The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom features an eye-opening glitch that lets you teleport to the game’s final boss, allowing speedrunners to beat the whole adventure in under an hour.
The exploit, which warps protagonist Zelda to Echoes of Wisdom’s final dungeon, skips the vast majority of the new Nintendo Switch game.
Inevitably, Zelda’s speedrunning community has seized on the glitch to massively boost completition times – though it is unclear how long the exploit will stick around.
“It’s now possible to [warp] from after you beat the first dungeon to the final dungeon (although it softlocks),” reddit user xIceblue wrote, on a post which shows the exploit’s method in detail.
“So we found a way to [warp] to right before, fight the boss there, and proceed into the final area. That flag apparently removes the softlock, and allows us to beat the game with four hearts.”
Footage posted by xIceblue, embedded below, shows the game’s Echo ability being manipulated using a method that involves dropping signposts on top of trees, until multiple menus overlap on top of one another. This is clearly not intended behaviour. From here, users can open up the game’s world map and simply drop Zelda down to near Echoes of Wisdom’s finale.
This should go without saying, but you should not watch the footage of someone warping to the game’s final area if you do not wish to see the game’s final area.
Echoes of Wisdom game breaking glitch discovered byu/xIceblue inspeedrun
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Over on Twitch, Zelda speedrunner Onaku has already posted an “any%” completion of the game at just 52 minutes (which you can watch on YouTube), but isn’t stopping there. Onaku is currently streaming now, at the time of writing, and aiming to get that time even lower – at under 50 minutes.
It’ll be interesting to see if this exploit lasts, or whether Nintendo patches it out in an upcoming update.
“Thanks to playful puzzles and an imaginative reinvention of Hyrule’s historic iconography, Echoes of Wisdom emerges as a bold and creative new chapter in Zelda’s legend,” Katharine wrote in Eurogamer’s The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom review.