I’ve owned The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch for a really long time. I haven’t put in as much time as most, but I’m currently sitting at a respectable 120 hours at the moment.
I absolutely loved the game when I was playing through it the first time, but upon completing the main storyline you are unceremoniously tossed to the main menu with sadness in your heart, and empty feeling in your stomach, and leftover adrenaline rattling around in your brain like a lone bead in a baby’s rattle.
And the baby is pissed.
I was mad! It was such a good gameplay experience, my literal favorite of all time in terms of single-player campaigns, and it was just…over. You jump back in from the last save before fighting Ganon, paraglide out of the castle, and keep exploring the vast and expansive world laid out before you. After a while, though, I got somewhat bored- this isn’t a bad thing, though, a game can’t be expected to captivate your attention for much longer than the original BOTW campaign did. I was enthralled and enraptured by the world, by the story, and by the character designs. After 60-80 hours, though, I started to feel less and less interested in playing- again, not a drag on BOTW- after all, we can’t all be Peggle 2.
Anyway, eventually you’ll get bored of running through the vast, beautiful landscape, digging up shrines and discovering hidden secrets about the world and yourself. One fateful day, upon starting up the game after getting pissed at Tetris 99, you’ll see the “DLC” option on the main menu, and decide to drop around 20 USD on it.
I now know how the smash characters felt when they got blasted in World of Light.
Holy moly do they hit you with all the new content all at once. You get approximately 500 new side quests, 6 hours of cutscenes, one hundred thousand different kinds of armor, and one extra main quest. Now, in most games I play, I end up accidentally completing the main objective first. It sucks, because once I finish it I end up sitting there, staring at my hands, and I realize that I should’ve done all those side quests first.
Such was the case with this DLC.
Now, there isn’t any particular order to do all the new stuff they give you in, so it wasn’t a problem, but it was a whole lot of different things to do all at once. You have to:
Go back to where the game started,
Get this thing called a “one-hit obliterator”, which will kill anything in 1 hit but will also make you die in one hit from anything,
Go to an area crawling with bokoblins and take them all out,
Complete the shrine that appears,
Do this 5 more times,
Return the one-hit obliterator,
Go to a divine beast,
Go to the monuments that show up next to them,
Look at the 3 aerial pictures of spots on the map and figure out where the hell those spots are somehow,
Go to all of them and complete the “trials” that the original champions had to complete,
Go back to the divine beast and enter the “illusory realm”,
Fight another one of the Phantom Ganon copies, but this time with basically no equipment because the illusory realm is “made from the fear in your mind” or whatever
Barely survive, which makes the respective champion’s special ability charge up much faster,
Listen to Kass’ song 5 times because you love him,
Do all of that 3 more times,
Go back to the Shrine of Resurrection
Solve another dungeon in the same style as when first unlocking a divine beast.
Now, major spoilers ahead for the DLC- if you plan on actually playing it, I recommend not reading further, as experiencing this for the first time is incredible and will send goosebumps up and down your spine.
You finish the dungeon, which reveals another blue chamber like when you complete a shrine. You walk up, touch it, it explodes, and the emaciated skeleton corpse of a meditating monk talks to you. Only this time, his hand twitches, and he stands up.
And then he fights you.
Oh my GOD it’s an incredible fight. I mean, any fight that starts out like this has to be sick:
The fight is intense. It starts out pretty normal, where he teleports around and obliterates around 50% of your health with a single hit, but once you get him down to about 2/3rds of his health, he floats into the air and Doctor Strange-style duplicates himself about 7 times. Protip- the copies disappear after one hit, so a solid Urbosa’s Fury will knock them all out except the main one. The only problem being that they come back almost as fast. Anyway, winning the fight left me physically exhausted, especially after losing like 3 times and eating LITERALLY everything in my inventory.
Literally. All my food, all the raw materials, and about 50 of the bananas from the Yiga Clan hideout. Upon winning the fight, you get a super long cutscene in which the platform you were fighting on transforms into a giant mount for the “fifth divine beast”.
It’s a fucking motorcycle.
It’s a fucking SICK motorcycle.
It’s added as a rune on your Sheikah Slate, which summons the sweet motorcycle directly in front of you almost instantly.
After all that, you leave the Shrine of Resurrection and walk out to find Kass.
I like taking pictures, okay???
There he is. He sings you a song he’s written about the trials the 4 champions overcame, a song which is so moving that it causes you to remember one of your lost memories, in which you, Zelda, and the 4 champions are stood around looking at the Sheikah Slate.
This is the part that made me cry.
It’s incredibly cute and heartwarming when they discover that it can take “lifelike recreations of real life”, which of course means “pictures”. They all stand next to each other, and the person they’ve co-opted to take a picture of them gives each of the champions a little direction, and then takes the picture. Right as they do, Daruk, who’s standing behind all of you (and also gigantic, by the way) Scoops all of you up in a big hug that’s captured in the picture.
I cried because I know all of them end up dead not long after that picture.
It was so incredibly sad, but also so sweet because they’re all kind of “alive” through Link and the abilities they’ve given him, and that moment right there was the perfect end to an exhilarating DLC, even though there were tears literally streaming down my face. The music playing behind it didn’t help either. The music during this scene and the monk fight both actually did a whole lot to enhance the emotions felt throughout the whole experience.
Anyway, the enhanced Champion abilities make the game a lot easier to traverse and make enemies go down a lot easier, because you can use them more frequently without worrying about being caught with everything on cooldown. And the motorcycle is a lot better than using a horse, since its summon is instantaneous and you can’t damage it.
