How speedrunners beat Majora's Mask in only 17 minutes (SPEEDRUN EXPLAINED)

since 2019 the Nintendo 64 Zelda games have seen some of the largest discoveries in speedrun history resulting in some of the largest time saves ever seen in Zelda speedr running in result it can be very difficult to understand what exactly is even going on in these runs at a surface level view Majora's Mask any% unrestricted is one of the most unique and one of the most complicated to understand speedruns and over the last few years I've receed numerous comments both on YouTube and on my stream on Twitch confused as to how this run is even possible so for the first time ever I'm going to fully break down and explain the current 17-minute world record provided to me by the Japanese speedrunner Thunderbolt first we need to talk about why this run is called any% unrestricted in Majora's Mask the vast majority of our competitive speedrun categories run with a rule set called no major glitches a rule set that bans three metad defining glitches stale reference manipulation text overflow and arbitrary code execution in any perc unrestricted however these massive glitches are allowed and the only limits are what is possible in the base game without the use of any external cheats or tools we'll talk about these major glitches when they appear in the run so just keep these two in mind for now if you're interested in these more restrictive competitive rule sets I've left a link to the current any% no major glitches road record by the human protractor and the current any% glitchless road record by Jess down in the description below first thing to note is that Thunder's run is done on the English Wii virtual console release and while we'll get into y later it should be noted that this route is only possible possible on this version you'll notice Thunder starts us run with a very strange file name and while once again we'll have to come back to this later it is important to note that the last three characters have to be capital F lowercase p and lowercase R the timing of the Run begins on starting the file and we are sent into a long unskippable cut scene for the sake of all of our attention spans I've sped this section up but the only notable part of this is that Thunder is going to attempt to advance every text box as quickly as possible [Music] now that we've gained control of Link we're going to immediately start back walking as it is the fastest way for a human to move in a straight line in this game this is where we see our very first trick in the game Stump Jump by jumping into the mushrooms on the side of the stump link Clips up saving a bit of time and movement over normally jumping on the stumps there's another unskippable cut scene here where Skull Kid shrinks link from 6t and makes him 511 so I'll speed through this part just to save him the embarrassment Thunder now begin spinning towards the door which is De Link's fastest form of movement when not traveling long distances or when making turns just as we thought the cut scenes were finally over tattle is going to stop and talk to us for a bit reminding us that this is still somehow shorter than the introduction sequence of tear of the Kingdom we're now going to make our way out of the prologue area and there's a couple small movement optimizations Thunder takes here such as jumping into this lower flower to spend less time flying in the air as it's slower than walking we're now going to navigate over to the chest in this room containing deu nuts as we need an item in our inventory for a trick coming later in the run and this is the fastest one we were able to acquire as deu link Thunder now does a very precise jump using a spin to skip flying in the flower this trick is very difficult despite only saving a second due to link needing to face forwards in a spin animation when hitting the ledge now that we're in the clock tower basement we can navigate through this area using spins there's a couple different ways to navigate through this room that are all about as fast such as side hopping up the stairs instead after watching all those cut scenes at the beginning we're going to skip this one certain cut scenes in this game take two frames to activate and by pausing in such a way that only one frame passes at a time we can exit the clock tower without the happy Mass salesman talking to us saving over a minute compared to watching the cut scene this is also probably a good time to talk about first cycle the first 3-day cycle of this game exists to introduce the player to the time mechanic and the main area of Clock Town in order to successfully finish the first cycle you traditionally have to do a couple things things find a Stray Fairy in Clock Town to give to the Great Fairy in Clock Town in order to get magic find and acquire the moon's tier to trade for the title deed in order to access the top of the Clock Tower and wait until midnight of the third day in order to gain access to the top of the clock tower however Thunder is going to do things a little bit differently first thing thunder does After exiting the clock tower is immediately reset the console as the game automatically saves after leaving while also playing a cut scene that is skipped by resetting the game next order of business is to navigate to the laundry pool where the stra FY I talked about a few seconds ago is located during the day Thunder then turns around and back walks here which serves the purpose of oh back walking as well as reducing lag in the area saving a couple of [Music] frames our goal now is to advance time of day to 300 p.m. and the fastest way to do that is by breaking into the stock podt in from the top as the bottom entrance is closed for a few hours we're then going to listen to Grandma's stories which are so boring it puts link to sleep for two hours at a time we can do this a few times in order to advance the time to 3 [Music] p.m. after Link's well-deserved nap we need to make it to North Clock Town to trade in our fairy we got for magic magic gives link the ability to blow snot bubbles out of his nose which is going to come in handy later when you normally enter a clock Town location for the first time a short cut scene plays panning around the area this cut scene does not play if you enter the area from termin of field though however deul link is not allowed outside of Clock Town thankfully this guard is horrible at his job and we can just back walk right past him allowing us to skip the north Clock Town entrance cut scene this version of Termino field is in a very weird State due to us being in first cycle there's no music enemies don't spawn and some actors don't spawn use this section as your final moment of Peace because after acquiring Magic things are going to get crazy really quick now that we have magic we can leave the Great Fairy Fountain and pop the bomber kids balloon in order to start the tag Min game but Thunder isn't doing this for the reason you may think we're going to have to pause for a second and have a little talk remember earlier when I kept saying that I would explain things later welcome to later in both oine of time in Major's mask whenever link picks up an actor above his head such as a bush or a pot link gets a reference to that writing his x y z position and rotation to the object in order to give off the illusion of him carrying it around however what if he attempted to pick up an object that has been unloaded welcome to stale reference manipulation or SRM actors on the map are contained in a section of memory known as the actor Heap whenever link is holding an actor he is writing positional and rotational data into the spot in this Heap where the actor's information is stored however if this actor is unloaded he will continue to write this data into the same spot in memory which is now occupied by something else this has massive implications allowing you to do things like pick up the incorrect actor write values to a chest so they contain different items write values to Grotto overlays so they can take you to different locations and even perform something even more powerful arbitary code execution in the context of Majora's Mask any% we perform SRM by tagging the bomber kit while blowing a bubble on the same frame the balloon pops if we wait in the tag text box until the bubble Pops in our mouth the destroy function in the Smoke particle effect will load into the same place in memory where the bubble was using a very precise XYZ rotation of the bubble we can perform a jump instruction and instructing the game to set the inventory cursor value to the value 0x3 ff1 by doing this we can scroll the inventory cursor to different parts of memory including our file name this is the reason why the game is played on the English Wii virtual console release and VI Thunder sets his file name to end in fpr as it allows us to equip our file name giving us the Goron mask hook shot and fierce Dei mask congratulations you now qualify for a bachelor's degree in computer science and can understand what happens in the next section of the Run let's go back to [Music] Thunder after starting the bombers mini game Thunder has to be very careful with how he loads and calls the Katon bushes near the playground as he's manipulating the actor Heap in such a way that the balloon smoke loads in the right spot in order to climb this fence he performs a trick known as a twisted back flip where he back flips releases Target and grabs the ledge he then manipulates the actor Heap a bit further by shooting the fence with a bubble he's now going to perform a setup to do the ace we talked about earlier the first step is manipulating the bomber kid to be in the correct spot something that is much harder than it looks he then does some slight angle adjustments in order to get the correct starting angle for the setup he now stuns the bomber kid with a bubble and side hops so that he's standing next to him during the day night transition this is in order to call the Katon bushes during that transition which all affects the Heap I'll let the majority of this next section speak for itself but he's going to stun the bomber once again shoot a bubble at the balloon and do some very precise movements in order to to tag the bomber on the same frame that pops with the correct bubble angle he pause buffers in this section due to the high Precision of this [Music] trick he's now going to scroll up to his file name and equip the items we discussed earlier allowing him to break out of first cycle this is also the reason why we get nuts in the beginning of the game as otherwise we'd have no way to put the cursor on the pause menu the reason we choose to get the Goron mask from the ace setup is due to the fact that Goron Spike rolling is the fastest method of movement in the game our next goal is to make it to the woods of mystery on day two Thunder is going to dance with the Scarecrow in West Clock Town in order to make it day [Music] two [Music] on our way to Woods of mystery he's going to try and keep his magic bar full which is unfortunately RNG dependent ideally he has a full bar magic when entering the Majora fight so that he can skip picking up another magic drop also since we're technically still in a cycle State the cut scene trigger at the entrance to Southern swamp is not loaded he's now going to keep his camera aimed away from the potion shop so that the witch doesn't spawn in the woods of mystery now the reason we keep the witch from spawning and the reason we're here on day two in the first place is due to the fact that there's a grotto in the woods of mystery on this day if you remember our discussion of SRM earlier you know that we can use SRM to change where the Grado takes us to also the only reason we give ourselves hook shot using Ace is for this specific R the hook shot actually loads as an actor in the Heap giving us a very quick Heap manipulation for The Grotto [Music] warp he now performs a glitch known as a super slide by using the Snapper recoil on a shield while attempting to pick up the bush he interrupts his grab State sending him backwards and delaying the pickup until he releases his shield he does this in order to unload the bush through the loading plane causing him to pick up a stale reference now he aligns himself in a specific position and drops the stale reference overriding The Grotto to take him to Majora's [Music] lair since he gave himself the fierce deity mask using Ace the first phase of the Majora fight is Trivial all he has to do is stun the mask in the air and jump slash it once it's on the ground in the next phase he waits until he gets a good Target on Madura and deletes him in about 2 [Music] seconds wrath is where things start to get really difficult I'm just kidding he literally hits him once and then uses the beam attack again to defeat him in another like 2 seconds that final hit on Majora is time Thunder completed Majora's Mask in just 17 minutes I once again want to give him a huge shout out for allowing me to use his footage for this video he's linked down in the description so be sure to check him out anyways thanks for watching hopefully you enjoyed the video I make videos on Zelda glitches and speedruns so please consider subscribing if that's your sort of thing or I don't man I don't know [Music]

Channel: JakeZSR

Views: 7,059

Keywords: Majora's Mask Glitch, majoras mask speedrun, majoras mask world record, majoras mask glitches, ocarina of time glitches, ocarina of time glitch, ocarina of time new glitch, speedrun glitches, best glitches, jakezsr, linkus7, breath of the wild, breath of the wild speedrunning, breath of the wild glitches, tears of the kingdom, tears of the kingdom speedrunning, tears of the kingdom glitches, majoras mask remains escape, Speedrun Explained, GDQ, First Cycle Skip

Id: NWMbkkPyO4s

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024