Tears of the Kingdom speedrunners have finally broken a major milestone

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom can’t be accused of being a short game. It’s not an overstatement that if you so wish, you can spend hundreds of hours in Hyrule before exhausting all the content on offer. Some players don’t really care about any of this, though. They want to get to the end fast. They’re called speedrunners and have now broken a major milestone in TOTK.

Whenever a new game launches, especially one as big as TOTK, you can always bet there will be speedrunners trying to squeeze out a playthrough in as little time as possible. Speedrunning heavily relies on finding holes and glitches in the game’s design to advance from one place to another much faster than the developers intended. TOTK has an inherent feature that heavily impedes quick playthroughs, but even that couldn’t stop one speedrunner from reaching the end credits in under an hour.

What is the fastest speedrun of Tears of the Kingdom?

Japanese speedrunner Zdi6923 posted his milestone achievement on YouTube, the first Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom speedrun to go below one hour. The precise time in which Zdi finished his Any% Tears of the Kingdom run is 59 minutes and 22 seconds, three minutes faster than the previously known record. Of these 59 minutes, around 38 were spent in the tutorial area.

This is the speedrunning obstacle we mentioned. At least for now, no one has come up with a way to skip the Great Sky Island or at least reduce the time it takes to go past it and into Hyrule Kingdom. Apparently, the game is coded to kill you whenever you try to leave the island without completing all of its shrines, which forces speedrunners to do what they hate the most–actually playing the game.

Tears of the Kingdom speedrunners have been steadily bringing down the minimum time for completion since launch day. It took less than 24 hours after release for a speedrunner to finish Tears of the Kingdom in just 94 minutes. The unskippable (for now) Great Sky Island played a big part in halting others from bringing that number down below the one-hour mark, but Zdi6923 has broken this major milestone just three weeks after the game launched.