By HickMay 26, 2017
I’m a progressive guy, I’ll admit it. I don’t have a lot of patience and I always want to feel like I am accomplishing something. One of the hardest things about Breath of the Wild was changing this frame of mind. It was the first game that I didn’t want to progress through quickly. I wanted to take my time to explore and find a lot of stuff. I am not a completionist (unless we are doing 100% walkthroughs for our Youtube channel), so I knew I wasn’t going to get everything in the game, but I wanted some of the “numbers” to be respectively high.
For the most part, I feel like I did a good job of this with BOTW. I completed 108 out of 120 shrines (90%) before I looked for help online. I actually completed all of the Divine Beasts without needing help from the internet (which was shocking). I did all the memories. I completed around half of the side quests (although I don’t remember the true number), and I got around 125 Korok Seeds, haha. As most of you know, there are 900 Korok Seeds in BOTW. I was actually shocked by this low number as I felt I explored almost every area in the game. While it would be somewhat annoying, I’m not sure why Nintendo didn’t allow you to input a Korok Seed on your Sheikah Sensor. I am, however, not mad at this low number at all, and I’ll tell you why.
After defeating Calamity Ganon, I wanted to go back and finish off some of the things I missed. At this time, I was mostly using the internet for guidance. I am one of those people who would rather “look for guidance and complete everything” rather than “don’t look for guidance and don’t complete everything”. I have an 8 month old daughter at home and a wife who is currently in her 2nd trimester, so my time is valuable. I can’t run around for hours looking for the 12 shrines I missed. That would get old very quickly.
So I finished up the remaining shrines. I currently only have 3 side quests remaining. I might defeat Calamity Ganon one more time to “re-experience” it, and then after that it is the Korok Seeds, but you have to go about them a different way then the previous things I mentioned. It’s really hard to look to the internet for guidance on Korok Seeds. Yeah there are maps of all 900 of them out there, but to mark off which ones you have and where the remaining ones are would be a tedious task. Because of this, I plan to simply run around without looking at the map and collecting Korok Seeds.
So after completing much of the game, I’m leaving exploring (once again) for last, and I love that! Am I going to find all 900? Most likely not, but I do know that I will run into many places that I thought I explored but I did not. I am now up to 155 Korok Seeds, which leaves many left to be found. This is why the Korok Seeds are the best part of Breath of the Wild. You can always come back to the game AFTER YOU BEAT IT and still feel like you are making progression and accomplishing something! Nintendo presented a number so large that it would take you a very long time to find all of them.
What made me think of the true value of Korok Seeds was actually Forza. Many of you probably don’t know, but I am a huge fan of racing games (I’m talking about real racing games here, not Mario Kart, but I also love Mario Kart). At the top of all the racing games for me is Forza, exclusively for the Xbox. When I purchased my Xbox One, the first game I got for it was Forza Motorsport 6. After completing the initial campaign, I came to the realization that I would have to beat the game a total of 6 times to 100% it (there are different types of car classes you race in). I’m still not even close to that, but it was the first game that introduced me to a significant period of time to fully complete the game. I still go back and do races because I have the ability to still accomplish something and progress towards that 100%. Seeing as how I “feel” like I have completed most of BOTW, yet the map only tells me I have completed 36%, gets me excited. There is still much more to do, which means I will be able to continue playing the game way into the future. It avoids that trap where many games fall into where you don’t really care to play the game much after you beat it. I don’t feel that with BOTW, and the Korok Seeds are a major contributing reason for that.
Great job Nintendo with this idea, but I gotta ask one last thing, why not just make it 1,000 Korok Seeds? Seems legit, haha.
