I am new to speedrunning and this is the first and only category I'm playing. I'm about 20 runs deep with a PB of 2:54 and I feel like I now understand the route as a whole pretty well. From what I'm seeing online, working on boss fights and also some mob fights will serve as the biggest time savers. My question to the optimal runners is; what strats make the biggest difference in the overall time as opposed to not doing them. There are plenty of battle & platforming strats that intimidate me, which I haven't worked on or maybe even tried yet, but I don't know where to start. What are the biggest game changers? How can I get this 2:54 down to a 2:25 with the least practice? I know the answer to this is highly personal to the runner but I'm sure there are some commonplaces at this point of improvement. Thank you guys in advance!

Note: One thing that I know I need to work on is Simba, particularly colosseum world terminus and final rest. Everytime I try to execute the roar's correctly I get interrupted by heartless somewhere and lose a million seconds. help a brutha out

Without actually seeing a run of yours, I don’t think it’s possible to give any advice or help. We won’t know what you do wrong or what you’re doing unoptimally unless we can see it. Otherwise we’re taking shots in the dark and hoping we can hit something. I encourage you to submit your runs or at least upload them somewhere so we can sss them and provide any advice we can. Until then, the best advice is to watch a few high level runs and just do what they do - if you struggle with any strats then we can help in those specific cases. The biggest time losses I tend to see are sloppy movement, slow menus and various boss fights going slow.

As for Simba, it sounds like you’re summoning him late or slowly. As long as Simba is summoned quickly, the heartless should never be close to hitting you. For World Terminus, a safer strat is do release the roar on 3 flashes instead of 2 which will stun the enemies instead of resetting their animations. For final rest, idk what the problem is without seeing it. Just make sure you mash out the summon to get it out quickly. In final rest you can use stop on the last invisible before killing it to buy yourself a little setup time if you’re worried about getting Simba out in time.

As I recommend to everyone, join our discord which is stickied in the main forums and is linked on the side of the games/series. More people can provide insights there as opposed to here.

honestly if you wanna get by with doing the least amount of practice, and get a good run? In my past experience from PS3 just watch a lot of other peoples runs and become a copy cat so to speak . from there just do no resets and you'll get where you're going eventually.

Mind you everyone is different, but that's how I got sub 3 on PS3.

On a proper note though, as what timmi said peopel will need to prolly see your run to give you more of an idea of what's gone wrong, and you should most def join the discord where there are plenty of runners available to help ! !

This is the first ive heard of the discord, shouldve looked harder lol. I have spent some time watching several runs and have copied to the best of my ability. I figured there was no way to blindly help someone save time, unless there were some insanely fast strats i didnt know about. But now that you say it I think my menus are too slow and I have room to improve almost all fights. I'll take you guys' advice and upload a run to seek personalized advice. ??

This will sound stupid, but something that can lose you like a minute or more on menus is not using the “Start” trick to exit them.

A lot of people, especially newer runners, don’t know that when in a menu you can press “start” to instantly close the pause menu. You’d be surprised how much time that saves over pressing the back button (circle on English, X on JP) to back out of each menu screen one at a time.

Some people know this from casually playing, but I always mention it because I never learned about it until doing runs and seeing other people do it. And I’ve seen a number of new runners over the years not know about it either.