Tears of the Kingdom Speedrun Clocks in at an Hour and a Half on Launch Day

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been out for less than half a day and features hundreds of hours of content, so naturally, someone has already figured out how to speedrun it in an hour and a half. An any% speedrun from Gymnast86 (spotted by VGC) was posted to YouTube less than an hour after the game launched, marking a 1:34:33 completion time. It’s both surprising and completely predictable to see the Legend of Zelda community hopping in to finish the game at blistering speeds so close to launch. If you’re OK with spoilers, you can see the Tears of the Kingdom speedrun for yourself below.

For the uninitiated, an any% speedrun is a run in which the player reaches the end of the game as fast as possible without worrying about any of the intended content in-between. That means glitches that skip major portions of a game are on the table, making any% runs one of the more creative – and fun-to-watch – categories in speedrunning. Dissecting any% runs can be especially interesting to watch, so thankfully, Gymnast86 uploaded a video detailing the process of today’s run.

While many might have assumed that some strategies from the game’s predecessor, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, would make a Tears of the Kingdom speedrun easier, the speedrunner said that this isn’t the case: “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. 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.”

You can see Gymnast86 break down his Tears of the Kingdom speedrun in the video below.

As incredible as today’s Tears of the Kingdom speedrun is, it will surely be made to look like child’s play in the coming weeks as players find new, quicker methods to complete the game. As VGC notes, the quickest any% speedrun for Breath of the Wild comes in at a whopping 23 minutes and 42 seconds. So, with any luck, we’ll see a similar time pop up for Tears of the Kingdom before too long.