The Legend Of Zelda Breath Of The Wild / Tropes 0 to C

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• 100% Completion: The challenge of getting 100% completion is daunting. The game's Completion Meter requires the player to physically visit every location on the map, complete all 120 Sheikah Shrines and 4 Divine Beasts, and gather all 900 Korok Seeds. If you truly want to complete everything, you'll find that there's an additional 16 armor sets (plus 15 individual armor pieces) to collect and upgrade, 18 memories to rediscover (although 4 are automatically unlocked by the Divine Beast questline and a 5th by getting the Master Sword), 76 side quests to tackle, 14 Towers to activate, 385 photos to take for the Hyrule Compendium, 84 overworld minibosses to defeat for 3 Medals of Honor, make every food recipe, and a handful of bridles and saddles for your horse companion. Oh, and if that isn't enough for you, you can buy a number of Zelda amiibo (and the DLC) to unlock some exclusive armor sets/pieces and Epona.
• 1-Up: As per the Zelda tradition, fairies come out to heal you for five hearts if you take a fatal blow. Mipha ups the ante with her ability, granting a full heal plus five temporary hearts on death.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: The Bow of Light is given to you to fight Dark Beast Ganon.
• 10,000 Years: The supposed duration of time between the first emergence of Calamity Ganon and Link's awakening in the Shrine of Resurrection, according to Impa. For reference, human civilization is 10,000 years old, and that's a generous estimate. This doesn't even touch on if the previous games really happened in this continuity, and no one says how long it took for the Sheikah to develop their 10,000-year-old tech.
• Abandoned Camp Ruins: In the ruins of Hyrule Castle Town Link can find the remnants of a campsite presumably used by explorers attempting to search through Hyrule Castle.
• Ability Depletion Penalty: When the Stamina Wheel is exhausted from strenuous activity, Link's movement is dramatically slowed and he is unable to use items (including his sword and shield) until it replenishes somewhat. However, compared to Skyward Sword (which introduced the mechanic), Stamina is harder to deplete and easier to regenerate.
• Ability Required to Proceed: Despite being a series staple, this is used sparingly.
  • In order to leave The Great Plateau, Link needs some way to stop the fall from killing him. In the process of getting said paraglider, Link is required to get every other exploration ability — once you're done with the prologue, there's nowhere you aren't capable of going, no shrine you aren't capable of clearing (assuming you can handle their combat difficulty). If you somehow leave the plateau without picking up the paraglider, Link will "void out" and warp back as though falling into a Bottomless Pit.
  • If you choose to free the Divine Beasts, you will need to obtain certain items in order to lower their defenses^note Zora Armor and Shock Arrows against Vah Ruta, Bomb Arrows and (optionally) cold-resistant clothing for Vah Medoh, Bomb Arrows and the Thunder Helm for Vah Naboris, and Fire-resistant clothing or Fireproof Elixir for Vah Rudania, but you're not required to use these items while inside the dungeons or against the bosses.
  • If you want the Master Sword, you'll need at least thirteen hearts to survive its test. Unusually, however, the sword is not required to complete the game.
  • Some shrines cannot be completed without the use of arrows. Luckily, if you go out into the field and find/buy some, you can teleport back to the shrine in question.
  • The middle parts of the Eldin region avert Convection, Schmonvection. This means Link bursts into flames past a certain part of the mountain. One needs to stock up on Fireproof Elixirs or craft them, then get the Flamebreaker Armor once you get to the South Mine or Goron City.
• Aborted Declaration of Love:
  • When Princess Zelda leaves the Master Sword with The Great Deku Tree before going to face Ganon alone, it's implied that she was going to ask The Great Deku Tree to pass on her Love Confession to Link once he returned for the sword. It's also possible that she wasn't, given that The Great Deku Tree cuts her off by insisting she should deliver the message herself, but the lead of up of "Tell him I—" sure seems to point in that direction.
  • Breath of the Wild also has the Zora Princess Mipha. After Zelda suffers several failures to summon her power, Mipha steps up to try and offer the Hylian Princess some pointers. Given the lead-up, it's heavily implied that Mipha was going to admit that she used her feelings for Link as an emotional anchor to help summon her healing powers and that Zelda should try the same. However, she was cut off before she could finish speaking.
• Absurdly Short Level: While most Shrines provide puzzles to solve, a Mini-Boss battle against a Guardian Scout, or an obstacle course to conquer, there are others that merely consist of a compact chamber housing a treasure chest and the guardian Sheikah monk. The real challenge for these Shrines is finding or unlocking them via Shrine Quests, making it so the mere feat of getting to the Shrines is the reward for completing said quests.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Hyrule Castle has a sewer system that, much like Twilight Princess, doubles as a prison and, much like A Link to the Past, served as an escape route for Link and Zelda in the backstory. The fact that it empties into the moat makes it convenient as one of many possible paths for Storming the Castle.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Despite the heightened realism, there are several liberties taken to make the world easier to get around.
  • Link's "weight" is always the same regardless of what he has equipped. This means climbing up a wall while semi-naked and climbing up a wall in plate armor while wielding a greatsword bigger than Link is takes the same amount of time and stamina.
  • For that matter, the climbing system is fairly liberal with what you can climb. Link can hang on to vertical walls no problem and can climb most surfaces with no issues. The only instance of being unable to climb a wall is in the shrines and beasts, as it would break the puzzles.
  • While weather and temperature matter, Link never needs to eat, sleep, or drink (although you can recover Hearts via all three methods).
  • When it is raining, Link cannot climb due to how wet everything is. ^note Well, he can try, but he'll periodically slide down some distance—about the same distance he can climb up in intervals between slides—and lose a big chunk of stamina in the process. Basically, trying to climb a wall that's more than three times Link's height in the rain is a waste of time. However, once the rain subsides, the area is completely dry immediately and Link can resume climbing. In real life, surfaces wet from the rain (or close proximity to waterfalls) would still likely remain wet for a while, this is done so as to not make the player wait even longer for the rain's effects to subside.
  • You don't actually have to wear an entire armor set to gain enough elemental resistance in most cases. Most areas will only require one piece of cold/fire/heat resistant clothing to prevent damage, and even the most extreme environments only require two pieces of a given armor set to protect Link, allowing the player to swap in a piece with a different bonus to deal with various situations. Elixirs of appropriate strength can also be used to reduce or negate the need for protective clothing altogether.
  • The stable operators will remind you that a horse is not magical and cannot answer a summons if they're too far away, unlike previous games where Epona will appear instantly when called.^note Averted if your horse is wearing the Ancient Saddle from the Champion's Ballad DLC However, the stable staff themselves can retrieve a horse instantly, no matter where it currently is.
  • Despite the potential for falls to be fatal if done from too great a height, bodies of water are always safe to land in and no damage is sustained from doing so.^note Unless you've run out of stamina, of course, in which case you drown instantly — though if you're not out of hearts, drowning only returns you to dry land, one heart poorer.
  • Also, no matter how far you fall down, your falling speed immediately resets to near-zero without any adverse effects the moment you use your paraglider, thus allowing you to conserve stamina by opening it mere feet away from fatal landing. In real life, such a massive deceleration will be fatal even if you're still in the air; as stated elsewhere on this site, it's Not the Fall That Kills You…, it's the sudden stop.
  • Wild animals turn into chunks of raw meat right after being killed. And felled trees transform into twined-up bundles of wood after being hit.
  • Cooking only requires that the required ingredients be thrown together into a hot pan for a few seconds, regardless of the type of dish.
  • By the late game, Link can potentially be carrying around a veritable buffet of food items and meals, a lot of which he could've been holding on to for possibly weeks or months of in-game time. Despite the description for frozen crabs implying otherwise^note "Doesn't provide as much companionship as an unfrozen crab, but it won't spoil during your travels.", none of your rations will ever mold, spoil, or otherwise become inedible at any point, even when they're made with or are highly perishable products (i.e. milk and eggs) in real life.
  • Link needs to hold on to the paraglider with both hands, yet can put the paraglider away and switch to bows instantly and then back again when in midair, and also drop remote bombs while gliding without touching the Sheikah Slate.
  • Acquiring a weapon will frequently result in Link also getting an appropriate but heretofore-unseen sheath for it.
  • When dyeing clothes Link and the ingredients chosen are dumped into one big bucket, in order to dye the clothes he is wearing. Somehow this only affects the fabric Link is wearing and not his hair or skin.
  • Despite the hot temperatures of Death Mountain setting fire to nocked arrows and blowing up nocked bomb arrows, simply having arrows on your person in a quiver (by having a bow equipped) will not cause them to burn, as it would prohibit using bows altogether.
  • Larger enemies like Moblins and Lynels need to arm themselves and look imposing, but Link needs to be able to use their weapons when they're defeated, so the size of the weapon is scaled to the current wielder, leading to things like an ordinary Hylian Soup Ladle becoming gigantic in a Moblin's hands and a huge Lynel Crusher shrinking down for Link's use when it's dropped.
  • Multi-shot bows fire a spread of functional arrows but only consume one from your inventory with each shot. This is likely to make them worth using at all, as they'd rapidly deplete Link's quiver. The item descriptions do at least acknowledge that this happens, and state that it's unknown how they do this.
  • Weapon durability only comes into play once the player picks up the weapon. An enemy can get off hundreds of attacks with their weapon but it'll always be treated as new by the game once that same weapon falls into Link's hands.
  • Cryonis pillars never change position from where they're called up, even if they're raised from one of Hyrule's mighty rivers. They also ignore gravity, as demonstrated when you use the Rune on waterfalls.
• Acquired Poison Immunity: In the Vah Ruta quest, Shock Arrows are required to disable the beast. Since the Zora are an aquatic race, they can't touch the arrows without receiving a painful electric shock. One elderly Zora keeps touching a Shock Arrow in the hopes of building an immunity to it over time, but it never works.
• Activation Sequence: Dormant Guardian Stalkers can be found lying inert in various places on the map, and will stir back to action if Link comes too close. Tron Lines across the robot's body flicker as it twitches to life, then a ring of blue light shines along the turret neck. The lines remain steady as the Cyber Cyclops eye brightens blue with a distinct BONG sound. Spider-like legs raise the Guardian up as this boot-up completes, moving the machine towards Link as the Laser Sight activates.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Kate Higgins is most famous for playing Sakura Haruno, an energetic Ninja girl from Naruto. In Breath of the Wild, she plays a young Purah in the final flashback of "The Champions' Ballad", who is also an energetic girl of the ninja-like Sheikah.
  • Before being cast as Revali, Sean Chiplock (then known as SonicMega) had portrayed the similar-looking Falco Lombardi in Smash King, one of the longest-running Super Smash Bros. Brawl machinimas since 2009. Like Falco, Revali is an arrogant, if benevolent blue bird who greatly enjoys flying and combat. This hasn't gone unnoticed by players.
• Actually, That's My Assistant: The elderly Impa tasks Link with visiting the Hateno Ancient Tech Lab to unlock further abilities for the Sheikah Slate. Upon reaching the Lab, a young girl named Purah directs him to a man named Symin in the back. But when Link show Symin the Sheikah Slate, he's quickly informed that Purah, who is Impa's sister, is the real director of the Hateno Ancient Tech Lab. This whole situation occurs because of Purah's embarrassment; thanks to a botched experiment, she had been regressed into a 6-year-old, and she decided to pass off the average visitors to Symin so no one would know what state she was in. She only revealed herself to Link because the Sheikah Slate demonstrated that he was the ancient Hylian Champion. However, he can read the diary of Paya, Impa's granddaughter, and discover that she has an "Auntie Purah," tipping him off to the ruse well beforehand.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts:
  • Beedle makes a return, recurring at stables, bazaars, and other rest stops Link passes through. He always stocks arrows and a selection of critters just right for combating the area's natural hazards. He also overcharges for the arrows compared to any other merchant and the critters can be gotten for free in the right places, but that's the price of convenience.
  • Activating the Great Fairies requires increasingly larger donations the longer you go in the game, with the final Fairy charging 10,000 rupees to talk to you.
  • Kilton's shop, The Fang and Bone, is a case where he hates you by only accepting a currency he made up that requires you trade him monster parts for all of his exclusive gear. These parts also tend to be worth about half as much "Mon" compared to when you sell them to normal merchants for rupees, meaning it could cost you an entire playthrough's worth of cheaper parts just to buy the Dark Outfit.
• Advanced Ancient Humans: The Sheikah are portrayed as having once produced lots of advanced futuristic Magitek, to the point that the Kingdom of Hyrule deliberately abandoned the technology out of fear of its power and only dug it back up 10,000 years later to use it against Calamity Ganon.
• Advanced Movement Technique: There is a number of interesting techniques. An easy one that can be used by anyone playing the game is the "whistle sprint": Simply by holding down the whistle button and mashing the sprint button, the player can move almost as fast as a regular sprint, but with the bonus of their stamina wheel refilling instead of depleting.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: There is one in a shrine added in the Champions' Ballad DLC. The spikes that cover the advancing wall normally wouldn't be much of a threat, but you have to do the shrine while Link is temporarily a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
• After Action Patch Up: One of Link's recovered memories features Zelda checking over a small cut he sustained while defeating a horde of monsters, including numerous high-level bokoblins and a silver lynel. Zelda, understandably, chides Link for being reckless in taking them all on even as she notes that the cut she's looking at seems to be the worst of his injuries.
• After the End:
  • The game takes place in a Hyrule whose civilization has undergone many years of decline after a great disaster, and the natural world has taken over. According to Nintendo's official timeline, Breath of the Wild is set at the tail end of every single one of the three timelines.
  • Even 100 years ago, Hyrule appears to have been this. The Sheikah technology is 10,000 years old, but Hyrule is in Medieval Stasis^note or at least Renaissance Stasis, given the presence of cannons. It's stated that the fall of the Sheikah led to it becoming Lost Technology, and Hyrule never regained that kind of advancement again. The towers, shrines, and ancient weapons are left over from a bygone era that was left as decaying ruins even at Hyrule's most recent "height".
• Age-Down Romance: The scientist Purah is an old woman in a little girl's body after experimenting with de-aging runes. According to the notes she took as she was growing younger, she developed a crush on her lab assistant while she was a teenager.
• Agony of the Feet: Link can kick open small chests like usual, but make him do it barefoot and he'll wince in pain.
• A.I. Breaker: In some Tests of Strength, there's nothing notable about the arena save for a flooded floor, intended for you to use Cryonis to stop the Guardian Scout's spinning attack. However, if you freeze the floor at just the right moment between the spin attack's start and the Guardian Scout's collision with Link, the Cryonis pillar will sprout up, launch the Guardian Scout into the air, and when it lands, it will be "dizzy" for a moment due to the game not knowing what to do in that turn of events, as it just frantically whirls its weapons around while its arms are folded up, allowing you to whale on it.
• Air-Aided Acrobatics: There are cracked patches of earth that emit strong gusts of wind that give Link more vertical distance with the Paraglider, especially in the Hebra region.
• Airborne Mook: Guardian Skywatchers, flying variants of the Guardians that have the same deadly firepower as their Stalker cousins, but with the advantage of being airborne.
• Alien Landmass: Some parts of Hyrule are home to huge stone overhangs, held by rocky pillars and often perforated by large holes that let light down to the lower levels of the area. The largest single formation of this sort is the Cliffs of Quince on the way to Hateno Village, while another forms the "roof" to the inner part of Karusa Valley in the Gerudo Highlands. The Great Cliffs, on the Highlands' edge, similarly consist of a set of straight and narrow stone formations, held up by irregularly-spaced columns and crisscrossing each other over the desert sands.
• All Deserts Have Cacti: The main portion of Gerudo Desert has saguaro-style cactuses, despite the resident Gerudo tribe being based on Middle East motifs.
• All for Nothing: Zelda's notes reveal that the five pillars around Hyrule Castle are Guardian deployment silos coded to only emerge when Calamity Ganon appears, meaning that Hyrule's excavation of the Guardians was largely pointless, other than possibly giving Link and Zelda a little preparation for the onslaught.
• All-Natural Gem Polish: You can mine ore deposits by simply smashing them to pieces with certain tools or blowing them up with bombs. This can yield gemstones, which appear as perfectly-formed, brightly colored crystals despite both the violent method of their extraction and their coming from inside large, flint-like nodules. Specifically, ambers are smoothly rounded orange shapes, diamonds clear crystalline spears that resemble quartz more than anything else, opals are roughly-shaped but otherwise still many-colored, sparkly and well-polished, rubies are deep red faceted crystals, sapphires are similarly shaped and deep blue, and topazes bright yellow cubes.
• All Theories Are True: At Serenne Stable, Link encounters three researchers arguing over what caused the extinction of three known Leviathans. One argues it was a volcanic eruption, the other a prolonged drought, the last a prolonged ice age. Turns out, all three are correct. Link can find three leviathan skeletons in the game, each of which appears to have perished due to one of the three proposed causes.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage:
  • The main setting of the "Master Trials" DLC is the Trial of the Sword, an extended Multi-Mook Melee dungeon in which you face enemies (and most overworld bosses) within areas thematically based on different parts of Hyrule as well as the Shrines.
  • The finale of "The Champions' Ballad" DLC takes place in The Final Trial, an underground dungeon which contains environmental and elemental aesthetics and puzzles evoking those in the four Divine Beasts.
• All Your Powers Combined:
  • Calamity Ganon's physical body has the powers and attributes of each Blight Ganon, as well as some attacks (namely, the fireball move of Fireblight Ganon, the spear of Waterblight Ganon, the wind blaster of Windblight Ganon, and the short sword of Thunderblight Ganon, as well as the Guardian Beam attack shared by all four.)
  • Every time Link defeats a Blight Ganon and frees a Divine Beast, he frees the spirit of its respective Champion as well, and in doing so adds each of their unique abilities to his own Bullet Time ability. He is also able to master all types of weapon (sword and shield, two-handed sword, polearm, bow), whereas each of the Champions specializes in just one.
• Alpha Strike: When you fight Calamity Ganon, all of the Divine Beasts you liberated will fire their Wave Motion Guns at Hyrule Castle. If you liberated all four, they are capable of cutting Ganon's HP in half.
• Alternate Self: Provided one has the amiibo, Wolf Link from Twilight Princess can be summoned to fight alongside the Breath of the Wild incarnation of Link.
• Always Identical Twins:
  • There's a heavy twin motif in a unique shrine situation. Breaking the scattered distribution, there are two directly neighboring shrines located on either side of the gap in the twin Dueling Peaks. The keepers are twin monks, Shee Vaneer and Shee Venath, who look identical and are posed to mirror each other. Furthering the theme, their shrines are even two halves of one puzzle. Each shrine is an orb-and-socket combination puzzle to unlock the gates to the monks, and the only hint comes from signs within that indicate the solution for each can be found in the other twin's shrine. The default arrangement of the orbs in each shrine is the correct solution for the other, and taking the elevator in each to get a view of the whole room allows the player to make a sketch or take a screenshot to make sure they can correctly swap the two configurations to unlock the gates. If you moved any orbs, exiting will reset the arrangement so you can see the undisturbed combination.
  • The Dueling Peaks Stable is staffed entirely by sets of identical twins, with one single exception.
• Always Night: Typhlo Ruins is perpetually dark; the only way to find your way through to the Shrine is by lighting stationary torches and getting the necessary item off a Hynox. Even if you fail to light enough torches to make out the Hynox's body, its eye will still provide a conveniently bright target.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: When Paya's conversations with Link turn to how she got her name, she reluctantly reveals that it comes from a papaya-shaped Distinguishing Mark, but she's too embarrassed to say where exactly it is. Her grandmother Impa eventually reveals it's on her left buttock, leaving Paya mortified. It's actually a bit of an Out-of-Character Moment for Impa; asking about the birthmark most times will lead Impa to gently lead Link away from the topic, and she only reveals where it is after realizing how big of a crush Paya has on Link.
• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: The fight against Calamity Ganon take place in the huge, Tron Lines filled laboratory where he had originally been sealed.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Rainbow pigeons have purple backs, wings and necks, blue wingtips, green bellies, yellow, orange and red necks, yellow-green eye rings, and pink crests.
• Amazonian Beauty: Gerudo stand a good foot or two taller than Hylians and are noted for their beauty. They're also quite muscular and have very defined abs.
• Amazon Chaser: There are several Hylian men who come to the Gerudo Desert for the sole purpose of meeting and getting a Gerudo girlfriend.
• Ambiguous Situation: Is Zelda's "sacred power" the Triforce? On the one hand, the Triforce symbol does appear on her hand when she uses her power during the Great Calamity and against Dark Beast Ganon, which has been the traditional indicator of a Triforce user since Ocarina of Time. On the other hand, however, the Triforce itself isn't mentioned or seen at all in the game, and her power is just referred to as a "sacred power", which makes it unclear if the Triforce is the source of her power or not.
• Ambiguously Gay: Bolson, the head of a home construction company based in Hateno Village, is a flamboyant and effeminate man who wears pastel pink pants with a matching headband and a single earring in his right ear. He makes lots of construction puns that sound vaguely like Double Entendres, and thinks Link plopping down 3 grand on a house is very "studly". This is notably subverted in the German translation, where after finishing the house he specifically states he wants to find a "wife"^note "Frau", which like wife is only used for women instead of a "spouse" like in the English or Japanese version. This might be just a translation error, though.
• Ambushing Enemy:
  • Chuchus often hide underground or in trees with nothing to mark their presence, and pop out onto the surface or drop down to the ground when Link passes close.
  • Lizalfos can change their coloring like chameleons, and often use this ability to blend with their surroundings while lying down. Lizalfos can often be found lying in ambush in this manner, using their cryptic coloring to try to avoid notice. Notably, unlike other enemies, these hiding lizalfos will not instantly charge forward when they see Link; instead, they remain still and hold off attacking until Link is right on top of them, with the only sign that they're aware of his presence being a brief tilt of their heads. They can be fairly easy to see when in the open, as their mimicry only allows them to take on a more-or-less solid coloring, but can be very difficult to spot when hiding in tall grass or in bushes or when clinging to rocky outcrops.
  • Some Bokoblins stay crouched down in areas of tall grass, usually on the side of roads, staying still and hidden until they can spring out and ambush passing travelers such as Link.
  • Several areas in the game are littered with the wrecks of ruined, corroded Guardians. These are mostly just scenery, but a few remain functional enough to shoot lasers even though they cannot move. These decayed Guardians typically remain inactive and indistinguishable from the inert husks around them until Link comes close to them, at which point they power up and start firing. A few Guardian graveyards also hide some fully intact and mobile Guardian Stalkers; while most Stalkers roam about openly and attack Link as soon as they see him, these ones play dead and pretend to be broken down until Link either approaches or hits them with a ranged attack, which will prompt them to drop the ruse and attack.
  • Some Stal- enemies, skeletal versions of regular foes, pretend to be inert piles of bones in order to ambush Link, and will only spring up to attack when he's right on top of them.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: The North American and Japanese box art differs to the European box art, with a darker tone of color for the former than the latter. The EU box art also has Link looking like he's preparing for adventure, while the NA/JP box art has Link holding his sword and shield getting ready for combat action.
• Amnesiac Resonance: Link starts off in the Shrine of Resurrection with no memory of who he is. Yet he still instinctively follows the directions of the mysterious but friendly female voice greeting him upon his awakening, and he soon finds he is skilled enough with swords, axes, and bows to take on the monsters roaming the Great Plateau.
• Anachronic Order: Due to the locations of the memory photos, it is highly unlikely that players will find the Recovered Memories in chronological order, leading to the effect of you needing to gradually piece together Link's past as you go along, only being able to see things in its intended order once you've completed the quest.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • One engineered into the game. Link has a tremendously advanced piece of technology at his hands... from 10,000 years ago. And what does the game make him do with said advanced technology? Well, considering that he's the only one with any access to that tech, use it to perform better at his new hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
  • From the DLC. Link's reward in The Champions' Ballad is his own Divine Beast. The player expects something akin to the Champions' Divine Beasts, an animal-based automaton, perhaps. What they get instead is a Sheikah-tech motorcycle, though it does retain the animal theming of the other divine beasts by resembling a horse or unicorn.
• Ancestor Veneration: The Gerudo show hints of this, with their reverence of Lady Urbosa being a bit different from how other tribes revere they fallen Champion, and one Gerudo outright stating that they don't worship Hylia.
• And the Adventure Continues: After Calamity Ganon is defeated, if Link successfully retrieved all his memories, Link and Zelda agree to keep exploring the new world and continue their research in hopes of restoring the kingdom of Hyrule someday.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Your reward for completing all 120 shrines is the Wild armor set. Its stats are very good (but not unrivaled), and the Set Bonus from wearing all 3 pieces powers up your Master Sword's beam attack, but the most attractive thing about it is the cosmetic effect of finally giving Link his classic Iconic Outfit, which he had gone without for most of the game.
• Antepiece:
  • The first Guardians you encounter are stationary Decayed Guardians in the ruins of an abbey on the Great Plateau. After a brief cutscene showing one activating when you approach the area, you'll soon find that the walls of the ruins easily allow you to hide behind them to avoid the Guardians' lasers. This provides a relatively safe opportunity to get used to the attack patterns of Guardians before you encounter all the variants off the Great Plateau that aren't stationary and aren't blocked by walls or other things.
  • There are antepieces to help you get used to the mechanics needed to combat the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild:
    • For Vah Ruta, you'll need to swim up waterfalls to get high enough to activate Link's Bullet Time so you can fire Shock Arrows into the orbs at its shoulders. You can get some practice for the timing by swimming up the waterfalls around Zora's Domain and aiming at the surrounding wildlife.
    • For Vah Naboris, sand seals are needed to get close enough to shoot Bomb Arrows at its feet. The area needed to trigger the event is far enough to get used to sand seal surfing.
    • For Vah Rudania, the only way to corral it into Death Mountain's crater is to fire Yunobo into it using the cannons found all over. While they aren't too complicated to use, there are still plenty of those same cannons found across the Abandoned North Mine that teaches the player that they can be fired while in motion, thus allowing the player to pick off any Sentries they find up ahead.
    • For Vah Medoh, Link's Bullet Time skill is also needed to shoot Bomb Arrows into Medoh's cannons. The Flight Range can be used as a means of target practice.
• Anthropomorphic Shift: Inverted with the Rito. In The Wind Waker they were essentially humans with bird beaks and wings, while in Breath of the Wild they're more genuine Bird People. Compare Medli◊ from the former with Revali◊ from the latter.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Stables can be used to retrieve horses that are already out on the overworld. If your horse gets stuck or you just don't want to deal with walking it back at the moment, you can warp to any shrine near a stable and ask for the horse at the stable. Somehow, the crew will retrieve the horse for you, creating an indirect but very helpful way to essentially warp your horse, and if you want to put the horse away, you're right at the stable.
  • You can fast travel out of any battle except for those with the Blight Ganons and Calamity Ganon itself. Notably, this includes other boss battles like the one against Master Kohga.
  • You can buy the photo for an entry in a specific category of the Hyrule Compendium for a small fee, in case you're having trouble registering something or, as it the case with certain Lynel weapons, didn't get a picture before the enemies' leveling up removed them from the game world. Upon beating the game, this includes the bosses, preventing them from being permanently missable.
  • If you struggle with a shrine, you can teleport out of it at any time and come back later; simply unlocking its entrance with the Sheikah Slate is sufficient to make it a functional warp point, so you aren't forced to backtrack to it again. And if you complete a shrine without full hearts (for example, you get hurt during one of the Tests of Strength, or took damage from hazards in the shrine), your health will be completely restored upon receiving the Spirit Orb for that shrine.
  • Spending time in one of the game's three extreme temperatures (cold, hot, burning) will damage Link over time, making it difficult to explore large portions of the map. The game introduces this early on with Mount Hylia on the Great Plateau and conveniently places generous amounts of an ingredient used to create cold-resistant food right at the edges of the cold zone to encourage players to get used to the new cooking mechanic. The Warm Doublet, a permanent source of level 1 cold resistance, also becomes accessible during the tutorial. Though optional, it's hard to miss and is extremely useful because cold zones are scattered all over the map, unlike other dangerous climates which are generally only found in one specific region, and players who are following the main quests are unlikely to discover the dedicated cold-resistance set for a while. Once off the Plateau, all inhospitable regions that must be visited for main quests will make elixirs or equipment needed to deal with the environment readily available at the entrance to the area or somewhere close by. In one case, Link is even required to purchase appropriate equipment as part of the main questline. In a pinch, elemental weapons (such as a lit torch) can also be equipped to help Link cope with hot or cold areas.
  • The Champions' Weapons can be reforged in the event that they are severely damaged or broken to prevent them from being Too Awesome to Use. Each weapon can be reforged in the hometown of its owner by giving the local weaponsmith a lower-tier version of the weapon (found lying around town after each Blood Moon), five pieces of flint, and a single diamond, which can be obtained from Zora's Domain in exchange for ten easy-to-find Luminous Stones or bought for 2,000 rupees each in Tarrey Town. If you're short on cash, a certain rock on the southeastern slope of Satori Mountain (just south of the Stalnox) will always have a diamond under it, which regenerates after every Blood Moon.
  • Braziers and the like and raft sails are not physical objects that your weapons can hit, sparing you the possibility of your torches and Korok Leaves breaking by physically striking the objects on accident when you're swinging them around to use their fire or wind.
  • If you aren't equipped with a bow, melee weapon, or shield and you pick one up, you'll automatically equip them for use right away, rather than having to enter the pause menu to equip them. Very handy for moments when your weapon breaks and you salvage another one quickly or if you had dropped your gear from being electrocuted.
  • The very first tree you can climb once you start the game has the exact height to reach the top with a full stamina wheel. If you happen to fall by accident, you will take two and a half hearts of damage, which is just enough to not kill you.
  • Every single major landmark, from major towns to stables to fairy fountains, will always have a shrine out in the open very near to it to give you a fast travel location so you're not forced into excessive backtracking. The shrines added in the DLC also close a few gaps in the fast-travel by adding a few new points to warp to.
  • After completing the game, you get sent back to your file but with some new content, including a quest from Kilton to defeat every individual overworld boss (Hinox, Talus, Molduga). To help with this, the health bars of overworld bosses that have been defeated previously are labeled as such (e.g. "Blue Hinox (Defeated)"), so players know they don't have to engage them again for the sake of 100% Completion. This feature even applies to Calamity Ganon, who (of course) needs to be defeated to receive the quest.
  • During the Final Battle, regardless of the bond you have, your horse will never refuse your commands, so you don't have to worry about the horse suddenly not wanting to sprint or steer.
  • The game includes a hidden mechanic that protects players at full hearts or better from getting One-Hit-Killed, leaving them instead on their last quarter-heart. This is in addition to the Auto Revives of Mipha's Grace and carrying a fairy in your pocket. However, it's only effective at full hearts, will not save you from damage that surpasses its threshold (meaning that you still will get one-shotted by damage that would be sufficient to kill you several times over), abrasion or fall damage may well wipe out your last hit point anyway, and Guardian lasers ignore it to enforce their status as The Dreaded. This mechanic is also absent in the Downloadable Content's Master Mode.
  • If you run out of stamina while paragliding or climbing, you automatically let go. However, afterwards, you have one last chance to pull the paraglider out, just for long enough to reset your fall speed and avoid dying on impact once you're close to the ground.
  • Even though Master Mode upgrades virtually all enemies one level, at least one red enemy of each type (including minibosses and the red lynel on Ploymus Mountain) is left in the game. These red enemies are also exempted from Level Scaling in both the base game and Master Mode so the player won't have to pay Purah and Symin to unlock them in the Compendium.
  • The Sheikah Towers are designed in such a way that rain catches at the top of the tower, meaning that rain won't make Link lose his grip on a tower if he happens to discover one during a rainstorm or one so happens to start mid-climb.
  • If Link is attacked while he's ragdolling, during which you lose control of him, he will not take damage from enemy attacks until he actually gets up to prevent a Cycle of Hurting. However, he will take continuous damage from rolling along the ground.
  • Link is able to take priority over groups of the same kind of item on the ground when picking them up. Should a monster be killed and it drops its parts along with its weapon, Link can be easily directed to pick up all the monster parts only and ignoring the weapon until it is the only item left with no need to reorient him.
  • Zigzagged when using flammable weapons as makeshift torches, such as when you have to carry Blue Flames to power the Ancient Tech Labs. These weapons being on fire alone will actually not affect its durability at all, but if the weapon is continually on fire for a certain duration, it will burn away completely and disappear. However, should you happen to snuff it at any time before this time limit, the weapon's durability will remain unaffected from being set on fire.
  • Approaching bosses with minimal to no equipment will slowly auto-generate weapons in the vicinity during the fight.
  • During the assault on Vah Medoh to destroy its cannons, opening the paraglider will completely recharge Link's stamina wheel, since there's no way to land to regain stamina and the player would have to cook lots of stamina-boosting food otherwise.
  • While equipping an ice weapon will cool Link off in hot biomes and vice-versa for fire weapons in cold areas, neither of them will amplify damage or negate your food or gear-based resistance if you have the same type of weapon as the temperature. An Acceptable Break from Reality so you aren't outright restricted from any kind of weapon.
  • While the Master Sword will temporarily run out of energy if you use it too much, it unleashes its full potential and restores its durability in the presence of Ganon or something corrupted by him (which includes all major story bosses and all major dungeons). This ensures that once you have it, you'll always have a weapon available during climactic encounters.
  • While it's entirely possible, if unlikely, to be hit by a random bolt of lightning during a thunderstorm (as opposed to the ones attracted by metal weapons), these bolts do minimal damage compared to their metal-attracted counterparts, making it unlikely that Link will be outright killed by one.
  • In Master Mode, bosses take longer to start recovering health than regular enemies. It's especially vital for the main story bosses, most of whom exploit Villain Teleportation that would otherwise give them lengthy periods to recover health.
  • Even though Hestu the inventory-expanding NPC is literally right next to the Master Sword, you don't need to buy a slot from him to obtain it — you get a bonus slot for it automatically. As such, if your weapon stash is full, you don't have to throw anything away or go hunting for Korok Seeds.
  • Any merchant, traveling or in shops, will buy any kind of item off of you even if it's not something they sell, and they all pay the exact same rates, so you don't have to run around to multiple shops in order to make all the transactions needed to afford a new piece of gear.
  • Remote Bombs, by virtue of being an unlimited and free rune power, mean that you're never truly defenseless once you have the rune (though they are not recommended for combat if you have equipment), and they can fell trees and break metal boxes, crates, and barrels, which means you usually don't need to wear down your weapons to break them. However, the contents will be blasted away a little, making weapons (or Magnesis dropping for metal boxes) the better choice on small ledges.
  • Also regarding Remote Bombs, the block-shaped variety is provided at the same time as the conventional spherical bomb, so you can place them as demolition charges on slopes or apply them in other circumstances where you want them to stay put where you throw/place them (while the regular spherical bombs now lend quite well to Wreaking Havok to deliver them to target).
  • As long as you have a few hearts full, bottomless pits, lava, water (when you run out of stamina), bogs, and the like are not instant-death hazards. Instead, you'll be put back where you were last standing and lose a small amount of health.
  • Every time you receive a sidequest, a yellow banner displaying it will appear onscreen for a few seconds. Some NPC interactions sound misleadingly like sidequest prompts but are just generic hints, so if you don't see the banner, you should know you're not being asked to do anything for that NPC.
  • One shrine quest requires you to stand on a pedestal while riding a deer to make the shrine emerge. Normally, deer only spawn in ones, twos or threes, their herds don't typically appear in close proximity to each other, and they're very easy to spook and send running for the hills. Consequently, tracking down a deer and successfully mounting it has the potential to be very frustrating; to counteract this, the area where this shrine is found has the highest deer spawn rate of the game and is always filled with small herds.
  • A side quest has an NPC in the Southern Mine ask you to collect three fireproof lizards for him. Small animals like lizards spawn somewhat unreliably, are rarely found in large numbers close to each other, are easy to miss due to their small size and, in these lizards' case, cryptic coloring, and will run away and quickly despawn if spooked. To offset this, the Southern Mine is absolutely crawling with lizards, which can be found in ones and twos every couple meters and under every liftable rock.
  • Several Korok Seed puzzles require to you to get a rock on a bridge or shore into a ring of rock spires in the water, either with good Stasis-launching or strategic Cryonis usage. Since this can be difficult and the rocks can't be retrieved if they miss and fall in the water, each of these puzzles is accompanied by a large amount of rocks nearby, and all of the rocks will respawn as soon as the puzzle area is put a few steps offscreen, keeping the player from having to warp away to reload the area.
  • Thunderstorms never occur over towns, giving you a safe area to warp or escape to during a storm. Rain is the worst weather a town will ever have.
  • The two tech labs require you to carry a blue flame from a furnace over to the labs, but there are long paths and, in the case of the Akkala lab, several enemies in the way. Since you'll probably have to put away your torch to do something else, the game provides several stone lanterns along the way that can be lit with the blue flame to bring it closer to the lab. Once the player is done, they can pull out the torch and relight it from the last lantern and keep going. The lanterns are also rainproof as well, keeping the fire lit even if it starts pouring, allowing you to safely wait it out and continue without going back to the source.
  • Octoroks can snipe Link with alarming accuracy and are a major nuisance. However, because of this, an alerted Octorok's first two shots are made to always miss, making sure the player knows it's there without immediately hitting them out of nowhere with a cheap shot.
  • If Link drops his gear near the edge of an elevated piece of land, intentionally or not, they will placed away from the edge to prevent them from falling off. This also goes for rafts in the middle of the sea, but you're out of luck if it's moving at full speed when the weapon/shield/bow is dropped.
  • If you miss an enemy with an Ancient Arrow, it will almost always bounce off whatever surface it hits or become embedded in it for you to pick up later, preventing you from wasting a valuable item even if you're a terrible shot.
  • An early upgrade for the Sheikah Slate gives it the ability to track any object or creature that you have a picture of in the Compendium. This makes the numerous Fetch Quests somewhat less tedious. One item that can be registered and made trackable is a treasure chest (which applies to all shapes and types), making it easy to know if you've cleared out a shrine or Divine Beast, or alerting the player to some of the wealth of chests scattered and hidden around the map. The Sheikah Sensor+ works on enemies, too. This makes it a useful tool for avoiding Guardians, particularly the stationary Not Quite Dead variants, and can save the player a lot of trouble out in Hyrule's many fields.
  • Reflecting an attack with Perfect Parry will not damage the shield. This can be seen when parrying a Guardian's laser — normally, it destroys most shields in one hit. Since the game encourages using tactics such as dodging and parrying, it's more forgiving about shield durability so the player doesn't eat up a bunch of shields using Perfect Parry on enemies.
  • When scaling a vertical surface you can either climb, which is slow and steadily drains your stamina, or leap upward at the cost of a good chunk of your stamina meter. You can always leap, though, no matter how low your stamina meter has dropped, and even if it's fallen well below the amount of stamina you consume while leaping. This means if you're just not going to have enough energy to make the ledge, you can make one final leap of desperation to reach it. Additionally, if you lunge while climbing with the last points of your stamina, your lunge will go further than normal, giving you a better chance to reach the top with your final bit of energy.
  • The Champions' Ballad DLC adds rematch fights with the Blight Ganons, and both they and the new boss at the end can be fought as many times as the player wants, making it easy to get pictures of them for the Compendium if you didn't the first time. With the DLC, the only boss you can't rematch at all is Master Kohga, making him the only boss photo you'd have to buy if you missed the chance.
  • An example that will hardly be noticed, but if a cutscene (such as unearthing a shrine) occurs while Link is swimming or gliding, his stamina will be fully refilled at the end, to prevent him from falling to his death or drowning because the player got distracted. Encounters which require you to glide or swim will also automatically teleport you to safe ground during the cutscene.
  • Due to Link needing at least 13 permanent hearts to obtain the Master Sword without being killed (unless you abuse glitches), if you try to do so the first time without the required amount, you'll be stopped just before your health runs out. However, this won't happen on any future attempts, so if you still don't have enough hearts on your second try, it's game over.
  • The Great Fairies share their power once unlocked, so the player doesn't have to visit more than one to upgrade armor to the maximum extent possible, and can visit the most convenient one whenever an upgrade is desired.
  • When using flint to start a fire, you must strike it with a metal melee weapon to spark it after dropping it on/next to the combustibles to be lit. Thankfully, it will inflict no wear on the weapon to do so. This can be tested by striking flint with a pristine weapon; the pristine sparkle in its inventory square remains after striking the flint.
  • Solving a Korok puzzle causes the Korok to sit or hover nearby afterwards, so the player can immediately see if they've solved it already without having to open the map to check.
  • Yiga assassins can teleport in to attack you at inopportune times, but the game won't spawn them if Link is swimming, climbing, or otherwise uniquely vulnerable to a sneak attack. They can also be entirely avoided by staying on horseback.
• Anti-Hoarding: Vendors will not restock their arrows if you have more than fifty in your inventory already. Just use them. In the Trial of the Sword it goes a step further in that while you can't buy arrows at all, the game is extremely generous with them so long as you take the time to scavenge around. Furthermore, there are encounters which would extremely frustrating without liberal use of arrows, such as rooms filled with bokoblins on platforms all armed with elemental arrows or Decayed Guardians on platforms barely large enough to hold them. Ancient Arrows are also given out here intending to be used on some of the nastier enemies like Lynels. Normally, Ancient Arrows are too expensive to use, especially when you'd be denying yourself resources, but you don't get to keep anything from the Trial of the Sword anyway.
• Anvil on Head:
  • Using the Magnesis rune, Link can hoist a metallic object (preferably a metal box or something big) high into the air, move it from afar to make it float above the unsuspecting enemy, then let go and have the object smash onto its cranium and deal damage. Unless it's from high above though, it may deals negligible amounts of damage compared to just slamming it from the sides, but either way will stun it. You're encouraged to do this in the Vah Rudania "battle," as when one of the conveniently located metal boxes is dropped on or smacked into a Guardian Drone, it dies in one hit. Of course, it's just as easy to drop it on your own head.
  • Using the amiibo Rune with certain amiibo will cause a chest to fall from the sky; if you target an enemy with it, the chest will land on them and hurt them. If you target an NPC, they'll shout and flinch away as if you swung a weapon at them.
• Apocalypse Cult: The Yiga Clan is a cult split off from the Sheikah tribe that worships Calamity Ganon and exists to resurrect him and kill Link. It's not uncommon to be talking with a seemingly normal NPC when they'll suddenly reveal themselves as a Yiga and try to kill you.
• Apocalypse Not: Hyrule has been ravaged by the Calamity a century ago. In the game's present, there are already a few settlements that are either untouched by the Calamity (e.g. Kakariko Village, Hateno Village), or have recovered. You can even help put together a new town.
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction: During the infiltration of the Yiga Clan Hideout, in order to incentivize stealthy gameplay, a single hit by the Yiga Blademasters instantly kills Link and causes a game over. This is in stark contrast to any other confrontation with Yiga Blademasters, whose attacks indded hit strong, but not fatal in the slightest.
• Arcadia: Hateno Village is a rural Hylian village on tallish hills overlooking beautiful green hills, and unlike the settlements of the other races of Hyrule, it isn't facing any imminent threat from the Divine Beasts.
• Arboreal Abode: The Great Deku Tree has an inn inside his "belly". Besides being a botanical setting, it's also unique among the other inns because Link can rest in it for free.
• Archaeological Arms Race: Hyrule's main plan 100 years ago was to dig up Lost Technology built by the Sheikah eons ago to beat Ganon the last time around, and deliberately recreate the legend. However, having an incomplete knowledge of how the Magitek worked, plus missing a few key details (such as the Sheikah Towers and the intended use of the Sheikah Slate) meant that Ganon ended up turning their own weapons against them.
• Arc Number: Four, mostly revolving around the Champions and likely invoking Four Is Death given the way the past's tragedy tinges most of these instances. There are four non-Hylian races, four dead Champions, each from the four races, and four Divine Beasts once piloted by the Champions. The Champions also represent the four weapon types in the game. There are four Blight Ganons corrupting the Divine Beasts, and four powers you earn from the Champions' spirits. There are also four main rune powers at the beginning of the game, and four shrines that give and teach them, which you have to complete to leave the Great Plateau. The Champions' Ballad DLC echoes this, starting on the Great Plateau and giving Link a four-pronged weapon used to defeat four enemy camps that unlock four more shrines which must be completed before the weapon creates four monuments that start the quests in the four regions. The Sheikah created four types of Guardians, and the Guardian Scouts have four models. Even your upgrades rely on fours. There are four Great Fairies who can collectively upgrade your armor up to four times once they're all freed, and the Goddess Hylia statues' price for health and stamina upgrades is four Spirit Orbs, which are obtained from shrines...and thus, to earn upgrades, they must be completed in groups of four.
• Arc Symbol:
  • The Silent Princess flower, which is a rare breed that may be dying out. The flower represents both Zelda (in her frustration over the position she's been forced into in life) and the hope of Hyrule to flourish after disaster. The final shot of the Golden Ending is of a cliffside covered in these flowers, symbolic of Hyrule finally undergoing a rebirth after the defeat of Ganon.
  • The Sheikah eye is even more prevalent than ever before, appearing on much of their technological interfaces. The Yiga Clan introduces an inverted version of the symbol which they have adopted after defecting and forming their cult, and it appears all over their hideout and on all of their masks.
  • Koroks are heavily associated with spiral patterns, which exhibit in the design language of some of the Korok seed puzzle mechanisms and items, and in the places where some Koroks can be found. This is based on the spiral Kokiri's Emerald from Ocarina of Time being their Spiritual Stone, and the Gorons' and Zoras' Stones have served as their symbols as well. Notable is that the same symbols have also been used to symbolize Courage, Power, and Wisdom respectively, the three pieces of the Triforce and by extension the Three Goddesses Farore, Din, and Nayru.
• Arduous Descent to Terra Firma:
  • Prior to the events of the game, Link has a close encounter with death while trying to protect Princess Zelda from mechanical Guardians that successfully ravaged the land of Hyrule and allowed Calamity Ganon to destroy the kingdom. While Zelda herself manages to save him thanks to her awakened powers, he's so gravely injured that she takes him to the Shrine of Resurrection in the Great Plateau. A century later, Link wakes up fully recovered, but without his memories and unable to leave the Great Plateau due to how tall it is. He receives the guidance of an Old Man to acquire abilities for the Sheikah Slate as part of his training. The Old Man then reveals his true identity to Link as the deceased King of Hyrule and, after explaining to him the events that led to the kingdom's destruction, gives him the Paraglider so the young hero can land back safely to the kingdom's surface.
  • Early in the game, Link causes the Sheikah towers to rise from the ground. At least one NPC ends up stranded atop one.
• Armor Is Useless: Averted for the most part, with heavier armor providing more protection at the expense of your stealth capabilities, and vice versa. Subverted with the Champion's Tunic, which despite appearing to be no more than a simple cloth tunic, is fortified with pieces of divine dragon and thus offers a higher defense rating than any other piece of clothing in the game at a given level.
• Arranged Marriage: Princess Mipha intended to propose to Link with the Zora Armor before she was killed, horrifying the royal advisor Muzu. In the alternate timeline game Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity the player can choose to accept the Zora Armor from her on Link's behalf by completing the Heart's Escort quest.
• Arrows on Fire: In addition to Fire Arrows making a return in this game, Link can set a regular arrow on fire to achieve a similar (albeit weaker) effect, with regular arrows igniting instantly on Death Mountain. Arrows are even capable of carrying the unique Blue Flame, similar to burning weapons, although it turns into regular fire when igniting normal areas.
• The Artifact: Note how each of the houses in Tarrey Town have a distinct "building block" design◊. This is a carry-over from a scrapped mechanic in which you were able to design and customize each building from scratch.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • Horses have their own AI that allow them to move and avoid any obstacles without any input. As Aonuma said, "Real horses don't run into trees very often." They also have personalities related to their bond with Link, and have to be tamed before their behavior is useful; a tamed horse will follow roads automatically.
  • The enemy AI in this game is some of the most advanced yet. If they have a wooden weapon, they'll set it on fire to improve its effectiveness. If they lack a weapon they'll look for an Improvised Weapon, such as sticks, rocks, and even Sheikah Orbs and their fellow monsters (Giant Mooks such as Hinox will even pick up trees and use them as weapons). If you disarm them, they'll try to retrieve their dropped gear, which extends to grabbing an ally's gear that they've dropped, and even grabbing your gear that they made you drop. If bombs are thrown in their path, they'll avoid the blast's reach or kick it back towards Link, and if armed with ranged weapons, they'll snipe Link from a safe distance. When they aren't fighting Link, they can be seen hunting animals for food and sleeping at night.
  • Non Player Characters have their own daily routines, so they aren't just standing around indefinitely waiting for you to talk to them (except shopkeepers). They also might change their behavior if it's raining.
  • Hinoxes and Stalnoxes don't protect their eyes with their hands initially, but if you give them an arrow in the eye for their troubles, they'll quickly wise up and start doing so, making it much harder to time a shot.
  • Usually, Bokoblins and Moblins without ranged weapons will take the shortest path to get to Link to attack him. However, if they see Link preparing to shoot or throw something at them, they will try to strafe and close in at the same time to avoid getting hit while trying to get within striking range. Those with shields will still use the shortest path, blocking any projectiles along the way.
  • Lynels take the cake here. Try to engage them at range? You get sniped. Try to hide behind cover? They will shoot upwards and rain arrows from above. Try to engage them at melee combat? They wil Attack! Attack! Attack! to force you to keep your guard up or get hit. Try to use a Lynel Mask? They'll figure it out, unlike other mobs. Try to distract them with literally anything? They will not only investigate for an extremely long time, but will actually try to fool you into thinking they're no longer interested. Nothing short of extreme skill or looking up a guide will get you through a fight with one of these.
  • Guardian Stalkers are very quick moving enemies and will typically rush you to reach a range that is just a hair beyond your melee range while also weaving back and forth to make it hard to accurately land a shot in the eye to stun them. The whole time this is going on, they'll be charging up that nasty laser, making it difficult to take them on head to head without specialized gear or taking advantage of the terrain to block their line of sight.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • Animals and enemies aren't the brightest around fire. Cuccos can repeatedly walk into the same fire, and humanoid enemies can burn themselves to death by walking into their campfire. Fire Chuchus aren't even fully cognizant of their own fire, and will blithely roll into explosive barrels and blow themselves to kingdom come. Bokoblin cavalry found on shores may accidentally ride into deep water, drowning themselves but leaving the horse to swim back to safety.
  • If you are unseen and throw a bomb in the middle of a group, they will close in to observe it. This is obviously deliberate, and seems to have been added on account of being hilarious.
  • On a similar note, if a disturbed Bokoblin camp has explosive barrels in it, one of them will always pick it up and try to throw it at you. The problem is, Bokoblins' throwing range is smaller than the blast radius, so they will invariably hurt themselves and anyone else caught around the blast in the attempt.
  • You can periodically rain down arrows on a monster camp from atop a cliff, and while they'll look around for the source of the attack for a few seconds, they'll eventually resume their routine like nothing happened as long as you're unseen. None of them will think to look in the direction the arrows are coming from, even if you don't move an inch and repeatedly aim at the same spot. This still applies even if you blow up a Bomb Barrel in their midst from a distance, killing all but one or two of them.
  • If Link's wearing the appropriate disguise mask around some enemies and they take any damage, even environmental damage such as getting struck by lightning or struck by a rolling boulder, this will break Link's disguise — they'll blame Link and act as though he just attacked them himself. Despite how illogical it is, this form of stupidity actually hinders the player.
  • While horse behavior is generally pretty smart, they can sometimes get caught up in moving one direction and slam into a wall even if they're auto-pathing across a main road, or freak out over small lip that's not nearly drastic enough to pose a challenge. Intentional or not, these are behaviors that can be seen in real horses.
  • In order for Link to enter Gerudo Town, he needs to disguise himself as a woman. Only women are allowed in, and if Link tries to enter the town in his normal clothes, the guards stop him. He can then change clothes in full view of the guards, and, as soon as his female costume is complete, they'll let him in.
  • If you draw a bow and fire it at a distant enemy while an armed NPC is nearby, they'll act as if Link is threatening them with the weapon and fight back. Luckily, this won't really have a big effect on Link unless he actually attacks the NPC and gets thrown off a nearby cliff as a result.
  • Bows and arrows expose a hole in the combat AI: ranged weapons make monsters act like support/artillery units, even when they shouldn't. Any enemy armed with a bow will only use that to attack you, even if you walk right up to them — most enemies can punch/kick when unarmed but generally won't if armed with a ranged weapon. And they only fire every 5+ seconds. If you disarm a tough silver/gold enemy and get them to equip a bow, you can beat them up with melee weapons and they won't really fight back, since they don't have enough time to get an arrow ready.
  • Enemies in a panic state can only focus on the source of their panic. If Link hits an enemy with a Sneakstrike and runs around in front of them, they won't register his presence while they get up and turn around to look for the guy who just backstabbed them, allowing Link to Sneakstrike them again.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • Rafts can be moved by blowing air on their sails with a leaf. In accordance with Newton's 3rd Law, this would either move you very slowly backwards in real life or, if you generated a strong enough blast of air, it would blast you off the raft and into the water. The better method would be to blow air off of the raft in the opposite of the direction one wishes to go, which is indeed how wind physics work in all other Zelda games.
  • The scoop in the Sunken Scoop shrine doesn't create any waves when you move it through the water, which makes it possible to come from under the balls to lift them out. In real life, you'd be pushing the balls out of the way when you move the scoop under them and end up lifting out the water, too.
  • Link's able to climb up surfaces that seem too smooth for anyone short of Spider-Man to climb up.^note Justified with the Cryonis ice blocks, which the game says are perfectly stable, meaning they can't melt, and ice is only slippery when there is a layer of water to eliminate friction. However, he cannot climb up Shrine walls of any kind, even including grates.
  • Lightning can target Link and enemies during thunderstorms if they hold metal weapons or shields. While the chances of getting struck by lightning in real life period is anywhere from a 1-in-600,000 to 1-in-960,000 chance, lightning tends to strike the tallest available object and favors striking the most conductive material around. A loading screen tip in the Japanese version handwaves it by saying lightning in Hyrule is particularly attracted to metal objects.
  • Lampshaded by one scientist who is studying the Rito. He concludes that they shouldn't be capable of flight because their wings are too small to lift their bodies. To help with his research, he runs a minigame asking Link to paraglide as far as possible. The paraglider, being roughly the size of an umbrella, is also much too small to do what it does. Which makes it the perfect test, really.
  • It shouldn't even be possible for Link to swim when he's wearing a full set of metal armor and chain mail while carrying a metal shield and an iron sledgehammer on his back, but none of that will weigh him down one bit in the water.
  • Wearing a fully upgraded Sheikah Armor set makes Link move so quietly that he can just casually swim up to wild fish and catch them bare-handed, though the set is mentioned to suppress the sounds of your footsteps, not all sound in general.
• Art-Shifted Sequel: The game sports cel-shading and bright colors mixed with realistically-proportioned characters much like Skyward Sword but with a more gouache-inspired and weathered-looking aesthetic.
• Assassination Sidequest: Some sidequests across Hyrule consist of characters asking Link to defeat a group of enemies, or even a boss (usually Hinox or Talus, but there's also one involving Molduga), due to safety reasons. One of the toughest sidequests involves defeating a pair of large Guardians in a prairie in Akkala located west of Tarrey Town.
• Assassin Outclassin':
  • Link does this frequently, thanks to the Yiga Clan. Their members disguise themselves as travelers and will attack Link if he stops to talk to them. However, as they have relatively low health, it's not that difficult for Link to simply beat them up and steal their bananas. They do become tougher after Master Kogha dies at the end of the quest to infiltrate the Yiga Clan hideout, particularly since they begin to randomly ambush Link rather than waiting for him to provoke them.
  • One of the memories shows that Link was up to this one hundred years ago, as well. Link saved Zelda from a trio of Yiga assassins in the Gerudo Desert, which was what led her to reconsider her opinion of him.
• Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!:
  • If you get too close to a wolf, it will howl, alerting all nearby wolves to its presence to attack you. Kill at least one of them, and the rest will give up on killing you and run for the hills.
  • A swarm of Keese will quit attacking if even one member of the swarm is killed, at which point the whole mass will turn tail and flee.
• Attack Drone: Windblight Ganon. In the second phase of the fight, it detaches the spikes projecting from its back and uses them to redirect its shots to confuse Link as well as to fire condensed blasts of wind from its arm cannon. The drones can be temporarily taken out.
• Attack Its Weak Point: The game uses this trope the least of any game in the series, though it is still present. The individual dungeon bosses, Guardians and Hinox all have weak points that can be exploited (as do the Lynels, though they aren't technically boss enemies themselves), but the open-ended nature of the combat means they will still take damage and can be fought without utilizing the weak spots if the player goes in with the right equipment. Only the Talus minibosses and the final boss require hitting weak points to deal damage at all.
• Attack Speed Buff: Quick Shot is a special effect that bows can be spawned with, which allows shots to be fired more quickly and with a shorter waiting time between each.
• Aura Vision: The Magnesis, Stasis, and Cryonis runes include visual filters which highlight items and materials that can be affected by these powers. In addition to easily seeking targets, this can be used for seeking desirable materials, such as cooking ingredients, which always appear under Stasis vision even if the rune doesn't have any effect on them. ^note Except it always does - fruits on a tree, for example, will remain hanging in mid-air when the tree is felled while they're under the Stasis effect, which can be used to blaze some Korok puzzles.
• Automatic New Game: If there are no save files present, the game will start with a black screen with "Press A" as the only thing displayed.
• Automaton Horses: Completely averted. Horses have their own AI and their own temperaments. Each horse has a likelihood of disobeying your commands depending on their temperament, and to decrease this likelihood, you have to increase your bond with the horse by soothing it when it does obey your commands and feeding it food like apples. Also, if you release the control stick to let them move on their own, they divert around trees and obstacles. Horses do have one automaton-like trait in that, when given no commands, they will stand perfectly still and not wander around unless they are attacked or see food nearby.
• Auto-Revive: Fairies and Mipha's Grace both heal Link when he falls in battle. Mipha's Grace even gives temporary bonus hearts.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Horses, due to the more realistic way the game handles them. Despite the increased movement speed, you're actually quite limited in where you can go with them, as they will naturally refuse to jump off cliffs or climb mountains. Adding to this, your horse can't teleport from across the world if you try to whistle for it in the base game; the only way to instantly summon them is to go to a stable or to get the DLC and get the Ancient Bridle and Saddle.
  • The physics engine in this game is incredibly robust and allows for a lot of outside-the-box tactics. Unfortunately, not all of them are practical:
    • With enough Octo Balloons, it's possible to create functional airships in the game. Unfortunately, they require a lot of precise setup and one wrong move risks Link falling off, not making them very practical for long-term travel. They also pop after a set period of time.
    • People have discovered that with the proper setup and enough Octo Balloons, it's possible to fly your horse around the map! Unfortunately, nine times out of ten, you'll end up killing the horse in the process, and there's not many places where flying your horse to would actually be useful.
    • People have managed to create infinite prop surfing machines in this game. Unfortunately, while they offer a lot of vertical airtime, they aren't too useful for travel.
    • Normally, you can't lift the object you're standing on with Magnesis. It's possible to stack two metal objects on top of each other, though, and lift the bottom one to fly forever. However, it's tricky to stay balanced, tends to drift in one direction or another, and the higher you go, the more likely something can go wrong. This has also become much more difficult to start since the update, as the game can detect what you're trying to do and just cancel Magnesis.
  • The Radiant Set suffers from the game's planned obsolescence. The game teaches the player to gradually phase out bone-made weapons which are benefited from this set's bonus, which by the time one upgrades the set, are out of the player's weapon inventory with no prospect of ever making it in again. Aside from this, the set provides the benefit of avoiding Stal-enemies, but due to the fact that the game also teaches the player to engage enemies to farm for monster parts, there's a significant possibility that the player may well never wear it at all other than to make Link look like a Luchador.^note It does also serve the minor purpose of allowing the player to see Link in the absolute darkness of Thyphlo Ruins and the belly of Vah Rudania.
  • Played with in the case of the Stealth Set. While being tremendously practical for stalking monsters and animals, as well as making Link swift as an arrow during the night, it's the weakest enhanceable set in the game. As such, it's advisable not to use it in melee combat unless one is an experienced player. Thankfully, Changing Clothes Is a Free Action, so its defense weakness only really applies to the particularly impatient.
  • The Dark set, which you can only buy from Kilton for an exorbitant amount of "Mon" after beating all the main dungeons. It makes Link look like an Evil Counterpart of himself, but otherwise serves no real purpose. The full set makes you move faster at night, but so does the Sheikah Armor with two upgrades; the latter can be obtained much earlier (it's sold in Kakariko Village, the first town you visit in the main quest, and the items needed to upgrade it twice aren't hard to find), costs less, and provides a stealth boost and better defense in addition to the speed bonus.
  • The DLC Phantom Ganon set. On the one hand, you get a stealth bonus (like the Stealth Set) and an attack bonus on bone-based weapons (like the aforementioned Radiant Set, which is a little mess on its own), and get to cosplay as Ocarina of Time's incarnation of Phantom Ganon, complete with Ganondorf's long, flowing Badass Cape. On the other hand, the same limitations as the Dark Armor set apply to it (can't be upgraded or dyed).
  • Also in the DLC is the Royal Guard Set, which is tremendously hard to obtain because its parts are at Hyrule Castle basically crammed as far-reaching as one can possibly imagine, all while adding the sole benefit of an increased stamina to Link's charge attacks when obtained, it being undyeable and unenhanceable. This makes it a little more practical than the other sets mentioned here, and Link does look dapper wearing it...
  • The associated Royal Guard weapons sport visually striking designs and have impressive attack power, but have comically low durability. Their in-game text actually mentions that this drawback made them impractical as standard weapons and they were considered failed prototypes more than anything.
  • Though aesthetically cool to look at, Sheik's Mask, which can be obtained through the Sheik (Super Smash Bros) amiibo, is hilariously impractical to upgrade, as it requires 10 Star Fragments and 10 Silent Princesses to bring up to 4-star level (both being among the most scarce and precious resources in the game), only for it to have the exact same defense and bonuses as the base-game Stealth Mask. It's the equivalent of buying cacao in the raw to make yourself a cocoa cup that you can buy in the supermarket.
  • In general, amiibo-exclusive armor is impractical to obtain because it requires the purchase of amiibo figurines to begin with, apart from multiple scans in the Switch to gather. Apart from that, all enhanceable amiibo armor require Star Fragments to upgrade, which have been mentioned to be grueling to farm. Weapons obtained through Zelda proprietary amiibo are awesome, but also require multiple tries, as well as not being recoverable in-game; in perspective, no amiibo armor or weapons can be purchased from Granté at Tarrey Town once spent, so to obtain them again, the amiibo figurines have to be re-scanned all over again with the same drop rate.
  • Most of the cooking mechanic qualifies. While it can be fun to experiment and create really neat, complex dishes, gameplay-wise there's no benefit to doing this over simply throwing five of the same ingredient together and calling it a day.

B

• Back from the Brink: Although things have calmed down in the century since the Kingdom of Hyrule was destroyed, Calamity Ganon is starting to break free of its seal; not only could it destroy the world on its own if free, its evil influence is also causing the Divine Beasts to act up and wreak havoc on the four corners of the land. Link awakens in the Shrine of Resurrection just in time to free the Divine Beasts of that evil influence and ultimately confront Calamity Ganon itself.
• Background Music Override: Hyrule Castle's musical theme will always play even if you encounter enemies, though a bass line and marching sound effects will be added during combat.
• Back Stab: Link can perform a powerful Sneakstrike by attacking unaware enemies from behind. It deals a lot of damage (weapon damage x8).
• "Back to Camera" Pose: The North American cover art sees Link stand with his weapons at the ready as he looks from a cliff over a foggy Hyrule, his back to the viewer. The game has Wide-Open Sandbox elements, and the cover art complements this: Link, the protagonist, has much exploring to do.
• Badass Family: Every known member of the royal family of the Zoras has at least one heroic feat to their name. Dorephan took out a Guardians completely unarmed. Sidon slew a massive Octorok after it swallowed him whole. Mipha was the best fighter out of all of the Zoras (since the Champions were stated to be the strongest of their respective races) and her intended husband was Link.
• Bad Moon Rising: A Blood Moon fills the night periodically, and causes all defeated enemies to respawn at their camps. If you're unlucky, this happens while resting at a campfire and you wake up surrounded by Moblins and Bokoblins.
• Bag of Holding:
  • Double Subverted. Being a Zelda game, you expect it to be a given, but gameplay shows Link carrying his quiver, bow, weapon, and shield all packed on his back (strongly resembling official art for the first game◊). However, if you change equipment — say, a sword for an axe — you will see just the axe on your back. The rest of the equipment still sits tightly stored away in your pouch of holding.
  • Zigzagged with all you can pack away. There's a 60 slot limit on how many individuals cooked foods and elixirs you can carry, 100 slots for armor, and no known limit for materials. Melee weapons, bows, and shields have a much lower set limit on how many you can pack away, but you can exchange Korok Seeds to Hetsu in order to increase those limits: weapons cap out at 19, shields at 20, and bows at 13. The lower cap for bows is due to arrows sharing the same inventory, while the Master Sword and the Bow of Light have their own dedicated inventory slots in the Weapons and Bows & Arrows pages, respectively.
• Bag of Spilling: Link awakens in the Shrine of Resurrection naked as the day he was born, save for a pair of decency shorts, with only a top and pants in the nearby chests and no weapons whatsoever. Over the course of the game, he regains his memories, revealing that he was already hero-ing before the events of the game (some of which is seen in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity). The last two memories explain why this is: Link fought so far beyond his body's own abilities with so little rest that he was just as ruined as the Master Sword he was carrying at the time, and he only stayed conscious long enough to see Zelda unleash her divine power for the first time; relocating him to the Shrine and sealing him inside for a century was the only way to save his life. After that, Zelda entrusted the Master Sword to the Deku Tree, to reclaim the power that Link so thoroughly exhausted, and even when he gets it back, he can only use that power in short bursts at a time instead of as a functionally immortal weapon. It takes the additional Trial of the Sword quest to fully reawaken the Master Sword, and even then it requires the occasional recharge.
• Bait-and-Switch Compassion: When Link visits Gerudo Town, he can ask for a drink at the local canteen. The proprietor notes that he looks too young to be drinking alcohol, to which Link can respond that he's over a century old. The woman will be silent for one text box in apparent surprise, only to laugh at the Hylian visitor's "joke."
• Ballistic Bone: Stalnox can break off their rib bones and hurl them, though unlike most examples of the trope, they have a limited supply. You can also pull this off yourself using the dropped arms of Stal enemies and in the case of a Stalizalfos arm, it'll act as a fragile Precision-Guided Boomerang.
• Balloonacy: Octo Balloons can be dropped on objects, attaching on touch and lifting them into the air; this includes rocks, bombs, and even heavy things like rafts and minecarts.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Link has no visible nipples when he's shirtless, and the generic Gorons lack them as well.
• Bare Midriffs Are Feminine:
  • Every Gerudo has nothing covering the lower chest. From the athletic to the heavyset, from the smallest child to the oldest crone. Therefore, this applies to Link whenever he has to sneak into the city dressed as a Gerudo woman.
  • Some Rito females dress like this. They most likely do so as a gender indicator rather than modesty, since even if they did have Non-Mammal Mammaries, they'd be covered by feathers.
• Bat Out of Hell: The Keese appear again, this time resembling their Dark World counterparts from A Link to the Past, as they sport only one eye. Some fly around in swarms that will divebomb Link if he gets too close.
• Bat Scare: If Link is out in the open at night, he may sometimes get attacked by large swarms of Keese from out of nowhere. They can be scared off with a good attack that takes out a few of them, though.
• Battle Boomerang: A class of weapons you can find. Unlike in previous games, you can use it as a melee weapon, use the throw action to throw, and use the action button to catch it. The two-handed giant boomerangs do more damage and have a wider range.
• Battle in the Rain: Link and Prince Sidon's battle against Divine Beast Vah Ruta takes place in the rain because Vah Ruta itself is using its water-generating powers to create a Perpetual Storm. In the backstory, Link's battle against the Guardians in the Ash Swamp, in which he lost his life, also took place in the rain.
• Battleship Raid: The Divine Beasts, a group of gargantuan war machines, serve as the game's plotline dungeons. Before Link can even enter them, he must enlist an ally to help him make the approach without getting blown to bits by their defenses, then solve puzzles inside each Beast before defeating the boss within.
• Battle Theme Music:
  • The game has a battle theme for Calamity Ganon, which is remixed in a different way for each of the Blight Ganon entities fought in the Divine Beasts (in turn, each version of the theme has a second, higher-pitched version for its boss's second phase). The bosses fought in the overworld have their own themes (except Stalnox, which uses the same theme as Hinox). The boss fought at the end of The Champions' Ballad DLC (Monk Maz Koshia) has his own theme as well, being namely a Boss Remix of the shrine battle theme. Lastly, the Guardian Scout minibosses fought in the Test of Strength shrines uses a mildly altered version of the standard mini-Guardian enemy theme, and includes a special victory fanfare heard when the Scout is defeated.
  • There are also several enemy themes: There's the standard music for normal enemies (its intro is extended for when it's a Yiga or a Lynel), a techno-styled track for small Guardians, two piano tracks for the large Guardians (one for the static ones, and another for the ones walking as well as the flying Sentries), and a theme for the enemies that are generated from Calamity Ganon's malice (a remix of Ganon's Leitmotif).
• Bears Are Bad News: Bears are the strongest animals that aren't explicitly one of Calamity Ganon's monsters. Alongside wolves, they're also some of the few animals that will actively try to kill you if they spot you (as opposed to at most charging you down if you're in front of them and then running for it, as most large animals do). They hit hard, and take a lot more damage to kill than regular wildlife usually does.
• Beat Still, My Heart: Guts dropped by monsters — Bokoblin and Lynel ones resemble hearts, while Moblin Guts are livers, Hinox Guts are kidneys, and Molduga Guts are spiraling things that don't resemble anything specific — continue to beat and pulse indefinitely after their owners' deaths.
• Beautiful Void: The Great Plateau is a downplayed example. Only a few groups of enemies, a few birds, and a mysterious old man are alive to join you; all the rest is beautiful scenery and the sound of the breeze, with little in the way of music or even sound effects.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Downplayed, as both Princess Zelda and Mipha and seen tending to a wound on Link's right arm in memory flashbacks, but this is most likely Played for Drama for the sake of the situation regarding his relationships with them. There is also another memory depicting Link and Zelda's escape from Calamity Ganon and the Divine Beasts; both of them are completely soiled head-to-toe in grime, mud, and rain. It is also played with where a lady in the Gerudo Town Inn points out the scars she sees on Link's body while giving him to a spa treatment.
• Beef Gate:
  • Some areas are guarded by powerful enemies that make it difficult to explore those areas early in the game. A Downplayed example, as these are far from insurmountable, and a sufficiently skilled and/or determined player can still do things in any order they want. The Lynel on Ploymus Mountain is a subversion. If your required encounter with it during the Vah Ruta Quest is early in the game, you will most certainly be unable to successfully fight it, but since you just need to collect shock arrows in its territory, it can be survived by treating it as a stealth mission and can be skipped entirely if Link happens to already have the required number of shock arrows in his inventory.
  • Hyrule Field and Hyrule Castle serve as such a gate to bar the path to the final boss. Hyrule Field is directly north of the starting area, but it's full of Guardian Stalkers, which are fast, have a long sight range, are virtually immune to normal weapons and fire a laser that will One-Hit Kill a starting-level Link. If you want to get past them, you need to explore quite far into the world to get a weapon capable of easily destroying them, explore a slight amount to gain access to horses (which will let you outrun them more easily), or learn how to play Dead Man's Volley. The castle itself is surrounded by the thickest concentration of Stalkers and patrolled by several Skywatchers, while its halls are crawling with powerful enemies and the most obvious path forward dumps you into cage matches against Lynels.
  • Done to near-Railroading levels in the game's first real mission, which is to get to Kakariko. Go the intended route, and you'll find an inn you can rest at if you're near death, some horses you can tame to quicken the trip, valuable knowledge from NPCs, and you'll also meet Hestu, who can expand your inventory. Want to go a more direct route by going around Dueling Peaks? You will meet two fully-functional Guardians^note With how insane the render distance on this game is, it's fairly suspicious that if you are close enough to see one Guardian, you still can't see the other despite them not being too far apart. Run away from one, you run smack into the waiting lasers of another. and a Stone Talus. Carrot and stick, indeed.
  • The main roads to the four settements where the Divine Beasts are found are all patrolled or guarded by powerful enemies: flying Guardians (Rito Village through Tabantha), a pair of functional Guardian Stalkers (up Death Mountain to Goron City), a camp of enemies armed with shock arrows in the rain and a scripted encounter with a moblin (through Lanayru to Zora's Domain), and a string of monster camps and mounted enemies that will chase you down (through Gerudo Canyon to Gerudo Town). This isn't enforced, however, as nothing is stopping you from leaving the main road and simply going around most of the enemies or finding a different route altogether. Even in Lanayru, where the constant rain makes climbing off the beaten path more difficult, it is possible to circumvent most of the enemies. It's played a bit straighter with Gerudo Desert, as trying to go around the main path puts you at risk of running into Guardians, getting lost in sandstorms, or even having to run for your life and pray you can get away from Vah Naboris before it zaps you.
• Before the Dark Times: Before the Great Calamity, the Kingdom of Hyrule was a fairly decent place to live, though monsters and the Yiga Clan were becoming increasingly active as Calamity Ganon's return came closer. While the few Long-Lived characters are frequently wistful about those times, the modern era is portrayed as surprisingly safe as well due to Ganon having been trapped in Hyrule Castle. But monsters still rule the wilderness, and Ganon is on the verge of breaking free.
• Beneath the Earth: According to the backstory, Calamity Ganon emerged from beneath Hyrule Castle a century ago to unleash its genocidal rage upon the land. You end up fighting Ganon in the giant underground Sheikah laboratory where it had presumably been sealed up to that point.
• Bequeathed Power: Upon freeing each Divine Beast from the Blight Ganon that controls it, its Champion will bestow their magical power to Link. Mipha's Grace restores Link's life if he runs out of hearts and gives a few extra hearts, Urbosa's Fury is an area-of-effect lightning attack, Revali's Gale allows Link to leap high into the air with his paraglider, and Daruk's Protection puts a powerful barrier between Link and enemy attacks.
• Better than a Bare Bulb: From the not-viable wingspan of the Rito to the fountains Great Fairies live in, this game loves its lampshades.
• Betting Mini-Game: Lurelin Village has a guy named Cloyne who runs a "pick one of three chests" minigame that is similar to the one in the original NES game.
• Beware the Nice Ones: The Champion’s Ballad shows Urbosa and Daruk actually fighting, and while normally kind and friendly, these scenes paint a terrifying picture of when they’re angry. Daruk hurls insults and Nintendo friendly swears, and Urbosa outright says she's only letting the Yiga Clan Footsoldiers who attacked her live because Zelda happens to be watching.
• Beware the Skull Base: Many of the monster encampments across Hyrule consist simply of giant, hollow stone skulls; others, consisting instead of stacked wooden platforms, are themselves decorated with animal skulls and often surmounted by horned skull-shaped domes. There are also immense, dragon- and whale-like skeletons that serve a similar purpose. Particularly notable is the encampment in the Bottomless Swamp, consisting of an absolutely titanic horned skull surrounded by several of the smaller stone craniums half-buried in the mire.
• BFS:
  • The Claymores, one of the weapon types. Their longer blades allow more reach than one-hander weapons (albeit not as much as polearm weapons), their weight allows Link to easily knock shields out of his opponents' hands, leaving them vulnerable to his attacks, and deal a lot more damage than their one-handed versions. The downside is that they attack much more slowly and, as with all two-handed weapons, Link's unable to use a shield while holding them.
  • An NPC named Danton lampshades this trope if you show him the Master Sword, saying that he would assume the blade of evil's bane would be as big as him and covered in jewels.
• Big Bad: Calamity Ganon destroyed Hyrule in the long past and plans to finish off what's left once it escapes. Link has to defeat it before that happens.
• Big Boo's Haunt: Any non-village area can turn into this at night, just like in Ocarina of Time. But a more pervasive if subtler example would be the opening area, the Great Plateau. The dilapidated ruins of the birthplace of the Kingdom of Hyrule is where Link first wakes up in the Shrine of Resurrection after a century. The smaller locations on the Plateau also have time and death themes; there are the Temple of Time, the River of the Dead, and the Forest of Spirits. Lastly, the mysterious "Old Man" who gives you various tasks to acclimate Link to the world and get him started on his quest to defeat Ganon turns out to be King Rhoam Bosphoramus Hyrule, who has been waiting as a ghost for a century for Link to wake up.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • In the memory triggered near the Gerudo bazaar, Link saves Zelda from a Yiga assassin by swiftly cutting him down.
  • In the game proper, you can sometimes encounter traveling Non Player Characters being chased by monsters. It's possible to invoke this trope yourself by killing the monsters before they can harm them, and you'll be rewarded with food, Rupees, or an elixir if you do so.
• Big Eater: Link eats a ton of food over the length of his journey, since food is your only way to restore health besides beds, and gives extra stat buffs. Zelda even mentions how much Link eats in her diary.
  Zelda's Diary: Bit by bit, I've gotten Link to open up to me. It turns out he's quite a glutton. He can't resist a delicious meal!
• Big Fancy Castle: Hyrule Castle. Emphasis on big, since it can be seen from almost all corners of Hyrule.
• Bigger on the Inside: The Divine Beasts. If you use various gliding glitches to land on and in Vah Naboris or Vah Medoh, you'll find that the exteriors and interiors rendered when you're in the main game world are much smaller than when you access the dungeons the proper way.
• Big Storm Episode: There's a region north of Hyrule Ridge, the Thundra Plateau, which is going through an abnormally intense stormy downpour. When Link arrives in the central area, he's told by the voice of a Sheikah monk that he has to solve a puzzle to unveil a Shrine so that the storm will dissipate. During this period, Link must not wear any metallic equipment or weapon unless he has the Thunder Helm, or else he'll risk being caught by a lightning bolt (which spells major damage or instant death unless the aforementioned special helmet is worn).
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head:
  • One "traveler" who is obviously a Yiga assassin in disguise will gush about Master Kohga. Link has the option to say he "has a dumb belly", which doesn't go over well.
  • When parting, Daruk's spirit tells Link to give Ganon a message from him if he should see him again — "good riddance, bacon breath!"
• Bittersweet Ending: Standard-issue for The Legend of Zelda. After the battle against Calamity Ganon, it's sealed away, and Link and Zelda are reunited, but many good people, like the King and the Champions, had to die to make it all happen and Hyrule is still in ruins. However, the lingering spirits of the King and Champions are free to pass on to the afterlife, and without the menace of the Guardians and monsters everywhere, Hyrule can finally begin to properly rebuild. The Secret Expanded Epilogue adds a bit more of both bitter and sweet by hinting that Ganon's defeat is only temporary and he will return one day. On the other hand, Zelda is shown to have overcome her insecurity regarding her powers and plans to continue her research and, with Link's help, restore Hyrule to its former glory.
• Blackout Basement:
  • The Thyphlo Ruins are shrouded in perpetual darkness, where only sources of fire and Daruk's Protection provide enough light to see for a few feet. While you can brute force your way around (and you might have to if you enter the island from anywhere but the starting bridge), the intended way to navigate to the Shrine is to follow the direction the bird lanterns' beaks are pointing. There aren't a whole lot of threatening enemies in the ruins, but in order to reveal the shrine, you'll eventually have to obtain the ball from a Hinox, which usually forces you into a fight that's only visible thanks to whatever lanterns you lit up beforehand.
  • Once you enter Vah Rudania's insides, all the ceilings and doors shut and plunge you into darkness. Thankfully, you only have to do a short torch run to the map terminal before all of them open back up, letting the lava light the place up again.
  • "Path of Light", one of the shrines in the first part of the Champions' Ballad DLC, is pitch dark. Some of its hazards, such as lasers and jets of fire, are among the only clearly visible things in the gloom; others, such as a set of rotating spiked walls, are only dimly visible where they pass through small islands of torchlight. Notably, the normal feature of the Stasis run where items that can be stopped are lit up yellow is disabled in this shrine to prevent the player from easily telling where things are.
  • From the Master Trials DLC, Floors 6-10 of the Middle Trials of the Sword are like the Thyphlo Ruins. This time, you have to fight in total darkness, with each room only lighting up once everything is dead. Fortunately, enemy eyes glow so you can at least tell where they are, but you can't see when they begin attacking.
• Blade Below the Shoulder:
  • Waterblight Ganon can project an energy spear from a block at the end of its left arm.
  • Both the Fireblight and Thunderblight Ganons can project energy swords from their arm stumps. When the former Turns Red, it will light its blade on fire.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Downplayed. Any dish cooked with a spicy ingredient, such as the Spicy Pepper or Goron Spice, will give you cold resistance when eaten.
• Bleak Level: Hyrule Castle and the surrounding area. While the four Divine Beasts that serve as the other main dungeons can be a bit ominous, what with the backstories about how they were corrupted and the Malice filling their interiors, they're still brightly lit locations with musical tracks that mix ominousness with triumph. Hyrule Castle, however, is a bleak ruin dripping in Malice, all the plant life in the vicinity is grey and dead, the town at its base is sufficiently demolished to the point of barely being recognizable as a former settlement, deadly Guardians are ubiquitous, and all around are subtle signs of the massacre that took place a century before. There's also a more quotidian level of bleakness with the diaries of Princess Zelda and her father King Rhoam, found at their respective desks in the castle. Both record how they felt plenty of fear, and Zelda plenty of shame, over Zelda's inability to awaken the sealing power needed to defeat Calamity Ganon, and how this was leading to their relationship being badly strained due to King Rhoam's tough approach to guiding Zelda's training. And the final entries of each were written the morning of the day Ganon returned and the catastrophic events that led to the kingdom's destruction began.
• Blinded by the Light: One of the Zora Stone Monuments talks of "The Miracle of the White Scale", where a former king was saved from a lethal blow in combat when his enemy was blinded by the sunlight reflecting off of a scale that his wife had woven into to his armor. It then became tradition for Zora princesses to craft armor for their intended husbands in honor of this event.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The English script makes the following claim in relation to Calamity Ganon: "He has given up on reincarnation and assumed his pure, enraged form." Not only is it a mistranslation, but it actually says the opposite of the original context. The original line is "This form was born from his obsessive refusal to give up on revival".
• Bling of War: Gerudo love decorating their armor and weapons with lavish amounts of gold and jewelry. The Zoras weaponry are also plated with silver, which actually prevents corrosion with water.
• Bloodless Carnage:
  • Typically for the series, you can hack into your enemies with swords, spears, and even woodcutting axes, all of which should cause gore to fly around like confetti. Should, but doesn't. The closest the game has gotten to averting this trope is where the Blight Ganons explode in crimson fountains of liquid Malice upon defeat. It still isn't proper blood, though, and every other enemy dies bloodlessly.
  • In Memory #17, Link collapses defending Zelda from a Guardian, sustaining fatal injuries that take a century-long coma to recover from. However, when he loses consciousness he appears only to have been mildly roughed up and his clothes aren't even torn.
• Blown Across the Room: The Spring-Loaded Hammer only does Scratch Damage, but makes up for it with its ability to send enemies soaring through the air on strong hits. Best utilized when fighting around cliffs and near bodies of water, especially for Bokoblins and Moblins, who are unable to swim.
• Blow That Horn: If an enemy on a guard tower spots you, it'll blow a horn to alert all of the other enemies to get attacking. Taking these guards out is helpful for a stealthy one-by-one approach to clearing camps.
• Blow You Away: One of the available weapons is a large Korok Leaf, which, similar to the Deku Leaf from Wind Waker, sends out a gust of wind when swung. It's more useful for activating wind mechanisms and steering rafts and ballooning platforms than fighting, with one exception: its gusts can knock Stal enemies to pieces from a distance, allowing Link to deal with them without coming under attack, and it can also be used to blow enemies off of cliffs or into deep water.
• Blue Is Heroic: Link's main outfit used in memories and most promotional art is the blue Champion's Tunic. In addition, Zelda's 'adventurer' outfit is predominantly blue, and all the Champions incorporate the same hue of blue into their clothing: Urbosa's skirt, Daruk's and Mipha's sashes, and Revali's scarf. The Guest Star Party Members that help Link board the Divine Beasts also have a hint of blue in their designs. Additionally, the Sheikah glyphs on Towers and Shrines and freed Divine Beasts will turn from orange to blue upon activation/completion.
• Blue Means Cold: Naydra is an ice spirit who takes the form of a dragon with blue icicle-like spikes.
• Bodyguard Crush: Zig-zagged. Link served as Zelda's personal knight one hundred years before the game's events. Zelda initially resented him because of his stoic demeanor and how easily he achieved his destiny while she struggled to unlock her powers. Later on, however, she warmed up to him and they became friends. Dialogue from a certain sidequest all but explicitly confirms that Zelda ultimately fell in love with Link. Whether Link reciprocated her affections is left ambiguous, though the player can choose to imply he did (and still does) by selecting certain dialogue options.
• Bond One-Liner: If you get killed by a blademaster during the Yiga Clan Hideout Stealth-Based Mission:
  Beware, fool, the eye of the Yiga.
• Bonus Dungeon: The DLC has the Trial of the Sword; an incredibly difficult challenge that, if one succeeded, permanently gives the Master Sword the bonus it usually only gets near Guardians, Malice or Ganon.
• Bonus Feature Failure:
  • The Tunic of the Wild set, aka BotW's rendition of Link's classic green clothes. It's obtained by beating all 120 shrines in the game, at which point Link is completely overpowered. And even if he wasn't, this Tunic is not the best armor set of the game, stats-wise. That's still the Champion's Tunic, and there are other two armor sets that have the exact same defense stats as the Tunic of the Wild that are infinitely easier to find, namely the Soldier's Armor and the Ancient Armor. You'll also probably have those armor sets fully upgraded at this point, and to get the Tunic of the Wild up to par with them you'll have to upgrade it as well, which requires tedious grinding to find dragon parts and Star Fragments. The fact that a lot of people find the clothes design bafflingly underwhelming doesn't help either.
  • The costumes included in the DLC campaigns. While they add some fun Mythology Gags, they cannot be upgraded at the Fairy Fountains and most of them have the same effects as equipment found in the regular game. This makes them useful early in the game, but leaves them soon outclassed by equipment found later.
  • The Master Cycle Zero, a magitech motorcyle that Link can summon almost anywhere in the world, making it a useful alternative to a horse. However, it can only be unlocked after clearing all four Divine Beasts, by which time most players will have unlocked fast travel points in every corner of the map, making any other means of transport redundant.
  • For players going for 100% Completion, the Amiibo-exclusive armour sets. The game is very generous when it comes to Link's armour inventory, but he still doesn't have enough space to own every piece of armour made available to him via Amiibo.
• Book Ends: One of the first places you're likely to visit is the Ash Swamp, as it's on the most direct route to Kakariko, where you're directed right after the tutorial. It's also one of the last places you're likely to visit, since the swamp is the location of the final memory that only unlocks upon getting all the others.
• Boom, Headshot!:
  • Enemies suffer double the normal damage from arrows and thrown weapons if they're hit in the head.
  • The Stal versions of regular monsters can be killed instantly with one hit to their head by any weapon, no matter how much damage it does.
  • The normally incredibly tough Guardians can be dispatched by a single Ancient Arrow to their "head", essentially an eye on a stalk.
• Border Patrol: Hyrule is huge but not endless. Most of its borders are marked by either the great ocean or a massive gorge which functions as a bottomless pit, and these feature strong inward-blowing winds to prevent the player paragliding or sailing to the edge of the map. The Gerudo Desert similarly has harsh sandstorms which appear near its edges and make navigation difficult. Despite these obstacles, a creative player can still reach the edges of the game world, only to encounter an invisible wall and the simple message, "You cannot go farther."
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Master Sword will never break, and instead just goes on cooldown when it runs out of durability. Get it as soon as possible, and you'll always have a weapon on hand for combat, or if you just want to break ores or cut down trees and obstacles.
  • Have a fire weapon on hand like the Flameblade, and you have something that can keep Link warm in colder areas, can melt ice blocks simply by standing near 'em, and can light fires for cooking or to rest at campfires to pass the time.
  • Armour that only boosts your defense with no added effects (the Hylian set, Soldier set, the Amber Earrings) are very helpful to have throughout your journey. Sometimes, you don't need to worry about weather or the environment, so just having some simple damage mitigation might be all you need. The Hylian set in particular isn't too difficult to fully upgrade, and can be acquired very early. The Amber Earrings, especially, are tied with the Soldier, Ancient, and Hero head pieces, and the Diamond Circlet, for the most effective head armor in the game, and only requires amber and flint—exceedingly common items—to fully upgrade, while the others require, among other rare items, Star Fragments and Lynel parts. They're also the cheapest piece at the jewelry shop.
  • Hearty and Enduring meals add extra Hearts and Stamina respectively. These can give you more health and stamina to work with before you've upgraded them fully, being more potent the more you add. Then once you have upgraded your hearts and stamina some more, you only need to use one of the respective material to fully restore your hearts and stamina easily.
  • Cryonis can let you bridge across rivers and bodies of water fairly easily, and with a bit of patience, can also be used to ascend waterfalls (at least until you get the Zora armour), all without using too much Stamina, save for the occasional bit of climbing or paragliding you might have to do.
• Borrowing from the Sister Series: Nintendo brought in developers from subsidary Monolith Soft, creator of the Xenoblade Chronicles series, to bring elements from that series here. Many Xenoblade staples were included in BotW, including Scenery Porn environments in a wide open gameworld, an After the End setting with dangerous Lost Technology, Humongous Mecha boss enemies, and Crow's Nest Cartography towers/landmarks to reveal the map.
• Boss-Altering Consequence:
  • You have the option of heading straight to Calamity Ganon after receiving the Paraglider. It's not recommended though, as doing so means that you'll have to fight every Blight Ganon in a row and face a full-health Calamity Ganon. Completing every Divine Beast will eliminate the Blight Ganon boss fights and reduce Calamity Ganon's health down to half.
  • If you drop a Mighty Banana while fighting Monk Maz Koshia, he will become distracted and temporarily stop fighting to eat it. This will only work once per battle, though.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy:
  • Played straight with Windblight and Fireblight Ganons. The back and wings of the Vah Medoh mech have an array of spikes and spires for no discernible reason other than to provide cover from Windblight's attacks, as well as vents which you can conveniently use to snipe him when he gets too far up to reach, while the relatively wide, flat back of Vah Rudania serves as room to maneuver away from Fireblight's gigantic claymore and fireballs. Justified, since neither of them has designed the respective Divine Beast, nor even really selected the fighting location within it, as it's basically predetermined by the Control Unit's location.
  • Played straight and then subverted with Waterblight Ganon. He is fought inside of a massive, empty chamber in Vah Ruta with no clear purpose that screams Boss Room, but halfway through he will turn the large amount of room to maneuver on its head by flooding the room and forcing Link to fight from four small platforms.
  • Utterly averted with Thunderblight Ganon. You fight him in the main chamber of Vah Naboris, which for one thing, is cylindrical with sloping walls, and for another, is full of narrow beams and ledges that both block your aim of him and are very easy to get knocked off of. Have fun!
  • Played with in regards to the Bottomless Pit that makes up the centerpiece during Master Kohga's boss fight. It serves little function during the fight itself, but after Link wins, Kohga's last-ditch attempt to kill Link using his "Ultimate Technique" ends up knocking himself into it.
  • A non-boss example can be found in one of the Hebra mountain hot springs, which is swarming with Ice Lizalfos. Despite their numbers, a clever player can easily kill most of them by exploiting Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors and baiting or knocking them into the steaming waters, which will instantly kill them.
• Boss Bonanza: If the player goes to Hyrule Castle to fight Calamity Ganon before freeing all of the Divine Beasts, all of the Blight Ganons that Link didn't already kill will appear to face him right before the final battle. Therefore, if the player goes straight to the final boss without beating a single one, Link will fight all four Blight Ganons and Calamity Ganon with no breaks in between.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • Lynels return, and are by far the toughest regular enemies in the game. The strongest Lynels are roughly as powerful as Calamity Ganon, yet due to not technically being classified as bosses, they can still be vaporized by a single Ancient Arrow.
  • The Silver variants of the Bokoblins, Moblins, and Lizalfos can hit you hard and soak up a ton of damage, requiring at least one or two high-attack weapons just to slay one. Master Mode introduces gold variants of said monsters, and they prove to be the toughest regular enemies to defeat.
• Boss-Only Level: The Ancient Shrines based on the Tests of Strength (Minor, Modest and Major) consist solely of a wide square chamber where you fight a designated Guardian Scout, a Mini-Boss designated to test Link's combat skills. Defeating it will grant access to the rest area of the Shrine's monk. The trope is subverted with one of the Shrines in the Champions' Ballad DLC, because when you defeat the designated Guardian Scout and reach the end, you press a button that reveals a new part of the Shrine that isn't based on fighting a major opponent (only some small Guardian Mooks while solving a maze puzzle).
• Boss Remix:
  • The Divine Beast Vah Ruta fight uses a dramatic variant of Prince Sidon's theme because he is helping you fight it. The Divine Beast Vah Medoh fight uses a mix between the Flight Range minigame theme and the opening portion of the Rito Village theme. And the Divine Beast Vah Naboris fight uses a bit of Urbosa's theme because her descendant Riju is helping you fight it.
  • Monk Maz Koshia's music is a remix of the shrine battle theme.
  • The Final Boss, Dark Beast Ganon, uses a remix of both the "normal" battle theme and the main theme.
• Boss Room: The Blight Ganon dungeon bosses play with this. Only Waterblight Ganon is located in its own separate room used exclusively for the fight. The others are fought in rooms that you must traverse frequently to solve puzzles that will eventually reveal the boss. Nevertheless, these rooms are all big and arena-like.
• Boss Rush: Should the player choose to challenge Ganon in Hyrule Castle without freeing the Divine Beasts first, they will be treated to this—they must fight Windblight Ganon, Waterblight Ganon, Fireblight Ganon, Thunderblight Ganon, and Calamity Ganon. The player will only have to fight one at a time, but they are given no breaks in between each fight. This Boss Rush can be diminished by freeing some of the four Beasts beforehand, or outright averted by freeing all of them.
• Boss Subtitles: The field bosses (Hinoxes, Stalnoxes, Stone Taluses, and Moldugas) will have their creature name and the name of the area they are found in. The main story bosses instead have "Scourge of [insert name of dungeon where they are found]" above their names; the exceptions are Master Kohga, who is labeled "Leader of the Yiga Clan," and Dark Beast Ganon, who is labeled "Hatred and Malice Incarnate." Major friendly NPCs will also get subtitles when they are first introduced.
• Bottomless Magazines: Unlike Link, enemies have unlimited arrows, and their weapons never break unless they're set on fire. Sometimes, their arrows can be embedded into surfaces for you to pick up when they miss, allowing you to exploit this for awhile, though eventually the arrows won't be retrievable.
• Bottomless Pits: The canyons bounding off Hyrule's northern and western boundaries sink downward into a deep, fog-shrouded abyss and out of sight. Further, while most of the towers are in relatively mundane places, like the top of a ridge or the middle of a lake, there is one bizarre exception in the tower for the Gerudo Highlands area. The Gerudo Tower is situated in the middle of an enormous hole in the ground, with the hole and tower itself seeming to extend infinitely downward. Some shrines also consist of a seemingly infinitely deep room, with floating platforms arranged in midair. Additionally, there is a bottomless pit in the center of Master Kohga's arena, which is where Kogha will ultimately meet his demise. Later on, as part of the Champion's Ballad DLC, you will need to toss an orb into Kohga's pit to unearth a shrine. In all of these cases, gliding below a certain depth will cause Link to instantly lose hold of his paraglider and pitch screaming into the abyss, after which he'll respawn on solid ground minus a heart of health.
• Boulder Bludgeon: Disarmed Bokoblins and Moblins will occasionally throw rocks as projectiles. Bokoblins pick up small ones from nowhere, while Moblins use the large ones scattered around the overworld (which Link can also use).
• Braggart Boss: Master Kohga is a silly and egotistical enemy who introduces himself with a dramatic boast about his fighting skills but who is much easier to defeat than the other main story bosses. His appearance in Age of Calamity show that he DOES have a lot of fighting potential despite his silliness, however.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • The Wild armor set, which gives Link his classic Iconic Outfit, upgrades the Master Sword's beam attack, and has generally high (but not unrivaled) stats, is a borderline example. It can only be obtained by completing all 120 Sheikah shrines, so once you have it there's probably very little left to do. Also done humorously with Kass's daughter Genli; she says she'll give you a special reward for completing all the Shrines, but all she does is congratulate you. Granted, due to the nature of the game, there's nothing stopping a player who wants to have Link don the set as soon as possible from simply focusing on clearing every shrine before doing any of the real story work barring a few exceptions (Vah Medoh and Vah Naboris must be cleared to unlock sidequests that grant access to two of the shrines), allowing those players to experience the story while wearing the traditional look.
  • As far as steeds go, the Lord of the Mountain is also basically this; he has to be navigated down from the top of his mountain to be of any use at all after you "tame" him, and vanishes if you dismount (or get knocked off by an enemy) and walk more than about ten paces from him. You can't register him at a stable (unlike the other two unique steeds) because the stable managers are terrified of him. On top of this, he only spawns occasionally on his mountain top and you only have two tries to tame him before he stops coming back until the next time the mountain glows. He does technically have the best stats in the game, of course (even if you can't see them due to being unable to register him), and on top of having max stamina, his also instantly regenerates, but if you're riding him, you probably already have a more convenient horse with high-end stats by that point anyway.
  • One of the final rewards for beating The Champion's Ballad is the Master Cycle Zero, a Magitek-powered Cool Bike that is more maneuverable, and agile, than any horse in the game. It's also one of the final rewards of the post-game story DLC, which was released long after anyone who wanted to 100% the game would have. Unless you have other stuff you want to do, all you can do with it is explore the world more, but it offers more mounted freedom compared to riding on horseback (and makes the True Final Boss less annoying).
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: There is a side quest at the top of a tree where a minor NPC asks Link to bring the answers to five riddles. The answers to the first three riddles are fairly common fruits or mushrooms, the answer to the fourth riddle is a harmless fish. The answer to the fifth and last riddle is the hoof of a Lynel, a brutal centaur-like monster and the game's renowned Boss in Mook Clothing.
• Breakable Weapons: All weapons and shields break after varying degrees of use. Even the Master Sword is not entirely exempt from this game mechanic, but instead of breaking and disappearing from your inventory, it "runs out of energy" and goes on a 10-minute cooldown timer before it can be used again.
• Breaking Old Trends: While at the same time Revisiting the Roots, this game is much unlike the others that came before, being open-ended in a massive Wide-Open Sandbox with an emphasis on verticality, featuring fully-voiced cutscenes, and allowing the player to equip any kind of armor and a wide array of weapons. Even Link's attire defies convention, his signature outfit consisting of a blue tunic with no cap. (The classic green tunic and accompanying cap are, instead, unlockable by completing all 120 Shrines.) Link's Item Get! pose is also no longer present since the game opts to have a simple pop up text box showing what you obtained.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Most amiibo, including the stupendously inexpensive Animal Crossing cards, give you extra supplies (food, mushrooms, plants, etc.) once a day. 30th Anniversary Series and Super Smash Bros. Legend of Zelda amiibo all give items relevant to the character, including exclusive weapons and armor (such as their green tunics). Wolf Link from the Twilight Princess HD remaster gives you a battle companion in the form of Wolf Link, and SSB Link gives you Epona.
• Brick Joke: When you first meet Tulin in Rito Village, you can greet him with "good morning" or "good evening". Greeting him wrong (as in saying good morning when it's night out and vice versa) has him saying that's a weird way to greet someone. Talking to him again after clearing Vah Medoh has him greet Link as "the weird greeter guy."
• Bridge Logic: Trees can be chopped down to create makeshift bridges. On the Great Plateau, the Old Man specifically mentions this to Link, in an area with tall trees and a ravine where such a bridge is needed to cross.
• Broken Bridge:
  • Getting off the Great Plateau at the beginning of the game is the only one. The entire rest of the game is one big Beef Gate. You could hypothetically go straight to the final fight against Ganon... if you can somehow survive getting into Hyrule Castle with so little health and low-grade equipment.
  • Only females are allowed to enter Gerudo Town; should Link attempt to enter, the guards will kick him out on sight. To circumvent this, Link will need to find and put on Gerudo Vai clothing to disguise himself.
• Broomstick Quarterstaff: One of the melee weapons is a Wooden Mop. Now, you too can scrub all the floors in Hyrule.
• Brutal Bonus Level:
  • The Trial of the Sword comes with "The Master Trials" DLC pack, which is similar to the Cave of Ordeals from Twilight Princess and Savage Labyrinth from The Wind Waker. It has 45 rooms that pit you against different enemies and obstacles in a variety of environments, divided into three independent sections you have to complete in one sitting each, without being able to save in between rooms. You also start off each section without armor, weapons, or items, and only the latter two can be replenished from what you find in the rooms.
  • The Champions' Ballad from the second DLC pack starts with a lesser instance of this trope. If you've conquered all four Divine Beasts, you'll be beckoned to return to the Shrine of Awakening, where you can pick up an unusually-shaped weapon called the 'One Hit Obliterator'. If you choose to wield it, you'll be reduced to a One-Hit-Point Wonder (attempts to eat food or otherwise heal will be wasted), and charged to defeat all of the enemies in given locations across the Great Plateau. Defeat them all to unlock additional Shrines, and open the path to complete the rest of that DLC pack's challenges.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: Several small swamps can be found across Hyrule, and feature a very hot body of mud where Link will sink if he attempts to cross it without using either the ice blocks created via Cryonis or an object that is large enough to be used as a bridge. One of the Sheikah Towers is entirely surrounded by one of the largest moats of mud in the game (it's only smaller than the mud surrounding Typhlo Ruins), and the amount of Wizzrobes located nearby makes reaching it, let alone climbing it, very difficult.
• Bug Catching: Bugs can be used to make armor upgrades as well as different kinds of elixirs and beetles can be traded to Beedle in exchange for food and elixirs. In addition, a few sidequests in the game require collecting certain bugs for different NPCs.
• Bullet Time:
  • If Link uses the bow-and-arrows in midair, either by leaping off his horse or while falling from a significant height, the game moves in slow motion for easier aiming. This uses up a lot of stamina, though, and time returns to normal when you run out.
  • A well-timed dodge from an enemy attack slows down time so that Link can pummel them mercilessly with a "Flurry Rush", in a similar vein to the "Witch Time" mechanic from Bayonetta. "Flurry Rush" with a sword is similar to the "Triforce Slash" Final Smash of Link and Toon Link in Super Smash Bros..
• Bullfight Boss: Some models of Shrine Guardians have an attack where they start whirling their weapons around and charge headlong into you, which they use when you get far enough away from them. When they hit something that's not the arena walls or you, they short out and get stunned, allowing you a few free hits in. Some shrines even have the fight in a big puddle of water, encouraging you spawn ice blocks for the Guardian to smash into and save your hide from being on the receiving end of a One-Hit Kill.
• The Bus Came Back: This game marks the return of both the Rito and Korok races, who haven't been seen since The Wind Waker all the way back in 2003. This game also brings back the Gerudo, who hadn't been seen since Four Swords Adventures in 2004, barring the various appearances of Ganon(dorf).
• Butt-Monkey: Leekah, a young woman who likes to watch the river by Woodland Stable, but is often attacked by monsters in the process. Out of all the roaming NPCs, it seems to be especially difficult to get to her before she gets knocked out.
• By the Eyes of the Blind: Various spiritual beings including Koroks, dragons, and the Lord of the Mountain are invisible to almost everybody. Link, of course, can see them just fine.
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: You can see the eye of the Hinox while fighting him in the pitch black forest.

C

• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": There are elves (Hylians), humans (Hylians?^note Though they live alongside Hylians, a few games do draw a distinction between the Hylian protagonist and the majority of the population, who are typically distinguished by their rounded ears in said games. In one or two games they're even a functionally extinct race.), merfolk (Zora), goblins (Bokoblins), orcs (Moblins), dryads (Koroks) and more around. However, unlike in other Zelda games, the trope is averted with Cuccos (which were thought to stand in for ordinary chickens), as Cado notes that the main distinction between chickens and Cuccos is that the latter is flight capable enough for people to glide by carrying them.
• Call-Back:
  • Link's default outfit resembles the Island Lobster Shirt outfit from The Wind Waker.
  • The requirement of 13 hearts to unlock the Master Sword pays homage to Zelda 1, in which upgrades to your sword required you to "master" it by having enough hearts.
  • Every exclusive item obtained from amiibo, as well as most of the items in EX chests (with the exceptions being the 3 EX chests found on the Great Plateau), is an item or outfit from a previous game.
• Calling Your Attacks: During one quest, a Goron named Gonguron roars "GORON POWER, GOOO!!!" before starting to mine like a maniac in a cave to reveal a shrine.
• Canon Immigrant: As part of the "Champions' Ballad" DLC, Link can gain a Sheikah-tech motorcycle known as the Master Cycle Zero. This is an adaptation of a motorcycle that he could ride in Mario Kart 8 DLC, simply called the "Master Cycle". In addition, the Master Cycle Zero was also added to Mario Kart 8 in an update.
• Carnivore Confusion: In Gerudo Town, there is a Rito named Frita browsing the various meats for sale. She's disappointed that they don't have any poultry. This is justified, however, as the Rito themselves appear to be modeled after birds of prey such as falcons and eagles, which are carnivores and are known to sometimes eat smaller birds. With a similar justification, Zoras primarily feed on fish, while being based on (predominantly carnivorous) sea animals. In some places, you can spot pig-man Bokoblins hunting, killing, and devouring a wild boar without complaint.
• Cartography Sidequest: Activating the Sheikah Towers gives Link a map of the surrounding region. Only the very first Tower found on the Great Plateau is required to beat the game.
• Carry a Big Stick: Warhammers are another option for melee weapons. As one can expect from such a weapon, it appears to pack a lot of power, but swings quite slow. Additionally they are effective at mining but can't cut down trees.
• Cartoon Bomb: Played with. The Remote Bomb rune ability allows Link to generate either a spherical bomb or a cubical bomb. Neither of these two are conventional examples of cartoon bombs, in part due to them being Hard Light items generated by Sheikah technology, but their designs take clear influence from the standard look of a cartoon bomb, with a little ring at the top of both the sphere and cube variants meant to mimic a fuse.
• Cartoon Meat: This game ticks all the boxes save for the "bacon strips" one, most notably the classic flat steak with a thin strip of fat around it (basic and prime meat), the semi-cylindrical slab around a large bone (gourmet meat), the clean drumstick and entire plucked birds ready for roasting.
• Cash Gate: In order to get into Gerudo Town, Link must be Disguised in Drag using Gerudo garb. Link can only get this outfit by paying 600 rupees to Vilia.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Taken to new heights with humans in this game. There are more named NPCs than in any previous Zelda game, and every single Hylian and Sheikah has a unique face. Oddly, Gerudo are largely same-faced despite also being human. The only NPCs that completely reuse models and lack names are the 900 Koroks hidden around the world.
• Cataclysm Backstory: The game takes place 100 years after Calamity Ganon ravaged the land. The Hylians knew it was coming and tried their best to prepare for it, but the Calamity took over the mechanical army they'd unearthed and turned it against them. The Kingdom of Hyrule is all but a non-entity, with only a few scattered villages remaining. The only thing that stopped Ganon from wiping out everything was Princess Zelda sealing him in Hyrule Castle, which she continues to do until the game starts, but she can't keep it up forever...
• Cave Behind the Falls: Several can be found across Hyrule, particularly in the Faron region due to the area possessing a lot of waterfalls to hide them behind. Some even contain shrines, and one waterfall cave (with some unusually-high-tier weapons for that point) can be found as early as on the Great Plateau.
• Cel Shading: Thanks to a much more advanced visual engine than that of The Wind Waker (even the HD remaster). The total visual design is said to be inspired by Japanese animation.
• Censored for Comedy: The icon for Dubious Food is a pixelated greenish mass on a plate, simultaneously invoking this and Nothing Is Scarier with the question of how bad the food must be if you can't even stand to see what it really looks like.
• Chainsaw Good: The Ancient Bladesaw can be summed up as a Space Marine chainsword with laser teeth. It's very effective with its great damage and great durability.
• Character Customization: In a way. Each outfit's pieces can be mixed and matched and some lighter headgear will change Link's hairstyle, but most of the clothes have a plot or utilitarian purpose like granting an elemental resistance or buffing certain stats, making it impossible to enter some areas without the requisite clothing.
• Character Name Limits: Horse names have a 9 character limit.
• Chariot Pulled by Cats: The game has desert-dwelling "sand seals" that can pull chariots for racing, and are needed to chase one of the Divine Beasts.
• Cheerful Child: Nearly all of the child NPCs you meet are preciously cute and cheerful, with some of them wanting to grow up to be like their heroes or parents.
• Chekhov's Gun: Some shrines subvert the conventions of puzzle dungeons by making the player realize that everything inside is a piece of the puzzle. All shrines have treasure chests that reward the player, but in some cases, the innocuous metal chests which don't seem to have any other purpose are actually key to solving a puzzle by serving as a weight or electric conductor. Other shrines require the player to carry something throughout the shrine rather than leaving it at the puzzle where it was solved, since it's needed in the next puzzles as well.
• Chekhov's Volcano: While Death Mountain is indeed erupting due to Divine Beast Vah Rudania's influence, the real threat when scaling the mountain comes from the fiery cannonballs Vah Rudania shoots at trespassers.
• Cherry Tapping: Calamity Ganon takes damage from any weapon just like any other enemy, which means you can beat him into submission with a soup ladle or a farming hoe, or reflect his lasers back at him with a pot lid, though you'll more than likely need some actual good weapons to soften him up first. Sadly for the fun-seeking players, you have to kill Dark Beast Ganon with one of the following: Bow of Light, Twilight Bow, Master Sword Sword Beams or Ancient Arrow.
• Chest Monster:
  • Treasure Octoroks look like buried treasure chests before they pop up when you approach or attack the chest. The chests are just on their heads like the plants of other Octoroks. Wearing the Champion's Tunic spoils the surprise, however, displaying the Octo's health points even when hidden. Additionally, if you have the Magnesis rune active around them, these chests don't register as being metallic, unlike the actual chests they resemble. The Compendium says this is because the "chests" are actually parts of the Octoroks' bodies.
  • Several barrels in enemy camps will contain Chuchus to catch the player off guard when looting through the supplies.
• Chromatic Arrangement:
  • The Champions' blessings. Daruk's Protection is red, Mipha's Grace is blue, Revali's Gale is green, and Urbosa's Fury is yellow.
  • Also the runes used to scan for interaction with the game world, Magnesis is red, Cryonis is blue, and Stasis is yellow.
  • And the arrows, Fire, Ice and Light arrows all reappear in their traditional red, blue, yellow arrangement. Bomb, Ancient, and Shock arrows are also red, blue, and yellow respectively.
• Chubby Chaser: There are random female Yiga Clan members who are smitten with the rotund Master Kohga, and fawn over how cute they think his big belly is. Link isn't impressed and can piss them off by saying that he has a dumb belly.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Much like how Twilight Princess lacked Octoroks, this is the first Zelda game with an absence of Stalfos, though non-human "Stal" enemies still appear.
• Circling Birdies: NPCs who are knocked out by monsters will lie on the ground with yellow circling stars above their heads until they wake up.
• Clingy MacGuffin: A minor example with the Master Sword. Once Link has pulled it, it enters his inventory with a dedicated weapon slot, but it can't be dropped or thrown (the latter because of its Sword Beam). The only way to remove it from the inventory is to attempt the Trial of the Sword, which involves placing it back in its pedestal.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: After Calamity Ganon's cyborg form is defeated, he gives up on reincarnation to gather enough power to become Dark Beast Ganon, a massive boar-like monster that is the purest embodiment of Hatred and Malice. Sadly for Ganon, his Dark Beast form is so slow that Link mounted on his horse can literally run rings around him while firing Light Arrows at his weak points. Dark Beast Ganon's only attack is a Breath Weapon that Link's mount can also avoid rather easily. While it is ordinarily invulnerable, the fact that it absorbed Zelda means she can cut through its defenses to give Link easy targets to attack.
• Collection Sidequest: The Spirit Orbs from the Shrines and the Korok Seeds. Getting a certain amount of each will get you a health or stamina upgrade for the former and an expanded inventory for the latter. Getting all of each will get you Link's Iconic Outfit for the former and an item that can make Hestu dance for the latter.
• Color-Coded Elements: The game uses white or very light blue for ice, red or orange for fire, and lime or yellow for electricity, which informs the coloration of elemental weapons, enemies, and Chuchu jelly; animals native to environmental extremes or useful for making elemental resistance-granting dishes; elemental resistance-granting elixirs; the three dragons; and the electric crystals inside the shrines. As far as non-dragon elements, Water Is Blue, Wind Is Green (in the menu; it's white when seen in-game), and Malice (shadow) is Red and Black and Evil All Over with golden eyes where applicable.
• Color-Coded Patrician: The Champions' Ballad DLC reveals the blue color on the Champion's Tunic, Zelda's dress etc. is actually the color of the royal family; each Champion's blue article of clothing was crafted by princess Zelda herself and awarded to the Champions by the king during an official ceremony.
• Colossus Climb: Two of the large field bosses, the Stone Talus and the Hinox, can be climbed upon. For the former, it's necessary to Attack Its Weak Point unless you have Bomb Arrows to hit it from a distance.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Outside the main bosses, you can tell an enemy's strength by its color. Red is weakest, followed by blue, black (white-maned for Lynels), silver, and gold^note Gold enemies only appear in Master Mode.
  • And the elemental affinity for some of the monsters and the arrows goes along the line of: Red for fire and explosive arrows, yellow and lime-green is for electricity, and ice is bluish-white.
  • Sheikah magitek has Tron Lines which glow in a particular color to indicate the status of the device: orange if it has power but is inactive, blue if activated, and magenta if controlled by Ganon. In addition, while their lower halves will turn blue when you activate them, Sheikah shrines will not turn blue on top until they have been completed (this also counts for their map icons, making shrines you've activated but not finished easy to find).
• Common Place Rare:
  • After the trope was played straight in all previous 3D games (as well as some 2D ones) Breath of the Wild finally does away with this, freely giving you bottles for ingredients (milk, Goron spice) and any elixirs you brew.
  • The rubber armor set, which reduces damage from electricity and can make you completely immune to it if upgraded. In this case, the rarity of rubber is justified by the fact that no one knows how to make it anymore.
• Companion Cube: A girl named Loone has adopted one of the orbs used to access Sheikah shrines, calling it "Roscoe". She refuses to part with it unless Link brings her pictures of three different types of Guardians, which she becomes much more enthralled with, getting over Roscoe as a result.
  Loone: So smooth and ancient...
• Completion Meter: The game has one, but it actually doesn't take into account a myriad of the things in the game, such as sidequests. Instead, it measures how much exploration of the world map you did by noting if you found and completed every shrine and dungeon, collected all 900 Korok seeds, and visited every location.
• Completion Mockery: One of the many sidequests in the game is collecting Korok Seeds, with there being a total of 900 in the game. If you actually take the time to collect all 900 and bring the to Hestu, you are awarded with "Hestu's Gift", which is nothing more than a golden piece of Korok poop. The in-game description even says "It smells pretty bad". The fact that it looks a lot like the Korok Seeds implies that the player has spent the whole game collecting Korok's droppings..
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: If you're unfortunate enough to encounter a Lynel, their arched arrows can travel through walls and roofs to hit you even if you're well covered by something and there's no flight path that should let them shoot you.
• Conlang: The game introduces proper in-game words and translations for the Gerudo language, as opposed to their more random typography that has existed since Ocarina of Time. Examples include "voe" and "vai" meaning man and woman, respectively. It's very bare-bones, but it's more than can be said for any other language in the series.
• Console Cameo: The Sheikah Slate is modeled on the Wii U GamePad. It was originally planned that the GamePad would be able to display Sheikah Slate functions during gameplay, but that functionality got cut when the devs decided that turning away from the TV screen to look at the pad was distracting. Fans generally agree that the real reason second screen functions were removed was to have complete parity with Switch version, which also shares a similar shape but can only use one screen at a time.
• Continuity Cameo: Link's sidekick from the previous installment, Fi, plays a subtle but pivotal role during the final memory, being the one to tell Zelda that Link can be saved by being put in the shrine of ressurrection. While she doesn't appear physically, Fi's sound effects and theme from Skyward Sword can be heard, indicating that the voice Zelda is hearing is, in fact, her.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The three springs Zelda prays in to awaken Hylia's power are identical to◊ the Skyview Spring from Skyward Sword, albeit more ruined by time.
  • The Forgotten Temple bears an extremely close resemblance to the Sealed Temple from Skyward Sword. The Old Man says that the Temple of Time is built where the Kingdom of Hyrule was founded more than 10000 years ago, meaning the Sealed Temple should actually be somewhere below the Temple of Time.
  • During the ceremony that Daruk suggested to commemorate Link's ascension to being Zelda's personal knight:
    Zelda: Whether skyward bound, adrift in time, or steeped in the glowing embers of twilight, the sacred blade is forever bound to the soul of the hero... Over the seas of time and distance, when we knew the golden power of the goddess.
  • In another scene, she also says that legends tell of a voice speaking from within the Master Sword, and asks if Link can hear it. In the final memory at Fort Hateno, the sword speaks to Zelda. We hear it as Fi's chime. If you complete the Trial of the Sword DLC, when Link returns to the Korok Forest with the fully-upgraded Master Sword, he gives it a swing and Fi chimes again.
  • Urbosa mentions how the Calamity Ganon was said to have reincarnated into a Gerudo body in the past, a reference to the villain's human persona, Ganondorf. In that same cutscene, she refers to Nabooru, calling her a legendary hero of the Gerudo.
  • She also says that Vah Naboris was named after Sage Nabooru. This is also the case for Vah Ruta (after Sage Ruto) and Vah Rudania (after Sage Darunia). Vah Medoh is the odd one out, being named after a sage from a different game, Sage Medli.
  • Plaques on the road to Zora's Domain talk about Zora history. One of them talks about the Sage Princess Ruto.
  • In the Champions' Ballad DLC, Mipha writes in her diary about how Ruto fell in love with a Hylian swordsman and hopes that it means good things for her and Link.
  • In the first game, Link begins outside and enters a cave to speak with an old man, whereas in Breath of the Wild, Link begins in a cave and goes outside to speak with an old man. When the old man asks what Link plans to do with a torch, Link can respond "It's a secret," referencing the first game's "It's a secret to everybody" line.
  • The map is filled with nods to the series, from recurring locations to various landmarks named after past characters.
  • In the prologue of Skyward Sword, it is said that the original Demon King Demise arose from Beneath the Earth with his army of monsters. In the West Hyrule Plains, you can find a canyon littered with monster fortresses known as the "Breach of Demise", implied to be the very same crack that the Demon King emerged from.
  • The ruins around Hyrule:
    • The Ranch Ruins are pretty clearly the ruins of Lon Lon Ranch.
    • The ruins directly in front of the castle still have the same rough layout as Castle Town from Twilight Princess, although the buildings have been torn to the ground and they're overgrown with blight.
    • The ruins around the Temple of Time on the Great Plateau strongly resemble Castle Town from Ocarina of Time.
    • The Temple of Time itself is nearly identical to the Temple of Time from Ocarina of Time.
    • One of the shrine quests is given by a scientist examining what appears to be a shattered Twilight Mirror, and involves finding and photographing the missing pieces.
    • Deep in the desert, there are some ruins labelled in the map as Arbiter's Grounds.
  • One of the Shrine Quests is called Song of Storms, which is a song you learn in Ocarina of Time from an irate windmill owner involved with Link in a Stable Time Loop, and in Majora's Mask from the Poe composers Flat and Sharp.
• Contractual Boss Immunity:
  • Ancient Arrows are a One-Hit Kill weapon that will instantly vaporize any enemy they hit. Against bosses and overworld minibosses, however, they are effectively reskinned bomb arrows: they do a fair amount of damage, but nothing mind-blowing. They also aren't a guaranteed kill against Guardians: they can kill a Guardian in one shot, but you have to hit the Guardian directly in its eye for that to work, otherwise it will just do some basic damage.
  • Lynels are completely immune to all elemental effects. They cannot be burned, frozen, or electrocuted. Even explosive arrows will do little more than stun them, and even then only if you actually hit them directly in the face. They can still be one-shotted by the One-Hit Kill Ancient Arrows, but doing this means you won't get any of their extremely valuable item drops.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Calamity Ganon is considered by the people of Hyrule to be a force of nature; nothing like the Sorcerous Overlord incarnations it had assumed previously. It takes the form of a great miasma cloud in the shape of a serpentine boar, encircling the ruins of Hyrule castle where Princess Zelda has been keeping its true form contained for the past century.^note That's right; unlike how it ever was before, this time it's Zelda who has Ganon locked away!
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • Some of the Sheikah Shrines' trials are simply getting access to the shrines in the first place. While a lot of the trials to access them are sensible enough to have been prepared during their construction (such as collecting scales from the Divine Dragons, solving an ancient riddle or simply overcoming difficult terrain to reach an otherwise freely-accessible shrine), some of the "trials" tied to the "Blessing" shrines are orchestrated by people born long after the respective shrines' architects, intentionally or not. They can range from winning a climbing mini-game (which is also a Goron rite of passage from a select group, but it's ambiguous if this trial is a tradition that dates back to the original Calamity, which would have suggested cooperation between the Ancient Sheikah and Gorons) to preparing a drink for a lost and fatigued Gerudo blocking the access terminal on the otherwise freely-accessible shrine.
  • There's also a few shrines that you're only able to enter solely because the correct NPCs happen to be nearby. For instance, you'd never be able to enter the Warbler's Nest shrine without the help of Kheel and her sisters (even if you know the code to open the shrine, you can't do unless all the sisters are accounted for). You'd also never be able to enter the shrine at Palmorae Ruins without Garini's help because it requires two people working together for it to actually be revealed.
  • Tarrey Town thrives on this. In order to construct and run the town, the founder Hudson needs a Goron miner, a Gerudo tailor, a Rito with store management experience and a Zora priest, and due to Bolson's quirky policy, they all have to have names that end with -son. In the sidequest "From the Ground Up", Link has to recruit those people, and there just happens to be a Goron miner, a Gerudo tailor, a Rito with store management experience and a Zora priest in Hyrule, all with names that end with -son, despite the utter improbability of such names among people of those races (which Hudson, of course, won't stop lampshading). To top it all off, Rhondson, the Gerudo tailor, and Hudson just happen to be single, and the sidequest ends with their wedding.
  • In the final battle, after teleporting out of Hyrule Castle and Calamity Ganon assumes his Dark Beast form, there just happens to be a horse conveniently standing right where you teleport out, ready to be ridden into battle, whether or not you actually travelled to the castle by horse or not. You can even have gone through the entire game without touching a horse once, and there will still be one that will have a perfect bond with Link. Whether this is a straight example, or whether Zelda somehow takes care of there being a horse, remains unknown.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Played With. Temperature plays a huge role in the game, with Death Mountain and the Gerudo Desert to the west being quite hot. Death Mountain in particular takes it even further, with wooden gear literally bursting into flames the higher you go up the summit, to say nothing of the damage being dealt to you. The Sheikah Slate's temperature readout on the map will simply read "Error" in red, while the on-screen HUD's temperature gauge will be red-hot... and on fire if Link isn't under some manner of Fireproof effect. On the other hand, a single piece of the Flamebreaker armor will shrug off the effects of heat (yes, including if the rest of your body is still exposed to it), a Fireproof Elixir enables you to wear whatever you want in the presence of heat, and certain lava pools (such as those in shrines) don't emit heat and are safe to approach regardless. Notably, a shrine requires you to carry a block of ice until the end, and unless it gets in direct contact with flames or lava it will not melt in the slightest.
• Cooking Mechanics: Your main source of health (as enemies no longer drop hearts). Ingredients are mixed together to make dishes, some of them quite elaborate.
• Cool Airship: Vah Medoh. It's clearly visible from the Great Plateau at the very start of the game, along with Vah Rudania. It's so big that when it was first seen in the distance during E3 2016 gameplay, a lot of people mistook it for a Floating Island.
• Cool Bike: The Champions' Ballad DLC includes Master Cycle Zero, a motorbike made from Sheikah Magitek that Link can use as a steed. It can even accept any type of material to be used as fuel.
• Cool Horse:
  • Link can tame and ride wild horses. A young stable NPC explains to Link that the solid-colored horses are wilder but have better stats (are faster and have more stamina) than the spotted, gentler horses. He exclaims to Link that he considers the solid ones better and wants to tame one when he's older.
  • There are also skeletal stalhorses, which Link can also ride, though they disappear at dawn.
  • Scanning the Adult Link amiibo for Super Smash Bros. will give you Epona, who has four stars for each stat and a mild personality. However, you can only get her once per game with each amiibo (ergo, having multiple Eponas require multiple amiibo). Taking her to the stable has the stable-keeper freaking out that she's a legend. If you accidentally summoned Epona on the plateau and were forced to leave her behind, there's a chance you can get a second one at a later date via amiibo. Of course, this is all dependent on the RNG.
  • One of the sidequests consists of finding and taming a pure white horse that's said to have belonged to the royal family. Zelda rides the same breed in the flashbacks 100 years ago, and its design in general is based on the horse Zelda and Impa escaped on in Ocarina.
  • You can catch a giant black horse with flaming red hair, based on Ganondorf's horse in Ocarina of Time, said to be the Last of Its Kind.
  • There's also the Lord of the Mountain, a glowing, horse-shaped Animalistic Abomination with four eyes and five stars in each stat, plus limitless stamina. It cannot be registered, however.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: The Dubious Food and Rock-Hard Food are byproducts of Link experimenting with different incompatible ingredients with his recipes; Rock-Hard Food is obtained by including rocks or wood in the dish, while Dubious Food is the general output for failed recipes. The NPC Moza also provides such "recipes" to Link, though she's more of a Lethal Chef considering the garbage surrounding her and blackened mash in the cooking pot when you meet her.
• Corrupted Contingency: Having become well acquainted with the perpetually recurring cycle of Ganondorf coming back to life and attacking the land of Hyrule, the ancient Sheikah built an army of Guardian drones and Divine Beasts to defend the princess and champions tasked with sealing Ganon back into limbo. Unfortunately, after they succeeded the first time, Ganon had 10,000 years to plan a counterattack, and upon returning again he seized control of the Guardians and Beasts and used them to kill the champions and ravage Hyrule into a wasteland.
• Cosmetic Award:
  • The player only needs 441 Korok Seeds to maximize the size of their inventory. Should they go the extra mile and collect all 900, the player gets the Hestu's Gift token, which resembles a little golden poop and causes Hestu to dance for them at any time.
  • Beating every overworld boss of each type (Talus, Hinox, and Molduga) unlocks a medal for that type.
  • Completing the Hyrule Compendium, and talking to Symin afterwards, gets you a confidential envelope with a picture of a beautiful Sheikah woman in it.
• Cosy Catastrophe: The game takes place in what's left of Hyrule 100 years after Calamity Ganon destroyed it; despite this, life has gone on as usual for the populace. Many of the villages Link visits are thriving (and even some of the ones directly threatened by the Divine Beasts are doing well for themselves), people travel at any time despite the threat of monsters along the roads, and goods are still being produced and sold (with some people even expanding their business). This is the result of Zelda sealing Calamity Ganon in Hyrule Castle, allowing the places that weren't destroyed in the initial catastrophe to survive and recover, and the monsters that should have been rampaging the countryside are without leadership and keep to themselves, only attacking anyone foolish enough to venture into their territory. By the time the game starts, however, there's a very real threat of Ganon breaking free and finishing what he started.
• Counter-Attack: Creating and exploiting openings in order to counterattack monsters form the basis of the game's combat system.
  • By parrying with Link's shield just as an enemy attacks, the player will briefly stun enemies and potentially knock their weapon out of their hands, leaving them wide open to a counterstrike.
  • By jumping backwards or sideways just as an enemy attacks, Link will briefly enter Bullet Time, dodge to blow, and dart in to quickly deal a maximum of two combo attacks against the enemy. This allows Link to deal a great deal of damage with no chance of the blow being countered, dodged, or blocked, but requires waiting for the enemy to strike first to activate.
• Counterpoint Duet: In a non-sung example, whenever he's at a stable, Kass will play Epona's theme in counterpoint with the regular stable theme.
• Country Switch: Since the Switch is Nintendo's first region-unlocked console, the Switch version of the game is identical across all regions and contains data for all languages, displaying whatever language the console is set to. A post release patch even allows the user to select the voice track independently of the text language. Averted for the Wii U version, since that console was region locked, although Nintendo did release free DLC that provided multi-audio.
• Covert Pervert: There is a very shy Sheikah girl named Paya who can't get through a conversation with Link without stammering or getting embarrassed. When you read her diary, you find out why: She's eye-fucking Link any time she looks at him.
• Crafted from Animals: Bokoblins and Moblins, orc-like enemies whose technology tops out at a stone age level, use weapons that are simple wooden sticks at their base levels but are reinforced with bones and then fossils at higher tiers. These mostly consist of nonspecific spikes of sharpened bone used to make clubs, spears, shields and bows harder-hitting, more durable or just more menacing, but more clearly identifiable examples include the second-tier Moblin spear, which has an entire antelope skull tied to it to form its point, and the third-tier Moblin club, whose head is a vertebrae from some unknown giant beast tied down to its central stick.
• Cranium Ride: Climbing to the top of a Talus' head is helpful to reach its weak point (an embedded piece of ore) and hit it with a weapon and inflict extra damage. In the case of a Frost Talus and an Igneo Talus, it's necessary to warm it with a projectile first (hot for Frost, cold for Igneo). Even after you're atop the head to hit the weak point, the boss will eventually shake its body to brush you off (which causes damage), so beware).
• Crapsack World: Hyrule is a low octane version of this. Hyrule is an anarchic and sparsely populated wasteland where monsters are very abundant, destroyed settlements litter the landscape, and Hyrule Castle houses a world-ending Eldritch Abomination that is only barely being contained, with the seal likely to break at any moment. However at the same time, people live cozy lives in the settlements that still stand and don’t seem terribly bothered by their situation, barring one NPC who implies he regularly has to talk people down from jumping off a bridge. As a bonus, nature has been thriving untouched in many areas for the last hundred years, creating vibrant, beautiful landscapes at every turn.
• Crate Expectations: The game has them scattered throughout the enormous overworld. While usually found next to enemy camps, they're also occasionally inside ruins or near NPCs, and are a good source of arrows and apples.
• Creepy Crows: Mount Satori, a supernatural mountain marked by the presence of a gathering of spirit-like beings on its summit during certain nights and by the absence of regular enemies on its slopes outside of the undead, is also home to immense flocks of crows constantly wheeling and circling in its skies and perching on its slops and cliffs. Similarly, the Bottomless Swamp — an area of sucking quicksand-like bogs, pools of deadly Malice, dead trees and giant stone skulls half-buried in the mire — is home to a similar, smaller flock of crows that circles above it at all times.
• Critical Hit:
  • Weapons will do double damage when they break, whether by being thrown or running out of durability hitting an enemy. Weapons with the "Critical Hit" perk also score a crit when a combo finisher connects.
  • A weirder example is "critical cooking" — sometimes, randomly, cooking something that gives a temporary status effect will give you a special version of that dish with either a stronger stat boost or a much longer-lasting one. A special musical jingle lets you know when this happens. You can get this boost guaranteed during Blood Moon nights as well.
• Crossing the Desert: Most of the Gerudo region is a huge, dangerous desert that Link must brave to reach Gerudo Town, and eventually the Sacred Beast Vah Naboris. Local dangers include sandstorms which block your view and disables the map, various enemies, and scorching heat that damages Link if he's not prepared for it with proper equipment or meals.
• Cross Promotion: In a promotion for Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Link can garb himself in the outfit worn by Rex, the main hero of the former game.
• Crow's Nest Cartography: The Sheikah Towers, which require Link to climb them and insert his Sheikah Slate. Visiting these towers fills in the borders of an entire region on the in-game map, and allows the player to get a clear look at their surroundings and identify shrines, landmarks and other points of interest to head towards. Since they are Warp Whistle destinations, they also double as convenient high points for Link to use his paraglider.
• Crystal Weapon: Whatever it is that ancient technology is made of, diamonds are a part of it, as the Gerudo diamond circlet offers ancient resistance.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • There is widespread evidence that Calamity Ganon inflicted this upon the kingdom a century ago. Every fort, garrison, and training camp Link stumbles across is in ruin or re-purposed by monsters into homes. Several battlefields containing shattered Guardian hulks are littered with rusting swords and shields concentrated in small clusters, giving the sense of a Bolivian Army Ending. If one reviews the world map and plots the location of the military camps, it becomes apparent Hyrule expected Ganon to attack from outside the kingdom and make his way to the palace. They never expected him to emerge from Hyrule Castle itself.
  • On an individual level, each of the four Champions was killed after apparently suffering one of these at the hands of the respective Blight Ganon that now controls his/her Divine Beast. While it's never directly stated in the game itself, the abilities used by each Blight Ganon during Link's Boss Battle against it imply that each Blight was specifically created by Ganon with skills and weapons that would perfectly counter the favored fighting style and special abilities of the respective champion that it was responsible for defeating.
• Cut and Paste Environments:
  • The Sheikah Shrines. Each and every one of the entrances is the exact same stone cave with ornamental Tron Lines. Furthermore, the "shrines" themselves are vast underground Magitek puzzle chambers with a Portal-esque minimalist angular architecture. While the layout is different in each shrine (aside from the numerous "tests of strength" which host the exact same battle against the exact same robot in the exact same arena), their walls, railings, platforms, doors, torches, and everything else look exactly alike.
  • To a lesser degree, this extends to the world itself, with certain structures, korok puzzles, ruins, and even landscape elements being reused multiple times throughout the world. One prominent example is a distinctive shelf of rock with a hole in the middle, which appears in at least four separate places^note near Fort Hateno, in northern Faron, over the entrance to the Yiga hideout, and in the Hebra mountains with only minor surface changes to fit in with the region.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: One of Link's memories is of Zelda matter-of-factly chastising him for taking unnecessary risks as they survey a huge pile of monsters he's just killed. At his peak 100 years prior to the game, Link apparently could simultaneously take on at least four White-Maned Lynels and a huge number of Bokoblins. Even in the hardest bonus content of the game, the player never faces more than one Lynel of any type at a time.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • Shrine puzzles can often be handled in more than one way, not necessarily by tackling the intended challenge. For instance, most fire-based puzzles are intended to be handled with clever use of the bow, but fire arrows and/or a torch completely trivialize them, as does liberal use of Chuchu jelly and metal weapons for electrical puzzles. A lot of switches are meant to be held down by objects hidden in the shrine, but ten apples will do just as well, or you can temporarily lock a pressed switch in place with the Stasis rune. Of course, this kind of experimentation is encouraged, as it doesn't matter how you reach the monk at the end; they praise your resourcefulness, no matter how you get there.
  • The Myahm Agana Shrine features a rather challenging ball-rolling maze similar to the Rollgoal minigame of Twilight Princess, but controlled entirely with the motion controls of the Wii U GamePad or the Switch's control options. Naturally, you can turn the whole maze over by flipping your controller upside-down, and letting the ball roll on the flat underside. That, or tilt the maze so that when the ball respawns, it's dropped into the final stretch rather than the start.
  • Setting foot on Eventide Island starts a challenge where Link is stripped of all his equipment (including materials and food) and pits him against all sorts of monsters, including a Hinox, in a quest to recover three orbs and drop them onto pedestals. You can partially subvert the no-gear part simply by dropping your stuff on your raft you used to get there before you touch the shore, and then pick them up again when the challenge commences. However, upon completing the challenge, whatever you found on the island is lost, including your own equipment that you "scavenged" (although you could just drop them again before you put the last orb in the hole).
  • Instead of sneaking through the Yiga Clan hideout, you can opt to kill all the guards. With most weapons, this is more difficult, as the hideout tries to enforce stealth gameplay. How? Well, the Yiga Blademasters within the hideout, and only within the hideout, ignore all of your health, fairies, and Mipha's Grace and will always kill you with one hit plus summoning Footsoldier backup when they see you. This is the game's clear way of telling you you aren't supposed to be noticed. But if you've stocked up on Ancient Arrows, clearing them out is a piece of cake.
  • Rinu Honika Shrine of EX Champion Daruk's Song in particular features a gauntlet run where you have to bypass the blazing fire burners with puzzle solving with bombs, magnesis and gyro controls... or you can just wear the complete Flamebreaker Armor and literally walk through it. And considering the fact the shrine has to be unlocked within Death Mountain, an already hot area that would set you on fire without fireproof status, you would already have bought Flamebreaker Armor to save time on making Fireproof Elixirs.
• Cyborg: The Blight Ganons are a mixture of Malice, the malevolent matter produced by Calamity Ganon, and bits and pieces of Sheikah technology. Although Malice sustains the monsters, they primarily rely on the energy blades and laser beams provided by the tech to fight. Once Link interrupts Ganon's reincarnation, he too manifests as a mishmash of flesh and Magitek.
• Cycle of Hurting:
  • If a guardian sends Link ragdolling with a laser blast, they can lock onto him again while he's still reeling, giving him less than half a second to move by the time he gets back up. And they'll have closed the distance, so the blast might as well be hitscan. Good luck surviving much longer.
  • Back Stab an enemy, and they'll fall to the ground. Walk around to their front, and they'll get up; stare at you, and turn around and look the direction where they were stabbed. Repeat.
  • The Stasis+ rune makes this even easier, even against Guardian Stalkers. Freeze them when they approach, cut off their legs and keep hitting them. If they happen to spot you again or try to crawl away, your rune will have recharged in time to halt them and get to a safe attacking point again.
  • You might think big bad two-hander weapons reign supreme for horseback melee, but a Spear can knock a mounted foe off their horse, and if you have enough running space ahead of you, you can keep relentlessly jabbing them, never giving them a chance to get up. This is because the Spear can attack close to straight forward, and just off to the side enough to forcibly dismount a foe.
  • How speedrunners defeat Lynels when they need to. Headshot, spam attacks, headshot again, spam attacks again... It is the reason why many runners consider the All Lynels No Ancient Arrows category pointless.
• Cypher Language: The Ancient Sheikah language found in Shrines and Magitek devices is simply English with the normal characters replaced with symbols made up for the game. Knowing this is particularly useful for the Captured Memories quest because the string of blue symbols visible over the upper-right corner of each of the pictures in the Sheikah Slate before unlocking the corresponding memory is actually the name of the location where they were taken, which greatly simplifies tracking them down.

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