Ocarina of Time Remake Broken Within Days as Speedrunners Launch Link Skyward

It took speedrunners only a few days to start taking apart the Ocarina of Time remake. Nintendo’s Switch 2 release launched November 5, and players were already finding glitches that launch Link into the air, bypass sections of the game and warp his character model into something unsettling.

The new jump button is behind most of it. The 1998 original and its 3DS remake never let Link jump on command. Now he can, much as in Breath of the Wild, and the community is testing how far that freedom can be pushed. Reporting from IGN, Kotaku and Polygon shows a scene moving fast, even by speedrunning standards.

Actor jumping and the chest trampoline

The most widely discussed discovery is a trick known as actor jumping. Polygon describes it as a glitched super jump that works with certain aimable items. A player stands on a movable object, or “actor,” such as a chest or a movable tombstone. They fire the item, press the lock-on button before the animation finishes, then jump the moment it ends. The result is a leap far higher than the game intends.

Used in the right spots, the jump can skip large portions of a level. Polygon notes it is easiest with the hookshot, and that it looks easy to repeat. Runner Vespher showed a Nocturne skip using a buffered actor jump, which he jokingly labeled “ez mode.”

Related chest tricks have also spread. Stand in an open chest, make a few sudden movements or drop a bomb nearby, and Link shoots upward like a firework. Kotaku compared the effect to a trampoline. Some classics from the original game, including the building-bounding Hookshot Jump, also appear to work.

Floating, texture horrors and a child-adult mix-up

Other finds are stranger. Kotaku reports that rapidly flipping through inventory items in midair can make Link drift down like a leaf. One player, ORCinfo, said that once you get used to it you can keep jumping in midair and that “this is gonna break speedruns.”

Runner Zfg1 has been documenting what happens when the game is pushed into mismatched states, such as triggering adult Link cutscenes while playing as child Link, or the reverse. The effect is temporary but visually grotesque, with Link’s textures collapsing into something misshapen. Zfg1 also reported beating the Shadow Temple as child Link, which automatically turns the character into an adult. One roadblock remained before it could be used in a run, but he called it a potentially huge find.

Even the sprint button has a challenger

Nintendo added a sprint to the Ocarina of Time remake, apparently hoping to make slow travel a thing of the past. Speedrunners have mostly shrugged. IGN reports that early testing suggests rolling, long a staple of Hyrule traversal, may still be the fastest way to reach Ganondorf. YouTuber KnightPohtaytoe showed a method that target-hops forward into a roll and appears marginally quicker than sprinting. Reddit user Pomps8a showed a similar roll-based option without the hop.

What comes next

None of this guarantees fast times. As Kotaku points out, a glitch that doesn’t shorten a run is just a party trick, and the real prizes are sequence breaks that skip items, temples or story beats. Because the game switches between child and adult eras, there is plenty of room for them.

Polygon notes that Nintendo has not patched actor jumping out so far, leaving the community free to exploit it. Whether the company will respond is an open question. Given the game’s long history of strange speedrunning tech, which IGN counts across 28 years, the remake’s first weekend suggests there is much more to come.

Explore more on this topic with Vexel Search.

File photo: Speedrun Ocarina of Time – Team Superplay – Mang’Azur 2013 – P1590504.jpg by Yves Tennevin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.