BotW’s greatest stunt master is back and better than ever

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo’s wildly popular open-world action-adventure game, is the gift that keeps on giving. Although I’m six years old now BotW Stans continue to uncover all sorts of obscure secrets and fun tricks in Link’s Switch adventures. Out of absurd speed runs To crazy mods, there’s plenty of fun to be had in the fallen kingdom of Hyrule. One BotW The player in particular has chosen to go all-in on insane stunts, some of which are so damn cool that The Great Plateau can feel like the set of one Fast & Furious Movie.

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Introduced in 2017 to universal praise and high scores metacritical And OpenCritic, BotW was an incredible swan song for the Wii U and a must-own for new Nintendo Switch owners. With an open world full of emerging gameplay opportunities and a rather emotional narrative about a kingdom lost to demonic forces far too powerful for a single hero, Link must summon his strength and recruit allies to defeat a vile Ganon in preparation for rehydrating the villain in the upcoming sequel, Tears of the Kingdom (DeadK).

BotW was a mood. While you could gear Link up to battle the idiots that roam the Great Plateau, you could also ignore most of the hassle to live a more picturesque virtual life, cooking, fishing, and taking pictures. Or as in the case of Twitter user ambiyou could turn Link into a virtual stuntman and let him hurtle through the air like he’s trying his hand at a Michael Bay movie.

kotaku met up with ambi to chat about it BotWthe complications of capturing the tricks they post online and the opportunities they see in them BotWthe upcoming sequel Tears of the Kingdom.

1,500 hours ambis life later

Ambi going from them/they pronouns is a BotW Video creators who primarily share their work on Twitter. Their posts usually consist of funny memes and wild stunts, such as a chicken bombards buildings And Precision parried by massive skulls. All of this started around 2018, a year later BotW came out.

Ambi said that one day they got bored and started playing around with Stasis, one of several rune abilities Link has that allow him to freeze objects in place. This led to her first trick shot in January 2018. Dubbed “fire in the hole‘ the stunt saw Link hurtle through the eye socket of a large skull while riding a boulder, with explosive consequences for a Bokoblin camp. That was it for a while, but after a bit of a hiatus from video games and social media for “personal reasons,” ambi came back “on a pretty big creative high” this year and is back at work BotW stunt mines.

“Most ideas come to mind and I jot them down in my Notes app to try later,” ambi said. “I know the map very well and where many of the objects are, so coming up with new scenes to get Link through is easy. The amazing thing about it BotW most of these ideas work! This game rewards creativity more than any other game I’ve played, which is why I keep coming back to it.”

Ambi said they put nearly 1,500 hours into it BotW, which is approximately 62 days. It’s thanks to all that time wandering around the Great Plateau that they’ve been able to find the best spots for stunts.

“A lot of my tricks happen in the Hyrule Field area as it’s a pretty awesome ‘central’ location between a lot of the metal objects you can find in the game,” ambi said. “There are two metal doors to the southeast and four or so metal crates to the east. There are also explosive barrels in the northeast and northwest sections [of the map.] It also has a few guardians so it’s pretty easy to match things up. The Great Plateau is a close second as there are many objects there.”

Stunts go horribly wrong until they get right

Setting up the trick shots is far more complicated than publishing. Capturing footage isn’t difficult thanks to the Switch’s internal recording capabilities. But since this is a video game with extremely complex physics, getting a stunt right requires hours of repeated trial and error.

Sometimes the stars don’t match and the game just doesn’t deliver the result you hoped for, like that one time Ambi tried to throw a horse down a hole. What happened in the end was the horse is vibrating thanks to an unfortunate bug that caused it to “drown” and get stuck in his swimming animation. However, this blunder resulted in her most viewed video.

“Because most of my tricks are superphysics based, they all go completely wrong…until they finally go right,” ambi said. “Some of my best videos were actually made from mistakes that happened and I just improvised and did something completely different with the result. My most popular video to date actually happened as an error trying a trick that ended up not working and ended up throwing an error. As I watched the horse do this, I noticed that it had a “club beater” in the way its head was bobbing. So I went through my music library to find it Magikarp Festival of Pokémon tournament [and it] fits quite well [plus I] got as many angles as i could to make the video. I still couldn’t reproduce the bug so I’m super glad I acted when I did.”

Some tricks like this “cute jump rope shot” and the “Tree sentinel shot‘ were the easiest to set up and film. These didn’t require objects to be placed beforehand or anything like that to work. In fact, ambi said these two were easy mainly because the stunts were all about getting the timing right. But while these were some of the easiest tricks to record, ambi explained that one of their more popular posts, a trick where Link did a motorcycle backflip off a metal door to shoot three guards while dodging their laser beams, was by far the most hardest was performance from everything they uploaded.

“I hope I can continue to step things up ahead Tears of the Kingdom, so I’ve held back a lot of my best ones that I hope to upload soon,” ambi said. ‘What I’ve already uploaded, my last ‘Backflip Vroom Kaboom shot‘ take this crown. The setup took about an hour and a half and I ended up doing it several times when I wasn’t happy with the initial result.”

All the hype about Ambi is pointing in that direction Tears of the Kingdom

Ambi expressed guilt for the time they spent BotW, and says they have an “urge to add up all the hours into real days” to see what else they could do instead. However, they are driven by the anticipation of ambis posts and the “pure fun” of creating these videos.

“Honestly, at this point I’m just kind of [obsessed with] it,” said ambi. “Play BotW and setting things up in the world was my way of listening to music and random long documentaries in the background while my eyes and hands were busy playing the game. It’s become part of my routine and has been a super relaxing way to unwind with some mindless chores. I’m also very happy that people enjoy what I do, so that’s another big motivator too.”

Between listening to orchestral and piano albums and documentaries about “knowledge and theories of antiquity and early civilizations”, ambi is very happy DeadK‘s launch on May 12th. While they “love everything” Skyward Swordsaid ambi BotW is her favorite zelda Play right now, with all their anticipation of something new DeadK additions like the Save ability..

“Not surprising, but the new skills look very exciting,” said ambi. “It will be fun to see what people figure out immediately once the game releases. year one DeadK probably won’t look like fifth year DeadK as people even discover things [in BotW] til today.”

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What ambi has done breath of the wild was really wild to see. I choke on the stunts, some of which seem incredibly complicated to piece together. With Tears of the Kingdom Coming soon, it’s only a matter of time before ambi runs amok in the new game, blowing everyone away with insane new trick shots and stunts that can only happen in the wild world of Hyrule.