Breath of the Wild and the Magic of the Temple of Time
In this short clip from our livestream of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you can see and hear my excitement as I discover that the Temple of Time is here, in ruins and yet still recognizably the same place that I first visited in a game almost twenty years ago.


The Zelda games have long been concerned with the passage of time. One only needs to look at the titles of perhaps the two most widely beloved entries in the series–A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time–to see that this is true. Consider also Majora’s Mask, in which the final minutes and hours and days until the end of the world keep slipping away.
Previously, the games’ concerns with time always felt indifferent to my presence, the series talking to itself and letting me listen. I heard it in the Zelda games replicating their own structure. As certain elements became more and more deeply entrenched, it was as if the gameplay itself were a commentary on Hyrule’s fate, saying “This is the way it has always been (well, how it’s been since A Link to the Past, anyway) and this is the way it will always be.”
In the seismic shift Breath of the Wild brings to the series’ overly familiar gameplay, and in the recognizable but ruined Temple of Time standing in the midst of an irrevocably altered landscape, I now, finally, hear the series saying something else. “As time passes, things change. Things break down. Things fall apart. But we don’t have to repeat the past. We can create new things that build upon what came before rather than being beholden to it.”
What’s most strange and powerful to me about Breath of the Wild’s world is the way that, unlike any Zelda game before it, it speaks to my own past. My excitement in that clip is not because I know how significant the Temple of Time was in Link’s other incarnations and adventures, but because of how significant it was in mine. I remember being there long, long ago; how different it was then, how different I was then. How changed we both are by the passage of time. In Ocarina, Link visits the temple to travel back and forth seven years, and now, twenty years later, the place works its magic on me, as well.
I love it when you can feel the weight of history in a gaming world. Dark Souls is amazing at this: the sadness and ruin, the faded grandeur of some of its most unforgettable locations compels you to imagine what they might have looked like in their prime, hundreds or thousands of years ago. But Breath of the Wild is wonderful and sad in an entirely different way. This isn’t just a land that suggests a past, but a land whose past is tied up with my own. I don’t have to imagine what these places once looked like. I remember. I was there. The game makes me keenly aware that the past twenty years have gone by in a blink, and that in time, all of us will fade.

Link travels the land recovering his memories as the game also comments on our memories as players. I suspect that those who come to Breath of the Wild not bringing with them a lifetime’s worth of Zelda memories will have a very different experience. The Temple of Time won’t mean anything in particular to them, and they won’t feel, not like we do, how the game represents a breaking away from the old, deeply entrenched traditions. In this sense, it is a game that may always speak most deeply to those of us who have grown up with the series. In time, just what makes it so remarkable will be lost, along with our memories. But it won’t change the fact that we were here, and that we lived.
Notes
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