Hey guys :) First of all, I wanted to say hi to the community here. As the title says, I’m trying out speedrunning for the first time and I decided to start with SA2B. I played it a lot as a kid and after watching a few GDQ runs I thought it’d be a fun place to start. Anyone have any advice for getting started? I’m playing the 360 version btw.

First off, join the Sonic Speedrunning Discord as linked in one of the stickies, and we can help you get started from there.

As far as tips for starting off, don't reset. As a beginner you're best off building a solid foundation by completing no-reset runs, otherwise you'll get decent at the start of the game but really struggle with the later stages.

For specific things to work on, Knuckles pieces are the priority for newer runners; no matter how good your Sonic/Tails stages are, you'll lose much more time in the Knuckles stages if you get unfamiliar pieces that you just cannot find.

Thanks for the response Drakodan. I might try running Hero story without trying anything too crazy later today then. I’ll check out the discord too, and maybe just run some Knuckles stages a few times to memorise some of those emerald locations.

I remember when I wanted to try to run this game and speedrun in general, a year ago. I actually enjoyed playing Knuckles a lot and now it's my strongest part by far. I'd also recommend to check sometimes for runners in sa2/sa2b games section on twitch, you can meet them streaming every day and literally everyone is super friendly for new runners. :P

watching many different people play is very helpful, especially people of different skill levels, because you may come across many different strats for just one spot, all that you can try out yourself. Also watching people will help you learn Knuckles pieces.

As far as the practising yourself goes, yeah, what Drako said, no-reset runs are vcery helpful for beginners. Also, this is a very movement heavy and knowledge heavy game, despite having lots of fancy looking tricks to skip parts of levels. But those don't actually save as much time as you may think, and trying to learn and fancy strats early on will most likely rather frustrate you and hold you back getting a feeling for how to optimize your movement. The only major skip that is generally recommended for beginners is Eternal Engine skip for Hero story. You can try to learn other skips of course if that's what you want to, but it's not recommended if you're just starting to speedrun. Anyways, what that means is, you will save a lot more time at the beginning just by consistently and confidently getting through every part of the game, instead of trying to do any very difficult strats. This goes for the linear stages (Sonic, Tails) and the non-linear ones (Knuckles, as in not getting cought up trying to find a piece for too long). And if you do those no-reset runs, pay close attention to what spots in the run were giving you trouble, on which ones you got cought on for a while, and then afterwards you can go back and practise those,

Hope that is helpful, good luck and have fun with the run!