One thing is for certain. One thing always stands.
I am a Zelda fan.
For 24 years of my life I’ve been a fan of The Legend of Zelda.
I can say with all my heart that Link is my soul-bond character. He’s the only character that I don’t doubt for a second that is me.
Growing up with Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, The Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess, shaped me to be the gamer I am today.
I would replay these games, specifically Ocarina of Time, repeatedly.
Every year I finish a play-through of Ocarina of Time at least once. When my brother and I got COVID-19 in early January, we played all the way through Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, and almost Twilight Princess before we both got cured and went back to work.
Growing up as a three and four year old, my grandma would buy me toy swords and shields so I could pretend to be Link.
My grandma and I would play Majora’s Mask for hours, and my dad printed off the GameFAQs guide for us, which looked like a book!
As a teen, I’d wear a knitted cap because I felt I looked like Link.
I remember telling my mom when I was a child that I didn’t want to get braces because Link doesn’t wear them.
Needless to say, Zelda is everything in my life and always has been.
When The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild released in 2017, my dad got me a Switch and a copy of the game for my 21st birthday. I didn’t need to go out and drink, smoke, and party it up now that I was “of age” — I had everything I could ever ask for…
a brand new Zelda game.
I spent that entire weekend playing non-stop.
At first I thought it would be fun to beat the game without any clothing (The Naked Run), but as I progressed through the game, I found it to be difficult to keep up.
Breath of the Wild brought many changes to the series as a whole, and although it won Game of the Year 2017, beating out Horizon Zero Dawn, and everyone still highly regards it as one of the greatest Zelda games ever created — I still can’t get behind the game.
My biggest fear is that Zelda will change too much similarly to how the Final Fantasy games abandoned their hardcore fans for a more modernized approach to its franchise.
Although, Nintendo is seeing so much success that it wouldn’t make much sense for them to go backwards, some of us Zelda fans are still dying for a traditional console 3D Zelda game that utilizes unbreakable weapons, vast dungeons, unique items, and all the things that make up Zelda.
With this small amount of hope, came an E3 Nintendo Direct teaser trailer.
https://youtu.be/Pi-MRZBP91I
I had already figured they’d show us a glimpse of the sequel to Breath of the Wild. I previously had very little hype at all. In the back of my mind, I knew it was going to be exactly like the first game. I wasn’t excited, and it felt weird to not be excited about the game as a long-running fan.
Zelda was everything to me, it’s who I was as a gamer and a person. I wanted nothing more to return to being a fan so I didn’t have to play indie game Zelda-clones and that Okami game…
I wanted to play Zelda.
When I finally saw the trailer, as soon as Link fell from the sky and the orchestrated music played
I lost everything.
I started crying like a bitch.
It was so God damned beautiful, like my eyes were looking at Heaven itself.
I had kept everything bottled in over the span of 5 years +.
I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. I couldn’t take it. I wanted to love my favorite series again just like I was two years old, begging my aunt to beat Ganondorf for me.
The open sky, the new clothes and hair design, and what seemed to be a return of items again, all wrapped me tightly in one giant hug while I sat there with tears rolling down my cheeks.
Nintendo had given me a stronger sense of hope that it would be just different enough to be happy again.
After watching the trailer upwards of eleven times and breaking down each scene the best I could, I realized that weapon durability may have returned.
I’d say that I really hope it isn’t back, but if it does return, my hopes are that Nintendo will implement a repair system.
With Skyward Sword fixing motion controls, and the sequel to Breath of the Wild on the horizon, Nintendo made sure that today, they brought back a Zelda fan…
…and gave him a little spark of hope.
- Vohris
