Normally in video games, your objectives are simple enough: find the main villain, defeat the main villain, become a legendary hero the likes of which these lands have never seen – so on and so forth. This formula has been repeated a thousand times over millions of games, but it’s not always so simple. Take The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for instance: on the surface, your main quest is to defeat Calamity Ganon and rescue Princess Zelda, just as it’s always been for Nintendo’s hit Zelda games. In reality, though, the game is more complex than that, and Breath of the Wild‘s very nature poses a unique question: what if you don’t defeat Ganon?
Or, at least, not right away.
See, one fact about Breath of the Wild that became apparent to players not long after Nintendo released it in 2017 was that it’s a really big game. There are roughly 30 miles (80 kilometers) of Hyrule for you to explore, and since it’s an open world, you are free to go wherever you want once you get past the tutorial section on the Great Plateau. Once you leave the tutorial section, you’re almost immediately directed to Impa, an old woman in Kakariko Village who fills you in on the main storyline of the game: it’s been 100 years since the Calamity, in which series villain Calamity Ganon nearly destroyed Hyrule before being sealed away by Princess Zelda, who’s been using the last of her Goddess-given magic to hold him at bay.
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For first-time Breath of the Wild players, this usually invokes a sense of urgency to get the main questline done quickly – after all, you have to save the princess before it’s too late! And completing the game’s main story is no small task, either. First, you have to free all four Divine Beasts, get the Master Sword, then get inside Hyrule Castle without dying, defeat Ganon, and then defeat Ganon again, this time in his Dark Beast form, before Zelda is free and the game draws to a close. According to HowLongtoBeat.com, doing the main storyline of Breath of the Wild without deviating at all usually takes 50 hours of gameplay – once again, not a small task.
But the thing is, 50 hours of gameplay pales in comparison to the time it takes to do the main questline and all the side quests, which nearly doubles the time to 98 hours, and even that is nothing compared to the 189 hours it would take a player to finish a completionist run and 100% the game. By this metric, if you decide to either ignore Ganon from the start or take a break somewhere in the main questline, you’ve opened up the possibility of more than doubling the amount of time you get to spend playing a beautiful game that you almost definitely paid a lot of money for.
Why ‘Breath of the Wild’s Side Quests are Worth It
In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the main storyline is broken down into eleven essential quests that lead the player off the Great Plateau and to Impa, who then explains that you’ve got to defeat the Divine Beasts – Vah Ruta, Vah Medoh, Vah Rudania, and Vah Naboris – and then get Master Sword from the Lost Woods before going to defeat Ganon in Hyrule Castle. These eleven quests are the bare minimum for a playthrough and don’t include collecting Link’s lost memories, which are scattered around Hyrule.
If you’re the kind of gamer who prefers to take your time and explore before rushing straight to the final boss, Breath of the Wild has you covered with 77 side quests, just in the base game. Seven more quests are included in The Master Trials DLC and six in the Champions Ballad DLC, giving you a total of 90 side quests to embark on if you’d rather not storm the castle as a one-person army just yet. These quests are incredibly varied as well, ranging from standard video game fare like collecting ingredients and 100 crickets for an NPC in Hateno Village to more unique endeavors like taming a giant horse, uncovering the secrets behind the massive leviathan skeletons found across Hyrule, or winning a shield-surfing contest in the Hebra peaks, to name a few.
If quests aren’t your thing, Breath of the Wild also has 120 Sheikah Shrines for Link to find, each one offering a new puzzle to solve or, sometimes, a tough-as-nails combat trial for you to prove yourself against. Once completed, each shrine gives you a Spirit Orb to upgrade your health or stamina and a treasure chest, usually containing sellable loot or unique weapons or gear. The main questline will only have you interact with a handful of these shrines, but it’s more than worth taking the time and journey across Hyrule to find them all.
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But if the shrines still aren’t your cup of tea, Breath of the Wild is set up so that if you want to, you can pick a direction and just start walking. It’s near impossible to predict what you might encounter on the roads of Hyrule – you might collect all 900 of the korok seeds hidden away in tiny nooks and crannies of the map or defeat Yiga soldiers in disguise. It’s almost painful to consider that if you only do the main quest and rush straight to defeating Ganon, you run the risk of missing a good amount of the game’s content spread out across the vast open world Nintendo has created.
With that in mind, if you’re looking to play Breath of the Wild – for the first time or the tenth – consider letting Calamity Ganon wait until you’ve explored everything else the game offers. Your gameplay will be better for it.
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