Why Twilight Princess is my favorite speedgame

I first played The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on October 12, 2011; at least, that was my first time starting a real playthrough of the game (I had played it for a few minutes years before but never really got anywhere). I had just gotten burned out from Majora's Mask after having completed an SDA run of it a few months before, and had been looking for a new game to run for a while. Since Jiano (the previous Majora's Mask runner before me) had also run Twilight Princess, I was interested and decided to play through the game to see if I liked it enough to want to speedrun it. As it turned out, I absolutely loved the game, and after I finished my first playthrough I started learning glitches and watched through both Jiano's and Paraxade's runs of it to see what I was getting myself into. Apparently, when Jiano did his run, the route had a LOT of really stupid luck-based stuff in it that made it really painful to run, and he ended up settling with a run that he wasn't completely happy with because he couldn't improve it anymore without driving himself crazy. But thanks to new finds and route changes over the 2 and a half years since his run, the majority of that luck-based stuff was now gone, making the run significantly easier, and I used that as motivation to do my own run as a kind of "redemption" by easily plowing through all the (now much easier) parts that Jiano struggled with.

I ran the game from November of 2011 up until about March or April of 2012, and was getting very, very close to a run that I was happy enough with to submit to SDA. And although it was frustrating at times, in the end I had a lot of fun with it, and it's part of what got me through a really nasty research paper in school (I was in 11th grade) that I was dealing with at the time. I decided I needed a break from the game as the deadline for that research paper was approaching in April of 2012, and started running Metroid Prime casually as a kind of side project until I was ready to pick up TP again. But during that break, other people started running TP and started beating my times, and I got discouraged from continuing my goal of getting a TP run on SDA - I've always seen speedrunning as a kind of project, and since other people could apparently do my project much better than I could, continuing to work on it myself seemed pointless. It seemed like SDA was going to get a much better TP run from someone besides me, so I reluctantly saw myself out.

Around this same time, after I was finished with the research paper, real life issues started to pop up - to put it very simply, I developed a serious crush on someone in one of my classes at school, and by the time I worked up the courage to try to talk to them, the school year ended. I spent the whole summer seriously depressed and lonely, but throughout all of it, Twilight Princess was still there for me. Even though my dreams of doing an SDA run seemed to be a pipe dream (at least for the time being), I was still able to have fun with the game by playing through old routes and messing around with miscellaneous glitches that I hadn't really tried before, and some of my best memories of the game come from this time period. I still kept practicing segments of the run that I had been working on before, too; as it turned out, just being able to grind out something old and familiar helped to get my mind off of what was troubling me. I spent a few days doing no save+quit runs in mid-July (since the normal any%, which is what I had been doing, had changed quite a bit) and finally got the run that I would have been happy submitting to SDA, but since I assumed it would be beaten within a week or so, I never uploaded it anywhere. I kept mindlessly practicing segments, without any goal in mind other than keeping myself mentally occupied, pretty much every day up until mid-August, when I started playing other games and pretty much never touched TP again (at least until many years later).

Those "real life issues" continued for another year, and I graduated high school in June of 2013 with a lot of heartbreak, regrets, and emotional baggage that I never really had a chance to properly get rid of. Although things have gotten much better since then, I still often find myself yearning to go back to 11th grade, relive the good memories, and fix all the mistakes that I made. And looking back, speedrunning Twilight Princess was one of the greatest memories I have from that time. Even when things were looking down, playing that game let me escape from it all and just enjoy myself, and it's the reason why I've come back to it now over 3 years later - to recapture those old memories and relive a time in my life that still means a lot to me.

So why is Twilight Princess my favorite speedgame? Yes, it has good mechanics. Yes, it's fast-paced with very few unskippable cutscenes. Yes, it's very movement-based and doesn't have too many hard tricks to do. But on top of all that, Twilight Princess represents something very personal to me. It was a light that helped me see when things got dark, and today it serves as a glimmer of nostalgia that brings me back to a better time and helps keep old memories alive. Twilight Princess, to me, represents a simpler, more innocent time in my life - before I knew heartbreak, before I had to leave all my old childhood friends, before the onset of all these adult responsibilities that I now have to deal with (and all the additional ones that will hit me within the next couple years). It's a little pocket of history that I can escape to when I just want to go back in time and be a kid again for a little while. And that, above all else, is why Twilight Princess is my favorite speedgame.