The 15 Most Awesome References in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

From the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Image from Nintendo Switch version taken by C. Wassenaar and via Nintendo.

10. Laying Out the Map 

There’s no one true Hyrule, and the layout of the realm has been known to change from game to game. However, Breath of the Wild keeps some things fairly similar to previous iterations, especially Twilight Princess. Here, we’ll refer to the GameCube version of the map, not the reversed Wii version.

Looks rather familiar, doesn’t it? Really, there are a couple differences; notably, Breath moves the Lost Woods directly to the north of Hyrule Castle. However, the cold mountains to the northeast? Does anyone think that Hebra might just be a giant nod to Snowpeak, down to the fact that you can do some sledding/shield surfing for prizes on its cold peaks? Faron, however, remains to the south; the Gerudo desert is to the southwest. Kakariko lies to the east, and Death Mountain is to the north (ish) of Kakariko, while the Zora’s Domain is also nearby.

This isn’t the first time that Hyrule Castle has been right in the center of the map, though. If you look at the map of the Light World in A Link to the Past, you’ll see that that’s where they got the desert idea from, along with the idea of putting a lake not far from the desert. Ultimately, Twilight also borrows from Ocarina of Time, as well, which mostly differs in what’s centrally located (Lon Lon Ranch as opposed to Hyrule Castle).

Breath just happens to do all of this on a much, much larger scale, as evidenced by the fact that you can just barely see all of the province names above, let alone the entire map.