If the game detects that its cartridge is a pirated copy, Zelda's hair will turn into a giant pentagon in cutscenes, fishing will always result in a hooked fish escaping after 51 frames of animation, and Spoiler:the exit to Ganon's Castle during the escape sequence will be blocked off to Link, as Zelda will run right through the bars, leaving Link behind and making the game impossible to finish.

Much like how Bowser's laugh in Super Mario 64 is sped up for use as the Boo's laugh, Ganondorf's laughter is sped up to create the laughter of the Poe Sisters in the Forest Temple.

While Link being able to manually jump either on his own like in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link or through the use of an item like the Roc's Feather from The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening is a recurring ability in the series, several 3D installments forgo this in favor of having Link jump automatically at the edge of a platform. There are conflicting claims by series producer Eiji Aounuma and series co-creator Shigeru Miyamoto as to who thought of the automatic jump during the development of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and why. Aonuma claimed the autojump was directly inspired by the Roc's Feather and he had it implemented due to his own poor ability at playing platform games, wishing that the game could do the jumping for him. Miyamoto on the other hand claimed that he had thought of the autojump one morning and sprung it on the development team, who were planning to add a manual jump and were previously used to making Mario games, as an intentional limitation to see if they could "do all kinds of things." Manual jumping would be incorporated into a 3D Zelda game for the first time with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.