Although we have a decade worth of posts to look back on, I have always had fond memories of the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the posts that came with it.  While I am unable to choose one single post, I suppose I can still justify my opinion that this game’s release alone would qualify as an event that really brought the gaming community together.  As far as I can tell, I wrote roughly five posts about my experience with BotW, a review, along with four posts recounting my own unique experience with the game at various points.

One thing that made my experience with this game so special was the fact that everyone’s playthrough was different.  Hyrule is a massive, open world unlike anything we’ve ever seen in a Zelda game before.  While we all started out on the Great Plateau, we all quickly scattered in different directions the moment our choices became limitless.  Everyone was accomplishing tasks, optional and required, in different orders.  Sometimes, I had completed something before other people had, while several people already knew something about the Yiga Clan that I didn’t.  We also shared our experiences with various monsters we had defeated, or in my case, retreated from, and recounted memories of the different horses we had managed to tame and shared our naming choices, whether silly, strange, or epic.

Rarely before or since have I felt so close to the gaming community as I did during those several months where it felt like the whole world was simultaneously playing the same game and sharing our experiences like a bunch of weather-worn adventurers meeting together at a cozy inn one rain-torn night to swap stories.  It was such a fun and interesting time to be a gamer and a Legend of Zelda fan.

So when the game’s sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, was released just under a year ago, I was just as excited about the game itself as I was the discussions that would inevitably stem from its release.  But…that didn’t really happen this time.  Perhaps people were just too busy enjoying the game for themselves to comment on my humble posts.  It might also be because Breath of the Wild was such a big deal, while Tears of the Kingdom was more of the same and didn’t warrant the same level of fascination.  Whatever the case was, I don’t recall much conversation surrounding our experiences with this game at all.

Breath of the Wild was already a momentous occasion on its own.  The comradery of its fans only made things a million times better.  So although ten years’ worth of games have been released since we started this blog, games that have since either been remembered fondly or have been lost to the sands of time, it only took me a moment to recall my absolute favorite event in all that time.  The several months that hundreds of thousands of Zelda fans were all in sync, playing the same game all at the same time, but having their own unique story to tell once it was all over.

The Duck’s BotW Posts

• Getting to Know Breath of the Wild
• The Duck’s First Week with Breath of the Wild
• Three Surprising Weeks with Breath of the Wild
• Breath of the Wild Finally Comes to a Close
• Breath of the Wild: A Review

Image from Flickr User: Jeux Video