Players finally getting ready to settle down for a lengthy adventure in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom may be wondering just how long it will take to beat it.
Well, get ready, grab a lifetime’s worth of snacks, and strap in, as your adventure in Hyrule will be a long one.
How Long to Complete Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
It will take players anywhere between 50 to 80 hours to beat all of Tears of the Kingdom’s main story and see its credits roll. Those looking to complete every side quest will likely take around 70 to 120.
However, completionists looking to clear every single piece of side content are looking at hundreds of hours.
HowLongToBeat, a site that catalogs people’s playtime and creates a rough estimate for video game lengths, states that TOTK will take players 48.5 hours to beat its main story and 68 hours to beat the story and side content.
However, this isn’t necessarily 100% accurate, and many reviewers have stated that the game took them substantially longer.
According to the Washington Post’s review of Tears of the Kingdom, writer Gene Park said:
By the end of my 60-hour run through the main quest, I hadn’t even found half of the 199 side adventures available, let alone completed even a quarter of them.
Here is how long it took other reviewers to beat the game (but not necessarily all content):
Tears of the Kingdom’s considerable length makes sense considering it is Nintendo’s biggest game to date!
Is Tears of the Kingdom Longer than Breath of the Wild?
Yes, Tears of the Kingdom has a significantly longer run time than Breath of the Wild.
BOTW took roughly 50 hours to beat its campaign and around 100 to complete all side content. For most players, Tears of the Kingdom may be 30 hours longer on average than BOTW.
This should come as no surprise, as Tears of the Kingdom is a substantially bigger game in almost every way. From new towns to a greater focus on story, fans can expect a more expansive experience.
Not only can players now explore sprawling dungeons akin to those found in classic Zelda games, but there are also dozens of sky islands teeming with things to do.
According to the Ask the Developer interview hosted by Nintendo, Tears of the Kingdom’s technical director, Takuhiro Dohta, stated that they were held back when developing BOTW due to the Wii U.
For example, they couldn’t add flying or underground spaces despite lead developer Eiji Aonuma desperately wanting it.
So, when they began developing Tears of the Kingdom, they started creating the world from scratch, allowing them to make it much bigger. That’s why the sequel’s scale, and thus length, is far greater than BOTW.
You can read the full quote from Dohta below:
Actually, the previous title, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, was originally developed for Wii U, so there were restrictions in development. There were a lot of ideas we wanted to implement during its development, but we made clear decisions on what we wouldn’t do in that game.
