One of the beautiful things about Breath of the Wild is that everyone plays it differently. Some players only care about the story objectives while others seek out every Ancient Shrine and Korok. I was a bit of a completionist. During the months after Breath of the Wild’s release, I played obsessively to complete every sidequest and puzzle out the secrets of the shrines. My eight-year-old daughter, on the other hand, had a wholly unique playstyle.
My daughter has the unholy tendency to wake up very early. Even on weekends when she could sleep in (and more importantly, let me sleep in), she wakes up really early because she can’t wait to watch YouTube videos or play games on the Switch. One morning, I groggily stumbled downstairs and made coffee before sitting down next to her. She was crouching on the bridge by the Tabantha Stable. I didn’t see any enemies or creatures nearby. In fact, she usually avoids the enemies in the game in favor of simple exploration. Minutes went by and she didn’t move a muscle. Eventually, I asked her what she was doing. She replied with the simple, knowing phrase: “I’m hunting dragons.”
Now, my daughter is generally not in favor of hurting any creatures whether in-game or in real life, so the idea of her hunting the dragons was an odd one for her. When I asked her about it, she gave me a look genetically encoded into children and reserved for parents who ask apparently stupid questions. “Dad, I’m not hurting the dragon. I’m just shooting it with my bow and arrow to get dragon parts,” she said. Of course, I knew this, but my family is notorious for teasing each other, and I knew that if I teased her, she’d only dish it right back at me.
I watched quietly as the winds whipped up and the haunting tune announcing the arrival of Dinraal played. My daughter launched herself into the air with Revali’s Gale and took aim at the dragon’s horn. She missed initially and began to fall towards the ground before opening up her paraglider and riding the wind again. For a few moments, she bounced up and down like a yo-yo on the updraft that the serpentine creature created as she took shot after shot. Just when it seemed like her quarry was going to get away, the familiar spark of a hit appeared on the horn, and my daughter drifted off in search of her hard-won prize.
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I would frequently walk past my daughter “hunting dragons” when I was on my way to take care of household chores or to cook dinner. Sometimes her prey was Naydra and other times Farosh, but just as often I would find her in that familiar spot on the Tabantha Great Bridge hunting Dinraal. I guess she’d found her spot, and she stuck to it.
