Rejoice! The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is officially out. It hasn’t even been 24 hours yet and someone has beaten it in under 2 hours. Zelda speedrunner gymnast86 posted a time of 1:34:33 for a full speedrun of the game without the use of any amiibo. The game has only been out for a day so the record is likely to be broken in the coming days, weeks, and years.
Gymnast86 has released the run on his YouTube page and has released a separate video explaining how he pulled it off. He showed the basic route he followed to complete the game and shared some of the tricks he used. Gymnast86 also noted that some of the tricks that were possible in Breath of the Wild have been ‘fixed’ by Nintendo. “From what we can tell, almost none of the glitches that were present in Breath of the Wild seem to have made it into Tears of the Kingdom”, he notes.“That doesn’t necessarily mean that we won’t ever be able to perform these glitches, but just that the methods we know of activating them in Breath of the Wild won’t work in this game.”
In gymnast86’s speedrun, he utilizes the new Fuse ability which lets Link attach different objects and materials to weapons and shields and Ultra Hand which lets Link fuse two items together. Gymanst86 notes that with these new abilities, it seems all but inevitable that players will discover new techniques in order to reduce the time. “Once again, these strategies will probably be outdated pretty quickly, so if it’s been a few days since this video has been published, be sure to seek out newer information.”