one of my favorite tidbits about speedrunning that comes up every time the games done quick marathons come around is how Wind Waker speedruns are about five hours long because of the giant wall in Hyrule that actually forces the runner to play the game because they’ve been throwing shit at this wall for over a decade and still can’t figure out a way past it. the wall in hyrule is entirely unglitchable and the only way past it is to play the game properly. the speedrun would be like one hour if they could get past this wall but nope, it’s five hours. fuck the wall.
and the comedy of this situation is exponentially amplified the more you know about skips and glitches in speedruns in general
as examples of how broken WW is elsewhere, you can clip through walls and go out of bounds to skip entire dungeon sequences pretty much anywhere with a ledge, use the Wind Waker to enter a state where you ignore physics and swim at 5000 miles an hour, and even fly infinitely into the sky after dying like some kind of helium zombie. do you know how many games could be broken wide open by an infinite height trick? TTYD would shave off 3 or 4 hours.
but this fucking barrier around Hyrule Castle, against all odds, is just completely insurmountable with any of this. Ganondorf is literally the most successful and powerful villain in gaming history and this Super Extendo Fuck You Shield™ is a shining testament to it
This is the kind of information I want on my dash
Okay but do you have any idea just how big the Super Extendo Fuck You Shield™ actually is? Try approximately four times the height of the castle itself.
And not only that, but even if you get over the invisible wall, there’s another barrier that causes damage and knockback. So even if you managed to get over the invisible wall part of the Nintendo Containment System™, there’s still an additional, cylinder-shaped barrier that will do damage to you and knock you back out, even if you try to get in from the top or bottom. That castle has more security measures than Fort fucking Knox and it’s all to give a middle finger to speedrunners wanting to finish the game in an hour. It’s fucking wild.
As of July 2019, the barrier has been defeated in all versions of the game, and the current World Record is 1hr 04m50s. The current method is to give yourself seventy invisible grappling hooks, which corrupts so much of the game’s memory that there’s not enough left over to load the barrier (or a lot of other things, like enemies or cutscenes. It’s amazing). You can just walk right trough where it’s supposed to be.
