Last summer I ran crystal with the raikou route trying to defeat pokeguys world record. I stopped in September because there were many optimizations found with gen 2 manips such as A presses and not needing to reload new bark town. After a month of playing red unsuccessfully I went back to crystal in November and still manips had not been made. I got within 2 seconds of pokeguys time and completed 3 runs total. I then asked entrpntr to make gen 2 manips in December (he had already proved how good they can be in the crystal battle tower category) and he said he will.

  Pokeguy and Gunner got a gold race into gdq which was in January which prompted entr to focus on gold manips first. After about 3 weeks he made a toto, both r29 manips with a mikey crit manip as well as a Don manip which was truly fantastic work. Entr now tells me that doing this has burnt him out and will not make the crystal manips at least until after gdq. I offer him 1000 US dollars to make the manips and he declines. 

  With entr no longer an option for me I seek out stringflows help yet again, he previously has told me that he won’t do crystal manips. I essentially put a 75 dollar bounty on each r29 manip. Stringflow tells me that he will help and begins with a toto search that will span 2 months. After gdq I negotiate a deal with entrpntr that involves me playing and finishing a battle tower speedrun, in return he will make a raikou manip which helps stringflow out a lot. 

  Me being me I took the battle tower category extremely seriously basically focusing 100% of every waking moment on it. I grinded battle tower for about 60 hours before moving on to learning the actual route which includes 4 1 frame window manips. Optimized the route a bit before beginning runs with minimal practice of the actual route. I get world record by 7 minutes on my first day of runs so the deal with entr is done. I don’t stop there though, I wanted to fully optimize the route. Unfortunately everything I tried involved needing new manips so I stopped running the category. Overall I had a lot of fun with battle tower as it offered a new challenge and took away my fears of 1 frame windows. Also talking to entr a bunch on discord was really nice, it was the first time I talked to anybody in the psr community as a real friend like that.

  This didn’t last though, I am back to seeking crystal manips and before entr can make a raikou manip the toto must be done first. We discuss many totos that came up and switched the toto we were doing like 10 times no joke. We finally found a complete beast of a 3 frame toto manip and I’m very excited the moment I laid eyes on it. Stringflow and entr wanted me to prove I could hit a 3 frame igt track window so I did 20 attempts and got one of the totos 16/20 times which is a success. Now that we have toto the rest of the manips can fall into place(this is when things get bad)

  Stringflow says he will make r29 while entr makes a good raikou manip(perhaps with yoloball). 2 weeks go by and I ask them how’s progress going. Entr says he hasn’t started anything yet but has thought of it. I get a lot of ignoring from stringflow however(which means no progress). I get immensely frustrated at the situation that has built up for 6 months and I just lose control and get very upset with stringflow and tell him things that perhaps I shouldn’t have. He then says he is not making the manips anymore because of this and I let out a tear which shows me just how passionate I am about crystal.

  I decided to try to play crystal with the current route and just assume that manips won’t be made however with a 1 frame window toto that could be a 3 frame and just slow encounter manips and bad raikou manip I couldn’t muster up the motivation. I then try yellow but just not feeling any motivation for it. I believe this whole situation has made me lose motivation in competitive speedrunning. I feel so helpless, having to rely on other people to play the game that I love, that I begun speedrunning for. The game has been unplayable for 6 months now while every other gen 1 and 2 game have been super optimized with manips.

  I will now be considered a retired speedrunner until the manips I seek are made