I was going to write about the state of the world, but I got a paragraph in and my anxiety was so high I had to sit and breath and ground myself for ten minutes to stave off a panic attack (it’s difficult handle anxiety when you’re sleep-deprived and the world’s this messed up). So, instead, I figured I might write about The Legend of Zelda again, for the first time in a while. Eight months, almost, which feels pretty significant. Not that I haven’t been tired and sad since then, just that I haven’t needed to write about The Legend of Zelda about it. Anyway, I saw this video on YouTube that proposed to talk about mysterious, forgotten, or unused areas in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which seemed like a really cool idea to me. I love those little strange zones you can sometimes fine where there seems like there should be something and there isn’t for some unknown reason. Unfortunately, this video wasn’t about any of those areas and instead was about various features on the map that were not utilized in-game by any mechanics or quests. Or just were different in Tears of the Kingdom in ways that didn’t make surface level sense. It was a real let-down since the first thing the video showed is literally just good level design. There’s some “unused floors” in the ruined Temple of Time in both games, but they’re literally there so starting out players have places to stop if they decide to climb the inside of the temple instead of outside it, a thing that becomes readily apparent if you look around them at all in any way other than the carefully selected angles the video recorded. So I’m going to talk about some areas that aren’t secret or mysterious but are purposely left empty because the point of the game and its space wasn’t to have something under each rock and tucked into each corner but to build a world rich in potential for storytelling if you just spent enough time on it.