speedplans

As many of you know, I announced plans to return to speedrunning Twilight Princess about a year ago. Since then, I've mostly waffled back and forth between different categories, unsure of what to do with the game. The last time I mentioned it, I said I was going to do TPHD any%, but nothing ever really came of that, and I kind of just quietly drifted away from TP in general once again.

So what happened?

As I've mentioned before, one of the main reasons I decided to make a comeback was to take care of unfinished business. I originally ran the game in late 2011 and early 2012, and my goal was to get an any% RTA run that I could submit to SDA to serve as a successor to Jiano's run. Due to a combination of real life issues and increased competition that I couldn't handle, I ended up having to bail on this goal near the middle of 2012, never having really gotten a run that I was happy with. I did one No Save+Quit run in July of 2012, my best run of the game by far, but I still wasn't happy with it and figured it would just be beaten pretty quickly anyway. (It stood as the NoSQ record for almost a year, for some reason.)

The main reason I had so much trouble picking a category once I came back to the game last year was really because the route and strategies have changed so drastically since then. So much has changed, been added, and taken away in the any% RTA run in the past 4 years that it doesn't really feel like the same game anymore. And, over the past year that I tried to get back into it, I was very much aware of this. I came back to the game to take care of unfinished business and relive old memories, but with everything being so radically different, the old memories never materialized, and it didn't really feel like i was "finishing what I started" as much as starting a completely new game altogether. So I waffled back and forth between categories for a year, trying desperately to find a good balance between similarity to my old run and "officialness" (i.e. legitimacy as a recognized category that people took seriously). In the end, this was doomed to fail, and a few weeks ago I finally gave in and admitted that TP simply isn't the same game anymore that I used to run back in the good old days, no matter what category I chose.

With this revelation, I've finally decided what it is that I need to do. In order to reunite with TP as I used to know it and finally get proper closure, I need to return to the any% RTA run - using the old route and strategies from early 2012.

That's right, I am going to be returning to the old early 2012 any% route, using more or less the same movement and strategies that I used back then (with some minor exceptions that I'll get to in a moment), and aiming for a time I would have been truly happy with in those days. That way, I can finally - in a quite literal sense - finish what I started all those years ago.

This is a deeply personal project, one that I don't expect a lot of people to really care about, and I doubt I'll be streaming most of my attempts at it (I get too nervous streaming attempts of *anything*). But I will be releasing the final product and will most likely be revealing it on stream with live commentary once I'm done. And I will keep you guys updated on my Twitter about my progress.

The general strategies I will be using for the run will be more or less a combination of my 3:42 No Save+Quit run from July of 2012 and Paraxade's segmented run from 2011, using the same route as my 3:41 any% RTA run from February 2012 (which was the optimal any% RTA route until Pillar Clip and Faron Escape were found - basically NoSQ Classic with back in time and a few small savewarps). I will be making a few exceptions where I will use more modern strategies; these will mostly be either very small movement optimizations that are pretty obvious in hindsight, or strategies that help improve consistency and make things easier. This should be pretty natural for me, since it's been 3+ months since I've played; and even though I did try to learn the newer strategies over the past year, I didn't really mess with them enough that they're too ingrained in my muscle memory at this point (I'd be surprised if I could remember most of them, honestly).

The time I will be aiming for will most likely be somewhere around 3:32-3:34, with hopefully less than 4 minutes of mistakes (including bad RNG). I had originally planned to get 3:37, but the time I saved in my NoSQ run from the stuff Paraxade told me about (and just better movement in general I guess) cut off about 3 minutes from that estimate (3:42 NoSQ back then was about the equivalent of 3:33-3:34 RTA). Basically, I'm just going for a relatively clean run with decent movement - the kind of run I would have been happy submitting to SDA 4 years ago.

So what's next after this? Well, at that point, with my unfinished business with Early2012% taken care of, it's likely I'll finally be ready to move on and start running the current any% route. I'm not that big a fan of it - I find it rather dull and empty compared to the early 2012 route - but it'd be nice if I could actually get an any% RTA run up on SDA like I wanted to back in 2011/2012. For that, I doubt I'll be aiming for the world record; I'll probably just be aiming for a run with as few mistakes as possible without worrying about hyper-optimizing it like the current world records do (probably anything around 3 hours should be fine).

Other than that, I'd like to get back into Metroid Prime and do something similar with that - I started semi-casually running it in early 2012 using the strategies from the 1:16 PAL any% run on SDA (since those were pretty easy), and in late 2012 I actually bought the PAL version so I could more easily compare with it (and also NTSC 0-00 crashes are scary and my Wii can't read discs anymore). I'll probably aim to match or beat the 1:16 using similar strategies first, then start learning the new stuff - the same basic plan I have for TP. I might also look into running Echoes at some point - but no promises (echoes is hard).

That's all for now. I'll keep you guys updated on how things are going with all that. Cheers!

-ingx24