This is going to be a quick one because now that I can finally play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I literally don’t want to do anything else including whatever it is I’m currently doing. If I still had a dating profile it would simply say Likes: Playing Zelda, Dislikes: Not Playing Zelda, there would be no photos of me because taking selfies is not playing Zelda, and I wouldn’t actually respond to any messages because my phone has been dead for three weeks because I haven’t charged it and don’t actually know where it is because fuck dude I’m god damned playing Zelda.
You may be asking, If you’re so obsessed with this game why are you only playing it now when it’s been available for weeks? And I’m going to answer you even though I don’t want to answer you and I think you know what I’d rather be doing (it’s playing Zelda, I want to be playing Zelda).
Last year Horizon Forbidden West came out and I played that for a few months and that’s the last time I’ve wanted to play a new video game release. After I finished playing Forbidden West, do you know what I did?
Do you know what I fucking did?
I played Zelda.
Specifically Breath of the Wild. I played it literally all summer. For the fourth summer in a row. My Switch recently informed me I have logged five hundred and sixty hours in Breath of the Wild. I didn’t even ask. It just flashed on the screen, followed by a reminder that humans are mortal with a finite amount of time. Which is fucking stupid because of course I know that, Nintendo, so what do you think I’d rather be doing right now? Contemplating my mortality or giving you seventy-three American dollars to play another Zelda?
Actually I don’t want to do either of those things. I want to play Zelda.
I finished Breath of the Wild – for the fourth time – and by “finish” I mean “did literally everything except defeat Ganon because fuck that guy and collect all the Korok seeds because nine hundred is secretly a very large number” – and then I didn’t play anything for a few months because I don’t really like video games in general, I hyperfixate on a very specific type of video game: large open worlds I can dick around in for hundreds of hours.
In January I decided to play the Director’s Cut of Death Stranding which is a very unique combination of “the most batshit movie-length cutscenes” and “Dicking Around: The Game,” like, I am quite literally delivering underwear to middle aged women via zipline and beating up the mentally ill with thermonuclear bombs all while pretending a White House representative in a permanent mask named Die Hardman isn’t trying to tell me for the eighteenth time why I have to get to across the country and save my idiot undead sister from a terrorist who is obsessed with her and Egypt and also me for some reason I never actually put together.
It’s high quality trash but it’s not Zelda.
Fuck, I wish I was playing Zelda.
I played Death Stranding for a hundred and fifty hours and that brings us to the clusterfuck of this spring when three games that I wanted to play all came out within weeks of each other.
One of them was Zelda, obviously, obviously one of them was Zelda. You know what, it doesn’t even matter what the other two games were. The only thing that matters is that, while I was excited for both of them, I wasn’t Zelda excited. I knew I would play both games to their fullest but once I started playing Zelda I would be locked in for the rest of the summer.
And actually, it does matter that one of the games was Jedi: Survivor because when Jedi: Fallen Order first came out it was a notoriously buggy piece of shit and I wanted this new game to get at least three patches before I even tried to download it.
I absolutely hate that we’ve entered this space where it’s acceptable for triple-A games to be released as buggy pieces of shit with the expectation that it’ll be patched in the first weeks but that is a conversation for an entirely other article I will write after I have played Zelda.
So here we are, a little more than a month after its release date and I finally started playing it and as a expected I don’t want to do anything else. Here’s why I like it: you can run around Hyrule and the adjacent kingdoms and collect mushrooms and apples and bugs. There’s puzzles. There’s scenery. There’s a big scary bad guy but he stays in the exact middle of the map and waits politely for you to be ready to fight him. Which I never am so I never do and it’s great. Zelda totally has control of that situation. Meanwhile, Link and I will be harassing the annoying lady who is weirdly obsessed with her stupid flowers.
Actually, that was the last Zelda. In this Zelda, Zelda is still the only actual thing standing between the bad guy and Hyrule, and Link and I are getting thrown around by a sentient stone monster because he’s sitting on top of an outfit we won’t even wear but need to have.
Breath of the Wild was truly Dicking Around: The Game, and somehow the freaks at Nintendo were like, “No, we have not reached maximum Dicking Around. There’s even more Dicking Around achievable.”
And fuck, dude, they were right. Even after only six hours my Dicking Around efficiency is through the roof. I gave a guy an apple! I’m going to be riding that high for the rest of the week.
Okay, that’s enough words. I’ve stocked up on enough Kid Cuisine and bourbon to get me to the end of August. Mid-October if I start skipping breakfast. I’ve cancelled all of my plans and commitments and will be ‘disappearing from the country’ the day before my sister’s wedding. I’m not even editing this thing.
I’m going to go play Zelda.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 