The Poetry of Breath of the Wild

We tell ourselves that stories are everywhere—so what do we miss when stories are all we look for?

By the time I first stepped digital foot onto the open plains in the Breath of the Wild, it had accumulated years of praise. Somehow, I had managed to avoid any real knowledge of the game or what it offered—but, in early 2021, I had at least heard many people say that it was not just a good game, but the best game. Their favorite of all time.

Those are some lofty expectations to set someone up with. In fact, it sat on my shelf for a month before I decided I would finally see what it was all about— whether it really was as good as everyone was saying. 

Of course, The Legend of Zelda is a series of games that all generally see the player controlling the swordsman Link as he journeys through the kingdom of Hyrule, often to rescue the princess Zelda from some diabolical villain. The details and story of each iteration vary, but the basic idea is the same. Grab a sword, vanquish monsters, fill your utility belt with weapons and gadgets, and save the kingdom. 

With Breath of the Wild, the setup is similar. Again, we play as Link, and we have the charge to save the princess and the kingdom, but, this time, we encounter Link waking up in a mysterious facility. He stumbles out into the light to behold a wide open world. 

From there, we learn that Link has woken up one hundred years after an event known as The Great Calamity. One hundred years before, Link had served alongside Princess Zelda and four other great heroes to prepare the kingdom to defend itself against a prophesied evil. But, when that evil arose, all their preparations proved ineffective. The monster, Calamity Ganon, took control of their defensive countermeasures, defeated the four other heroes, and laid waste to the kingdom. 

Link himself nearly fell in that eruption of evil, but agents of the princess carried him off to the shrine of resurrection—the same spot where he woke up a hundred years later, while the princess went to the castle alone and exercised her divine power to seal herself and the monster within the castle walls. 

So our adventure as players begins in the ruined and dangerous remains of a once-great kingdom. And with nothing but some raggedy clothing and a few tree branches to our name, it falls on us to finally defeat the evil that had won such a commanding victory a century before. 

But, unlike other games in the series, Breath of the Wild takes place in an open world. Which, for the unfamiliar, means that nearly from the start, you can go wherever you want and do whatever you want. Obviously, you have the ultimate objective to defeat Calamity Ganon, but how you do it, when you do it, and what you do on the way there is totally up to you. 

Because the creators of the game can’t know for sure what you’ll do or when, they can’t orchestrate well-timed reveals or twists, can’t create a plot that hinges on a character you may never meet, and can’t guarantee that you won’t find some way to launch yourself into the air from a mountain, land at the top of the castle and defeat the monster with a ladle, the story of the game has to be flexible enough to accommodate any possibility. And, if you listen to some of the game’s critics, that results in a story that isn’t very good. 

But what if it isn’t a story at all? Even late to the party, I can affirm that my experience wandering Breath of the Wild’s kingdom was one of the more meaningful media experiences I’ve had—print, video, or otherwise. And I think one of the reasons it resonated with me so much is the fact that it works, not like a story, but like poetry. And I want to show you what I mean.

The Tyranny of Narrative

You don’t have to go far to hear people calling everything a story. Advertising is a story. Academic research articles are an exercise in storytelling. You personal brand—that better be a story. Of course, stories are an important part of human experience, and I don’t want to say otherwise. But I’m pretty sure that not everything is, in fact, a story. 

So, before we get too far, we should probably talk about what I mean by story. And what I mean is narrative. 

In 1984, Walter Fisher published an article called “Narration as Communication Paradigm,” in which he argued that there are two major ways of looking at the world. 

On the one hand, we have what he described as the rational world paradigm, which holds that humans are rational beings, that people make decisions through argument, that argument follows certain rules in certain situations, that rationality depends on one’s knowledge of a subject, argumentative ability, and skill in using the rules of a situation, and that, ultimately, the world is a “set of logical puzzles which can be resolved through appropriate analysis and application of reason.” 

This mode, Fisher says, has been dominant—but we make a mistake when we assume it’s the only way to understand the world. Sure, rationality has its use, but it’s not the only way to make sense of the world and live productively. The alternative he proposes is the narrative paradigm, which holds these core tenets:

First, that humans are essentially, not rational beings, but storytellers. Therefore, the true decision-making mode is finding good reasons from various situations, genres, and media. Those good reasons come from history, biography, culture, and character—actual human experiences and stories rather than abstract rational rules—and that good decisions depend on our nature as narrative beings. That is, we can make decisions, not based on rational formulas but on our inherent understanding of narrative probability, coherence, and fidelity—or our ability to detect whether something rings true with the stories we already know. As a result, the world is not a series of logical puzzles but a set of stories—and we choose among those stories “to live the good life in a process of continual recreation.”

Fisher says, “[T]raditional rationality is only relevant in specialized fields and even in those arenas narrative rationality is meaningful and useful,” and, I think, the fact that you can have someone coach you to write a better lab report by thinking of it as a story is pretty clear evidence of the way that narrative thinking has found its place in all kinds of human practice. 

So narrative is storytelling—when people say that Breath of the Wild has a bad story, they might be saying that it’s narrative doesn’t live up to their expectation for narratives, doesn’t do the things their experience with stories has taught them to expect. 

And what do we expect stories to do? Well, give us a sequence of cause-and-effect events that take us on a journey from beginning, to middle, to end. 

Quoting E.M. Forster, Peter F. Neumeyer writes, “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” The author of Forster’s plot had in mind a causality, a hypothesis, a point of view.” And Kieran Egan writes that a key distinction “sees the story as the chronological element of a narrative and the plot as the causal or motivational element,” going on to say that, “A plot is a set of rules that determines and sequences events to cause a determinate affective response.” 

So, if people are fundamentally storytellers, that means we’re attuned to narratives that have not just ordered sequences of events—but plots, sequences of events that depend on causes and motivations. It’s not just that one thing happened and then another thing happened—one thing happened because another thing happened. The queen died because of the grief brought on by the king’s death. 

And, for people who are familiar with previous iterations of the Legend of the Zelda, narrative with story and plot are the name of the game. Take, for example, my first foray into the series, The Wind Waker, which, spoilers ahead, ends with link defeating the evil king Ganondorf, turning him to stone with the power of the Master Sword. 

And why does that happen? Because the good king of Hyrule made a wish through the powerful artifact known as the triforce that Ganondorf would be defeated.

Why does that happen? Because Ganondorf, who possessed part of the Triforce, kidnapped the princess, who also possessed part of it, which drew Link, possessor of the third fragment, to confront Ganondorf  and save the princess. When the Triforce was reassembled, the good king had his chance

But why does Link even feel like he can take on this ultimate evil? Because he’d just completed a journey to restore the power of his legendary sword. 

Why did he do that? Well, because he had already confronted Ganondorf once before with a weakened sword and was summarily defeated. 

But why was he fighting him in the first place? Glad you asked—because a giant bird kidnapped Link’s sister at the beginning of the game—and Link was trying to rescue her. 

Why did that bird kidnap his sister? Because his sister looked like Princess Zelda, and Ganondorf had commanded the giant bird to kidnap anyone who looked like Zelda, blah, blah, blah so that he could reassemble the Triforce and rule the world or whatever. 

Long reverse story short, previous to Breath of the Wild, Zelda games like The Wind Waker were largely narrative experiences—they had stories and plots. You started the game and played your way through a controlled sequence of events that all had clear causal relationships with one another. 

All the way throughout, you knew Link’s motive, and you knew other characters’ motives. And each step along the way had a clear purpose in contributing to the overall goal. Why did you fight the weird bug and weird plant before you fight the weird ghost and snake? Because you have to find the sword before you can power it up. There’s an order to things—and that order is fundamental to the narrative. 

Now look at Breath of the Wild, which says, you gotta beat the big guy in the middle, but do whatever you want in the meantime. With a setup like that, there can’t be a story—because the game can’t predict what order you do things in. And there can’t be a plot—because, lack of sequence aside, there’s no real way to establish a causal link between one action and another. 

Why did you go visit the snowy Rito village first instead of the desert Gerudo Town? No reason, you just felt like going north instead of south. How does spending two hours looking for mushrooms to dye your shirt a different color help you to defeat the evil monster? It doesn’t—but, while you were doing it, you stumbled on an ancient shrine and solved a tricky puzzle inside, and you thought that was pretty cool. Why are you launching yourself off a tower and seeing how far away you can glide? Do you need a reason other than the background music? 

If you’re expecting a narrative experience like the step-by-step sequence of something like The Wind Waker, you probably are going to disappointed by the experience that Breath of the Wild gives you—because not only doesn’t it deliver a structured narrative—it can’t. Because it leaves things open and gives a player freedom to do whatever they want however they want, a structured narrative is impossible. 

So, yeah, put simply in those terms, Breath of the Wild does have a bad story. And critics will acknowledge that the game design decision to create an open world—which translates into a lot of freedom and enjoyable gameplay—comes at the cost of story. It is a lot of fun to play, they’ll say, but it’s just a shame that the story has to suffer as a result. 

And there are some narrative elements to this game. There’s the broad framing of the overall objective—the large cause of the Calamity leading to the large effect of fighting Calamity Ganon. But there are also a series of locations in the kingdom of Hyrule that, when you go there, trigger flashbacks of Link’s life before everything was destroyed. 

In those flashbacks, we catch glimpses of Link and his fellow champions preparing for the foretold calamity—working on guardian robots, studying ruins, accompanying the princess as she tries to awaken her divine anti-calamity powers. And we see the immediate aftermath of the calamity’s eruption—the destruction, the defeat, the despair of it all. 

That’s the more interesting story, people will say. The story I want to play through is the one that happened a hundred years ago—the one with all these characters with clear motives that make interesting choices to overcome tangible challenges. 

And instead, we’re just here, in a field. Breaking our swords over and over until, what, we get enough hearts to feel like we can fight the big bad guy? It might be fun to mess around in an unstructured Hyrule. But that doesn’t change the fact that the story of the game just isn’t that good—certainly not as good as the story before the game that it teases us with every so often. 

But, hey, listen—what if that’s the wrong way to think about it? The narrative paradigm offers some meaningful—and meaningfully humane—alternatives to the rational paradigm. But what if, in our wholehearted embrace of storytelling as the basic impulse of the literary arts—novels, movies, or video games—we’ve done ourselves a disservice and limited our ability to see a whole range of other ways to craft experiences?

What if critics saying that Breath of the Wild has a bad story is like philosophers calling rhetoric bad philosophy? Saying that Breath of the Wild has weak storytelling is only a meaningful critique if it’s trying to tell a story. But what happens if we look at this game not as narrative fiction—but as poetry?

Liberating Lyricism

Time spent in Breath of the Wild’s open world is time spent doing things like hunting for lizards in volcanic wastelands. Or sneaking up on sleeping monsters to steal their fish. Or catching fireflies to brighten an old lady’s day. 

Maybe you’re wandering through the wetlands and see something sparkle in the distance—so you go to see what it’s all about. Maybe you’re in the desert, caught unawares by big old sand monster. More likely, though, you’ll find yourself running in circles in a rainstorm, waiting for the weather to clear so you can climb a mountain without sliding back down to the bottom. Maybe, after dodging a terrifying monster at the foot of a volcano, your panic is interrupted by a breeze carrying a melody that draws your gaze up, unexpectedly, to a dragon, peacefully crawling through the sky. 

None of this feels like narrative’s process of causal completion. Instead, it feels more like what the sociologist Andrew Abbot describes in his piece, “Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology” as he analyzes Harvey Zorbaugh’s writing about Chicago: “[T]elling a story is precisely what Zorbaugh does not do. He rather looks at a social situation, feels its overpowering excitement and its deeply affecting human complexity, and then writes a book trying to awaken those feelings in the minds—and even more in the hearts—of his readers. This recreation of an experience of social discovery is what I shall here call lyrical sociology.” 

Indeed, like Abbot does with Zorbaugh, I would argue that telling a story is precisely what Breath of the Wild does not do. When you’re lost in the woods and you hear some familiar accordion music and then happen upon your bird-shaped friend, that’s not a plot point. When you’re zipping up the canyon in the Gerudo Desert on your way to infiltrate the Yiga hideout, you’re not cruising along the rising action curve of any one of the forty-eight plot structures theorists have devised. When you’re throwing bombs at trees to gather wood instead of looking for an ax that would break anyway, you’re not discovering something about Link’s backstory or motivations. In each of those cases—and at any point while playing the game—you’re just living in a moment, having an experience, and nothing more. 

Abbot goes on to say: “The lyrical is momentary. This above all is what makes it non-narrative. It is not about something happening. It is not about an outcome. It is about something that is, a state of being. A narrative writer seeks to tell us what happened and perhaps to explain it. A lyrical writer aims to tell us of his or her intense reaction to some portion of the social process seen in a moment. This means that the first will tell us about sequences of events while the second will give us congeries of images.”

Ask someone to tell you about what happens in The Wind Waker, and they’ll give you a plot summary—they can even give you explanations for why certain things happened in the order they did. Ask someone to tell you about the time they played Breath of the Wild, and you’ll probably get congeries of images. Because Breath of the Wild isn’t a narrative experience—it’s a lyrical one. 

Naturally, while writing this script, I asked YouTube to play some of the greatest hits from the game’s soundtrack—and reading those comments sections feels like reading poetry. People are writing about those primary, unstructured experiences they had while playing, the intense emotions recollected in tranquility that Wordsworth said poetry was all about. 

What people remember about the game—at least what they comment on soundtrack music videos—are those lyrical experiences, the poetry that the game is made of. They might not fully recognize it all as poetry, but poetry is what they’re doing. 

And that’s what we miss when we see everything through the lens of story. It’s also why I tell new readers of poetry that poetry doesn’t tell stories. Which isn’t to say that poetry can’t have narrative elements to it—but, if you go in thinking a poem will tell a story the same way a novel or TV show does, you’re going to be putting narrative expectations onto lyrical texts, and you’ll probably come away saying it’s a bad story. Or you’ll just be confused or frustrated because you understand stories but you just don’t get this poetry stuff. 

Right, because the tools of narrative won’t help you here—or, they’ll only get you so far. 

So, yes, from a narrative perspective, the memories or flashbacks in Breath of the Wild might seem like a frustrating tease—the story the game could be telling if it weren’t so stuck on being an open world game. 

But, consider those flashbacks from a lyrical perspective. What if we see them not as a desperate attempt to accommodate narrative to a difficult game genre but as meaningful elements of the game’s lyrical framework? 

You’re experiencing life through the eyes of Link, a hero who woke up a hundred years after nearly dying in the great calamity—without any of his former memories. You could play the whole game to the end without activating any of the flashbacks, but what is it like to navigate a world full of monsters, a world where most of the people have retreated to a few small towns, where irritating lizards, the heat, and even bees are always trying to kill you—to say nothing of the giant patrolling robots that come out of nowhere with frantic piano music and giant blue lasers—only to have the world around you pause while you witness a day one hundred years ago where your friends are testing the very robots that were meant to protect the kingdom but that now hunt you? 

The memory is not a weak attempt to get story into the game—it’s a scrap of narrative that changes your lyrical experience now. Whether you keep running from the robots or facing them down, it means something different after seeing the flashback than before—it makes the emotional experience in the moment, the lyrical now, a different one.

And, when you restore your memories of all the other champions, and see how Urbosa cared for Zelda almost like a mother a hundred years ago, it means something different to see her spirit perched in a giant camel robot, taking aim at the monster in the castle, ready for the moment that you decide to confront the beast. 

So, and of course the developer’s intentions don’t really matter here—we as players have a choice. We could read those flashbacks as a weak and mostly unsuccessful effort to put a story in a game that is mechanically at odds with storytelling. Or we could read them as narrative elements that serve to enrich and deepen a lyrical text. 

To treat Breath of the Wild as a failed narrative would be to misunderstand how it works. It’s not a bad story—it’s poetry that draws on narrative elements here and there to achieve its effect.

In a story, there’s always somewhere to be and something to do, always a cause affecting your actions. With a poem, though, it can be—and often is—enough just to sit on a snowy ridge and watch the sunrise. Where narrative attempts to organize moments and events into grand dramas, the lyric is content just to be—to observe, to ponder. 

And, for whatever narrative elements Breath of the Wild has, most of the time you spend in the game isn’t trying to fit your actions into a plot. You don’t need a reason to deck yourself and your horse in futuristic ancient technology to go bopping bokoblins in the head. There’s no plot motivation for hanging your favorite shields in your house. And the story isn’t going to change if you take a piece of royal fruitcake with you when you finally go to rescue Zelda. 

But all of it can and will change how you inhabit the moment-to-moment experiences of wandering a kingdom a hundred years too late to save it. 

For me, time and again, the most meaningful experiences came when activating one of the many towers that dot the kingdom. In the game, the towers are said to have been constructed by an ancient people in order to help in the fight against the Calamity. In practical terms, they serve to give you sections of your map. But the poetry of them, the experience in the moment—at least for me in early 2021 meant a lot.

See, these towers are scattered throughout the land, and getting to the top of each one requires some problem solving and a lot of patience—it’s a long climb. But then, when you do get to the top and activate the tower, you’re rewarded with a grand musical sweep that accompanies the sweeping view of the surrounding area.

And each time, even though those towers don’t really do anything, I experienced it as if the lights of hope were being turned on in a ruined a desolate kingdom. And it was an experience that seemed to say that, even if it comes a hundred years later than you wanted and even if it’s just you against an immeasurable evil, it was still possible for good to triumph. It was something that mattered not because of how it fit into a narrative sequence but because of what it was like to experience it in the moment. 

It was, in a word, poetry.

Conclusion

Stories are important, and, to be sure, they show up in all kinds of places. But when we treat story as the fundamental or only way of communicating human experience, we stand to overlook and misunderstand a lot of meaningful things. 

Forty years ago, Fisher argued that the rational paradigm wasn’t the jack of all trades that it was thought to be and that its usefulness was really constrained to specialized fields where it did work exceptionally well. In the years since, his alternative, narrative, has almost come to fill that role—and you won’t have to go far to hear people trying to explain the whole world in terms of story. 

But, just as there are things where rationality fails to offer satisfying accounts of our experience, narrative falls short of giving us universal understanding. Sometimes, things aren’t stories, don’t have plots with beginnings, middles, and ends. I’d argue, that in most cases, life refuses to conform to narrative structures—and in a lot of our media, narrative expectations keep us from seeing what’s really going on. 

So you could say that your life or even your Zelda game from almost a decade ago has a bad story—but what if it isn’t even a story at all? What if, instead of being disappointed by an absent plot, you settled into the moment now, really felt whatever you were feeling, and let that moment exist on its own terms rather than trying to fit it into some artificial story structure?

Well, if you did that, then you’d be doing what poets do. Observing and writing from a lyrical paradigm—one that sees life not as a series of logical puzzles or a collection of stories but a great big heap of sometimes coherent, sometimes conflicting, but always somehow significant experiences. 

And, of course, that doesn’t mean that you have to like poetry—but, who knows, when you see it for what it really is, you just might start to. 

But anyway, thanks for watching. This is one of those videos that I’ve wanted to make for a long time but that I never really felt like my technical skills were up to the task. They probably still aren’t, but I at least felt like I could finally give it a shot. And, who knows, now that video games are in play, we may just have to do more of these kinds of analyses. If you’ve got something you want us to take a look at, just let me know in the comments.

Otherwise, thanks again for watching—and we’ll catch you later.