A speed run is an attempt to finish a game faster than anyone else. (Within some set of constraints; e.g. it might mean seeing the credits, it might mean explic

A speed run is an attempt to finish a game faster than anyone else. (Within some set of constraints; e.g. it might mean seeing the credits, it might mean explicitly winning every stage or ever boss in the game, etc). The issue with this minigame was apparently that players would need to waste a basically random amount of time on the minigame, it was necessary to win the minigame to finish the game (in a way that meet these particular speedrun constraints). If the game takes two hours to finish and the minigame can take 1 minute or 5 minutes of it, an attempt where it takes 5 minutes is probably never going to beat the record. You might as well scrap it. And in this case you would not know until half an hour into the game whether this attempt you'd get lucky, or if it was a total waste of time. So this group wanted to find a way to mitigate the randomness, such that the viability of an attempt was determined by player skill rather than luck in a bullshit minigame.