BotW SGDQ Thoughts

So I'm ending up being "that guy" that submitted Zelda BotW to SGDQ (and somehow nobody else did, unless they're all pending...). Since I'm sure people are going to complain or laugh at me, I just wanted to get some thoughts before people brigade me and hate mail the crap out of me.

1) I genuinely really, really like the game. To the point that I definitely want to help route out a True Ending run that collects all 12 memories and the Master Sword, in addition to doing the Divine Beasts. That said, I took my time casually with the game and made sure to enjoy it and I've probably got more hours than I'd care to admit logged in it already. I will outright tell you that I had no intentions of learning to speedrun the game or interest in the speedrun beyond basic curiosity (Zelda releases are the closest the collective speedrunning community gets to have to a party. Everybody plays them and we know they're going to be broken beyond all belief).

2) The lack of a completed run is due to the boss gauntlet at the end. I generally understand each of the bosses patterns, what they do and how to fight them, which I believe is clear inside the video I made, but stringing the fights together is a little more than I can do with the time allotted. If nothing else, I put a lot of time and effort into understanding them and what to do, which led to a fair amount of slop on the parts that would look smoother otherwise. Hopefully, I can fix this within the next few days and it's a moot point regardless. I do believe that with practice, I will be able to complete the run much faster than the estimate nearly every time and the estimate would allow me two trys minimum at the gauntlet without having to either mercy kill the run or load a theoretical "safety save" that would load into Ganon with 3 hearts and realistic weapons for that point in the run.

Ultimately, when it comes to GDQs, I believe it's a runners job to offer games they're interested in running and the committees job to say what they want for the event. I'm willing to run Zelda at SGDQ, so I offered it, no differently than I did with DKCTF, Yo-kai Watch, Catherine and Persona 4 Golden (not that I have any expectations that the latter will be even considered). If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading, and I'd be happy to respond to any polite questions or other thoughts people might have.