The SMT IV speedrunning community has known for a while that it was possible to go out of bounds on some maps in the game accidentally, including Stratum 1 of Naraku, but a consistent way to do it hadn't been found, until xNight came up with this setup with a blunt weapon.

We still don't quite understand it, but the theory is this: Flynn is constantly in a state of "falling" at a constant speed, although this is never really noticed because Flynn mostly stays on the ground. Attacking with the weapon, for some reason, causes Flynn to stop falling until he walks again. In addition, certain slopes in the game have a weird property where if you walk up the slope into a wall, Flynn periodically blinks down. I think that Flynn ends up falling through the floor, and the game catches this and forces him to stand on the ground again. But there is a small window where you can change directions and make the game forget to place Flynn on the ground again, allowing him to fall all the way through the floor. Attacking with a blunt weapon halts Flynn's descent until he moves again while standing still, which makes this very easy to do if timed correctly. After Flynn falls down far enough, the game resets his y-coordinate to the top of the map, where you can fall and "land" somewhere else in the map. Until then, you can walk around out of bounds anywhere under the floor as much as you like.

Normally, this wouldn't really help for most areas in the game, but there is a locked door in Naraku’s 1st Stratum which has a room that leads to the 4th Stratum. The speedrun doesn’t reach 4th Stratum for about an hour in New Game runs. The dream of the SMT IV speedrunning community was to use this to sequence break to reach Minotaur right at the beginning of the game. Sadly, though, it turns out the game is very strict when it comes to the order of events the player does in the story, so this skip is mostly useless. It's a cute shortcut though that saves a few minutes.

This is a very safe trick to try out, so feel free to give it a go.

Let's use this thread to discuss methods of going out of bounds, potential places where it could be possible, ways this can benefit runs and save a lot of time, and other ways we can use this new tech in SMT IV speedruns.

You don't need a weapon at all.

1. Walk into the corner in the video.
2. Adjust angle until you're bobbing up and down a bunch.
3. From here, if you stand still and lightly tap forward, you'll slowly cycle through the bobbing up and down positions every time you tap
4. Tap forward until you get the position where Flynn is extremely low
5. Go left and you fall.

I think what's happening with this glitch is that you're simply standing at the height of the floor on your right but inside the floor to your left, so when you go towards the left you just fall through.

I did a few experiments with this. If you try to take the 4th floor shortcut when Alraune's domain is up, when you reach the 3rd Floor her domain will be blocking your way. I was hoping some trigger behind it would let you skip the domain but nope. You can't activate the domain either, so you softlock. Also, if you use this at the start of the game, to go to floor 2 before you get the quest to get the ring, the chest won't be there. It will spawn as soon as you clear the quest to get 3 demons. The trigger preventing you from going to floor 3 is also not there until you get the 3 demons, so you can use this as an alternate way to reach floor 3 early.

Since this early Minotaur thing doesn't work I really doubt anything would. The game is probably really strict with the triggers. Our best bet would be something like falling through the floor to go around a boss' trigger. For example falling behind Medusa's trigger to possibly skip her, but even that might not work. It would be really cool though if we found some useful OoB. I tried looking in other places but I had no luck.

Should have added this to this thread a long time ago but here is a video guide for Naraku OOB http://www.speedrun.com/smt_iv/guide/0cyc5