I may never defeat Ganon in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Like many people I know, I’m never done The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. At the very least, I never beat Calamity Ganon, the game’s de facto final boss. My friends who defeat the villain are often the same friends who spoil the game: they’ve analyzed all 120 shrines, outfitted themselves with the best gear, and found all 900 Korok seeds. For some, these are the perfect two instances of a person’s relationship with Breath of the Wild: schematic and totally familiar, or forever full of mystery.

In the year 2023, Polygon embarks on the Zeldathon. Join us on our journey through The Legend of Zelda series, from the original 1986 game to the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and beyond.

I leave Breath of the Wild intentionally incomplete. Intrigued by the game’s incremental and rewarding approach to the open world genre, I decided I wouldn’t treat its landscapes as a canvas for a quick conquest campaign, but instead my leisurely appreciation. The ruins of Hyrule would be a place for contemplation, something to return to when the days got gloomy and I needed that spark of discovery. As I understand it, this is a common feeling – Breath of the Wild It is an extraordinary video game, which some do not want to end once they start.

But now that the sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Kingdom’s TearsAnd Incoming, it’s finally time to put those particular feelings to rest. Over the past week, I’ve been back Breath of the Wild With the goal of finally seeing his story through to the end, and confronting Ganon’s disaster. But first, I have some unfinished business. After five long years, I will finish this beautiful journey, in just a few simple steps.

The first step: the divine feast

Completing the final Divine Beast was an easy enough task. Unlike some of the head-scratching standalone puzzles in some Breath of the WildThe many shrines, the four “traditional” dungeons to be solved in the main quest of the game are relatively simple, Vah Medoh is perhaps the simplest. It took me an hour. I am so smart.

With the fourth and final monster snatched from Ganon’s control, I was able to take on the game’s final challenge – technically something that can be tackled right off the bat Breath of the Wild, but at the cost of losing some of the game’s big story beats. And speaking of story beats…

Turns out I still need to find six more missing memories from Link, hidden scenes that give you insight into more of Breath of the Wildstory. And I couldn’t maybe Quit the game without doing it that.

Step 2: Call up the image

The cool thing about a side quest for lost memories Breath of the Wild is that it’s basically a series of Google Maps puzzles. To find each memory, you get a picture of a landmark, taken from a particular perspective, and use a combination of map reading skills, information gathering, and working knowledge of Hyrule’s climate to guess the location of the memory. It’s the kind of puzzle that makes you feel like a genius when you solve it, even if the bulk of the work is done through clean design logic in the world.

the last The cool thing about this side quest is that it directly focuses the player’s gaze on the world around him, which, like no one has played Breath of the Wild Know, I mean, they are guaranteed to find incredible things they didn’t even look for in the beginning.

Image: Nintendo

For example: One of Link’s memories is in a place called the Sanidin Park Ruins, the remains of a once beautiful fountain decorated with a carving of one of the horses that roamed the nearby plains. When Lost Link regains his memory associated with the park, he returns to a conversation with Princess Zelda about her pending journey to Mount Lanairo on the opposite end of the map, to pray for the Spring of Wisdom.

There is no real reason to go to Mount Lanayru other than sheer curiosity. Most players will travel to the nearby village of Hateno and discover a hostile frozen peak without many seeing it. But Zelda said there was a spring, and I believed her. So I climbed – and sure enough, spring was there. What zelda he did not do He stated that he was also being guarded by A.J particle Rotten Dragon.

Dragons are one of the first big surprises the player will find Breath of the Wild. They are adorable, almost docile creatures that light up the sky and seem disinterested in picking a fight. This is the one huge, and goodness, once you take care of the spoilage that has befallen him. It’s kind of a secret Breath of the Wild It rolls out better than any other video game: majestic scenery leads to an even more daunting challenge than difficulty – a reward for going somewhere just because you’ve never been there.

Image: Nintendo

All hidden marvel in Breath of the Wild Draped against more massive and clear. These tend to double as flags indicating where the player must go to complete the game’s main story: perhaps one of the divine beasts, or Hyrule Castle, where Calamity Ganon lurks. Each diversion, like this cool looking dragon, is placed alongside your virtual goals. But it is not a problem at all. You helped this dragon, and now I’m going to face Ganon. right on time.

Step 3: Get ready

People talk about it Breath of the Wild Almost in superlatives. Most, if not all, of these streaming terms are well deserved. The game is exceptional in almost everything it does.

It’s also, in many ways, a regular video game, with weapons and armor linked to numbers. The higher the number, the better the gear. And if you want better equipment? Go find some tchotchkes that can be used to boost those numbers.

Image: Nintendo

What determines Breath of the Wild Aside from that, he doesn’t explicitly tell you how to do these very mundane things. However, it makes the act of figuring out these processes exciting as hell.

Again: people have known this about Breath of the Wild For six years now. I’m just telling you that, unfortunately for me, it’s still true. Because I’m trying to fight Ganon, you know? And I want to make sure I have some great leads and some decent weapons so I can harm him while also looking fresh. And finding all that stuff — well, that’s a whole other adventure.

Which brings me to a place I had forgotten.

Step 4: Tarry in Tarrey Town

Image: Nintendo

Breath of the Wild He gets a lot of mileage from having a silent protagonist. The characters pummel Link, give him a good banishment, and get him to do all sorts of weird tasks (like collecting cockroaches for a smash) and Link will do little more than ignore a reaction, and the result is: naturally I will help.

This is how, while on your way to doing virtually anything else, including finishing a game, you can find yourself accidentally establishing a city. She met, in an earlier play, a young man named Hudson who wanted to start a new town he was planning on dubbing Tarry Town, which led to a long string of requests to not only bring in massive amounts of resources to build the town, but also people help him improve it.

Matches with lots of other great suckers Breath of the Wild Activities, these requests required me to revisit the world I had been exploring for dozens of hours: to find a Gerudo woman who was good at sewing, a Guron miner who could be influenced by entrepreneurship, Rito’s carpenter, and so on. In other words, it was an excuse to revisit all the places and people I’ve been introduced to over the past six years, and take a little farewell tour before ending things with Gannon.

Which I would definitely do next.

Step 5: Hyrule Castle

Facing the Gannon disaster is a two-part process. man fight? That’s just half of it. The first half involves finding your way to it to start with.

Hyrule Castle is the only proper dungeon in it Breath of the WildChallenging combat, stealth, and light puzzle solving that has one of the most exciting areas to explore in the game. It’s also quite lousy with great weapons, things that are quite a bit over the top numbers as well Wants To leave and smash all the fools who gave you a hard time in the last three hours. And because Breath of the Wild It’s very nicely open-ended, and there was no reason not to.

Step Six: Revenge

Breath of the Wild It is a beautiful video game about starting over and healing after a terrible failure. It’s also a great game to swing a sword with twice your body weight at giant monsters.

Step 7: More Puzzles

Photo: Nintendo via Polygon

Have you ever wondered why this rock formation exists? Or why, on the northeastern edge of the Gerudo Desert, there are seven giant Argonath-like statues of the Lord of the Ring.s? Or what goes on in those skeletal remains of gigantic creatures that are now just hurdles to climb? There are rarely definitive answers to these questions, but in Breath of the WildIt’s always helpful to stop and wonder a bit.

Step 8: The Finish

Nobody falls in love Breath of the Wild He is really eager to do that. Even with a sequel on the way, it’s still selfish to expect the artists and programmers who made this game to simply give us more To extend our travels, rather than inviting us to something new to think about and solve a mystery. Which means that, eventually, we may have to come to an end Breath of the Wild.

Or maybe we don’t. The place never loses its charm just because we know every inch of it. Instead, it acquires a new kind, attached to the person we were when we came to it, and the person we have become since we first went there. Video games are an intensely personal medium. At their most intimate, they are part novel and part diary, at once a story being told and a story being written.

in Breath of the WildYou can spend a lot of your time looking at a map that’s accessible and light on detail until you’ve actually finished the cartographer’s work. In one of the first updates to the game, the developers added a function called Hero’s Path, which allows you to press a button and see the path of your adventure traced to you in miniature, as your personal Legend of Zelda is drawn in green digital ink.

Image: Nintendo

As virtual works, the vistas and landscapes of video games do not decay and erode as they do in the real world. Breath of the WildIts ways will never be more outdated than it is now, its effects will cease forever, and the story the developers tell in it will always be frozen in amber. Instead, the player changes. My story, the erratic and random story told by that green path that cuts through the world, is also preserved there now, a record of the person I have been for the past six years, and yet I return to the game afterward. What kind of person was I when I took 20 minutes to do little else but climb a mountain, or get lost in the woods, or swim to an island on the horizon? Just because? What was I thinking? Why did you go one way and not another?

None of these questions really have anything to do with facing the Gannon disaster, I think. Maybe I can finish Breath of the Wild Now, knowing that I will never finish Breath of the Wild.

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