Although The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild came out almost four years ago, folks continue to pull off incredible feats in the game. Case in point: this player nailing a Guardian with an arrow from over 1,400 meters away.
Neko is a Breath of the Wild player from Japan with an extensive resume of impressive achievements, many of which are catalogued on their YouTube and Twitter pages. But the video they uploaded yesterday definitely takes the cake.
After jumping from the balcony of the Temple of Time near the beginning of the game, Neko fires an Ancient Arrow into the sky seemingly at random. It’s only by following that arrow across a vast distance (and more than one loading zone) with a “bullet time bounce” that Neko is able to show the projectile’s destination: an unsuspecting Guardian, which is soon reduced to a pile of smoke and rubble.
Neko says the Guardian is over 1,400 meters away from their starting position, but that’s not a number they guessed at. By combining the Bird Man Research Study mini-game (which measures how far you can travel with Link’s para-glider) with a couple of glitches, Neko is able to come up with a fairly accurate distance for their sniper shot. It’s all explained in the video (make sure to enable English subtitles if you can’t read Japanese).
Breath of the Wild is one of the best open-world games of all time, and it’s a testament to how well the developers at Nintendo blended intricate mechanics with a rich physics-based environment that players continue to challenge themselves in this way.