Should I Do ILs? (essay)

This is an essay (= opinion-piece) by shoutplenty.

The intrinsic value of doing ILs is that you come closer to the peak of your movement skill in short categories, and understanding/optimising the movement of SMS is one of its most attractive and gratifying aspects (that draws many in in the first place).

As a beginner, you’ll have different preferences for what and how you want to speedrun. Compared to the days when everyone just had to do Any%, there are more paths to take. All speedruns of fixed categories (from ILs to 120 Shines), termed RTA, are about optimisation, and evaluating how fast you can do short sections at peak vs how consistently you can perform well over long sections, as well as development of mentality. For many people, it’s more interesting to just play the speedrun without optimising, so other aspects like the variety of category extensions and the tactics of bingo provide a more enjoyable way in.

For RTA, a more perfectionist player may be tempted to focus on ILs. It’s reasonable, but even for such a player, ILs are symbiotic with longer categories like individual worlds (IWs) or Any%. It’s far harder to do well at even a long IL, let alone an IW, so the consistency built up from performing simple strats in a long category translates into consistency performing hard strats in a short one. Likewise, playing a range of levels helps train a general understanding of movement, that makes it easier to pick up harder things.

A player who’s more focused on Any% will learn faster by understanding the basics of a level by doing ILs with simple strats, and will develop better movement fundamentals from them, whose utility is more apparent in the endgame of the player’s Any% development. However, the most impactful thing on Any% performance is consistency at simpler strats, which isn’t trained by ILs.

A common route into Any% is to not try hard at ILs until getting a good Any% time, then invest in them to hit your peak. Such an approach is less gratifying for people who prefer the feeling of mastering something, since you have to first spend dozens of hours doing runs that don’t amount to much. You could alternatively start with an IL-heavy approach, but must eventually still confront a long period of high-variance runs before you build consistency. So I’d conclude, put effort into ILs if and only if you want to; they’re not important for Any% until high-level.