My Childhood Fear Became My Best Weapon In Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom

screenrant.com:

's new Echo mechanic, with which Princess Zelda can summon Echoes of typically hostile creatures to fight for her, allowed me to turn what was once a childhood fear into my most helpful tool. As a kid, I was obsessed with, and to be fair, I still am to some degree: in addition to being one of the greatest games ever made, it remains my favorite. isn't a particularly scary game, though, even if it does have some light horror elements.

The Shadow Temple is the most overt, essentially a black site for's usually honorable Sheikah tribe, where enemies of the royal family were once tortured. Castle Town post-Ganondorf-coup is also quite unsettling, filled with shrieking ReDead. Even some of the game's subtext peels away 's jovial fantasy veneer – the Hyrulean Civil War that precedes the game indicates unaddressed societal unrest; the Gorons and the Zora effectively locked away in Death Mountain and Zora's Domain, respectively, their entrances barred to those without express permission from the royal family, hints at a pervasive xenophobia; and even the iconic, lilting «Saria's Song» can't detract from the subtle reality that the seemingly innocent Lost Woods turn non-Kokiri children into Skull Kids and adults into Stalfos.

But what terrified me as a child was something far more innocuous, one of those irrational fears that worms its way into your brain when you're a kid, so you avoid whatever it is at all costs. For some reason, I was deathly afraid of the Peahats in Hyrule Field.

I first played when I was three years old. «Play» is a very generous way to put it. For years, I would turn on the N64 and run around in accomplishing nothing, not having the sufficient critical thinking skills to understand how to progress through what was, at the time, an extremely sophisticated video game. Instead, I would enlist my older brother or wait for my uncles to visit and have them to help me progress, i.e. play the game properly for me.

I could fish at the pond near Lake Hylia,