Submission #2750: jprofit22's NES The Legend of Zelda "1st Quest "Swordless"" in 26:40.33

This run is my first submission to TASvideos and I believe the first of its kind.

This is one of my favorite all-time NES games. If you are unfamiliar with this game you can refer to Baxter and Morrison's 2nd quest movie submission notes for a brief recap of the plot here: #2091: Baxter & Morrison's NES The Legend of Zelda "2nd quest" in 24:59.83

You can also find a highly in-depth description of enemy drops, enemy movement, gameplay techniques, link's movement, and a description of the screen scroll glitch in those same submission notes.

This is technically not a "swordless" run for the obvious reason that you have to collect one of the three swords in order to hit Ganon and complete the game. There has been lots of discussion in the forums as to what the best way to end a run of this type would be. To my knowledge the point of this site is for people to show off game "completion" in the least amount of frames. Without collecting a sword, game completion is not possible. So instead of a freezing glitch, dying on Ganon, or stopping the movie when you enter Ganon's room, I chose to collect the sword and kill Ganon. Note that I only get the sword after acquiring all 8 peices of the triforce, and do not use it until the fight with Ganon.

There are a few things I'd like to point out about my route, the screen scroll glitch, and enemy manipulations/drops.

First off, I was asked in the forums after I posted my WIP about why I use the gambling game more than the published 1st quest any %. In that run they only use the gambling game twice and get the rest of their rupees from enemy drops and a 100 rupee secret to everyone room on the way to level 8.

When I started attempting this run I noticed that if you get the candle on the way to level 4, when you pick up the ladder there and reset, the game for some unknown reason sets your item to the candle on restart. This of course is suboptimal since you don't need the candle until the 100 rupee secret room (if you plan on getting this) or level 8, and it forces you to access the menu to switch back to the bombs. After some testing I found that it is slightly faster to get the candle later (skipping the 100 rupees) since there's a candle room on the way to level 8. So basically you're trading 2 gamble screens for 1 menu screen and the 100 rupee secret, also allowing you to screen scroll glitch past the first candle room and the rupee secret. Furthermore, getting the candle near level 8 allows you to move up/right and down/left respectively, allowing a few frames to be saved by zig-zagging.

You may also wonder why I dont ever use the whistle to warp to level 3 to go to levels 4 and 7, and to level 1 when going to level 9. If going to level 7 before completing level 4 it is in fact faster to use the whistle, but with the screen scroll glitch it makes it optimal to do level 4 first and then over to level 7 by use of the glitch. Additionally I have to reset to get the wooden sword anyway, so I dont have to worry about walking 1 screen away from level 7 to use the whistle.

As for not using the whistle to go to level 1 after I pick up the wooden sword. In the any% they whistle from level 6 to 1, but I obviously have a different route and using the whistle after getting the wooden sword is much slower than just screen scroll glitch walking up past level 1.

There are some places in the overworld where I do the glitch and I move in a seemingly suboptimal way. This only happens when moving north/south through the black portion at the top of the screen. For some reason if there's bushes or rocks at the top of the screen they are offset in some places by about a block worth of movement. For example, while on the way to get the 30 rupees in the beginning of the run, when screen scrolling at the first forest screen after the beach area, it looks like you may be able to hug the bushes on the right and perform the glitch there. This is not so because the bushes are offset slightly. This is the reason you see me enter the bottom of the screen in the middle, come out of the top half a block to the left, and have to go back to the right before i reenter from the top and move on. This happens a few times during the run and may look a bit strange.

Some dungeon rooms again may seem suboptimal, and I'm sure a few frames could probably be saved here and there (although this would ultimately change the entire run from there on out which may or may not be desireable). You may see me kill some enemies first when it looked like i could have hit/killed more with the same bomb. Most of the time this is because i need to get a certain drop from a certain enemy and if I were to kill any other enemies first it would change the value of $052A thus changing the type of drop. An example of this would be in level 7 when entering the locked door room with 3 bats and 3 blue boomerang baddies, I drop 2 consecutive bombs to kill 2 of the 3 blue boomerangers where i could have killed some bats as well or even all 6 enemies with the 2 bombs. This is misleading because killing any of the bats before i killed the boomerangers would not have allowed me to get a bomb drop there. I tried to prevent this from happening as much as possible but unfortunately it does a few times.

Since this is a swordless run it would seem unfair to compare dungeon room completion times to the any% runs. There is no sword present which makes it considerably harder to complete rooms in as timely a fashion (especially blue darknut rooms), because without the sword you can not do things like lay a bomb/swing your sword at the same time (possibly setting up enemies in a group) and swing your sword when the bomb explodes hitting them with both and doing extra damage (cutting down on enemy cooldown and bomb usage).

As you can imagine the route plan for a swordless run is drastically different from an any% since you can only hit the dragon bosses of level 4 and 8 with the wand, and to get that you must get the ladder from level 4. With that in mind I believe that the route is pretty much fully optomized.

I would like to thank Phil, Baxter, and Morrison for their 1st and 2nd quest any% runs and submission texts. Without these this run would never have been possible. And also Baxter again for his feedback and encouragement in pm's and the forums early on. A special thanks goes out to LordTom for responding to my posts recently. It seemed like people had lost interest in this run considering noone really responded to my posted WIP and additional comments. Your responses and encouragement were very timely, without which i may have put off finishing this run for awhile or possibly indefinately. I hope everyone enjoys the run whether published or not. Its been a long time coming!

adelikat: Claimined for judging. I think this submission has implications for the site as a whole so I will handle it. Expect a verdict in the upcoming days.

adelikat: Accepting for publication. Verdict

Aktan: Processing as "Swordless Challenge"

FractalFusion: Replaced movie to change rerecord count to 12000, which is closer to the number of actual rerecords done.

adelikat: Replace submission file with .fm2 file