The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a beast of an open-world game. Despite the Nintendo Switch's compact size and hardware, Tears of the Kingdom is a grander take and expands upon the scale of Breath of the Wild manifold.
It goes without saying that in Tears of the Kingdom, you'll spend more time in Hyrule than ever before. This time around Nintendo packed a plethora of new terrains and abilities for Link to discover, so the journey is a long one. For those curious about how long that'll be exactly, this article will cover the duration of commitment you'll be in for.
How Long Is Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom?
On average, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will take you about 60 hours to finish. This would include the main story, a fair bit of side questing, recreational activities, and other ventures you may undertake in Hyrule, however, it isn't a done deal of a number as Tears of the Kingdom has so much more to offer.
Just like Breath of the Wild, there are hundreds of activities, weapons, and armor sets you can acquire, and doing all these can easily stretch your playtime to over 85 hours, which is nearly as long as it takes to beat Elden Ring. If you prefer progressing the main story alone, you can cut down the playthrough to about 45 hours, whereas exploring everything Tears has to offer will have you in for a longer, yet unforgettable ride.
Tears of the Kingdom 100% Completion Length
For completionists, on the other hand, their Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom playthrough will shoot upwards of 150 hours. There are simply too many side quests to count — 139 — and too many places to visit in Hyrule.
If you total all the optional content in Tears of the Kingdom, including the side adventures, side quests, shrines, finding armors, and solving puzzles, that adds up to over 400 different missions, which is absurd. The 150-hour mark is what you can imagine if you're lucky, and a more realistic assumption might be nearly 200 hours as a 100% completion rate will involve a great deal of grinding which isn't hard to wrap your head around since Tears is a massive game.
The popular playtime tracking website HowLongToBeat lists Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom as needing about 217 hours to fully complete based on thousands of player statistics. That sounds reasonable keeping what I said above in mind. The only other games that come close to this are Red Dead Redemption 2 and Persona 5, but even they fall short by over 50 hours of content. Going for 100% in Tears of the Kingdom won't be an easy task. It'll require dedication over months, and by the time you achieve that, expect to have clocked in hundreds of hours.
