Liminal Spaces You Can Never Reach in Ocarina of Time (Zelda) 

What games would you want to see liminal spaces covered in next? Also if you want, grab a Zardy plush keychain here shop.makeship.com/3qG78oa to celebrate the 2 year anniversary of my game!

Man, checking out the transitional area for Princess Zelda's courtyard/castle really gives "keep off the grass" a whole new meaning.

Liminal spaces? When Link pulled the Master Sword he got trapped in the Backrooms for seven years.

This reminds me of Any Austin’s “Unremarkable and odd places in Ocarina of Time” video that’s part of his unremarkable and odd places series. This game has such a special emotional atmosphere! Love it

That Temple of Time transition used to trip me out, even as a kid.

It’s time for the ultimate Ocarina of Time question: what happens if the Gerudo guards arrest Link while he’s fishing in a liminal space? My guess is that it either unlocks the Triforce or allows you to beat the running man.

This is so surreal because I've SEEN the loading happen, yet I never realized what was actually happening as the map changes.

This reminds me of when I played Banjo-Tooie and tried to fly after defeating one of the dragons in that fire-ice mountain area. It's essentially a fire level and an ice level combined, with an ice mountain and a fire mountain across from one another, claimed by fire and ice dragons respectively. When you look across from either mountain, you see the peaks of the other. If you decide to try to fly as Kazooie alone, you can fly all the way to the other mountin... But it's literally just a super super super far away shitty .jpeg-quality flat image of a mountain peak, and nothing else... It's hard to explain, but it was a total mind-fook for me when I crashed into the image and didn't actually transition to the other mountin peak as expected when I flew across...

that was really interesting, it was cool seeing the places with transitional areas look different from what they look like when passing through

Techniques like this are still very common in modern videogames. Dark Souls uses low-poly models of distant areas you can see from where you are extensively.

Welcome to Swankybox where we take the camera out of bounds and try to find secrets and new discoveries in some of our favorite games

I love videos that dive into obscure oddities of the low poly era. I'm currently developing a small game primarily inspired by Mario 64 and the N64 Zelda games. But with the additional quirk of leaning hard into the kind of weird playground rumors and prank articles you'd sometimes find in gaming magazines back then. This video has given me a delightfully devilish idea for my project, so thanks!

I was just thinking about transitional areas while playing xenoblade 3 they did some amazing stuff this time, what they've been kind of building up to.. first game had huge but largely still things in the background that they had to do a new cheat for for every map, second had the thing you were on MOVING and needing to see distant giant heads gently swaying or whatever, but this one had MULTIPLE massive things in the background of every map, and while each map is huge, they're more interconnected, so... they had to find little ways to cheat.. and there are entire long 'roads' of land that you can see, but never actually be on, because you warp across them once you cross a certain threshold. Piecing the roughly ring-shaped world together in my head while exploring it has been incredible.

Im suprised you didn't revisit the shadow temple to try after you beat the Boss

I think this is really useful when developing a game.

Programing stuff like this is REALLY cool!! Glad you share stuff like this, especially with Ocarina of Time which defined my early teen years!!!

A lot of people have been in the unloaded space in the well before! Speedrunners go there to collect bombchus early, or if you want to get the glitch that gives you black gauntlets those bombchus are required for that too.

I really love the background music. Bomberman 64 was one of the best games back in the days and still is I think. Really loved the soundtrack

Really cool. Kinda gives you an idea of what the devs were thinking and how they solved problems getting things to work with very limited memory to work with.

This is just boundary break for ocarina of time, I love it

The Bomberman 64 music, especially Altair's boss theme, was a nice touch.

Really cool stuff! I'm sure it's happened, but it'd be nice to come across a developer easter egg message that says something like "You shouldn't be here"

6:52 this is extremely ironic since this location is the most common and most known one out of this entire video, due to almost every speedrun route that needs chu's diving to unloaded botw

Just when I needed more OOT!

Can't you just beat Bongo Bongo and then go back to that room?

It always astounds me how they worked things out like this in older 3D games. Stuff we never thought about as kids, how its all basically smoke and mirrors to make the world seem connected, real and alive.

one spot you didn't check was in zora's domain, the cave in the outside wall that you can normally only access when zoras domain is frozen over.

The use of Bomberman music in this video GOT me, I love that song sm

3:19 everywhere at the end of ocarina of time

crazy how i noticed lagg when jumping thru...but also when climbing up like shown how lighting changed i never got he right angle but now it all makes sense. i noticed this before i even knew what it was lol

The Deku Tree architecture always creeped me out... who built it? The Sheikah? The Kokiri? Its so weird

These never get old. Thank you Swankybox!!

When the camera zooms into the guy who's turning that instrument, I could see a Dark Side Phil situation.

There's always more to learn about this game, and it makes it that much more amazing even after all these years

There's one area where this loading zone trigger was used on purpose. Just past Mido on the path to the deku tree, deku babas seem to appear out of nowhere. Usually they can be seen from much further away in their doormat state. This is a rare instance where something is loaded right near the boundary.

One of my personal favorite games to mess with is Jedi outcast 2. You can noclip into the cutscene areas and mess with the stationary actor models. Really cause chaos with some of the additional cheats. I managed to get the main character, kyle katarn, to make out with the side of the love interest face in one of the cutscenes

I like how most of these are used for Speed runs, unloading these areas also unloads things like doors and blocks but loading zones stay. So it is used commonly to get into the shadow temple without dins fire or as a child

This video:*starts with Glover music* Me:”Alright, you got my attention.”

that elf with a box in the intro is sure having a good time 😏😏

Game makers do this right now all the time, too. Going out of bounds is the older term before liminal spaces, which I think is the more appropriate term, as many of those out of bounds glitches help speed runners.

6:05 does the ring around Mt. Doom usually clip through the top of the temple like that?

It feels like that place you meet young Zelda at is a spot in front of The Temple of Time ruins in Breath of the Wild...

You should do one of these about Majoras Mask, as it has much more Liminal Spaces/Forced perspective Low Poly areas than Ocarina of Time does, especially in transition in the open world.

Yes, the spaces are liminal per the definition of them being transitional areas programatically, but the areas don't seem to have that sense of emptiness that is often characteristic of spaces that are considered liminal. Many times an uncanny feeling of non-belonging is a strong component of the feeling of liminality. A time or place which feels like something should be happening but, nothing is.

You missed the coolest ones! The rooms before the boss rooms are amazing, and often totally different!

A question I asked myself over 20 years ago finally answered thank you SwankyBox

As someone who grew up in the UE1 era of games and loved noclipping in and out of places none of this really sticks out to me

What program do u use too all the stuff u did in this vid

I used to know what liminal spaces felt like, but 20 years later and traveling at least a quarter of a million miles, I just don't know what the fuss is about personally.

Of course a room that you're seeing from afar is not going to be rendered fully. The N64 works hard enough without rendering polygons that the player cannot possibly be currently interacting with. Super Mario 64 similarly doesn't draw or even load sections of the level that are far away from Mario. It's actually quite clever how Nintendo programmed their early 3D games to cut corners graphically in order to make video game magic like SM64 and OoT possible in a time when hardware limitations were very real. The levels themselves were even designed around these limitations, making players go through tunnels (like the one in Dire, Dire Docks) to conceal what is essentially half the course being erased from existence. The vertical shaft leading to the Deku Tree basement is no exception.

Thank you very much for this interesting video. There is a place in MM that you also need to take a closer look at. it is the water temple. As we all know, in the main room there is a huge turbine that turns left or right and the water flows into other rooms, depending on how we align the levers in the first room. There is a situation in which none of the levers point in one direction and the turbine should now stand still, but in this situation it is not possible to leave the first room. While playing, I asked myself what was going on in the main room and whether the water was standing still without flowing in one direction. It would be super cool if you could get to the bottom of this 😁

You can actually get to some of these in standard gameplay. I'm honestly surprised you didn't show off the Graveyard/Shadow Temple entrance transition.

When you were in the Bongo Bongo room, maybe you could’ve tried to go in the unloaded version after the boss was defeated. That way the cutscene wouldn’t interrupt.

The loading behavior in Ocarina of Time is weird because Super Mario 64 loaded graphics of an area whenever you were in that area even if you got there an unintended way with glitches (aside from the loading zones in Dire Dire Docks, Wet-Dry World, and the Shifting Sand Land pyramid, which also change the collision and if you bypass those loading zones and go in that area you hit an invisible wall because the game prevents you from going anywhere where there's no floor below you) while this game behaves more like the DS version of Super Mario 64 where going into an area without going into the loading zone results in the graphics of the area not being loaded while the area still has its collision.

8:23 what is that brown mass on the left near the torch?

As you were exploring the Great Deku Tree, I was reminded of The Caretaker's 'Everywhere at the End of Time' Album. So your video also gave me the idea of exploring a person's memories as the person was losing their memory, which in this case would be Link. That would be a tragic game. Link having one last adventure in his memories, just as his mind was starting to undergo memory loss.

Imagine games like n64 where you can clip out of bounds and be stuck in games like sword art you can't die but you can't leave and no one can reach you because no one was intended to. That's definitely a horror story

Man I've been loving the OoT streak you've been on.

More videos like this, Swanky. I've lived for this kind of stuff since I was 8 lol

I always wanted to see these. Thank you!

There's Legend of zelda videos, then there's swankybox's voice on zelda videos.

I recognize the music in the beginning portion of the video. Glover, right? One of the space tracks?

Poor poor windmill guy, be like: "Let me teach you that song I hate, so you can use it and make it the reason I hate it." Broken physics ain't like you bro.

these are super unnerving yet also really fasciinating

Liminal spaces make me feel uneasy. The Oceania of time liminal space and transitions are fascinating!

I was always obsessed with these kind of places.

Weird that they did that fade to black in the fire temple despite not doing it in places like the Temple of Time. shoulda had a puff of smoke come up in each transition, it’d have fit thematically

can you do the liminal space between the sewers and the astrology lab in majora's mask? if you havn't yet, ive always wondered what if anything was there or if theres more sewer down there.

4:46 bomberman 64 music. interesting choice. it works

Big ups for the glover soundtrack

I always wanted to see the Hyrule castle courtyard without the camera limitation. Because I could never tell what the statues look like. They looked so weird to me.

They nearly feel like incomplete dioramas that you're looking on the wrong angle!

Also: PLEEEEASE do MORE Zelda videos, with all kinds of unknown things, oddities, mysteries, glitches, etc. in the games!

I can’t remember what game it was, but awhile back I had watched a video about Star Wars game, it might be knights of the old republic but I can’t be sure. There’s a liminal space where you can go to a certain room and if you take this really hard secret entrance you have access to certain Easter eggs. But if you go to the exact same room via a normal way, the Easter eggs don’t show up.

The Bomberman 64 tunes really jive well with the vibe this video gives me.

everyone watching this knew it wasnt in the game, but imagined you could reachthe triforce somewhere using this stuff

Now, the question becomes...can you fish in these liminal areas? :P

What about trying the Bongo Bongo section after the fight? Does it still trigger the falling animation to prevent fall damage?

Way up in the vertical shaft of the Fire Temple there's an unused door that can only be seen in the low res version. And I think that you can actually stand on the top of the shaft itself but it's been years so I'm not 100% sure.

I really would like to see Swanky explore the underground portions of Dampe's without the timer, as it would be nice to see him explore around! Also at least Dampe has the courtesy to actually race Link, unlike the Running Man!"

What about the corkscrew stuff in forest temple can you get into it when it's all weird?

Bomberman Altair theme, my heart stopped. Favorite character as child. Memories flood. How appropriate it was the Temple of Time. ... Ahem.

Actually, trying to enter or exit these liminal spaces can *sometimes* crash the game. It's inconsistent, but it happens. I remember when I was playing on emulator and tried to go back to the normal map from a partially loaded, partially unloaded (liminal) area in the Temple of Time, and the game crashed on me. Same thing happens in Majora's Mask at the Southern Swamp.

That was a lot I didn't realize, though noticed some of the janky transitions in a recent playthrough lol

The Bomberman 64 soundtrack really takes me back

Link looks like a Bosmer in the thumbnail. I've also glitched into the low quality sword of time chamber on console decades ago!

ive actually been ion the castle coutryard and the path of grass in the low resolution version when i was messing around with the moon jump ability in proect64

2:07 omg I remember that happening in the 3ds version

Love the Bomberman64 music you used for this video.

First case: "It's like a forbidden land", 'I find it very interesting". Dude, it's just a not fully loaded room...

10:10 Are those overlapping scrolling textures on the lava? I didn't know the N64 could do that. I guess it would be possible with microcode, but it seems like it would be very expensive for the time.

Would love to see a Banjo-Kazooie video on this!

this video reminded me of a thing i like doing in lego star wars 1 where i push the cpu player out of bounds and tag to him to go to places im not supposed to go to lol

When you enable draw distance in the PC Port you can see the full places

always love your videos swanky. thanks for this one!! zelda is my favorite

even if you can never reach them it is still fun to know about them

So what you're tellibg me is, in order to reduce lag in the Deku Tree they made a "dummy" of the basement that only exists for you to see what's below, thereby taking up more space on the cartridge than just having the full room. Interesting. I guess the lack of lag was worth creating the basement twice (or in this case, 1.5 times)

9:49 Indiana Jones 3, right there!

This Masterpiece of game really needs a remake of current consoles! >•>; Still very unique gameplay. Majoras mask is full of well programmed npcs, that changes on your progression and past time(game had 3days limit)

About the final part, have you covered it "the other way"? When you are in the "real" Ganon's Castle you can see the bridge with(out) the redead, but never access it? Have you done that? Is there collision? Are the doors there?