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 some arm wrestling hello internet welcome sick

game

theory

where today is the time to dust off the pixel rules and unravel the bad puns because we're doing it old school style today is the retro edition of

game

theory

, a blast from the past as we cover the absurd science and mathematics behind one of the oldest and most iconic

character

s in gaming

link

ing aka time hero aka

zelda

to all the children of the 80s and 90s who played the games without even reading the manual and assuming the series would be named after the main

character

link

is a hero who at least in my personal opinion is quite underrated in terms of his strength in any debate about the characters From stronger

video

games, you'll always hear about Steve's ability in Minecraft to carry giant gold blocks or kratos, his latest beatdown where he takes a mythological creature and manually separates the torso from the skull.

Sorry I had to censor all that last bit, but actually nothing Kratos does in the games is safe for us to use here and then he linked it. Well, I'm sure we're all familiar with the items he uses, like the boomerang bombs and the grappling hook that we covered in a previous episode of Game Theory, but I don't think the link is enough credit for the amount of strength he has, even when it is not. I'm not pulling things out of his bottomless purse a la Mary Poppins, so today I'm going to show you how muscular this guy really is and why the little Keebler Elf here could totally hold his own against much bigger, meaner, more branded modern characters. of insecure than him.

Besides Minecraft Steve, I mean, who needs the Triforce of Power when he already has the Triforce of Power Rising and it all starts with the links, the most basic item, the Hylian Shield? You see links. The Hylian Shield is made entirely of metal, at least in some iterations. it's in the original ocarina time, you can see from the back of the shield that that thing was metal at all something which interestingly enough was changed in ocarina of time 3d or parts of it were suddenly changed to be made of wood Now why do I do it?

Mention this well, the all-metal construction makes it very unusual for a single-armed shield throughout history, most one-handed shields were primarily wooden animal skin with a small rounded metal part called a protrusion. shield in the center which was used to deflect most of the blow and mount the handle, the reasoning for this is actually simple, having less metal makes the whole thing lighter and easier to carry, so knowing that the shield of Links is made mostly, if not completely, of metal shows how strong that shield arm of his is, he better use it. 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 magnesia faint to pick it up, so knowing this we can assume that the shield is made of iron. By doing some quick pixel measurements here, we find that the height of the shield is just under 1 meter and it is approximately three point three six centimeters thick, giving us a total volume of the shield of approximately 14,000 515 cubic centimeters which we then We multiply by the density of iron to see that the basic Hylian shield weighs a whopping 252 pounds, which is incredibly heavy, especially when compared to the weight of a typical real-world medieval shield that would normally weigh 10 pounds or less.

Here's my son, the 250+ pound captain with one arm every time he wants to block a flight, not to mention overdoing it, man, no wonder kid Link can't lift the shield with his arms and has to ducking under it like a turtle shell, it's more of a miracle it doesn't crush it. The damn reason I use this as my first example is simply to make a quick point. Link is much stronger than many of us give him credit for. Yes, all those years of smashing pots finally paid off with Link equipped with both. sword and weapons my Doom Ching pretty funny these new findings actually explain some of the conclusions I came to years ago back in the year of our Lord 2014, a year full of man buns and Bay, they did an episode that examined the physics of the links. hook, concluding that the damn thing was so powerful that it would rip off his arm, but now we have new evidence that suggests that, quite simply, his arms are really, really, really strong, strong enough to withstand the enormous amount of force that the iconic spear object.

This proves that real men wear tights, which means now is the time to take our investigation to the end to make sure we're getting clues here and there about the extent of the link's strength, but now is the time to find where it reaches its maximum strength and let's be honest. Link's feats of strength throughout the series are numerous, from lifting giant metal cannonballs over his head to jogging and Twilight Princess to vertical climbing over steep rock surfaces throughout the wilderness, but if you've ever played these games, I think we can all agree on that. There was a moment of force bonding that was so ridiculous, so absurd and so genius that it was burned into our brains from the first moment we witnessed it and that was the ocarina of time, the golden glove, the deadlift keys, they need A review, it looked something like this. someone keep this guy away from the caber throw and that's the strength of the power glove.

I love the power glove, it's so big. Let's first establish our baseline by finding out how strong Link is without the gloves. In the ocarina of time, we see the gloveless links fight. When you push the giant puddle blocks that exist inside the dungeons and when you look at their size, it's no wonder you're moving these things inch by inch, but how big are they and how much do they weigh? I'm glad you asked the fact that these blocks all appear to be perfect cubes implies that they are made of some type of stone that would be easy to carve.

We also know that these stones come in a variety of colors ranging from green to Brett yellow and lastly, each one comes carved with a Giroud or marking a desert tribe that gave rise to Ganondorf, implying that the stone could have ever been found in deserts or dry water areas. Based on those clues, it is very likely that the blocks we see in Ocarina of Time are made of limestone. The texture matches the colors and it is 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 you should know is that it is in fact the bedrock of many deserts. limestone In real life, for example, the Sahara is covered in limestone made primarily from the skeletons of microscopic sea creatures from the sea that once dried there centuries ago, so by 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 with the legs. We know from this past episode that the link is 1.7 meters or 5 feet 6 inches tall. As a refresher, this was calculated in-game by comparing the height of the link to the measurement marks in The Sigh Lab found in Lake is highly op. It is also a fact that is reconfirmed based on this data from the Smash Brothers games, so using the link height model as our measuring stick we find that the push blocks measure 306 centimeters or just over 10 feet in length. high. Cube that and we get twenty-eight point six five cubic meters and we multiply it by the density of the limestone and we find that these cubes coming together push to the bottom a whopping seventy-seven thousand six hundred and seventy-seven kilograms one hundred and seventy-one thousand pounds, that is, more than 85 tons of weight that he is pressing for comparison and the unloaded train car usually weighs between 25 and 30 tons, a fully loaded freight car, usually weighs less than 70, this single block It weighs as much as one hundred and ninety. grand pianos, remember this is just the basic block of stone without wearing gloves.

You know when you play, it can sometimes be easy to get annoyed by how slowly Link pushes these things, making finishing block mazes in the forest a chore. temple, but seeing how heavy these damn things are, I think we need to loosen the link a little. It's awesome that I can move it again if I'm being 100% precise and overly picky, which you know, I always am. He is pressing. blocks, which means he just has to exert enough force to overcome the frictional force between the block and the floor and do that calculation I did off screen.

I didn't want to bore you with the details, but anyway the amount of force that's straining there is less than just 128 thousand pounds, so you know why take back everything I just said, lazy, get a good family, Steve carries blocks so heavy they get into your pants, but now my friends we get to the good stuff, how much do those silver and gold ones cost? Gauntlets improve your strength. Solving 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 have to do here is expand the calculations.

Analyze the dimensions of the block. Determine your weight. calculate what force link is exerting to push that thing using our known coefficient of friction, so once again we use link as our measuring stick and we find that these blocks are more than twice their height 408 centimeters tall for a total volume of 60 7.9 cubic meters a weight of one hundred eighty-four thousand kilograms or four hundred six thousand pounds and then if you add the friction component, a horizontal thrust force of three hundred four thousand pounds is required compared to that three hundred four thousand pounds of silver gauntlet pushing feet which is 128 thousand pounds pushing feet without the gauntlets, we see that the silver gauntlets in a surprising twist work almost exactly doubling the strength of the link.

He is exactly two point three seven times more powerful with the silver gauntlets than without. It's really cool to find Nintendo really well done. I know he didn't mean it intentionally, but it's still impressive and now, for Grandpa, the literal gold standard for absurd feats of strength and one of the most storied game franchises in history, the deadlift of the gold glove, and here it is important to note that this requires a different approach. type of force completely, firstly you are dealing with a much larger object, secondly you are actually lifting it off the ground instead of just sliding it across the ground and thirdly you are actually throwing it into the air so that land behind it, let's start by looking at the pillar.

In itself, it has a different texture than the blocks we've seen so far, so we can't assume it's the same material based on its color and texture. It looks more like granite, probably most closely related to Black Forest granite. Well, I would say. I love taking advantage of the next set of measures to get more run time in this episode, so those sweet, sweet minutes of YouTube viewing are a component, you know, I won't bore you with that or delay the results any further by looking at its dimensions, including its height and shape. From the base, the shape of the pointed end buried in the ground, we can calculate that this giant column has a volume of approximately 250 eight point nine cubic meters or more than nine thousand cubic feet, that is approximately the volume of 450 refrigerators, now we multiply by the known density of granite and obtain a final weight of seven hundred twelve thousand kilograms one point five seven million pounds which is more than three times the weight of the blocks that he was pushing in the temple of the spirits is the equivalent of six and a half blue whales nine space shuttles a 15 the Eiffel Tower okay, the last one doesn't sound that impressive, but it's still impressive and this time you haven't even taken the easy way out 1.5 7 million pounds is the vertical force you need to lift him cleanly off the ground, which is 5 times stronger than with the silver gauntlets and 12 times stronger than he normally is.

It's an incredible amount of arm strength that puts 99.9 percent of the other characters in the game to shame, and yet he still has difficulty walking the moment he puts on the iron boots and, my friends, that's why you don't skip leg day and don't even get me started on their boring resistance meter, or you have to do those cardio days too, they're linked. Currently based on our calculations today, Time Hero is probably most accurately described as the gymnastics brother of the bicep curl, but hey, that's just a theory.Oh, game theory, thanks for watching.