A Link to the Past: Randomizer / YMMV

Demonic Spiders: Through simply putting certain enemies and traps in situations the vanilla game never considered, Enemizer turns a few already-tough enemies into severe roadblocks.
- Rollers and Chain Chomps are capable of doing several hearts worth of damage even with the mail upgrades and the former can be found in grass and bushes.
- Giant Spike Traps are often placed in rooms that don't give the player as much room to avoid them, such as the Palace of Darkness bridge or the Ganon's Tower cross-lantern puzzle. They can also hide in grass and bushes.
- Everyone's old favorite, Lynels, can appear almost anywhere, well before the player has anything in their arsenal that can actually damage them.
- Thieves are also far more common and still do their knockback (now in areas that actually have Bottomless Pits). They are always killable in "shuffled" mode, but in "random" mode they are only killable 50% of the time, which can be extremely annoying.
- Shuffling bosses can also bring about a hefty difficulty spike. Sure, some bosses are easier (Kholdstare and Vitreous in either of the Moldorm arenas, or Mothula pretty much anywhere other than Skull Woods), but if your run takes you through Trinexx in the Armos Knights arena of Ganon's Tower then you're in for a lot of pain. The Skull Woods boss room can turn nearly any boss into a difficulty spike, including Armos Knights, Lanmolas, Helmasaur King, and Blind. (However, the behavior of Helmasaur King in this area is also hilarious, as seen below.)
Discredited Meme:
- The team who provide running commentary for tournament races had to institute a rule against jokingly accusing players who use tricks such as hovering of "cheating," and doing so in Twitch chat tends to get one's comments deleted by moderators, as it can confuse newcomers to the scene.
- "Is this even randomized?" whenever anything vanilla happens in the seed (finding the Book of Mudora in the Library, the Green Pendant in Eastern Palace, and so on). Regardless of how off-the-wall everything else is, some wise-ass will invariably complain about it being boring, even if the streamer doesn't comment on it themselves. Andy has a bot in his chat which types "Is this even randomized?" in response to "!badmeme". Sadly, people still quote it all the time.
- The final chest in the vanilla game, just past the second Moldorm fight, was originally used to confirm that two racers were using the same randomized seed, thus "validating" the run. In later versions, more reliable methods were implemented, but the chest is still known as the "Validation Chest", and opening it is treated as a tradition, even though the chances of it containing something useful are miniscule. That way, the chat can get a kick out of announcing, "Run validated!" The commentary team have a standing rule against such jokes to avoid confusing people, but they have little authority over the chat. Calling the single arrow pickup a "validation arrow" is met with derision, as well.
Good Bad Bugs: Everything listed on LttP still applies, but there are a handful of glitches that were either not as useful in the vanilla game or not permitted under vanilla speedrun rules. The following are permitted and useful in randomizer:
- It is possible to trick the code into believing Link is climbing stairs when he isn't, allowing him to clip through walls. The most popular application of this bug, nicknamed Icebreaker, allows the player to bypass some of the trickiest and most time-consuming rooms in the Ice Palace.
- Rail-clipping: using a bomb, the Cane of Somaria, or Hookshot to force Link to clip through a seemingly impassable rail. It allows the player to skip most of Tower of Hera ("Herapot"), eliminates the need for Back Tracking through the west side of Swamp Palace ("Diver Down"), and allows Link to leap directly from a collapsing bridge to the big chest in the Palace of Darkness with the help of a bomb explosion. ("Hammeryump," also legal in vanilla.) A few of these rail clips, such as the Hammeryump, should not be done in a cross-dungeon door shuffle - doing these can normally break your game, even in Keysanity seeds. (Recent versions of door shuffle feature a setting that can either place thicker rails that will prevent clips that could break your seed, or constrain all entrances to each room that contains such a rail to the same dungeon.)
- Water-walking: tricking the game into allowing Link to run on water instead of swim. He can navigate Lake Hylia and Zora's Domain much more quickly (particularly with boots), and it removes the need for Flippers. It's most often done during Zora checks, since it will allow the player to also check the double-chested fairy (gives the Red Boomerang and the Level 2 shield in vanilla) even without Flippers, though it requires the Moon Pearl to pull off.
- "Invisible chest": If Link Mirrors into the Light World and leaves the purple chest behind, the game will assume that the chest is still being dragged behind Link for a few frames. This allows him to dash freely when delivering it to the desert thief, when normally that will cause him to drop the chest.
- "Hovering", which occurs by pressing the button to dash, releasing it for one game frame, and then pressing it again within a second. As long as the player keeps doing this, Link can walk over a pit without falling; done enough times, Link will be able to cross the pit. This is very difficult to do, but it is tournament-legal as long as a player is not using a turbo controller to do it. It can enable players to do quite a number of useful Sequence Breaks and is particularly useful in the door randomizer.
- More a visual bug than a game mechanics bug, but Helmasaur King's tail physics operate under the assumption that the floor underneath him doesn't move at all. When the Boss Shuffle setting puts him in Mothula's room, however, the moving floor causes his tail to go haywire, making it both unable to hit you and also utterly hysterical to watch. As noted on the Fan Nickname entry in the Trivia page, the fans have named this particular combination Helmacopter.
Funny Moments:
- Vinesauce gave us the immortal lines, "TEN ARROWS!? I DID ALL THAT FOR YOU??!", and "ONNNE RUPEEEEEE?!?!
- The Halloween edition. The intro cinematic shows the familiar image of a charred skeleton on the throne. "Even the King dressed up!"
- Wart squashing Ganon into oblivion, taking his place as the Halloween boss.
  "trick or treat, smell my feet"
- In the pool of randomized items, there are many that appear only once, and those are naturally harder to find. Most of them are progression items, or ones that are at least somewhat useful. But one of them is... a single arrow. Considering that the item pool contains twelve stacks of ten arrows, and additional arrows can be freely found under pots or dropped by enemies anywhere, being rewarded with a single arrow is a slap in the face. What's worse is that the hint tiles will include it among its "unique items", along with all of the useful ones.
- When Helmasaur is shuffled into Mothula's room... just see for yourself.
- The April Fool's 2021 festive mode has a verbose mode which simply Google Translates every textbox (horribly), Hilarity Ensues.
- The festive, there are other bizarre changes that can be made, such as shuffling the sfx instruments which can change Link's grunt into, well, anything. If flute locations are shuffled, wherever leads to Kakariko Village will instead drop Link right into Kakariko well. There's also an option to alter Link's sprite, either to render him upside down or have his head be a random offset from his body. But the offset isn't constant for every frame, meaning it's offset randomly for each animation; get used to Link's head jittering everywhere.
Memetic Mutation:
- It's fairly common for viewers to rate a so-called Hype Cave "[x] out of 10", depending on the results. Such places include the Mini-Moldorm Cave, the Paradox Cave, Kakariko Well, Blind's Hut, and other item-dense locations.
- Demanding to know "What are those?" whenever someone finds the Pegasus Boots. It's a reference to this Vine in which a man asked a police officer this question in an accusatory manner.
- Chiming "That's gotta be cane" whenever a Cane item is found.
- Counting the "blue balls" in each Agahnim fight in the style of The Count from Sesame Street. ("One! Ah-ah-ah-ah! Two! Ah-ah-ah-ah!", and so on.)
- Within the SMZ3 community, it's not an uncommon joke to suggest that other Metroid and Zelda games that share a console be combined into a randomizer, such as Prime / Echoes and Wind Waker (GameCube), Fusion and Minish Cap (Game Boy Advance), or Samus Returns and A Link Between Worlds (Nintendo 3DS).
Scrappy Mechanic: Pot shuffle is mostly felt to add tedium, since you just have to check a bunch of pots in the same room to find keys, and it was removed from the main randomizer branch. The only mode where it's currently an option is, not coincidentally, the only mode where it can meaningfully affect the logic: in door shuffle, it could result in pots actually being shuffled into different dungeons, or at least parts of the same dungeon that are connected in novel ways.
Scrappy Weapon: While you wouldn't notice it as much during the base game, the Fighter's Sword, the very first sword you get, can be an extremely difficult weapon to use depending on how the seed plays out. In the vanilla game, you never really face anything that the Fighter's Sword couldn't handle decently before claiming the Master Sword; here, you'll feel just how pitiful it can be if you're forced to face mid to late-game enemies with it due to it's massively underwhelming power (Lynels are impervious to it, have fun if they're randomized to appear more often around the world) and its incredibly short length. If you're especially unlucky, it might be your only weapon for a long while, and if you're using a seed that randomizes enemy placement, it can get insane pretty quickly.
Self-Imposed Challenge: Try playing two seeds with the same input from one controller. If you're that crazy, go ahead and add as many more seeds to play simultaneously.

YMMV / A Link to the Past: Randomizer

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