The Zelda video games can be kind of hit and miss for me. I appreciate the franchise for the trailblazer that it is, but only a few of its entries—Ocarina of Time and Link’s Awakening—have truly grabbed me. But my brother has raved about Breath of the Wild for about a year and a half. I trust my siblings’ recommendations implicitly for they rarely if ever steer me the wrong way. The game has sucked me in; it is an astonishingly great play.
I am kind of in a holding pattern right now. I have recaptured three of four Divine Beasts—MacGuffin-esque weapons that will help me defeat the series antagonist Ganon—and my sons want to see me take down the fourth. We try to limit the time that they’re in front of a screen so when I play during the week it is usually after they go to bed. So I am just whiling away time exploring the vast and varied world, looking for shrines, and secrets, and side quests. During this meandering journey is where I found a story of Quixotic yet beautiful hope.
The Kingdom of Hyrule is on the precipice of calamity. It’s been a hundred years since Ganon’s evil has laid waste to those who dared challenge him. Civilizations were razed. Their technology was possessed and turned into murder machines. Literal monsters lurk around seemingly every corner. One person—the titular Zelda—has single-handedly been keeping this evil from consuming Hyrule for a century and time is running out. So I bought a house.