FF14's most determined challenge runner finally hits a wall after 1,000 hours, then unveils a backup strategy that took 233 days to prepare in secret: 'I wanted so badly to tell people'

Final Fantasy 14's Solo Only is one of my favourite challenge runs ticking over on YouTube right now—mostly because of how utterly improbable it is. For context, RathGames has been taking on the MMORPG on his own without outside help—no market board, no trading, no parties, and no duty support NPCs.

This is a problem, given the main storyline is littered with mandatory bosses and trials designed for four, eight, or sometimes 24 players.

RathGames, who I've had the pleasure of speaking to before, has overcome these obstacles with ingenuity before—for instance, the 24-person Alliance raid Crystal Tower, which one couldn't even queue for without other players, was achieved via other "solo only" challenge run players who kept their interactions to a minimum.

But the latest video, at the cusp of Shadowbringers, is somethin' else. I don't usually provide spoiler warnings for videos like these, but I am about to spoil the end of the following video for you. I encourage you to watch it, but in case you don't have an hour to spare, read on.

The latest task in question was the penultimate boss fight of Shadowbringers, Hades, and the move Captivity. Similar to the Susano fight RathGames overcame with a over-levelled Pictomancer, Captivity places a party member in a jail that needs to be broken via damage by your teammates. Which is a problem if you don't have any.

Captivity can technically be skipped if one manages to get Hades' second phase below 30-odd percent of his health before he finishes casting it, but even after levelling an entirely separate job to level 100 and gearing it out with the best kit he could scavenge, RathGames was still just over halfway there. The game's damage scaling had finally caught up to him: It was an impossible DPS check.

Enter the time-honoured tradition of multiboxing. Sure, RathGames could call for help from other Solo Only challenge runners himself, but that'd be admitting defeat—and while he needed two players' worth of damage, there wasn't anything in the (self-imposed) rulebook that said he couldn't be both players at the same time.

He then proceeds to reveal that, in secret, he'd spent over 193 hours (far shorter than the 1,008 from his first Solo Only playthrough—the wonders of optimisation) levelling up an entirely different character under the same stringent ruleset, doing every single nail-biting, agonising challenge twice, just so he could say he'd done it all himself.

I reached out to RathGames over Discord, and he revealed to me the deep cover he had to enter to achieve this feat, explaining that Solo Saviour "was made last July and took 233 days to prepare"—that journey itself will be its own video.

"[It was] exhausting," RathGames says. "I wanted so badly to tell people, I was so nervous about being spotted while walking around. Really made me feel on edge any time I logged in." In fact, he was in such deep cover, he had to invent an entirely new challenge run just to keep his stream audience occupied and unaware.

"I did need a hiatus to finish Savior. I was nowhere near ready when we hit the wall, I even went and did an entire new challenge, chat commands only, to pad for time." That challenge, mind, was its own special form of purgatory.

As for the time he shaved off the run up to Hades—around 815 hours worth—he credits "not just my knowledge but the entire solo community's! Folks have done an incredible job optimizing the run, and since I knew all the fights already things were a lot easier."

When it comes to adhering cleanly to FF14's terms of use (no third-party programs, in other words), RathGames had to do it the old fashioned way—with fast fingers and a single keyboard: "I alt-tabbed. I had both games on the same monitor, and alt-tabbed every couple seconds.

"Movement was the easier part. The rotations were miserable to learn. I had to make a spreadsheet that had each attack lined up with the other classes' next move after to try and wrap my head around it."

It's an absurd feat—and made all the more cracked by the way in which it mirrors the themes of Shadowbringers itself. At the tail-end of the expansion, the Warrior of Light melds with Ardbert, an alternate-universe version of themselves, to help save both his and their own planets from Hades.

In a sense, RathGames has had to do just that—weaponise the experience of two entirely different solo-only runs to meld together and overcome his foul foe. I cannot wait to see what left-hook strategies he pulls out of his pocket to tackle, as promised, the final season of Solo Only—which will see him tackling Endwalker to tie it all off.