Just 2 months ago, VlackSR PB’d with a 52:45 in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX. With the world record being held at 52:44 by TGH, that leaves Vlack only about 1 second away.
The main category is Any% (No SQ/WW/OoB). Complete the game without save & quit, wrong warps, or out of bounds. The most brutal aspect of this run is that you not only need flawless execution throughout the entirety of the run, but also the final boss is just riddled with RNG. I couldn’t count the number of times Vlack had missed out on WR purely based on RNG alone. Upward of 10 times in a single stream! Day after day this bad luck just beats down on any runner with green splits.
One of the most notable luck-based moments of the final fight is during a phase in which Agahnim shoots projectiles towards Link, which must be deflected back at him. Every shot is 50/50 on whether it can be deflected or not. Those which cannot be deflected, in both LADX and ALTTP, are known as “blueballs”, the average time of which loses an LADX runner ~8 seconds. Unlike ALTTP, there is no maximum for how many blueballs Agahnim may give you, so this could truly go on forever. Fortunately for the runners, the average blueball count is only 2, and the record for bad luck is 17 in a row.
With this new time save, it could potentially nullify 1 blueball compared to WR.
A new 8 second time save has been added to the route, found and made consistent by Vlack himself!
One of the coolest parts of this route is bringing back lava swimming. You can trick the game into placing you safely into the lava, free to swim about, allowing for shortcuts otherwise not available.
Check out the route change!
Shoutouts to Vlack for this comparison video! He is certainly capable of getting WR without this as he has proved with countless runs, but this will certainly help fight back against some unfortunate luck for all LADX runners.
Check out more runs of LADX over at Vlack’s channel! We believe in you man, keep it up.
Well, as always, have fun and godspeed.
