I've been on and off trying to find a perfect game (for me) to speedrun, get good at, stream and generally just have fun with. Every time I try to go on this wondrous... headache inducing journey I always end up empty handed, and this has gone on for about a year even though I'm absolutely determined to pour my heart out into a game and be competitive with my times. Whenever I give up on searching it really does sadden me because there's days I feel close to my decision and others where my mind goes completely blank at the mere thought of picking a game. In order to give my close friends a break from me talking about my decision making process and to get more varied opinions and ideas on the matter, I'm posting this.

My experience in speedrunning isn't extensive. I used to do Pokemon Yellow, Refunct, Ori and the Blind Forest (or at least tried, never finished a run and didn't feel confident to push myself), Slime Rancher, A Hat in Time and multiple Final Fantasy titles. When it came to Pokemon and Refunct I ended up hitting against a wall way too hard and got burnt out pushing myself for hours and hours to push past it while not having much fun or feeling as though I can spend time doing something else (so that I wouldn't fall out of practice). Recently I gave Touhou Luna Nights a try and I enjoyed the game, but once I started looking into the route for any%, the idea of streaming it (interest in the game itself doesn't seem to be that high) and really thinking about it I feel like dropping it. Even though part of me still wants to do it, the other half tells me to find something else similar to it. I've gone full "dork" and made a spreadsheet at one point detailing thoughts on games. Detailing their times, genres, tech and if the game is active or not, but of course this never really helped.

My biggest issues when looking around are mixed, primarily it's settling on something I enjoy. I've heard to pick a game I love, but whenever I sit down and try to think about what games I love or that I'm nostalgic to my brain just shuts down and doesn't turn up anything. I can go down a whole list of games I've played throughout my life but picking the ones I love isn't easy for me, I can certainly go into detail about the games I dislike but not for what I enjoyed. Even when I find something nostalgic I end up finding reasons to not run it, for instance I'd spend almost every day of my young life playing Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on my GameCube but once I started to replay it and look into the route for Hero Story runs it just doesn't feel right in terms of controls or the idea of it after some practice. That kinda feeling has popped up for Kirby Air Ride, Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and Mega Man 2. I don't know if it's normal to feel that way or not but it's certainly bothersome.

I'm not sure where else I can look, I'm mostly just looking for either PC indie games or something from the N64-GCN era. When it comes to streams at the very least I'm looking for something that won't have me end up with 0 viewer streams since that's quite demoralizing. I don't want the speedruns to be extremely short (Refunct is a good example, runs lasting about three minutes) but not something crazy like Final Fantasy X with the WR at nine hours. The genre/style of game I feel like I'd enjoy the most is collect-a-thon, metroidvania/bullet hell, 2D side-scroller and/or JRPG. I'd absolutely appreciate any form of response whether it be opinions, suggestions or detailing your own experiences on how you found a game to speedrun. I've been feeling dread trying to figure something out so I'd love hearing from others about the topic.

Edit: When I brought up the idea of streaming, I may have expressed myself incorrectly about my thoughts on it. I'd like to stream mostly to interact with people while I'm doing runs. For example when I was streaming Refunct speedruns I had a couple viewers who were new to speedrunning the game, I was able to talk to them about it and show them tech. It felt great! As for why I want to speedrun it's just been something I've really wanted to do for the longest time. I remember watching old Mega Man speedruns on SDA back in the day and wanting to do that. Nowadays what draws me in is competing with others and the idea of self improvement with lowering a time. Sorry if the edit is written strangely as I wrote this after waking up.

I've been on and off trying to find a perfect game (for me) to speedrun, get good at, stream and generally just have fun with. ... [...] even though I'm absolutely determined to pour my heart out into a game and be competitive with my times.

Before finding a game to speedrun, I think you should really try to figure out why you want to speedrun at all. Is it because you want to compete? Because you enjoy so much a game that you just want to keep playing it again and again? Because you really enjoy something about a given game (say, a movement tech) and/or community (e.g., how everyone is really nice, even just hanging out) and want to connect to others (through streaming, racing, the site, local events etc) for that? Because you really enjoy a game and want to scream at the world "Hey, this is fun!"? Or maybe you really like the concept of speedrunning and want to be part of the speedrunning community?

In my case, I kinda started speedrunning so I could compete against others...

For a long time, I enjoyed watching speedruns but didn't attempt running anything myself. The closest I got to actually speedrunning anything was beating time attack challenges (for achievements) and playing my own games as fast as possible (after countless hours of playtesting, you kinda naturally start to speedrun stuff). However, as much as I liked the idea of speedrunning, I didn't fancy actually practicing (nor, maybe, grinding) for better times. However, after watching AGDQ 2017's Mystery Game Tournament I learned about blind racing and eventually started to join other blind race tournament (mostly, SRL Mystery Game Tournament). This eventually led me to joining a Momodora Reverie Under the Moonlight tournament, which became my first "official" speedrun (or, at least, my first speedrun here on this site).

I kept playing and trying to improve my time in that game for a long while, but nowadays I mostly "speedrun it casually" (heck yeah, that is a thing... I guess?). After that, I picked two other games (Catherine and JJAT) simply because I really enjoyed playing them and they have built-in timers. So, since I would usually go back to these games and try to get better times at them, speedrunning and submitting times to the leaderboards kinda came naturally. In particular, JJAT was an interesting experience because I had to set the game's leaderboard and I had to write its guide. Only recently I've picked a game (Youyou Kengeki Musou) because I wanted to play it more and the run seemed interesting and fun.

So, I'd say that for me speedrunning comes sort of naturally: I just find a game that I really enjoy and want to play more of it. And honestly, I'm not even that competitive... I mostly submit times to document it, I guess? Sort of a "Hey, I got this time in that game and I'm proud of it!"... Heck, twice now I've submitted times in games with few runners that got me the last place.

When it comes to streams at the very least I'm looking for something that won't have me end up with 0 viewer streams since that's quite demoralizing.

My take on this is quite different. When I'm blind racing, I can't look at the chat, so I got used to simply ignoring whatever is happening there (which is usually nothing, anyway). Also, streaming is something that I find quite weird... Am I playing a game to enjoy it myself or am I trying to make me playing the game a enjoyable experience to others?

Usually, I'll simply use streaming as a lazy way to record and automatically upload runs to the internet. It's only recently that I started to interact more with people as I'm doing attempts (and much to my surprise this has been quite a fun and interesting experience). However, my default is still to start the stream with the microphone muted and mostly ignore the chat.

I guess my point here is (again), why do you want to do that?

All in all, I find this a really fun hobby, but it can be quite demanding as well... If you fell like you won't enjoy practicing, running etc, maybe try other stuff? Maybe try glitch hunting, TASing, blind racing... I highly suggest trying blind racing, but I may be somewhat biased to that.

I hope all this rambling helps in some way. :D

I've personally had some similar experiences. Have watched speedruns for YEARS before doing any myself, seeing speedrunning as sort of a "club for the elite" (as in, there's nothing out there that I was anywhere near as good at as any speedrunners I saw were at their games); without realizing that speedrunners were as good as they were due to dedicated continued practice. Eventually I found a game I thought that I could learn, which I've since moved on from.

Anyway, most people put WAY too much thought in what is going to be their speedgame. You are better off just trying ANY game that you think looks interesting to practice, and moving on from it as soon as it stops being fun. Most people end up running multiple games anyway. You might find that your preferences for things such as length, genre, etc. change as you speedrun more. It doesn't need to be a game that you played as a child, that is popular, or that you played a lot beforehand. Could even just play random games that show up in Steam recommendations, other people's profiles, online marathons, the front page of this website, etc. until you find something that looks interesting.

As for getting an audience for streaming, that's a whole different issue that shouldn't be your main focus if you're just doing it for a hobby. Personally I can't stand streaming for 0 real viewers, which is why I offline record and upload to Youtube for a majority of my runs. If you have the kind of personality that makes for a good streamer, and have friends who can watch/interact with you before you get established, go for it. Otherwise, you can always just play offline.