I know of some tutorials and location of information - for instance LawyerDog's tutorial.

However, a lot of the information is years out of date and many links on wikis are broken or missing. I imagine not all that much has changed given that the leaderboard is largely pretty old times. But, given that this will be my first speedgame, anything that I can find would be of help - especially if there are any text guides that I can read in spare moments away from home or level-by-level guides for bitesize chunks to learn.

I'll definitely be looking at the WR run in more detail, but at this point I don't know enough to necessarily notice small details (e.g. experience management in the first few levels).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hey, welcome to Bastion speedrunning, glad to see a fresh face!

First of all, I'd strongly recommend you join our Discord channel so you always have a place to ask questions (and we definitely like answering them). Here's the link for that: https://discord.gg/0jOLZzV5X7OtmAzD

As you may have noticed, we don't have one good guide available for NG ASL, but on the Guides tab there are a few useful links. If you want a ¤full¤ guide, you'll want to probably start with Vulajin's guide in conjunction with the WR video. I've also compiled a playlist of my own videos that are breakdowns of a handful of specific levels (ones that typically give runners trouble).

If you want a text guide - well nobody has had the patience or motivation to create something like that for NG ASL, but I currently have a lot of extra time with a really bad computer, so I could type up a guide for any portion of the game you need more help with, just ping me on Discord. (Synth#5487)

TL;DR Join the discord and we can all help you!