On a winter afternoon in early 2016, viewers of Awesome Games Done Quick watched a runner named Yagamoth tear through the world of Secret of Mana in under two hours. Commentators and chat followed as he skipped story arcs that many players had never imagined could be skipped at all, using two controllers at once to bend the game’s action RPG systems into something closer to choreography. Within days, gaming outlets such as Kotaku were pointing to him as the face of a new kind of marathon run, one that balanced heavy glitch use with clear, engaging commentary that made the chaos legible even to first time viewers.
Behind that highlight is a decade long story of a Swiss speedrunner who specialized in long, intricate RPGs and treated commentary as a craft of its own. In the Speedrun Legacy Profiles, Yagamoth’s career stands out not for sheer world record count, but for how he turned runs into lectures, stitched story and routing together, and helped define what RPG focused marathons could look like.
Early Years and Arrival in the Speedrunning Scene
Speedrun.com’s profile for Yagamoth places him in Switzerland and shows an account that has been active for more than eleven years. Over that time he submitted runs across a spread of action RPGs and niche titles, including Secret of Mana, Terranigma, Tales of Phantasia, Skies of Arcadia: Legends, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Goof Troop, and various precision platformers such as I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden.
From the start, his game choices tell a story. These are not short arcade runs or simple platformers. They are lengthy console RPGs and action adventures that reward routing, damage calculations, and a willingness to live inside a single game for months at a time. By the mid 2010s he had carved out a reputation in that space as someone willing to dive deeply into systems and then explain those systems in real time.
Outside the leaderboards, his presence on social platforms reinforces that image. On his X profile, he describes his stream as “Speedruns, Challenge runs and casual playthroughs with focus on a relaxed and comfy atmosphere,” identifies with he/him pronouns, and lists Switzerland as his home. That combination of technical ambition and calm delivery would become his hallmark on marathon stages.
Secret of Mana and the AGDQ 2016 Breakthrough
The run that carried his name beyond the immediate speedrunning community came at Awesome Games Done Quick 2016, the winter charity marathon organized under the broader Games Done Quick banner. In the schedule that week, his Secret of Mana any percent one player two controller category slotted in as a showcase of heavy glitch use set inside a beloved Square action RPG.
Community VOD lists and articles record a final time of roughly one hour fifty five minutes, fast enough to bring the run close to contemporary leaderboard times while still allowing for full marathon commentary. Coverage from outlets such as Kotaku and Cheerful Ghost focused on two aspects at once. On the technical side, they highlighted how he used glitches, step manipulation, and the unusual one player two controller setup to bypass entire stretches of the story, skipping elemental spirits and postponing the arrival of party members in ways casual players would never see. On the presentation side, they pointed to how his calm, precise commentary made those breaks understandable, explaining why certain rooms were being bypassed or why enemies behaved oddly as the game’s memory was pushed into unnatural states.
It was not his fastest Secret of Mana performance. Speedrun.com records personal bests on console for several categories, including a one player two controller any percent time of 1:45:16, cooperative any percent times under one hour fifty minutes with partners such as StingerPA and BOWIEtheHERO, and a glitchless run recorded at just under four hours. Yet AGDQ 2016 became the touchstone that many viewers remember, the moment where a niche RPG specialist became, briefly, one of the faces of the marathon itself.
Lore% and the Art of Storytelling Runs
If Secret of Mana brought wide attention, another concept that bears his name shows how Yagamoth thought about speedrunning in the first place. In a long post on the r/speedrun subreddit he introduced something he called “Lore%,” a style of run that developed while he was working on the SNES action RPG Terranigma.
In that post he explains that, as he refined Terranigma, he began to run out of purely mechanical things to say during long streams. To keep commentary meaningful, he started weaving in detailed explanations of the story itself, walking viewers through character motivations, plot twists, and the underlying themes of a game many of them had never played. The experiment resonated. Viewers said they appreciated being able to follow both the route and the narrative at once, and he realized that the blend of story and mechanics could become a deliberate format.
By the time of that thread he could offer Lore% style commentary on three games in particular: Terranigma, Seiken Densetsu 3 (often known in English as Secret of Mana 2), and Tales of Phantasia. Highlighted VODs from his Twitch channel and independent video mirrors show him narrating those games almost like a live audiobook, folding in route explanation and glitch descriptions without letting go of pacing or character work.
What matters for a legacy profile is not only that he coined a catchy label. Lore% illustrates a particular philosophy: that long RPG runs could respect story rather than treating it as something to be skipped or muted. The category did not require different rules on leaderboards and, as he stressed in that original thread, it still functioned as a normal any percent run for timing. But in practice Lore% marked a point where commentary became central rather than optional, especially for games whose narratives were rich enough to reward that level of attention.
RPG Limit Break and a Broader RPG Portfolio
Although Secret of Mana became his signature game, Yagamoth did not confine himself to a single title. His Speedrun.com history shows runs of Skies of Arcadia: Legends on the GameCube with a recorded any percent time just over fifteen hours, as well as Diablo II: Lord of Destruction in a hardcore Barbarian category, plus attempts at I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden and other shorter games.
On the marathon side, he took those broader interests to other events. At RPG Limit Break he appeared in multiple years, including a Diablo II druid any percent normal run in 2017 and a featured Tales of Phantasia run in the 2018 marathon schedule. Recordings from those events echo what viewers had seen at AGDQ. He spoke clearly and methodically, explaining route choices, long term resource planning, and how seemingly small menu decisions could save significant time late in a four hour run.
Outside staged marathons, he also recorded tutorial style and “lore friendly” runs that continued to circulate in communities. Terranigma Lore% videos on independent hosting sites introduce the game to new players decades after its Super Nintendo release, blending critique, narrative summary, and live demonstration of advanced techniques.
Combined, these appearances help place him not just as a one game specialist, but as part of a larger wave of runners who treated classic RPGs as living texts worth revisiting, re routing, and re explaining for new audiences.
Moderation, Community Work, and Streaming Identity
Behind the camera and leaderboard entries, there is also the slower work of moderation and community building. Speedrun.com lists Yagamoth as a moderator for Secret of Mana and its 2018 remake, with more than twenty recorded moderation actions over several years. That role includes reviewing and verifying submitted runs, clarifying rules with other runners, and helping shape the way categories are defined. For a complex action RPG with multiple controllers, glitches, and platform differences, that work is substantive.
His presence on Reddit further shows the way he engaged with the broader speedrunning community. Under his own username he posted advice, asked technical questions, and offered encouragement to other runners. In the thread announcing Omnigamer’s speedrunning history book, for instance, he joked about “new strats and discoveries” that might make someone the fastest book writer, borrowing in game language to celebrate off stream work. Elsewhere he discussed accessibility and commentary style, acknowledging that he sometimes struggled to parse certain types of jokes in English and preferred clarity over banter in his own runs.
Streaming itself became part of that identity. His X profile links prominently to his Twitch channel, where archived highlights show a mix of speedruns, challenge runs, and more casual playthroughs of RPGs and indie titles. Even outside of marathon seasons, viewers could find the same measured commentary style that had set him apart on stage.
Finally, Yagamoth participated in longer form conversations about speedrunning life. Episodes of “The Catching Up Podcast,” a project designed to interview runners about their careers and lives beyond speedrunning, include an early feature focused on him. While that interview sits primarily as an audio primary source rather than a written one, it gives future historians a glimpse of how he understood his own work at the time.
Legacy and Place in Speedrun History
Measured purely by world records, Yagamoth’s career looks modest next to runners who hold dozens of top leaderboard times. His Speedrun.com profile lists twenty five full game runs across a handful of titles, many of them resting just outside the very top spots as routes continued to evolve in later years.
Yet numbers alone miss what made his presence distinctive. In the history of RPG speedrunning he represents several key threads.
First, he is one of the clearest early examples of a runner who treated commentary as equal in importance to gameplay. Lore% grew from that conviction, and his marathon runs modelled what it looked like to explain both narrative and mechanics in games that easily run several hours long. That approach influenced how later runners approached commentary for story heavy games, especially at events where first time viewers might never pick up the controller themselves.
Second, he helped demonstrate that action RPGs from the sixteen bit era could serve as marathon centerpieces rather than curiosities. The Secret of Mana run at AGDQ 2016 did not simply impress the speedrunning community. It reached broader audiences and gaming press, bringing attention both to the game itself and to the possibilities of glitch driven RPG runs.
Third, his moderation and community work quietly shaped how others engaged with those games. Category definitions, rule clarifications, and verification standards are rarely celebrated, but without them leaderboards for complex games would be difficult to maintain. His years of activity on the Secret of Mana boards, along with his public discussions of routing and commentary style, form part of that institutional memory.
In the context of a Speedrun Legacy Profile, Yagamoth stands as an example of the commentator runner, someone who prioritized communication and teaching alongside execution. For esportshistorian.org, his story sits at the intersection of game design, player creativity, and the evolving norms of what a “good” marathon run should look and sound like.