Zelda Runners – Big Gains

It’s that time of the year again. Yes, that’s right, everyone’s favourite 5th of February. Hope you’re all sitting comfortably, because this week we’re delving into the world of Termina, and taking a closer look at how the opening hours pan out in a standard Majora’s Mask run. This article also features a fantastic spotlight with EnchantressOfNumbers, a Zelda II Runner and Tetris Master. Trust me, you do not want to miss it.

 

Now Playing

This week, Wind Waker HD runners have found an important new glitch, which saves between 3 and 4 minutes in the 100% category. By item sliding (moving at a very high speed) into a statue in the Savage Labyrinth at a specific angle Link will clip under this statue. By using the Hookshot on a nearby torch, runners will be crushed by the statue, and will be placed back at the start of the room (you can see the trick in action here). While this might sound useless (verging on Link cruelty), resetting a room will replace any broken pots and collected rupees. This means we can smash three rupee pots on rest floors in the Labyrinth, collect 300 rupees, then reset the room to do so as many times as needed. This is much faster than the previous method of farming rupees, which used the pots on the Ghost Ship, and a similar respawning technique. Aside from gathering Rupees faster, this route allows runners to speed up the Auction House section of the run. Previously runners would bid 10% higher than the previous bid to stun the NPCs, and repeat this until the auction was over. Using this new glitch, however, runners can immediately bid 999 Rupees, which will stun the NPCs for the whole duration of the auction, which is obviously much faster. Other time saves could be found in this or other categories over the coming weeks, I’ll let you know in the next article any progression made!

Also this week:

• A huge speedrunning convention, PACE, has been announced. The event is organised by the Global Speedrunning Association, and will feature the Grand Finals of 3 major speedrunning leagues – Super Mario 64, Celeste, and Super Mario Odyssey. The event takes place in Maryland from the 25th – 28th of April. Long way away, right? Don’t worry, your friendly neighborhood writer will remind you of its approach nearer the time!
• The Breath of the Wild leaderboards went through a change this week also. Most amiibo categories have been moved to a miscellaneous category, with each being selectable as a filter. Any% amiibo remains as its own category. All Bug Limit categories have also been moved to the miscellaneous group. The All Quests category has been moved to the extensions page. A new category has been added – Master Sword Extended, which requires the player to obtain the Master Sword, then fully power it up through the Trial of the Sword.

 

Glitch Exhibition

This week we’re taking a brief look at the opening hours of Majora’s Mask (as opposed to the Final Hours). The infamous first cycle of this game sends shudders up runners’ spines for all the wrong reasons, being 15 minutes of rather boring and dull content. There are, however, a few diamonds in this rough, and that’s what we’ll be focusing on today. There isn’t much to look at in the first 5 or so minutes of the run, as this is all filled with cutscenes and basic exposition. In fact, we make it all the way to the Happy Mask Salesman cutscene before we see any real speedrunning content. Or do we?

This particular cutscene requires 2 consecutive frames to activate. By bringing up the pause menu, returning to the game for a single frame, then returning to the pause menu, we can prevent the cutscene from having any 2 consecutive frames to activate. Skipping this saves around 2 minutes, if executed efficiently.

Thanks to 2 other glitches, we don’t actually have to follow the intended path set for us at all. In fact, at this point, we want to advance time as quickly as possible to the end of the third day, when the Clock Tower will open, allowing us passage to Skull Kid. To do this, we first visit the Old Lady staying at the Inn, where we can advance time to the third day. After this, collect the Stray Fairy hanging around this area, then make a trip to the scarecrow in the Trading Post to advance it to the evening of the third day. You might be panicking, thinking “we don’t have time to collect the Moon’s Tear and reach the Clock Tower!”. Fear not, everything is under control.

We head back to East Clock Town, and approach the Guard preventing us from leaving the area. Turn to face away from this character, and backwalk at a slight angle towards the wall on his left. If done correctly, Deku Link will clip through him, and escape into Termina Field.

This version of the overworld is slightly glitched, as we’re never meant to be out here so early on (the first cycle of the game is a special case, and runs slightly faster than normal cycles). This means that no Overworld music plays in the background, and the area is devoid of enemies. We don’t have much time to roam, however, so collect 99 Rupees from bushes, then head back to Clock Town via the North Entrance.

Trade in your Stray Fairy for magic. This is a real kicker – if there was any other way to knock Skull Kid out of the sky we wouldn’t need to take this step, but without a magic meter Deku Link simply can’t blow any bubbles, so it needs to be done. Once you have magic, pop back to West Clock Town to deposit your 99 Rupees, then head towards the Clock Tower.

If you’ve carried out the last few steps optimally, and got decent luck in finding Rupees in the bushes, you should be able to reach the Clock Tower before it opens, but don’t worry if you don’t (I mean, it is the end of the world…). Obviously without the Deku Flower available to us we’ll have to find alternative arrangements to reach the entrance to Clock Tower. That’s where our final glitch comes in to play.

Gainers are, for all intents and purposes, forward backflips. That is, Link achieves the height of a backflip, while remaining in his current position, and is still able to grab ledges. By Z-Targeting facing the wall you want to climb, backflipping and releasing Z at the same time, then pressing Z again a single frame later, Link will backflip in place and, should the ledge or wall be grab-able, he’ll also cling on and climb up. Using this glitch in front of the Clock Tower entrance, we can climb up as Deku Link, skipping the Bomber’s Notebook sidequest altogether.

From here, routes split for different categories, as obtaining the Ocarina allows for much more freedom within the game. The first cycle, however, will remain the same for all categories, and will also remain the bane of many runners.

 

Spotlight

This week’s bumper interview is brought to you by Zelda II and Tetris: The Grand Master runner, EnchantressOfNumbers. I had a chat with them about their experience in both games, and their plans for the future.

EC: Tell us a bit about yourself (Who you are, what games you run, any records you hold etc.)

EoN: I’m EnchantressOfNumbers, most people call me EoN for short, pronounced like the indefinite and very long period of time. A lot of people ask about how I came by my username, and it’s a reference to the mathematician Ada Lovelace who is considered to be the first computer programmer.  I love math and studied a LOT of math in school and am now a software developer, and as a woman she’s been something of an inspiration to me. I am probably most known for speedrunning Tetris, specifically the Tetris the Grand Master series of games.  I’ve run these at two Games Done Quick events and was the first player outside of Japan (the only country where the game was released) to get Grand Master ranking in Rev Mode on Tetris Grand Master 1 where the pieces fall from the bottom of the screen to the top. I also got the world record in the Famicom platformer from Konami – Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa live on stage at Summer Games Done Quick 2018 at 27:18.  I also speedrun Zelda II and it’s been my goal to put up times that I’m happy with in every category. Most recently, I improved the world record with the first sub-57 time in 100%, a wonderfully glitched category that hasn’t seen a lot of attention until recently – the world record has come down almost 4 minutes over the past 4 months or so and prior to that the world record stood for about 5 years.  I’ve run a handful of other games on a more one off basis including world records in Pyramid, Famicom Tetris, and Loom. 

 EC: How did you first get into speedrunning?

EoN: My speedrunning really started with Tetris, I’ve been playing the game since I was about 4 years old on the Gameboy. I had seen the famous The Grand Master video that circulated online in the mid-2000s under the name “Japan Tetris Finals” or something like that and really wanted to play that version of Tetris, but just didn’t know enough to find it.  By late 2014 I had been able to find enough information about it to buy the arcade board and finally got it up and running in early-ish 2015. I got into streaming simply because I wanted to be able to record my games and analyze my own game play and streaming was really not much more effort than local recording.  Since the scores are sorted by times, those were my first real attempts at speedrunning. In late 2015, with a combination of the Zelda II 100% All Keys tournament and finding Feasel’s Zelda II runs from the Games Done Quick events in 2013 I had the urge to expand beyond just Tetris.

EC: Zelda II is obviously one of the less popular Zelda titles, but the speedrunning community is actually really active. What’s it like being part of such an active community?

EoN: Comparing to other games I’ve run like Pyramid where only one other person has put up one time or Bio Miracle where I’ve really been able to collaborate with only a few people one at a time, it is nice to have a community of people who support each other and are just excited about the same game.  I’m in 3 discord servers dedicated to Zelda II and 2 more servers with channels dedicated to Zelda II (it actually used to be more, but I decided to pare down my list of servers I’m in). The community is really great – pretty much everyone is happy to help new people learn the game and at just about any time of day that you might want to do a Zelda II run, it seems like you’re bound to get at least a couple members from the community to hang out in your stream.  Also, despite the 100% All Keys world record being as optimized as it is, the community is still finding new things – just recently we’ve started really opening the door on some overworld RNG manipulations first found by Rep2369. There’s also a newcomer to the community Schmidtty_Games who is working on a new All Keys theory TAS (Tool Assisted Speedrun) to incorporate the new tech found since the original one was done in 2013 by Boats60. With such an active community, we also see some friendly rivalries develop or people deciding to race each other to a specific goal and it’s great to be a part of such a supportive community.

 

EC: What draws you to this game over, say more popular entries in the Zelda series?

EoN: I think nostalgia is the biggest draw.  I remember playing Zelda II from a very young age, and it’s been my favorite of the series ever since.  I’ve always been drawn to the combat system of the game – for such an early video game, the combat is surprisingly deep.  You basically have to approach each enemy type differently and mastering combat is a very rewarding thing. Zelda II also has a reputation for being a difficult game and I’ve always found beating difficult games or difficult challenges to be very rewarding. As for other Zelda games, I haven’t really played much Zelda newer than Ocarina of Time and I’m just generally not a big fan of 3D games.  If I was going to pick up another Zelda game to speedrun, I think it would probably be either Link’s Awakening or Wand of Gamelon, but Zelda II and Tetris the Grand Master are likely to keep me pretty busy for a while. I also have something of a history of having unpopular favorites – Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is my favorite Castlevania.

EC: You’ve mentioned Tetris quite often, which is something my readers might not be so clued up on, especially as a speedrun! Give us a quick description on how it works and what makes it so exciting to run!

EoN: Tetris the Grand Master is quite a bit different from the Tetris games most people outside of Japan are likely to have played – the game ends at level 999, but instead of having to clear 10 lines to advance a level, the level increments with each piece that spawns and with every line that is cleared.  There is one exception – at levels x99 and 998, you have to clear a line to advance past that level. So a typical completed run will clear about 280 lines give or take and last between about 5 and 13 minutes depending on which game mode of which version you’re talking. 

The levels increasing on a finer scale like this allows for a more interesting speed curve.  The gravity of the game (how fast the pieces fall) gets up to what we call 20G which means the pieces fall 20 rows in a single frame, and since the tetris well is only 20 rows tall, this basically means instant gravity. 20G is a thing in newer Tetris games, but unlike these newer games, you can’t keep your piece alive simply by spamming the rotate buttons – in Tetris Grand Master you have 30 frames (about half a second) to place a piece before it locks once it touches the stack but the 30 frame timer will reset if the piece falls vertically at least 1 row.  Beyond that, the game also gives you a grade based on how you play, simply put, you need to be playing fast and clearing a lot of tetrises (4-lines at once) to get the highest grade. There are some different game modes across the 3 games in the series, but the games are always fast and you need to strike a balance between stacking for speed and grades and not topping out and losing the run.

EC: What are your plans for the future? Do you plan on sticking with Zelda II and Tetris for a while? Or do you have plans to branch into any other titles?

EoN: In the immediate future, I’m learning Zelda II Reverse Boss Order and I plan to submit 100% to Summer Games Done Quick 2019.  Long term, I want to achieve a Grand Master rank (or whatever the top rank in the particular game mode is) in all the modes of the three Tetris the Grand Master games, and put up times that I’m happy with in every category of Zelda II.  These will probably keep me busy for a while, but I’ll probably pick up other games along the way particularly during the 12 Hour Challenge community events. I do keep a list of games that I want to learn the speedruns for and it grows a lot faster than I can work my way through it.  A couple of games at the top of the list would be Castlevania 2 Any% and Any% FDS and Rygar Any%. Who knows when I will get to them, though

EC: If you could only run one category of one game for the rest of time, what would it be, and why?

This is a tough one because I definitely do like to switch things up to avoid burnout.  But I think I would have to say Master Mode in Tetris the Absolute the Grand Master 2 Plus (yeah, that’s a real word salad of a game name), TGM2+ or TAP for short.  The skill ceiling in that mode is very high, and I haven’t yet achieved a Grand Master rank after about 3 years of off and on play. My best rank is an S9 (the ranks start at 9, count down to 1, then go to S1 and count up to S9, TGM2+ adds a rank of M next, and then GM is the final rank).  The requirements to get an M rank are very strict requiring fast, consistent speed through the game and consistently clearing tetrises. If you meet the requirements for M at the end of the game, you get a final challenge: to play where the pieces turn invisible when they lock down and if you can survive that for about a minute you earn a GM rank.  If you can clear 32 lines or more during the invisible mode you get an Orange Line GM, which is ranked higher than the standard Green Line GM. Needless to say, these challenges should all be enough to keep me busy for a long time to come.

 

You can find EnchantressOfNumbers on Twitter and Youtube. You can view their full speedrun.com profile, and catch their runs live on their Twitch Channel.

 

Final Split

Another slow news week speedrunning-wise, but keep your eyes open for exciting events that are approaching very soon!

Wind Waker HD Any% World Record Progression Video – 8th February – Constructed by current 100% world record holder and past any% contender Linkus7, this video will showcase the major glitches and breakthroughs which have led to the remake’s any% time being almost 3 hours faster than that of the original. The video will be uploaded to Linkus’ Youtube Channel, and I’ll bring out a post highlighting it once it’s been released.

 

I’m just about done for this article, but I’d like to close with a brand new feature to this series, which I’ve given the catchy title “Breath of the What Just Happened?“. Each week I’ll close the article off with a clip of the latest shenanigans Breath of the Wild runners have come up with, from glitchy horse rides to shifty stasis launches. This week, it’s an Individual Shrine World Record (at time of writing), of the Kah-Tosas Shrine, set by runner silicatYT. I’d love to explain every part of this in minute detail, but… well you’ll see for yourself. Until next time!

KAH-TOSA: 3 seconds WR #BreathoftheWild #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/Rii2oGsdP5

— SilicatYT (@SilicatYT) January 30, 2019

Euan is the host of Zelda Dungeon’s Speedrunning series, Zelda Runners. He can be found on Twitter and you can catch his own speedrun attempts on his Twitch Channel. Just like he said last week, he hasn’t slept, and doesn’t plan to until Animal Crossing for Switch is announced. Try me Nogami…