Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Speedrunner Finds a Way to Play as Link, But a Link% Run Remains Elusive

This story contains minor spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

After almost 40 years, Zelda finally has her own mainline The Legend of Zelda game in Echoes of Wisdom. So, naturally, someone has already figured out how to show her the door and play the game as Link instead.

Okay, jokes aside, the glitch itself is pretty cool. First found by Japanese speedrunner Ikaboze, it makes use of a combination of speedrunning glitches and the fact that you play as Link in the game's prologue to make Link available in the rest of the game. Ikaboze's original video is here, but for English speakers, a few other Zelda fanatics have put together instructions. Here's an explanation in video form from ZeldaMaster that we've summarized below:

1. First, start a brand new game. In Suthorn Ruins once you gain control of Link, make a manual save of the game. From here, do not make any more manual saves. Autosaves are fine.
2. Beat the entire prologue sequence without manually saving the game. Escape Hyrule Castle as Zelda, do the first dungeon, and get to the point of the game where you are free to explore all of Hyrule (when you acquire the "Searching for Everyone" quest).
3. Collect the Sign echo from Suthorn Village or another location.
4. Go north of Hyrule Field to the Eternal Forest and start getting a feel for how far you can enter the forest before it warps you back outside. As you move, try dropping Sign echoes and try to get the signs as close to the edge of where you get warped out as possible. Your goal is to be able to examine/read a sign right at the point where the forest warps you out, so when you close the dialogue box you warp out immediately.
5. Once you've gotten used to the timing here, make sure your pause screen is set to the Load/Save screen so that opens immediately when you pause. Then, do the sequence with the sign reading/warping again. This time, try and hit the pause button on the exact moment you exit out of the dialogue box and are being eaten by fog.
6. If you've done it right, you should be in the pause menu, but still have control of Zelda underneath the menu. The map buttons should be overlaid on top of the pause screen.
7. From here, keep the pause screen open, and move Zelda around until you find an enemy; there should be a few nearby. Let her get hit until she dies. The second you see her die, hit the "Load" button and be on the file selection screen at the same time that the Game Over screen pops up over the top of your pause menu.
8. Your arrow buttons should impact both menus at the same time, so carefully navigate the menu so that you have "Retry" selected at the same time on the Game Over screen as you hover over the original, manual save file where you were Link in the Suthorn Ruins. Take a deep breath, and press A!
9. When the screen goes black, press Up, and when you hear the sound effect indicating you've moved on a menu, immediately press A again. If it works, you should hear the "load file" jingle play. If you messed up, you'll be back as Zelda near the Eternal Forest, but the whole world will be blacked out. If this happens, don't worry, just load your most recent autosave and try again.
10. But if you're successful, you'll be in the same spot by Eternal Forest, but playing as Link!

The glitch is tricky, so we recommend watching a video or two before attempting and practicing to get the timings right, but it does seem to consistently work on the current version of the game at the time of this piece: 1.0.1.

There are some limitations to be aware of. Though you'll be on the overworld and able to explore, your game state will revert to what it was at the very beginning as Link, so you won't have the map or most of your menu options unlocked. However, Link will come with two full lines of heart containers, bombs, arrows, his sword, and the bigger jump. You can unlock warp points and the map, and if you manually save the game at this point, you can reload it and still be running around as Link.

Critically, though, you won't be able to use Echoes at all, which is currently where notions of beating the entire game as Link fall apart. When the glitch was discovered, the Echoes of Wisdom speedrunning Discord members began floating the idea of a "Link%" run, but lacking Echoes, they can't meaningfully progress the game to a finished point...yet. Several intrepid individuals are goofing around with Link, trying to find ways to either get the Tri Rod or otherwise bypass points where Echoes are needed so that a Link% can be achievable. It's possible that it won't be long before beating the game as Link is discovered...though it's also just as possible that Nintendo patches the game to get rid of the glitch before people figure it out.

We gave Echoes of Wisdom a 9/10 in our review, calling it "far more than some second-tier spinoff, combining the expertly crafted dungeons and item progression you’d expect from a 2D Zelda with the wild creativity provided by Tears of the Kingdom." And for everyone still just trying to beat the game as Zelda, check out our wiki guides and our interactive map for help finding everything from heart pieces to every Echo in the game.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].