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.