Breath of the Wild expert explains all his fancy tricks

Nowadays, if you watch a clip of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, chances are very good you’ll feel bewildered. Between the speedrunners, trick shotters, and combat aces embracing the open world adventure, we’re still routinely seeing the game pushed to new limits. Case in point, in 2020 alone, Breath of the Wild fans discovered 20 new bugs that can exploit the game in all sorts of ways.

Seeing is one thing, though, and doing is another. If you’ve ever wanted to emulate the masters who do neat things in Breath of the Wild, you might find yourself overwhelmed — where would you even start? The good news is that there are resources out there for you. In mid January, known combat guru Max ‘RinHara5aki’ Blumenthal released a massive combat glossary via Google Docs that breaks down all sorts of techniques, from advanced parries to flurry rush variants.

Be warned: The document is so huge, Blumenthal recommends viewing it on desktop rather than mobile. I’m on a Mac Air and the thing is so demanding it’s slowing down my computer! Part of it is because it’s so comprehensive, with Blumenthal promising to add more tricks over time. But also, the doc includes a variety of GIFs that show you exactly what you want to look out for, along with button inputs. He also tells you the difficulty you can expect from each move, and whether it’s actually useful or if it exists more for show. Some things just look cool!

Here’s one quick example out of many: the Effect Persistence Spin, an easier trick that was discovered by neo_bocchi. Blumenthal writes:

Image: Nintendo via Max ‘RinHara5aki’ Blumenthal

The Effect Persistence Spin is an alternate version of the Bow Spin, allowing you to keep elemental effects infinitely while spinning. While it does have an upper hand over the Bow Spin by being able use the Great Flameblade’s effects and having a wider attack range, its inferior because of its horrid setup. You must waste all of your stamina and start to spin a little before your stamina recovers back to full. Approaching a fight with 0 stamina ahead of time just to perform this technique makes it hard to recommend doing consistently, but because of its range and elemental output it can be useful to cause chaos in mass mob fights.

You can read the whole thing here (assuming your computer can handle it).