The Speedrun Where Link Stares at Rupees for 17 Hours

[Music] in speedrunning there are two basic categories that can be applied to pretty much every game any percent and 100 the goal of the any percent category is to complete the game as fast as possible it doesn't matter how much of the game you go through so long as you can get to whatever is defined as the game's ending without modifying the game the 100 category also has the goal of completing the game as fast as possible but adds on the requirement that the runner must collect all of the things the game has to offer what things are required depends on the game and the speedrun community that surrounds it in addition to these two categories there's also a third lesser run category that can be applied to most games called low percent the goal of this category is to complete the game as fast as possible while collecting the least amount of things so it's sort of the inverse of 100 now some of you might be thinking wait isn't that just any percent i mean if you're skipping everything that it's possible to skip then you should be playing less of the game and therefore the run should take less time right the answer to that is sometimes for example the current ocarina of time any percent route gets only three items kokiri sword deku shield and deco nuts that's all you need to beat the game as fast as possible and as far as current game knowledge goes you can't beat the game with less than three items so for ocarina of time any percent is low percent for now at least but that's not going to be the case for every game for many games going out of your way to get extra items will save time as those extra items may be good for dealing with enemies quickly or for performing skips that save more time than their requirements take to obtain in the current breath of the wild any percent route runners pick up a bow as well as different types of arrows to prepare for the blight fights and calamity ganon obtaining arrows is not required to beat the game but using them for these final fights drastically reduces how long it takes to get through them compared to say only using swords so for breath of the wild any percent is not low percent and this is when the idea of low percent starts to become an interesting question for most speedrun categories progress happens when you can beat the game faster and faster that applies to low percent as well but there's a second way low percent can make progress that other categories can't which is when someone figures out a new glitch or technique that reduces how many things are necessary to reach the end of the game even if it makes the run longer since the primary goal of low percent is to complete the game with the least amount of things necessary it's possible that a new world record in a game's low percent category will be slower than a previous one on leaderboards low percent runs are typically sorted first by how many things the runner obtained and then by what the runner's time was so if i complete a low percent speed run in 2 minutes using 10 items but another runner completes a low percent speed run in 2 hours using only 9 items their run is better the reason low percent isn't as prolific as the typical any percent and 100 categories can be for any number of reasons such as the aforementioned case of low percent being the same as any percent or if nobody believes running low percent for a game would be very interesting or fun and for some games even attempting to run low percent becomes ridiculous this is the case for the legend of zelda twilight princess to put into perspective how weird twilight princess low percent is let's first compare it time wise to some other categories the current any percent record at the time of this video is just under 3 hours and the 100 record is around 6 and a half the current low percent record is 24 hours 59 minutes and 52 seconds almost four times as long as the 100 category compared to the any percent category low percent skips an additional eight things that are usually collected in any percent where things in twilight princess are defined as items collectibles and warp portals with its additional 22 hours low percent skips three postsoles two small keys and three warp portals compared to any percent that's it but obviously the question remains why does this take so long the answer to that is a technique known as pickup sliding on december 26th 2015 twilight princess speedrunner zelu was playing his game and opened up the treasure chest in snow peak ruins which contains the bedroom key and then for whatever reason just left the game on and went to do something else their game stayed on overnight and when they came back to it the next day on december 27th link was inside the chest instead of being in front of it where he should be this confusing behavior was shared with the community where community member dragonbane took a closer look at link's idling animation and found something strange normally when link opens a chest or picks up certain items as a human he'll turn around and show the player what they've picked up with a text box that describes the item and waits for the player to close it since the game doesn't know when the player will close the text box link is put into an idling animation that loops indefinitely during every frame of this animation link's position changes by a tiny amount depending on how he sways but he doesn't go anywhere because the animation always returns him to the same position after every loop or at least that's what it probably should do what dragonbane found was that this animation loop seems to be missing a frame right at the very end of its cycle meaning that every time link loops through this animation his position shifts if the animation had just one more frame to it link wouldn't shift at all on its own a pickup slide doesn't seem like it would be such a big deal until we realize that during an item pickup the game disables all of link's collision checks except for the one to make sure he's still standing on solid ground in other words link can clip through anything during this animation it just takes a while while link's speed can vary wildly for each attempt at a pickup slide the fastest he can go is roughly 0.007 units per second for reference link's regular walking speed moves him at roughly 700 units per second so a rupee slide at best is 100 000 times slower than walking at minimum link will need to move 36 units of in-game distance to fully clip through a wall so if we do the math we find that it takes almost an hour and a half to clip through a wall assuming link has the highest possible speed and is travelling perpendicular to the wall now as any twilight princess player will know link really likes to show off blue or yellow rupees every time he collects one this makes it possible to perform a pickup slide with a rupee often just referred to as a rupee slide since we also have the means of manipulating where certain rupees can drop this allows us to begin a rupee slide at an optimal location right up against a wall during attempts runners will make a rupee appear from some nearby source and bring it over to the desired location using the gale boomerang or by picking it up with link's quick spin attack since the direction and speed of a rupee slide is somewhat random runners will actually then activate a cheat code to see link's coordinates adjust in real time and use those adjustments to calculate whether or not link is moving in the correct direction without the code runners would probably have to wait at least 10 minutes or so between each attempt at the slide to see if their direction and speed are good once the math confirms that link is moving in the proper direction with good speed it's time to wait don't [Music] rupee sliding was first tried out in the arbiter's grounds dungeon to skip the infamous pogate normally you need to obtain four posouls in the first part of the dungeon to open up the gate and proceed to the second part the any percent speedrun manages to skip one of these pose and still open up the gate because the gate only checks for what it assumes will be the last three pose you collect but with a well-positioned rupee slide you can simply phase through the gate after a short 13 hours to skip the last three pose this slide in particular takes so long and due to the arbiter's grounds limiting link's speed more than other areas so with just that skip low percent becomes at least a 16 hour run the three portals that low percent skips are the north farren woods death mountain and hyrule castle town portals skipping the death mountain and north farren woods portals are fairly trivial and add only a few minutes to the run but skipping the hyrule castle town portal involves doing a bit of a lengthy setup to ride epona out of bounds and enter castletown through the east instead of west entrance during the lenairu twilight skipping this portal adds around 7 minutes to the run if done well this leaves us with just the two small keys left one of the small keys that gets skipped is in the snow peak mansion and it's just a little slower than getting the key so it doesn't add any significant amount of time to the run if it's executed well that leaves us with just one small key remaining that low percent skips at this point skipping the prior 7 things we listed makes the run about 17 hours long 13 hours of which is spent staring at a blue rupee the final small key that low percent manages to avoid is the very first one in the farron woods this key unlocks the gate to north fairing woods but there are conveniently some bakoblin enemies nearby that can drop blue rupees and allow for a ruby slide through so we should just use one of those rupees for a rupee slide and the small key is easily skipped after a few hours right ah well no if we just roopy slide through the gate and continue the game we have to come back to this area later as wolflink but ruby slides don't work as wolflink so we'd just be forced to go and get the small key we need to come back to north farron later in the game to access both the forest temple and the sacred grove for the gale boomerang and master sword items respectively the only way we can skip the farenwood's small key is if we can somehow get both of these items the first time we reach the area as humanlink unfortunately the forest temple is blocked off by a pair of boulders at the beginning of the game to make sure that players can't access it early and you're only supposed to access the sacred grove much later in the game after completing the lakebed temple thankfully this problem does have a solution but it's a very convoluted one in twilight princess it's possible to transfer a bomb bag to a new file if you've completed the midna's desperate hour portion of the game on another file already you can then use isa in upper zora's river to duplicate bomb bags into link's inventory and carry them onto the title screen using something called the back in time glitch then you can save over your file to save the progress of the bomb bag right at the beginning of the game this works fine for low percent in twilight princess because the category only counts the things you collect on the file which finishes the run so you can just start a new file speedrun the game up until the point that you can duplicate the bomb bag while collecting whatever items you want and then transfer a bomb bag onto a new file and continue it from the beginning then on the new file you can perform the previously mentioned rupee slide to skip the small key in farron woods blow up the boulders in front of forest temple to enter and obtain the gale boomerang use the gale boomerang combined with the long jump attack glitch to get into the sacred grove as human link perform another two and a half hour rupee slide to get past the first area and eventually make your way to the master sword where you will be greeted by this lovely cutscene once you obtain the master sword you can finally save tallow in front of the forest temple and then you can leave north farron without needing to come back and that is the entire convoluted process of skipping this one small key which adds another 7 hours to the run the total run time is now almost 24 hours and at least 17 of those hours are spent staring at blue rupees currently only two runners have ever completed a low percent speed run taka and anarakis with anarakis holding the current world record at 24 hours 59 minutes and 52 seconds obviously given the length of the low percent speed run combined with the enormously high cutscene to gameplay ratio it's not a very popular category and the sadistic part of me wants to let you know that it could be even worse if you want it to be there's one more small key located in the city in the sky dungeon that is technically possible to skip however skipping this small key is way beyond just being difficult it requires performing multiple frame and position perfect instances of a complicated technique known as clawshot actor displacement using this technique it's possible to literally rearrange the level geometry of this room and city in the sky and use the claw shot with a bunch of precise bomb boosts to gain height and make it to the upper part of the room no human has ever successfully performed this skip and it's considered to be tasks only but being able to execute this skip would lower the item count by 1 compared to the two runs that are on the leaderboard this means that if someone felt inclined to perform a low percent speed run and add this skip it wouldn't matter if it took them a week a month or even a year to skip the small key when that run finishes it would be a world record since nobody before would have completed twilight princess with as few things as it did it would also simultaneously be the longest craziest most difficult and most boring speedrun of twilight princess ever done which quite frankly is an impressive combination of traits for a speedrun to have this is the current state of twilight princess low percent whether or not it'll be possible to skip more things in the future is of course unknown we'll never truly know what the least amount of things we can beat the game with is unless the day comes where the number of things drops to zero until then we make do with what we know to be possible and in the case of twilight princess we're collecting the least amount of things ironically takes the most amount of time we stare at rupees for over 17 hours special thanks to taka and dragonbane for helping my research with this video i'm gymnast86 and thank you for watching

Channel: Lowest Percent

Views: 2,388,516

Rating: 4.9489937 out of 5

Keywords: zelda, the legend of zelda, twilight princess, loz, tloz, tp, speedrun, tas, wr, low percent, legend of zelda, challenge, 25 hour

Id: v2nRW3wKnVY

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ShiraCheshire]

This is hilarious. It's so funny what you can do with a bug as simple as "if the player leaves Link in this one animation for 10 hours he might slide around some"

[u/RousingRabble]

So how many people decided to test other games by leaving them on for 24 hours at a time?

[u/Mantin95]

Ive never looked up anything related to speed running so this video was extremely insightful and fun to watch. I really hope someone does that last incredibly hard low% speedrun of twilight princess. Also he said no human has ever done the method, has a computer done it?

[u/magusdavyd]

What I find odd is the devs decided to have root motion on an idle animation. It makes sense if he was shifting his weight or something, but since he stays stationary, there’s no reason for it.

However, if I remember correctly, the game had a foot IK system going on (if Link’s left foot was near a rock, it would lift the leg up so the foot was on top of it). So they probably had the root motion there for the subtle back and forth movements he does all the while his feet are planted in one spot. The knees would bend naturally and would be handled by the game engine rather than trying to animate it.

A little more detail on what I think is going on here. Root motion takes the world position of the character and adds the transforms of the root bone from the animation to their world position. Because the animation goes like X = 0, .1, .2, .3, .4, .5, .4, .3, .2, .1 and never returns back to zero when it loops, it retains that last position of the character (which wasn’t the original) and begins the cycle again from this new location which happens to be slightly further back than before.

[u/Lanamore]

24 hour low% speedrun?

Skurry - Hold my beer.

45+ hour Hollow Knight True Ending Low% Speedrun - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXjYs7-rydA

40 hours alone are spent grinding essence from mob kills which are a 1 in 300 chance if I recall correctly.

Jokes aside, thanks for posting this, already watched 3 videos of this awesome channel.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/[deleted]]

I'm always really impressed with how good video makers manage to pack more into their 15 minute video than some lame long form essayist does into 2 hours.

[u/MeathirBoy]

Low% runs are always the most fascinating speed runs. Hollow Knight has one where you grind souls for ~40 hours given RNG. Metroid: Zero Mission’s Low% Hard EU is suffering incarnate and one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in a video game (and I used save states for Zebetites).

[u/PrivilegeCheckmate]

Speaking as a former tester, there's this one game where you can turn into a wolf that rhymes with 'Hud Open: Mega-D of Pain'. On the gold master, a certain someone who might be posting here found a way to jump diagonally that launched the wolf like superman into the void. The thing is, once you sailed off screen you would cruise through random maps. Some of the time you would hit a damage texture and fall into lava or something and die, but sometimes you would hit an FMV trigger and the game would just continue after that cutscene.

So in the release version, the wolf only jumps in the four cardinal directions. You're welcome.