Why the heck did we start a Legend of Zelda blog, when there is already so much information available on the Internet?
Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild (BOTW) is, simply put, a wondrous present to be unwrapped each and every time you play. Unlike many video games, including earlier ones in the Zelda series, BOTW does not have a single avenue of playthrough. It’s not limited even to a handful of avenues. To employ another metaphor: The world of Hyrule is your oyster, and how you enjoy that oyster is (almost) entirely up to you.
The game’s openness is both brilliant and, more than occasionally, daunting. With previous Zelda iterations, we had always traversed Hyrule with a trusty guidebook in our hands. When we were confounded, we turned to the appropriate section of said book. It was easy enough to do; we pretty much started on page one and marched toward the end, exactly as we played the game. Understand, this was before digital books were a thing and quite possibly before the Internet was invented.
Naturally, we bought a book for BOTW. And Demelza confidently opened it up our first day of play, again the second, and even the third day, leafing madly through its many chapters while Itzal forged ahead, usually dangerously and without direction, before Demelza more or less tossed the tome aside. It wasn’t the book that was at fault; it’s a veritable trove of information. But how to find a walkthrough for the situation at hand, when everyone approaches the adventure differently, and Itzal can’t be held back? For the first time in over 20 years, Demelza felt utterly useless in her role as sofa sidekick.
We Needed Help
That said, we needed help, else our game would have come to a disgruntled halt, given Itzal’s short attention span and limited tolerance for frustration. Accordingly, we learned to consult the Internet both in advance and on the fly, where we found multiple Zelda-themed websites, fan forums, and – most entertaining of all – countless videos posted by those who came before us. (A personal favorite was posted by a young man who took out a Lynel rather nonchalantly, as if it were, you see, bothering him.)
Since there’s no set flow of play or walkthrough dictated in BOTW, some people make a great to-do over the fact that, with a few requisite actions under the belt – complete four shrines on the Isolated Plateau, get the paraglider, have runes will travel – it’s possible for Link to run straight to the castle and take on Calamity Ganon in his underwear. (Link, that is. Presumably the villain’s in his usual armor.) Videos of so-called speed-runs to the castle have been posted online. They are impressive.
But for us, and we assume the vast majority of gamers from the Baby Boom Generation, the joy is not in reaching the finish line, let alone in reaching it as quickly as possible. Rather the reverse; we began to dread the game’s end some weeks before it loomed and thus researched what we might find still to do. Where originally we thought we wouldn’t be troubled to leave a few shrines undone, when it came right down to it, we preferred to finish them all so as to prolong the play. We reviewed our list of side quests to see if we couldn’t make some Non-Playable Character (NPC) giddy with joy when we brought them a plate of shrimp creole. We took long horse rides across the kingdom.
We didn’t want it to end.
So here’s the thing. After our experience with the guidebook, we imagined that a compilation of what we wished we had known before starting would be our contribution to other Zelda Elders just starting on their quest. These would be the sort of hints and tips that accomplished teen gamers wouldn’t suggest, not because they’re holding back in a “sink or swim, boomer!” fashion, but because certain things are self-evident to someone younger than a Nintendo GameCube. There’s something hot-wired in their brains and their hands that makes a speedrun to Hyrule Castle even possible.
And later, rather than stopping with a single list of initial tips, we aspired to condense our ongoing research into theme-based chunks of help. We would strive to do so without spoiling the joy of discovery for someone else. Hence, the idea for this blog.
The Caveats
First, you can absolutely enjoy the game if you make every mistake we did. We know; we did. And if you don’t make those mistakes, maybe your game will be over sooner than it otherwise would have been, which flies in the face of what we said previously about prolonging the fun. But it was our experience that we could not have enjoyed the game as we did, nor even have completed it, had we not accessed the wealth of information on the Internet about such things as where to find a specific beetle or type of keese to upgrade our armor, how to complete a particularly difficult shrine puzzle, or what it took to free a given Divine Beast. It’s in that spirit that we give you this and the other posts that will follow. If you agree, read on.
And second, you will encounter spoilers here, just as you would if you were researching the game on the Internet. If that troubles you, abandon this blog and take up knitting.
On the other hand, ours is not a walkthrough. We won’t tell you how to access each and every treasure chest in a shrine or give you step-by-step directions to defeat a boss. (If we’re being honest, it’s not so much won’t as can’t; we’re aren’t wired that way. We rely on others who are.) Instead, we endeavor to strike a balance between being charmingly informative and leaving intact the aforementioned discovery. In doing so, we look for things that the average teenaged speedrunner wouldn’t think to tell you.
Game on.