Our Top Zelda Speedrunners to Watch

There are people who seek out to beat a game as fast as possible, with set rules or just going through it without glitches as fast as they can. The following people who I am going to talk about put time, effort, practice into the games that they speedrun. We at Zelda Informer highly suggest you give these guys a view and see how fast they can go on a Zelda game. Without further ado here is the interviews,

Linkus7

Now if you’re a fan of The Wind Waker you will like Linkus7. He speedruns the beautiful remaster of The Wind Waker known as The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD. With his great sense of humor I am sure he will bring lots of laughs and enjoyment. He speedruns any% and 100%, so if you are interested, I recommend him. We interviewed Linkus, so he can share more about himself.

Keep in mind there is grammar issues due to English not being Linkus’s first language and I wanted to keep his response as original as possible.

Can you tell me a little about yourself?

I’m Linkus7, I am a speedrunner and livestreamer from Sweden and I do streaming about half-time. I been speedrunning since Summer 2013 I started
running Zelda games in late 2014 early 2015 which was The Wind Waker.

What got you into speedrunning?

My brother came into my room and told me that he found a streamer on twitch at the time cause he was scrolling through the game directory at the time. In 2013
it was very easy to find speedrun games cause you only had to scroll down one page to find them because your already down there 80-100 viewer games
stumbled upon a Luigi’s Mansion speedrunner called FireDragon764.

Started watching him back then and he was a small streamer at the time he had
like 500 followers and I kinda got hooked. From there I found some old school runners like Narcissa Wright, Demon9, EnNopp112 I got into Zelda and
Mario through that. I started off getting into speedrunning Luigi’s Mansion & Super Mario Sunshine. I realized my biggest interest was in glitches
and I kinda moved on to Zelda games which are more glitch based then movement like in Mario.

What is your favorite Zelda game to run and why?

The Wind Waker HD for sure. I used to think the original The Wind Waker was the best Zelda speedrun and I definitely burnt myself out of that game
and also I like to think that game was starting to be really cool when I started to pick it up but the only thing it had offer was the glitches.

I think when you did the glitch over and over my push towards the game kinda disappeared. I defiantly think The Wind Waker HD because not only does it
have a really cool glitches but it kinda made the perfect hybrid of a movement and glitch based game that I felt in another Zelda game. I tried
runner games like Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and the original Wind Waker.

I definitely think Item Sliding opened up so many possibilities
because you can have so many different movement options like when you compare Gymnast he defiantly prefers more rolling and I prefer more of doing
item slides which saves half a second to a second but I think that makes the speedrun a lot more interesting

What are your future plans with The Wind Waker HD?

With The Wind Waker HD I defiantly want to push the time down. When I picked up the game I did a lot of practice and some people kinda thought I was a fishy runner at first cause when I learnt the game I didn’t have a capture card cause it broke so I came out of no where and got 2nd place in my first 2 streams, because I did offline practice for 3 weeks but even then people thought that was insane. But I think it was because I put so many hours into practicing. Then when I finally learned the game with my stream I got kinda lazy my stream started to grow a little bit and I started focusing on just enjoying the game cause I was scared of getting burned out. I continued finishing runs and building consistency even if the runs were just PBable (Personal Best).

I spent putting more time in the game because its getting so optimized and practicing a lot in general I would say I want to bring the time down to a 3:35 3:44 max unless something else gets found. Even with that the most optimized game like Super Mario 64, 120 Star loses a minute to the runners Sum of Best (Best possible time they could in theory get) and that is what is getting down to with Wind Waker HD basically if you have one mistake that’s fine but the second mistake forces you to reset with many glitches in a 4 hour run its defiantly getting to the point its getting rough to PB. After getting that time I am going to try to pick up Breath of the Wild a little bit if we find a new method for movement cause with all the running makes that run a bit “dry”.

When you started speedrunning did you expect to be where you’re at today?

Um.. No haha when I started speedrunning I defiantly in general I don’t look up to myself I defiantly noticed I had a small talent for specifically learning games faster then other people but comes obviously a wall were I noticed where I would pick up a game with a friend I would improve my time quickly compared to them but when you hit the wall its really hard to get a good time. When I picked up speedrunning I never thought I would get a really good time never thought of growing my stream too much obviously I was hoping my stream would grow. Cause when I picked up speedrunning I was 13 and I was little immature reseting so much getting mad and I didn’t have the patience I kinda just picked up a game, ran it until I noticed it was harder to get PBs but since 2015 I noticed it kinda flipped around after 2 years of speedrunning I kinda wanted to take it more competively now. I never thought I would see The Wind Waker HD, which would be the biggest a huge accomplishment I have getting this time down so much.

I mean since I picked it up the WR at the time was 3:51 and since then there has been no new routes and there is one new strat (strategy) that saves about a minute. I never thought the time would be brought down so much 2 months ago I thought sub (below) 3:40 would be the “god” time and now that every day I am on that pace. For the stream I noticed the bigger twitch got the hardest it was to grow the stream and you needed something special. My dream was to have an interactive chat so I would have someone to talk to every few minutes. I never my stream would get much bigger maybe partner one day. But the exposer of GamesDoneQuick and I guess also it helped that I had so many years of experience for commentary and I give a lot of history and input during my Zelda speedruns and a lot of people enjoy it deffently went past all expectations.

Do you have any last words? thoughts?

If you haven’t watched any The Wind Waker HD speedruns recently I think you should give it a chance. I think it is a great run because its the perfect combination of both playing through the game enough casually that you see a lot of gameplay but you also get a good taste of how glitches can effect the run. Also there is a lot of tutorials out there now made for the whole game and if you look at it and think its a interesting there is definitely a lot of help out there if you want to get into speedrunning, I think its a great game to start out with.

 

TorjeAGC

If you haven’t heard of Torje then you wouldn’t know as of writing this he currently holds the World Record for Ocarina of Time Any% with a 17:09 time. With his strive to cut down the time by a few more seconds watching him do runs can get intense cause you never know when a new world record can happen.

Can you tell me a little about yourself?

I’m Torje Amundsen, I’m 17 years old and from Norway. I’m mostly known for setting multiple records in Ocarina of Time Any%, including the current record standing at 17m09s. I’ve been speedrunning in general since March 2015, and running Ocarina of Time since May 2015.

What got you into speedrunning?

What got me into speedrunning was when in either very late 2014 or very early 2015, someone told me that I kinda looked like Link from Twilight Princess. I decided to play through the game again after that, and I was impatient and ended up trying to complete the game as fast as I could, using the game’s in-game timer on the file select screen. I got my time down to just over 18 hours after a few tries, and decided to search around to see if anyone had done it faster.

From there I found an SGDQ run by Mofat, and I started watching tlozsr stream Twilight Princess Any% speedruns. I decided to try and learn the speedrunning route myself, and after getting all the equipment I needed and learning the route, I did my first run in March 2015. I grew tired of Twilight Princess very fast, and I had been watching Jodenstone play Ocarina of Time at the time. I decided to try to learn Ocarina of Time instead, which went very well.

What is your favorite Zelda game to run and why?

My favorite Zelda game to run is definitely Ocarina of Time. I’ve tried Skyward Sword, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess as well, but I never enjoyed those nearly as much as Ocarina of Time. Ocarina of Time has such a huge variety of glitches, and the game is still being broken further apart by glitch hunters.

The last time anything major was found in these others games I’ve tried, I can’t even remember. Ocarina of Time on the other hand, is constantly getting new tricks found, bringing down the times of various categories.

What are you future plans with Ocarina of Time?

Future plans for Ocarina of Time would be to shave off at least another couple seconds from my Any% run, and then move on to the Ganonless category to try to get a decent time in that. From there, I don’t really have any solid plans. It’ll definitely be some Ocarina of Time category though, maybe All Dungeons or No Wrong Warp.

When you started speedrunning did you expect to be where you’re at today?

When I started speedrunning I definitely hadn’t even imagined getting to where I am today. I was god awful at the game when I started, and even though I improved at Ocarina of Time very fast compared to other runners, I never thought I’d continue my pace of improvement for a full year and then have the world record for Any%. I expected my peak to be around when I reached sub-20, but this obviously didn’t end up being the case.

Do you have any last words?

Some good last words would be; If you love a Zelda game (or any game really), but you’ve run out of replay value because you’ve played it so much, try speedrunning it. That’s what I did, and it turned about 100 hours of Ocarina of Time into 4000 hours of Ocarina of Time, and still clocking. The community over at Twitch is very helpful to people trying to learn the game too, so streaming yourself learning the game would help you improve faster.

 

 

Chaotic Ace

Another great, though little known runner is Chaotic Ace. He also goes by Ace. Ace ran The Wind Waker and currently runs Breath of the Wild. Currently Ace runs the any% category for Breath of the Wild. With the game being out for more than a month now we recommend giving Ace a watch! Here is the interview we did with Ace:

Can you tell me a little about yourself?

My name is Alex although I usually go by Ace or ChaoticAce. The name came from when I played Runescape back in the day but I won’t go in to that. I recently turned 21. The first games I can remember playing were Sonic games on the Sega Genesis that my grandparents had back when I was about 6 or 7. I also remember getting a Sonic collection for PC around the same time.

Something that always stood out to me in Sonic games when you completed levels was the timer at the end that told you how long you took to reach the end of them. This was always a recurring thing for me that I noticed when playing other games such as Sonic Riders or Super Smash Brother Brawl. I remember staying up for something like 6-8 hours one night working on level 1 of target smash in SSBB trying to get as fast of a time that we possibly could. You can actually find that here

What got you into speedrunning?

I stumbled upon a stream of The Wind Waker HD on Twitch the day of its release. The Wind Waker was always my favorite Zelda game so I naturally went and checked out the game and people streaming it. I stumbled upon someone playing through the game and also hunting for glitches and messing with speedrunning related stuff along the way. I had never been exposed to anything speedrunning related before with glitches so there was this doubt in my mind that it wouldn’t have been real and that cheats were being used.

Through this person I found multiple people speedrunning TLoZ: The Wind Waker and ended up testing a lot of the things I saw them do in runs. Every time I saw something new I thought “This can’t be real.” but then I would go and after many hours of trying to replicate it, would pull it off myself. I did this a lot for quite a few months until eventually I thought “I know enough to do a run so why not?”

What is your favorite Zelda game to run and why?

For me that’s actually a really hard thing to answer. I’m usually pretty bad at picking favorites for things. At first it was The Wind Waker due to it being the only game I knew and the only game I considered myself decent at. It’s a pretty difficult thing to answer because all kinds of things go in to picking one single favorite game. Something like The Wind Waker, which is a nearly four-hour run, has OVER an hour and a half of cut-scenes and text, but some of the coolest glitches in any Zelda game in my opinion.

At the same time, something like Twilight Princess is an hour shorter but is almost entirely gameplay with very little cut-scenes or downtime. Then you have something like Majora’s Mask which is under an hour and a half, has a nearly 50/50 cutscene to gameplay ratio for Any%, but also has insane tricks and doesn’t take as long to do runs of. At the moment if I absolutely had to pick a favorite I would probably say Skyward Sword as I had way more fun learning and running it than I expected. I would probably still be running it if it wasn’t so long. The record isn’t even a minute under five hours and there is nearly no down time which makes it very tiring and time consuming to work on.

What are your future plans with that Zelda game?

At the moment I’d like to get a time I’m happy with in Breath of the Wild Any%. Hopefully it won’t take too long as there are a bunch of other games I want to learn new categories in and improve my already existing times. Both Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask 100% are pretty cool. I also feel my Any% times in those games need a bit of work. The Wind Waker HD has caught my eye as it feels simpler than The Wind Waker and is also slightly shorter, but I’m not really sure if I’ll stick with it.

I’d also like to return to The Wind Waker and improve my time by something like 3-5 more minutes but I’ve already spent so much time on that game that it can be hard to find motivation for when the game has become a bit stale and hasn’t really changed that much over the past year or two.

When you started speedrunning did you expect to be where you’re at today?

Nah. I just ended up getting super invested in The Wind Waker and eventually ended up getting really good at it. I was never focused on growing a stream or “brand” as a lot of people like to call it. I was always super focused on improving the game and pushing it as far as possible.

I got a bunch of support from other great runners and cool people such as ZFG and Demon9 among many others. I ended up running the game at SGDQ 2015 and although it didn’t quite turn out how I would have liked it, it was a great experience that did help get me to where I am I guess.

Do you have any last words?

There seems to be this huge misconception that in order to get in to speedrunning or find glitches in a game or do anything similar, you need to be a genius or have huge amounts of knowledge about the game. It really isn’t that way. Like I said before, I just kind of started with me messing around for months.

Sure a lot of that time was spent trying things that had already been tested and tried by many other people, but it’s good because it helps you build up the knowledge required to know what type of limits a game may have. What type of things may or may not be possible. Think of it as playing a guitar or learning a sport.

You’re not going to be the best at first or have much of an understanding of how they work. You eventually are just able to do things because you’ve done them so much and understand how they work, like kicking or throwing a ball a certain distance to a specific spot, or playing a bunch of chords in a very specific order with certain timings. Sure it’s not the same physical efforts but they all have the same core mechanics behind them. Learning, Practicing. Ingraining the basics in your head through repetition, then executing.

FullGrownGaming

Our last runner is FullGrownGaming. Knowing him for some time now I feel like he deserves to be here. He is a great streamer who also brings lots of laughs and joy and “meme’s” to his stream as well. He currently runs Majora’s Mask 100% which is a really great speedrun to watch. You get to see a lot of the game with its own side of glitches as well.

Can you tell me a little about yourself?

I guess you could say I’m a dude with a high work ethic. I dedicate myself wholly to whatever I do, from my studies at the University of Florida to my upcoming international move. I make sure I give 110% to everything I’m involved in.

What got you into speedrunning?

I got into the world of speedrunning in the mid 2000s. There was a challenge for Ocarina of Time called the “Uber Challenge” that involved beating Ocarina of Time with lots of restrictions, from not using the lens of truth to not allowing deaths. The glitches required to beat the challenge blew my mind, and I branched off from there. I never strayed too far away from the Zelda scene, though, and am actively running Majora’s Mask even to this day.

What is your favorite Zelda game to run and why?

My favorite Zelda game to speedrun is Majora’s Mask, bar none. It starts off slowly, but once you get past the opening cutscenes, the game opens up. The routing involved in the 100% category is some of the most impressive routing I’ve seen in all of speedrunning, and the glitches that make the route possible are creative and varied. It’s not without its drawbacks, however. The game is littered with randomness and cutscenes that make the run not quite as skill-based as I would like.

What are your future plans with Majora’s Mask?

My plans for Majora’s Mask are to complete my goals, which are currently sub-5 in 100% and sub 1:25 in any%. I might branch out into other categories after that, but I’m not totally sure yet.

When you started speedrunning did you expect to be where you’re at today?

I never in a million years could have expected to be where I’m at today. I thought it’d be a small, enjoyable hobby, but it’s taken off dramatically. I’m one of the top runners of the game, something I never thought I’d be, and I’ve grown my stream to a point I never really thought possible. Also, my involvement in the Majora’s Mask community led to me being at AGDQ 2016, where I met my girlfriend of over a year now. I’m moving internationally to be with her in less than two months, which is pretty insane considering it never would have happened if I hadn’t started speedrunning Majora’s Mask.

Do you have any last words?

If you have any questions, find a runner and ask. The speedrunning community is generally very helpful to new runners, so pick a game and get out there and run it!

 

Not only are they entertaining to watch, but they also run Zelda games that the community is familiar with.