My Children Have Ruined Zelda. Again
Video games. Such fertile grounds for the seeds of torment.
My kids have ruined Zelda. But not for the first time.
The first time my kids ruined Zelda was six years ago. 2017. A beautiful time. The Nintendo Switch had just launched and for me, a new parent at the time, it was love at first sight.
A malleable console that bent itself around the complexities of my very busy parenting life, the Nintendo Switch was a saviour. With a hectic full-time job and two toddlers, I couldn’t always justify dedicated time in front of a flat-screen TV to play video games, but the Switch was different. It could connect to my TV and be played as a handheld console. I could play it on public transport, I could play in bed before falling asleep, I could play it while squeezing out a luxurious dump.
Point being: The Nintendo Switch was a gift. A wonderful gift that poured itself into the narrow gaps of my busy life. I adored it.
I also adored Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the video game it launched with. Arguably one of the best video games of all time, Breath of the Wild was an open world masterpiece that broke all the rules. It wasn’t just a reinvention of the Zelda series, it was a reinvention of the open world genre as a whole. Like someone reached through an alternate dimension and handed us a perfectly formed video game from a universe unburdened by dull fetch quests, banal aesthetics and copious amounts of bugs.
I played Breath of the Wild constantly. I racked up around 150 hours adventuring in the land of Hyrule. I didn’t just finish the main quest, I was a completionist, attempting to find and complete the game’s 120 shrines – bite-sized puzzle rooms essentially.
I’d done about 112/120 of these shrines when my then 4-year-old son decided he too loved Breath of the Wild.
That’s when the chaos began.
Game Over Man
Slowly but surely, my son completely destroyed my Breath of the Wild save game.
In Breath of the Wild, equipment is everything. Earned over hours of playtime, your weapons, armour, arrows – even food – are key to survival. Most things in the game become worn down and ultimately destroyed from overuse.
And that, my friends, was the problem
I’d return home from work to find my son cross legged on the couch or (as pictured above) perched precariously on the kitchen bench, the Switch wedged between his grubby, sticky little hands. My heart would sink into my butthole. I knew the damage would be massive.
My perfectly curated weaponry sets, complete with the best swords in all of Hyrule, accumulated over dozens of hours of in-game hardship – gone. Replaced with rusty halberds, broken blades and – on more than one occasion – a literal soup ladle.
My extremely valuable suite of arrows – that I’d been saving to face the most challenging and difficult boss fights in the game – also gone. After some trial and error my son had figured out how to use the game’s bow and arrow. He clumsily explored the wilderness, firing ludicrously overpowered Guardian arrows at Bokoblins, the weakest and most common enemy in the game.
Slowly my in-game stash went from a near-infinite selection of every high-powered arrow the game had to offer to… literally nothing. This inventive little bastard had bled my arrow supply to zero.
Worse still, he completely warped my save game. Instead of loading up the most current save, he’d scroll backwards, load up random saves and then overwrite them, innocently wiping progress from my playthrough, “unfinding” shrines that I’d spent hours locating and completing.
It was, unquestionably, an unmitigated waking nightmare. Exhausting to the point where I decided to just quit playing and give him complete access to my save.
Game over man. Game over.
Six Years Later
It wasn’t that serious, but it was annoying. Extremely annoying. Sure I could have made him his own profile, but he had so much fun messing around in my game with all the powers unlocked so I let it slide. Also: he was four. I’d already gotten 150 hours of joy from Breath of the Wild, so I acquiesced. My save file became his playground. And my graveyard. I made my peace with it.
Fast forward six years, to the release of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild.
As a family, we couldn’t wait. We devoured the trailers, watched the gameplay walkthroughs. We counted down the days till we could get our hands on the brand new Zelda we’d been waiting years to play.
My son is 10 years old now. In the six years since he destroyed my Breath of the Wild save, he’s become quite good at video games. He mostly dedicates his time to what I call the “Big 3” (Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox). In my analogy Minecraft is Roger Federer, Fortnite is Rafa Nadal and Roblox is Novak Djokovic. Because he’s clearly the worst and most annoying of the three.
(Andy Murray is Among Us. Had a few good years at the top, but couldn’t quite cut it in the long term.)
My son also continued to play Zelda. He eventually created his own save file, completing the game like a normal person. He was looking forward to doing the same when Tears of the Kingdom was released.
Me? I was simply hoping to have an experience unsullied by the grubby fingers of toddlers intent on breaking all my shit. Maybe this time, it was possible.
The Seeds of Torment
Ah, human dreams. Such fertile grounds for the seeds of torment. I would soon find that my children, through Zelda, could bring new layers of pain. They had such sights to show me.
Previously the idle destruction of primitive minds at play was the source of my suffering. This time round I was the primitive one. Simply put: as a 42 year old man, trapped in an atrophied body with a withering brain, I could not for the life of me keep up with my children.
Sometimes my 10-year-old would watch me play, delivering advice with a tongue so acerbic it burned to the touch. “Why are you so slow?” “Why can’t you dodge?” “Why don’t you parry?” “Why are your weapons so bad?” “What’s taking you so long?” “Why do you suck?”
In order to better his own skills, my son had taken to watching combat guides. His naturally quick reflexes, bolstered by forbidden YouTuber tips and tricks, resulted in a Zelda player with a skill set light years ahead of my own. I’d watch him dispatch Lynels and Gleeoks like it was baby shit, parrying and fury rushing the toughest enemies in the game with ease. He couldn’t understand why his dear old dad, who once taught him the dark arts of video gaming, couldn’t do the same.
I could only watch as he rattled through the main quest at a terrifying rate. I’d walk into the living room, only to be spoiled by in-game cut-scenes dozens of hours ahead of me. I’d head to another room, in an attempt to ignore it, but it was pointless.
Because later, when it was my turn to play, my younger son would wander in, having just watched his older brother play.
“DAD,” he’d say, “DID YOU KNOW [insert massive spoiler here] AND THEN [insert second massive spoiler here]”
The suffering was endless. Not only were plot points spoiled, puzzles were too. I had absolutely zero chance of playing through dungeons or shrine quests without a frustrated voice popping out of nowhere, delivering the solution before I had the chance to say “shoosh”.
It got to the point where I’d scream out loud, “NO SPOILERS” when the kids emerged from their bedroom – covered in slime, boogers and god knows what else – to watch me play. Despite the explicit warnings, they couldn’t help themselves.
“THERE’S A SECRET CAVE THERE!”
“YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO GET THE YIGA ARMOUR?”
“THERE’S A CHEST IN THAT ROOM!”
Eventually I succumbed. I tried to roll with it, at least a little bit. Tears of the Kingdom is a big ass video game and no matter how many secrets were spoiled, there were plenty more round the corner.
The Coliseum
One Sunday morning I watched my 10-year-old play for a bit. He was in the Lynel Coliseum. The Coliseum isn’t a necessary part of the main quest, but completing it gives you a nifty piece of gear that I – unlike my children – will not spoil.
The Lynel Coliseum is hard as all balls, forcing you to beat five of the game’s toughest enemies back to back to back. I used up all my gear trying to beat just one of these bastards in the wild, beating five in a row seemed… impossible.
Not for my 10-year-old.
Armed with youthful reflexes and a YouTube-sized repository of knowledge, my son made short work of Lynel Coliseum. During those five intense battles, this borderline endless parade of Lynels hit him two or three times, tops. He dodged, he parried, he flurry rushed those fuckers and brutalised them. I was in awe. It wasn’t that long ago I was carrying him – literally carrying him, because the game let you do that – through levels in Super Mario 3D World.
My son had surpassed me in the noble pursuit of video games.
There’s a lot to unpack here. I didn’t ask for this. I was very much against my son being a “gamer”. I imagined myself like Marlon Brando in the Godfather, cradling my son, controller in hand. “I never wanted this for you,” I’d croak. “You could have been a senator!”
It’s funny, as a former games journalist, I spent years trying to get people to take games seriously. As a parent I resorted to type immediately, dropping old school bangers like, “it’s a beautiful day outside, stop wasting it playing that bloody Mineshaft!”
But Zelda’s not bad. It could be worse. It could be iPads and a rotating procession of free-to-play junk-ware. It could be Mr Beast and YouTube shorts, grinding his flailing attention span to a microscopic dust.
It could be Roblox. Urgh.
The truth is it’s fun to share a video game like Zelda with your kids. I’ve always found it difficult to engage with the games my kids are obsessed with. Minecraft is too complicated, too much of a time sink for me. Fortnite is a (well-made and surprisingly kid-friendly) fluorescent orgy of in-jokes and cutting-edge pop culture I’m too busy and – frankly – too old to engage with.
But Zelda? Zelda has been the perfect middle ground. A goldilocks zone of a video game. A uniquely placed portal all of us could walk through at the precise same time. It’s been awesome. Even if those little bastards ruined it for me…
Again.