Blindfolded Ocarina of Time any% - ESA Commentary (Collapse Skip)

Blindfolded Ocarina of Time any% - Commentary Notes

I will divide this document into multiple sections that represent usual splits in the run, as well as general information about the whole game and the blindfolded aspect of it.

Feel free to just do the commentary how you feel like, I think with your game knowledge it will be totally fine to just go with the flow and have fun. It's not necessary to include all the information here, I just thought it could be a guideline if you want some more details on some sections etc. Do as you see fit best! :) If there are any questions I am always available to answer them too!

Information:

Current PB: BLINDFOLDED Speedrun: Ocarina of Time - any% in 30 minutes (World First Collapse Skip) - YouTube 30:35 , world first completion of any% with collapse skip. I will likely beat this still during the derust/practice in the next few days.

History: I routed any% blindfolded for the first time in 2020, and finished the world first run just over 1 hour. I pushed the times down a bit and then CrystalSaver and HyrulianKnight came and improved the route a bit and grinded. The current WR by Saver is a 26:40 (without Collapse Skip but doing the normal escape sequence). We are unsure if we want to split collapse skip into a separate category or not, but since it is super difficult and only saves a tiny bit of time total we might keep it together. Anyways since collapse skip I am the only runner atm.

Movement: most of the setups and movement are done with Ztarget cam, all the roll options for angles and consistent jump distances are a blessing for blindfolded.

The route varies quite a bit from the visual one as we cannot get a bottle reliably via GIM at this point while blindfolded. We also cannot do Kakariko bottle as the chickens are too random, hence we need to fish and do the big detour through the entire land to get ruto’s letter bottle :)

//I wrote this commentary for a very general audience without background knowledge once, I will try to put some more speedrun related facts in there though, hope its okay! Though maybe its not a bad idea for ESA as well to explain more basic stuff ^^)

Splits:

ForestEscape:

The very first thing we need to do is to get our sword. In blindfolded, we use many techniques to navigate through the world. Most importantly as you can instantly see here, we count steps, backflips and sideflips to keep track of where we are. Like this we can safely make our way to the first chest with the sword. The rock in this maze is on a cycle, so we actually need to be extremely fast in our inputs in this part.

The next step is to escape out of the forest. In a normal playthrough, you would get the shield now and go into the first dungeon, but we need some more items in order to perform our speedrun glitches. Thats is why we go to the lost woods.

Here, we will see our first glitch of the run called Navi Dive. There is a way to get out of the forest into Zoras River, but you would usually need a scale first in order to be able to dive deeper. We position ourselves in a very specific spot on this monument and then cancel our jumpslash with the navi textbox. That will recoil us underwater and since navi is speaking to us, we get pushed to the bottom of the water right next to the entry. We can then cancel the text and just swim through the loading zone to escape the forest.

Fishing:

Now we need to do lots of overworld movement. Our goal is to get to Lake Hylia to get our next important item: The golden scale! In Zora’s River, we collect a bunch of Rupees on the way since we will need money to go fishing and to buy some items later on. We mostly get carried by the river here, so not much to worry about. We count the swims of Link for the movement.

In Hyrule Field, we have a lot of time to talk because there is a long section of walking. (also good time for donations). Now you might have noticed that Link is always walking backwards. That is because the targeted backwalk is actually the fastest movement option of Link. In blindfolded we want to setup a good angle and then just backwalk all the way to our destination. We need to approach the entrance to Lake Hylia from the side, as there is an owl waiting that usually will talk to us for a long time. We take the ladder at the end and just skip the owl with this particular movement though. (fun fact: its possible to blindfolded WESS this entire section, but when I routed this I forgot that we dont have the shield at this point for a necessary crouch stab setup…)

In Lake Hylia, we just go straight to the Fishing Pond. There we can win the gold scale by fishing the biggest fish. But originally, you would only get a heartpiece right? That is correct, but we will use a glitch that will get us the adult reward for fishing with child link! I will talk about it later. Fishing in general is one of the most random parts of the run though and in terms of marathons the absolute scariest. The fish can decide to just not bite, but in that case you can just throw your fishing rod again. If the fish bites and then escapes, which is totally random, you have to exit the pond and retry. In PB attempts it's an instant reset, but for marathons I need to learn like 500 more backup setups only for that stupid fish. We also only have 60 rupees so 3 tries, then it's an absolute disaster.

We set up some specific position and then fish, and after everything worked well, we use another fish to locate our camera position and then continue with the scale glitch.

To activate the glitch to obtain the gold scale, we have to catch the fish and then walk into the water while holding Z. We then need to navigate and talk to the shopkeeper without pressing any other buttons. And tada, we get the gold scale!

Next with the gold scale, we can get the bottle that lays in Lake Hylia with Rutos Letter. This letter we will have to bring to the Zora King in order to obtain an empty bottle.

Zoras Domain:

First of all there is a bit of farming: We use the shop reloading of the room to farm a total of 15 rupees and 15 deku nuts, as well as one Deku Stick (might change amounts for marathon safety).

Then we walk up to the King and get the bottle after another long Mweep cutscene. Good donation time :)
From here, we need to go back down to collect a fish into our empty bottle. Trust me, it will be a very important fish. After we get the fish, we restart the console. Sometimes its very difficult to catch the fish as it is somewhat RNG dependent, but after a while it should work out.

Deku Tree:

When we reopen the file, we spawn again at our house in the forest. With our collected rupees, we finally go to the shop and buy our shield. From here we follow the normal route and go to the first dungeon. On the way, we farm 2 (or 4 in marathon settings) more Deku Sticks from enemies.

The first task inside this dungeon is to break the web on the floor. There has been a new trick recently called “Quick Putaway” which lets you destroy the web instantly, but it is a one -frame trick, so for a marathon I will only try this once but then usually take the normal route you can see here. If we succeed in the QPA (Quick Putaway), we instantly go down to b1 with a megasidehop from the enemy and defeat ghoma first. Else, we are going to go up the tree, grab the slingshot which is needed for the new collapse skip, and then climb up the tree the normal way to break the web via falldamage like in a casual playthrough.

We drop onto the web and quickly set up our position again with the ladder, because now comes a really big and cool skip: the megasidehop b1 skip. We use one of the enemies here to do a megasidehop, which is basically a damage recoil with our shield followed by a sidehop. It is pretty precise, but we have a good audio cue for this. As you can see, we fly all the way onto the upper platform and skip most of the dungeon with this. Now we need fire for the second web.
For this, you usually would need to push the block, but with some precise angles, you can use a trick and jumpslash precisely after a backflip to light your torch, we use it to open the web and prepare for the scrubs.

The scrubs are fairly easy, we just shoot their deku nuts back at them. We need to damage ourselves here to 0.5 hearts. At the end we need to be quick the talk to the last scrub, otherwise he escapes and blindfolded, we dont know where he goes.

It is time for the first boss of the game: Ghoma! And again, we need to use two glitches here!

After entering the room, you notice that I do a jumpslash with my stick. We will use a glitch called power crouchstab in this fight, because when Link shields and stabs with his sword, it actually take the attack value of the last attack and not of the sword. And a jumpslash with the stick does a LOT of damage. We use 2 Deku nuts and 2 crouch stabs into Ghomas eye to stunlock it, then we do a final jumpslash to kill him off. Now it is very important how we were positioned because we actually at the same time did a second trick. Did you notice that I set up my health to exactly 0.5 hearts? Well the last jumpslash actually killed me and the boss at the same time. Double Kill! This allows us to respawn at the top of the dungeon with the boss room open, because the wall closes usually after you defeat him and you cannot go back otherwise. This will be very important for the next glitch.

WrongWarp:

Now comes the most complicated part of the run. With all the items we have collected so far, we go back to the boss room using one more megasidehop. Then we enter the boss room again. Okay now it will be complicated and many glitches will be involved. From entering the boss door, we set up a very specific spot and do a very specific setup, I take my fish out, drop it on the floor and then catch it again. This is for a glitch called “Ocarina Items”. This allows us to trigger the blue warp but also cancel out of the cutscene because we basically, we play Ocarina with our sword. You can see, the cutscene starts playing and from then we need to do a frame perfect setup with two deku nuts and precise input to get back to the door. (Fun fact: I also pseudo-beatcount this with the SM64 slider music like in many of my other speedruns^^) Now when we enter….

We end up at Ganons Castle, the very end of the game! What we did earlier is called “Wrong Warp”, basically we use a broken cutscene pointer in the games memory to warp to a different are than intended.

Collapse Skip:

Now comes one of the hardest part of the run:

We need to do a new collapse skip setup, which requires 4-5 back to back frame perfect inputs. How is that possible visually, or even blindfolded? The answer is pausebuffering. You can pause and unpause in OoT and buffer inputs to be executed right afterwards, but that does not make things 100% easier. For blindfolded, all we have to work with is audio cues. Frame advancing during pauses is not very easy as you still need to frame perfectly pause again after 1f. I try to pseudo beatcount how long it takes until the first frame plays but yeah, its really difficult without visual cue. The good thing: 3 out of the 4-5 frame perfect pauses have a distinct audio cue (sword hitting the wall on the first frame). We can use that to confirm if we paused correctly. The problem is that the other pauses have ZERO indication because we need to frame advance one frame AFTER a sound cue. If everything works out, we should clip through the floor and be able to skip right to the end of the escape sequence. If we fail, I should be able to back up my position and simply retry again. We then just need to clear the final room and enter the final cutscenes. (Last time for donations)

Ganon: I will explain the last bossfight during this cutscene. It has 2 phases.

In phase 1, we do not have our sword, but luckily, sticks and deku nuts are very strong as well. We attempt a quick kill loop with 2 nuts and 2 sticks that should kill him instantly. If that fails, we need to get our kokiri sword out and hope that we manage to beat him the normal way.

In Phase 2, we first need to find our sword and then jumpslash his face to stunlock him, and jumpslash a few more times to hit his tail. We need 5 hits. This is all very scary because one hit of Ganon means instant death, and we have to repeat the EVERYTHING from the beginning of the Wrong Warp lmao (yep I will literally cry if this happens in a marathon run, and yes it happened before on PB pacers. Its quite scary that I submitted this run for a marathon setting as its extremely unsafe with Ganon and Fishing. If everything goes to hell and I go close to over estimate I will just reload the fight in GZ or something, dont know really yet. 😅)

After phase 2, its is basically over, all that is left to do is is do a final slash with the sword onto ganon. And that is it! We beat Ocarina of Time, while being blindfolded, in less than an hour! We have successfully saved Zelda from the evil, even though we kind of met her in the escape sequence for the first time.

__________________________________________________

THIS IS NOT IN THE ROUTE ANYMORE

Tower Escape:

In this last part of the run, we have to escape from Ganons Tower in 3 minutes. But first we have to do another little glitch. A very easy one actually. We run off the Tower and die. Why, you ask? Well we are not supposed to be in the castle as a child. So when we die and reload the escape sequence, we suddenly have the Master Sword on the B button! And we need that for the upcoming Stalfos fight. But first we need to get down there through with some difficult movement. There are three main problems at the escape. 1. There are random rocks falling down that can mess up our position and damage us. 2. We only have 3 minutes which is not much, especially with blindfolded Stalfos. And last but not least, we are not allowed, by any means, to touch any rock on the ground that burns. If we by accident do so, and it can easily happen during the Stalfos fight because of RNG, we crash our Wii and have to repeat everything from before the Wrong Warp. In a Marathon Setting, I will probably grab another shield quickly from kakariko. With the Hylian Shield, you do not crash.

Now the Stalfos room: This is the hardest and most random part of the entire run. The stalfos kill you with 2-3 hits and they can lead you to the burning rock. You have to hit them 3 times with a jump slash and if you dont kill both fast enough, they revive. That is why we need to use Deku Nuts to stun then, jumpslash and hope for a loop. That way we can quickly kill them but it is very random and difficult to pull off. The problem is, if we fail and die once, we have to retry it without deku nuts anymore because we only have 16 in the beginning. Or we have to again reset to before the wrong warp. So you really really want this to succeed first try. Fun fact: If we get damaged, we can easily heal ourselves with the previous glitch that we used to play ocarina with our sword. If we do the same glitch and “play” ocarina with out empty bottle that we have cloned, the game for some reason thinks that there is milk inside and heals you to full health.

After that, we only have a few more rooms and then the last big fight against ganon starts.