We already knew that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a pretty massive game. But as it turns out, even its speedrunners aren't moving all that fast when it comes to the 100 percent completion trial.
If you want to earn notoriety as the fastest Breath of the Wild player to complete the game, top to bottom, you now have a benchmark to shoot for. According to Kotaku, a player has posted the lowest 100 percent completion time to date, and it took them a whopping 49 hours.
In case that figure is blowing your mind, remember that this is for filling out the entire Breath of the Wild checklist. There are players who are completing the game within an hour by dashing toward the finish line, but where's the fun in that? If you make a beeline straight to Ganon and defeat him, that proves little more than you've figured out a quick route to the game's conclusion and have mastered the controls well enough to defeat the big bad without much in the line of upgrades or weapons. We're not trying to belittle those efforts, but clearly that's a less impressive feat than the one that takes more than two days to "blaze" through.
As with most big adventure games, Breath of the Wild keeps track of your progress in the form of a percentage. Everything from dungeon completion to item gathering and collectible finding is included in this figure and, once you've done literally everything there is to do in the game, you'll finally hit that 100 percent mark.
For most players, that feat will never be achieved. Most folks will likely play the latest Zelda game for dozens of hours, hit a point where they're basically tired of playing and cruise on through to the finish. Stripping all of the meat off of the bone takes a very long time, even if you're playing as quickly as possible.
The current record is held by the French player Xalikah, who managed to get 100 percent in Breath of the Wild in 49 hours, nine minutes and 41 seconds.
To be clear, just like with any speedrun, Xalikah didn't just mosey through the game, get 100 percent and post their time as the lowest to date. They relied on all sorts of clever tricks to move through areas and defeat baddies more quickly, utilizing unconventional tactics along the way. Also, this is a speedrun, so the process had to be completed in one go. In the original story, Xalikah admitted that the real trick was managing to clear everything as quickly as possible once the lack of sleep started to kick in. When most games' speedruns clock in at a couple of hours, tops, we don't doubt that Breath of the Wild pushed Xalikah's skills to the limit.
As is usually the case with these types of achievements, we assume we're only a couple of weeks away from reporting how that time got beat by someone who was playing the game with a guitar controller while sitting upside-down on the couch.
