different third party controllers gained different amounts of time. With this in mind we discussed in a skype group (which would later be turned into the Tales Speedrunning Discord) and decided we didn't want the game to turn into a competition of hunting down hardware and so 3rd party controllers and emulators were banned from use. The other rules question was what morphed into the use of macros and that was multiplayer. In my testing of dealing with AI i found I had more consistent fights by setting my party to semi-auto and mashing with my feet which was jsut awkward and goofy so we decided to seperate multiplayer as well.

For the next while the game was seeing daily activity with multiple route changes a day as the time got shaved down farther and farther. Most changes were very small but a few notable ones was accidently finding that hard route was faster because of trolly casual runs, Absolute being awesome, Early sylph being added and removed countless times to fit with different routes, and the introduction of buying toy weapons. Most of my routing focused on optimizing pathing the order of events menus and most other non battle stuff (though lots of battle rerouting did occur)

I was taken away from the game for work for awhile and after I came back I focused more on doing a good run but started to be less active as I realized I enjoyed the routing aspect more and by the time the next season rolled around for me to be taken away from doing runs I was basically retired.

Around the time Jay started getting serious with the game (as he had sorta been floating around the scene for awhile) dabomstew also get into looking a bit more into the game. Most of my decissions were basically based on me testing things out with a stop watch so taking a more in depth look at the route showed several places where i ahd either mistimed or botched execution on tests or something (notable one is leaving the tower of mana on the raine route) so this cleaned up the route a ton and from there Jay with his much better battle mechanics to be able to test out different strategies started rerouting a lot of the fights to remove the RNG plagueing the run (As I was never really good at fights and was only able to mash super quickly and had good rythm practice for regals combo)




Went a bit in depth to the old days of the route and some of my persective for the jaymota reroutes

Honestly the thing that I am by far the most proud of is that the route guide is still a thing and still updated even without me. So few games actually give you anything to go off of when learning a game so I am so happy that my random whim to convert my basically unused notes into a detailed description of what a speedrun of the game should optimally look like has carried on to let new people learn the game.