Speedrunners are already tearing the new Zelda game apart, beating Echoes of Wisdom in less than an hour with only 4 hearts

gamesradar.com:

Speedrunners are already tearing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom apart, as at least one streamer has beaten the game in less than an hour.

Speedrunners wasted no time in breaking Echoes of Wisdom into tiny little pieces at launch, but discoveries made in the past week or so have turned Zelda's first epic solo adventure into more of a one-hour nuisance for the very productive princess. How? Well, Echoes of Wisdom's waypoints let you fast travel across the map, and one so called Wrong Warp glitch is letting some players skip straight to the very final dungeon from the get-go.

Shared by Redditor xIceblue - and embedded below - the exploit sees Zelda using various signs atop Eternal Forest trees to overlay menus, fast travel to the game's first dungeon, and then trick the game's code to skip ahead to the final boss fight. "Game-breaking Wrong Warps have already been discovered and made consistent by multiple members of the community," the Redditor wrote. Beware of the footage below: it contains some endgame spoilers.

"It's now possible to Wrong Warp from after you beat the first dungeon to the final dungeon (although it softlocks), so we found a way to Wrong Warp to right before, fight the boss there, and proceed into the final area," the comment continues. "That flag apparently removes the softlock, and allows us to beat the game with four hearts."

Streamer and speedrunner OnakuTV  used the exploit to rocket their way to a world record Any% run, beating the entire game in 52 minutes and 51 seconds. Combining all their best segments together leads to a 'Best Possible Time' of just 50 minutes 41 seconds, meaning that a playthrough of less than 50 minutes is entirely possible. With the exploit out in the wild, all speedrunners need to do now is tighten up timings and movements and other tricks for some truly unbelievable runs.

Oops, the new Zelda game is “8 times the size” of Link’s Awakening because Echoes of Wisdom devs just couldn’t help themselves.

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