WhenThe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wildlaunched back in 2017, it was like Nintendo had set the nice version of Pandora’s box in front of a legion of players and carefully stepped away.Tears of the Kingdomupped the chaos, as players committed war crimes and designed their own drones to assault Bokoblin camps with extreme prejudice, but the feeling that a million mischievous spirits had been unleashed on the world was present in the first go around, too.
Breath of the Wild’s surprises were mostly pleasant. Or, if they were unpleasant, they were pleasantly unpleasant, built atop the foundation of friction that made the game so different from Zeldas past. And the nexus of pleasant and unpleasant surprise was Eventide Island.
I Want To Go To There
As soon as Link gained access to the map, you could tell that there wassomethingoff the southeastern coast of Hyrule; a triangular island that might or might not be reachable from the mainland that stretched for it with a peninsula resembling the Grinch’s fuzzy fingers. If you went to the peninsula,andclimbed to the highest point on the cliffs overlooking the sea,andhad upgraded your stamina enough,andhad brewed enough potions to replenish your energy as you flew, you could glide down to that island.
Once you landed, a disembodied voice would inform you that you had begun a challenge. You would be stripped of your clothes and your gear and tasked with returning three lost orbs to their empty pedestals amidst a dangerous island populated with antagonistic creatures. It was a harrowing treasure hunt, as you attempted to hunt down the spheres without alerting the monsters to your presence. Without your gear and weapons, you were nearly as vulnerable as when Link first climbed out of the Shrine of Resurrection.
It was exhilarating. Much of the thrill came from the fact that, dozens of hours in, the game was offering you a factory reset. Though speedrunners have taught me that it’s possible to doanythingin Breath of the Wild at any time, most players won’t reach Eventide Island until they’re dozens of hours into the game and have crested the power curve. They might have filled their inventory with useful weapons and tools and potions, but on Eventide Island they were all stripped away. It was you vs. the elements.
I Want To Go Back To There
Tears of the Kingdom revisited Eventide Island, but it wasn’t quite the same (as I wrote about here). Intentionally so. Where Eventide Island had been a puzzle box in BOTW, TOTK reimagined it as a hidden combat challenge, with an area of the island that was unused in the previous game now housing a secret pirate cove filled to the brim with enemy sailors. Tears of the Kingdom’s design allowed it to reuse Breath of the Wild’s map to subvert player expectations, and this was one of my favorite examples. Nintendo knew it couldn’t recreate the surprise of discovering Eventide Island for the first time, so it cleverly did something completely different.
you may’t replicate Eventide Island, in the same way you can’t replicate the experience of Breath of the Wild as a whole. People often mention Breath of the Wild as the game they most wish they could erase from their memory because surprise is key to its appeal. The open-world masterpiece ran on upended expectations the way an Ultrahanded vehicle runs on Zonai energy cells.
It was a surprise for Zelda fans coming off two decades of increasingly easy, hand-holdy (though, often, still great) adventures. It was a surprise for anyone familiar with the open-world paradigm of the mid-2010s, eschewing the familiar checklist and allowing you to go anywhere you wanted from the moment you flew down from the Great Plateau. And the surprise was there on a moment-to-moment basis, too, as you discovered new systemic reactions, new shrines, new areas to explore, new elements of the world.
You can’t replicate that feeling. Tears of the Kingdom made this especially clear. The game improved on Breath of the Wild in basically every way, but it didn’t sell as well as BOTW, didn’t reviewquiteas well (read: it was still universally acclaimed), and BOTW is the one that players still cite as their all-time favorite game more often. Pure quality can’t compete with the joy of the new, and I’m reminded of that every time I make the trek back to Eventide Island.
