Video Games Notable For Speedrunning - The Legend of Zelda Series

The Legend of Zelda Series

The games in the Legend of Zelda series generally take a large amount of effort to speedrun due to their length and non-linearity, even when played as quickly as possible, and because a lot of different techniques can be used in addition to extensive route planning. Nonetheless, they have been fought over by many speedrunners due to their high popularity, and have thus been improved frequently.

In 2006, a groundbreaking series of glitches were discovered in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time which enabled the game to be completed with only three of the six Sage Medallions. This, along with the completion of MUPEN64, resulted in the production of the first tool-assisted speedrun for Ocarina, finishing at 2 hours and 33 minutes. In early 2007, another major glitch, dubbed "Bottle Adventure," was discovered by Kazooie. This glitch exploits the way the game handles pointers to manipulate inventory items onto the B button. In August 2007, a player named "P. DOT" completed a Bottle Adventure-enabled TAS with a final time of 1 hour and 56 minutes. In 2008, another glitch was discovered that allowed a player to clip through the Door of Time with only a sword and no Spiritual Stones. In 2012, a groundbreaking glitch was found in Ocarina of Time by SockFolder and R0bD0g. By escaping the warp that appears when defeating Queen Gohma and using a door that leads back to the Deku Tree, the game warps the player to Ganondorf's defeat, skipping nearly the entire game; the player only need to escape the collapsing castle and defeat Ganon to end the game. The current world record of the game is held by theMakaron on the Japanese version with a time of 21 minutes, 28 seconds.

In September 2007, a tool-assisted speedrun of Majora's Mask was completed with a time of 2 hours and 14 minutes, utilizing many of the same glitches as Ocarina of Time, such as bomb hovers and superslides. The Speed Demos Archive time of 3 hours, 37 minutes remained outdated by two years, until the 6th of September 2009, when a new record produced by Daniel 'Jiano' Hart had managed to clear the game in 2 hours, 3 minutes and 4 seconds in a single-segment all thanks to new glitches and sequence breaking (including the Wrong Warp glitch, Goron Lullaby skip, Boss key skips in both Great Bay and Snowhead temples and Bottle Duplication glitch to prevent backtracking for collecting 7 Zora eggs). The run was then improved to 1:49:33 by Steven 'ingx24' Brown. (The standard for timing changed between these runs. Old SDA timing was from gaining control of Link, whereas new ZSR timing is from starting the file. Ing's run in ZSR timing is 1:52:52) A Japanese player 'SVA' then took the record with a 1:47:47 (the Japanese version is considered to be only slightly faster). 2 new tricks (a trick to clip out of bounds with the hookshot or bow, and post-dungeon cutscene skips) and further optimization lead to the current record of 1:42:53 by ZFG.

Tomas 'Tompa' Abrahamsson of the tool-assistance community has been able to reach the end of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in only 0:03:44.65 (3 minutes, 44 seconds) due to a glitch that allows Link to travel through walls. Since the levels in the game are connected by the edges of one screen, the player is able to walk through walls, passing entire levels as he goes, and eventually reach the Triforce room. This glitch, which requires that the player presses the “up” and “down” keys at the same time, can theoretically be reproduced on a real console, although it is nearly impossible to perform by a human player using a conventional controller: pressing “up” and “down” at the same time is impossible with most controllers, which feature a D-pad that can't be depressed in opposite directions at the same time. The run also features a trick that makes Link run faster by alternating “up” and “down” button presses every other frame; this is also not practically possible to perform by a human player due to the high speed at which one would have to give this input. This makes the run a very clear example of the difference between human and physical limitations.

Besides a very short completion of this game, another tool-assisted version that does not use the aforementioned exploration glitch was also produced, resulting in a much longer run of 1:16:11, also by Tomas 'Tompa' Abrahamsson. The fastest non-tool-assisted completion time without savewarps, deaths, or going out of bounds is 1:26:06 by Kryssstal.

Another interesting case is "The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening". this game came out in two versions. The Game Boy version included a glitch that allowed completion in 0:03:49.12. This glitch was fixed in the "DX" version for the Game Boy Color making the smallest attained time 1:00:02.68. Both of these runs are tool-assisted.

Other Zelda game speedruns include The Legend of Zelda in 0:34:23 by Darkwing Duck, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in 0:59:43 by Kristian 'Arctic_Eagle' Emanuelsen, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in 3:28:04 on the GameCube version by Pheenoh, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D in 0:39:15 by TomNook120.