One of the most overwhelming obstacles in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is one that many speedrunners have been trying to overcome for years. Those who have played The Wind Waker know about the tall, invisible barrier that protects Hyrule Castle underneath the Great Sea. There’s never been a viable way to get through the barrier without having to proceed through normal gameplay — that is, until recently, when speedrunner dragonbane0 managed to find a way to remove the barrier entirely! So much for needing the Master Sword to shatter that barrier.
Below you will find the new trick in action, instantly snapping the accursed barrier out of existence. All that is required is the usage of the Hero’s Bow, and re-entering Hyrule Castle.
ZeldaSpeedRuns (via their YouTube video description) touch upon the results of this phenomenal trick. “Through precise dynamic memory exhaustion the barrier can be prevented from loading entirely. This has been achieved with the recently found glitch to spawn arrows at Link’s side which won’t despawn and keep using up dynamic memory until the point comes where you can dry shoot arrows which will corrupt the dynamic memory space further and permanently.”
Now that this trick has been found in the GameCube release of The Wind Waker, speedrunning the game is looking to be quite promising! As it stands, this is but a recently practiced glitch, so we have yet to determine how much time this will save in the long run. We look forward to seeing more from those who speedrun the game!
For all who aren’t aware, there’s already a viable barrier skip in the HD release of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. This tactic requires the use of both the Wind Waker and the Grappling Hook.
This revolutionary glitch was originally founded by speedrunners Giratana1 and LinkOscuro. MrGymnast86 managed to complete a run of The Wind Waker HD while also performing the Barrier Skip. The video below can best explain it in more detail, and requires a lot of precision and patience.
If you are new to the speedrun scene and want to learn more about speedrunning in The Wind Waker, or any Zelda game for that matter, head on over to ZeldaSpeedRuns to find out more information and resources.
