This is the result of a month of playing no game but Twilight Princess, and while I'm not entirely happy with the run, you can only play a game so much before it starts to feel like a job, and I hit that point. I really wanted to get 3:55 or better, mostly because of the ridiculous amount of time I waste trying to get City in the Sky early, but every person has their limits. After achieving my 3:56, I was in route to get a 3:55 run but choked during Hyrule Castle, which basically murdered any motivation I had left. I'm hoping we can find a few minutes more of time savers and then I'll have a good reason to play again, but this is it for now. Twilight Princess is a pretty good game, but things like collecting tears are probably worse than watching long cut scenes you can't skip. I'm sure that 3:51 is as good as a human could possibly get, so I am perfectly ok with 5 minutes of mistakes in a 4 hour run(2%!). The amount of luck required to get a good time is ridiculous.

The overall play quality in this SS over my old 4:47 is noticeably better. Although the run is 50 minutes shorter, there are much harder sequence breaks and glitches that I had to perform this time around. The first 2 hours went amazing, my best by far, but once I hit Morpheel, there are some pretty nasty mistakes. When you're 2 hours into a run, it's hard to hit restart and go again, which is why I'm ok with how the last 2 hours went. You have to understand that there is a huge amount of luck involved in a lot of this game. It could take me hours to get a good enough run passed the gate glitch, and that's only 7 minutes into the run.

Anyway, I hope anyone who watches this understands how hard it is for everything to go right, and even the easiest tricks that I pull off 99% of the time in practice(CitS early), can go wrong after 3 hours straight of playing(which doesn't even include how many resets I had before it). Onto more specific comments about the run.

• Ordona Province/Faron Province

  I get the blue rupee, which saves me 6-7 seconds during day 2, since I don't need to get the blue from under the rock. The first goat herding went almost perfect. Glitching through the gate worked first try, even though I wasted a second or two trying to roll into the pole, it's perfectly acceptable. Cage opening is always a pain and didn't go too well here, but it's near impossible for everything in the first 10 minutes to go perfectly. The 2nd goats went terrible, and I was supposed to restart, but since no attempt that day made it passed 2nd goats I wanted to at least end the day with a run that made it somewhere.

• Twilight Castle

  This part is about as easy as it gets. I miss the midna text skip but that only costs a second or two, so no big deal there.

• Ordona Province

  This part is also easy, the only difficult part is the jump to the roof to skip the midna jump, and I had no trouble with it here.

• Faron Twilight Part 1

  Tears went well, which is unusual. If the messengers swing too fast, you can't get the correct super jump to get onto the hill, which is why I purposely take the hit from him, then get it the next swing. Early master sword has killed many, many speed run attempts.

• Sacred Grove

  Another easy section, lots of running around and a long unskippable cut scene. All good here.

• Faron Twilight Part 2

  Getting through the purple fog can be done a bit faster, but for some reason whenever I get this far it screws me over, so I'm extremely careful going through it. Everything else went fine.

• Forest Temple

  Early gale boomerang has always gave me trouble, even though it's a fairly easy trick. Thankfully I pull it off first try, which doesn't happen too often for me. Ook was not nice on this day and jumps around probably 6 or 7 times, but there's nothing I can do to prevent that from happening. I have a little trouble climbing the tree before Diababa, but it only took a couple seconds. Diababa himself likes to waste my time whenever I have a good run going, but luckily for me both bombs hit and I get to proceed onwards.

• Eldin Province Tears

  This part really sucks, it's 10 minutes of boringness. Tears are extremely tedious. I have a really good time going at this point, about a minute ahead of my 2nd best run. I have no idea where I gained so much time, but it's ok with me.

• Ordon Village

  Sumoing is not cool. He has a high chance of doing a slap, but he still has a chance to sidestep, which is a pain in the ass if he keeps doing it. I almost never get good sumoing, but this time it went wonderfully.

• Lanayru Province Twilight

  Early Lanayru has ruined many, many attempts, and usually takes at least few rolls to pull off. Somehow I manage to get it in one roll which is badass, and now I'm completely destroying all of my other speed run times up to this point. There is a trick to kill the Kargaroc that involved jumping into the water as human Link and sinking to the bottom with the iron boots, and when the Kargaroc tries to grab you he dies because he touches the water. This trick is very risky, because if you screw it up, and the Kargaroc grabs you as Link, then the game freezes. Since my run is so good up to this point there was no way I was going to risk it, and opt with the original way you're supposed to kill him. Nothing noteable happens during tears, pretty normal.

• Peak Province

  All the way to Snowpeak went well, I get the rupees during snowboarding which doesn't always happen. Nothing else to say really.

• Snowpeak Ruins

  I get Ooccoo and use her so I can steal the bomb bag from Iza. I don't have any problems with that. I somehow don't jump my first try at the bomb boost which costs me some time, but it's not too much. I get the freezard skip first try. I kill the ball and chain lizard pretty quickly, and I'm done with the temple.

• Eldin Province

  I have to go here since it's the only way I can get water bombs. I empty as many bombs as I can while I'm riding to the grotto where I have to fish. The thing with the fishing grotto is there's 3 skull fish, and they will always bite before the bomb fish do, so you have to kill them before you can catch the bomb fish. This part is completely luck based, usually you can see 1-2 skull fish swimming and you can just kill them without fishing them out, but if you're unlucky then none of them will be visible and you have to waste a ton of time with fishing. Luckily for me all 3 were visible and I can swim through, letting them latch onto me, then get out and kill them with a single slash. I catch 2 water bomb fish, then I Ooccoo back to Snowpeak and grab the 5 water bomb chest there, which is much faster than fishing out 5.

• Zora's Domain/Lake Hylia

  The goron bomb bag is necessary since the bag I stole from Iza will disappear once I beat Lakebed Temple, and I still need water bombs later on for Zant. The swim out to Lakebed Temple is pretty long and boring, I miss the Zora suit.

• Lakebed Temple

  There is a glitch, when you go to the save screen, that turns any water bombs in Iza's bomb bag, into normal bombs. I need to do this so when I open the water bomb chest the bombs go into my goron bomb bag. I found out after I did this run that you don't need to save to do the glitch, but it only takes a couple seconds to save, so no big deal. I waste a few seconds setting up the staircase LJA, but that's ok because I really don't want to screw that up. I guess I threw the water bomb over the railing too far or something because it didn't hit the rock, which wastes one of my water bombs and some time. No problems with the Deku Toad fight, the ball and chain makes short work of him. The vine glitch is random, there is no guaranteed way to glitch through the vines. I'd say you have about a 50% chance to glitch through, which sucks. I manage to get it 2nd try and then it was time to fight Morpheel. Morpheel can be a real pain sometimes. Right off the bat he can go low or high, if he goes high, you can't latch on right away, and also ruins any chances of a fast boss battle. Morpheel just did not cooperate at all this fight, everytime I went up so did he, and he wouldn't even do his damn suction attack which makes it much easier to latch onto him. The fight was pretty sloppy but it was also just bad luck since he goes in random directions.

• Hyrule Castle Town

  I. hate. this. part. Just let me do more temples. I somehow manage to make mistakes in this rather simple section. I knew I shouldn't have tried that fancy sidehop to the window.

• Gerudo Desert

  There's a ~15 second time saver when getting into the Gerudo Ruins that is incredibly easy that I didn't find out until a few hours after I did this run. Everything went smoothly, though.

• Arbiter's Grounds

  This dungeon was kinda sloppy, it's either this or CitS that I screw up on, and in this instance it was definitely AG. In the 2nd room I miss lighting the torch and take a bunch of hits from the stalfos, wasting a good 10 seconds or so. I waste some more time on the 2nd poe, the damn skull heads, or bubbles, whatever they're called, kept hitting me and I had some trouble recovering from it. I actually get down to 3/4 a heart here which is ridiculous and shouldn't have happened. Killing the 2 Redeads and the army of stalfos was a bit slow. The ghost rat room is always annoying, I get incredibly unlucky and my momentum stops completely as I'm jumping over the gap. I kill the dumb ghost rats then I somehow manage to grab a blue rupee which wastes more time. You can actually 2 cycle Death Sword, but it's a lot riskier trying to stop him with the ball and chain, so I use the much safer method using a spin attack. Stallord you can always assume is going to be rough. I think I get a good Stallord maybe 1/30 runs. It's that bad. The damn stalfos come up in completely random locations, when you touch them or Stallord you bounce in a random direction(I think you can actually control where you go but I sure as hell can't), and if you're really unlucky, which I was, you can get stuck under Stallord's arm, and it sucks ass because you have to get off the spinner and run all the way back up through the sand. There's not a whole lot you can do if you just get unlucky in the fight.

• Kakariko Village

  Ok, this is the reason I wanted to improve my run right here. This trick I can get almost every attempt when I'm practicing. I had actually practiced this a ton the day before to make sure I wouldn't screw it up. It takes a grand total of 12 attempts(2 minutes worth!) to finally get through the damn statue. I hope this part at least provides some laughs at my expense, it's still more entertaining than watching tear collecting, right?

• City in the Sky

  Hopefully my best City in the Sky run I've ever done makes up for the previous atrocious mistake. I need to grab the water bombs at the start since I don't want to fight Zant with less than 5, and it took a lot to beat Morpheel. The entire temple went great. I had some minor mistakes here and there, but that is to be expected.

• Palace of Twilight

  This temple takes an extremely long time and is also about as frustrating as it gets. So many places to make mistakes, and there aren't even many short cuts or tricks that I have to do. It's simple stuff like killing the Zant heads that can really mess me up. The Zant head in the first room of the east wing was definitely the last big mistake of the run. This guy can spawn in 5 different spots, and they're random as far as I know. So he starts out wasting my time by spawning across the room, and then when he spawns closer I miss 2 quick spins, letting him live on. He spawns across the room again, then spawns right where I want him. I go to jump slash and for some stupid reason I'm holding right so I sidehop into the darkness, and wonder what just happened. I backtrack to him and finally bring this epic battle to a close, and proceed to the next room. I get screwed by the damn game in the 2nd room. About 3 or 4 times the cursor for my clawshot was yellow but I couldn't reach them. I hate it when it feels like the game is trying to prevent me from finishing. The rest of the temple goes just as planned and I make it to Zant. This boss fight is normally very easy, but without the Zora suit it can be tricky. I do not believe it's possible to beat him with 2 water bombs. If it is, then it's definitely not something I want to try in a SS. I do beat him with 3 water bombs which was excellent. The rest of the boss fight went well.

• Hyrule Castle

  I'm happy with how this dungeon went. All of the barrier fights can be a pain because of the dark energy attack. You can randomly jump into the walls which slows the killing down immensly, and it only happened to me a couple times. I use the slingshot on the armored lizards because it always stuns them and I don't know of a better way to fight them. Puppet Zelda was nice and gave me the minimum 7 cycles. Beast Ganon was also nice and made sure to knock me the right way both times I hit him with the ball and chain. I get knocked off right at the start of the horseback fight but I recover quickly and still get a decent time on him. The Final Ganondorf strategy never works correctly, at least for me. Whenever I go for the jumpslash when hes getting up I either miss or he hits me right when I hit him. It was an ok fight, but could've been better.

I recorded until right when the credits start. Not only do I not have enough DVD space at that point, but also the credits are 15 minutes long. If you want to watch the credits go watch them on youtube or something, because this is a speed run, not a let's watch the credits run.

Thanks to everyone who I bothered asking questions and for giving me feedback. Thanks to the SDA staff for running the site. Thanks to anyone who can forgive me for the CitS early fiasco.

This is my first speed run and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Obviously, this run wouldn't be possible without everyone who has contributed even the smallest of short cuts. Thanks to pretty much everyone in the gigantic Twilight Princess topic, there are too many people to name. One of the main reasons I put so much work into this run is for it to be put on SDA and hopefully get more people interested in running Twilight Princess, or finding glitches/short cuts.

This run, like most any run, especially the first, has mistakes. I'd say 5-7 minutes could be cut off with a lot of improvements, but I couldn't see more than that without some new breaks. The biggest improvement would come from Segment 31, using the clawshot to jump slash to get over the first couple rooms. I'm too dumb to be able to do it, so hopefully the next person will be able to pull it off.

Some Highlights of the run:

• My first 10 segments are all well done. This is mostly thanks to YautjaElder who gave me some very good times to try and beat.
• Some say my sumoing is quite impressive.
• Arbiters Grounds turned out really well. I was extremely lucky on Stallord, defeating his first cycle in less than 30 seconds.
• Snowpeak Ruins went extremely well and it will be a tough time to beat. Definitely my favorite part of the game to speed run.
• My rupee route turned out to be perfect. I had exactly the amount I needed throughout the whole game.
• City in the Sky turned out better than I had expected.
• Palace of Twilight. This is definitely my least favorite of all the Temples. There are almost no tricks to be used, its quite linear. I still manage to make a very good run of the place thanks to doing it in 3 segments.
• Segment 42 was pretty much flawless
• I get 28 seconds on the Ganon on horseback fight. Definitely the best horseback fight I've ever done.

There are 2 versions of Twilight Princess: The Gamecube version and the Wii version. The Wii version loads faster which makes a pretty huge difference in the long run. So much that I don't think the few neat tricks on the GC can make up for.

I'd just like to say that the remote and the nun chuk will cause a lot of frustration in a speed run for the Wii. I've failed many, many attempts at segments due to unresponsiveness of the controller. Sometimes I wish I would have done the speed run on the GC version, but I've grown used to the remote failing on me.

Thanks to SDA for the amazing site. Without SDA I would have never even thought about speed running Twilight Princess.