r/truezelda • u/Tainted_Scholar • 7d ago
Open Discussion [ALL] There are no port towns in Hyrule.
I recently watched Any Austin's video "Finding the Edge of the World in Zelda" and it made me realize how rare oceans are in this series. Rather ironic considering that it has two games set entirely on the high seas. But in a lot of Zelda games, Hyrule is completely landlocked. And even when there is a coast, there are no port towns.
There have been settlements on the ocean, but most of them are small fishing villages like Papuchia Village, Lurelin Village, and Seesyde Village. You don't see port towns that are trade hubs with large galleons and other sailing ships.
I think it's because the series mostly doesn't care much about what's going on outside of the immediate area the game is set in. Very rarely do you hear people mention other nations or realms beyond Hyrule, it's only if you directly visit other nations in a game that the wider world is given much consideration at all. So, we don't see port towns in Hyrule, because they're inclusion would mean acknowledging that there are places beyond Hyrule for ships to go, and that's just not something that the series thinks about very much.
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u/FirefighterIcy9879 7d ago
The town of mido in Zelda 2 is a port town.
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u/Tainted_Scholar 7d ago
I honestly completely forgot about it.
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u/Drafonni 7d ago
Windfall Island from WW and Mido Town from AoL should count as port towns I think.
Hyrule Castle in BotW/TotK has docks as well.
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u/AvatarWaang 4d ago
OP did acknowledge two games set entirely on the ocean. I'm assuming they're WW and Phantom Hourglass.
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u/Drafonni 3d ago
That would be the 2 games for sure.
He mentioned other towns from WW in the post but not Windfall Island
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u/eagleblue44 7d ago
I thought about this in my recent playthrough of ocarina of time but how do the residents of Hyrule leave in a lot of these maps?
There are usually cliffs keeping you contained everywhere you go to contain the player but how do they leave?
In wind waker and phantom hourglass, there's open ocean so they can probably keep going and leave that way but a lot of the others are completely surrounded by cliffs and mountains with no way to climb them.
It's been a while since I played all the Zelda games so I could be misremembering some spot that's wide open but if memory serves, there's not a lot of ways to leave Hyrule.
As you mentioned, there are a lot of games with open water but no port town to dock a big boat at so they seem generally pretty cut off from the world.
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u/Tainted_Scholar 7d ago
Hyrule is indeed geographically isolated (defensible?) in just about every game, but if the citizens really wanted to, they could easily build new paths leading out of the kingdom if they wanted to by clearing out rocks or building ramps and bridges. But for the most part, Hyrule seems to be entirely self-sufficient and uninterested in the rest of the world, outside exceptions like the Oracle games.
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u/Drafonni 7d ago
That's more of an issue with game design than lore.
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u/xyZora 7d ago
But it impacts the lore. Unintentionally, or not. I find it fun to think how decisions taken from a design perspective have consequences on
how the world is presented.2
u/Drafonni 7d ago
It's something to consider for sure, but it's also like how there isn't only 100 or so people in Hyrule even though that's how many NPCs there are.
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u/xyZora 7d ago
You do have a point and I usually write this stuff off because we know game design limits it. Even a game like BOTW or TOTK have a population amount that's not sustainable.
However, some games do take into consideration stuff like this (Dark Souls comes to mind, the lore mentiones several countries that never appear in game and you get items from other places). I do wonder if Nintendo has thought about the larger world outside Hyrule. I would love for the series to make that a more central part of future stories.
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u/HiMyNameIsMark182 7d ago
we have visited lands outside of hyrule, such as Termina, which can be argued to not be a real world, but does feel and is different from hyrule.
The World of the ocean king can also be considered another world we visit, that may not be real, along with Koholint Island, which is confirmed to be a dream, but did exist at one point, if only for a moment.
The Four Main Landmasses that we know that exist outside of Hyrule are Labrynna, Holodrum, New Hyrule, and Hytopia. TOTK is also the first Zelda game to mention another Zoras Domain existing outside of the one we see, so we know there are other Zora out there. lastly,
Zelda 2 does show us that Hyrule has an extention of land to the East which acts as part of hyrule, but that has never been mentioned since that game, so its unknown if its canon.
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u/xyZora 7d ago
This is true, but they remain vague enough they nevet exist as political and social units that interact with Hyrule. The closest thing we have to this is the Gerudo creating an alliance with Hyrule in OOT/TOTK. But after that, the Gerudo dissapeared or where properly integrated into Hyrule.
And I wish there was more of this interwoven into the plot. It would make the world of Zelda feel larger.
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u/HiMyNameIsMark182 7d ago
Technically speaking, Ordon Village in Twilight Princess exists right outside of Hyrule Proper, having a massive chasm splitng it and the Faron woods. id assume that by the time of BOTW, they have become one land. its very possible that some lands added to the world of Hyrule later on use to be their own thing until they were intergrated into hyrule, like the gerudo.
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u/xyZora 7d ago
Yeah that's true! But Ordon is so isolated from, well everyone that I always just felt it was Hyrule adjacent anyway. At least it's the only proper government they respond to.
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u/HiMyNameIsMark182 7d ago
again, it definitely feels like there are more places to go if link could just jump over or go around the fences lol, just that we as players are never allowed to do so. but you are right to say, the only path out from ordon does lead directly into Hyrule, so that is a bit funny.
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u/xyZora 7d ago
Even in WW their ship technology is really rudimentary. The pirates have the largest ship in that game iirc (ignoring the ghost ship). It's like Hyruleans are unwilling to develop sea travel beyond the bare minimum to survive and then just... stop.
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u/eagleblue44 7d ago
There aren't even that many boats out on the water either so the island residents don't get out to go visit any island and the only form of communication is the mail between the islands. Yet there must be some way for people to travel to other islands as the school teacher has an island resort she goes to every now and then.
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u/Rosario_Di_Spada 7d ago
I mean, Windfall Island is a trade hub, with people coming there from regions outside the game's map, so it counts for something. Also, the region does seem to be only sparsely populated.
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u/lilacsigil 6d ago
I mean, it's not like the Windwaker people have a lot of wood to build large boats out of! They should go Polynesian raft style.
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u/bubblesaurus 7d ago
there is also the ocean in the Majora’s Mask, but we don’t see much there besides the research center
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u/eagleblue44 7d ago
There's that and the woods that Link comes through at the beginning of Majora's mask which begs the question of how Link got there. Did he find another way through the lost woods or did he find another way through the desert?
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u/HiMyNameIsMark182 7d ago
i think its heavily hinted at that the forest at the start of the game is the lost woods. while it may not be accessable to us, its likely there are ways out of hyrule that we, as the player, just never experience, because that would lead us to escape the boundaries of the world. i could see ways out of hyrule via the forest, maybe by the mountains of death mountain, and from maybe hyrule castle town.
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u/i_8_the_Internet 7d ago
Wind Waker: am I a joke to you?
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u/like-a-FOCKS 7d ago
if you want to compare it to real world, a river is probably worth more. fresh water, fish, boat travel, water mills, it's all there.
Depending on how large you believe Hyrule to be in a realistic setting, Lake Hylia might be as large as any major real world sea, it always takes up a significant percentage of the Kingdom's area.
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u/AvatarWaang 4d ago
BotW/TotK has some port towns to the southeast.
As you pointed out though, Hyrule isnt really concerned with what goes on outside it's borders. And given the fact that extreme isolationism isn't unheard of in Earth's history (never mind Japan's history), it doesn't really strike me as odd that this fictional world also practices isolationism. Also, I would keep my country away from a nation that is occasionally plagued by a warlock trying to take it over.
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u/Ragfell 7d ago
I mean, there are plenty of nations IRL that are landlocked. Switzerland is a good example -- it's guarded by mountains on all sides.
We know that, at one point, the Gerudo desert was actually an ocean (see Skyward Sword).
I do love the few looks outside of Hyrule -- Ordona is probably my favorite. That's part of what makes Termina as interesting as it is; there's a bay.
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u/Skyward_Slash 7d ago edited 7d ago
Are oceans really that rare? Zelda 1, Zelda 2, Link's Awakening, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, Oracle of Ages, Oracle of Seasons, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom all feature ocean and/or seas.
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u/henryuuk 6d ago edited 6d ago
But in a lot of Zelda games, Hyrule is completely landlocked.
correction : "the part of hyrule we visit/get to see" (in those games) is "landlocked"
Just cause the explorable area of a game stops somewhere doesn't mean that is where Hyrule stops
Look no further than just the first two games, where the map of the first game was later only a small part of "greater Hyrule" in AoL
This is even more so when we consider the borders/region of Hyrule is also not just in stasis over the millenias that the series spans
Also, not an example for "OG Hyrule" but, "new hyrule"(/"unnamed new kingdom") from ST has several towns next to the coast/see at least (and Linebeck III's trading post)
With one being a specific fishing village that uses the railways to send their fish over to the rest of the kingdom
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u/Cloudhiddentao 6d ago
You also see this with Alttp, ALBW, and EoW. EoW shows there’s an ocean just east of where the map in the other two games stops.
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u/xyZora 7d ago
This is definitely for gameplay reasons, but many civilizations ignored the sea, so it would be curious for there to be lore reasons as to why Hyrule chooses to be landlocked.
Add to that the Hyrule seems to almost do no trade and it's mostly self-sufficient. Unless you count the Zora, Goron and Gerudo as vassal Kingdoms that trade with Hyrule proper and not true "hyruleans".