Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of the most frequently, and thoroughly, speedrun games on the planet. Having been released almost 25 years ago, the game has been explored to death, and yet gamers find a way. There was one version of Ocarina of Time left undefeated for 13 years: the five minute demo contained inside of Super Smash Brothers Brawl.
As a celebration of Nintendo’s characters and history, Brawl contains demos for dozens of classic games from the NES onwards, and Ocarina of Time is one of them. This speedrunning challenge is made unique by a few factors. First, the five minute time limit. The world record for a normal run of Ocarina of Time is 6m53s and is currently held by Canadian player PaintSkate8. To beat the game in five minutes is, itself, a challenge. Second, that the demo has multiple save files the player can load into. A traditional Ocarina of Time speedrun requires you to play from the beginning of the game in order to set specific values on particular chests and items, causing them to produce an alternate effect, like loading the game’s end credits for example. The same basic principles apply to the five minute demo, but the routing has to be completely different.
A few days ago, on August 21, 2021, that mythical route ‘any%’ was completed by the speedrunner Savestate in only 4 minutes and 51 seconds. In the above video he selects the second save slot and goes about setting the required values. To do this, he performs a minor feat of chaotic wizardry. With a few animation and movement glitches here or there, he goes all the way from Hyrule Castle to the Lost Woods in seconds. From there he goes to Goron City, where he begins detonating bombs and rolling with a machine-like precision. The values appropriately set through his pattern magic, he returns to the Lost Woods to attack a shrub, which for some reason now contains the game’s ending credits.
Speedrunners are the closest modern equivalent to sorcerers, and I will not hear anything to the contrary.
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