Quintin Barkell
Master Griffin
ENG 101
14 September 2025
100% Games
When starting a video game, most people's goal is to have fun and beat the final boss. However, I'm not most people; when I see a new game, my goal is to do everything there is to do. This is known as 100%ing a game. Over the course of this essay, I will narrate my experience 100%ing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, also known as BOTW.
When I started researching whether BOTW was worth 100%ing, the first place I went was Speedrun.com. This website gives me a great framework for what most of the community's definition of 100% is for BOTW. It also helps me understand the minimum time investment for the game. (Take the fastest time someone did it and multiply it by two.) The next place I went for information was YouTube and Google to see what other people think 100% looks like for the game. After all of that, I now have my basic list for what is needed for 100%. Now the fun part, how do I do it? This brings us to a very important and controversial question: are glitches/exploits allowed? For me, the whole point of 100%ing is to see everything the game has to offer, so if Nintendo doesn't want to fix the glitch, then I'll exploit it to its limit. After all, BOTW requires a lot of items to max out my inventory, and duplication saves me lots of hours of work.
Now that the skeleton of my plan was finished, I had to start filling it in. To make things easier I broke it up into sections: Main, Armor, Food, NPC's, Inventory, and Weapons. With things broken into more manageable sections, I decided to find out what miscible things are in BOTW. A "miscible" is something that must be done before a certain point in the game, or it will be gone forever. These include weapons, pictures, weapon modifiers, and some useful glitches. Unfortunately, if you are not paying enough attention, or in my case, misremember a glitch, you will be forced to restart the entire playthrough, losing all in-game progress. The feeling of absolute defeat when I realised that I had to restart was soul-crushing, but, as they say, the show must go on.
While I was not happy to restart, it didn't end up being as bad as I thought it would be. After all, I already did it once, now I can do it better, and so I did. With my prior experience now forced into the forefront of my mind, I started to check things off my list at an astonishing pace. There was, unfortunately, one thing that I could not speed up: the money farming glitch. To max out my rubies (999,999), I had to move a certain structure across the map while I got attacked by enemies that could kill me with one attack. I then had to constantly push the "A" button for three hours straight. To make things better, I had to do this three times over the course of my playthrough.
BOTW is a very kind game for the casual player. There is no better example of this in the game than the Koroks. When discovered, Koroks give the player a "korok seed". To discover a Korok, you must complete their minigame, a few examples of minigames are shooting a balloon with your bow, matching a pattern using iron blocks, or even just lifting up the right rock. These are used for upgrading your inventory, and when all seeds are collected, Hestu will provide you with "Hestu's gift". The reason I said BOTW is very kind to a casual player is that it wants them to easily find lots of them without any research. In order to do this, Koroks are everywhere, totaling up to 900 of them. The good news is, every time I got a seed, it was marked on the map automatically. The bad news is that it is very easy to miss one, forcing me to double-check the region, and the seeds are only shown on the map using its maximum zoom. While it did take me a very long time to get all the seeds, I loved playing through the minigames, with such a variety of them, they never seemed to get old.
BOTW has a very expansive map with thousands of things to do. My favorite item on my completion list to finish was definitely the "Hyrule Compendium". Using the in-game camera, I took pictures of all the creatures, monsters, materials, equipment, and treasures. It was so fun to use some simple glitches to take many interesting and unique pictures. The photo I took of the "One-Hit Obliterator" is one of my favorites. As I raised the Obliterator to the sky, I caught a glimpse of its majestic visage glowing with the colors of the four elements. With the blood red light of the moon at my back, I stood where it all began, where I first awoke without my memories, only then, when all factors were perfectly aligned, the moment was immortalized with the perfect photo for my compendium.
There are many hidden little secrets around the map. The simplest one being "Treasure Dogs", these cute balls of fluff tend to hang around the many stables scattered throughout the world. When I fed them my "Seared Gourmet Steak," they had little hearts floating from the top of their heads. With their bellies full, I followed the happy dog to its buried treasure. Another fun interaction I had was talking to the many NPCs (non-player characters). With over 200 unique NPCs, I loved reading through their dialogue and learning more about them in the many journals scattered throughout the world.
After everything I've talked about in BOTW, from its expansive open world, to the many fun little secrets scattered throughout, and yes, its daunting 900 korok seeds. I still find myself loving my nearly obsessive need to 100% the game. While I don't believe 100%ing is for everyone, I encourage you to try BOTW and explore to your heart's content. After all, there is no better place to start learning the literacy of 100%ing games than to already love the game.