[secret found jingle]
December 26, 2020 3:07 PM   Subscribe

It's Zelda Day 2020! Here's some video links on various things about Legend of Zelda games:

Additionally, Youtuber Kleric has a collection of entertaining videos demonstrating how to use a variety of glitches in Breath of the Wild, like how to build a flying machine, how to generate hundreds of horses, how to abuse bullet-time physics and build "spaceships", making huge numbers of one-hit-kill arrows, how to do 'menu overloading' and the many uses for that, how to get out-of-bounds, how to stop time (or more accurately, cause it to never start), how to "moon jump", how to duplicate Korok Seeds, and how to pull off the "Hinox Curse", among other things. Oh, he also fights some of the last bosses with tree branches and does the "Eventide Challenge", which ordinarily takes away your inventory before starting it, but without actually starting it. Some of these links previously appeared in a prior thread I made, mind you.

In building this post, I kept a playlist of Youtube videos throughout the year that I drew from. There's a lot of things in it (41 of them!), many of which didn't quite make this post, but that you might find interesting. Some examples include Japanese fan animations, stuff on the implementation of Zelda II, and some Mario 64 levels hacked into Ocarina of Time.

To forestall the inevitable question--
A while back a number of posts on The Legend of Zelda games happened to be made on the same day: December 26. Since then, I have commemorated this event each year by making a Zelda-themed post on this day. If anyone else wants to do this it's fine with me, but like, don't knock yourself out over it. It's just a silly thing.

Zelda Day previously on Metafilter
posted by JHarris (27 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thanks for this! I had seen the 'do nothing' run but the rest look interesting. Such creativity and persistence in these efforts!
posted by erebora at 3:45 PM on December 26, 2020


If you're into speedruns, here's Summoning Salt covering some history (up until 2017) of Legend of Zelda (original, NES) speedruns:

World Record Progression: The Legend of Zelda

Even if you aren't into speedruns, there's a good chance you'll like it.
posted by secret about box at 3:54 PM on December 26, 2020 [5 favorites]


One of my favorites, which I think has been posted on MetaFilter before, is a video of one of the world's best speedrunners of the original NES LoZ beating the game blindfolded (part 1, part 2). It takes him over 10 hours but is an amazing achievement.
posted by biogeo at 3:56 PM on December 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


All of Summoning Salt's World Record Progression videos are great, even if you aren't into speedrunning or the specific game in question. Many of them have some real moments of human drama and competition.
posted by rifflesby at 3:57 PM on December 26, 2020 [4 favorites]


Oh, ha, apparently the reason I remembered that being posted on MetaFilter before is because I posted it.
posted by biogeo at 3:58 PM on December 26, 2020 [9 favorites]


Probably my favorite set of Legend of Zelda videos is Link's Awakening LP'd by Meccaprime -- which is best watched without any particular introduction or information.
posted by rifflesby at 4:05 PM on December 26, 2020 [4 favorites]


Heh. For me, the world record progression videos are a bit inside baseball, and they also tend to drag on a bit for my liking so I don't post them generally, but sure, some people like them. I can only really use my own aesthetic sense in determining what is or isn't interesting for people to watch. But then, no one says they can't post what they like themselves. And hey, it's a good day to do it too, but you only got a few hours left!
posted by JHarris at 4:06 PM on December 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


Is that Low Percent guy also the Lock Picking Lawyer? They sound exactly the same!
posted by saladin at 4:07 PM on December 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


Yeah, the similarity of his timbre and diction (in this commentary at least) is pretty remarkable. And both of them are interested in tool assisted speedruns and avoiding the use of keys. I'm just going to decide they're brothers.
posted by howfar at 6:25 PM on December 26, 2020 [4 favorites]


The LPL would've found the Barrier Skip in under an hour.
posted by jy4m at 7:41 PM on December 26, 2020


Thanks for another great post, JHarris!

I haven't played any Zelda lately, but here's a retrospective on my very favorite totally-not-Zelda game, 3D Dot Game Heroes on the PS3, published by From Software and created by the studio behind Bravely Default.
posted by StarkRoads at 8:45 PM on December 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


If you loved Breath of the Wild and wish you could play it for the first time all over again like me, you might enjoy this streamer I've been watching lately who goes by Dee Bee Geek. He's never played a Zelda game before so has no knowledge of the tropes but he's a gamer so it's not like watching someone play Tetris wrong or anything. His joyous enthusiasm and general delight at literally everything is really refreshing. Here's the YT playlist! He recently did a charity stream going around finding koroks and also completely the Tarry Town storyline, which is tremendously sweet.
posted by Mizu at 9:11 PM on December 26, 2020 [6 favorites]


Nice find Mizu, thanks!
posted by JHarris at 9:28 PM on December 26, 2020 [1 favorite]




I don't really play video games, and abhor a lot about gamer culture, but I always find speed run videos amazing. Something about them just makes me...cackle every time. There was a pretty amazing one for super mario 64 about how they used a glitch in how his velocity was calculated. I guess it's just amazing the absurd ends some gamers will go to, and I like how the people making the videos that I've seen at least seem to be a more laid back sort that understand how absurd what they are doing is and don't take themselves seriously, despite spending absurd amounts of time on what end up being extremely...time wasting goals.
posted by wooh at 4:28 AM on December 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


I was just thinking about the Christmas where I found Zelda II under the tree. I was a little too young for it (no chance of ever getting through Death Mountain) so for the next year or so I relied on the occasional visits from my cousin to advance my game to a point where I could wander from town to town fighting random encounters with enough cool stuff like the upward and downward thrusts and the fairy spell which thought was really cool because I thought it was a form of cheating (Think you can get me? Ha! I'll turn into a fairy and FLY TO THE TOP OF THE SCREEN)

I think that was the only Zelda game I got for Christmas. I bought A Link to the Past with some birthday money, and I never owned a game boy or any of the later systems. I had the chance to buy a reissue of the original when I spotted it at K.B. Toys for $15, but stupid me grabbed Ultima Exodus instead because I was really fascinated with putting together characters and naming them even though the rest of the game is terrible and I never could play it for more than five minutes before dying horribly in some confusing way.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:06 AM on December 27, 2020 [3 favorites]


Is that Low Percent guy also the Lock Picking Lawyer? They sound exactly the same!

It's a collective - at least Linkus7 and Smallant and Gymnast86 are all Zelda speedrunners. It confused the dickens out of me the first time I clicked through to one on my TV (where descriptions are lost) and went ... wait I _know_ this voice...

There's a good breakdown by Bismuth of how lackattack24 achieved the current LoZ speedrun record that goes into a lot of the weird little nitty gritty that explains some of the invulnerability frames and other quirks of the game that the speedrun blows through. It's still a generally comprehensible speedrun, although some of the recorder warps are still frickin' magic.

Speaking of, Breath of the Wild speedrunning is currently being broken by completely bonkers savefile state glitches. Getting off the plateau early? Sure. Want the bow of light before the end of the game? Why not?

If you're craving more Zelda story and are open to other game styles, might I suggest Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity? On the one hand, a lot of missions, many of which are pretty snappy. On the other hand there's an almost Ubisoft level of map scrubbing for incomplete inventory quests and the main story quests can take more uninterrupted time than I'd like. But, still, it's fun!
posted by Kyol at 8:10 AM on December 27, 2020 [2 favorites]


wooh, I've played way too many video games, but agree with you, both on gamer culture and on the wry humility of speedrunners.

RonButNotStupid, Zelda II is a personal favorite. Its challenge keeps me coming back. I love how success is never a foregone conclusion. As for Ultima Exodus on NES, it's still not the excellent computer originals, but someone's made a romhack of it to make it less frustrating to play!
posted by JHarris at 8:13 AM on December 27, 2020 [2 favorites]


Hyrule Warriors is also two-player couch co-op, which is great. It doesn't play anything like a Zelda game, really, (I'm not familiar with this franchise but I gather it's essentially a Dynasty Warriors game with a LoZ skin) but it's still fun. My wife and I have been enjoying it together.
posted by biogeo at 8:14 AM on December 27, 2020


Hyrule Warriors is completely and utterly bonkers. I've put in over 200 hours on the Switch version, which collects all the DLC of the previous two releases into the main game, and still have a ways to go to completing everything. Those Adventure Mode maps have tons of levels. A lot of the unlockables you're doing all this to earn feel pretty weak, but once in a while you unlock something hilarious like the gigantic 8-bit fairy weapon/character.
posted by JHarris at 8:19 AM on December 27, 2020


[secret found jingle]

I haven't played Zelda since the original was still fresh on NES, and reading that, I heard the sound in my head like it was yesterday.
posted by Buy Sockpuppet Bonds! at 8:40 AM on December 27, 2020


Gosh Mizi, this jolly fellow playing BotW is just delightful.
posted by R343L at 11:26 AM on December 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


Zelda II is a personal favorite. Its challenge keeps me coming back. I love how success is never a foregone conclusion.

I like how when I play it, I'm instantly taken back to 1988/89. Unlike the now common top-down aesthetic of it's predecessor which has been followed by almost every non-3d game in the series, Zelda II will forever be linked to a specific time and place. Also, I still can't come anywhere close to beating it.

Also the Captain N/Zelda II crossover episode was like the best thing ever

As for Ultima Exodus on NES, it's still not the excellent computer originals, but someone's made a romhack of it to make it less frustrating to play!

Oh wow. I'll have to check that out. After having cut my teeth on Dragon Warriors I & III (I never had II), Ultima Exodus for the NES was a confusing mess. At the time I didn't know anything about the Ultima series, and had no idea how much it pre-dated the games I had already played. Having played only modern JRPGs, Ultima was just confusing and obtuse. Distributing food was tedious, and I could never figure out why the game let you fight any random NPC (including Lord British) if you didn't have to do it somewhere in the game (e.g. the 'Pray' command in Earthbound).
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:32 PM on December 27, 2020


If you ever want advice on Zelda II RBNS let me know, I've finished it several times on "one credit," although I think I've only finished a true deathless run once.
posted by JHarris at 6:58 PM on December 27, 2020


Thanks JHarris. I can get up to the Great Palace with a little emulator help, but I've mostly made my peace with not being able to complete it because it's hella hard.

Besides, if I don't play, then I don't die, then Link's blood can never be used to revive Ganon. As a kid, I lost so many saves because I'd quickly power-off the console so as not to see the 'GAME OVER -- RETURN OF GANON" screen and hear that laughter.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:18 AM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


I've been watching Kleric's videos for a while now, and it's been fun to see their presentation and confidence grow over the course of the series. The "Shrines in Seconds" videos are a lot of fun, because they're a lot like my own play style. I'll explore a shrine and go, "Oh, okay. I see how they intended for this to be done," and then I'll stubbornly find some other way to do it. Not nearly this quickly, though!
posted by xedrik at 7:44 AM on December 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Kleric is legendary. Their No-Touch Eventide Island on Master Mode is my favorite.

Speaking of legends, Japanese YouTuber Peco is amazing and so creative.

Peco - Lizalfos slayer

Peco - Lynel slayer

Not disco enough for you? How about defeating a Gold Lynel with boomerangs?
posted by dorkydancer at 9:00 AM on December 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


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