An OoT Speedrun Like No Other
For the speedrunning community, no game is as popular to run and watch as Ocarina of Time–save for (maybe) Super Mario 64. With seemingly as many glitches as there are runners, Link can do just about anything imaginable. Beat every boss in reverse order? Yup, easy. Slay Ganon with just a Deku Stick? That one’s required in Any%. How about beat every single dungeon in the game without opening a single door. That one’s actually impossible. Or, at least, was until recently.
OoT Any% No Doors was a feasible run for a long time. The route tasked players with clipping and wrong warping past just about every entryway in the game, a task easier done than said (with a little practice). As I mentioned, with such a huge community of runners and glitch hunters, players can do just about anything imaginable.
But one door proved impossible to outsmart.
The History of All Dungeons No Doors
The concept of All Dungeons No Doors existed as an in-joke for the OoT speedrunning community for a while. No one needed to do it. Yet it stood as this distant dream for runners, some final triumph of skill over their favorite game. A classic “Man vs Machine” storyline.
Make no mistake, a massive amount of runners teamed up to discover the glitches that made this run viable–though I’ll only be naming a few here. Just over a year ago, a Tool Assisted Speedrun (TAS) was uploaded to the aptly named Youtube account NoDoors TAS. The run was completed in 2:21:32.184 (2 hours and 21 minutes).
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ShzyggtsCs]
A TAS uses an emulator–a hacked copy of the game–to progress a single frame at a time, using a computer to perfectly register every input. So much in the speedrunning community can only be completed this way; human error and a non-freak of nature reaction time unsurprisingly underperform when compared with computers. A TAS can’t be a world record, but it’s a fun way to show off techniques and act as a perfect model for a run.
This long standing joke gained attention when TaylorTotFTW and ZFG broke down the TAS with detailed commentary on the run and glitches. The video will be embedded in a moment.
A Door Prevents the No Doors Speedrun
As alluded to above, a single door stood in the way of the run being viable. Problem is, that “single door” is actually three.
The Spirit Temple’s boss room is divided into three sections. A brief pre-fight with the Gerudo Sage, a hallway, and Twinrova’s final chamber. Despite all the exploits and glitches at the community’s disposal, no one could find a way to hyper extended super slide or backwards long jump into the final room. Most dungeons have techniques to circumvent the Boss Key, but the the Spirit Temple proved to be an exception.
The Glitch
This isn’t going to be pretty, but let’s breakdown the glitch that changed everything:
Setting Up the All Dungeons No Doors Glitch
Runners need to remove the sword binding on the B Button, something called Swordless B for obvious reasons. This is deceptively easy to do. However, they needed to keep Favora’s Wind–teleporting–invisibly bound to the B button as well. Doing so in any situation other than–I guess–dying to Ganon (while playing the Hookshot as an Ocarina because of actual bugs) will remove Link’s sword. If that sounds crazy . . . yup. Welcome to high-level speedrunning.
Jokes aside, Link automatically loses the Master Sword at the start of the Ganon fight, freeing up the B button without shedding that Favora’s Wind binding. By playing an item like your Ocarina (yes that’s possible), Link can leave the fight without his sword but still maintain his new button configuration.
This weird Favora’s Wind B button effectively lets Link teleport into boss rooms, provided he already locked it in as a teleport location. Getting into the first (of three) Spirit Temple boss chambers is comparatively straightforward. You launch yourself well over any collision to hit a loading zone behind the door. Link can now set his spawn location to the boss chamber then leave.
Remember, all of this was just to start the actual glitch. The explanation only gets uglier from here.
The Glitch that Broke Ocarina of Time
Runners now made Link “set teleport to room 1,” as Favora’s Wind was locked into the first of three boss chambers. Runners then were able to leave the whole dungeon to try and change that “1” into a “3.” So let’s talk about the glitch that changed it all.
There’s a grotto, a hole, in Goron City with the same “room 3” tag as Twinrova’s final boss chamber. By doing something called a Death Hole–dying while entering a grotto–that same “room 3” binding gets attached to Favora’s WInd, sort of. Now, by using that power, Link can teleport directly to that final chamber. Complete the boss fight and you complete the seemingly impossible dungeon sans door.
It is so much more complicated than that. It requires confusing the game by preventing link from entering the grotto and about twenty other steps that I just can’t understand. In short, my explanation is wrong, but it’s the least wrong explanation I have. If I had to grade my understanding, I’d give it a solid C+.
Admittedly, my knowledge of OoT tech is limited. Sure I can’t explain Reverse Bottle Adventure, but even the best runners in the game don’t fully get why this trick does what it does. Rather, they’re just really good at executing the “how it does.” In the TAS commentary, ZFG and TaylorTotFTW explain it marginally better than I did. Their explanation starts at two hours and five minutes into the video.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p9_GxicLlw?start=7530]
Is it RTA Viable?
Not only can it be done, it has. RTA means a person with a timer going start to finish. The first runner to complete All Dungeons No Doors% was–coincidentally–the same runner to first do Any% No Doors, Jbop1626. I mentioned Jbop in my Mario Sunshine speedrunning project back last March. He’s a friend of mine who kept me in the loop as this project developed.
While his first run–the very first complete run–took just over four and a half hours, his current record sits at 3:59:46. He begins that monster of a glitch at roughly 3:40:40. Scrub over to that if you’d like to see a real person implement the glitch. The entire run is embedded below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbQg283IKDM]
What’s Next for this Ocarina Category?
Frankly, I’m still largely in the dark. Surprise, this isn’t a terribly popular category. It does represent a major triumph for OoT runners, deserving recognition as such. While you won’t see this category at Games Done Quick, it symbolizes the realization of a longstanding goal–even if that goal started as a joke.
If you want to read more on the run, this pastebin covers a ton of helpful No Doors FAQs. It also features a pretty solid list of the runners who made it possible. Check it out for some acknowledgments.
PJ's played games for the better part of 16 years. His earliest gaming memory involved going to his neighbor's house to play GTA Vice City way too young. His second was being thoroughly unamused at a demo in Target. It was weird and hard. You had to keep swinging on ropes. That game was The Wind Waker, his favorite game of all time.
He speedruns. He writes about speedrunning.
He plays music. He writes about music.
He Tweets. Find it here: @HashtagPManning
