Game Theory: Is Link the STRONGEST Video Game Character? (Legend of Zelda)

come on elf boy show me what you're made of it's time for an arm-wrestle [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello internet welcome sick game theory where today it's time to dust off the pixel rulers and unpack the bad puns because we're doing it old-school style today is game theory retro edition a blast from the past as we cover the absurd science and math behind one of gaming's oldest and most iconic characters link AKA hero of time AKA zelda to all the 80s and 90s kids who played the games without ever reading the manual and assume that the series would be named after the main character link is a hero who at least in my personal opinion is actually pretty underrated in terms of his strength in any debate about strongest videogame characters you're always gonna hear about Minecraft Steve's ability to carry giant gold blocks or kratos his latest beatdown where he takes a mythological creature and manually separates torso from cranium sorry had to censor all that last bit but really nothing Kratos does in his games brand safe for us to use here and then he have linked well sure we're all familiar with the items he uses bow the boomerang bombs and hook shot which we covered on a previous episode of game theory but I don't think link it's enough credit for how much strength he's packin even when he isn't pulling things out of his Mary Poppins esque bottomless satchel so today I'm gonna show you how buff this guy actually is and why hylians little Keebler Elf over here could totally hold his own against modern characters much bigger and badder and brand unsafe than him as well as minecraft Steve I mean who needs the Triforce of power when he's already got himself the Triforce of power lifting and it all starts with links most basic item the Hylian Shield you see links Hylian Shield is made entirely of metal at least in some iterations it is in the original ocarina time you can see based on the back of the shield that thing was metal throughout something which interestingly enough was changed in ocarina of time 3d or parts of it were suddenly changed to be made out of wood now why do I call this out well the fully metal construction makes it very unusual for a one-armed shield throughout history most one-handed shields were primarily wood animal hide with a small rounded metal part called a shield boss at the center being used to deflect most of the blows and mount the handle the reasoning for this is actually simple having less metal made the whole thing lighter and easier to carry so knowing that links shield is mostly if not completely made of metal shows just how strong that shield arm of his is I better use my strong in fact we can calculate it we know from breath of the wild that the Hylian Shield is made of a ferromagnetic metal we can use the magnesia swoon in order to pick it up so knowing this we can assume that the shield is made of iron doing some quick pixel measurements here we find that the shield's height is just under 1 meter is about three point three six centimeters thick that gives us a total shield volume of roughly 14,000 515 cubic centimeters which we then multiply by the density of iron to see that the basic Hylian Shield weighs a whopping 252 pounds that is insanely heavy especially when he compared to the weight of a typical real-world medieval shield which would usually weigh in at 10 pounds or less here's my boy just captain over 250 pounds with one arm every time he wants to block a flying not to talk about overkill my man it's no wonder that child link can't lift the shield with his arms and has to crouch under it like a turtle shell it's more a miracle he doesn't get crushed by the darn thing the reason I use this as my first example is just to make a quick point link is a lot stronger than a lot of us give him credit for yes all those years of pot smashing finally paid off with link being equipped with both a sword and guns my Doom Ching funny enough these new findings actually explain away some of the conclusions I reached years ago way back in the year of our Lord 2014 a year full of turnt up Bay's and man buns they did an episode examining the physics of links hookshot concluding that the darn thing was so powerful that it would rip his arm clean off but now we have ourselves new evidence suggesting that simply put his arms are just really really really strong strong enough to withstand the massive amount of force iconic item dishes out just goes to show that real men wear tights which now means it's time to take our research all the way sure we're getting hints here and there about the extent of link strength but now's the time to find where that strength maxes out and let's be honest links feats of strength throughout the series are numerous from lifting giant metal cannonballs over his head and jogging around and Twilight Princess to climbing vertically on sheer rock surfaces throughout breadth of the wild but if you have ever played these games I think we can all agree there was one moment of link strength that was so ridiculous so absurd and so cool that it was burned into our brains from the first moment we witnessed it and that was the ocarina of time golden gauntlet deadlift keys need a refresher it looked a little something like this someone keep this man away from the caber toss and that is the strength of the power glove I love to power glove it's so big let's first set our baseline by finding out how strong link is without the gloves in ocarina of time we see gloveless links struggle when pushing around the giant puddle blocks that exist inside of dungeons and when you look at their size it's no wonder he's scooting these things around inch by inch but how big are they and how much do they weigh well glad you asked the fact that these blocks all seem to be perfect cubes implies that they're made of some kind of stone that would be easy to carve we also know that these stones come in a variety of colors ranging from green to yellow Brett and lastly each comes carved with a Giroud o marking a desert tribe that gave rise to Ganondorf which implies that the stone could have once been found in deserts or areas of dried-up water based on those clues it's highly likely that the blocks that we see in ocarina of time are made of limestone the texture matches the colors match and it's a soft enough stone to carve with primitive rock carving tools in fact there are reasons why limestone was a common choice of material for ancient building societies and what should know it but the base rock of many deserts is in fact limestone IRL for example the Sahara is covered with limestone made mostly of the skeletons of microscopic sea creatures from the sea that once dried up there centuries ago so looking up the density of limestone we can now calculate the weight of these blocks simply by knowing their dimensions we can measure the height of the blocks by comparing their height to legs we know from this past episode that link measures in at 1.7 meters or 5 foot 6 inches tall as a refresher this was calculated in game by comparing links height to the measuring marks at the sighs laboratory found in Lake highly op it's also a fact that is reconfirmed based on this data from the Smash Brothers games so using the height of links model as our measuring stick we find that the push blocks are 306 centimeters or just over 10 feet tall cube that and we get ourselves twenty-eight point six five cubic meters and multiply that by the density of limestone and we find that these cubes that link is pushing around all the way in at a whopping seventy seven thousand six hundred and seventy seven kilograms one hundred and seventy one thousand pounds that is over 85 tonnes of weight that he's pushing for comparison and unloaded train car is usually 25 to 30 tons a fully loaded boxcar well usually clock in at under 70 this single block weighs as much as a hundred and ninety grand pianos remember this is just the basic block of stone without it using any gloves you know when you play the game it can sometimes be easy to become annoyed at how slow link pushes these things making it a chore to finish the block mazes in the forest temple but looking at how heavy these dang things are I think we need to cut link some slack it's impressive that he's able to budge him at all again if I'm being 100% accurate and way too nitpicky which you know I always am he's pushing blocks meaning that he's only having to exert enough force to overcome the frictional force that exists between the block and the floor and doing that calculation which I did off-screen I didn't wanna bore you with the details but anyway the amount of force he's exerting there is less a mere 128 thousand pounds so you know why take back everything I just said slacker get good fam Steve carries blocks that heavy shove down his pants but now my friends we get to the good stuff just how much are those silver and gold gauntlets enhancing his strength solving for the silver gauntlets is actually surprisingly easy link uses them to push the much larger blocks that exist in the spirit temple so all we need to do here is just scale up the calculations analyze the dimensions of the block determine its weight calculate what force link is exerting to push that thing using our known frictional coefficient so once again we use link as our measuring stick and find that these blocks are over twice his height 408 centimeters tall for a total volume of 60 7.9 cubic meters a weight of a hundred and eighty-four thousand kilograms or four hundred and six thousand pounds and then if you add in the frictional component it requires a horizontal pushing force of three hundred and four thousand pounds comparing that three hundred four thousand pounds silver gauntlet push feet who is 128 thousand pound pushing feet without the gauntlets we see that the silver gauntlets in a surprising twist work out to almost exactly doubling link strength he's exactly two point three seven times more powerful with the silver gauntlets than without him really cool finding actually well done Nintendo you know he didn't intentionally mean it but impressive nonetheless and now for the granddaddy the literal gold standard for absurd feats of strength and one of the most storied game franchises in history the golden gauntlet deadlift and here it's important to note that this requires a different kind of strength entirely first off he's dealing with a much larger object secondly he's actually lifting it off the ground instead of just sliding it across the floor and third he's actually flinging it into the air so it lands behind him let's start by looking at the pillar itself it's a different texture from the blocks that we've seen so far so we can't assume that it's the same material based on its color and texture it looks most similar to granite probably most closely related to Black Forest granite well I'd love to milk the next set of measurements for additional run time in this episode so those sweet sweet YouTube watch minutes component you know what I'm not gonna bore you with those or delay the results any longer looking at its dimensions including its height the shape of the base the shape of the pointed end buried into the ground we can calculate this giant column to have a volume of about 250 eight point nine cubic meters or over nine thousand cubic feet that's about the volume of 450 refrigerators now we multiply by the known density of granite and get ourselves a final weight of seven hundred and twelve thousand kilograms one point five seven million pounds that is more than three times the weight of the blocks that he was pushing around in the spirit temple it's the equivalent of six and a half blue whales nine space shuttles one 15th of the Eiffel Tower okay that last one doesn't sound that impressive but still it's impressive and he hasn't even taken the easy way out this time 1.5 7 million pounds is the vertical force that he needs to lift it cleanly off the ground that is 5 times stronger than he is in the silver gauntlets and 12 times stronger than he is normally it's an insane amount of arm strength one that puts 99.9 percent of other game characters to shame and yet he still struggles to walk around the second he puts on the iron boots and that my friends is why you don't skip leg day and don't even get me started about his lame stamina meter either got to do those cardio days too they're linked as it currently stands based on our calculations today the hero of time is probably more accurately described as the gym bro of the bicep curl but hey that's just a theory Oh game theory thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 2,261,436

Rating: 4.9080443 out of 5

Keywords: legend of zelda, link, zelda, breath of the wild, breath of the wild 2, legend of zelda breath of the wild, breath of the wild sequel, legend of zelda breath of the wild sequel, breath of the wild 2 trailer, how strong is link, legend of zelda trailer, nintendo, switch, link's awakening, zelda breath of the wild sequel, cadence of hyrule, links awakening, legend of zelda switch, nintendo direct, nintendo switch, the legend of zelda, zelda botw2, botw2

Id: MleyAFrP5io

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020

Reddit Comments

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[u/EPIChasidat63]

What about throwing the pillar wouldn’t it need more strength to do that

[u/Super_S_12]

So... were you able to prove that those stone blocks don’t have any air space in them?

[u/Wajirock]

Steve can hold multiple black holes in his poker.

[u/nightmarenoise]

So what you're saying is, he's not the weakest Link?