In a scene obsessed with shaving seconds from ten-minute runs, Baffan built his legacy on a single project that took more than two weeks of real time. Under his handle alone, a French speedrunner turned Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean into one of the longest continuous real time speedruns ever completed, then spent years refining it until he could say he was finished with the category and mean it.
A speedrunner finds a cult GameCube RPG
Baten Kaitos released on the GameCube in 2003 as a card based Japanese RPG with a “Magnus” system that captured items and attacks on cards. Some of those cards change over real time, measured in active gameplay hours while the console is running and not sitting in menus. Bananas rot, flames die out, and a bottle of Shampoo eventually ages into a rare Magnus called Splendid Hair after 336 hours of in game time.
On paper it is a miserable candidate for speedrunning. In practice, it became exactly the kind of problem that attracts a certain type of runner. In interviews Baffan has described falling in love with Baten Kaitos first, then asking himself what a speedrun would even look like in a game that long. He first pushed the game in more conventional ways, building a fast any percent route that could clear the story in a little over 13 hours and at one point holding the world record in that category.
By the mid 2010s, with any percent largely mapped, he turned toward a far more ambitious idea. Instead of a route that skipped content, he began to design a way to do everything. That meant every side quest, every secret Magnus, every time dependent evolution, and every missable photo or card that the game would only offer once. Articles covering his project note that more than fifty items can be permanently lost if the player misses narrow windows, which leaves very little room for improvisation during a 100 percent run.
Inventing a fourteen day category
The first Baten Kaitos 100 percent runs were more experiments than polished records. In a long running Speedrun.com forum thread about the longest speedruns anyone had ever done, Baffan dropped into the discussion with his own numbers. He explained that his earliest full route attempts already stretched into absurd territory, with his first 100 percent run somewhere around 356 hours and his fourth finishing in 342 hours, 19 minutes, 56 seconds. He also revealed a detail that would become important to the community’s understanding of the category. Of that 342 hour run, only about seventy seven hours were active gameplay. The rest was idle console time, waiting for cards like Shampoo to tick forward toward their evolved forms.
Even in that raw state his work drew attention. Guinness World Records recognized his Baten Kaitos 100 percent run as the fastest completion of the game in that category, noting the 336 hour wait for Shampoo to become Splendid Hair and Twitch’s brief decision to block his stream for “idling” during an attempt. Vice and GamesRadar profiled the project in 2015 and 2016, presenting it as a kind of endurance engineering problem. The runner had to design a route that minimized time spent in menus, carefully scheduled every deck change and shop visit, then built an entire life schedule around those constraints.
From there, the category became a years long project. Speedrun.com’s records show a chain of improvements from Baffan as he lowered his 100 percent time. One run clocked in at 14 days, 5 hours, 20 minutes and 3 seconds, another at 14 days, 3 hours, 17 minutes and 19 seconds, and finally the time that would become his signature mark: 14 days, 2 hours, 43 minutes and 26 seconds, or 338 hours, 43 minutes, 26 seconds of real time.
Each of those runs is documented in full. His Speedrun.com entries link to a detailed FAQ on Pastebin that explains the rules, routing philosophy, and technical requirements for verifying such a long run, and they point to full playlists on YouTube where viewers can watch the marathon unfold day by day.
Living with Splendid Hair and the long idle
To understand why those numbers matter, it helps to look closely at Splendid Hair and its role in Baten Kaitos. In the game’s fiction it is a joke reward that unlocks the last six tracks in the sound test. In a speedrun it functions like a time bomb. The runner must acquire Shampoo early, remove it from their combat decks so it can age in the background, then keep the game running for at least 336 hours without spending too much of that time in menus, where aging pauses.
Journalists who spoke with Baffan emphasize how much planning goes into that waiting. In one interview he described having to organize snacks, water, and bathroom breaks for thirteen hour stretches of concentrated play, then balance those sessions against long periods where the console simply stayed on while he slept or went about his day. He had to keep one eye on the timer and another on the many other real time evolving cards that also need to be in the right state when the run reaches its final hours.
Those constraints led to some strange side stories. In 2016 Twitch’s automated systems temporarily suspended his channel during an idle segment of a Baten Kaitos run, mistaking a long, quiet stretch of a legally required wait for “non gaming content.” In 2019, while attempting another improvement, he lost ninety seven hours of progress in Azha after turning in too many Quest Magnus at once, accidentally skipping a unique cloak required for 100 percent. He explained online that his last backup save was nearly an hour behind and that chasing a new personal best from there would be unrealistic, so he ended the attempt.
Those incidents underline something that becomes obvious when you study the route. For all the jokes about “just leaving the console on for two weeks,” the run is extremely fragile. A single misread quest requirement or missed time window can invalidate hundreds of hours of idling. That tension between long periods of apparent nothing and narrow windows of intense execution is part of what made the run so compelling for viewers and so punishing for the runner.
Refining the record and documenting the category
By the late 2010s, Baffan had moved from simply proving that Baten Kaitos 100 percent was possible into a role as its archivist and steward. He co authored a detailed FAQ that became the de facto reference for anyone interested in trying the category, covering everything from equipment routing to how to handle video for a 300 plus hour real time run.
He also helped build and moderate the Baten Kaitos board on Speedrun.com, where his name appears as a super moderator and as the verifier for other runners’ 100 percent attempts, including later records set by Japanese runner hyphen_m and others. When hyphen_m pushed the category down to roughly 14 days, 1 hour, 30 minutes, and 13 seconds, overtaking Baffan’s own time, it happened on the leaderboard he had shaped and under rules he had helped refine.
His 338 hour, 43 minute, 26 second run remains the most famous of his attempts, in part because it came near the end of his involvement in the category and in part because of how widely it was covered. GameFAQs placed it second on a 2026 list of “historically significant speedruns,” highlighting his multiple failed attempts, the ninety seven hour reset, and the Twitch suspension story as examples of how extreme the run had become.
Retirement from Baten Kaitos 100 percent
On the Speedrun.com page for his 338 hour run, the description shifts from simple timing notes into something closer to a farewell. “After almost 6 years of working on this category, I can proudly say that I am finally done with it,” he wrote, adding that unless a game breaking discovery appeared, the run would probably stand for a long time and linking to a Twitter thread titled “The End of Baten Kaitos 100% Speedruns.”
That thread, posted in 2020, laid out his reasons for stepping away. He had achieved the sub 340 hour goal he had talked about in earlier interviews, he had shaped the route into something others could follow, and he had spent much of his life for nearly a decade thinking about the odd little GameCube RPG. It was enough.
Retirement did not mean disappearing from speedrunning altogether. His Twitch profile describes him as a streamer of Final Fantasy XIV, Nintendo titles, anime games, and “meme games,” with the occasional return to Baten Kaitos 100 percent runs that are “less than 340 hours.” Outside of Baten Kaitos he has touched other scenes; at one point he co held an any percent record in The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords on Game Boy Advance with a 20 minute, 42 second time, a reminder that his skills were not limited to marathon content.
Legacy in the era of endurance runs
By early 2026, the Baten Kaitos 100 percent record belongs to another runner, and Baten Kaitos itself has been reintroduced to a new audience through the HD remaster collection. Yet when people talk about the longest speedruns ever completed, or about the one run that convinced them endurance categories could be interesting, they often end up back at Baffan. Articles about modern marathon projects cite his Baten Kaitos work as an early inspiration, including a Diablo 3 player who spent thousands of hours on a 100 percent challenge after watching him perfect the 2003 RPG.
In that sense, his Baten Kaitos project fits neatly within what a Speedrun Legacy Profile is meant to capture. It was never just a single world record time. It was the creation of a new category from almost nothing, the documentation of that route in public, the willingness to risk hundreds of hours on a single mistake, and finally the decision to put a full stop on a chapter that had defined his time in the hobby.
Today the leaderboard has new names and slightly faster times. The Shampoo still takes 336 hours to become Splendid Hair. The core of the route still follows the blueprint he drew in notebooks, FAQs, and forum posts. For a niche GameCube RPG and a small but devoted speedrunning community, that is a legacy measured in more than days on a timer.