The Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has been out since 5 November. Speedrunners have already found super jumps, sequence breaks and some deeply cursed-looking Links.
The Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time launched on 5 November with a new jump button, a dash and overhauled visuals.
Polygon reports a new trick called actor jumping that launches Link far higher than intended and can skip chunks of the game.
Kotaku and IGN say runners are also using open chests as trampolines and inventory swaps to float or climb walls.
Well-known runner ZFG has shown child Link clearing the Shadow Temple, plus age-swap glitches that squash him into the wrong model.
IGN says an early Any% run finished in a little under four and a half hours. Polygon says Nintendo has not patched the new jump trick yet.
The Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has been out since 5 November, and it took speedrunners about four days to start tearing it apart. Nintendo rebuilt the 1998 classic with overhauled visuals, fully voiced cutscenes, a dash and, for the first time in this game, a proper jump button. That last one was catnip.
Polygon, Kotaku and IGN all reported the discoveries on 8 November, US time (early this morning in New Zealand). Nintendo has rebuilt Hyrule from the ground up, and the people who treat the original like a science project already have new ways to skip half of it.
Nintendo Australia game page says the adventure has been ‘reborn through time’, with reimagined visuals, a refreshed soundtrack and modernised gameplay. A follow-up post on 6 November called it a ground-up rebuild for Switch 2, not a simple coat of paint.
According to Polygon, the extra jump has enabled tricks that were not possible in the Nintendo 64 original or the 3DS remake. The one getting the most attention is a launch runners are calling actor jumping, where targeting a movable object such as a chest or tombstone and jumping at the right moment sends Link far higher than the game intends.
Used in the right spots, that extra height is enough to skip large chunks of the game. Polygon says it is easiest once you have the hookshot, and that Nintendo has not patched it out yet.
Kotaku says open chests are another launch pad: stand in one at the right angle and Link can bounce out like he hit a trampoline. A bomb in the chest appears to help. Runners are also mashing the start menu and inventory, and switching items in mid-air seems to let Link float. “This bug shouldn’t exist lol,” posted a runner quoted by Kotaku as ORCinfo. “Once you get used to it, you can jump endlessly in midair.”
IGN has seen the same launches, plus a wall-climb that comes from switching items at the right moment, and notes that some runners already think cancelling a roll with an attack is faster than Nintendo’s new sprint. The new movement was meant to make getting around Hyrule less of a slog. The people hunting records treated that as a challenge.
The real prize is sequence breaking: skipping temples, items or whole eras, or hitting them in the wrong order. That matters even more in a game that swaps Link between childhood and adulthood.
Well-known Ocarina of Time runner ZFG, whose clips were picked up by both Kotaku and IGN, says child Link can now clear the Shadow Temple, which then turns him into adult Link. “We still have 1 roadblock to get past before this can be used in a speedrun, but it’ll be huge assuming we can get past it,” ZFG posted, according to Kotaku.
Forcing the wrong age into the wrong cutscene also makes a mess of Link’s model. IGN reports ZFG showing an adult Link collecting the Silver Gauntlets chest that is meant for child Link, after which the game tries to squeeze adult Link into the child model. Kotaku describes the results as temporary and deeply unflattering. It looks wrong, and runners are into it.
The clock is already coming down. IGN says content creator MrGymnast86 finished an early Any% run in a little under four and a half hours, against a roughly 20-hour campaign for a typical first playthrough. That Any% time will almost certainly shrink as more skips line up.
If you like watching a community take an official game apart, we have also covered Fallout 34 cramming three Fallouts into one game and modders getting SteamOS running on Macs. We will park everything for this remake on our Ocarina of Time page.
Nintendo spent a fortune making Ocarina of Time look like a new game, then handed Link a jump button and a dash like he had wandered in from Breath of the Wild. Of course the speedrun scene treated that as an invitation. This community has spent 28 years turning the original into homework. Giving the hero of time knees was always going to rewrite the route.
Nintendo can patch the easy launches if it wants. Runners will find something weirder soon enough. If you are still on your first honest playthrough, maybe stay off YouTube for a week and just enjoy Hyrule. If you are here for the chaos, the next few weeks are going to be ridiculous.
Was the jump button a mistake, or the best thing Nintendo added? Come yell about it in the GetRekt Discord.
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