"Splorin"

When I had trouble reading books, I spent many hundreds of hours in Hyrule, uncovering secrets, hunting for items, and rediscovering my love for adventure games and the way they tell their stories.

After I quit bookselling my relationship to reading changed. In those five years, I essentially read every day — an undeniably good thing. I was never the sort of Book-Tok reader who somehow plowed through more than a hundred books a year, but my average was over fifty. Basically, if I wasn’t finishing a book a week, then I was falling behind. Sometime within those handful of years, my sincere enjoyment of reading shrunk. Yes, a book would leap out from the constant stream of brightly colored, web-icon-perfect covers — would stir that small fire of recognition inside me. But a lot of the time, the books felt like assignments. Perhaps they were beautiful, but I wasn’t open to that beauty. I was trying to build recommendations, host book clubs, get to the next thing.

Then I quit the job.

And, without deadlines, without prompting, without a line of people asking with genuine curiosity what I’ve read that week — I stopped reading.

For about two months, I didn’t read more than a friend’s Substack post here or there — perhaps one of a dozen viral essays, just to see what everyone on Twitter was up in arms about.

I’d acknowledge this with my husband. I, like all readers, had a large to-read stack with books I was sure I would love, but there was an invisible wall blocking me from them. “You’ll get to them.” He’d answer. “You’re just taking a break right now. You’re playing Zelda.”

I had recently started a fresh save file of Breath of the Wild, a game I had played years before, but hadn’t really given a lot of attention or emotional bandwidth. I have a long history with The Legend of Zelda, so I don’t know why the first play-through of Breath of the Wild didn’t stick with me like the second play-through did — but it probably had something to do with the fact that the first time I booted it up was during the pandemic, a time when the games I most connected with were Animal Crossing and Mario Kart — games that involved my friends.

Anyways, after quitting bookselling and subsequently quitting reading, I restarted The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and it became a second home. The time I had diligently carved out for books was swallowed whole by my adventure through a dilapidated Hyrule.

“Calamity Ganon” is the final boss in BotW, lol.

Those who aren’t familiar with BotW may have a misconception about what being in the game is like — combat and story are a pretty big part of it, like most adventures, but the core of Breath of the Wild is the wild.

According to my Switch, I’ve spent over 350 hours playing BotW, and the vast majority of that insane amount of time was in this second play-through, just straight up wandering around the map, completing side-quests, finding rare items, and doing Korok puzzles. (One of the things BotW and its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, have in common is the truly bonkers amount of Koroks you can find all over the map, most hidden by tiny puzzles. The reward for collecting all 900? A golden turd, which is worthless in the game. This pissed a lot of people off. I think it’s incredible, and hilarious. The gift is in the journey, etc etc.)

It smells pretty bad.

If you only engage with the main plot points of the game, the story is good, but simple: you are an amnesiac hero, awoken in a land destroyed by an ancient calamity. There is a princess waiting for you — she is all that is keeping the calamity from fully taking over, but she can’t hold out for much longer. She has been waiting for you to wake up for a hundred years, and the world has all but crumbled since then.

If you engage further, which oddly enough involves a good bit of reading journals and dialogue, you discover the meat of the story — a poignant tale about a princess who is prophesied to save her kingdom with a power she has never been able to access. Her mother, who was meant to guide her, is dead. Her father, the king, won’t allow her to pursue her true interests, science and technology. He forces his daughter, instead, to focus only on the impossible task of accessing a spiritual power she simply can’t find.

By allowing yourself to slow down and engage deeper with the game, you discover that your aren’t just a knight tasked with saving a princess. You are a soldier who has lost everything to the calamity and to time. Zelda isn’t just a princess. She is your friend. She is your last connection to your old life, and you are hers.

Anyway, it’s an incredible game. It’s gorgeous, with lovely music and perfectly silly dialogue. The puzzles and combat range from comforting to all-encompassing. When you figure out the rhythm to parrying guardians and lynols, you feel like a god. You run around in your oddball armor combos, looking for some random guy’s wife, gathering wood to build a town, or reading journals, and suddenly you’ve spent what amounts to fifteen days straight helping these cel-shaded characters build better lives, and you haven’t even confronted “clammy ganon” yet.

In a lot of ways, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are huge departures from all previous Legend of Zelda games. Just the nature of their true open world design (you can complete the story in basically any order, go wherever you want right away, etc) makes it so. “Classic” Zelda involves an order of dungeons, or temples, where an item is unlocked and then subsequently used to solve puzzles and defeat bosses. As your item cache expands, so does the complexity of the dungeons. This mechanic simply doesn’t work the same in an open world. But the side-quests, the goofy item collections, the way the story builds the more attention you give it — that’s 100% “classic” Zelda. So much so that, after getting my fill of BotW, I couldn’t resist returning to these, now, ancient games.

I could write an entirely new essay on Ocarina of Time, how I can’t stop going back to it. The first time I played it, at nine or ten years old, I didn’t have an N64, but my cousins, who lived in the trailer across the street, did. Every day for a summer I’d go over there and we’d take turns riding Epona back and forth across Hyrule field, trying to sort out what to do next in the story without looking it up on the dial-up internet. It was a single player game, but it was communal, that way. There were puzzles that all but required you to consult with others. Where the fuck was that other key in the water temple? What’s the secret to getting around the guards at the castle?

Sometime during my third or fourth play-through of Ocarina, the first one done in my thirties, I stopped feeling guilt over all my gaming. I mean, okay, there’s still guilt. But it’s not so prevalent, because I realized how deep this affection for The Legend of Zelda, for games in general, was. I wasn’t avoiding reading, not exactly. I had just forgotten this particular kind of joy. I had made no room for it, for years, and now it was making up for lost time.

I still spend a lot of hours playing video games, including many different versions of The Legend of Zelda, but I am also back to reading every day. Reading feeds my soul in a very necessary way, a nourishment I really can’t live without for long. I am so glad I’ve found that again, in many incredible books over the last few months, but… I am also glad that the books have made a little room for other things.

Like Koroks. Like splorin. And just other shit like this.

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Hi, thanks for letting me ramble about my special interest! Yes, I could go on forever about Zelda games. They rule. If you’re Zelda curious but are more of a watcher than a player, here are some of my favorite edits of different play-throughs. Unfortunately it’s a lot of dudes. If you know some ladies, gays, theys that play Zelda, comment below!

It’s three hours long, but this edit of Dan and Arin from Game Grumps playing Windwaker is literally some of the funniest shit I’ve ever seen, culminating in Arin trying to get selfies with Ganondorf as Dan screams at him not to die.

Literally Quinbobin playing anything is great, but since we talked so much about BotW, here’s the start of his incredible, Korok-obsessed run.

Felix, a young Dane from Nintendo Life, absolutely loved BotW and chose to embark on the N64 Zelda games for the first time. I got so much joy out of watching his blind play-through of Ocarina of Time, a game I’d played so many times I’d forgotten, until watching, what it was like to sort these puzzles out for the first time. Felix is also a minigame master — it’s a sight to behold.