BotW Any%

Breath of the Wild - Speedrun Any %

TL;DR BotW Any% Chart

As usual, I am late to the game. My initial exposure to Breath of the Wild speed runs was a run in November 2020 by Sketodara. Wait, is Link flying through the air !!!. Like I said, late to the game. Note: I am sure I got some things wrong, please correct me.

Why is he swinging his ax around randomly at the top of the Temple of Time?

Totally fascinated by this while knowing this was not a casual game mechanic, I wondered why and how, along with all of the other oddities Sketodara was doing to beat the game in Link's short-shorts.

Why did he need all of those fish when he got to the castle?

Down the Blupee Hole

Watching a collection of recent of Any% runs, it appeared they were all doing similar things, taking similar paths, but did not provide the insight I was looking for.

Luckily, speedrun.com exists and provides easy access to the underlying data for the runs, runners all of the games runner's run. Or is it games gamers game.

Going further back to older World Record Any% runs helped to explain how and why the tricks / glitches were used. Below is an annotated plot of all Any% runs over the lifetime of the game.

Watching all of the new Any% world record runs allowed the identification of when the different types of tricks, or glitches, were used and how it changed future runs.

The first large drop was right after the games release. The plot is cut off a 45 minutes, but the initial Any% runs are well over an hour long. One of the first runs, uses a bomb to get over "that gap" in Magnesis. Stasis and Epona were used heavily in these early runs by gymnast86, Ikkitrix and Ocrastraw, and the order of the shrines appeared to change from Magnesis Bombs, Cyronis, Stasis (MBCS) to Magnesis, Cryonsis, Stasis, Bombs (MCSB).

An Ikkitrix run in 2017-08 and another run by LouLouCore in 2018-05 marks the end of the initial era of speed running BotW Any%.

Watch this Clip

In late 2018, the combination of clipping into shrines, out of the Shrine of Resurrection (SoR) and the Bullet Time Bounce (BTB) knocks over 5 minutes off the fastest Any% run.

Aren't you suppose to activate the tower?

At this point, the order of shrines on the Plateau gets set as Stasis, Cryonis, Magnesis, Bombs (SCMB). Wolhaiksong and rasenurns appear to drive a the times down with just a few months, followed closely by Sketodara. There is so much to unpack here.

The Chart

The data (available from speedrun.com) from the plot can be interacted with at BotW Any% Chart where you can see the videos in context with respect to other run and submissions from the same runners.