Where is That Damn Dragon?

It's a funny old thing, life. Sometimes, you get really excited for a cool new game, and other times you end up dumping something like 30 hours into a game you've already finished because hey, why the fuck not?

That's kind of where I am recently - although it was less the result of a new game, per se, it was more a case of the Dusk (or I guess it's called Dusklight now?) decompilation of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

The Twilight Princess Corner

When I think about the Zeldas I love - and one day, maybe I will rank them, but I'll probably just settle for a tier list - Twilight Princess is not high on the list. This is not necessarily a slam on Twilight Princess - in fact, it has the distinction of being the last mainline Zelda title that I actually finished before Breath of the Wild came along. I had the Wii version, although I always secretly wanted the Gamecube version, because the sword swinging mechanic was... less than enjoyable. I mean whatever, it was fine to be like "woo I'm swinging a sword around" but like... nah. Nah.

Hello Epona

Also Wind Waker was like a billion times more stylish! Twilight Princess always felt like an almost overcorrection to the people who got all bent out of shape about Toon Link, who rules. Whether or not that was actually at the front of Nintendo's mind when developing it is immaterial, that's how it looked at the time. A "mature" Zelda for everyone angry at the idea of colors in video games. Plenty of bloom though, that shit was how you knew you were playing a modern video game. I think the strongest part of Skyward Sword is that it found a balance between a more colorful, cartoonish style without going full toon. The weakest part is the sword control, which is tolerable enough in the HD edition but still fiddly in a way I do not enjoy.

It's so gritty and mature

Anyway, I'm delighted by Dusklight, which gives me HD Twilight Princess since Nintendo seems to want to keep their version of it locked up on the Wii U, a console I never owned but kind of always wanted to own, if only for the HD Wind Waker and Twilight Princess combo. Alas, that will probably never happen now. One day I am sure Nintendo will put them out on the Switch, they are in a vault marked "break in case of low hardware sales" and we'll never see them until they get desperate. If the Ocarina of Time remake rumors are in fact true, we especially won't see them for like another five years.

Ah Midna, my favorite little gremlin asshole

Now that I've lured you in by talking about a game that is actually somewhat in the current consciousness, allow me to swerve on you by talking about what I've actually been playing now, which is Breath of the Wild.

The Dragon Appears

Depending on the day you ask me, Breath of the Wild is a top 10 to top 5 Game of All Time for me, and I guess while we're at it throw Tears of the Kingdom up there too. Don't ask me to decide which of the two is better please I will do that in a half-assed tier list some other time. I've had the Switch 2 versions of both games since I picked up a Switch 2 last year, but I'd only put a little time into Breath of the Wild on there to see what the Zelda Memories functionality was like on my phone and that was kind of it. I started a new save and played far enough into it to get the runes and the paraglider, but then I'd set it aside and, you know, played other stuff.

Playing Twilight Princess, however, got me back in the Zelda Mindset, which is a way of saying that my attention span, fickle as it is, decided to focus almost exclusively on Zelda games (am I also running through Ocarina of Time again? Yes. Will I finally beat Skyward Sword HD, a game which I bought when it released and then never got past the fire temple until last week? Let's not get carried away, but it's not out of the question). Mostly though, I was just thinking about Breath of the Wild, because I knew I had a (mostly) new save and so hey, why not just run around in there a little? It would scratch the itch and after an hour or so I would go back to Twilight Princess or hey Pragmata is still waiting for me to finish it and there's that final boss in Forbidden Solitare for me to take care of and, you know, a whole fuckin' backlog. What I did not foresee was that I would put something like 30 hours into the damn game over the next week. That was because I saw the damn dragon.

[this is where a picture of the dragon would go, except I was too busy scrambling up a mountain to try and catch it to hit the screenshot button. You'll have to imagine it instead]

This happened because I was just nosing about - doing the thing you do in Breath of the Wild, which is look at the map and think "oh hey I wonder what that lake is" and then get on a horse and ride in that general direction. I am a pervert who plays exclusively with the Pro HUD, meaning I see my health and nothing else, so this strategy ends up meaning I spend a lot of time getting turned around, stumbling somewhere else, and then several hours have gone by and I don't remember what I was doing in the first place. It rules!

A lot of this kinda shit in my Breath of the Wild experience, where "experience" means "riding through breathtakingly gorgeous landscapes while tinkly piano arrangements of Zelda music plays and then I forget what I was doing and just vibe"

In this case, I headed for something which ended up being the Spring of Power - there's a shrine there, I think, but at the very least there's a big Goddess statue who told me to get a scale from the big red dragon what shows up around Death Mountain - I assume that unlocks a shrine, because that is what most things like this do. Lo and behold, as I climbed out of the Spring, there it was! There, on the mountain! I hopped on my horse and took off. The dragon floats around at a pretty leisurely pace, and you can tell when it's around because there's distinctive music that plays, so I figured I had a good shot.

Above: the Spring of Power in the game and on the map. This is also where I first spotted the dragon.

I did not catch up to the dragon, but I figured "hey, it was just around this area, I bet it will circle around again," and so after a brief detour involving some of those big lizardy bastards who took too big of an interest in my presence on the mountainside, I found a nice vantage point and resolved to wait.

It was just around sunrise when I lost the dragon and started my vigil

And wait.

Still no dragon

And...wait

Surely that dragon will show up soon

The dragon failed to show. Now here's the thing about this - and importantly, the thing I do not need or want anyone to explain to me - I don't know if there's a specific way to trigger the dragon's appearance, I don't know if it only shows up under like, certain conditions, I don't know shit about it. I know that it passes by the Spring of Power and definitely comes where I was camped out, but Link chilled out there for an entire fuckin' day of in-game time and I didn't see hide nor hair of the motherfucker.

Undaunted, I decided the best course of action would be to just nose about the mountain range and see if I could scare it up somehow. Or more accurately, I was like "man no way is my ass gonna stand on this mountain for two in-game days" and went exploring. This meant I ended up doing a couple shrines in the area because, you know, they're shrines. I can't ignore those! There's just enough distance between things, and (especially on the Switch 2) you can see just far enough to catch sight of some other interesting thing to head in that direction. This happens to me a lot, and if - as I was - you're waiting for another chance to spot that dragon, a great way to hang out in a given area and kill some time.

What I can't really explain - and I'm being serious here, I don't know the chain of events that happened - is how I ended up in Ruto Village.

A Divine Beast is not a Dragon

I mean look you walk around enough, you decide to warp to a stable to get your horse back because it's too much of a slog to get back to it and there's no Bokoblins with horses you can steal, you get a little turned around because you don't have the minimap on, suddenly there's snow and a big bird mech. At this point my Dragon Quest was more or less forgotten, because I mean what, am I not gonna go ahead and get the big bird on my side?

More importantly, I was pretty sure there was another one of those springs of power nearby. Or a Spring of Wisdom, anyway - a traveler I ran into at one of the stables had mentioned it. That and I had a vague memory of fighting a corrupted dragon in a snowy mountain the first time I played through the game.

Turns out I was... well, not completely right, but correct in that there was a dragon on a snowy mountain to the south of where I'd tried and failed to fight the other guy. I guess if you can't fight the dragon you want, fight the dragon you're with, right?

You can tell I was successful this time, because there's a shrine there now. You have to scroll north for a bit to get to where I was.

In Which Your Humble Author Tries to Make Some Kind of Point

Look, I realize this is not a unique experience to be had in open world games. That's kind of the promise of open world games, right? You can just kinda go along and have some weird fuckin' adventure and hey, maybe you'll advance the main quest line while you're at it! Except if I am being honest, I've really only ever had it in Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. Even Witcher 3, a game I fucking adore and have beaten multiple times, has never started with me trying to do one thing and instead ending up on... not like the other side of the map but pretty close to the other side of the map, you know? Similarly, Elden Ring - another big open world, full of secrets for you to stumble across - is missing something I can't quite put my finger on. I love Elden Ring, don't get me wrong, but the very nature of that game lends itself to being... a little more regimented in my approach. When I play Elden Ring I am usually - not always - on a Mission of some thing or another - I'm going into a mine, I'm going into a grave, I'm going into one of the mega-dungeons to make my way to a boss that will kill me six million times until I beat it and feel like I've just killed God, I'm specifically out to fight a dragon that is hanging out - never moving, just always in the same place - somewhere. Elden Ring rules, and its open design means you can always just kinda go somewhere else if you get stuck, but it is a dead world - by design, really. It's full of the ruins of a civilization and nobody is having a good time. It's not a place you want to live.

I think what it comes down to is that it's not enough to just have Stuff to Do in an open world game. I ended up on the other side of the map in part because it just feels fucking good to ride around on a horse in Breath of the Wild. Elden Ring's riding is... I mean you're basically just in a car that can double jump, and Torrent disappears and reappears at your command rather than existing in the world at all. I love Roach, but he teleports to you when you call for him, and riding him doesn't feel quite as good in a way I can't put my finger on. Worse horse physics, maybe, or maybe because you can just hold down a button and he'll go into autopilot, following whatever road you're on. The horses in Zelda will also follow roads, but it's not a dedicated button, it's just something the horse does on its own (assuming you are on good terms with your horse, anyway). It's a little more naturalistic, as are the various horsey things they get up to, like eating the apple out of the offering dish I needed to summon a Korok.

The clomping of hooves on the grass is a great noise. Also you can see a mounted Bokoblin in the distance. I killed him and took his horse.

It's also not afraid of being empty. It doesn't feel the need to have something happen or a sidequest pop off every two feet - it just lets you soak in the atmosphere. I think in other games of this sort it would drive me insane. Again, I have to refer to Witcher 3 here: I am far more likely to either fast travel to get where I'm going, or stick to the road because I just want to get to the next thing - and when I do run into a monster or group of bandits, my reaction is more likely to be annoyance at the delay than excitement at the prospect of maybe killing my way to some new weapons/arrows for my perpetually dwindling supply, or worry that Oh Shit I Need to Run Now, or any of the things I feel in Breath of the Wild. Elden Ring's the same way - most of the time I'm just going hell for leather to get to the next site of grace, and then I'll slowly make my way to whatever landmark I noticed. With Breath of the Wild, I take my time. I ride leisurely, because the world's big and some parts are empty, but that just gives you moments of peace.

Notice I said the world is occasionally empty, but I didn't say dead. Quite the contrary, the world feels alive even when you're just cutting across an open field. There's bugs, or breeze, or maybe just the minimalist piano soundtrack so you really just hear your horse's footfalls. Importantly (and in contrast to the world of Elden Ring, which is extremely In Ruins, or Witcher 3, which is... also in ruins for the most part), you can see people, and most of them are even happy. They bounced back from the apocalypse, and they've rebuilt, and it's hard to ride through the world and not feel the overall optimism of the world. It's peaceful, even if it is also full of stuff that wants to kill you sometimes. I couldn't even bring myself to get frustrated about the fact I couldn't find the dragon and get into that shrine - I figured I would get back to it eventually, maybe, or maybe I'd just end up doing other stuff. There's a real je ne sais quois to the way the world feels that, amazingly, they also replicated in Tears of the Kingdom. Well, sort of. I've got a whole thing about Tears of the Kingdom's charms I can get into another time.

I guess in the end all this serves to say is "damn, Breath of the Wild really is something special, isn't it?" It's a game that you come out of full of dumb little stories, like waiting to ambush a dragon that never shows up and then ending up somewhere else entirely, fighting a different dragon. It's neat! Breath of the Wild! You should play it!

Oh, and I did end up going back to try finding the dragon again. I managed to spot him (again, kind of by chance), but by the time I got back to my horse and took off, he was already gone. I'll get him one of these days, the bastard.

Smug son of a bitch disappeared like two seconds after I took this screenshot