Another rough week, as you can tell from my recent rant about process, on top of my ever-growing exhaustion from a mixture of my ever-present burnout and what has become increasingly clear is poor quality sleep on a bad mattress, so I’m going to set aside everything else I could write about to talk about the Legend of Zelda once more (also, don’t try to figure the dates out, since my whole writing versus posting schedule is whacked out right now). Today, I bring before you the topic of Fishing in the Legend of Zelda franchise. My introduction to which began with one of those Bass Pro arcade games at my local pizza parlor, which made for a rough introduction to video game fishing in general. Their other arcade machines were down or occupied by other children (some of whom were my siblings), so I wound up giving it a try when I otherwise wouldn’t have. I didn’t care for it much and the generally unpleasant time I had with that game meant I dreaded any amount of fishing in any other video game for years to come. Not that there was much of it. I’m sure there was other video game fishing available on the N64, but my only exposure to it was through The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I also eventually tried it in Link’s Awakening DX and bounced right off it. I technically didn’t really fish in Wind Waker, but I really enjoyed treasure hunting and I’d count that as a fishing minigame in retrospect even if I absolutely avoided having that thought at the time I played the game. I then avoided fishing so hard in Twilight Princess that I didn’t realize you can get rewards from it. I eventually came around a bit later in life, in my teenaged years, but that was only after I no longer had limited video game time and could actually take my time with things.

Sometimes I wonder what the constant pressure to play quickly and rush through video games did to me, but I think I was already doomed to being stress-prone and riddled with various anxiety disorders by the time my mother imposed time limits on our gaming time. Still, it’s difficult to ignore how much I started to enjoy the more passive parts of video games, such as fishing, once I no loner had to wonder if I’d use up my entire half hour trying to catch a “lunker” so I could get the gold scale in Ocarina of Time. Being able to take my time, to think things through, to actually scope out the fishing scene and test out how the game would react to certain behaviors, and even just having the time to be patient all contributed to me enjoying the act of video game fishing more and more. After all, there was little skill to fishing in Ocarina of Time, mostly just luck and instinctually pulling the rod to one side or the other as the fish fought you. Skill mostly entered the game in knowing how to get the fish you wanted or how to best position yourself for the shortest reel time, but there was a bit of an art in the practice of patience as you continued to fight the “lunker” fish for at least a few minutes. If you started to get impatient or tried to get clever, you’d lose the fish more often than not. I remember hanging out in a friend’s room with my group of high school video game friends as one of them tried to get this fish and how everyone got sick of fishing for it except me, who played and fought it for at least an hour before finally landing it. It was the most skilled and talented I ever felt at video games (until the days of Overwatch, anyway), performing that feat without glitches in front of all my friends.

That display of competence and patience is what inspired me to give all the other types of fishing in the Legend of Zelda games a shot. It was a while before I really went back to Link’s Awakening, but I managed to quickly complete all of the fishing minigames in the DX version I had and then just breezed through them in the Switch remake. I went back to fishing in Twilight Princess much earlier, though, busting out my copy of the game before I even went to college and trying it out again. Never in the little fishing area, though, because I’d so pointedly ignored it in my first playthrough that I forgot it existed. I only went through it during my playthrough of the HD remake for the Wii U once that came out, which I only did after finally playing through the Wind Waker HD on the Wii U and recognized that the treasure-hunting part of the game was basically its own kind of fishing. It’s weird that it took me so long to play the Wind Waker HD since I bought got the themed Wii U that released with it, but I only wound up playing it right before Twilight Princess HD came out, which means I got to appreciate both kinds of fishing AND enjoy fishing in Twilight Princess without needing to mess around with motion controls, which really elevated the experience.

These days, I tend to fish in video games a bit more widely. I enjoy some Palia or Stardew Valley fishing, enjoy a decent fishing minigame in most forms those take, and still absolutely hate pretty much every implementation of fishing in Pokémon games (it’s just so boring). And while I’m sure there’s plenty of people who would love to see some fishing mechanics in Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom (and the games could probably support it pretty decently), I prefer throwing bombs into the water or zapping it with electricity since it means I can collect my fish and move on a lot more quickly than if I was supposed to catch them one at a time. That would be so time consuming! I mean, I’d still absolutely do it and love the hell out of it (especially in BotW, where I like to take my time doing things), but I would also mostly gather fish by other means since it’s difficult to go back from doing something quickly and easily once you start. If I had to collect fish outside of video games, I’d also probably prefer those methods. I don’t particularly enjoy fishing in meat space, after all. I’m not that patient, I don’t much care for eating fish, and I’m not about to trick a bunch of fish to stab themselves in the mouth just so I can throw them back in the water in some kind of sick display of my power over their life and death. I’m not about that lifestyle. I’m much rather keep my fishing digital.