Zelda Tears Of The Kingdom Gameplay Speedrun 100 Percent Completion

Getting All Four Tears and Beating the Final Boss Fast

100 percent completion in Tears of the Kingdom means finding all four light of the gods, completing every side quest, unlocking every temple, and having enough rupees and stamina to actually pull off some of these routes without choking on movement timers. The standard any% route clocks in around two hours if you know your glider resets and Utrae skips by heart, but adding the full completion requirements pushes that to roughly four to five hours for a skilled runner. It is a lot of backtracking disguised as linear progression. The difference between a clear run and a 100 percent speedrun is mostly about how you handle shrine hunting, temple key collection, and the Zonai device inventory management between zones. Standard runners skip content. A 100 percent runner has to thread it in without losing momentum. I learned that the hard way during my first attempt when I spent twenty minutes searching for a specific shrines puzzle solution because I had never pre-planned which order to hit the temples in. My workaround was simple: I mapped out the four main temples in reverse emotional damage order, starting with Wind Temple since it has the most straightforward navigation, then Fire, Water, and Light last because they demand the most precise timing. Temple order matters more than people admit. Wind has a wind current skip that saves about forty seconds if you time the updraft correctly near the middle pillar. Fire requires you to collect three fire-based Zonai constructs for the torch puzzles and you can combine them into a single device to skip two separate interactions. Water is where most runners lose time because the underwater sections force slow movement and the puzzle solutions are harder to memorize on the fly. Light is the final boss build-up and you need to make sure your inventory is not cluttered with useless devices before you enter because the game does not let you drop items mid-battle, which means you have to plan your loadout before the door opens.

The real bottleneck in 100 percent runs is not the temples. It is the side content. You need to clear all shrines, which means finding and solving thirty plus individual challenges spread across the map. The quickest method I found was grouping shrines by region and running them in a clockwise loop from the Great Plateau outward. This cut my shrine hunting time from roughly an hour down to about twenty-five minutes because I stopped backtracking across the entire map between distant shrines. I also learned to skip the combat-focused shrines when possible by using the Ultrahand ability to lift entire terrain pieces and drop them on the enemies rather than fighting them manually. That trick alone saved me about twelve minutes across all shrines. Another thing nobody talks about is the inventory management between shrines. You are constantly switching between Zonai devices, weapons, and materials, and every menu navigation adds up. I recommend binding a simple loadout template that includes a glider, a few basic Zonai constructs, and a healing meal. Having this preset means you spend less time fumbling through menus and more time actually running. The game itself does not have a quick-loadout system, so you have to build one yourself using the inventory management features available during pause sequences. Some runners try to combine temple completion with shrine hunting in the same region, but that usually leads to worse times because the transition costs are higher. A cleaner approach is to complete one temple, then immediately handle the nearest shrines, then move to the next temple. This keeps your route efficient and reduces the chance of accidentally triggering cutscenes that reset movement timers or cause unintended saves. One cutscene skip I found useful was in the Fire Temple where you can use the Ascend ability to bypass a long corridor sequence, saving approximately eight seconds per attempt.

The final boss fight itself is not particularly difficult for speedrunners because you can cheese it with repeated Rito jumps and bomb arrows from range, but the 100 percent completion requirement means you need to have the correct number of hearts and stamina vessels before engaging. I typically aim for at least fifteen heart containers and three full stamina wheels before the final battle. Anything less and you risk dying mid-fight, which adds unnecessary time. The race clock does not stop during deaths, so each retry costs you at least thirty to forty seconds minimum, and usually more if you lose your position or momentum. If you are new to this, start with a practice run where you focus only on learning the temple layouts and shrine locations without worrying about the clock. Once you can complete each temple in under twenty minutes and clear a region's shrines in under ten, then start adding the timing pressure. The transition from casual play to timed execution is where most runners stall out, and it usually takes several weeks of consistent practice to get comfortable with the movement tech required. Glider reset optimization alone can save you two to three minutes across a full run if you practice the technique enough to land it consistently under pressure. There are also a few edge cases where the run can go sideways. If you miss a single shrine, you have to backtrack, which can add five to fifteen minutes depending on where you are on the map. I once missed a shrine near the Lanayru region and had to loop back across the entire eastern map, costing me over twelve minutes and forcing me to restart the sequence. The lesson was to mark shrine locations on my mental map before leaving each region, and to verify completion before moving to the next area. It sounds obvious, but under pressure it is surprisingly easy to overlook.

Another common pitfall is overcomplicating your Zonai device builds. Beginners often construct elaborate machines that look impressive but take too long to assemble and are fragile under speedrun conditions. Simple is better. A basic floating platform with a propeller fan is usually sufficient for most traversal needs and takes about two seconds to deploy. Time spent building complex contraptions adds up faster than you think, and breakdowns mid-route are frustrating and costly. For download links and community resources, the speedrun.com page for Tears of the Kingdom lists the current world records and provides tool-assisted speedrun videos that break down frame-perfect inputs for each skip and route optimization. Watching TAS runs is the fastest way to learn advanced techniques because you can see exactly when to press buttons and where to position Link for maximum efficiency. I found that studying the current 100 percent completion WR of around four hours and fourteen minutes helped me identify which sections of my run needed the most improvement. The gap between a good runner and a great runner is usually in the smaller details, like how you angle your glider during a specific air dodge or how quickly you can cancel certain animations. The main takeaway is that 100 percent completion speedrunning in Tears of the Kingdom is less about raw skill and more about preparation, route planning, and consistency. You can be the fastest mover in the game, but if you waste time in menus or miss a required objective, your run falls apart. Practice the routes until they are muscle memory, keep your inventory organized, and do not get distracted by optional content that does not contribute to the completion requirement. The clock does not care about your curiosity.