Why the Blood Moon in Tears of the Kingdom happens: There might be a technical reason 

A way to forcibly trigger the Blood Moon in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been discovered recently, gathering attention from players. This discovery could suggest that the Blood Moon may also serve as a backdoor trick for when the game is about to freeze or crash, revealing a thoughtful design philosophy that values the user’s immersive experience. 

A Blood Moon at your will 

The Blood Moon is one of the elements in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that was carried over from the previous title, Breath of the Wild. In both games, the Blood Moon rises once a week in game time, and a cut scene is played when the clock hits midnight. As the ominous scene plays, monsters and enemies on the field that had been defeated are resurrected. The Blood Moon also has a beneficial point to it as items on the field also get respawned. 

What’s new in Tears of the Kingdom is that a method of triggering the Blood Moon at will has been discovered. This means that it has become possible to quickly restore items on the field at any time without waiting for a week in-between. As will be explained in more detail later, this method is believed to intentionally make the game become unstable and cause a memory shortage.  

In order to pull this off, the player must equip a bow that can fire in rapid succession and find a rock that can be destroyed. Then, one has to continuously fire at the rock in slow-motion using arrows fused with Opal. The processing of the rapid water splash effects appearing one after the other suddenly causes the game to become “heavy”, and the Blood Moons follows right after, regardless of whether a week has passed or not. 

Why the sudden Blood Moon? 

The Blood Moon cutscenes occurring out of cycle are believed to be related to the game experiencing a memory overload, meaning the abnormally occurring Blood Moon could possibly be an internal process of the Nintendo Switch to free up memory or avoid a crash without the user being aware. 

Although only guesswork based on the behavior of the game, Tears of the Kingdom may be using the Blood Moon event as a reset feature after memory usage spikes, essentially as an alternative to the game shutting down or freezing up. A Japanese game programmer has also provided insight in favor of this theory. The previously mentioned method for triggering the Blood Moon possibly creates conditions for a memory usage spike by generating many effects at once that require heavy processing, though it is also possible that it causes a processing error, unrelated to memory capacity, thus leading to the Blood Moon cutscene. 

It has been inferred among users that the Blood Moon is used in a similar way in Breath of the Wild as well. There were cases of the Blood Moon event happening irregularly in the previous title when players stayed for longer periods of time in locations that required heavy processing or when they continuously knocked down trees with bomb arrows and similar. It would seem that in both games, the Blood Moon has a role of “insurance” in the event of abnormalities occurring. Furthermore, in Tears of the Kingdom it has even become possible to trigger this event at will through rather simple means, though caution is needed as it does essentially involve faulting the game on purpose. 

A mechanism that goes hand in hand with the high level of freedom 

Both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom use a physics-based system, and because of the freedom this brings, it is relatively easy for players to deviate from normal play and cause behavior that is not foreseen by the developers. Such behavior can result in the game overloading and not being able to run properly. This is where the Blood Moon gimmick comes in handy, as a measure to ensure that the game will smoothly reset without crashing no matter what happens. It is a mechanism that reveals the design philosophy of the game. 

Incidentally, the previous title also had various glitches that required steps that would not normally be performed in normal play. There were also bugs in the physics calculations that had Link zooming at tremendous speeds. But despite the wide variety of glitches, cases of the game freezing up were comparatively rare. Here too we can see at work the philosophy of designing a system that will not give out even in the case of unexpected player behavior. This may be why when physics calculation errors occurred, it didn’t lead to the game freezing and only manifested as strange behavior by Link. 

In addition to intercepting possible glitches, the developers also anticipated all the various ways to have fun that the players will come up with, intentionally leaving elements that will maximize potential for fun playstyles.  

For example, the possibility to hop onto a trolley or iron box and levitate by using Magnesis is considered to have been intentionally left over by the developers. (Famitsu.com). Moreover, players utilized this potential to invent the “Flying Machine,” surpassing expectations of the developers (Nikkei Crosstrend). The many inventions made by users in Breath of the Wild served as a confidence boost for the director Fujibayashi Hidemaro, encouraging him to pursue the concept of freedom in Tears of the Kingdom.  

This is all part of what contributed to Tears of Kingdom having a system that maximizes freedom and allows a variety of ways to enjoy the game. The irregular Blood Moon event that takes place when a problem unforeseen by developers occurs is likely a means to further support the player’s freedom, not disrupting immersion even when the system requires a reset. The subtle ways in which the internal mechanics are aligned with the game’s worldview is likely one of the things players find most noteworthy. 

Written by. Amber V based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-06-20 18:48 JST)