Breath of the Wild's Quiet Desolation

Imagine a landscape with nothing but ruins in sight. Civilization has been reduced to small, quaint settlements. Monsters patrol the roads with swords and spears at the ready, hunting down the daring, few travelers. Yet there is still life. Flowers sprout from cracks in the ruins of what once was—bringing life where life was once lost. From the scattered remains of crumbled houses, there are now bits and pieces of prosperity as the citizens begin to rebuild what was once lost. Civilization may have nearly ended, but there is still color, and the world is still breathing. This is the post-apocalyptic world of Breath of the

Image Credit: Nintendo

Wild, the award-winning, 2017 open-world game. Compared to the common zombie-based shooter that screams destruction, Breath of the Wild whispers it in desolate remnants of civilization nearly forgotten.

Its beauty comes from its quiet bleakness. (A major spoiler warning for people who haven’t played the game.)

When people first faced the vastness of this newest installment in the Legend of Zelda franchise, many long-time fans were shocked at the difference between Breath of the Wild and its many predecessors. Rather than a world largely based on puzzles, the new game aimed its sights at something different—a lonely, open landscape, riddled with the remains of a war, which? players are free to explore to their hearts’ desire. The game has hundreds of mysteries to be discovered and secrets just waiting to be found. Rather than the blatant puzzles the other games held, like pushing around blocks or finding hidden keys, the mysteries lie in the landscape and the history.

What makes Breath of the Wild stand out is the absolute desolation of Hyrule, the game's setting. While many Links–the default name given to the lead protagonist in the games, take on the role of a hero defending their people from a rising threat, our Link faces something different. As you go through the game, you unlock memories that take you back one hundred years, and you find our hero and his friends struggling to win a war. Guardians, machines that were meant to fight the Calamity, the apocalypse, alongside our hero have been turned into enemies designed for slaughter. Every advantage that the people of Hyrule thought they had has been turned against them, and the future looks bleak. That is where the story, the player's story, truly begins – with the death of a hero who has failed. At the beginning of the game, you, as Link, walk out into a bright world where the sun is just breaching the horizon of a new adventure, unaware of the destruction that has ravaged the lands. One hundred years have passed, and our hero has been resurrected to fix the crumbling world. Without any memories or friends, you venture off into a world that has been covered by Blight, the black, sludgy corruption that holds portions of the world.

It’s as you regain your memories that you find darkness in the light. Slowly, you learn, as Link remembers, everything that once was – homes where you now see rubble, people where you now see death, where there was once a castle. There is now nothing but the impending danger that you will be forced to face. After all that is the hero’s duty--to save the princess and fight in hopes of reclaiming the future you once lost.

For longtime fans of the franchise, Breath of the Wild has brought back some distant memories as well. Those who have played Ocarina of Time will remember Lon Lon Ranch, a nice little place where the player can find friendly faces. It’s also where you first find the horse that has carried players through more than one Zelda game. However, rather than being bright and joyous and filled with friends, Lon Lon Ranch has been abandoned. The sign that once welcomed you hangs, faded and crooked. There are no friendly faces here anymore.

Other familiar faces include the three great leviathans that show up at different times throughout other games: Skyward Sword’s Levias, the guardian of the skies, the Windfish, the great dreaming deity behind Link's Awakening, and the Ocean King, the powerful yet old water deity of Phantom Hourglass. In previous games, these powerful deities are legendary beings that each of the Links must encounter to continue their adventure – they are inherently bringers of good and light. To meet these three great leviathans in Breath of the Wild, you must accept a small side quest from a few unimportant NPC’s, non-playable characters. The quest? “Leviathan Bones.” in this desolate future, that is all that remains of these once great beings. The great wish-granters and the leviathans that one defended the skies are

Image Credit: Nintendo

now nothing more than skeletons, scattered and half-buried through the world.

While they were wildly important in other games, they are nothing but small Easter eggs now. “Leviathan Bones” is a side quest that you’re somewhat likely to stumble upon, but Lon Lon Ranch is wildly out of the way of almost anything you might do in the game. These are nothing but small reminders of the destruction that this land has gone through and, even once you find them, they mean just about nothing to people who have not played the previous games. That is what makes the setting in Breath of the Wild; it screams destruction without saying much at all.

Many other games have broached post-apocalyptic settings. Your regular zombie-shooter is often about people trying to survive after the world has already ended. Horizon: Zero Dawn, a popular PS4 game that came out around the same time as Breath of the Wild, depicts life after the apocalypse, but every second is a fight to survive. And yet Breath of the Wild is both sadder and quieter. While Horizon still has large civilizations of people who know what it takes to live, Breath of the Wild’s few villages are weakly populated. In addition, our hero undertakes his journey almost completely alone – very few people in this world even know that there is someone fighting for a future, and none that can stand to fight beside him. While most Links have some sort of navigator or friend beside them or waiting for them back home, our Link is alone. Sure, there are a few scattered moments of peace, but the friends you encounter can do little more than offer advice.

What makes Breath of the Wild so different is that it wants the player to find these things on their own – it wants the player to go out and find these clues and put together the pieces of what happens. Yet, still, the game does not at all force these things on you. Speedrunners have actually found that you can bypass all of these points entirely.

Breath of the Wild is undeniably a beautiful game. The flora and fauna are bright and yet hide so much destruction behind them. All that is left are memories and ruins of what once was. You, as the player, are left to put all of the pieces together - to remember a castle where there are now nothing but ruins. Whether this is from other games or the memories you find along the way, the pieces are all there. Rather than screaming death and destruction, the game shows you what once was and lets you remember the rest all on your own.

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If your interest in post-apocalyptical settings, check out my Horizon Forbidden West blog looking into how the creators look at religion.