Early interactions between Guardians and Link in Breath of the Wild are long and arduous fights with Link being in a desperate defensive state. After he gets ancient arrows, they become an afterthought with barely a few sentences describing Link taking them down.
Silver Bokoblins, despite supposedly being strong and serving as powerful enemies in the game, go down with surprising ease the first time Link comes across them, and that's before he gets the Master Sword.
Master Kohga goes down without much of a struggle just like in the game. His death is comical just like in the game, and the narrative and Link both mock Master Kohga's joke of attack patterns. That being said, his death may be anticlimactic, but the death is a kick-starter for a much darker segment of the story.
Hollow Revali is one of the many constructs made by Astor. However, its fight with Teba is the shortest of the fight, and Teba is never in any danger. Again, a clearly intentional case to show just how good a fighter that Teba is, as the other Hollows get more extended fight sequences and make their respective heroes work to win. It's also a nice Mythology Gag to Teba being the biggest Game-Breaker in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.
Arc Fatigue: In Breath of the Wild, it takes a total of fifteen out of fifty chapters for Link to even begin to go after the Divine Beasts. While there is a lot of character drama, and this segment has all the various memories from the original game, it still takes an absurdly long time when the memory arcs could have been incorporated into the Divine Beast arcs.
Ass Pull: The existence of the Frog Spirit in Breath of the Wild. Fi gives a whole Infodump to Link in a single chapter, revealing existence and history of the three spirit animals (the Boar for Ganondorf, the Owl for Zelda, the Wolf for Link), but at no point mentions Hylia creating a fourth one. It can be construed as Exact Words on her part, since she's only giving out backstory information, but since she doesn't mention a fourth spirit, it comes a bit out of nowhere when it's suddenly revealed that Impa is meant to wield a grand spirit animal along with Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf.
Die for Our Ship: Avoided with Mipha, Zelda, and Paya. He has a loving relationship with Zelda, is Amicable Exes with Mipha, and has a healthy friendship that has I Just Want My Beloved to Be Happy from Paya, treating all three with healthy respect as characters, and avoiding any gratuitous jerkass moments from any of them for the sake of shipping.
Ending Fatigue: Chapter 50 of Breath of the Wild serves as a dénouement, but it spends a long time giving each central character a conclusion to their arc, and sets up several Sequel Hooks. It takes a grand total of twelve pages on the PDF document, and takes a long time to finally reach the iconic ending scene from the Golden Ending of the game, and can be a lot to take in.
Gotta Ship 'Em All: The fic avoids Die for Our Ship with Mipha and Zelda by pairing Link with both of them at different times in his life.
Harsher in Hindsight: All those awesome moments when Link and other characters slaughter monsters in droves without breaking a sweat? Not so awesome on a second reading where you have the knowledge that these monsters are not actually vicious monsters, but slaves to the curse as well, meaning they're victimized both by the curse and the warriors that hunt them down. They finally get a break when they and their master are freed from Demise's curse.
Heartwarming in Hindsight: Zelda's nickname from Urbosa and her late mother was "little bird". It fits quite well when it's revealed that she wields a powerful spirit in the form of an owl, and she may have actually known that Zelda would wield such a spirit.
Iron Woobie: Hyrule is a borderline Crapsack World, filled with people who carry a lot of pain before and after the Calamity, but that doesn't stop them from going on forward.
Link. While he conquers his struggles of trying to carry the weight of being the latest and best in a long line of knights, he gets an added stress from other places. He had a loving relationship with Mipha that had to end because of the lifespan differences, and additionally had a child with her that for the same reason, would still be a little girl when Link aged to death. He found friendships with the other Champions and a lover in Zelda, only for it to all be ripped away in the Calamity, resulting in his death. He has no memories when he awakens a century later and has to relive everything that he suffered. The Zora elders resent him for what happened. Then he carries the pain of the Yiga Clan's murderous activity and his own struggle with his inner demons. But he soldiers on and keeps on fighting through thick and through thin.
Zelda. Like in canon, she struggles to awaken her ancestral powers. She lost her mother at a tender age. Her father's teachings emphasize the need to do this, otherwise she'd be labelled a complete failure, which results in an even more strained relationship than shown in canon. She fails to awaken her power until after everyone she loves, including Link, is dead. But all of that doesn't stop her from locking herself in a deadlock with Calamity Ganon for 100 consecutive years.
Mipha. She had a loving relationship with Link that she vainly hoped would rekindle. She had a child out of wedlock which is a shameful thing for anyone in any royal family, including hers, even if no one verbally said it. Just as she chose to let him go and love him, her life is prematurely ended, leaving her daughter without a mother, her father without his daughter, and her brother without his big sister. She spent a century locked away in Divine Beast Vah Ruta and nearly losing hope. But even after all that, she still dutifully carried out her purpose, and never lets on how much she's suffered, at least to anyone except Link.
Paya. She starts as a straight Woobie early on. She's a sweet girl who lost a close friend who went missing when they were children, and found a decapitated Yiga murder victim when she was still a child. In her older years, she finds herself unable to really interact with people, and it gets at its worst when her family heirloom is stolen. But she doesn't become a Broken Bird, and instead resolves to be stronger, by going through a Training from Hell that involves her feeling death more than once, and watching her loved ones die while she's helpless to watch, but even this doesn't stop her from choosing to become a hero in her own right, while still retaining some of her more Adorkable moments and the shyness that makes her a cutie.
Riju. She's a little girl who lost her mother to the Yiga, and thus ascended to the Chief's throne before she could even actually sit in it. She feels like a complete failure as a ruler, unable to keep her family heirloom safe, and this is compounded by the fact that she's still mourning her mother. Finally, Divine Beast Vah Naboris awakens and threatens her town while she can't do anything to stop it. Despite this, she never lets on any of the pain she's in, and keeps on going with her duties as Chief, and eventually gets a break when Urbosa gives her a pep talk.
Moral Event Horizon: The Yiga find numerous ways to cross the horizon as the first story progresses. First, they're shown murdering an innocent girl for no real reason other than For the Evulz. Then they soar over the horizon when the torture chamber is shown in full nightmarish detail. Afterwards, they top this by planning an assault on all of Hyrule's settlements with the goal of eliminating all threats to Calamity Ganon's resurrection. They also had murdered Dorian's wife and intended to kill him too even after he fulfilled their requests of him.
Narm Charm: The author freely admitted in the post-chapter notes that the back-to-back Title Drops in the literal end of the first book in Chapter 50 "The Silent Princess" were corny. However, given the nature of the Silent Princess flowers, it still works and makes perfect sense and works in the context of life coming back to a new Hyrule.
There's extensive areas that serve as nothing but Description Porn of landscapes and/or characters that serve little purpose than to extend the length of certain chapters. The author specifically tried to avoid this in another case with the Yiga War Arc, hence why the chapters are incredibly long. They claim that if they tried to split chapters, they'd have been too short and this would have been the result since they would have found a way to lengthen the chapters out to a "proper" length.
Adaptation Expansion in the first book gives Impa her own separate arc, and there's also a large War Arc with the Yiga Clan, and these two arcs divide the final Divine Beast arc from the Champions' Ballad arc. This takes up ten chapters and multiple days In-Universe, and if you're reading this fic just to see the canon game get adapted, then these ten long chapters will come across as nothing but filler to pad out the length of the fic.
Paranoia Fuel: The Yiga Clan is even more paranoia-inducing than in the game. The way that Link and the first Yiga Clan member, who's in disguise, interact, is a disturbing clip. At first, it seems kind enough, and then gradually veers more and more into ominous territory until it's finally clear that the person is a murderous psychopathic ninja. It rattles Link In-Universe, and it's likely to leave readers feeling a bit uneasy about speaking with strangers again.
Realism-Induced Horror: The Yiga Clan's various nightmarish scenes are uncannily similar to real life serial killers classic tactics. One scene has the Yiga Clan Footsoldier just making casual charming conversation that devolves into something ominous. Another scene has a woman all alone suddenly falling victim to a killer that was in hiding waiting for the man she was with to leave. Another has a Yiga invoking a Wounded Gazelle Gambit to lure in someone to save them, which is an infamous tactic used by real life serial killer Ted Bundy.
Link meets a woman who's travelling alone and offers him some Mighty Bananas. He accepts the offer and buys them, and then walks away, and the reader is tense waiting for her to out herself as a Yiga Clan member...only to have her throat suddenly slashed by a Yiga member that was watching them.
Link infiltrates the Yiga Clan hideout and discovers a torture chamber filled with dead bodies of people that were tortured and murdered by the Yiga. The sheer violence is so intense that Link becomes murderous himself and outright massacres every Yiga in the hideout.
After the massacre of the Yiga Clan in their hideout, Astor and Sooga and Original Character Kolana are shown leading the Yiga in Master Kohga's place, and they're shown planning an all-out assault on Hyrule to wipe out the remaining settlements.
Monk Maz Koshia doesn't just award Link the Master Cycle Zero for his efforts in the Champions' Ballad arc, he grants Link an entire Divine Beast. There's a fifth Divine Beast, the horse named Eponia.
Squick: The Yiga's torture chamber is filled with nightmarish and disgustingly violent imagery, from freshly burnt corpses to a depiction of a pregnant Sheikah's baby being ripped from her body.
Paya starts as one, but then turns into an Iron Woobie.
Princess Lochlia suffered a lot in her life. She lost her parents when she was still the equivalent of a toddler, had a close friendship with a Hylian that tragically ended the only way a Mayfly–December Friendship can end, and had to suffer for years from discrimination from her own people who disliked her Hylian ancestry. It was so bad that she was willing to risk her life by going after the Lynel on Ploymus Mountain to finally get her people's approval.
Muava retains the canon pain she was in, where she was once a gorgeous Gerudo woman who sought the love of her life, searching for Lover's Pond for years without success until she had grown so old that no men found her attractive anymore, and now spends her time taking care of a Goddess Statue that is neglected by her people, just like Muava herself. Link is saddened, but Muava assures him that she's content with her life. Link does offer her a lifeline with Purah's anti-aging rune, and the location of Lover's Pond. She takes the offer.
