The earliest known showcasing of the trick comes from a group of Chinese players experimenting and exploring the game. They posted it in a compilation video in August. Another player named LegendofLinkk recreated it and, since then, the game’s speedrunning community has been playing around with the trick in order to find radical new shortcuts through the game.

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High-speed blasts are not completely uncharted territory for Breath of the Wild; early speedruns made heavy use of “stasis-launches,” which allowed players to freeze items with their stasis runes, hit them to build momentum, and then ride them great distances. Some launches involved players allowing Link to get hit by objects in order to fly faster. This new bullet time bounce trick is a bit trickier to perform but, when executed correctly, it takes less time, making it perfect for speedrunners.

Breath of the Wild has been undergoing something of a speedgame bonanza over the last few months as more and more glitches have been discovered, many of them involving the shield. For example, players have found that it’s possible to clip out of bounds using the shield, which makes it easy to enter shrines and skip obstacles. This latest shield bouncing trick has the potential to shake up many of the game’s routes, particularly in the early game, and with these new tactics emerging, it seems likely that we’ll see even more changes coming to the game’s speedruns soon. As for casual players: if you ever wanted to bounce off an enemy so hard that your game needs to stop and load the rest of the world while you move, now’s your chance to give that a try.