Exploring the Game’s Boundaries: A Timely Escape in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
One of the main features shared by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is that you can reach the final zone and pass the game without having completed the rest of the places to visit in Hyrule. However, this is not the case for the initial zone, since in both titles it is mandatory to finish it first before having total freedom to explore the map.
Speedrunners found a way to bypass this barrier in Breath of the Wild, so some wondered if the same would be possible in Tears of the Kingdom. That’s where Timber comes in, a very skilled player and speedrunner who set himself the challenge of discovering a way to escape from the Great Isle of Dawn without having to complete all of its Shrines and objectives.
For a normal player, jumping over any edge of the island and jumping into the void is suicide, because the game itself places a barrier in the form of clouds that is impossible to cross. However, Timber wanted to prove that it can be done, hence he has left us with a complete 50-minute video showing each and every one of the steps he has followed to get away with it.
Even so, there is a huge gap between words and deeds. Of course, it is not as easy to say it as it is to put it into practice, because it has taken this player no less than six months to overcome this crazy challenge. Half a year of hard work in which he has tested to satiety all kinds of techniques and has taken advantage of game failures to find a way to escape from this island in the form of tutorial without having to overcome it previously.
In any case, to complicate things even more, he not only wanted to get off the island without further ado, but he also set out to reach the final battle, in order to face the hordes of enemies before the final fight against Ganondorf. Incidentally, it is also another amazing feat to face the big final boss of the adventure with hardly any objects or materials to survive.
In any case, the video is not to be missed, because in it we can see how, for example, he tries to talk to characters so that the dialogue does not interrupt the fall as he moves towards the Hyrule plain. In addition, he takes advantage of multiple ways of fusing objects to be able to cross the ground and thus plummet to the depths of the kingdom.
This is but a thousandth part of the techniques he performs, because many times this did not give good results, since the game killed Link instantly as soon as it detected that he was touching the ground. At the same time, he also encountered the inconvenience that many times the hero of the saga was frozen in the air without being able to do anything else to avoid it.
Despite these drawbacks, nothing stopped Timber in his quest to find a way to take advantage of all the glitches of the game to achieve it. Thus, when he began to have more success in his attempts, Link took more than an hour to descend from the initial island to the final battle, but if he missed the landing site he had to start from the beginning, so there is no doubt that all this feat has tested his enormous patience.
The video is to watch it quietly and very concentrated, because what we must also recognize is that Timber has made a sublime montage. In the video he explains in detail all the steps he has followed during all these months to reduce the fall time to only about 20 minutes, and then face Ganondorf and his henchmen and finish The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with only 0.20% progress.