It was a few years ago that I realized many audience wanted a full completion movie of the 2nd quest, and I'm glad to that this TAS is finally here. This run improves my previous canceled effort by 1779 frames (29.6 seconds). The main improvements come from less gambling, better boss fights, and some minor route changes. Thanks to Chanoyu for pointing out to me one of the crucial feedback.
Note that
in the previous submission I argued that this branch should be named "full inventory", but in this time I've decided to retract it.
The example I provided completes the game with Link's inventory indisputably full, and leaving him with 1 rupee and 1 bomb. But my
"1st quest, all items" movie uses up and finishes both the rupee and bomb, despite having the exact same goal as it. And it would be unorganized to have two branch names for the identical goal.
What's included in "all items"
There are numerous secrets and hidden items in The Legend of Zelda, both RTA and TAS have shown a lot of interest in attempting to complete the game and collect them all. But the game doesn't offer an official collection rate, so there are some differences in the rules between two, even for the same goal, and TAS aiming to obtain:
- All heart containers
- All maps
- All compasses
- Letter
- 16 bomb upgrade
- Bow
- Silver arrow
- Magical boomerang
- Ladder
- Raft
- Recorder
- Magical sword
- Red candle
- Magical bracelet
- Magical wand
- Magical book
- Magical key
- Red ring
- Bait (bought twice)
- Red potion
- Big shield
RTA doesn't collect maps and compasses for all dungeons, and also only obtains letter from old man and does not buy red potion.
A couple of sub-items (yellow boomerang, white sword, blue ring) were not obtained because they all have corresponding higher items.
Known tricks and glitches
Zigzag walking
When Link is walking upper right or lower left, it is faster to turn every time he passes a corner than not to do so. There is no difference between zigzagging and not doing so, in the reverse case (upper left or lower right). Because the distance Link moves depends on the direction he is facing and the way he takes his first step.
Link moves 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, ... or 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, ... pixels each frame, and can only change direction on every 8th X or Y coordinate (let's call those coordinates a crossroad). If the first step moves 1 pixel, he has to walk 6 frames until the next crossroad: 1 -> 3 -> 4 -> 6 -> 7 -> 8 (it should be possible to turn at the intersection, so if he reaches at "8n+1th pixel", he stops at the coordinates -1). But if his first step moves 2 pixels, it will take 5 frames: 2 -> 3 -> 5 -> 6 -> 8.
The directions in which the first step moves 2 pixels correspond to up and right, and down and left. So if Link move upper right or lower left, you can save 1 frame each corssroad he zigzag.
Screen-wrap glitch
Explaining the correct mechanism of this glitch is difficult. The following are simplified steps to perform the glitch.
- Stand on the second closest crossroad of the solid object you want to clip.
- Move 2 frames in the direction of the object.
- If the direction you're facing is left/right, input up or down; if it's up/down, input left or right. If done correctly, Link looks in the opposite direction of his movement.
- When you resume moving again, Link clips the object.
In addition to the methods described above, this glitch can also be exploited in another way. Walking through obstacles can be applied to most of the objects--blocks in the overworld and underworld, water blocks, the sides of the screen they are facing, and enemies. However, screen-wrap glitch does not work in a dungeon.
Item drops
Whether or not an enemy drops an item depends on luck, but what kind of item it drops is not random. There are 3 memory addresses involved in determining which items an enemy will drop.
52A: This sorts enemies into 4 groups and determines item drops based on the 10 orders in which enemies are defeated. Here's a valuable chart that Baxter has created in the past to help demystify about this.
50: It's commonly known as "10 kill counter". The old man's secret in level 8 of 1st quest ("10th enemy has the bomb.") refers to this. If Link kills 10 enemies without getting hitted, the 10th enemy leaves a "good item" and $50 resets to 0. When the 10th enemy is killed by a bomb, the enemy drops a bomb. If Dodongo is killed by the sword while inhaling smoke, $50 is always increased to 10, regardless of its previous value, and it drops a bomb. Otherwise, the enemy drops a blue rupee.
627: I call this fairy counter for short. Similar to $50, this counts the number of enemies Link has killed without being damaged. If the value reaches exactly 16, then every enemies killed on the 16th will drop a fairies. This is only reset when he is attacked.
Enemies in group X never drop an item, even if the above conditions are met.
L+R/U+D stab
If Link is standing on a crossroad, you can make the sword hit a target on the upper left by L+R+A (when he's facing horizontally) or U+D+A (when he's facing vertically) input. In fact, whether you press U+D or L+R is not a big deal as long as he's standing on a crossroad, as he is free to turn while using the sword.
Roocorder glitch
Also known as Roocorder, named after the discoverer (rooslugs). This glitch happens as the raft and recorder's routines run at the same time, and makes the recorder send Link to the wrong place, to the upper left screen of the dungeon where he was supposed to go. Before looking into the details for this strategy, you might want to understand how the recorder works.
Recorder sends Link to the entrance of dungeon he has completed. The dungeon order is determined by the direction he was facing. Ascending order when looking up or to the right, and descending order when looking down or to the left. For example, if he has finished level 1, 2, 3 and 4, and has never used the recorder, whirlwind sends him to level 1 if he looks up and blows the recorder once. If he repeats it one more, it sends him to level 2. However, since the destination of the recorder is always follows 1st quest, the dungeon order of 2nd quest is slightly different from 1st quest. For example, L2 in 1st quest is located in the same place as L3 in 2nd quest. Considering this, the game designer intentionally changed the recorder order in the 2nd quest to 1, 3, 2, 5, 4, 6, 8, 7.
And here's how the recorder works:
(i) When Link blows the recorder, the game determines which dungeon to send him to.
(ii) Then the game proceeds to pre-position him to the left of the screen where he will be transferred (because the whirlwind actually scrolls from left to right to take him).
(iii) If Link boards the whirlwind without being disturbed, he is transported to the dungeon determined in (i).
The key to the glitch is (ii). When Link clips the block on the left side of the dock and blows the recorder, the whirlwind's path overlaps with the dock (it doesn't matter how far apart they are, as long as the two locations are horizontal to each other). This causes the recorder and raft to run simultaneously, canceling the recorder's and only executing the raft's routine to scroll up the screen. The result is a wrong-warp to the upper left of where Link should have moved.
Level 2: recorder
The any% run picks up 6 keys in level 2 as the keys are constantly being used, but we collect 1 less key here since we can get the magical key right away from level 8. The room where you can break the wall with a bomb, take the key, and leave is skipped, which is a nice time saver as we can skip 2 screen scrolls.
In the room where we defeat 8 bats to open the locked door, the 10 kill counter is maxed out. Since the 10th enemy was killed with the sword, that enemy should drop a blue rupee, but bats are in group X, and they do not drop any items. So the blue rupee drop is carried over to the next enemy. In this case, the transferred enemy is Manhandla.
Attacking Manhandla's core increases the value of $50 and $627 by 1 for every frame it is damaged. This makes it easy to get blue rupee or fairy from him, but in other words, it means that your strategy of planning for the next enemy drop with the 10 kill counter or general item drop patterns may be messed up by his damage taking mechanism.
In the room with 3 Zols, we pick up 2 blue rupees for gambling.
Gleeok's detached heads also have the same routine as Manhandla's core. Link's life was already full and he didn't need a fairy, so we refilled the bomb by exploding it on the heads.
Level 6-a: ladder
The first heart container is obtained from the tombstone near the top of level 6. You can save time by minimizing the distance with screen-wrap glitch before entering L6.
Gohma, the boss of L6 can only be defeated with a bow and arrow, but Link doesn't have them yet, so we take the ladder and leave. This is a strategy that was also seen in any% run.
After leaving level 6, we collect the magical bracelet and buy arrow and bait. We don't buy the shield yet, there are two main reasons for this: the first is that if you are going to buy the shield now, you need to forgo arrow due to lack of money, but there are no apt shops where you can buy arrow after this point. And the second is that the cave has an animation of Link walking up and down the stairs, which takes about 2 seconds if you repeat entering this shop; a secret place you enter by burning tree, on the other hand, doesn't have this animation. The shop near L3 hidden in tree can avoid this delay, so we do not buy the shield here.
The game has a 4 frame rule and one of its roles is to determine the result of the gamble. By increasing the time you enter the gambling cave by 4 frames, you can adjust your winnings to desired place. The fastest way to make money is to place 50 rupees in the center, but sometimes we can't get that opportunity no matter how much we delay the entry. In those cases, taking the left bet is the second best.
Level 8: wand, magical key, bomb upgrade
Here, L8 is probably the only level in the original Zelda run that resets the game twice. This is also why L8 takes almost 5 minutes to complete. First, Link heads from the room full of red bubbles through a secret passage to the room where the wand is hidden. After acquiring the wand, he heads a few more rooms he's been through to get the map.
Once Link returns to the entrance, he switches to the bait and begins. The Red Goriya blocking the path to the magical key can be cleared by handing him the bait, and if you reset the game immediately after feeding him, the path will open up normally with the bait unused. The time it takes to walk back to here from the beginning is not negligible (about 26 seconds), but it's a worthwhile strategy when you consider that it saves 100 rupees you'd need to buy the bait again, and the time it would take to cover that money with extra gamble.
Collect all the hidden items and finally buy the bomb upgrade and complete the level.
Level 4: magical book, bomb upgrade
You can choose to collect the white sword after level 8, but I skipped it because we get the magical sword at the very end anyway (which is important for only Patra and Ganon), and given the amount of time it takes to obtain the white sword, I considered that white sword didn't result in a clear time savings to complete the rest of the level.
There are rooms where you must leave either lives or rupees in L4 and L7. In this run, we pay the old man a rupees instead of heart containers because we must complete the game with all the items.
Level 1
L1 has yellow boomerang hidden, so the only items we need to acquire are map and compass here. Many RTA runs get L1 first because they don't have a rule that requires them to get the map and compass. If you visit here first without ladder, you must detour two rooms since you can't cross the water from the room with the map.
In my previous attempt, I completed level 1 last. That resulted in about 6 seconds of wasted time due to a lot of unrecovered lives, and I realized that mistake in hindsight and accomplished a successful improvement in this run by completing L1 earlier before completing L5 and L6.
Level 5: bow
The gambling cave near the start of the overworld is very frequented. Cover rupees and head to L5.
This is where sword+wand double stab first appears. I had already tried this when making the previous submission, but for some unknown reason misunderstood that this would not work, which was pointed out to me by Chanoyu. Gleeok's first head has 10 HP, and the rest have 5. When the damage from the sword and wand is combined, its damage is 3, which is enough to defeat the boss quickly.
Level 6-b
We now have both the bow and arrow, so we head back to level 6. Level 5 is good for exploiting Roocorder glitch because it is where you get to by raft.
In the room with map, Likelikes are far apart from each other, which is troublesome. Using the B item as a wand instead of bomb would be a potential time saver, but I didn't try it since have to use the bomb again soon after anyway.
Use all of bombs and replace them with wand, and utilize double stab in Gleeok fight.
Level 3: magical boomerang
The overworld maps are ordered from top to bottom, and left to right. If Link attempts to walk to an empty map from the far left, he appears on the previous map on that screen, i.e. the last row of the previous column. Collect the 2 heart containers and enter level 3.
Here too, Red Goriya appears who requires bait, but we didn't exploit the glitch as we'll buy bait and shield from the shop near level 3.
Level 7: red candle
Since we collected the magical boomerang in L3, the bombs don't automatically swap to wand when running out them. Plus, we needed to have a reserve of bombs to progress smoothly on the final level, so saved 5 bombs.
After completing level 7, Link has 15 rupees and the last item he needs to buy is red potion that costs 68 rupees. 50 rupees are gained by gambling, and the remaining 3 rupees are earned on the way to collect the final heart containers. In the desert where a heart container is hidden, Link blows recorder and defeats the Blue Leever and Red Leever while the secret entrance appears. The blue one was killed to prevent the old man from appearing delayed, and the red one to earn the last blue rupee.
Level 9: red ring, silver arrow
In the first Patra fight, the statue greets Link with an unwelcome fireballs. This causes a lot of delay, and it's better to save Link's lives to get hit by the fireball here and cut the lag.
How Lanmolas take damages is similar to Moldorms (fire snakes): all segments have an invulnerability time if the body close to the tail is not hit first. Attempting to kill with a single stab will be rather slow. By precise manipulating their movements to hit the tail firstly, you can defeat them with two stabs.
Ganon always dies at bottom left in the last battle. The reason is, of course, so that Link can zigzag to the final room. Luring Ganon to the door is slow. When he takes damage, he moves invisibly from the bottom left or bottom right toward the top, which is slower than Link walks.
I wanted to finish the game with at least 1 rupee and 1 bomb left, but I couldn't get the extra bombs. I was able to get it by defeating 2 Red Wizzrobes in the silver arrow room with a bomb instead of sword stab, but it would be slower. It's unfortunate that there was exactly 1 bomb left before we entered the 3rd Patra room. If can't do that, I wanted the number of rupees and bombs Link currently has on the sub-screen to be equal to zero.
arkiandruski: This looks amazing. Accepting as a new branch.
