This essay started as an explanation of my Breath of the Wild experience for a friend. Thus, it is relatively raw and unedited.
I hope that readers will find this essay an interesting retrospective on some elements of Breath of the Wild, but it is primarily a self-expression piece about the art forms that I love.
Breath of the Wild is an amazing game that is primarily characterized by its exploration affordances. It imposes almost no ordering on the player's actions; once you complete the Great Plateau, you can basically do whatever you want.
It's no surprise then that Breath of the Wild's narrative elements take a back seat. Individual stories are generally standalone and small, since they have to make sense no matter what order the player encounters them. Since they are small, I argue that they lack depth. You'll spend your time talking to and helping, well, NPCs (in the more colloquial than literal sense) instead of full-blown characters.
Something similar can be said of Link's memories and the main storyline. Those memories can be collected in any order, so they can't be too tightly-coupled. If they were, I think the collection process would be more confusing than compelling.
In the grand scheme of things, the memories are also short. You can probably spend around 100 hours playing Breath of the Wild; less than 1% of that time would be spent watching memories. There's a fundamental limit to how much story can be crammed into such a form.
That's all fine; I don't think people pick up Breath of the Wild for its story. But if you're like me and particularly captured by narrative, I think you can get something uniquely beautiful by injecting narrative into your experience.
There's nothing too crazy about Breath of the Wild's main antagonist. Calamity Ganon isn't even really a character; he's just the big evil force that causes all your problems. The game doesn't try to make you care about defeating Ganon in particular. It's kind of a fact of life that you should ultimately seal him away because you are opposed to evil.
The narrative does provide another reason to defeat Ganon though: Princess Zelda. The game will periodically tell you that Zelda is trapped and that you should go free her. Just giving instructions isn't particularly interesting though, so the game has collectible memories that reveal Zelda's story leading up to Calamity.
Zelda has some characterization. By finding Link's memories, you'll learn like two obvious things about her: she struggles to access her power and she loves research. There are other more interesting character threads, like her relationship with Link and her father, but these are mostly expanded on by Zelda's diary.
The pre-Calamity story also has holes. Tons of them. The timeline is unclear, and things like why Zelda's power manifests itself the way it does aren't tied up nicely. That isn't a knock against the game; a tight and deep story about Zelda would be very difficult to fit into the game's storytelling mediums. It's just a tradeoff.
It takes significant creativity, in my opinion, to glean anything truly compelling from these glimpses of Zelda. The player is basically given the perspective of an uninterested spectator; Link never talks, so there isn't much interaction happening in most of the memories. While her diary provides insight that the memories cannot, it is terse, missable, and possibly only seen after you decided to go and fight Ganon. These narrative elements, while interesting, probably won't meaningfully change your motivation to defeat Ganon. You were probably going to do it anyway, eventually.
“Eventually” is the key. If you were deeply convinced that saving Zelda as soon as possible was of the utmost importance, you probably wouldn't take as many detours to pick mushrooms or chase frogs or climb mountains. Giving the player a high priority goal is antithetical to the game's open-world experience.
All of these points were true for the majority of my play-through. I was freeing the Champions and gearing up to free Zelda, but I was also wandering the mountains and hunting for Koroks and picking every apple in sight.
I was free, and I was unmoored. Without some higher motivator, my actions lacked weight. I ultimately didn't care when these main story things got done, if at all. There are no extrinsic motivators pushing me to complete the story, and the game can't adequately strengthen my intrinsic motivation to do so.
All of that changed when I read “Calm Waters Run Deep” by MaryDragon. It's a fantastic Zelda POV “expansion of canon”. It can definitely be fluffy at times, which isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it really shines with its characterization of Zelda.
The story explores the story of a princess burdened with responsibility. Zelda has been failing to unlock this hereditary golden power for years, and the only person who would even understand this problem, her mother, has been dead for a decade. She's torn between her interests and her duty to her kingdom, and once Link appears, the pressure is all on her. These things are hinted at in the game, but "Calm Waters Run Deep" paints a heartfelt and compelling picture of Zelda's struggles.
The path the story takes to fill in the gaps between memories is also well-considered. What are Link and Zelda's trips to the springs really like? What about the moments after Link falls at Fort Hateno, when Zelda must face her destiny all alone? Small details from throughout the story come full circle to weave a tight and gorgeous tale of Zelda's last months before the Calamity.
This story was so well-done that it changed how I thought about the game. I felt like I had new insight into Zelda's story. This narrative sparked the intrinsic motivation that the game couldn't instill. I went through the rest of the game faster. My in-game actions felt more purposeful now that I was moving toward an ending I actually cared about. Isn't that kind of crazy? Having this extra narrative in my head injected meaning into the game.
I'll be brief, but fan-made narratives had a similar effect on me with respect to Breath of the Wild's villages and NPCs. There are good post-Calamity stories available online, and the ones that I liked the most generally offered two things: side-character expansions and an exploration of Zelda's adjustment to post-Calamity life in Hyrule.
Reading about side-characters is great because, like Zelda's pre-Calamity story, it gives emotional beats that the game simply cannot provide. Its the difference between "let me finish this Divine Beast" and "let me help these Rito that I genuinely care about reclaim their air space". It's sonder but projected onto video game characters.
I mention Zelda's post-Calamity life because it also endears me to the main story. These stories are often about Zelda's recovery from spending 100 years in an ethereal state, as well as Hyrule's recovery from generations living under Calamity Ganon's influence. Both of these are heartwarming topics to me, and they give me something to “look forward” to from the events of the game.
After reading an initial version of this essay, my friend asked (approximately):
If you love narrative so much, aren't there more fitting games out there for you than Breath of the Wild? Why play Breath of the Wild when you can read a book?
I do love reading, but I wouldn't say it is fun in the way that a well-designed gameplay loop is fun. I primarily played games to have fun; Breath of the Wild was no exception. I had a great time playing it well before I read any of the game's fanfiction. If I instead never read any Breath of the Wild fanfiction, I'm sure I would still have a very high opinion of the game.
Thus, I wasn't surprised that I found the game fun, but I was surprised when I started finding meaning in its story. Having added narrative in mind didn't change how much fun I had playing the game, but it drastically changed my overall appreciation for Breath of the Wild as a work of art. Playing the game and reading these works in tandem evoked feelings that neither activity could do alone.
Needless to say, how I came to love Breath of the Wild was a particularly personal journey that I just wanted to write about. Everyone is different. I imagine that some people could experience the game the same way I did but still not be compelled.
And I bet that people like the authors of these fanfiction works didn't even need external narratives to be compelled by stories just below the surface of Breath of the Wild. The stories that I loved most felt like they were canon; it felt like those threads were there the whole time and I just needed someone to show me.
In a normal play-through of Breath of the Wild, you don't have to do a lot of things. If you skip memories or Divine Beasts, the game doesn't lock itself up. Those narratives will just be lost to you. On the other end of the spectrum, there are story-driven games that require players to “play their part” to find out what comes next. You have very limited agency.
There was an interesting phenomenon that I encountered when I both knew the narrative and had agency. You'll have to suspend some disbelief here, since it is all in a video game.
Knowing about story elements like the construction of Tarrey Town or about individual NPCs that I hadn't “met” yet didn't ruin the game for me. Part of that is because, like I said before, Breath of the Wild is much more than its story. But the more interesting reason for that preservation of my experience was because prescience of an option didn't mean it had to happen. In my mind, a story's universe has a pre-determined path, but my save file's universe could still have its path shaped. I didn't have to finish the Tarrey Town side quest, and if I didn't, it just wouldn't exist in my save.
I often did follow through on these story beats though, and it was still a meaningful experience. I would liken it to something that the narrator of Ted Chiang's “Story of Your Life” describes.
In the process of learning Heptapod B, the narrator gains a teleological view of her life; she remembers events that haven't happened yet. Yet, knowledge of the future doesn't stop her from “playing her part”.
One could argue about what that means about free will, if one feels like arguing about a science fiction novella's universe. I don't really care though. At the end of the story, I interpret the narrator as choosing to have her daughter despite knowledge of her eventual death. She decides that the events that she remembers from her daughter's life are things worth experiencing. And I think that's a beautiful sentiment.
There is a cynical part of me that reads this essay back in an unfavorable light. It's not everyday that you read about someone's headcanon inner lives of Nintendo characters, right? Good or bad, it is objectively weird. I've never written anything like this before, and it feels intensely vulnerable to do so.
Yet, this essay is also sincere to what I felt as I played through Breath of the Wild. Nothing compels me like narrative does; that's just who I am. Besides, what fun is life if you don't let art move you?
<3