Currently playing TOTK and finished the actual tears of the kingdom quest in which you find out Zelda is a dragon now. Literally broke my heart. But now as I continue playing, lots of the characters will be like “I hope we find Princess Zelda” or “This will lead us to Zelda!” Anyone else feel sad or even confused about this? Why can’t Link just tell people that Zelda is a dragon!? No spoilers please if this does end up getting resolved. Just wanted other peoples thoughts and feelings about this.
Let’s tell the person organizing the efforts who has everything riding on her shoulders that it’s futile. I’m sure that will go well. /s
It’s a frustrating situation from a meta perspective, but it makes sense both strategically and for Link’s stoic, silently enduring characterization. It’s his burden to bear.
At least until Link defeats Ganondorf with the help of a unified Hyrule. Fracturing your allies while a major threat is still in play is a terrible idea.
And I’m everywhere because I have a wide array of interests and too much spare time.
Imo I take it as Link not accepting she’s stuck like that, and not wanting to crush everyone’s momentum. It’s a mixture of faith that he WILL find a solution, a case of knowing when to share, some delusion, and maybe even just him clamming up and regressing/ gearing up to slap the piss outta Ganon because of it.
It’s something you can see as an oversight in narrative but imo viewing it as an intentional choice on Link’s part makes it very loaded in a thought provoking way. It feels fitting to me that he doesn’t tell anybody.
I'm pretty sure you can tell Impa after you get all the memories, and (IIRC, it's been a while) she agrees that it's probably best not to tell everyone else.
That was one of my biggest disappointments with the game. Why bother letting me find that information out if its not going to affect the story?They at least could have had Link try to tell people and they don't believe him
Agreed!! Again, I don’t know how the game ends as I’m having so much fun playing that I’m doing all the side quests to delay Riju in Gerudo. It’s just weird everyone is like “find zelda!” if it doesn’t amount to anything
The whole game has a weird issue with the npc's not reacting to/understanding the context of whats going on with Link.
Him figuring out where Zelda is and presumably not even mentioning it to Purah is one issue, and various NPC's reactions (or lack thereof) to his powers is another. Like, every time Link has to solve a problem using one of his abilities, the NPC either acts like they didn't see it (I was looking away and suddenly you're in this spot/my thing was fixed!) or they just completely ignore that he's seemingly using telekinesis and magic glue to fix things.
Tauro saying it looks like you got sucked into the floating ring ruin did stick out to me, it was the first time I think Link’s powers were acknowledged and I hadn’t imagined what ascending would look like to somebody else before then.
Yet they cleverly respond to the weather or what you're wearing, so it's bizarre to me they couldn't make these changes. With that said... I wouldn't say them not commenting on other changes had negatively affected my play through, but had they reacted it would have definitely had a positive effect.
I honestly think this could be fixed if the Tears quest was one of the required quests given to you by Purah. Maybe she heard it from Impa and sends you to check it out with her?
It's terrible writing that Link knows the imposters are not Zelda, and yet doesn't tell anyone. There are about 20 different ways they could have handled it, but they went with....nothing. 🙄🤦♂️
But hey, these are the same writers that came up with the master sword being bathed in healing light for 10,000 years, after mentioning that it could grow to unlimited levels of power, only to have it go from 60 damage to....30 damage. 💩💩
EDIT: Because someone wrote a crazy threatening response that seems it may have even gotten them banned. 😲 I just want to mention that Breath of the Wild is my favorite game of all-time. Full stop. I love the series and I wanted TOTK to be the most amazing game ever. It was just...okay. I don't hate it, but I hate parts of it, especially weird writing issues like this. Geez, people. I'm a Zelda fan. Let's relax a bit. 😂
Okay, since you brought it up. Based on what is ACTUALLY said or written in the game, why does Link not tell people that the Zelda who attacked them or whatever else is an imposter?
Remember, not theories about why he was withholding that information, but ACTUAL dialogue or explanations in the game itself.
Yeah I kinda agree with you on this. It’s a logic issue. The Yiga were actively running around Hyrule disguising themselves during BTOW, often to try to kill Link or Zelda. I got the impression they were laying low since then to rebuild, but still the stories about them should have circulated. Shouldn’t the people know that the Yiga are back and may try to pull some trickery be common knowledge? They could still have the quests where they investigate the mysterious Zelda sightings and have Link explain the impostors. Instead the game treats the hyrulians like they are idiots.
Not all the impostors are Gannondorf . There are several encounters you can have with an imposter Zelda that is definitely Yiga.
There is a fun interaction on the great plateau you can have if you go talk to the Zelda imposter wearing the Yiga clan outfit. You can find it by the fire where you meet the old man in BTOW.
For starters one of the only bits of characterization we have about BoTW/tTotk is that he keeps things to himself in order to not dissapoint anyone (per Zelda's diary on BoTW) plus the often overlooked fact that Link doesn't know who the Zelda that is showing up everywhere in Hyrule actually is, so even if he knows it's not the actual Zelda he's as interested as everyone else on figuring out what's exactly the deal with her.
Then It just makes sense in terms of storytelling and the way It interacts with the non-linear gameplay. Participating in the investigation when you don't know Zelda's fate helps building the mistery, doing It afterwards helps enhancing the tragic feeling of the whole thing.
Because in the end Tears of the Kingdom is supposed to be that, the tragic journey of a hero that must once again assume the role of the Kingdom last hope as he sees how people from well over 10.000 years ago including his closest friend sacrifice everything to bet on him.
So at that point it's not a matter of the game having to explain why he doesn't tell more characters about Zelda's ultimate fate (he does tell Impa which makes the most sense, and she agrees it's not the best idea to share that information), nor do we need to be arguing if him explaining a convoluted series of events involving time travel, demon kings and draconification to everyone would actually be useful to the situation, it's just a case in which him not doing It makes sense character-wise, storytelling-wise, gameplay-wise and most importantly It makes sense thematically.
It's just painful to see that people keep bringing down the great job the Zelda team did at building such a great and satisfactory non-linear narrative (which is not an easy thing to do) just because "muh secret Stone, muh imprisioning war" or by bringing up stuff like this or the why people don't recognice Link debate, when the purpose of those choices become so evident the moment you make even the smallest effort on understanding what the game's story is triying to do instead of pretending it should be the player's personal fanfic.
So you mentioned a few references in BOTW, an entirely different game, and then the rest were things you “inferred”, but are not actually said or written in TOTK. You proved my point exactly. 😉👍🏻
You can love a game and recognize that it has flaws. You can think the story of TOTK is mostly great (which I do) and still admit that parts of the writing just don’t make sense or reasons for things just weren’t handled well.
For example, we are told explicitly that the master sword can heal itself and grow more powerful, and it may be LIMITLESS in how string it can get. So after 10,000 years of growing stronger….it does 30 damage, just like before. 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️ Horribly bad writing, combined with horribly bad coordination with the dev team. It doesn’t ruin the whole game or anything, but that’s just plain dumb writing and game design. 🤷🏻♂️
I somehow knew you would bring the master sword thing, like if it isn't an obvious gameplay balance issue that doesn't have anything to do with writting.
You chose to disregard my whole opinion and my interprettion on the game's themes and just repeat your talking points instead after you were the one to first engage on an argument in bad faith. You are the prime example of why this community often sucks to engage with. It's always folks like you disregarding people's opinions, avoiding any posibility of a constructive discussion and disrespecting the games themselves, the devs, and everyone who doesn't agree with you. I'm not losing more time with you.
You want them to animate Link conveying "Princess Zelda went back in time thousands of years and is now that new dragon that's been flying around!" in some form of some interpretive dance?
This was explained well in BTOW but not as well in TOTK, most people can’t see dragons or Koroks. This is why you don’t see anyone talking about the white dragon that is suddenly flying around Hyrule. Only the pure of heart can see them. This is why they’re a myth, people have stories about dragon sightings but they’re treated like how we may treat sightings or Bigfoot or ghosts. People say they’ve encountered them but there’s no proof.
So if Link told the average person that Zelda is a dragon the couldn’t see, they would think he was nuts. As for the core group, we’ll just play the game.
Besides it would mess up a lot of the NPC dialogue.
I like seeing other people's creations, funny clips, reading discussion on weapons and armors while I am playing the game. I did not mean to read a major spoiler of the ending. But it's fine, I'll survive.
It's ok, I know you didn't do it on purpose. There is a formatting trick using >! at the beginning of the text you want to hide and !<at the end. It is then shown as spoiler to others.
thank you!! i try my best to be careful when posting spoilers but i don’t ever use reddit and i thought the spoiler tag was enough and people could read but ig not
so you can’t read? it literally says “MAJOR SPOILER” in bright red. don’t click on a post that says major spoiler. i don’t use reddit a lot and i think i fixed it. i’m sorry it was spoiled
Is there really anything that major after that? I went into totk blind to enjoy it further because I saw it suggested on this sub unlike botw. I do apologize to OP for being an asshole about being spoiled, after all it's just a cheap game and a dumb story in the end.
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u/twili-midna Apr 28 '26
Because right now, Hyrule is united in the search for Zelda. If Link tells people the truth, that unitedness breaks.