With The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo has completely overhauled the open world genre, with a game that subverts and defies the expectations of this template of games. This also means that, largely, Breath of the Wild smartly sidesteps the kind of banal and trite collectibles that have become almost synonymous with the genre.
Take Korok seeds, for example- these are smartly hidden across the world, that you uncover by exploring and investigating suspicious things, and generally are all mini puzzles unto themselves. You actually appreciate how well they’ve been integrated into the game’s world. Until you realize there are 900 of these things. No, that’s not a typo- there actually are 900 Korok seeds hidden across Breath of the Wild‘s massive, massive game world. You don’t actually need all of them- these seeds are used to upgrade inventory space, and your inventory maxes out at 441, meaning that there are as many of them as there are only for redundancy, so players can stumble upon enough ones through the game.
So what do you get if you manage to collect all of them? Surely you get something special, right? For having collected this most annoying collectible? As it turns out, Nintendo gives you something, um, special indeed. When you go to Hetsu (the in game character you take your seeds to) having collected all 900 of them, he gives you… well… take a look at the screen below for yourself.
Well played, Nintendo. Well played.
