After 250 hours, a Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player lost an 82% complete save and declared "I'm free" until he tragically realized he could get it back

One The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom player suffered what seemed like the ultimate tragedy in losing a 250-hour, 82% complete save file. But it turns out there's a fate even worse: getting that save file back.

Back on April 23, Brian 'Brian_F' Foster, a competitive fighting game player and commentator, revealed that he had beaten Tears of the Kingdom after 250 hours, having gotten all Shrines, all light roots, all Armor sets, all Sage's Wills, and all Yiga schematics. But with six sidequests missing and the map only 77% completed, Brian_F decided to keep going for a 100% completion run.

Tears of the Kingdom is an amazing, expansive game that's an absolute joy to explore - up until the very moment you decide you want to 100% complete it. We're talking about a feat that initially took speedrunners 139 hours - that's over five days straight - to complete, and while Speedrun.com shows those runs are now down to 'just' one or two days, that's still a good metric for you to judge just how arduous and menial going for full completion here can be.

On May 11, Brian_F posted an update. "Nintendo decided to end my suffering at 82% map completion by corrupting all of my save files and making the game auto crash," he said. "I'm free." But then, one commenter noted that you can restore corrupted save data in the Switch's data management settings. There's an option to 'check for corrupt data' that can generally repair bad saves.

"Unfortunately, this worked (even though the feature said no data was corrupted?)," Brian_F reported. "83% now."

Let this be a lesson to you, folks: pursue your completionist tendencies only at your own peril. Someday, your Sisyphean task may take a turn so ironic you become the subject of a post on a video game news site.

Not all of the best Zelda games require so much of your life.