Zelda: Breath of the Wild speedrunners are still setting records just days before Tears of the Kingdom

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — (Image credit: Nintendo)

We're now less than a week away from the launch of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but the Breath of the Wild speedrun community still has plenty of life in it, as evidenced by a brand-new world record set just days ago.

The latest record for Breath of the Wild Any% - the category where you simply try to beat the game as quickly as possible, with no regard to other completion goals - is now 23:42. The new record was set by prolific BotW speedrunner Player 5 over the weekend, and improves by seven seconds on the previous world record, which was set by Koroks 12 days ago.

Seven seconds is a pretty extreme improvement for a new record in a game with a speedrunning community as active as Breath of the Wild, and perhaps the most notable bit is that there's plenty of room for improvement. Player 5's record comes primarily through exceptional times in the battle against Ganon. Player 5 says in the description of the YouTube video that the time to complete the Great Plateau "certainly isn't awful, but compared to my best plateau time it loses 15-16 seconds."

Player 5 adds that "this might be my last PB before TotK (we'll see if I can squeeze out another in the next week) but there's still a ton of room for improvement."

You'll likely recognize Player 5's name if you've spent any time looking a BotW speedruns - heck, just last year we were writing about how Player 5 had gotten the record as low as 25 minutes. With the Tears of the Kingdom speedrunning era nearly upon us, it's just about time to see what the old recordholders can do in the new game. As one commentor on Player 5's world record video says, "I'm actually scared of what this man will be able to do in TotK."

Tears of the Kingdom is getting a 500-page official guide, but not until a month after the game's launch.

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.