TP Categories

As most of you are probably aware, I've been waffling a lot over what Twilight Princess category to do. I've talked to a few people one-on-one about this to try to get some guidance, but so far not much has helped. So I decided to type this up to explain my dilemma so that maybe people who follow me on twitter will be able to help me figure out what to do.

I started speedrunning Twilight Princess about 4 years ago, in November of 2011. I had just played through the game for the first time, and since I enjoyed it so much I decided to try my hand at speedrunning it. Around this time, SDA had just began allowing RTA (single segment with resets) runs on the site, so naturally I was most interested in doing that. At the time, the RTA and No Save+Quit routes were essentially identical; the main difference was that RTA used the Back in Time glitch to have the sword for saving Talo (so you didn't have to push the bokoblins all the way down the ramp) and to avoid having to tame Epona and backtrack to Ordon to get iron boots later in the run (you could just get iron boots at the beginning of the game instead since Epona was pre-tamed). Other than that, the only differences were a few savewarps to cut out some travel time in dungeons, which didn't actually change the route at all. Since RTA was basically just an easier version of No Save+Quit, and the few other active players were mainly doing No Save+Quit, the choice of what category to do was obvious, and I naturally went with RTA.

I ran TP RTA from November of 2011 all the way until April of 2012, and was coming very close to getting a run I was satisfied with. But around May of 2012, other players started coming back to the game and beating my RTA times, and the competition was too overwhelming for me to want to keep going. Keep in mind that, at the time, speedrunning was undergoing a transition from being like an art form, where each category was mainly being "worked on" by one or two people for entertainment purposes, to being a more competitive endeavor where multiple people would compete for spots on a leaderboard. Since I've always fallen on the side of the former, it was really demotivating to have other people just pick up my "project" like that, so I gradually drifted away from TP and tried out other games until real life issues slowly drew me away from speedrunning entirely. The last thing I did for TP was a No Save+Quit run in July of 2012 that I never uploaded because I figured it would be beaten in a few days (it stood as the record for 6 months), and after screwing around a bit with the new RTA route (more on that in a bit), I never touched the game again.

I tried to get back into TP a few times over the next couple of years, but each time I lost motivation quickly and gave up within a couple weeks, mostly because I was suffering from really severe depression due to the aforementioned real life issues. Earlier this year, I started recovering and getting back into speedrunning as a way of trying to recapture a happier time in my life and relive old memories. This summer, I decided it was time to finally finish what I started 4 years ago and get a TP run up on SDA. However, a lot has changed since I last played the game, and now I'm stuck deciding which category I want to do. I've listed the possibilities below with all the pros and cons of each:

--- Any% (RTA) ---

This is the category that I primarily ran in 2011 and 2012, which makes it technically fit best with my original goal, but as alluded to before, the RTA route has changed quite a bit since I played the game. Because of pillar clip, which was discovered in early-to-mid 2012, the RTA run can now use a previously-segmented-only route that skips Zora Armor (the old method of doing this route was Rupee Dive which required insane RNG manipulation that you would never get in an RTA), saving about 3-5 minutes. This, in addition to some other recently discovered tricks, makes the current RTA route nearly unrecognizable to me compared to what I used to do in 2011 and 2012. Additionally, this category has become so competitive and optimized over the past couple years that there is essentially zero chance of me ever getting the record without driving myself batshit insane trying to grind out the necessary RNG. I could just get a run that I'm satisfied with that's close to the record and just submit that to SDA, since SDA doesn't require a run to be the record in order to accept it, but that raises the question of why the hell anyone would watch my run as opposed to just watching the WR on youtube. I feel like I would be doing SDA a disservice by submitting a run that isn't the best of its kind at the time of submission and that has a clearly superior and faster version readily available elsewhere.

--- Any% (No Save+Quit) ---

This is a different category than I ran back in the day, but it's actually much closer to the old RTA route that I used to do (as stated before, the RTA and No Save+Quit routes were basically identical when I ran the game), which would make me feel a lot more "at-home" and comfortable running it. Additionally, this category is still very unoptimized and pretty much has no one running it seriously at the moment, meaning that it would be very easy for me to get the record and push it forward as my own "project" like I used to do in 2011-2012 with RTA. The problem is that I find it very difficult to take this category seriously - the No Save+Quit restriction feels really arbitrary to me since SDA now allows RTA runs, and every time I start practicing it and see Link without the shield I feel like I'm wasting my time practicing a silly arbitrary category when I could just be doing a real one. After doing nothing but RTA for pretty much my whole time running this game, No Save+Quit just feels like a downgrade by comparison.

--- Wii Any% (RTA) ---

This one is pretty interesting and has pretty much not been done by anyone since (I think) 2009. I actually considered switching to this version near the end of 2011 while I was practicing the game, because I'm really bad at aiming with the GameCube control stick (so I had a lot of trouble with City in the Sky) and Wii version has a much easier way to get into Lakebed early using Midna dive which is a Wii-only trick. The downside is that the motion controls with the sword can apparently be unresponsive at times, and the whole game being backwards would take quite a while for me to get used to. I did a poll about a month ago where I asked what category people would be most interested in seeing a new run of, and surprisingly Wii Any% RTA came in a strong second place right behind GC Any% RTA, which makes me think that I could make a pretty big contribution by doing a run of it. This version is definitely "uncharted territory" and doesn't feel arbitrary to me like No Save+Quit does, but it would be quite a bit different from what I ran years ago and thus doesn't have the same nostalgia factor that No Save+Quit has for me.



I'm honestly leaning most strongly toward Wii Any%, but I really don't know what I want to do and would really, really appreciate you guys' help figuring this out. I'll make another strawpoll and attach it to this tweet so you guys can vote on it, but feel free to leave a reply as well.

Thanks,
Steven "ingx24" Brown