Go Mode podcast - Fun Aga Stuff

I've been tuning in every episode - I love to have a rando podcast to listen to at work! It's great to hear not only an introduction to different dungeons, but also discussion of general rando community stuff. But now you've opened the floodgates, so here's all my feedback for the Aga episode :P

You missed one of the logical Aga requirements: Aga can be required when the hammer is inside the Pyramid Fairy. This can be required even if you have East DW access (e.g., even when you have the flippers) because although the Super Bomb CAN swim with you, it CANNOT however jump off a ledge (it will stop following you and the timer will start to tick). Unfortunately, there is no way to get to the East side of the DW without the hammer without also hopping off a ledge (there are no diving boards on the east side of the north river crossing or the east side of Dark Lake Hylia). This means that Aga can be required in order for you to mirror from the Bomb Shop and walk up to the castle gate warp point which appears after having defeated Aga1 in order to take the Bomb to the Pyramid. I've estimated that this is a less than 0.1% chance of happening (seeds where both the hammer is at the pyramid fairy AND you haven't already defeated Agahnim for some other logical reason), but it has happened to me in both actual races and in the simulator. This requirement CAN be sequence broken in many very interesting ways, all of which involve the Super Bomb Teleportation glitch, and some of these sequence breaks can get pretty involved and interesting, but considering how rare the scenario is and how difficult some of them are to pull off, these sequence breaks are pretty dang obscure.

At 49:40 you say you need the (Hookshot AND (Hammer or Gloves)) OR (Titan's Mitts) to access west DW. Flippers is also a logical possibility: (Hookshot AND (Hammer or Gloves or Flippers)) OR (Titan's Mitts).

Interestingly, this flippers requirement can also be sequence broken in a couple of ways by either doing a fairy revival, or by performing a recently discovered bomb jump across the water to the Ice Palace island, and then another newly discovered bomb jump to the SE into the screen transition toward the "Dark World Shopping Mall" screen, putting you in fake flippers via screen transition, which allows you to swim to the whirlpool there which will take you to the Dark Witch Hut area where you can then hookshot across. The utility of this sequence break is incredibly limited since even if you had the set of items which would make you consider this sequence break you would rarely ever WANT to because it means you are either skipping the glove, the hammer, or the flippers somewhere (so it's about a 2 out of 3 that you're skipping a very important item by doing this break and a 3 out of 3 that you're skipping progression), but with the new hints system I have had it come up already in the simulator where I wanted to do these bomb jumps in order to get my boots earlier than they were logically available or to go over to the Skull Woods area to set up a boots walk to sequence break to the item on the Hylia Island, but these are weird scenarios and your mileage may vary.

I wouldn't say this is a correction, but I do think it's an interesting detail: Defeating Aga1 affects tree pulls - some tree pulls are removed and others are added. This is usually not noticeable in most circumstances since tree pulls become less relevant in the mid- and late-game, however this can be important to know sometimes, for example when rupee farming for Zora or PoD.

The change you mentioned about Save & Quit (S&Q) after Aga1 also effects situations in which you would want to retain a Mirror spot after having returned to the Dark World. This is a little-known fact about ALttP, but it can be VERY useful: your mirror spot is NOT erased simply by going to the Dark World! It is only erased when you Save and Quit or when you use the mirror again, so the real difficulty is getting back to the Light World while retaining your portal, but there are a few ways. For example, if you die in the overworld and you HAVEN'T yet defeated Aga1, you can select Save & Continue (instead of Save & Quit) to return to the light world. A S&C does NOT remove your previous mirror spot unlike a S&Q and so this can be leveraged to retain a mirror spot after going to the Dark World - for instance if you dived crystal TR without the ice rod. This is even (kind of) mentioned in the original ALttP Game Manual!! Under "Save & Quit" the manual has this warning: "NOTE: The location of any warp points created by the Magic Mirror will not be saved." However under the "Save & Continue" section right before the "Save & Quit" section in the manual, it does not have this warning. But this particular method of retaining your mirror portal will not work after having defeated Aga1 because the Save & Continue will put you on the Pyramid instead of returning you to the Light World.

Interesting fact: the final match in the summer tournament could have been decided in either player's favor if either player had read their game manual carefully and retained their mirror portal on laser bridge in this way after having dived Ice Rod-less TR and failed to find the Ice Rod there, but neither player used this technique to retain their portal (perhaps because it is still a relatively unknown tech). Retaining their portal would have allowed them to flute back to Death Mountain and hop right back into the dungeon at Laser Bridge instead of having to do the whole dungeon over again. Because of how close the game was, this one late-game play could have changed who walked away with the gold medal!

This Save & Continue mirror-retention trick can be very significant - I've had it come up in several races and even commentated a recent Daily race in which 2 of the 4 featured runners knew the trick and were able to use it to change the outcome of the race.

There is another way you could return to the LW, even if you HAVE defeated Aga1, and retain your mirror portal: you can perform a Chris Houlihan which spits you back out in front of Link's House regardless of whichever world you triggered it in. Unfortunately, the only place that we currently know how to preform a Houlihan in the Dark World is in the Ganon pit fall, so this has a lot less utility than the Save & Continue method since it can only be used near the end of the seed. However, it could happen that in an All Dungeons seed, for example, that you dived pendant TR without Ice Rod, but failed to find the Ice Rod in TR and so you then bailed at laser bridge. Then you find Ice Rod in GT and instead of mirroring back and redoing the whole TR dungeon you can instead climb the rest of GT, finish Aga2, and then Houlihan into the Ganon pit to return to the light world. Then you can flute to (1) and simply drop back down into your mirror spot to walk right into laser bridge and finish off Trinexx. If your opponent and you were otherwise neck and neck, this would easily gain you 2-3 minutes over them.

I know you haven't really covered sequence breaks yet, but this is the kind of stuff I nerd out about. And mostly I think it's really interesting that this particular knowledge could have changed the outcome of the 1st place Summer Tournament match. If you ever want someone to come on for a "Stupid Tech" or "Sequence Break" segment, I'm always available =P

Finally, again on the note of sequence breaks, I think one of the coolest things about Aga1 is the Aga Tower Barrier Skip - but I'm pretty biased about that one =P

Thanks for all the time and work you guys put into this series, keep 'em coming!
-Qirn (pronounced "K e r n")