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.

My go-to example for this is actually a space pictured in part of the video but otherwise unremarked on (maybe because the video’s just junk content that amounts to “things are different between games” and “empty space exists” and “they’re doing environmental storytelling but letting you fill in some of the blanks” which is just commenting on the existence of something, not actually SAYING something about it): Makar island. It is a little, incredibly unimportant island to the west of the Lost Woods and the Great Deku Tree and, in Breath of the Wild, it is constantly under the effect of stormy or cloudy conditions. At night, masses of stalhs of various types rise and attack you in waves rather than in little clusters and groupings as if this is a cursed place filled only with the dead–a thing that appears to be the visual story of the space since the only things on this little tuft of rock is a dead tree and bones. It is a place that exists only to occupy a space on the map and yet is rich with storytelling potential least of all because it shares a name with a Korok sage from the game that introduced the Koroks (Wind Waker). It joins a whole host of other areas of similar theme: blasted out houses, crumbled towers, ruins left to moulder, all inhabited only by rusted weapons, the occasional Guardian in BotW, or the spirits of the dead (at night, of course). None of these places have a specific meaning or mechanical purpose, but they’re all important to creating the environmental story that sets the tone of BotW: the world is in ruins and you can’t fix, but you might still be able to save it.

Other places that seem pointless but aren’t are empty caves. A small, empty-cave might not appear to have any particular value, but there’s still a story to be found if you look for it. For example, a lot of these empty caves have bears outside of them. Maybe not directly outside, but fairly near to them more likely than not. Which implies that this empty cave is probably the bear’s home. In fact, in BotW, you can almost always find a cave of some kind nearby if you spot a bear wandering around, like a much more dangerous version of the blupees that will show you the entrance of nearby caverns in TotK. These BotW caves might not contain treasure or anything of import, but they’re crucial to making the world feel as realistic as it does. That’s part of what made BotW such a special game: there was always a reason for everything to be where it was, even if it wasn’t obvious or even mechanical in nature. Not every mountain top had a korok hiding beneath a rock, but every single one served to give you a clear view of the surrounding area and all the hints you’d need to find something interesting nearby. Every giant tree wasn’t filled with birds nests and rare mushrooms, but they were an important part of making the forests. Sometimes the reason a thing exists in a game like this isn’t even to tell a story but to just be the thing it is and occupy the space it does. SOMETHING has to go there, after all.

It’s difficult to spend over six hundred hours in that game and come away with the belief that things were forgotten or overlooked. Every time there’s a ledge on a mountainside, it’s a great spot to look out at the world around you. Every strange little pond tells a story of water collecting or recent rain. Even in TotK, as some things on the surface get reflected in the below and some do not, there’s usually some kind of explanation if you go looking for one. I’m sure things were forgotten. It’s such a large, detailed world after all, it would be astronomically unlikely for nothing to have been overlooked. But so much of it was created with intent, so much attention was paid to its design and form and function in order to create a specific experience of play in BotW (which is probably why that feeling doesn’t really exist for TotK, because they were building off what they’d put together for BotW rather than approaching it from a strictly TotK perspective) that I have a difficult believing that anything as notable as something that appears on the map could get overlooked. The reasoning behind it might not be super apparent, but so much of the game is about providing you just enough detail to fill in the blanks yourself that it really makes me believe that we’re supposed to look and then make up our minds for ourselves rather than rely on some kind of clear and evident reason. I mean, the whole of BotW is about slowly recovering memories but carrying on despite not knowing things! That’s literally in-keeping with the core theme of the game! And TotK is about things being warped and changed by time and the presence of evil! Not everything SHOULD be reflected. You just need to look around a little bit with an open mind and it becomes clear that even the things people forgot about are there for a reason: to create the game you’re playing. Isn’t that enough?