Glitches shave off quite a bit of time during speedruns, but some games have more glitches to exploit than others. Wind Waker has the infamous barrier skip and Ocarina of Time has a variety of sequence breaks allowing speedrunners to get through the game in less than 20 minutes.
Major glitches in Skyward Sword have been harder to find, but speedrunner Gymnast86 has found a glitch that allows him to skip several parts of the game. He calls this newly found glitch “Reverse BiTMagic”, with “BiT” standing for “back in time”.
Performing Reverse BiTMagic is possible due to the way the game’s save data is organized. In an interview with Kotaku, Gymnast86 explains:
“When you select a file, the flags get updated to the area the file is saved in. When you start the file it reloads them right after you press start. When we open the shed door after pressing Start, we’re updating the value for the area after the recheck has already occurred, so that value of the shed opening on Skyloft will stay during the load to the Eldin region.”
Gymnast86 discovered the glitch when he was looking to find his way into a locked part of Skyloft. “But during the process of trying that and after staring at how the game updates its memory of these values, I began wondering if there was a way to apply Skyloft value changes to other maps,” he stated.
Utilizing Reverse BiTMagic can cut playtime down by an estimated 40 minutes, potentially taking speedruns down to four hours.
