The Tears of the Kingdom Korok seeds are still poop, you guys.
You know they are still poop, right?
In 2017, Nintendo rewarded its most die-hard Zelda fans with digital poop. While playing Breath of the Wild, finding Koroks—cute little tree-branch guys with leaves for faces—would net you a Korok seed. As a reward for finding the Koroks, the first 441 of these seeds could be exchanged for extra inventory slots. Cool.
The remaining 459 seeds could eventually be exchanged for a cartoonishly coiled pile of shit. Less cool.
The stinky curlicue offers no benefit other than as a permanent ticket of sorts that grants Link witness—at Link’s request—to the shit giver’s silly little dance. Or as is more likely the case, witness to a silly little shuffle to the nearest toilet.
We should have known. The Korok seeds challenge the very classification of “seed.” They can't be planted. The descriptive text notes their "distinct smell” (I'm not a botanist. Maybe certain seeds stink. Durian fruit smells like dead bodies. Maybe its seed does too). But there's no excuse for us to have ignored the very nature of the Koroks themselves: they are tricksters. It stands to reason then that Hestu—the aforementioned shit giver and shit dancer—after having built up and honored a mutually beneficial exchange of goods with Link would eventually leverage that trust to deliver a more powerful punchline. No more “maybe those are petrified teardrops.” At 999 returned Korok seeds, all that remains is: “those were definitely rain-drop shaped, sphincter-pinched nuggets of poo.”
Collecting brought valuable rewards for a while. In a game with very limited weapons, bows, and shield slots, increased capacity—the reward—meant a lot. So, reasonably, we expected further collecting to mean further rewards, right? If 441 seeds/poops increased our inventory, would 999 seed/poops do something even greater? Expand our inventory to the infinite, for example? For some, it was worth a try. For me, I just waited 13 days post-game-release until some nonsleeping, noneating, and (ironically) non-bathroom-using gamer spent the dozens of hours to find out.
All of this is known. Going into Breath of the Wild's sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, we know the Koroks are assholes. We know Hestu is a bigger asshole. Yet, we still eagerly collect Korok shit from prankster Koroks like we’re some kind of voracious toilet at Loki’s house.
In Breath of the Wild, the punchline’s audacity was enough to forgive it. But what about Tears of the Kingdom? Is a joke funny the second time? (Oh, and yes, Nintendo does give the same non-reward reward for the Tears of the Kingdom hunt. Only this time, you must collect 1,000 Korok seeds. And to be fair, Hestu’s gift now has FOUR coils, not a measly three).
The first time, our collector's brain drove us to gather as many seeds as possible, kept motivated by continuous high-value rewards. This is game design 101.
But what drives us this second time? Personally, I love the audacity of a repeated joke. But from a wider (ie, smarter) perspective, I believe Nintendo gets away with the punchline’s return because the magic of Tears of the Kingdom is that the journey is the reward.
The world of Tears of the Kingdom is simply so fun to explore, and gathering the Korok seeds represent such a surprising variety of delightful game mechanics that even with no reward (which is essentially the case here), collecting remains fun. The Korok seed hunt is like dragging a pooper scooper through cat litter made of fidget cubes and memory foam. I know the end won’t smell great, but the journey is amazing.
We also must consider that perhaps the Koroks are innocent. Maybe their shit gifts are genuine, like a house cat offering a dead bird or an aunt at Christmas gone off-list on a hunch that maybe you'd like The Simpsons Wrestling instead of your requested Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.
But I can't accept that possibility. The Korok are sentient creatures with a mastery of the Hylian language and, in Tears of the Kingdom, they have friends. They understand complex language, have empathy, and they cherish social connections. I refuse to believe these beings have a blind spot for appropriate displays of gratitude. Imagine your aunt trying to pass off her gift-bagged dump as sincere. You wouldn’t buy it.
Or maybe you can’t imagine the Korok being innocent. Nintendo’s got you covered there, too. Presented as just another way to stretch the game’s verbs, Tears of the Kingdom allows Link to physically move the Koroks using his new Ultrahand ability (an ability that allows Link to move things). The guise here is that Link must help reunite Koroks with their friends, but that’s only one option. Other options include:
Tossing the Koroks off of cliffs
Strapping rockets to the backs of the Koroks and sending them into space
It’s good to know that Nintendo has given players the freedom to respond to the double-dipped poop joke however they want. They can laugh along. They can dismiss the stringed carrot entirely, driven solely by the collector mentality. Or they can commit war crimes.
Me? I’ll help those Korok assholes only as long as I’m getting good rewards. As soon as my inventory space caps out, though, the remaining Koroks are as good as dead to me.
