The Legend of Zelda is a bizarre aversion — it's practically impossible to maneuver yourself in a position where you're totally stuck, even if you skip the sword. It's possible to beat almost the entire game without the sword, which is a popular Self-Imposed Challenge. The only thing you need the sword for is Ganon, but if you lose to him, you warp back to the entrance of the dungeon, where you can leave and go get a sword.
In the original game, if you are unable to defeat the enemies in a locked room (especially on swordless runs), then your only options of escaping are either restarting the game or quitting. Fortunately, the save mechanic from the second controller allows players to start back at the dungeon entrance and it does not affect the death count on the save file, but your hearts will go back down to three.
A common example is encountering Ganon in the last dungeon without picking up the Silver Arrows, something easy to do. The doors lock behind you, but you can't actually finish Ganon off without the arrows. The only choice is to let him kill you. Ironically, the shutter door which can lead to forcing an unwinnable battle also acts as a safeguard to prevent the game from being unwinnable. If the player were to leave the room and not grab the Triforce after defeating Ganon, then it despawns thereby unable to rescue Zelda.
Due to all kinds of glitchy stuff in the game, it's possible to glitch Link into the floor at the start of a palace, glitch the floor so Link keeps falling through it, get Link stuck in the middle of an ocean and all kinds of other stuff where the player's only option is to reset or use the "quick end" code (which isn't even possible when stuck in the ocean). Some of this requires stuff that isn't even possible on the original console, like pressing up and down at the same time, and other glitches require the player to do things that most normal players wouldn't think of doing, like talking to the same character several times in succession and then entering a door on the right frame.
In the three palaces where blocks fall to form a wall, you can climb on top of the wall, jump, and activate the Fairy Spell to go to a glitched palace. The layout is the same as the first palace, but the palette and tileset are the same as the palace you were originally in. If, for some reason, you have not completed the first palace, you will find Horsehead at the end. If you defeat this Horsehead, the game will register as you having beat the first palace, but not the palace you originally entered. However, when you exit this glitched palace, you will find that the palace you originally entered will be destroyed as if you had completed it. If you happen to save, you'll be unable to finish the game, and you will have to delete your file and start over.
If the player tries to complete palace 3 before collecting the Handy Glove in palace 2, you might get stuck in an early room. Breakable blocks fall down on either side of a large floating platform near the ceiling. If you stand beneath the platform, the breakable blocks can wall you in on either side, and since the floating platform protects you from falling blocks above you, you can't even take any damage to die and restart the room.
Zelda II can be rendered unwinnable with the "fairy warp" glitch. It requires you to go to Darunia and jump from roof to roof until you reach the tallest building in town — then jump up off screen, use the Fairy spell, and push either left or right. You'll fall into a glitched-up town, and trying to leave will deposit you in the middle of the ocean, unable to move
There is a room that crashes the game (it tries to generate a chest that doesn't exist) that is inaccessible except through the out of bounds glitch.
It's possible to glitch your way into the first battle with Agahnim immediately after you rescue Princess Zelda at the start of the game. But if you beat him, you're transported into the Dark World — without the Magic Mirror or Moon Pearl, meaning you're stuck as Bunny Link, and with no way to do anything in the Dark World or return to the Light World. The only way out is to die or reset the game — but this does give you the option to restart at Link's house, allowing you to continue the game as normal (with a few anomalies, such as the priest being alive and the Dark World entrance in Hyrule Castle being active at the same time).
Link's Awakening is notorious for a door in the fourth dungeon, Angler's Tunnel, that can only be unlocked with an Interchangeable Antimatter Key. The door in question is located across a moat that you're meant to cross after gaining the ability to swim. Unfortunately, in early versions of the game, the designers failed to realize that Link can just barely clear the moat by jumping, leaving him with neither the swimming ability needed to finish the dungeon nor the key needed to get that ability. Both the DX version and the remake fix this by making the jump impossible.
You can get stuck in Eagle's Tower in the original (non-DX) version. If you drop one of the orbs down a certain hole, then it won't respawn properly, preventing you from completing the dungeon. It's also possible to drop the orb behind a pillar and on spikes, rendering it impossible to retrieve it.
You can trade your shovel for the boomerang, and another shovel will appear in the shop. Buy this shovel, and then your inventory will be too full in the last dungeon to pick up the Fire Rod, which you will need badly. This can be rectified by using up all your Bombs or Magic Powder, thus freeing an inventory slot... but without Magic Powder, the final boss becomes unbeatable...
The Mad Batter's cave had a less-harmful oversight in the original Japanese release: if you jumped off the ledge west of the Batter's vat, you'd end up in an area surrounded by walls with no way out except by reloading the game.
The infamous "warp glitch", a bug exclusive to the original Game Boy version of the game which allows the player to skip whole screens at a time, plays host to a number of unwinnable situations
Near the starting point of a new game is the Trendy Game, which is completely walled off by bushes — but you can teleport past them with the warp glitch. And if you haven't gotten the sword yet, you're stuck, because there's no other way to clear the bushes — and you can't warp out, either, as the glitch requires you to reach the edge of the screen. You can permanently screw your file by saving in the Trendy Game shop, which moves the save point to the shop's entrance (but this isn't a big deal, because you're at the very beginning of the game anyway).
In theory, it would make the item Chain of Deals easier. However, due to a glitch in the programming, only the next item in the player's quest will be available. If you skip ahead to the room where the final item (the Magnifying Glass) is located without having the second-to-last item (the Mermaid's Scale), the next item in the sequence will be sitting there. You will have a very hard time winning the game then, since you won't be able to complete the maze at the end without either brute-forcing every combination of moves or using the same glitch to warp directly into the final boss's room. Also, if you're unfortunate enough to save the game inside the Magnifying Glass cave after performing said glitch, you'll never be able to leave, since the mermaid statue is still blocking the entrance on the overworld.
Messing around with the glitch in caverns has a good chance of dumping you into a facsimile of the sixth or seventh dungeon long before you're supposed to enter. If you try to exit, you'll wind up stuck in the dungeon's still-hidden entrance and unable to move. This is a good reason to not experiment too much with the glitch until you've learned Manbo's Mambo and can warp out of these unwinnable situations.
There's a flooded cave in Tal Tal Heights that can be entered by falling down a pit in the mountains above it. Normally, it’s impossible to do so until after you’ve obtained the flippers, but you can access it early by screen warping. Since you aren’t able to swim, though, entering the cave from above gets you caught in an endless loop of falling into the water, drowning, and falling into the water again once you respawn.
Thanks to a glitch in the game, players can turn any item in their inventory into a bottle. This is generally regarded as very helpful when used for useless things like the claim check for the Biggoron's Sword. If it's used on something you actually need, you're SOL.
A common myth is that it is possible to use your keys in the wrong order in the Water Temple (such as raising the water level without breaking the floor with the Megaton Hammer), thus locking yourself out of completing the dungeon... and the game. This is not, in fact, a complete game-stopper; the keys are laid out to ensure you can always continue, but doing things in certain orders can make it incredibly convoluted to actually find the next one.hintThe most commonly missed key is under the floating block in the central column room where the panel to raise the water to the first level is located.
Ocarina of Time has some intricate and bizarre glitches that, when combined, can make the game completely unwinnable. The "Wrong Warp" glitch is a ridiculously complicated glitch that essentially allows you to change the destination of a post-boss fight "blue warp"note it forces the game to activate multiple scene changes at the same time, adding the two scenes' values together to transition to the wrong place; part of how you do it is by tricking the game into treating certain items like an ocarina, so that you can "play" them when you're not supposed to — speedrunners can do this to warp from the end of the Gohma fight straight to the escape from Ganon's collapsing castlenote the best way to do it is after Dodongo's Cavern, as that warp will take you straight to the end credits. The "Bottle Adventure" glitch is a similarly complicated glitch involving bottles which allows you to permanently replace one item with another item, which can be useful if you're replacing a cheap or common item with a strong or valuable one. But if you activate all the blue warps except one, then use that one to warp to the Ganon fight, and use the bottle glitch to permanently replace your Light Arrows (which you need to win the ensuing fight), the game is unwinnable.
By using a simple technique called a roll clip, it's possible for players to skip the trigger in the Forsaken Fortress for when Tetra first contacts Link using the Pirate's Charm. However, doing so has disastrous consequences later in the game: when you have to sneak aboard the pirate ship to obtain the bombs they stole, you'll get booted back to the version of the pirate ship that was parked near the Forsaken Fortress on your first visit. Not only will you not find the bombs onboard, but the ship and the fortress will both be pitch black dark, you lose your sword, and with Tetra absent, you can't get catapulted into the fortress to trigger the missing dialogue. Fortunately, you can get back to the regular world map by saving and quitting. Unfortunately, you'll have permanently lost your sword, and the King of Red Lions won't let you near the Forsaken Fortress anyway, because you don't yet have the Master Sword, which you still can't acquire without bombs. The only way of returning to the fortress to trigger the missing scene is by encountering a Moblin after losing your sword, which will boot Link into his Forsaken Fortress cell because the game assumes you’re supposed to be in stealth mode.
In the HD version, it's possible to make the game unwinnable at the exact moment you should've beaten it, by achieving a Mutual Kill during the final battle with Ganondorf. If you manage to trigger the finishing parry against him and suffer an attack that kills Link at the same time, you'll suffer a Game Over rather than the ending playing out as intended, which has the effect of confusing the game about what it's supposed to do next. As a result, any further attempts to complete the final boss battle will boot you to a glitched version of the arena where Ganondorf is stuck in his test animation and you can't interact with him or Zelda, leaving you no way to finish the game on that file.
In the Wii version, there's an infamous glitch triggered by saving and quitting after Link and Shad find the Sky Cannon in the basement of the sanctuary. Reloading the game will cause Shad to spawn at the top of the stairs; however, the game will act as though he’s still in the room with you. Midna won’t let you warp the cannon until you speak to Shad and ask him to leave, which you can’t do without going back upstairs, which triggers Shad’s dialogue that keeps you from leaving the room without solving the puzzle, essentially trapping you in a situation where The Key Is Behind the Lock. The glitch was patched in later versions of the game, including the HD remaster.
There's a game-halting bug that occurs in both versions. After crossing the Bridge of Eldin and bombing the rock wall, a piece of the bridge will be warped away to somewhere else. If you happen to save and quit before entering the Lanayru twilight, then on reloading, you’ll spawn at the entrance to Kakariko with no way to cross the still-broken bridge. Later copies of the game, as well as the HD version fixed this so that Link spawns on the bridge’s north side if you save and reload.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: The Song of the Hero quest can be made impossible to finish should the player speak to Golo the Goron a second time in Lanayru Mine, after getting the Thunder Dragon's song, but before going to the forest or volcano regions. If you save instead of loading an earlier save, prepare to restart the whole thing. Luckily, it's easy enough to avoid, and Nintendo posted a free downloadable channel that corrects the save corruption, and the bug is completely fixed in the HD remaster.
If Link is given a piece of one-time armor by an NPC - specifically, the Thunder Helm or the Zora Armor - without space for it in his inventory, it will vanish forever. The Thunder Helm is only given to you after finishing its questline, and its effects can be replicated by wearing the Rubber armor, making its loss annoying but harmless. However the Zora Armor is absolutely required in order to enter Vah Ruta, so while losing it doesn't make the game unwinnable by any means, it locks you out of Mipha's Grace, several sidequests, a Heart Container and the game's true ending. Luckily, since the game autosaves frequently and keeps many backups, this one can be fixed by just reloading an earlier save.
You can glitch your way out of the final battle — but once out, you can't teleport or save. The way to fix that is to go to Lurelin Village and play the gambling minigame, which will reactivate teleporting and saving — and will allow you to save in more places you couldn't before, like inside a Divine Beast or outside the game world itself (if you've glitched your way there). But if you save in those places, you're now completely stuck, because you can't warp from there back to Lurelin Village.
The since-patched "world reset" glitch could be used to repeatedly collect the "Wild" armor set, which you can't get rid of by selling it in a shop. Filling up your entire inventory with copies of it would prevent you from being able to use any other set of armor, including the Zora Armor. Nobody ever did this by accident; among other reasons, you need to beat all 120 shrines before you can even get the Wild set, at which point you can easily just finish the game.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: It is possible through Ultrahand abuse and ingenuity to make some of the Shrine puzzles unwinnable, by managing to get required parts into sections of the shrine that require said parts to access. It's a very tame example, as you can always warp right to the shrine's Overworld or Sky entrance which resets everything.
Defied in the Ocarina of Time Randomizer mod, which has a setting called "Logic" to specifically avoid the randomizer placing items in places impossible to reach without glitchesnote such as the Megaton Hammer being in the place of Volvagia's Heart Container or the Mirror Shield being in the place of Twinrova's Heart Container; even with glitches, both bosses require those respective items. In fact, it can be adjusted depending on the player's knowledge of and willingness to use glitches: "glitchless logic" means that the seed is beatable without any glitches at all and "glitched logic" means that it is beatable but may require certain glitches. If the player wants to for whatever reason, they can set "no logic," which means that the seed does have a chance to be unwinnable without bugs that rewrite Link's inventory.
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