I submitted this piece to Sickmutt's BARFOLOGY issue 1 but I have no idea if I made it in, so rather than sitting on this artwork I wanted to finally post it.

Aiming to be a lot more experimental this year and use what I learned in college more.

There are a few things that make Breath of the Wild 100% speedruns interesting to me in a way that shorter speedruns (specifically, anything that's feasible to expect someone to complete within one sitting) don't; shorter speedruns, even the longer ones like up to 2-3 hour ones, require you to approach Absolute Perfection more and more, closer and closer, and there's only so much room for error. There's not really salvaging your mistakes, or salvaging suboptimal rng, when a run like this inevitably gets optimized. Eventually, trying to improve is just going to feel like running into a wall, and it's not going to be enjoyable.

But with Breath of the Wild's 100% speedruns- which, as of today, have a world record clocking in at 15 and a half hours- even after years of optimization, you can still see runners' splits going back and forth, one hour they're a minute ahead, later they're 3 minutes behind, and by the end of the run they've gone back and forth a dozen times and wound up 7 minutes ahead. The way this run is structured, it's essentially never going to be truly optimized, not to the point "short-form" runs are, and because of how long the run is, Just Not Making Mistakes or hoping for the rng to be absolutely divinely perfect is just not viable.

So instead you see a very different dynamic; you see the runners slowly optimizing probably thousands of different executia of the same few fundamental tricks, a little different each time, a little worse here a little better there. They go "oh, that's not great but I can make it work". They lose a full minute and go "well, it's a long time, there's plenty of time to improve on this." The attitude this run seems to put runners in for the bulk of it, to me, seems a lot healthier than the chronic-reset hell that a lot of short-form runs can be. You're essentially never going to have a run that doesn't get a gold split somewhere, you're always going to do something better than you've ever done it before.

On top of that there are little routing things that I really like in the run; there's a certain event that appears after a certain period of ingame days (iirc) that you need to be at a certain place for, so runners have to plan for that, and sometimes they get too optimal at the parts before and their timing is off, so they have to adjust their routing and add more before it. There's also abilities that recharge after fixed periods of time, so runners have to carefully decide where to use these, and again, when they're too fast they have to adjust the routing on these. So even after the initial macro-routing there's a lot of little adjustments that are palpable even just watching the run.

Granted, it's not perfect; in order to get to this point, you have to do the first hour of the run, which is mostly setup. Glitching an overpowered bow that shoots 10 arrows in, duplicating your arrows and fairies to 4000 or something so you never die or run out of anything you need. And before you've done all this it's easy to lose a ton of time to some kind of bullshit that doesn't generally happen during the rest of the run, and hey, it's only an hour, so it's easy to justify a reset. So, a run like this one could maybe be better. But it's hard to know.

anyway. if you wanna watch hundo runs, the first part of the current world record is below. i enjoy them a lot and i recommend them, I like the current WR holder, he's got a pleasant demeanor.