My relations with games before running

I thought about date a few days ago, thinking why people feels speedrunning is too hard for them. I'm gonna explain what was my relation with my current speedgame before running them, to show you that the skills we acquired before getting into running a game something anyone can do. Hope this can get some people into speedrunning :D

Xenoblade: Before getting into running this game I did one casual playthrough, in which I was completly amazed by everything in this game. I played for pretty much 1 month and a half non stop, trying to do as much things the game was offering me... Thereore I was mostly overleveled for everything and it was quite easy to finish. When I saw what the NG+ looked like, I thought it was quite dumb and therefore didn't even try it; but I kept a little playing on my NG file until I reached lvl 90, then I pretty much stopped playing... And 6 months later, while in vacation, I started wanting to speedrun games, more exactly this one; not in single segmet, since I thought it would tke WAAAAAY too long to finish it like that, but I was quite otivated. I did quite a few researces about the game, took notes over the NG+ route to see what could be the route for the game, and found out on SDA a topic about the game and NG speedrun. I found HafBakedProphet's PB, and that's pretty muh how I started learning the run and speedrunnng the game!

Fire Emblem: A serie that I first play when I was like 10 y.o at a friend's house on emulator. I was really hooked by the game, and DL the emu version at home. I did around 2-3 casual plays of the FE7, about the same amount of FE6, since I really loved those 2 games, planning out the team and supports I wanted. Then I played FE9 and FE10 casually. The day I started FE5 I thought "hey! Why not trying to speedrun FE7 and FE6?" I tried, alone in my corner, to do a one segment play. It was terrible and I finished in around 10hours, but with really no planing whatsoever.Thn I started looking for runs on the internet, found a good old multi se run and tried to do some SS runs with it. It was pretty terrible again but I got ~5-6hours, so slightly better. Then Vykan12 told me about RN maipulation and such, and I started doing al that, learning, practicing and rerouting FE7, helped by Molotov' run.

Minish Cap: That was pretty much the only game I had as a kid, the only game I really enjoyed a lot, so I played it A LOT. Probably did 10-15 100% casual play on my good old GBA. Without any planing or so, just playing the game trying to completly finish it. I was never able to get all fusions or all figurines but always ended really close to it. Later, after I waited for a real cartridge of FE7 to do real runs, I looked for TMC speedruns and found them pretty cool, and I started consider running them.

Tales of Symphonia: I played this game when I was 8 with a friend, on a game that his older brother borrowed from another friend. Even though we never got passed Exbelua (yeah we were pretty slow) I REALLY loved that game. I as never able to play it before a while, and thought about this game again wen I was around 15 and tried to emulate it. Well it was terrible: I had no GC controller, music wasn't working at all... But I could play this game again! The next day the ROM stopped working somehow and I was never able to figure out the problem or to play the game again. And dear god I tried! 2 years later I bought FE9 and ToS on eBay and rushed through the game... Until CD2 which didn't work! SO I bought an EXTRA CD2 and was able to finish the game. Took me 70hours IGT but god that was really amazing to be able to finish the game. After a while I found Raz's channel and his speedruns of te game and some months after I got into running the game!

Pandora's Tower: All my experience with the game was done on stream, during this summer. I finished it casually, and I found it would be an awesome speedrun while playing it, so I went into routing and stuff.. pretty short story compared to the others ^^