With the recently released Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment being the last game to be set in the Breath Of The World timeline, a reader looks back at The Legend Of Zelda’s most beautiful map.
It’s easy to forget, while tossing bokoblins like confetti in Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment, that an era in gaming has come to an end. The alpine peaks of Hebra, the wetlands of Lanayru, the rolling dunes of the Gerudo Wastelands, the broad expanse of Hyrule Field – first shown to us in that iconic E3 trailer nearly a decade ago – all of the locations of the Zelda: Breath Of The Wild era are, like those rascally Tabantha goats, being put out to pasture.
The Wild era map is far from the biggest in role-playing history, and it’s far from the most populated, but it’s arguably the most artful and considered. Its best attribute is that it’s not actually a map, it’s a landscape. Traditionally, maps in video games have represented areas in which action occurs and objectives completed.
The whole point of video games is that you keep going – even cozy games necessitate some forward movement – and yet I’d struggle to count the times in Breath Of The Wild or Tears Of The Kingdom that I found myself completely still, just adjusting the camera to get the perfect angle as the sky changed colour or a storm started to brew.
The Romantic poets understood that there is a naturally heroic quality to landscapes, and this seems to be the ethos that went into making the Wild era map. Half the time the most interesting thing happening on screen has nothing to do with Link, whether that be a deer suddenly hopping out of the brush or the way the light hits the wavering grass.
It’s a landscape that seems to exist independently of what you’re hoping to achieve there, making it as much a mood, a feeling, an aesthetic as a land that needs to be saved.
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And yet there’s no denying it: time has come. There would be no worse fate than for the breath to turn stale.
Admittedly, Age Of Imprisonment doesn’t do much to imbue this beloved landscape with new life. The levels are largely flat and repetitive, but the game feels to me like a very fun (and very dumb) victory lap for this era of Zelda.
The enemies, the ancient races, and a story that centres around Zelda. It’s a testament to its durability that even in a game where the settings don’t matter much, I still find myself panning to get a good look at the locations after I’ve rid them of monstrous hoards.
I’ve played enough Zelda to know that one should never say never. I never thought they would resurrect the Hyrule from A Link To The Past. Yet, here we are with A Link Between Worlds and Echoes Of Wisdom. In Echoes we saw what its name suggests: echoes of the Wild era transposed into a delightful top=down version and intermingled with familiar regions.
This is surely a taste of what’s to come, and while I can’t wait to see what the next iteration of Hyrule (or dare I say Termina) might look like, I suspect it will be in the surprising, quiet moments – a flock of birds flying over the Temple of Time or the shadow of something high above creeping across the prairies – that I will be swept back to that most legendary of Zelda landscapes.
By reader Robert Yurchesyn
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