It’s not unusual for RPGs to have arbitrary challenges for completing the game. Infamously, it’s possible to complete Final Fantasy I with four White Mages in your party, which is extremely difficult but somehow doable! You can take it even further thought: Final Fantasy VII has a No-Materia run. Materia is one of the most fundamental parts of FF7, but you get to use items and upgrade your weapons, armor, and accessories.
Final Fantasy VIII has its own challenge runs too, as you could imagine. There’s a low-level run, which ends up being pretty interesting due to the exploitable mechanics of FF8 (you can gain AP for your Guardian Forces without gaining experience for your characters, for example!).
But that’s child’s play. That’s nothing. That’s baby mode. Like the No-Materia run, FF8 also has a challenge where you avoid engaging with the main mechanics of the game: the No Junction run. The rules are simple: You can’t junction, at all. What the fuck? Is this even possible?
If you can believe it………. yes.
Although the forum threads are long gone, it sounds like the idea for a junctionless run started in 2001 on the GameFAQs forums. The rules were first codified in an FAQ uploaded in September 2002 by a user name Hyprophant, and they seem relatively unchanged since then. Let’s just remind you what this means. You can’t junction a GF, which means you can’t draw or stock magic. Which also means you can’t junction magic to any of your stats. You have no commands in or out of combat besides Attack. I guess you can use items outside of battle, but that’s it.
This is, understandably, super fucking difficult. Early impressions of this challenge from GameFAQs users include “no fun” and “an absolute nightmare.” Great!
The only way this run is even remotely possible is because of Limit Breaks. In FF8, if you have low health, you have a random chance of being able to use your Limit Break. If you switch the game’s timing mode from “Active” to “Wait,” the game will gives you as much time as you want to keep refreshing the combat menu until you get your Limit.
This is very abusable! It sounds like every Limit Break is useful, but the walkthroughs and comments I’ve read have singled out a few strategies. Selphie’s Slot Limit Break is, of course, extremely broken because it gives you a chance of immediately ending the current battle by using The End. Quistis gets access to Blue Magic, which is some of the only magic you can use without junctioning.
Most interestingly, Zell turns out to be the real hero of this category. During his Duel ability, you get a few seconds to input button sequences that trigger powerful attacks. But when an attack animation is playing… the timer pauses! If you’re really, really fast, you can keep mashing out attacks and stretching out the limit break for minutes, plural. This is way more damage than the game ever intended you to get out of Zell, but in an incredibly unfair challenge like No Junction, who gives a shit?
If this is too tough for you, another GameFAQs user named Smoking Frog II came up with an idea for a slightly relaxed challenge run in 2003 the he called the No GF game. In this variant, you can’t use GFs or magic, but you can junction GFs and use their abilities. On the fun side, this means you get access to crafting, Card Mod, and other similar bullshit (positive) that makes the run more interesting. I like that somebody made a challenge run that lets you use the game’s most exploitable mechanics.
However, the rules are super arbitrary. You can use Selphie’s Slot Limit, but you can only use abilities that aren’t normally accessible as magic spells. That’s goofy, and it is also the Route of the Coward. No Junction runs aren’t meant to be easy! They are meant to be suffering!
Now let’s hold on a second, because the No Junction run is still too easy. You can defeat enemies, collect items, and gain levels, like a fool. You know what would be a real challenge? A No Junction run with no leveling at all.
This bullshit is called the No Junction No Level Up challenge, and there’s a guide for this one too, written by Chris Boyd (aka TitanCannon4) in June 2007. This seems to have been the origin of the NJNL run; the surviving posts on the GameFAQs forum from the late 2000s only talk about this challenge in the context of TitanCannon4’s walkthrough.
(If you want some quality message board drama, I recommend checking out this eight-page thread from 2010, where JoloStuki repeatedly interrupts a discussion about NJNL run strategy to tell people that they are wrong and stupid and they keep trying to talk around him while he’s disrupting the topic.)
The route is still similar to the traditional No Junction challenge, but you get even less flexibility. Odin and Gilgamesh take on a much bigger role in this run, because you need that random extra damage coming in. TitanCannon4 outright admits that, at least in 2007, this challenge required emulation and liberal exploitation of save states. Without save states, he estimated that the final battle took him over 150 tries to complete.
This truly merciless challenge seems to have largely replaced the traditional No Junction run among FF8 power players. To be fair, FF8 is not a popular game for challenge runs, especially compared to FF7 or even FF9, so it’s not like there’s space for multiple communities with different run preferences, like how Super Mario 64 has five different major speedrun categories. NJNL is The Challenge.
I am sure there are people who completed this run back in the day after spending dozens of grueling hours chucking Squall’s corpse at Ultimecia until they beat the game through sheer luck. Or, more likely, they completed it in emulation with the ability to retry over and over with save states, as TitanCannon4 recommended. But who was the first person to prove that they did it legitimately?
The first fully video-documented playthrough of this folly that I could find comes from antiguy2413, who uploaded a 25-hour playlist back in 2015. This run was done in segments (each video is about 20 minutes long and starts with him loading his save file), but this seems to be the real deal. He doesn’t edit out his failures, like his four attempts at beating Ultimecia, or the solid hour he spends trying to beat the Progenitors. He also appears to use High Speed Mode, a feature that was added to the Steam version in 2014 that allows you to speed up the game, though he only uses it for segments and battles he has to play multiple times because he died. But he really did it. Start to finish, without save states.
Funny enough, the last videos in this playlist weren’t uploaded until 2023… because he forgot to upload them. But I take him at his word that he did in fact complete this run back in 2015 and it did not take eight years to complete.
Since then, there have been a handful of other NJNL videos, usually from bigger YouTubers who have conspicuously edited out their mistakes or edited the whole thing down to a breezy hour. But so far, I haven’t found anyone who’s done the whole thing in one sitting and uploaded a monstrous 40-hour “speedrun” video. Will we ever see someone break that barrier? I hope not!
That might seem like the last hill to climb… but we can do better.
In 2015–2016, over the course of an entire year, a Japanese user named shelfal completed the first known “solo” NJNL run. Under these rules, only one party member is allowed to be alive per battle, and to make matters worse, according to a GameFAQs summary of the series, their arbitrary rules also prevented them from using Zell’s Limit Break or The End via Selphie.
This is psychotic and impressive. I don’t know how else you could top this.