Nintendo’s acclaimed roleplaying game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, introduces you to its backstory through song. Stumbling upon a blue birdman with an accordion, you’re given the condensed version of Hyrule’s history by a traveling minstrel named Kass. The bard’s tale is deceptively simple: a cataclysm caused by the game’s antagonist, Calamity Ganon, has dramatically upset the established order of things.

Describing the Kingdom of Hyrule prior to the Great Calamity, the rhyming Rito presents you with a seemingly ideal society where suffering, sorrow, and strife were banished from the realm. But the physical remains of this glorified past argue against his rosy picture. Compare Breath of the Wild’s pre-calamity ruins to any of its post-calamity settlements and you’ll pick up on something strange: the previous inhabitants of Hyrule interacted very differently with their landscape.

A transfer of ideas and values into the world around us

We rarely distinguish between the two terms in everyday speech, but ‘space’ and ‘place’ are not quite synonymous. What’s the difference? Places are quite simply spaces into which people have introduced meaning through various processes of modification, transformation, and change. Spaces in other words can exist without people. Places can’t. Referred to as placemaking, this shaping of space involves a transfer of ideas and values into the world around us. It occurs at several different scales. People for example can personalize individual apartments, but they can also modify entire landscapes. Reflecting the dominant attitudes of their collective inhabitants, landscapes are sites of cultural hegemony onto which the worldview of a society is written using the broadest possible terms. You can actually discover quite a bit about a cultural group through careful observation of its landscape interactions. This holds true in video games, too.

What sort of landscape interactions can we observe in Hyrule? Characterized by its imposing stone buildings, the pre-Calamity civilization is depicted as being primarily concerned with domination. Meanwhile the architectural vernacular of the post-Calamity societies by contrast implies a focus on harmony with nature.

These concepts are even echoed in the building’s materiality

In Breath of the Wild‘s post-apocalyptic world Akkala Citadel is where the Kingdom of Hyrule supposedly fell from glory. Chosen for its apparent impenetrability, the story goes that King Rhoam put up his final stand at the site against the forces of Calamity Ganon. Akkala Citadel wasn’t impenetrable, but it’s hard to imagine how this impressive piece of defensive architecture could ever have been stormed. Towering over the surrounding countryside, it dominates everything in its immediate vicinity. This belies the fixation of pre-Calamity kings like Rhoam on power, strength, and control. The structure is clearly supposed to represent their ideal of an ordered society—and landscape. These concepts are even echoed in the building’s materiality. The fort certainly looms large on the horizon, but it stands out from the local terrain, too: the stone façade of this gothic stronghold clashes dramatically with Akkala’s green grass and colorful wildflowers. The contrast between its uniform grey and the pastel countryside makes the building’s highly formal architecture seem even more artificial. The aim was clearly to make it stand out—not fit in.

The main features of Akkala Citadel can also be seen in the pre-Calamity seat of government: Hyrule Castle. The jewel of King Rhoam’s crown, Hyrule Castle was lavished with embellishments like flying buttresses and soaring parapets, but it was nonetheless built in the same style using identical materials. Just like Akkala Citadel, the structure sticks out like a bad bruise from the surrounding trees, lakes, and grassy plains. Calamity Ganon’s pitch-black Malice can’t even hide the degree to which its stone architecture differs from the lush hinterland of Central Hyrule. Cutting an entirely unmistakable profile, the air of artificiality which this creates even finds a reflection in the building’s imposing presence on the local skyline. There’s no escaping it. You can spot the structure from anywhere in the region. The reason is quite simple: Hyrule Castle dominates the landscape. Dwarfing the mostly rolling features of Central Hyrule, the building rivals even the distant mountains in Hebra, Edlin, Necluda, and Gerudo for control over this corner of the countryside.

They conform to the landscape instead of imposing themselves upon it

For Breath of the Wild’s designers, Gerudo Town represnts the opposite of Hyrule Castle in almost every way. Carved into the local bedrock, the settlement was designed to blend into its landscape. The locals don’t seem overly intent on dominating much of anything since few buildings in this community have more than even a single floor. Hyrule Castle by contrast must have dozens. Most of the inns, shops, and houses in Gerudo Town are technically subterranean, so the tallest feature in the area is unsurprisingly not actually man-made. It’s a fountain. Abounding with life-giving water, this natural spring is the beating heart of the settlement. The surrounding desert makes water a scarce and vitally important resource, but even this couldn’t push the people of Gerudo Town to control or master their spring in any real sense. The settlement’s architecture has been adapted to the local terrain — not the other way around. The flowing water just feeds passively into a series of open-air basins on the various rooftops. Hinting at a cultural focus on harmony, this kind of adaptation to the landscape is one of the settlement’s key characteristics.

They’re on opposite ends of Breath of the Wild’s world, but Gerudo Town and Goron City have several things in common. Firstly they were built using nothing but natural materials found readily nearby. While the former is mostly earth, the latter is almost completely rock. In addition, they were both carved into some kind of a natural outcropping. Boring into the mountainside, almost every building in Goron City for example is really just a façade, most simply shelter cave entrances. Finally Gerudo Town and Goron City both conform to the landscape instead of imposing themselves upon it—this is perhaps the most important point. Nestled into a deep valley at the foot of Death Mountain, Goron City adapts to the surrounding terrain by accommodating irregularities with simple solutions like stairs, platforms, and suspension bridges rather than trying to overcome these with more sophisticated architecture. This communicates the same focus on harmony seen at Gerudo Town. Connecting the inhabitants even more directly to their landscape, the strongest evidence for this cultural value is the Mount Rushmore-like statue greeting Goron City’s guests.

Hyrule’s remaking is actually depicted as a restoration of balance

These landscape interactions reveal that something isn’t quite right about the story we get from Kass. He presents the Kingdom of Hyrule as an ideal society, but its architecture seems to argue otherwise. Wander through Hyrule and you’ll find that its post-Calamity settlements have a completely different relationship to the landscape than its pre-Calamity ruins. While kings like Rhoam are depicted as having been preoccupied with domination, the inhabitants of Gerudo Town and Goron City appear to be more concerned with harmony. This raises a troubling question: how calamitous really was the Great Calamity?

Resulting in a state of harmony with nature, Hyrule’s remaking is actually depicted as a restoration of balance. Should we interpret Calamity Ganon then as an agent of positive change? Kass tells you that everything was better before his campaign against the Kingdom of Hyrule, but the game world shows you the exact opposite. In placing its pre-Calamity ruins in direct opposition to its post-Calamity settlements, Breath of the Wild implicitly argues that sometimes good things come from bad places. The Great Calamity in other words represents a new beginning—not a cataclysmic end.

The newest issue of Heterotopias, 004 is out now, and in it’s focus on landscape includes pieces on The Witcher 3, Kentucky Route Zero, Night in The Woods and more. Get it here.

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