Alright, listen up, fellow Hyrule explorers! I, a self-proclaimed master of all things Zelda, have just had my entire gaming worldview shattered into a million pieces. And it's all thanks to something that was staring me right in the face for over a year since I first dove into the Depths! You see, I thought I knew every nook and cranny of Tears of the Kingdom. I've built flying machines that would make the Zonai weep with pride, I've fought Gleeoks with nothing but a soup ladle, and I've fused more weird things to my shields than I care to admit. But it turns out, I, and apparently thousands of others, completely overlooked one of the most genius, subtle, and frankly obvious connections to Breath of the Wild ever conceived. The shame! The horror! The sheer, unadulterated awe I now feel for Nintendo's world designers!

It all started, as so many revelations do, not in the serene fields of Hyrule, but in the chaotic forums of Reddit. A user by the name of Elite4501, a true hero of our time, pointed out a connection so brilliant it makes me want to re-evaluate my entire life. They discovered that the four chasms on the Great Plateau in Tears of the Kingdom aren't just random holes in the ground—they are meticulously placed right where the four Ancient Shrines from Breath of the Wild once stood! I mean, come on! How did I not see this?! I spent HOURS on that Plateau in BOTW learning the ropes! The Plateau was my home, my tutorial, my everything! And in TOTK, I just glided over those gaping maws in the earth, thinking, "Huh, spooky holes," without a single neuron firing to connect them to my past adventures. The collective mind of the Zelda fandom has been collectively face-palming for weeks!

Now, here's the kicker that makes this discovery even wilder. This alignment is incredibly rare in the vast world of TOTK. Think about it! The Surface of Hyrule is littered with memories of the past, but this specific shrine-to-chasm transformation is a special club. Aside from the sacred four on the Great Plateau, only a handful of other chasms share this honor. Users in the know, like Mr_Noh and BackgroundNPC1213, chimed in to list the exclusive members:

• The chasm on Tingel Island 🏝️

• The Hyrule Castle Moat West Chasm 🏰

• The Lake Hylia Chasm 🌊

• The chasms hidden within each of TOTK's three terrifying labyrinths 🧩

That's it! In a world with over a hundred chasms, only these select few are built upon the hallowed ground of BOTW's Ancient Shrines. It's not a common game design trick; it's a deliberate, meaningful choice. It makes the Great Plateau feel even more like a sacred, foundational site—a place where the old world literally collapsed into the new.

But wait, it gets better! Nintendo didn't just leave these chasms as cool Easter eggs for lore nerds like me to find a year later. Oh no. They built an entire, rewarding gameplay loop around them! These four specific chasms are directly tied to the side quest "A Call from the Depths," and this quest makes them function exactly like the shrines they replaced. Let me break it down for you:

BOTW Element	TOTK Transformation	The Connection
Four Ancient Shrines	Four Chasms	Same physical locations.
Shrine Orbs/Spirit Orbs	Stone Eyes	Collectible items for progression.
Receiving a Heart/Stamina piece	Bargainer Statue reward	The end reward is identical!

You descend into each chasm, you brave the gloom, you find a creepy, giant stone eye, and you return it to the lonely Bargainer Statue lurking beneath the ruins of the Temple of Time. When you finally return all four—BAM!—the statue offers you a choice: a glorious Heart Container or a life-changing Stamina Vessel. That's the equivalent reward of completing four full shrines! It's like Nintendo winked at us and said, "Yeah, we removed the puzzle rooms, but the spiritual journey and the payoff? That stays."

This realization hit me like a Lynel charge. The Great Plateau in BOTW wasn't just a tutorial; it was the cradle of Link's rebirth. Those four shrines gifted us the core Sheikah Slate abilities—Magnesis, Stasis, Cryonis, and Bombs—the very tools that defined our entire adventure. They were foundational. In TOTK, the Plateau is eerily quiet, almost abandoned. There's not much reason to go back... except for this one, profound quest. The chasms are a silent, monumental callback. They are the graves of the old tutorial, and the birth canals to a new kind of challenge in the Depths. The fact that completing their associated quest gives you a full four-shine reward is Nintendo's way of honoring that legacy. It's poetic game design!

I have to just stop and marvel. We all noticed the big, loud parallels between the Surface and the Depths when TOTK launched. That was the headline feature! But this? This subtle repurposing of specific, meaningful locations? This flew under the radar for over a year! It's a testament to the insane depth and care poured into Tears of the Kingdom. They built a game so massive and dense that we're still uncovering its secrets in 2026! These chasms, in a very real sense, are the only shrines to survive wholly intact between the two games. Their form changed, their mechanics changed, but their soul and their purpose in the player's progression remained perfectly constant.

So, to any fellow players who, like me, thought they had seen it all: think again! Hyrule is still full of mysteries. This discovery has reinvigorated my love for this world. It’s not just a sequel; it’s a living, breathing palimpsest, where the old world is literally written underneath the new one. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to the Great Plateau, stand on the edge of one of those chasms, and offer a silent apology to the ghost of my 2017 self for not figuring this out sooner. The genius of it all is simply... breathtaking. 😲✨