Soapbox features allow our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random things they’ve been chewing on. Todaycracks Jim the moment you pick up the legendary sword in the latest Zelda game…
There were several moments in my playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom where I would put the controller down, put my hands on my head, and sit beaming in front of the screen. Initial Dive on Big Sky Island as it appears in the title; music during the Wind Temple boss fight; the first time I bypassed the puzzle by attaching two rockets to a wooden plank and sent Link raging towards his goal.
However, none of that came close to the moment you picked up the Master Sword.
I was hesitant to compare Tears of the Kingdom to the Zelda games that came before it (it’s still very new after all), but watching Link get his hands on the legendary blade, I had no doubt that this was one of my favorite moments in the entire series.
Before I get into why I haven’t been able to get the sequence out of my head for the past two months, let’s first lay out a big old spoiler alert. I’m going to dive into tons of details regarding the story of Tears of the Kingdom. If you still haven’t found the Master Sword in the game, then you’ll want to go back now and do it for yourself first. Trust us, there’s nothing better than a spoiler-free experience…
I left the quest for the Master Sword until well over 50 hours into my game. I’ve completed four regional phenomenon quests and, safe in the assumption that I’ll be heading to Hyrule Castle to fight Ganondorf right after (naive as I was), I thought it would be a good idea to go into it with Link’s legendary blade in hand — come on , I wasn’t going to end the game with some strong but very ugly Fuse monstrosity now, was I?
Tears of the Kingdom took the Zelda trope I knew so well and made it ten times better
I put it off because I know how those sequences go. You have your own Link to the Past access where you travel to a peaceful forest and extract the master sword from the stone, surrounded by lovely woodland creatures. Or there’s a version of Ocarina of Time, which is almost the same only in an ancient temple and with significantly fewer squirrels.
Like so many things, Tears of the Kingdom took the Zelda trope I knew so well and made it ten times better. I love A Link to the Past as much as anyone, but you can’t honestly say that a sunny forest (no matter how peaceful) is cooler than a ride on a back a real dragon…
Okay, maybe I skipped a bit there. Thankfully, I think getting the Master Sword this time around is such a series-defining moment that almost every aspect of getting his hands on it has me muttering “Woof“.
This includes how to actually find the haunted thing. There are several ways you can do this: find all the Dragon Tears and reveal the final cutscene showing you exactly where the sword is, you can swing to the Lost Forest half expecting it to be stuck in the ground again. Or you can just run into the Light Dragon without doing any of that. I’m sure the first one is a bit more cinematic, but Saint Hylia did the latter have its punch-the-air moments.
After clearing the Great Deku Tree’s phantom indigestion, he will give you the main quest ‘Retrieving the Heroic Sword’ which shows the exact location of the Master Sword on the map. The only difference with this lens compared to others is that I noticed it it was moving. I initial thought was that there was some kind of sky island in orbit around Hyrule and I would have to jump in and remove the sword. I quickly traveled to the nearest shrine to the moving marker and, in place of my imagined moving island, there was an entire gold and white dragon with my sword buried in the head. Woof.
There’s a sense of tension in the acting here that’s unlike anything the show has done before
This isn’t the first Zelda game to make us work for the chance to grab a legendary blade (the thought of Skyward Sword’s Sacred Flames still makes me shudder), but sliding up to and landing on the back of a Light Dragon is something else. Arguably, this in itself had the potential to be the best moment of the series, and as the ‘Grab’ command appeared as I approached, I thought I knew where this was going — after all, we’ve all played Breath of the Wild — but it had to subvert my expectations all over again.
There’s an obvious change around replacing Breath of the Wild requires 13 hearts to raise a sword for two full rounds of stamina, which makes everyone who thought they were getting ahead of the game by filling up health first laugh, but the best change comes from how this feels like no other swordmaster moment that came before it.
Clearly, the sequence is more cinematic than ever before. I love the old Master Sword sequences, but there’s only so much drama you can get out of a man in a funny hat grunting as he pulls a blade out of a rock. Tears of the Kingdom opts for the complete opposite end of the spectrum — pure spectacle. There’s a dragon, yes, but as you pull the sword out of the dragon’s head, it starts hurtling through the sky at top speed, leaving Link frantically holding on like he’s Tom Cruise in that one Mission Impossible movie.
How can Nintendo make another Master Sword sequence after this?
And I don’t use “for dear life” lightly. Attempting to draw the sword while low in the heart in Breath of the Wild would result literal death, but exhaustion is not the most picturesque way to die. Tears of the Kingdom creates a situation where if you’re not ready to pick up your sword (which, mind you, you have no idea if you will be, the first time around), Link will tumble off that dragon and fall hundreds of feet before meeting a particularly mushy end. There’s a sense of tension in the acting here that’s unlike anything the show has done before.
Although the best part about this whole sequence is that it actually means something. In the previous games, Link gets the Master Sword because he needs it to banish evil. The same is true here, of course, but Tears of the Kingdom has an edge so intrinsically woven into the story that discovering where she’s been all this time has its own distinctly melancholy undertone.
I won’t explain exactly what the twist is here — although if you’re here, I’m sure you already know — but it’s fair to say that it brings together Link, Zelda, and the entire history of Hyrule in one scene where my previously uttered “woah” quickly turned into ” aww”. It’s epic, tense, exciting, but most of all heartbreaking.
So, as I watched Link fall safely onto the nearby Sky Island as the dragon flew off into the distance, I let out an almighty sigh. From relief? Yes, but also disbelief in what just happened. How can Nintendo make another Master Sword sequence after this? What should I do with all this dragon knowledge I just learned? And, most importantly, why did I wait over 50 hours before looking for that damned blade?
Princess Zelda may be stuck in the past, but her franchise sure isn’t. And this moment only enriched the rest of the game for me. While I’m reluctant to say at this point that Tears of the Kingdom is the best Zelda game ever, I’m convinced that – at the very least – the Master Sword moment may be the series’ best moment ever.
