This run aims to beat The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as quickly as possible (Any%) without performing any glitches. The definition of “Glitchless” here is a strictly logical one, voted and agreed on by the Ocarina of Time speedrunning community, where basically anything goes and is legal in the run as long as you aren’t performing a glitch to achieve it. It’s the definition used on Speedrun.com for the Glitchless Any% category, found here:
https://www.speedrun.com/oot?h=Glitchless-Any&rules=category&x=zd35jnkn-7890o58w.xqk98nd1
- Emulator used: BizHawk Version 2.8 (x64)
- Plugin settings: (with game running) N64 -> Plugins -> Global -> Core Type: Pure Interpreter, Active Video Plugin: GLideN64, Video Resolution: 320 x 240
- Display settings: Config -> Display Configuration -> Display Method: OpenGL
- Sound settings: Config -> Sound -> Output Method: OpenAL
Category Definition (From Speedrun.com)
Since there is such a gray area in defining what is or is not a "glitch" in this game, a group of OoT players voted to define a set of rules that they would all abide by. It is important that all players use the same rules, since it allows them to compare times with each other. These rules are not perfect, but they are the current standard. This category aims to ban things solely based on the techniques used, not the results of those techniques. To the extent that common sense allows, we may explain this as: "If the means are not a glitch, neither are the ends." So if you do not perform a glitch, you may skip any part of the game, regardless of how important. This category was originally the only Glitchless category. It now stands apart from Glitchless All Main Quests which aims to create a speedrun which feels more like a glitchless category, rather than aiming to be strictly logically glitchless like this one.
Allowed Techniques:
• Power Crouch Stabbing
• Roll invincibility
• Post-damage invincibility
• Jumpslashing in mid-air for more distance
• Shield dropping
• Using broken deku stick
• Hookshot Extension
• Rolling from the blue switch in Jabu Jabu's Belly
• Damage boosting
• Damage Buffering
• Placing bombs on lava pits to damage Volvagia
• Skipping text triggers via weapon swapping
• Passing through the back side of a one-sided collision (e.g. bridge clip, darunia's door, forest's falling ceiling)
• Attacking to collect or hit an object on the other side of a collision
• Momentary Antigravity (e.g. b1 skip)
• Shielding damage midair to take Link out of a backflip or sidehop and into a normal airborne state. A.K.A. "Recoil Jump"
• Twisted sidehops or backflips out of siderolls or standing ESS shuffles
• Touching misplaced or accidentally-exposed loading zones (e.g. Early Jabu and Trials Skip)
• Delaying a timer by pressing cutscene items midair. This includes internal timers such as those used for switches.
• Going Out of Bounds (any area which is beyond the boundary walls of the map, or any area which is exposed to the lowest void plane in the map.)
• Being in an unloaded area
• Hoverboost (equipping hover boots whenever you want, including high speed situations)
• Remote Wall Interactions (touching a wall to interact with another wall sooner, e.g. jump to Volvagia)
• Swimming laterally while wearing Iron Boots.
• Climbing ladders or vines during cutscenes.
• Cutscene skips which only use movement from inputs completed before the cutscene begins (e.g. voiding, entering a loading zone)
Banned Techniques:
• Infinite Sword Glitch
• Megaflip and megasidehop
• Extended Antigravity (e.g. unloading lower gerudo fortress)
• Ground jump
• All forms of superslide
• Hovering
• Entrance point glitch (or other respawn point manipulation)
• Clipping (note that this is well defined for both solid collision and soft/actor collision. contact a moderator if you aren't sure if something is a clip).
• Cutscene diving to sink into water
• Flame storage
• Item Manipulation (BA, RBA, GIM)
• Using collection delay to your advantage (e.g. early eyeball frog or gold scale. Delay happens naturally in many shops if you buy quickly, this is ok)
• Something except for a sword on B (excluding normal circumstances like riding Epona)
• Bottle Duplication
• Wrong warp
• Void warp
• Walking While Talking
• Causing a switch to remain pressed longer than it should
• Ocarina Items
• Z-slide
• A-slide
• Using restricted items (such as farore's wind in the overworld or ocarina in boss rooms)
• Unloading an actor which clearly should be loaded (e.g. actor glitch, unloading KZ's ice, overloading the graveyard or trials to remove graves or Gold Gauntlet monoliths)
• Abusing actors which have not had a chance to update after loading (such as 0,0,0 glitch and the deku b2 web)
• Opening underwater chests while wearing the Iron Boots
• Dying to achieve anything other than a deathwarp
• Stale Reference Manipulation
• Arbitrary Code Execution
• Quick Putaway
Common Questions/Concerns About Whether Something Is a Glitch
All of the things that may appear to be glitches at first glance are actually just clever exploitations of the allowed techniques. They may appear to be grey areas, but going by the definition outlined above, they are allowed in this category.
The two biggest points of contention are 1. Going out of bounds, and 2. Touching an exposed loading zone without actually going in the normal entrance to that place.
Going out of bounds comes up a number of times:
- Bypassing Gerudo Fortress gate
- Getting to Hyrule Castle via seam walking
- Going up Death Mountain via seam walking
- Entering Shadow Temple without using Din’s Fire by entering the unloaded area with the entrance door
- Skipping Minuet of Forest cutscene by voiding out after the cutscene starts
Every one of these is considered a legal move as long as no glitches were performed to achieve them. Being out of bounds is not inherently a glitch, per the category rules.
Touching an exposed loading zone is less frequent:
- Entering Jabu-Jabu’s Belly
- Entering the main tower in Ganon’s Castle
As with going out of bounds, these are legal moves using the same justification: no glitches were performed to achieve these outcomes; the loading zones just happen to be there. It’s an oversight by the developers and nothing else.
I will be happy to answer any questions about anything in the run that may look like a glitch. If it’s useful, I will add that information to the submission text.
General Movement and Tricks
ESS Position
By holding just outside the dead zone on the analogue stick and then holding Z, Link will shuffle in place. This is called ESS Position and lets you change your angle for one frame, after which Link will snap back to whatever way he was facing when you started holding Z.
Sidehopping
This is the fastest form of movement as child, but not as adult. It is still used a lot as adult if the distance covered is short enough, as they reach their maximum speed much quicker than backwalking and allow for quick angle changes.
There are certain situations in the game (typically after some cutscenes) where you can’t sidehop or roll immediately (an example is talking to Mido after Deku Tree).
If you don’t hold Z on the first sidehop in a chain, Link’s angle will be slightly skewed when he lands. This can be used to change his angle a bit during a sidehop chain without stopping and allows for getting round some corners more smoothly.
Twisted Sidehops/Backflips
This is done by holding ESS position and Z, and then tilting the control stick in one direction and performing a sidehop/backflip, all the while still holding Z. This causes Link to perform a sidehop/backflip at a certain angle, but because Z is still being held, the camera doesn't change and he rotates back to the direction he was facing previously while he's in the air.
Backwalking
This is the fastest form of movement as adult and is used as much as possible, particularly if the distances to cover are long, straight lines.
Rolling
Constant rolling is slow because Link’s speed drops so much so often, but these are useful in some places where a sidehop doesn’t quite cover the distance needed.
Bomb/Damage Boost
If you’re hit by damage in mid-air, you will gain some further distance. This is used a few times in the run to clear pits.
Hover Boost
If you equip the hover boots after getting hit by a damage source (typically bomb explosion), you can maintain the speed from the explosion for some of the movement after equipping the boots, which lets us clear some large gaps. If this is done at the very edge of a platform (such that there's not enough land for the hover boots to activate after unpausing), Link will perform a large jump (rather than hovering with extra speed).
Recoil Jump
You can shield damage mid-air to knock Link out of a backflip stance, allowing him to grab ledges after performing a backflip. This is useful when combined with a twisted backflip, as it lets you get grab a ledge out of a backflip, which normally isn’t possible in this game (although it is in Majora’s Mask).
Power Crouch Stab (PCS)
If you crouch by pressing R to shield, and stab your sword, the value of that attack will be the same as whatever the last “sword” attack you did was (it also applies to Deku Sticks and the Megaton Hammer). If your last attack was a jump slash, then the PCS will deal the same amount of damage as that. This is used on every boss fight.
Item Buffering
By pulling out an item whilst walking into a cutscene that activates via a trigger on the ground, you can delay it from starting. If you rapidly alternate between items, the cutscene will never start until you complete the item pulling animation. This is used to skip several owl cutscenes, and other smaller ones like the vine text in Deku Tree.
This run is largely movement-based, so most parts don’t really need commentary from me to understand what’s going on. I will however discuss some of the parts that may be confusing or warrant an explanation.
Overall Route
- There’s no glitchless way to skip the Door of Time, so all three Spiritual Stones and the Ocarina/Song of Time are collected.
- You need the Light Arrows to kill Ganondorf. You only need the Shadow and Spirit Medallions to activate the Light Arrow cutscene, so these are the only ones obtained. You still need the bow to actually fire the arrows, so part of the Forest Temple is also completed.
- The route taken as a child is done so to manage the time of day, as you can only reach Zelda if you enter the castle during the day (guards block the path inside at night). If this requirement wasn’t there, parts of the route would be different, such as only visiting Zora’s Domain once. As it stands, the route taken is the most optimal.
- The route taken as an adult (e.g. going to the Lost Woods and getting the song there after the Shadow Temple, then leaving for the Spirit Temple and returning later) is done because you can’t get to the bow in the Forest Temple without a strength upgrade to push the large blocks, in this case the Silver Gauntlets, and also to reduce the amount of traveling required on the overworld (the current route is quicker than completing Spirit Temple before going to the forest at all, due to the time saved traveling back to the forest across the field).
Dodongo's Cavern
- A recoil jump from the beamos laser beam is used to reach the switch in the main room.
Death Mountain
- Using a seam walk, you can get onto the level boundary and sidehop straight to the top, skipping a long, slow climb.
Shadow Temple
- Although Din’s Fire is still required to obtain the boss key in the Shadow Temple, we can skip using it to enter the temple itself by getting onto the level boundary using bomb boosts, then jumping past the loading zone which loads the door to the temple. As none of this movement constitutes a glitch, it is legal in this category.
- In the 1.0 version of the game, you can kill Bongo Bongo quicker by dropping a bomb onto him from the room above. This skips the cutscene at the start of the fight, however it constitutes a glitch per the category rules - "Abusing actors which have not had a chance to update after loading (such as 0,0,0 glitch and the deku b2 web)". As such, the fight is done normally. Credit to Danny B for providing me with the following explanation for why this is a glitch: "Bongo spawns very far below you in the room, basically the full fall distance of a bomb. As such, Bongo spawns culled, meaning it never gets a chance to run its update function. Therefore its hitboxes spawn at 0,0,0 and can be hit by a bomb or any other kind of damage to which it is susceptible."
Minuet of Forest
- The Minuet of Forest cutscene is skipped by voiding out after it starts, which you can do by getting out of bounds and falling into the cutscene trigger from there. This is achieved by combining a hover boost on the stairs with the small amount of vertical distance running directly into a bomb can give you on slopes, which results in Link coming off the stairs and becoming airborne. From here, you can swing around the boundary and fall into the cutscene trigger.
Spirit Temple
- The Silver Gauntlets are needed to be able to push the large blocks in the Forest Temple (having the Goron’s Bracelet would also work, even though it’s ostensibly a child-only item, but getting that is much slower). These can be reached from the outside using the magic bean we planted earlier combined with a hover boost to land on the seam of the statue. You can then reach the Mirror Shield ledge by abusing bomb boosts.
- You can prevent Twinrova from moving around the room in her second form by firing the hookshot at her after she fires her spell at you, which causes her to spin in place and means she can "move" to her existing position. More information on this (and the Twinrova fight in general) can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lWMPdvEDNQ&t=387s
Forest Temple
- The Forest Temple stalfos fight just off the main room is required for the stalfos in the bow room to spawn.
- Recoil jumps are used to get on top of the large blocks after moving them into position. The Navi text box before the first one can be skipped before reaching the block, but would always end up being activated when setting up the recoil jump, so is unavoidable.
Ganon's Castle
- The exposed loading zone we need to touch to enter the main tower is done by "landing" on part of the wall, below the barrier's damage hitbox.
The barrier hitbox overhangs the wall by quite a bit and the only way to hit the loading zone is from beneath it, so the only way to be directly above the bottom of the green loading zone wall is to be just barely under the red damage barrier, as far in as possible.
Credit to Danny B for the image and explanation. This means that you have to be quite far down the stairs before starting the hover boost in order to have any hope of actually touching this zone.
- During the castle escape, we used to shoot a light arrow to prevent Zelda's magic from showing, which we thought saved time. I tested this during this run and it didn't save any time. However, pressing C-up before the cutscene starts lets you regain control of Link 3 frames (1 visual frame) earlier. This is still slower in most cases than getting "the kiss", i.e. becoming wedged between Zelda and the door, as that leaves you closer to the loading zone after the cutscene. I was unable to get the kiss on the first outside door at the start of the escape, so the C-up trick was used instead there.
- After getting the Master Sword back in the Ganon fight, you can hit any part of him (not just his tail) to start the next part of the fight, however hitting anywhere other than the tail means he takes an extra hit to die after he’s up, so it's quicker to hit the tail.
Potential Improvements
Shadow Temple
- The room with the fans can be done without taking the hover boots off, which would save a pause and would be a second or so faster overall. This wasn't discovered until I was already way past this section, so it wasn't worth redoing for it.
Timing Method
TASVideos times from power on until last input required for the ending to play. Going by this timing method, the time of the run is 445316 frames, or 2 hours 3 minutes 41.93 seconds.
Console speedrunners time their runs differently, from first frame of Link’s movement until first frame of the Ganon death cutscene.
Going by this timing method, the time of the run is 434299 – 11099 = 423200 frames, or 7053⅓ seconds, or 1 hour 57 minutes 33⅓ seconds. It’s my recommendation that if the run is published, both times be included in the video file (the second one could be called “RTA Time”). Otherwise, viewers will not be able to truly appreciate the difference in time between this run and unassisted runs.
Special Thanks
Danny B currently holds the unassisted Glitchless Any% world record (2:12:14 as of 15/02/2023) and is actively attempting to improve it further on his Twitch channel. I spoke with him about various parts of this run whilst I was making it and he offered insight and assistance that really made a big difference for me, including explaining why certain things were/weren’t glitches and answering questions I had about the route. He also reviewed several of my WIPs and provided feedback on those. Thanks Danny! Below are links to his profiles. If you enjoyed this run, you will definitely want to check him out.
A few optimizations have been brought up both in the submission text & the thread but nothing that is a problem giving the potential timesaves compared to the length of the run.
The Entertainement poll on the movie is 11/0/0 (which is a perfect!!) at the time of writing. Everyone in the thread enjoyed the run and I agree ! The category demonstrates how far & technical the game is even in a glitchless context which is super cool.
After discussion with both other staff members & the community, we conclued that the category based on the OoT community consensus is clear enough & the TAS differentiates itself enough from other published TASes of the game to make it acceptable.
So I accept this run to Alternative as a new branch.
Just as a note, since this TAS only syncs on 240p, I wont be using any upscaling or goodizers this time. Not to mention even changing multi-sample settings caused desyncs. So expect some pixelated stuff when this gets published.
