It’s been about three weeks since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom released. By all accounts, it’s a masterpiece, an exemplar of the medium, the clear shoe-in for Game of the Year 2023 for those so inclined to partake in such lists. People are still posting funny videos of wild Contraptions they’re making with the game’s tools, and even now, this far out, I’m seeing folks talk about how blown away they are by the experience of playing it.
I wish them well. I’ll be over here, still playing through Breath of the Wild, struggling against my own lack of interest in the game and maybe even my dislike of the franchise as a whole.
I bought my Nintendo Switch Lite in 2018, along with a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The resale electronics store employees who sold it to me gave the game their highest recommendation, saying “this is the game the Switch was made for.” Even back then, I felt a sense of obligation towards playing it; if I “wanted to be a good games critic,” I thought, I needed first and foremost to engage with what games were doing currently—and Breath of the Wild was one of the most well-received games of the last five years at that point.
The Legend of Zelda has of course always been in my cone of peripheral awareness. It would have been impossible for me to miss as a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Oklahoma City through the mid-2000s: Twilight Princess came out in my freshman year in high school, and Skyward Sword was on everyone’s Wii – including that of my best friend’s – during my sophomore year in college. I wasn’t all that interested in video games generally during this period (though I still enjoyed ceaselessly replaying Kingdom Hearts 2 on my old PS2 at roughly the same time). By the end of high school I was playing bass in almost two punk/rock bands and occasionally participating in Left 4 Dead multiplayer matches while convincing myself that I’d have a career in journalism in just a few short years. All around me, meanwhile, people were having further formative experiences with The Legend of Zelda.
Occasionally I’d talk to someone about their experiences with the franchise, and they would tell me about how blown their minds were playing Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask on the Nintendo 64. They’d always wax poetic about the effects OoT had on them, or how the demon moon in Majora’s Mask had frightened them. Occasionally they’d talk about the sublime experience they had with The Wind Waker on the GameCube, and its island archipelago reimagining of Hyrule. They’d talk about how much Link and his seemingly interminable struggle meant to them. Many of them had the Triforce tattooed somewhere on their bodies.
I always enjoyed these conversations about the games, mostly because I appreciated how much my friends enjoyed them. But through it all, not even a spark of interest seemed to kindle within me.
And so, returning to 2018, many years after many of these conversations had taken place, I found myself feeling apprehensive as I inserted the Breath of the Wild cartridge into my new Switch and turned the handheld on for the first time. After some futzing with basic setup and installation, I dropped into the post-apocalyptic wilds of Hyrule for myself for the first time. This was my opportunity to drop into the franchise that everyone I knew had talked up for over a decade. What kind of relationship would I form with the colorful cast and lush setting? As I stumbled out of the Shrine of Resurrection on the Great Plateau for the first time, my breath caught – the view was gorgeous. The sparse piano-driven soundtrack was beautiful. I took my first tentative steps out. Adventure awaited.
The Legend of Zelda is one of maybe six true cornerstone franchises at the heart of Nintendo’s inarguably wildly successful business model. There is a Zelda game on every single console and handheld device Nintendo has ever put out, running the gamut of experiences from puzzle adventure to rhythm action. To say the company has been long-term invested in Zelda over the years is an understatement. And with the Switch, they have spared (mostly) no expense bringing as many different eras of Zelda to the platform as possible. In addition to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, Switch owners can also buy Skyward Sword HD, the remade Link’s Awakening, Hyrule Warriors, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, and Cadence of Hyrule, the Crypt of the Necrodancer spinoff.
In addition to that, Nintendo Switch Online, the console’s heavy-nostalgia-driven subscription service, offers The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on its NES emulator, The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past for the SNES, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask on N64, Link’s Awakening DX for the Game Boy Color and The Minish Cap for the Game Boy Advance. And as you can see in the feature image for this post, NSO really wants you to know about this. From a surface-level marketing perspective, of course, it makes sense: a new game’s coming out, it’s maybe the definitive version of its franchise, might as well promote the other Zelda experiences a discerning Gameur might have.
But, like, it’s weird, right? People are already religiously devoted to Zelda. Many folks have already played through, if not every entry in the series across all console and handheld platforms, a wide majority of them. Who is this promotion for? I thought about this for a while until the realization hit me.
Oh, yeah. Right. It’s for me, or folks like me, who haven’t yet been brought into the fold and seen what makes the series special. If only I could have the same transformative experiences with the previous heights of the franchise, I’d finally “get it.”
Forgive me, and this is not an indictment of the games themselves, but this shit feels real pushy to me. What is so earth-shatteringly important about Zelda that I need to pay extra for NSO’s expansion packs and experience all the old series highlights right now? Why do I need to play these games? Why does it seem to matter so much to other folks?
Whenever a new game comes out that I’m not being paid to review or haven’t otherwise acquired review code for, I inevitably feel a bit of FOMO (the “feeling of missing out”), even if the game doesn’t really seem like it would be my bag. I’m genuinely happy for the folks who are loving Street Fighter 6, for example, and maybe a little less so for the folks getting sucked into Diablo IV‘s live service spider web currently. I’ve never been a big fighting game person in general, nor has Diablo ever really interested me. But in that vein, I also don’t feel pressed into experiencing these games. I am allowed to let them pass me by. If the games end up going on sale, or show up on a subscription service I pay for, maybe I pick them up. In this way, I (try to) maintain a healthy relationship with the games I play and choose to cover. This also helps me wander away from the consensus of the release-review cycle and form opinions without the pressure of an embargo deadline.
But Zelda has felt like a different beast for a long time, to me. There’s the way the game’s fandom has historically reacted to negative criticism, for example. Watching critics get whacked with death threats and sustained social media harassment is not my idea of a good time, and assuming I play one of these games all the way through and find real quantifiable reasons for not enjoying it, why would I then willingly submit myself to the torment nexus by posting a review?
Then there’s the prospect of developing an active fan relationship with a game put out by Nintendo, of all companies. It’s easy to forget that Nintendo hires extremely litigious IP lawyers who go after everyone from emulator devs to random pizzerias doing themed party nights to fighting game clubs wanting to play a particular version of Smash Bros. in a particular way. It’s just as easy to forget that the company just got done running a guy who dared to market a device that let Switch owners play pirated games through a whole felony prosecution and subjecting him to debt servitude that will last the rest of his life. Sure: no ethical consumption under capitalism and all that. Microsoft and Sony, to say nothing of the myriad other AAA studios I still buy games from, are no better, realistically. But Zelda is inextricable from Nintendo, and what Nintendo does out in the world has an effect on my thought process, for better or worse.
Finally, I find myself overwhelmed and a bit intimidated by the longstanding critical consensus these games seem to receive across the board. The experiences my friends relayed to me through the 2010s were universal, and that didn’t bother me so much; but going through just about every review or retrospective of every mainline Zelda game and seeing phrases like “genre-defining,” “masterpiece,” and “game-changing” show up basically everywhere gives me a funny feeling. I’ve never liked being a part of the “critical consensus” as it stands, but when it comes to Zelda, the prospect of saying “oh I didn’t like this game very much” in front of everyone else in the field makes me a bit sick, to be honest. These factors, coupled with the way Nintendo seems hellbent on getting people who haven’t played Zelda to do so, all contribute to my sense of unease around the franchise. But I have to stress: even if none of these factors were factors, there’s still my own experience to consider here.
My first foray into the unknown territory of Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule ended in the most mundane of disasters, not very far from where the game started. It was a few years ago at this point, and I don’t remember exactly what caused me to put it down, but I stopped playing the game before I ever got off the Great Plateau. In going back to the game this January, I discovered that my saves were all roughly four years old, and that every single one terminated halfway through unlocking the first handful of shrines scattered around the Plateau area. Loading into one at random, I saw that I was on a snowy hill, slowly freezing to death. Clearly it hadn’t occurred to me to pack warm clothing, or spicy food. But I was also more-or-less locked in place with very few supplies to get me off the hill and back into warmer climes. I watched my hearts slowly disappear as I became the first – and last – Hylian icicle. My other saves meted similar fates to the Hero of Time. I clearly just hadn’t gotten it on this initial playthrough.
So I started over. And so far in my new 10+ hour save, I’ve managed to not only get off the Great Plateau, but make it all the way to Zora territory and reclaim the Divine Beast Vah Ruta from Ganon. I would even go so far as to say I’ve had an alright time meeting the aforementioned colorful cast of characters and exploring the lush greeneries this time around.
But still, I feel a lack, that I’m missing something others seem to just intuitively grasp. It’s a fine game! But when I put it down, I don’t feel that sublime urge to pick it back up again, to reenter Hyrule and continue exploring and progressing through its narrative.
This is something I’ve been sitting with for a while. I don’t think it’s the game itself. In fact, I’m pretty confident the problem here is me.
What is it about the game that doesn’t interest me? Is it the game itself, or the other outside factors that I talked about earlier? Do I really dislike Zelda? Even though I haven’t played these games? What is the source of that dislike? I started this post as an attempt to come to some sort of conclusion, but even vocalizing every point of concern I’ve had with the franchise, with Nintendo, with the culture of fandom around it all, I find that the how and the why are both still pretty ineffable.
The question now is, do I continue my exploration of Hyrule, and the source of my discontent, or do I let the game – and everything contained within – go?