17 Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Secrets continued...
Take a closer look at Link's pants
The Trousers of the Hero, which should really be called the Hot Pants of the Hero, have a neat little Easter Egg — a teeny-tiny Octorok sprite, from the original Legend of Zelda!
You can only get these very short shorts by scanning the 8-bit Link amiibo, which of course comes from the same game. Hold up, is Link wearing these shorts the whole time in the original LoZ??
Bees hate fire
There are many cases of Breath of the Wild's designers drawing from real-life mechanics to inform their "do anything you want" world. This was the Zelda game where things worked more or less like you would expect — cut down a tree and watch it fall, or find out that mountains are too slippy to climb in the rain. It's all very impressive.
So it's not a huge surprise to find out that you can scare bees away from their hive by using a lit torch or a campfire, which smokes the bees out and forces them to leave without attacking Link. Just like in real life!
Panic! At The Blood Moon
If you've played Breath of the Wild, you've most likely seen a Blood Moon, which resurrects all dead enemies and resets items. It's a neat mechanic for both players and the developers, as it allows the game to basically clear its memory every now and again, a bit like deleting cached files on your computer to lessen its load.
But there's a special kind of Blood Moon that fans call the "Panic Blood Moon", which occurs when the game can tell that something's gone wrong (or when it reaches 90% of its memory usage). Because the Blood Moon resets everything, it's useful for fixing these problems.
A Panic Blood Moon can occur at any old time, and often without warning, so you might suddenly get one in the middle of the day. But don't worry — this is just an easy way for the game to restore itself to a previous state, and clear up any glitches that may have happened!
Korok diversity
Koroks have a lot in common — they're all idiots, they're all annoying, and they're all wearing those creepy masks — but one smart cookie on Reddit actually took the time to study Korok demographics. In this detailed census, _pe5e_ figured out that there are five colours of Korok, and nine masks that they can wear, as well as a few other extras like whether or not they're flying, holding things, or what kind of puzzle type they are.
This study led to the discovery that there are 45 combinations of mask/body colour, but that it's not entirely equally divided across these two types — for whatever reason, there are way more of the "pointy heart" masks, and very few "butterfly" masks. What does this mean? Oh, probably nothing. It's just interesting.
Dragons, and piggies, and owls (oh my)
Hylians worship the three sacred goddesses of Wisdom, Courage, and Power. But there's a mysterious race of people alluded to in Breath of the Wild called the Zonai, and although we don't know much about them, we do know that they worshipped the same three concepts — albeit in a different way.
In Zonai culture, Power is represented by a boar, Wisdom by an owl, and Courage by a dragon. We know this from the statues that are littered around Zonai ruins... and we think it might have something to do with what Tears of the Kingdom is all about.
What's in the booooox?
There are five "impossible chests" in the game. These are chests that set off the Sheikah Sensor, but are invisible or hidden. You can get most of them through glitches and patient (mis)use of the Sheikah Slate abilities, but one chest in Aris Beach proved extra impossible to reach until last year, because it's too far away from anywhere the player can spawn — and if you swim over to it, it will start sinking, and you can't open an underwater chest anyway.
The trick to getting the chest requires basically every glitch in the book: Moon Jumping, Ollie Clips, Super Swimming, and a bunch of other stuff that doesn't have cool names.
What's in the chest? ....A piece of Amber.
The secret lives of Avocado and Durian
That is, Cado and Dorian, the two guards in Kakariko Village.
If Link goes into someone's house in Kakariko Village before they return home, they will be startled to see you there — but the two guards, Cado and Dorian, have unique responses.
Dorian says that you scared him because he thought you were "them", meaning the Yiga Clan, and Cado thinks you are his ex-wife, Rola.
Nekkid Snake
Be honest: When you discovered that NPCs had unique responses to Link being naked (as in, just in his underwear, because you can't be fully nude in a Nintendo game, come on), which characters did you immediately talk to? For us, it was Hestu, the giant weirdo Korok who sings you little songs, and we were not disappointed. He does a little dance!
Unfortunately, Hestu is so distracted by you being "united in exposure" that he won't actually upgrade your armour until you put clothes back on.
Brigo's internal compass
Early in the game, you'll probably cross Proxim Bridge, and meet an NPC by the name of Brigo (named that because he's on a bridge, obviously. Nominative determinism strikes again).
Brigo is there to defend the bridge from monsters and help out travellers, and if Link talks to him, he'll offer to give you directions to Kakariko Village, the Great Plateau, and Hyrule Castle. But his directions are mostly based on him pointing over to where these areas are, and so some players decided to test how accurate his pointing was.
It turns out that you can nudge poor Brigo into different places, and it will alter the direction in which he points — but he will always be pointing to the place you've asked about. That means that the pointing sequence animation is dynamic, and actually takes the location as a reference point. How cool is that?!
There you have it! 17 cool facts about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Some are the work of some creative and thoughtful designers; others are references; and some are just... interesting oopsies. Either way, we can imagine that we'll be finding out new things about BOTW for many years to come, and we hope that Tears of the Kingdom manages to bring the same joy and surprise when it comes out in May 2023.
Did you know all of these? Do you have any interesting facts to share with us? Head to the comments below!