Listen to the Rain

This is it. The end of the road. The final step on the journey.

I replayed the original Legend of Zelda on a whim after beating Dracula's Curse, to see if it was a fluke or not and whether I really could play games in Japanese. Once Breath of the Wild was announced at E3 2016, that was when I came up with the plan to play as many Legend of Zelda games as I could on the way up to its release. Originally, I thought I would just play up to Ocarina of Time. Then, I thought I would play up to Twilight Princess. And once I got that far, I figured, why not see it all the way through?

Of course, it meant that it took me until almost a year and a half after the game came out before I got to it, and then seven months playing on and off to beat it, while I beat seven other games in the same time (including Darkest Dungeon, which itself took me 70 hours). All told, one third of the total time I spent playing Legend of Zelda to this point was spent playing Breath of the Wild, which took me 180 hours, compared to 365 for all other Zelda games combined.

But the thing is, I was having fun the whole time. That's a miracle for any game, and especially for a Zelda game after the series had gone in the direction of Skyward Sword and Tri Force Heroes. The games had taken the Ocarina of Time formula about as far as it could be taken and were getting increasingly ossified, and required something drastic to shake them up and provide something new and exciting. And, well. They delivered.

The Japanese is just a transliteration of the English "Breath of the Wild."


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