Kingdom Hearts 1 Final Mix Any% — Improved World Record

In the hype of Kingdom Hearts 3, a little over a week ago speedrunner MistMaster1 improved his personal best in Kingdom Hearts 1 Final Mix, Any% – PS4 Beginner category by 47 seconds. Already holding the world record prior to this accomplishment, Mist continues to remain at the top of the leaderboards  with a  time of 2 hours, 10 minutes, and 48 seconds. Funnily enough, he just PB’d a few days before this as well.

Kingdom Hearts 1 is the first in the Action RPG series originally made for the Playstation 2. The game is included on the PS4 1.5 & 2.5 Collection along with 5 other KH games.

The run started on a very strong pace. There was plenty of quality gameplay and a fast boss battle with Guard Armor. However, after Wonderland, mist started having a difficult time. Load times were becoming an issue as well as some bad luck. Mist was almost always a few seconds behind his best times, which in speedrunning can either cause frustration, or inspire you and push through to victory. In this case, it may have done both.

“Eh, not a very good run…if I was tied after pot centipede
then I would say the run is okay. But 8 behind is kind of bad.”

The run continued to look bleak with Goofy pushing Mist toward certain spawn areas he wanted to stay away from in Halloween Town. Often times in Kingdom Hearts runs, players need to be aware of what their party members are up to. Donald and Goofy can ruin what could be a good fight. Mist began to feel like he was losing his momentum at this point. Frustrated, he almost reset the run — but luckily (for both him and us) he continued after a strong Halloween Town. Neverland featured some optimal, or close to optimal fights and the speedrun was starting to look hopeful.

“Generally speaking, that was a really good Neverland…
Its one of the most volatile parts of the entire run so that feels pretty good.”

Although Hollow Bastion 1 had some rough patches, mist got the bop skip. The bop skip is in reference to a cut scene where Donald bops Sora heartless on the head with his magic staff. If runners are fast enough, they can skip the cut scene prior to the bop. It doesn’t save too much time but it is a fun detail to note during KH1FM runs. Hollow Bastion 2 was a great return to form and Mist was on his A-game. End of the World brought similar results. Overall, end game was looking really clean. Mist had some hurdles but managed to save time where it counted!

The run is pretty incredible and just goes to show how unpredictable and rewarding speedrunning can be! Be sure to check out the run in all its glory below!

Although the speedrun began on a shaky note, Mist was able to keep it together to get his PB! Congrats Mist! On the days after the run, Mist continued playing KH1FM before moving on to some different territory — switching to Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix.  Come January 25th, he will stop streaming until the world wide release of Kingdom Hearts 3 which comes out January 29th. He then play KH3 and possibly look into speedrunning it down the road — though nothing is set in stone.

Congratulations to Mist improving your personal best and setting the world record even further out of reach for other speedrunners. The run is posted below, I hope you enjoy it as much as us at Speedrun News have! For a direct link to Mist’s run, click here.

Special message from Level Story:
Hi Mist! You may have seen me over on your streams a lot lately. I first saw your run at SGDQ 2018 and absolutely loved it. You have quickly become my favorite speedrunner, inspiring me to pick up KH1 to speedrun myself. I can’t wait to see what is in store for you. Keep up the fantastic work! Looking forward to watching you play KH3!

Thanks for reading, and we’ll catch you next time! If you’d like to get involved and help SpeedrunNews, or just want to hang come chill with us jump in our Discord!

levelstory