The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is already being conquered in less than an hour by speedrunners. Speedrunner gymnast86 has taken down Ganon and seen the credits in 58 minutes and 1 second, faster than I could even get off the Great Plateau. Using a combination of tricks and glitches, speedrunners are blazing through Hyrule, but some methods are causing a stir in the speedrunning community.

Besides optimizing their routes, speedrunners are using a technique called "whistle sprinting" to keep Link moving at top speed. Whistle sprinting involves holding the D-pad down to whistle while tapping B. This allows you to keep Link sprinting while recovering stamina and saves a significant amount of time. The technique causing some controversy amongst speedrunners though is the use of amiibo. By using the Super Smash Bros. Link amiibo you can summon Epona, a technique the speedrunner in second place, Orcastraw, utilizes.

While some Redditors voiced dissent about the use of amiibo summons, the first place speedrunner, gymnast85, who doesn't use the amiibo technique in his runs, stated, "To me, it seems silly to want to get rid of a cheap piece of plastic which makes runs of this game slightly faster." Since speedrunning is all about using glitches and tricks to shave time off a game completion, I have no idea why anyone would get up in arms about using an amiibo. However, I'm not a speedrunner myself, so maybe that community has some hangups of which I'm not aware.

Gymnast86 says that his world record completion wasn't even a good run. Speedrunning Breath of the Wild is still in its infancy, and as time goes on, there will be more and more timesaving techniques discovered. While I'm more of the type to take it slow and see the scenery, I love seeing what speedrunners discover about a game in their quest to shave seconds off their overall completion time. I know I'll be keeping eyes on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's speedrunning scene to see just how short of a time someone can complete the game in the future.