One of the potentially most annoying parts of any attempted speedrun of Final Fantasy IV is the prospect of random encounters. They are rarely actually fought, and the potential for a back attack or surprise attack means precious seconds lost. The routes listed on this page serve to minimize the amount of time wasted on random encounters.
Essentially, a step route is a series of extra steps or alternate paths taken while running the game with the goal of decreasing the total amount of time the run takes. This page provides ready-to-use step routes for the original US SNES release of Final Fantasy IV (originally released as Final Fantasy II). Routes for other releases may also be available at some point.
If you use any of the routes and something goes wrong, please let me know and link me to a video so I can attempt to investigate the problem. It could simply be a mistake in execution or a misinterpretation of the instructions, but it could also be a problem with the route generation or with this site.
For an introduction to step routing, I recommend reading the Step Routing Basics guide. If you have suggestions or comments regarding that guide, please contact me.
In addition, each route has its own individual Tutorial tab which should help newcomers.
In order to find your seed during a run, I recommend using my Seed Finder tool.
All modern routes are now available with tutorial and summary data and are twin safe. The next step is adding more recovery options.
These are the standard routes people are most likely to use.
| Route | Twin Seed Safe | Optimization Status |
|---|---|---|
| Paladin% | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% NoCW | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% No64 (Rosa) | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% No64 (Rosa) (Safe) | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% No64 (Rosa) (Marathon) | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% No64 (Edge+Excalbur) | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% No64 (Edge+Excalbur) (Marathon) | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% Glitchless | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% Glitchless (No Seed Manipulation) | ✓ | Suboptimal (Optimal Estimate: Mid to Late 2025) |
These routes are intended to be used to recover a step route in case the original one was permanently lost.
| Route | Twin Seed Safe | Optimization Status |
|---|---|---|
| Any% No64 (Rosa) (Marathon) (Recovery: FuSoYa) | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% No64 (Rosa) (Marathon) (Recovery: Paladin) | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% No64 (Edge+Excalbur) (Marathon) (Recovery: FuSoYa) | ✓ | Optimal |
| Any% No64 (Edge+Excalbur) (Marathon) (Recovery: Paladin) | ✓ | Optimal |
These routes are uncommon alternate routes that are less likely to be used during a run. They currently have no summary or tutorial data. They may or may not be twin seed safe.
| Route | Twin Seed Safe | Optimization Status |
|---|---|---|
| Any% No64 (Rosa) All Bosses [riversmccown] | ✓ | Suboptimal |
| Any% No64 (Edge+Excalbur) All Bosses [riversmccown] | ✓ | Suboptimal |
| Pre-Mist Clip | Optimal |
These routes are archived from the old version of the site. They have not been updated to the new data structure, and their optimization status is unknown (though they should be near optimal relative to their input data). There is no associated tutorial or summary data. Eventually, I would like to convert them to the new structure, but this is not a high priority. These routes are not guaranteed to be twin seed safe (though some of them may be).
| Route | Optimization Status |
|---|---|
| SFC Any% NoCW | Unknown |
| SFC Any% NoCW (Toru_1988) | Unknown |
| Any% No64 (Edge+Drain) | Unknown |
| Octomamm% (Cecil+Kain+Darkness) | Unknown |
| Paladin% Single Segment | Unknown |
| Any% No64 Single Segment (Edge+Excalbur) | Unknown |
| Any% No64 (Edge+Drain) Marathon Safe (AGDQ 2016) | Unknown |
| Any% No64 (Edge+Excalbur) Marathon Safe (AGDQ 2016) | Unknown |
| Any% No64 (Edge+Excalbur) Extra Bosses Marathon Safe (AGDQ 2016) | Unknown |
| Unprecedented Crisis v2.1 Any% No Major Skips | Unknown |
| Unprecedented Crisis v3.1 Any% No Major Skips (riversmccown) | Unknown |
| Unprecedented Crisis v3.1 Any% (Mist Clip%) | Unknown |
| The Darkness Within v1.07b Any% | Unknown |
Final Fantasy IV uses a relatively simple system for determining when encounters occur. There are 256 possible seeds. For any given seed and encounter rate, the step numbers where encounters occur is fixed. By following the path through the game, we can determine exactly when encounters will occur and what formations they will be.
There are two ways we can adjust our route:
Including healing time, an encounter will waste anywhere from 5.6 to 32.0 seconds. The overall average is somewhere between 8 and 10 seconds per encounter. Knowing this, there are three primary ways taking extra steps can actually be beneficial:
All of this sounds wonderful, of course, but as I'm sure you can imagine, trying to figure this all out in your head would probably be a fool's errand. Instead, we use a computer to solve the problem. Specifically, I use a tool I've written called Rosa to generate the routes.
For the standard routes, the first place there is an option to take extra steps is the Watery Pass-South Save Room. In most cases, any two seeds can be told apart by the time you reach this room. However, there are several pairs that cannot. These pairs have been named twin seeds. These can roughly be divided into two groups:
The following pairs, while indistinguishable solely by encounter steps, can be distinguished by the encountered formations. For this reason, when using the Seed Finder, it is highly recommended to choose formations as you go. In fact, twin seed-safety is only guaranteed if you do select formations.
The follow pairs of seeds are completely indistinguishable by the time you reach the Save Room. If using the Seed Finder with a twin seed-safe route, if you get one of these pairs, you will be given instructions on how to proceed to identify your seed. Alternately, you can load both routes, and follow one as long as encounters match exactly. If at some point it doesn't match, you switch to the other. That said, this option produces a much higher workload.
This section documents the effects of changes made to routes to ensure twin safety. Any unlisted pairs required no adjustment and were safe by default.
The Excalbur routes are currently highly suboptimal, so there's no point recording the exact modifications done in the name of twin seed safety. The situation should be rectified by Fall 2020 or so.
I don't know exactly what his contribution was, but some early work on the concepts of step routing was done by the_roth, who is one of the top runners of FF4 in the world.
I'd also like to thank Myself086 for his instrumental work in the development of FF4 step routes. His pioneering work used a truly optimal solver, though it operated on a simplified model that didn't take individual encounter times into account and did not optimize the final descent. His routes were originally used to seed the generation of my own.
Later on, many of the routes were optimized with encounter timings using an optimizer written by fcoughlin. I've since enhanced the timing information even further to change based on the current party, so we can no longer use his optimizer. Until I wrote my own optimal solver, the routes available here were descended from optimal routes generated by his software.
My previous optimizer, Spoony, as I've hinted above, did not generate truly optimal routes as it used a stochastic optimization algorithm. However, testing has indicated that it gets very close.
The routes are now generated by my truly optimal solver, Rosa. However, the routes have become significantly more complicated since the time of Myself086 and fcoughlin, so the process is more time consuming. (For example, no64-excalbur had 56 variables at the time. Today, it has over 200. Suffice it to say that the relationship between number of variables and time to complete is not linear. Paladin% currently has 45 variables and processes something like 180 times faster than no64-excalbur.) Anyway, they'll be done eventually.
If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or any other feedback, please send me an e-mail or message me on Twitch.