Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they've been chewing over. Today, Jim gushes over the moment you retrieve the legendary sword in the newest Zelda game...
There were several moments in my playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom where I would put the controller down, bring my hands to my head, and sit beaming at the screen. The opening dive to the Great Sky Island as the title appears; the music during the Wind Temple boss fight; the first time I bypassed a puzzle by strapping two rockets to a plank of wood and sent Link rag-dolling towards his goal.
None of these, however, came close to the moment when you retrieve the Master Sword.
I have been hesitant to match up Tears of the Kingdom against the Zelda games that precede it (it is still very new, after all), but, having watched Link get his hands on the legendary blade, I had absolutely no doubt that this was one of my very favourite moments in the entire series.
Before I dive into why I haven't been able to get the sequence out of my head for the past two months, let's first lay out a big old spoiler warning. I am going to be diving into a whole lot of details regarding Tears of the Kingdom's story. If you still are yet to find the Master Sword in the game, then you're going to want to turn back now and do it for yourself first. Trust us, there's nothing quite like experiencing it spoiler-free...
I'd left finding the Master Sword until a good 50 hours into my playtime. I finished the four Regional Phenomena quests and, safe in the assumption that I would be heading off to Hyrule Castle to fight Ganondorf immediately afterwards (how naive I was), I thought it would be a good idea to go into it with Link's legendary blade in hand — come on, I wasn't about to finish the game with some very strong but very ugly Fuse monstrosity now, was I?
Tears of the Kingdom took a Zelda trope that I knew so well and made it ten times better
I had put it off because I know how these sequences go down. You have your Link to the Past approach where you travel to a serene forest and pull the Master Sword out of a stone, surrounded by adorable woodland creatures. Or there's the Ocarina of Time version, which is much the same only in an ancient temple and with significantly fewer squirrels.
Like so many things, Tears of the Kingdom took a Zelda trope that I knew so well and made it ten times better. I love A Link to the Past just as much as anybody else, but you can't honestly say that a sun-speckled forest (no matter how serene) is cooler than riding on the back of an actual dragon...
Okay, I might have jumped the gun a little there. Fortunately, I think that getting the Master Sword this time around is such a series-defining moment, that almost every aspect of bringing it into my possession had me muttering "woah".
This includes how you actually find the cursed thing. There are multiple ways you can go about this: you find all of the Dragon's Tears and reveal the final cutscene that shows you exactly where the sword is, you can rock up to the Lost Woods half-expecting it to be stuck in the ground again. Or you can just actually stumble across the Light Dragon without doing any of that. I'm sure that the former is that bit more cinematic, but holy Hylia did the latter have its own punch-the-air moments.
After clearing the Great Deku Tree's phantom indigestion, he will give you the 'Recovering the Hero's Sword' main quest which pinpoints the location of the Master Sword on the map. The only difference with this objective compared to others is that I noticed that it was moving. My initial thought was that there was some kind of Sky Island in orbit around Hyrule and I would have to leap on and remove the sword. I fast travelled to the nearest Shrine to the moving marker and, in the place of my imagined moving island, was an entire gold and white dragon with my sword buried in its head. Wow.
There's a sense of tension to the act here that's unlike anything that the series has done before
This isn't the first Zelda game that has made us work for a chance to grab the legendary blade (the thought of Skyward Sword's Sacred Flames still makes me shiver) but gliding over to and landing on the back of the Light Dragon is something else. Arguably, this alone had the potential to be a series-best moment, and as the 'Grab' command appeared as I walked closer, I thought I knew where it was going — after all, we've all played Breath of the Wild — but it had to go and subvert my expectations all over again.
There's the obvious switch around of swapping out Breath of the Wild's required 13 hearts to lift the sword for two full rings of stamina, laughing at all those who thought they were getting ahead of the game by loading up on health first, but the best change comes from how this feels like no other Master Sword moment that has come before it.
Clearly, the sequence is more cinematic than ever before. I adore the Master Sword sequences of old, but there's only so much drama that you can get out of a man in a funny hat grunting as he pulls a blade out of a rock. Tears of the Kingdom opts for the complete opposite end of the spectrum — sheer spectacle. There's a dragon, yes, but as you pull the sword of out the dragon's head, it starts speeding through the sky at top speeds, leaving Link clinging on for dear life as if he's Tom Cruise in that one Mission Impossible movie.
How can Nintendo make another Master Sword sequence after this?
And I don't use "for dear life" lightly. Trying to pull the sword whilst low on hearts in Breath of the Wild would result in literal death, but exhaustion is hardly the most graphic way to die. Tears of the Kingdom creates a situation where if you are not prepared to lift the sword (which, bear in mind, you have no idea if you are going to be, the first time around), Link is going to take a tumble off that dragon and fall hundreds of feet before meeting a particularly squishy end. There's a sense of tension to the act here that's unlike anything that the series has done before.
Though the best part about this entire sequence is that it actually means something. In previous games, Link gets the Master Sword because he needs it to banish evil. The same is still true here, of course, but Tears of the Kingdom has the blade so intrinsically woven into the story that finding where it has been all this time has its own special melancholic twist.
I won't explain exactly what the twist is here — though if you're here, I am sure you already know it — but it's fair to say that it draws together Link, Zelda and the entire history of Hyrule into a single cutscene where my previously-uttered "woah" quickly turned into an "aww". It's epic, it's tense, it's exciting, but most of all it's heartbreaking.
So, as I watched Link plop safely onto a nearby Sky Island as the dragon flew into the distance, I breathed an almighty sigh. Of relief? Yes, but also of disbelief about what had just happened. How can Nintendo make another Master Sword sequence after this? What do I do with all of that dragon knowledge that I have just learned? And, most prominently, why did I wait for over 50 hours before looking for that darn blade?
Princess Zelda may well be stuck in the past, but her franchise certainly isn't. And this moment only enriched the rest of the game for me. While I am reluctant to say that Tears of the Kingdom is the greatest Zelda game ever at this point, I am confident that — at the very least — its Master Sword moment is perhaps the best moment in the series ever.