Highlights
- A player managed to obtain the Master Sword in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom without obtaining the paraglider.
- The player accomplished this by staying on the Sky Islands, completing 20 shrines to unlock the necessary stamina, and using fairies to survive fall damage.
- This achievement showcases the game’s open-world design and adds to the impressive paraglider-free challenges completed by the fandom.
While obtaining the Master Sword in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom normally requires adventuring all across the game’s world, one tenacious player managed to do it without so much as descending from the Hyrule Sky in order to obtain the paraglider. Their incredible achievement serves as yet another example of Tears of the Kingdom being a master class in open-world design.
Warning! Mid-game spoilers (Master Sword location) for Tears of the Kingdom ahead.The Master Sword in the latest Zelda game is stuck in the head of the Light Dragon, a mystical beast that starts wandering the skies immediately after the prologue. However, most players won’t even see it—let alone reach it—before finding all 11 Geoglyphs in Tears of the Kingdom, which makes the Light Dragon fly much lower and reveals its location on the map.
Whether in order to defy expectations or for some other reason, Reddit user Black_Hand_Gotthard recently went through the effort of obtaining the Master Sword in Tears of the Kingdom before touching the surface of Hyrule. While ignoring the Geoglyphs inherently made tracking and intercepting the Light Dragon more difficult, the real challenge was reaching it without the paraglider, which can only be procured by completing one early-game quest after descending from the Hyrule Sky.
But instead of taking the path of least resistance, this tenacious player decided to stay on the Sky Islands until they managed to complete at least 20 shrines. Doing so allowed them to unlock the second full stamina wheel, which is a requirement for pulling the Master Sword from the Light Dragon’s head. While the fan did not offer a detailed breakdown of their achievement, they did reveal that the undertaking required “many fairies” due to all the fall damage that they suffered without the paraglider. For context, each fairy in Tears of the Kingdom is equivalent to an extra life, resurrecting Link whenever he suffers fatal damage.
Besides farming fairies, the player presumably made extensive use of Zonai Wings and custom-built flying contraptions in order to travel between Tears of the Kingdom‘s Sky Islands without the paraglider. The same method was likely used for reaching the Light Dragon itself, as the creature mostly flies way above even the highest Sky Islands before Link completes his Geoglyph hunt.
This incredible achievement isn’t the first impressive paraglider-free challenge that the fandom completed to date; one player previously managed to beat four Tears of the Kingdom temples without the paraglider, having later revealed he wasn’t even aware that this essential piece of equipment was in the game when he started playing it.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available on Nintendo Switch.