Skipping an entire area is the dream of many speedrunners from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. One player spent over 6 months to skip the game’s tutorial and ultimately succeeded.
What kind of tutorial is this? In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you learn almost all the important skills you need for your entire adventure right at the beginning of the game. For this, you land on the tutorial island, which you can only leave once you have completed the introduction.
For speedrunners, this situation is a nuisance, as the tutorial takes a lot of time and cannot be skipped. Any attempt to leave the area before completing the tutorial ends with a teleport back to the island.
Here you can watch the trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
One player takes 6 months to skip the tutorial
How did he do it? In a roughly 50-minute video, YouTuber Timber summarizes how he managed to skip the tutorial. This required all sorts of glitches and bugs, including moving outside the area and transporting items across different save files using save manipulation.
Skipping the area requires a very complex process that we cannot present in detail here. For that, it’s best to watch Timber’s video. However, even in the video, he only briefly covers individual glitches; there are sometimes separate videos on how to execute the skips.
Did he do it all by himself? No, a large team from the speedrunning community of the game joined his endeavor. Together with many others who are also mentioned in the video, Timber worked on the method to leave the tutorial island without having completed the introduction.
Even though this effort may cause some head shaking, the Zelda community loves to play the games in many different ways. One player completed the new Zelda game on the Switch without ever touching the ground – How did he do that?
