The launch of Switch 2 has finally seen the arrival of GameCube games as part of the Nintendo Switch Online service, and speedrunners of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker might just be feasting better than any of us. While this emulated version is nearly identical to the GameCube original, there are two tiny changes that have busted the speedrunning scene wide open.
As explained in a new video from speedrunner Linkus7, Wind Waker has a glitch that lets you reach out-of-bounds portions of the game's dungeons. The out-of-bounds areas don't actually load any collision data, so you'll just fall endlessly - unless you land on a chest, which for some reason does remain loaded as a solid, but invisible object.
This glitch is present in the original game and has been known about for years, but there's never been any real way to make use of it, because there's no way to force the rest of the level to load in after you've landed on the chest. Playing the Song of Passing, which changes the time of day, should be able to force the stage to load, but instead, it simply crashes the game.
But on Switch 2, the devs have simply disabled that crash. You can now do the out-of-bounds glitch, land on the chest, play the Song of Passing, and continue playing the level as normal. This is specifically helpful in the Earth Temple, which Linkus7 estimates can now be completed in about two minutes.
The other change is even more basic: it's the GameCube emulator's built-in controller remapping. Wind Waker speedrunning relies on a trick where you rapidly swim back and forth. Do it fast enough, and Link starts building up absurd levels of negative speed - so much that you can launch yourself away from the starting island without the aid of a boat.
But this trick is no joke, requiring you to "basically pause buffer the game, frame-perfectly, for about three [or] four minutes," Linkus7 explains. There's another way to do the trick, though: simply "flick the analog stick 20 times per second." That, of course, is "ridiculously hard and only a few people in the whole world can do it."
With the official GameCube emulator's built-in controller remapping options, however, you can simply map one of the analog stick directions to a button, hold a direction, and rapidly tap the button to shimmy back and forth and easily build up that negative speed.
Linkus7 says this trick is now something "even you could do at home, trust me." And I can pretty much confirm that - it's still not easy to do if you're unpractised, but I did manage to knock out one brief super swim in just a few minutes of trying. For proper speedrunners, who can now perform the trick throughout the game, with trivial ease? It's a complete game-changer.
For now, the Wind Waker speedrunning community is splitting runs into GameCube and Switch 2 categories in an effort to encourage players to compete on the new console, build new routes, and enjoy essentially free world records. Once the exact details of the Switch 2 routes of have been worked out, the categories may be reintegrated.
The Switch 2 version of Wind Waker still isn't a perfect place to speedrun, as it's missing support for the GBA link through the Tingle Tuner, which was key to the old GameCube routes, and the fairly substantial input lag in Nintendo's GameCube emulator is likely to throw off some runners. But even with those caveats in mind, it looks like we're about to enter a whole new era of Wind Waker speedrunning.
Many of the best Zelda games of all time are playable on Switch 2.
