The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speedrunners discover a skip that was "one of the biggest tricks still left to find" in the 27-year-old RPG, and it saves 2 whole minutes

Ocarina of Time
(Image credit: Nintendo)

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is almost three decades old, but people are still discovering new speedrunning tricks in its rusty lines of code.

Most recently, the speedrunning community learned that you can skip the vast majority of the game's Fire Temple dungeon by using a hookshot glitch.

Speedrunner ZFG shows off the newly-founded trick in the clip embedded below, explaining that you'll need to have ledge cancel enabled and die when the timer ends to hookshot jump your way to the top of the temple. By the time Link actually dies, his body should be firmly on another level when his fairy revives him.

ZFG even slows the video way down to demonstrate just how finicky and just how close the trick is to not working, as soon-to-be temporarily deceased Link barely makes it into the next load zone. The things speedrunners do to shave off seconds, eh?

In this case, the trick could apparently trim over two minutes (practically an eternity) in some Ocarina of Time speedrunning categories like All Dungeons or Nocturne RTA, which has runners trying to learn the Nocturne of Shadow song as quickly as possible. ZFG says it "was one of the biggest tricks still left to find."

The All Dungeons world record currently sits at 1 hour 11 minutes and 57 seconds and was set a year ago, while the Nocturne RTA record was broken just two days ago, perhaps thanks to this Fire Temple skip, and took 41 minutes 29 seconds to do, according to Speedrun.com. I don't think it'll take very long for either to be broken again.

27 years later, this uncanny "Hero of Law" mod makes The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time the game it was always meant to be: Ace Attorney

Freelance contributor

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.

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