100% Completion: How It Feels to Completely Finish Every Legend of Zelda Game

The Legend of Zelda is a big series. In every sense that it can be said, it is big. It is one of Nintendo’s best-selling properties with well over a hundred million franchise sales, it has an incredibly deep and expansive universe, and the games themselves are all filled to the brim with content in one way or another. If you find yourself jumping into a Zelda title, chances are high that you’ll spend quite a bit of time in its engrossing world before you slay the final beast.

But not all Zelda titles are made equally; each game has its own set of rules, its own distinct style and feel, and the act of completing them all offers a wide range of unique experiences. To reach 100% completion in each of the games takes a lot of time and dedication. Through the highs and the lows, reaching a full 100% completion can often seem like an unconquerable mountain, a terrifying peak you can never reach. Reach it you can, though. Finally, after many years of playing the Zelda series, I recently finished 100%ing all 19 main entries in the franchise, and it was an incredible journey.

The Legend of Zelda is not a series that generally rewards you for completionism; at least, not directly. Across the series, there are numerous quests that require intense searching and seemingly endless grinding. Many of the games feature a myriad of useless items (for instance, any ship part or train piece you acquire but do not actively use in Phantom Hourglass or Spirit Tracks.) Throughout the series, you will find yourself spending nigh countless hours on many quests, cleverly uncovering each game’s sundry secrets and unraveling their riddles, and many times you will find yourself with a reward you cannot do anything with.

Ocarina of Time allows you to earn a pet cow, which doesn’t really do anything. More pressingly, there are the Gold Skultula tokens; 100 of them to collect, but the only meaningful rewards you get from finding them you get for the first 50. By the time you can receive the final reward, you’ll get little (if any) meaningful use out of it before you wrap up your adventure. It does feel nice to have saved that whole family, though. The Minish Cap has things called “Kinstones” which you obtain through various means and combine with different NPCs around the map to different effects. Your reward for getting them all is just a funny little statue in your inventory screen, but it is satisfying to combine them each time. On top of that, the game’s best shield can only be earned once you have already beaten the final boss, making the true “100% achieved” moment feel a tad anticlimactic compared to the rest of this truly beautiful and magical experience.

And, of course, there are the Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild: A mind-boggling 900 to collect across the vast land of Hyrule, and the only way to know which ones you already have is by zooming all the way into your map. Sure, they upgrade your inventory at first, but it takes less than half of them to max that out. After all is said and done, you finally receive your reward…a literal golden turd that does nothing but sit in your inventory.

You would not be blamed for asking “why should I bother at all with all this extra stuff?” And, well, the answer is just as simple as the question: Because it’s fun. It’s a great journey and you feel like you left the world having done as much good as the game would allow you to. The Zelda series does not often give you a special token or unique reward specifically for reaching 100% because it does not need to. The heart of The Legend of Zelda lies in your beautiful, treacherous, incredible journey through an incredible mythical world that springs to life at every corner. If you’re in it just because you want a shiny reward at the end, you start to lose sight of why you’re doing it at all. You’re here to make the world a better place because you are a hero!

Take Majora’s Mask into consideration. If there is one Zelda game that begs to be completed 100%, it’s Majora’s Mask. This beautifully dark adventure into the macabre world of Termina holds some of the best and most emotionally resonating storytelling of the franchise — and the majority of that is told through its side quests. Termina is chock-full of stories across the full spectrum of heartbreak to heartwarming that all come together to make it feel incredibly alive in the face of inevitable death. Earning yourself one of the coolest and most overpowered items in Zelda (the Fierce Deity Mask) is just the cherry on top of this 100% adventure.

Similarly, few games can match the absolute zany, unhinged charm that Link’s Awakening possesses. With a surprisingly emotional story, I found that 100% completing this game was especially meaningful because of how it allowed me to form a deeper connection to the residents of Koholint Island. It features one of the most entertaining trading quests in the series (and it has stiff competition) alongside a wealth of interesting characters. It’s one of the easier 100% completions (and the only one that requires zero deaths), but if you’re in it for the story more than anything, that’s how you bring the most out of this peculiar entry. On the other end of the spectrum is Breath of the Wild, an intimidatingly massive world with a seemingly endless array of tasks and things to find. Not everything you find will be necessary, but everything you do matters to somebody, somewhere in the world of Hyrule. You can spend thousands of hours doing nothing but wandering, or be incessantly single-minded in your determination toward completion.

None of these games give you anything special for specifically doing everything, but that does not matter. The anguish of the approaching apocalypse amplifies alongside your affection for Termina’s people along the way. The underlying sadness of Link’s Awakening becomes more apparent. The liveliness of the land and its people grows as you explore in Breath of the Wild. This is how the series rewards you for doing it all. 100%ing them allows you to feel so much closer to the world, and when you finally do complete it all, the satisfaction of knowing you left such a big mark on the in-game world, regardless of being fiction, is increased a thousandfold.

The Legend of Zelda is about going on an adventure. It is about exploring a world and doing amazing things in that world. And there are many amazing things to do in these worlds; it’s not about what we get for our time, it’s about spending that time doing something you loved. You did everything. You put all the puzzle pieces together and you got the full picture. You saved the world and made everybody happier along the way. There is a fantastic sense of pride at the end of it all each time. There is no feeling quite like 100%ing every title in the Zelda series, and it truly is an incredible journey.

Here we now sit on the precipice of a brand-new adventure in Tears of the Kingdom. I do now know what sorts of adventures I’ll be going on when I return to my favorite world in the world, but I can’t wait because I do know this: whether you do everything or not, there’s no better feeling than the journey itself.