is there anything i need to know before i approach the first attempt to speedrun this game.

it depends on if you want to do a run with or without RNG manipulation. There have been many crazy things going on with this game in the last year in terms of RNG manipulation, which is why the times on the leaderboard have gone from 5+ hours to less than 1 hour.

Running the game without RNG manipulation is fairly simple, it is just a bunch of grinding, and occasionally picking up some items. With RNG manipulation is incredibly complex and fairly difficult to figure out just from watching a video.