>>55227395It can be interesting as an intellectual exercise, since a group of people are picking apart the game's design and mechanics in order to identify the most optimal route through it. When you add time as an additional resource that you're trying to minimise, it leads to many trade-offs that a normal player probably wouldn't consider. For example, do you battle an extra trainer and get additional experience and money (both of which will be limited in a speedrun) in exchange for some additional time added onto the route? Do you stay at low health and gain the extra benefits (red bar in gen 1, torrent in gen 3) at the risk of getting knocked out easily?
Although in practice, actually speedrunning the game is incredibly boring since you're mostly just mashing A through dialogues and combat. Plus everyone is following the same route, so the only real difference between each player is RNG. Only a handful of people will actually do the interesting part (creating a route), while the majority do the boring part of executing it. Watching a well-commentated speedrun that explains some of the decisions through the route can be enjoyable, although I would never bother speedrunning the games myself since you're essentially doing the exact same thing over and over again and hoping for good RNG.
