What does it take to be a world-record-holding speedrunner for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? Well, being French helps a lot. The current world record holder for BOTW, Player5, says that the French dialogue shaves about 4 seconds off his run, compared to English — and with a time of just 24 minutes and 15 seconds, 4 seconds is quite significant.
Player5's record-breaking run was posted on Sunday, May 15th, and beat the runner-up by over 30 whole seconds, putting him well in the lead. "I actually don't do a lot of practice off-stream," he said while streaming the run. "Mostly it's just the on-stream runs I do."
The run is an Any% one, which means that the only required goal is to get to the end of the game. Other runs — like the "All Dungeons" one, the "All Main Quests" one, and "All Shrines", are self-explanatory and take much longer; usually a matter of hours. The 100% speedrun record — which requires runners to complete all Shrines, all Divine Beasts, all quests, all upgrades, all Koroks (!), and all towers — is currently just over 16 and a half hours.
Using a combination of glitch tricks, Player5 whisks Link across the map, grabs the powers from the Great Plateau, chats to King Rhoam a bit, and then zooms his way over to Hyrule Castle for the final fight with Ganon, who is unsurprisingly a pushover despite Link only having two hearts. And that's it!
Here's how Player5 described the world record run:
Very good run with most of the timesave being in paraglider (loads) and castle. There's still small amounts of timesave in the other plateau splits and blights, but overall I'm happy with the run. 24:0x is definitely doable, but sub 24 will probably require some riskier strats.
Player5 is no newcomer to the Breath of the Wild throne — he's currently sitting on a first-place run for All Main Quests (2 hours, 21 minutes, 59 seconds) and All Dungeons (1 hour, 31 minutes, 49 seconds), as well as a first-place 28 minute 16 second run that's entirely "Damageless". He's just very good at Zelda.
But 24:15 is only the best time... so far. According to the Best Theoretical Time, which combines all of the best segments from all of the best players, it's humanly possible to complete Breath of the Wild in just 21 minutes and 20 seconds. So... stay tuned?
If you love speedruns, don't forget that speedrunning and charity fundraising event Summer Games Done Quick is happening soon, beginning on Saturday, June 26th and wrapping up on Sunday, July 3rd. It'll be in person again this year, and you can check out the schedule by vising the GDQ website!
Did you learn any speedrun tips from Player5's run? Tell us in the comments!
[source speedrun.com]
Comments 16
Cool, I’ll have to watch this run later
Incredible time save. For a game as commonly run as BOTW, finding a way to save an extra half minute is mind boggling.
Also on topic, why for Zelda games do top runners tend to use European languages instead of Japanese, which is usually seen as the standard? Wind Waker is Italian, Twilight Princess is German and BOTW here is French. Is there a particular reason why it's faster than Japanese?
Haven't been in to speedrunning in like 5 years but the Zelda ones back then were pretty impressive, particularly OoT which got real weird. My favourite run is the Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon ones due to all the weird techniques only found in the Japanese version
@Fizza - I cannot say for certain, but some languages used Speed up the text loadout, speeding up the games forced scenarios.
@Fizza In BotW the text in the cutscenes goe faster in French.
@BTB20 @Paraka Oh I get it now. Since the cutscenes now have voice acting, picking the language where it gets read the fastest would make a lot of sense.
Oh nice! I'll give it a watch later tonight, I love watching runs of this game.
Suggestion for Nintendolife:
I think it's fantastic that you support the speed running community with bits like this, and I personally love them. But would it be possible to make a habit of putting WHAT world record you are talking about in the headline?
I know you're slaves to the almighty click, but I think you'll find that it's counterintuitive here. Because some people only follow one or two categories, rather then generate an extra click by getting them to click on an article they have no interest in, what the lack of a category is really doing is making it so they ignore the articles altogether.
24 minutes is just about long enough for me to figure out where I am after my 4th time in a row getting lost. No, actually that probably takes an hour. I guess I won't get world record. 🤪
Does he play it on a real Switch or PC emulated?
@Fizza It depends on how much text is displayed. If I remember right, A Link to the Past had less text displayed on the Japanese version, resulting in a faster run. There are glitches present in some versions that are not in others, so this could also be why certain runners choose certain localizations.
It seems that the French version has the least amount of text displayed for BoTW, at least for any%. There's another category where Italian shaves off time at the last cutscene due to having less text to skip.
@HeadPirate The thumbnail in the video says "ANY PERCENT." This fact is also written in the third paragraph of the article. I'm pretty sure that those who want to can figure it out lol.
@Bydlak I just messaged the runner. He said he plays it on the Switch for accuracy, and that emulated runs are not allowed for the leaderboards.
did anyone tell him the game isnt linear?
@BloodNinja
Ninja, thanks for sorting it out! That's good to hear. His achievements are truly legit this way.
@Bydlak You’re welcome
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