my friend thinks that practicing full speedruns is how to practice as a beginner I argue that he should practice levels indivualy before doing a full run who do you agree with: A: Me B: My Friend
I would say it depends on the game, but as someone who usually plays games separated into levels, it's a lot easier for me to learn certain chunks and stitch them together. But even that preference may vary per person, so it could be that it depends on the player as well as the game.
For SMO as a specific game in mind, I would imagine either way is fine.
I'd say to LEARN the run, yes, practice the levels individually until you know all the movement, routing, etc. But at a beginner level you don't really need to practice unless you want to; you can usually get PBs by just playing full game runs.
my take is if you're a beginner honestly just do whatever the hell you want because when you're still figuring out fundamental aspects of how the game works, it's a waste of your time to try to be super metacognizant of your approach to speedrunning in general
Honestly a mixture of both is probably the best, if you do runs you can see what you’re struggling with then fix it in IL practice.
You'll get better and more consistent by playing individual levels, but you don't want to overdo any one kingdom before you're consistent with all the others - being able to not die in later kingdoms will save much more time than perfecting DSS in cascade!
imo for learning, il's are good but for general practice as a beginner, it's probably best to do full game runs. when you're a beginner, you're not fully comfortable with the controls so doing full game runs will make you more experienced in controlling mario. i think it's best to do il's for practice once you're around the intermediate level, so that you know exactly what movement you'll do when. but for a beginner the most important thing is to learn the route and just get better at general movement.
Personally as someone getting people into speedrunning these days; I think it boils down to how long the run is. Smo is a long run for most starter runners. If you take smo on first, then IL to the point you know what you need to do then in a run. Full game is by far better till you reach decent times with "Free movement". Also, learning what it is to be an hour deep into a run and have to pull of late game hard tricks is something only full runs can get you to feel.
Generally I would recommend just practicing some of the main beginner-friendly jumps/tricks like dino skip, moon skip, night metro awning jump and then focus on full runs at first. The general route isn't too difficult to learn especially if you have watched speedruns of the game (but it depends on each individual's experience). Once you know the route, practicing and improving general movement is the most important way to save time. Full game runs are great for that, but ILs can work too of course.
Ok, so, what I did when I was learning this game...
I followed along with Smallant1's Beginner's Guide. (Nowadays I would recommend Tomshiii's guide instead.) He had a video for each Kingdom. I would watch the video and focus primarily on memorizing the route. Then, I would do an IL or two of that Kingdom--just to learn and memorize the route. Once I had the route memorized, I would move on to the next video and repeat the process. I'm slow, so this took me like a week or two, but once I had the route for each Kingdom memorized, I just did full-game runs. I didn't do an IL again until I was at like a 1:06:XX. From there, IL's with a focus on improving your lines, optimizing your movement, and maybe implementing some more advanced tricks/strats are the most efficient ways to improve.
