The Wind Waker Barrier Skip Finally Discovered!

Finally, after 17 long years, one of the most elusive skips in all of Zelda speedrunning has been cracked. The barrier surrounding the submerged Hyrule Castle in The Wind Waker blocked runners from progressing to Ganon’s Tower early in the game, forcing them to collect the Master Sword and the Triforce of Courage before they could proceed. This, of course, was a lengthy distraction, but no method could be found to skip the barrier.

The final piece of the puzzle was a glitch using piles of arrows, which, when used correctly, exhausts the game’s memory, causing the Barrier to simply not load at all. The glitch and the skip itself were discovered by multiple runners. The video above shows footage of the skip by Dragonbane, but runners LegendofLinkk, azer, R3D, and various others also had large parts to play in the discovery.

A skip for this section was found a few years ago in the HD version of the game. By using an HD exclusive glitch known as Item Sliding, runners can send Link hurtling at the Barrier at a precise angle and, when he hits a certain speed value, he’ll clip through. Unfortunately there’s no way to reach this speed value in the original game, so this method didn’t work.

As with the discovery in the HD version, the effects this will have on various routes isn’t quite known yet, as the community is still getting to grips with exactly how the skip works. However, you can expect at least one major reroute in the coming weeks. Once that happens, I’ll have all the latest in the Zelda Runners articles!

What are your thoughts on this momentous discovery? Let us know in the comments below!