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It was easy to tell just from sound that the giant dragon wending its way across the sky meant you no harm, but that robot scuttling across Hyrule Field was death on six legs. Village themes referenced previous games, and music for battles was satisfyingly intense. The stirring fanfares and heroic rhythms were gone, it seemed, replaced by fragments that blurred the line between sound effects and music.īut upon exploring the vast open world, players found more substantial soundscapes to discover.

Even the music that played while riding a horse was understated and impressionistic, reminiscent of Debussy. When players awoke the amnesiac Link from his hundred-year sleep and emerged onto Hyrule’s Great Plateau in the game’s first minutes, they were greeted with a sparse backdrop of mostly flute and piano, lovely and lonely, befitting the ruin-strewn world. Then “Breath,” a 2017 launch title for the Switch, took a sudden swerve.

Many of these motifs, such as “ Zelda’s Lullaby,” appeared in multiple games. Now that I’ve played a few hours of “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom,” the sequel to “Breath,” which released May 12, I’m confident that the music team not only knew how important sound was to the last game, but resolved to do it better still in this one.įor the next few decades, the series built on that tradition of wall-to-wall music with memorable themes. More than anything, sound was what made those experiences so unforgettable, from the echoing four-note piano theme that announced visiting a place for the first time to the accordion waltz played by Kass, the avian bard who pointed the way to several puzzles. The thrill of finding unfamiliar plants and combining them in my cooking pot, or the quiet contentment of approaching a stable where I could pass the night in peace.

The sheer joy of seeing the names of new locations I’d discovered appear on my screen or spotting the telltale orange glow of a shrine on the horizon. Having played Nintendo’s “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” for hundreds of hours over the past five years, I can say it was ultimately the little things that made it one of my favorite video games of all time.

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