TOTK Replay Ideas and Challenge Runs

9

Stay at base stats

Image: Nintendo via PointCrow/YouTube

The rule: Hold at 3-4 hearts. Skip every stamina upgrade for the entire game.

Ignore every Light of Blessing that you collect. You won’t be cashing them in. Time to see how much of the game you can tackle with Link precisely as strong as he is after the game’s first encounter with Ganon — not very! To make this remotely doable, you’re going to lean hard into stealth and puzzle-solving. You’re going to build Zonai tanks to do your fighting for you. You’re going to study your enemies’ weaknesses and figure out ways to take them down environmentally. Brute forcing your fights will no longer be an option.

8

Ration your healing

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

The rule: Cap how many dishes you can eat mid-fight, or ban hearty meals outright.

Will you commit to a hard limit on how many snacks you can have during battle? Or will you implement a blanket ban on hearty recipes — e.g., anything that replenishes Link’s health? Again, this will force you to rethink your combat strategy. Anything that hurts you too badly, something you might have previously shrugged off, will become a nonstarter. You’ll need to start dodging instead of tanking, and dedicate a few minutes to planning your strategy before you trigger a fight.

7

Commit to permadeath

Image: Nintendo

The rule: Die once, and the save resets. No exceptions.

This one’s simple. Did you get a black screen of death? Time to start over. (To make this slightly less repetitive, you might choose to make your start-over save a little later in the game — say, just after the tutorial.) Treat every Bokoblin camp like it might end your run, because any errant arrow could. In Tears of the Kingdom, there’s a good chance you’ll be taken out by a Gloom Hand, so be extra careful if you’re anywhere near one of their spawn points. This playstyle is gnarly but rewarding. If you go for it, check out the r/LinkDies subreddit for strategy and community as you play.

6

Rush Mineru first

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

The rule: Unlock Mineru as early as possible.

After you’ve gained control of Link and are down on the Hyrulean mainland, beeline toward Mineru. Anything that the game throws you first, any “main” quests that NPCs try to guide you toward — ignore it, that’s side content now. There is only Mineru. Find Mineru. (Don’t know where she is? Check the storm clouds over the game’s Faron region.)

Why do this? Mineru, once unlocked, can be very helpful for mining ore and assisting with crowd control in combat. Since the game does not want you doing this first, though, just be aware that you will experience dialogue and cutscenes that assume you’re further along than you are…which will make your next foray into Hyrule a strange, nearly glitchy-feeling pacing experience.

5

Fight only with machines

The rule: Fight with Zonai machines only. No swords, no bows.

The first time you prepare for a real enemy encounter, put the blade away and reach for your Zonai parts instead. Whatever contraption you can cobble together has to do the fighting for you. This can look like a series of simple Zonai weapons — but try to put on your Hyrulean engineering helmet and think outside the box. This approach will turn fights that used to be simple button-mashing fun into something closer to a steampunk tower-defense puzzle.

4

Set yourself an Eventide challenge

Image: Nintendo via Polygon

The rule: Every time you enter a new region (or activate a new tower – your choice), drop everything. Weapons, armor, food, materials, all of it. Rebuild from scratch. Repeat.

Eventide Island was a fan favorite Breath of the Wild challenge because it forced players to stop mid-game and re-enact the survival-level stakes of the tutorial plateau…with enemies very much not at tutorial level. Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t have a direct Eventide Island quest analog, so why not create that challenge yourself? Every time you expand the map or head to a new region, reset completely. That means a shirtless Link and a zeroed-out inventory. Then, start improvising with whatever you find near: A dropped club, a random mushroom, whatever the region hands you. This will force you into the scrappy problem-solving mindset that the game doesn’t really demand after you’re a few hours in.

3

Prioritize Zelda’s path

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

The rule: Chase every dragon tear memory in order before advancing Link’s main quest.

Once you’re on the mainland and you can start locating Dragon’s Tears, get to work. Hold off on any of Link’s present-day objectives until you’ve found all of them. Bonus points for doing them in the order you’ll find in the back room of the Forgotten Temple. This is a forced way to go about your run, but in some ways it feels true to lore: If Link was looking for Zelda and happened across one of her memories in an unexpected gigantic geoglyph, wouldn’t he drop everything to locate all of those memories?