people talk about this game like it's some groundbreaking, breathtaking, wonderful pinnacle of video games and i really wish i understood that. this game feels really nice to move around in, its visuals are really appealing and its score is pretty cute. but there's not much of a real narrative (or writing at all), no memorable characters, no cool side-quests, no dungeons, a pitiful lack of enemy variety + almost no bosses, and nothing that made exploring feel worthwhile. most of it feels like filler check-list fluff (towers, shrines, koroks). the world is well-designed but there's not much substance inside of it beyond its sandbox elements. i genuinely feel like, insane for not liking this the way people talk about it but i just do not see it personally. it's just okay!

I jumped off a charging horse, killed two Moblins, landed back in the saddle. I climbed a cliff for a solid five minutes only to be headbutted off the top by an unexpected goat. I conjured ice to ascend a waterfall. I flipped a puzzle upside down. I jumped from great heights and played chicken with the ground. I went snowboarding. I unleashed bees on my enemies. I regularly took a big dog for a walk. I bought a house. I built a town. I met a load of wonderful people. I smiled for hundreds of hours.

Nintendo drags the Zelda formula kicking and screaming into 2008-era open world design to create something that's mostly okay and mostly empty.

I'll open by saying that I have zero love nor nostalgia for Zelda as a franchise, nor do I hold Nintendo in any high esteem. The general consensus for decades was that Ocarina of Time was the single greatest game ever made; I played it and wasn't especially impressed. Two and half decades later, and history is repeating itself; Breath of the Wild has now been accepted to be the single greatest game ever made, and I'm again not especially impressed. It's not that I can't see what people enjoy in these titles, but more that I don't see how anyone believes any of this to be unique. Everything that's here has been done before and better in games two decades this one's senior, and adding meal prep and pretty graphics doesn't change the fact you could describe this as "Assassin's Creed with Half-Life 2 physics puzzles" and barely even be wrong.

I've heard from a few people with positive opinions on this that the main draw and appeal is the exploration, and that wandering around in search of new things is fun. In this, I disagree. The game is incredibly open in the literal, physical sense; there are a lot of big, green, empty fields with literally nothing in them. You can sprint for two straight minutes down a dirt path and see nothing, find nothing. I intentionally went off the beaten path several times in my twenty-hour playthrough, and I only ever found three Korok seeds. I never even met the broccoli man who lets you cash them in for inventory upgrades. Why bother trekking around when there's so little to actually see, and so little to do? A tiny tile with a ruined building on it every three miles doesn't make for an interesting overworld. It's so sparse, seemingly in service of just being capital-B Big. The world is so Big! The map is so Big! You can climb up a hill and then go back down again, what fun! Your reward for exploring this empty world is that you get to be in the empty world for longer. I imagine the people who love wandering through the map are actually enjoying the Shadow of the Colossus movement and climbing mechanics more than anything pertaining to the actual map that's here. Moving Link around feels good and smooth, but I think people who are in love with the traversal would be just as happy running through gm_Flatgrass as they are with the entire Kingdom of Hyrule. Hell, the greater density of the former might even be better.

If you're lucky, you might stumble into a Moblin camp every couple of minutes, but these act as annoyances more than anything else. Whatever items you'll get from defeating them are almost always strictly worse than whatever you walked up to them with, and the gear durability system means that you'll walk out worse for wear than if you hadn't bothered. I really don't mind the weapons breaking anywhere near as much as most of the detractors seem to, but that's because the game is so ridiculously easy that I was never in danger of running out of equipment. My weapons were always overflowing, I always had shields, I always had bows and arrows, I always had two pages of cooked meals that would heal me to full and stuff me with bonus yellow hearts. Thunderblight Ganon was the only thing that ever posed even the slightest challenge, and that's because he was capable of blasting through one-shot protection and his ragdoll kept flying out of the boss arena whenever I downed him. Bosses are the only forms of combat that you can't just walk around, which means that the optimal strategy is to ignore every camp or roaming enemy you see and save up your best weapons to wail on the Ganon forms. When the best play is to run past everything, ignore repairs/upgrades, and sprint to the bosses who die way too quickly to high-tier gear, you have created a world that is not fun to explore; you've created a world where there's a lot of fucking empty space between the glowing marker where the boss is and the indicator of where you are currently.

So much of this feels like a complete and utter waste of time. You can't cook food in bulk, meaning that in the early game when you're making nothing but three-apple meals, you have to do them one at a time. You can carry hundreds of resources at once, and something like eighty cooked meals, so it's going to take a lot of time to stock up on your functionally infinite healing for no good reason. Selling and buying items from shops is just as slow, traversing over flat plains with nothing to do is boring, and tons of the shrines have timed puzzles with sliding platforms and rolling balls that move at a glacial pace to ensure that players on the clunky-ass gamepad have more than enough time to react. What broke me was the fact that you're gated from pulling the Master Sword until you have an arbitrary number of hearts; after clearing out all four of the Divine Beasts and about 30 shrines, the game told me that I needed to go do at least another 24 shrines and dump all of my Spirit Orbs into HP if I wanted the sword. I decided that I had spent way too much time getting here to be turned away and told to grind for a single weapon, so I went straight to Hyrule Castle to end the game. Some friends of mine who were watching me play admonished me for "rushing" through it, which is a sentiment that I imagine many who disagree with this review are going to share. "Only" twenty hours, "only" thirty shrines, "only" three Korok seeds. The irony of a game that's celebrated for allowing you to play however you want apparently having a correct way to play it shouldn't be lost on you.

For as much as the developer foresight of allowing you to solve puzzles unconventionally gets celebrated, there were far too many instances where it felt like I was outsmarting the game and it couldn't keep up. I prepped for Fireblight Ganon by coming in with an ice rod, and it just didn't work on him in the fight because the game hadn't accounted for it; ice arrows still worked just fine, so it's not like this was intentional. Metal weapons and shields will get struck by lightning, but you can't pile them up onto a conductive switch to complete a circuit; switches that need to be weighed down can be weighed down with any random garbage in your inventory, so I don't know why this wasn't accounted for also. One puzzle in the Goron Divine Beast required me to block off jets of fire with a physics object, so I used a ball and crouched under the fire; it wasn't the correct physics object, so the game pushed me back against gravity and walled me off even though there was more than enough space to get through. The Zora Divine Beast that requires the Zora armor to get to features a sequence where you need to get to the tip of its trunk, and the trunk is spraying water down onto you; for some reason, this doesn't count as a waterfall. In any other game, this would all be fine, but Breath of the Wild's proudly-touted unconventionality is in actuality only limited to a scant few shrines where the solutions are so simple that there's hardly any urgency to break them. I feel the exact same way that I did when I played Ocarina and fire arrows couldn't burn down walls but Din's Fire could, except this came out two decades later and has no excuse.

I'm left without much to like. The combat is serviceable, but mashy and easily broken; the difficulty in the puzzles and the combat doesn't really exist because this is a game intended to be beaten by children; there's little intrinsic reason to explore, and I didn't get enough enjoyment out of the process to do it for its own sake; all of your abilities are unlocked in the first couple hours, leaving virtually no feeling of progression outside of numbers arbitrarily going up or down depending on the random loot you find; the story is the exact same that it's always been, which is to say completely mediocre and nothing more. It's a very pretty game, with a very pretty soundscape. Conceptually, I like the idea of delivering on Todd Howard's promises of being able to climb any mountain that you can see. I can see the appeal, but I can't think of a reason why anyone would consider this to be the greatest thing ever made — barring the idea that they simply don't play many games, nor have they really experienced a lot of media. This is all very unique for Nintendo, so if you only play what they put out, you're probably going to be blown away. If you've seen much of anything else, you'll probably only manage to be slightly more impressed than I am.

With the fact that what was hailed on release as being a breath of fresh air for the Zelda franchise has now been confirmed to be the model that the series will follow going forward, I'm left to wonder how long it's going to take people to get as sick of it as I already am. Tears of the Kingdom seems to be going as strong as this did at its peak, but I can't imagine that the momentum is going to last until the time Nintendo drops the third entry six years from now.

The biggest video game mystery of the past decade. It's the most groundbreaking, medium-redefining experience of our generation - and nobody can explain why. I'm convinced this is all a conspiracy orchestrated by YouTube video essayists. The promise (yet unfulfilled) of The Great Open World Video Game blinds us to the fact that we've seen all of this many times before.

Fundamentally, Breath of the Wild is a pastiche of the safest, most focus-tested game design principles of the preceding decade. You could call it the 'Tower' type game. Climb a tower to unlock a new area on your map, which will reveal the repeatable skinner box activities you can complete there. Puzzles, dungeons, enemy camps, the usual. These activities give you something like XP, increased health, or a new item, which account for progression. Once you're done, you climb another tower and repeat the process until you're ready to fight the final boss (or more likely, until you're bored and ready to rush to the game's end).

That's the gameplay loop. And like every single other one of these games ever made, the loop eventually becomes a dull grind. Breath of the Wild does nothing to solve this problem endemic to open world games. Some have praised the game's traversal, which, other than shield surfing (which is cool to be fair), is really just climbing walls, riding a horse, using a glider, or fast travelling; the same traversal methods in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, released seven years earlier (Shadow of the Colossus is also a clear influence). Really I would challenge anyone to explain how Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece while Assassin's Creed is a soulless corporate product. You're playing the same game. What's the difference besides some nice vibes and a cell-shaded art style? Grass? At least Assassin's Creed has that cyberpunk meets ancient aliens meets secret societies meets historical fiction bullshit made up by French people. That's creativity.

Proponents of the game may praise the Shiekah slate physics abilities as an innovation, and that feels true at first. But eventually your enemies become too powerful for hitting them with rocks or whatever to do a thing; you'll need to use some bullshit level-scaled RPG weapon. And even if the Shiekah slate remained effective in combat, you would still end up doing this. Why? Because this game has so much dull, repeated content to wade through that it becomes easier to take the path of least resistance, the least thought required, and just hit them with your sword. 30 hours in, no player is using cool Shiekah slate tricks to clear those regenerating bokoblin camps.

Much discussion has already been had on the monotony of the 120 copy-pasted shrines, which make up the bulk of the game's content (its version of the side tasks from Assassin's Creed), and the 900 copy-pasted korok seed puzzles, which act as the collectibles obligatory of every Tower game. I won't rehash that too much here, copy-pasted content is already the most common criticism of open world games in general. But knowing that, I want to talk about something I've noticed with a lot of the praise for this game.

Some of the most common sentiments expressed toward Breath of the Wild are that it's "magical" and captures the "joy of discovery" and a sense of "childlike wonder". And I think if you play through the entire game and still feel this way, then that is a horror beyond comprehension. What was your childhood like? Did you spend it as a laboratory subject or something? Just completing mundane, repeated tasks and being awarded food pellets? Because that's what Breath of the Wild is: a world filled not with a sense of mystery or infinite possibility, but the exact opposite: A world where you know exactly what you will find under every rock, inside every strange ruin, over every next hill. A completely controlled, sterile environment of utilitarian systems for the player to exploit. Completely antithetical to anything "magical".

I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that video games fundamentally cannot represent anything magical, emotional, or spiritual. Depicting anything in interactive form drains it of all sacred meaning, makes it a joke; it's the "press f to pay respects" problem. The tenets of game design stipulate systems and mechanics that are rational and understandable to players. That might be the biggest sin of video games as an artistic medium: taking everything unquantifiable and beautiful in life and reducing it to man-made systems for a single individual to exploit (For more discussion of this issue, play the Metal Gear Solid series).

This is felt especially harshly in a Tower game like Breath of the Wild, where an entire open world is reduced to a few classes of interactive activities. Progressing through a game like this is a process of total disillusionment with the entire world; spiritual death. It accidentally replicates the central theme of Ocarina of Time: the transition from idyllic childhood to grim adulthood. But Ocarina ends with Link confronting the darkness of adulthood and returning to a childlike state of play with his adult wisdom integrated. Breath of the Wild, though, is a state of permanent adolescence - it never goes anywhere, and simply decays over time. Eventually, you exhaust all of this life's possibilities and choose to finally, mercifully end it. Deciding to face Ganon isn't about bringing the story to a climax; it's the gameplay equivalent of taking a plane to Switzerland to get euthanized. And the game practically spits in your face after you defeat him, simply reverting to an old save before the final fight. There is no salvation, no redemption for this world. Only the ceaseless march of content.

Early on I said this game's reputation is a mystery, and I actually lied; there's a pretty simple explanation, one that I briefly mentioned: grass vibes. The game has an incredible atmosphere when you're first starting out, and that's what people are talking about when they call it "a breath of fresh air" or whatever cliché they think of. It has nothing to do with any game design element found here. Because there is no common understanding of what that would even mean. There's no concept of the formal elements of game design, or the storytelling language of video games. We're all just making this shit up.

People only pay attention to, y'know, the actual art: music, animation, visuals. The game itself can be anything, nobody really cares. The discourse surrounding games as a medium of art in themselves is mostly bullshit. People appreciate the traditional artistic aspects of a game (music, animation, visuals, acting performances, writing) and then project that sense of artistry onto the game design itself, where there is none (and in fact, there is a profound dissonance between it and those elements). That's how people process games as an art form. And that's why games like Breath of the Wild are held up as the pinnacle of games as art.

(I'll also say that I have no respect for any open world game like this after the release of Metal Gear Solid V (2015). It correctly portrayed this breed of AAA open world game as something that cannot be revived or rejuvenated as Breath of the Wild attempts to do; this is all salted earth. If MGSV had been properly understood, we would have seen it as the just and merciful execution of games like this.)

so i feel like i have to justify my rating to this game because everyone always questions it.

so breath of the wild. "the definitive open world experience."

so some positives before i shit all over this game. the art style is nice, looking at the large empty fields of this game is made more tolerable by the nice artstyle. you have a lot of choices in how you approach situations, which is always great. anyway,

the fact that you have this option means nothing when the most viable option is almost ALWAYS to do it normally. sure, there's a lot of imagination you can have but the problem with not building scenarios out of imagination itself rather than leaving them open, is that you really don't encourage people to take the time to do something interesting when it's always a blank slate with the most convenient option is to do the same exact shit every time. i see people compare this game to mgs V all the time and i dont really think thats fair, because in mgs V the worst option is almost always the most convenient and easy to think of one, actively making you think "ok how could i creatively do this faster."

the open world is extremely empty, with the only real things filling it being meaningless side quests, stupid korok puzzles and boring shrines. lets talk about side quests first.

so the thing about the side quests is that minus the one where you build a town they're all boring fetch quests where you get extremely subpar rewards. you aren't encouraged to do them because there aren't any real upgrades you can get from them. often time the reward is just ruppees or something else stupid. so you never really feel encouraged to do any of them.

the korok seeds basically all boil down to "oooooo out of place rock?!??!!??!" i dont feel like i need to explain myself here because i feel like this is something most people already know.

the shrines are probably the most defendable parts of the game. there are plenty of interesting ones, like the twin shrines, or the ones with really elaborate, out of the box puzzles. however most of the shrines aren't like this, and are either "duplicate shrine of another shrine but HARDER" or "puzzles where you use one of your abilities twice." rarely do you actually have to use your brain for these puzzles because they're all so obvious on how to solve them.

so if the world is empty, the engagements are uncreative, what about the main story?

well, the main story is probably one of the worst parts about the game. actually doing the quests before the divine beast you're currently going for can be interesting. however, the divine beasts themselves are literally the same dungeon repeated 4 times with the same art style as every other shrine in the game. the story itself is bland and forgettable, especially compared to the wild creativity of other Zelda games. actually beating the game gives you nothing. the ending is weak and pathetic.

i hope ive given a somewhat decent summary on why i despise this game. anyway if you disagree with me you're wrong and fuuuck you.

As hard as Breath of the Wild hit on release, there actually were a few aspects that disappointed me about it, and it’s not the stuff people usually discuss. My initial expectation was that this would be a full post-apocalypse in the style of the original Zelda, where the pacing is completely hands-off and dungeons are just random caves you stumble into. As well-done as Breath’s towns and set pieces and characters were, it all ran pretty directly against what I wanted out of it.

Still, the game’s magic would draw me back in for another replay time and again over the years, and it wasn’t until I sincerely held it up against its rigid and limited predecessors that I started to appreciate just what a quantum leap it was over not just the rest of the Zelda series, but many modern games in general. I still consider myself a fan of those older Zeldas, but whatever tonal preferences I may have with some of them, they’re so effortlessly eclipsed by Breath’s smooth free-form mechanics that give me a feeling of innate, childlike fun that is strangely uncommon in this type of atmospheric open world. It’s wild to think this game may still be topped by its upcoming sequel, because it’s already making the whole rest of the industry look dated by comparison and combines virtually everything I look for in games in a package that’s entirely unique.

Breath of the Wild is a game of absolute extremes. It shows total understanding and mastery over the craft, but it also shows fundamental misunderstandings of them at the same time. It gives you so much and then tells you to put what it gave you aside. It is a struggle between game designs.

Zelda has always been a series of exploration. It has always known how to make you feel wanderlust even when you're exploring relatively linear worlds, but in most cases, that feeling was more aesthetic than actual, which is fine, of course, but Breath of the Wild sought to be able to give the most authentic sense of wanderlust a game can give someone. Now let's talk about how it goes about accomplishing that goal, the flow of the game, the gameplay loop.

In a word: contradictory. And not the fun kind. Self-sabotaging may be a better word for it, but Breath of the Wild portrays a very simple gameplay loop on its surface. You explore, you find something, you explore. But when that "something" is a shrine or dungeon, which it is most of the time, you run into issues. The biggest issue of Breath of the Wild. The dungeons, the second half to any Zelda equation, are horrid. There are 120 shrines dotted all around Hyrule and they usually hold one puzzle idea in each of them. Or they don't and you just have to fight something, or you just don't have to do anything, and the puzzle was getting to the shrine itself. This is awful and shows a basic misunderstanding of what dungeons do in Zelda games. Dungeons are never about a puzzle, it's about the puzzle of puzzles. Dungeons in Zelda are a collection of interlocking puzzles that in themselves form one puzzle. It is tedious and ruins game flow to be exploring the gorgeous open world only to be rewarded for that by being taken out of that open world into one of many homogeneous boring rooms to do a puzzle that is completely disconnected from everything else. What makes dungeons in Zelda so fantastic is how they work with the overworld. When I was going through Faron Woods in Skyward Sword, I was excited to see how this location's most pivotal point, its dungeon would be integrated with it, and Skyview Temple feels like something that I was exploring for. It feels like an ancient ruin deep in Faron Woods, it feels like part of the overworld. The shrines and even the divine beasts don't. They all look the same, and trust me, while it does look nice, seeing the same exact aesthetic over and over and over again with no major changes to it gets really grating when there's such a beautiful and diverse overworld I could be exploring instead. And when I overcome a shrine or a divine beast, I don't feel like I accomplished much. Instead of giving you an item half way through a dungeon, divine beasts give you control over one aspect of the beast once you get the map. This is so under developed and the dungeons aren't even that intricately designed that you ever need to use those controls in inventive or unique ways. And after you defeat the divine beast, instead of having a new tool that you could use to access more of the overworld like in most zelda games, you're given a spell that is either completely useless, barely noticeable, or a huge convenience that makes the other three spells look actively terrible in contrast. (I'm talking about Revali's Gale of course. In a game about exploration, the one spell that explicitly helps you do that is so obviously better than the two that are focused entirely on combat, and one that is just a recharging fairy.)

Oddly enough, these problems could be solved easily. Just have typical dungeon structure. Have around 9 dungeons sprinkled around the map and have them be traditional Zelda dungeons. When you first get to Lurelin village, have the locals tell you of the old abandoned temple that's on an island off the coast. Have a dilapidated old mine in Eldin where the Goron chieftain's father went to combat a great monster decades ago and never came back from, just anything that feels like it's part of the world and not some weird abstracted separate realm where nothing you do in it feels like you're exploring a part of the world you want to explore. They don't even need items in them or mini bosses or a map and compass like most Zelda games. Just a location in the world that feels like it fits where it is and isn't just home to the same reused assets over and over again. And have the puzzles have meaning. Have each puzzle in the dungeon come one step closer to unraveling the whole puzzlebox. I have no motivation to solve Breath of the Wild's puzzles. They mean nothing to me after I get my stamina maxed out, which is usually fairly early into the game for me, I might add. They don't mean anything if all they do is give you a heart piece. Heart pieces that have two loading screens you need to sit through in order to get it. They don't help unravel one big puzzle, they don't feel rewarding after you get all the useful stuff from them, and they all look the same and have no individual personality to them.

Now you may say that that's because the dungeons aren't meant to be as important as they were in previous Zelda games. I'd then ask why then they're absolutely everywhere. You can't go thirty minutes without finding one, and that's due to another of Breath of the Wild's contradictions.

I want to get lost in Hyrule. Nintendo wants me to get lost in Hyrule. It is then really annoying when they drag me out to make me climb a Ubisoft Tower. These towers are there to give you a mission when you enter a new region. They are huge, you can see it from all over the region it gives you the map of, which goes against the wanderlust of the rest of the exploration. When I wander, I want to wander. I don't want a giant glowing beacon to tell me that I need to get to it. This is baffling to me. Design wise it goes against exploration. You do not explore to find the Ubisoft Tower, you can see them from across the map. I think either you should fill out the map of where you've been, or there should be map merchants like in Majora's Mask wandering around Hyrule or at inns. They would then sell you a map, and the closer to where you currently are, the more expensive the map is. Or the map of each region should just be hidden somewhere in that region, and thorough exploration of the region would then be rewarded with the map. In a game about the whimsical mystique of exploring the worst thing you can do is give the players a map too early. And this leads us back to the shrines. The contradiction of Breath of the Wild I mentioned before that led to the shrines being absolutely everywhere is that they are your fast travel.

Having so many fast travel points in your game is baffling to me when the point of the game is to explore. It's saying that you don't think your world is good enough for people to want to see it a second time, which by the way isn't true. It's just another way this game's mechanics completely undermine its open world at times. You already have the stables, and they are all located in perfect locations to be your fast travel. Also I think fast travel should cost something. In a game where the main gameplay is exploring, getting to skip some of it should cost some currency. Which you can only make by exploring, so exploring, and exploring well, lets you skip some of it later down the line. I'm thinking carriages that take you to and from any stable in the game that is accessible at any stable.

But when this game lets you explore, it is breathtaking. I adore running through woods, stopping along the way to checkout a small cave, or a small abandoned shack in it. I love having to survive by hunting and gathering, I love having to constantly be scrounging up weapons, and I love when I discover something big. Be that a town or an old temple or a giant waterfall, it's all so masterfully crafted and truly does give me genuine wanderlust, it doesn't just imitate it. I love going to a stable, and hearing someone talk about a mythical horse roaming the nearby area, or have someone ask me to show them proof of the Great Fairy Fountain. But that's where the third part of the Zelda formula comes in. The sidequests.

Zelda games typically flesh out their world by having great sidequests. While most Zelda games don't have too many of them, they all have at least one quest in them that's remembered as one of the best in the series. Breath of the Wild has many sidequests. Many many more than Majora's mask even, which is THE sidequest Zelda game, but they're all so lackluster. There's no heart in most of them. This isn't helped by the game's equally lackluster cast. There is no Groose or Linebeck or Midna in this game. The closest is Sidon, who doesn't get enough screentime, and even then still can't match anyone from Skyward Sword. Or Majora's Mask. Or Twilight Princess. Or Windwaker. Or Link's Awakening. You get the picture.

The sidequests used to be what gave the overworld its life back in Ocarina of Time. When you first got to Kakariko in Ocarina of Time and saw cuccos running around and find their owner distraught over their escape it made the village feel like more than just seven polygonal houses and a windmill. It made it feel like people really lived in this village. Granted, those people never moved from their designated spots, but still.

Breath of the Wild doesn't need that. I don't need a sidequest for the game to tell me that people really live in Hateno Village, that's just self-evident from how they move around town and the town feels like it could really exist as a town, and not just an area for you to explore in a video game. But when I actually talk to people and do their sidequest and its all robotic and nobody feels like a real person, I am quickly reminded that I am not actually in a village with real people, but rather I am in an area that I'm supposed to explore because I'm playing a video game. Which wouldn't be so bad if that isn't what the game wants me to do, and likewise isn't what I want to have happen. Also like, the quests themselves aren't usually even that fun even if you are just treating it like a checklist item to do in a video game. Most of them just involve getting x number of items and giving it to the person that asked.

This game is very combat focused. Which is interesting, and the combat is very fun. The flow of it is basically the same as its been since Ocarina of Time, but with enemies that actually support the combat system like in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. It's fun enough, but whenever I'd have to fight a lot in quick succession, I'd end up very tired of the combat. It works best when you've been exploring for a while and come across a group of enemies attacking a fellow traveler, or get ambushed by a yiga clan assassin, which is good because it means that it's a mechanic that actually positively flows into the games main mechanic of exploration.

Finally, I'd like to talk about the exploration. And only the exploration of this game. Ignore the things in the game that work against it and give it its proper due, because I am truly in awe of it. Breath of the Wild's world is one that I want to get lost in, I want to wander. I see so many different adventures in the distance and get excited to have them. I love stumbling upon a secret hidden treasure chest, I love that when I get lost I am rewarded. I am rewarded with treasure and beauty and the thrill of adventure. I love finding a town and buying new equipment at its shop and spending a night at its inn and then going on my way off to another adventure. I love gathering up local ingredients and sitting down to cook them all into what I think would be the best combination of dishes. I love seeing the destroyed world of Hyrule and the history it tells without any text boxes, it is truly a masterpiece.

Just not one that you get to experience to its fullest.

As a school teacher, the distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation is something I face on a day to day basis. You cannot teach a student to be intrinsically motivated, but you can force them to be extrinsically motivated. Grades, parental pressure, peer to peer comparisons, even compliments from the authority figure. These methods do not get students to suddenly become invested in learning about math, science, literature, etc. They do, however, get them to put effort into learning regardless of what little joy they find in it.
Such is the way of public education. A constant push and pull between individualized education for the diverse group of students in the world as well as ensuring their skills and knowledge is apt for the future of our society. The best thing a teacher can do then within said system is create an environment for the students to find a love of learning regardless of the exams, grades, and other negatives. If you think back to your favorite teachers in school there is likely something they did to instill a level of passion or joy for just coming into the classroom each day. If they matched really well with you perhaps they got you invested in a new topic or career path.

In many ways I find that the AAA game landscape is similar to public education in how its goal is to appeal to the masses. Public education serves everyone who does not have the opportunity to choose a private school or homeschooled education. Those situations end up being highly specialized areas where the expectations and results can be controlled due to the individual interests of the stakeholders being more considered. AAA games try to make experiences that are broadly appealing and interesting, niche appeals and interests can’t be catered to as to get the most people involved as possible. So like in public education they overcorrect the expectations for the player and try to implement rigid and clear methods of both punishment and reward with the ultimate goal of getting to the end.

Nintendo, the video game industry’s local House of Mouse, is a notable producer due to their seemingly massive amounts of Quality Control put into their top titles. They are a system built to get people from all backgrounds interested in games, as Disney is the same with animation. Though realistically most games they make are still reliant on very cheap extrinsic design. One does not have to look much further than this same year’s Super Mario Odyssey as a game whose core loop is based on an empty, extrinsic “grab all the moons” open world style. A game whose mechanics bore much discussion but there isn’t really much to say about the middling open world design of the game.

Breath of the Wild of course stands as a sharp difference to most AAA games on the market, even those created by the Japanese Michael Mouse itself. It is a game when discussed is about free flowing decision making as opposed to an accomplishment of objectives. For this review I will simply point to the current third most liked review of the game on the site by @JimTheSchoolGirl which will be my cheap short hand to show why many people love this game. The game itself is less focused on you, the player, beating it but instead giving you different opportunities to interact with systems and create your own creative solution to multiple problem solving situations. Jimminy was never told to do the things he listed here as a goal or a scripted sequence, this was meaningful because he decided to do this himself.
This is Intrinsic Motivation at work. This is something most game designers (and teachers) find nearly impossible to discover naturally but not only did this work for Jimminy, it has worked for hundreds of thousands of other people who salivate at the mere idea of this game. How in the world did they do it?

That’s not any easy question to dissect and give a short answer. It begins with things like the art style and music along with other aesthetic elements having that draw that appeals to many people. That part is the Disney effect so to speak. The game simply looks appealing and accessible without any fluff. That isn’t something to be said about most games especially for Immersive Sims which BOTW is often compared to.
That’s step one. Give people the invitation into the game. If we continue with the Public School Analogy this is the mandatory attendance, the part that gets butts in seats. Except for the fact that games are profit driven and not really meant to raise the next generation (oh dear god hopefully).

The next step is expressed easiest in the intro. You cannot begin a free form adventure in chaos. Most games that do not give you much advice in the beginning are doomed to not appeal to the masses. The developers solution to this was to have a restrictive tutorial with clear objectives before putting the foot on the gas. Much ado has been said about the tutorial island so I won’t dive too deeply into how it was designed, but I will say there are two pulling factors here that cause it to pull in everyone who has begun playing it.
One: A clear problem to solve. 4 shrines, 4 items, one area.
Two: Multifaceted solutions along with many smaller problems existing in the same area (temperature, guardians, weapon durability, etc.)
These combine together to form something similar to what is referred to as Problem Based Learning (PBL) in education. I am not an expert in this subject to be honest, but I will do my best to point out how these function in terms of building Intrinsic Motivation.

The first part is the clear meaningful problem to the participant. Oftentimes a PBL uses some local phenomena (forgive me if I use too many education terms lmao) to anchor itself in the minds of the student, similar to how the island creates a clear and immediate issue in the mind of the player. Secondly there’s many smaller issues in the way that the individual must consider in completing their final task. The game splits up the task into four shrines, each with their own smaller problems surrounding them, however often in Education it requires the students to go through an engineering process of design and redesign. The loop is similar enough to compare them since the player must constantly rebuild their knowledge base with each issue that comes up along the way from dealing with various enemies, climbing, dealing with cold weather, and interacting with natural objects like trees.
The goal of a PBL is that the student is self-sufficient. It stands in stark contrast to the sort of null hypothesis of Teacher Centered learning. Things like lectures and rote memorization as opposed to giving the students agency to investigate solutions on their own end and learn what they need to know at their own pace. This, as you can probably guess, is the line between Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation. Being able to give an individual their own agency to solve a given, relevant issue makes it far easier for someone to get invested in something. In education that is what is called Student Centered Learning, and in Breath of the Wild that is the interaction with many systems that is exemplified in the Tutorial Island.

The benefit of the player learning this other than a sense of pride, is that the designers are able to give them different complex problems within the same system and it is up to the player to engage and figure out solutions. This knowledge base can grow for new problems and new experiences, from riding horses, dealing with more complex enemies, the glider, and the dungeons in the game. A PBL exists to get students invested for the duration of the topic before the class starts again with something new to move on to. However the skills gained in the process are invaluable as the topics become more complex.

Of course on the other hand, many people fall off of Breath of the Wild. I know I stopped playing once I hit about 20 hours in and I have no intention to return. It isn’t really hard to see why either in this case. While it manages to draw in a massive amount of people to be naturally entranced to explore the world it creates that won’t ever work for everyone. In fact, to say that most gamers are intrinsically motivated to play games is foolish bait. I have many a person in my Twitter circle that will claim x game/genre is better because of what the player can invest themselves into, but that’s ultimately a very narrow view of the appeal of Video Games. Much of the appeal of gaming can be the rigidity of systems based in extrinsic motivation, hence why the mobile market is the most popular and successful. It is nice to have a simple goal with clear success and failure states (the discourse around Vampire Survivors has made this much more apparent lately).

One of the main issues of Breath of the Wild is that the developers and the game itself do not trust themselves. The core hook, while wonderful, will not keep everyone engaged to the very end. There is never much growth in how the game builds it’s problem solving. The comparison of a PBL often becomes tenuous particularly when it comes to time. A given PBL lesson will last typically around 4-7 hours spread throughout a week or so, this game lasts 30+ hours. There is no growth in these systems as they are introduced early on. There are very few new systems that are introduced as well, and often the ones that are introduced often only take a few moments to solve. There are many extrinsic rewards and objectives littering the game, however you do not do the shrines or divine beasts because they appeal to the feeling of beauty and exploration the game holds within. You do them because there are rewards or because the sensation of checking off an objective on a list is appealing. In so the game does not create objectives to enhance its core experience, but instead to attempt to distract from the flaws of its lack of dynamism.
After 20 hours you may not have seen everything the game has to offer but you certainly can feel like you have. That mileage depends on the person too. Some people will drop Twitter clips in the year of our lord 2022 showing crazy interactions in the game, others like myself will drop it to never pick it up again part way through. The truth is that the game does not build upon its core. It takes a very big “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” approach which, while respectable, did not entrance me in the way it did for many other players. Once I hit that 20 hour mark I said to myself “This game’s sequel will be straight up bussin’.” Jury’s out to see if that’s really true, but I would imagine the designers are more aware of what I discussed here than I am fr fr.

Breath of the Wild is a fascinating game that causes many regular people to fall in love with its world through Intrinsic Motivation. It fails often because outside of the core systems it does not provide any quality content for the players to engage in, things such as shrines and dungeons exist to fill time rather than improve the experience. I would certainly go so far as to call Breath of the Wild a classic, but it fails in so many ways I won’t gas it up like everyone else on the planet.
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Hey what's up gamers. I don’t really vibe with the author’s note but I will say this is the start of a “series” of sorts where I compare game design and Pedagogy since I think there’s more overlap than people readily consider. Really though this is my Copium of focusing on my career at the moment rather than trying to actually make a game haha. Eventually I will make that sweet game though and hopefully it’ll be good. Ideally it involves punching Dracula but we’ll see what happens.

Important thing to note is I’m a Master’s student in Education and have only taught for one year so far. I’m not really an expert, but I do have a lot of observations so please feel free to critique me and ask pedagogical questions. I’m always happy to tell people about how Teaching works haha.

Also shout outs to my homie @SimonDedalus for his review of Resident Evil 4 which certainly influenced my writing here in more ways than one.

The first 15 or so hours are magical. Then there's 30 more.

Breath of the Wild has a perfect opening couple of hours that give you these great physics tools and quickly set you loose in the open world. All of its intuitive physics and weather systems, as well as the controversial weapon durability system provide you with these great moments of thinking on your feet and out-of-the-box problem solving. Exploring the landscape and the flora and fauna that reside there is fun for its own sake, and the music and general atmosphere is enchanting enough to make simply being in the world enjoyable. I really think the vibe and beautiful art style of this game alone are what give it such a legendary reputation, rather than any kind of revolutionary game design. Nintendo knows how to nail the presentation of their games better than anyone, and it gives them the illusion of being groundbreaking and artfully designed. I really felt that way at the start of this one.

But after building a near-perfect open world experience in the first act, Breath of the Wild spends the rest of the game tearing it down through sheer tedium and repetition. Fighting the same three enemy types with the limited combat system (and being interrupted by the same combat music track), constantly breaking your weapons (which serves as no more than an annoyance once you build up an armory of weapons), doing dozens of nearly identical shrines and korok seed puzzles that just feel like chores... All of this is fun and fresh at the start, but the novelty wears off fast, and then the game just keeps going. Eventually you realize there is nothing mysterious or novel to be found in this world, really; Every cool place you find is just a container for a shrine or a korok seed. The first labyrinth you find is exciting. Then you realize there are three of them and they're all just shrine puzzles. Breath of the Wild is the joy of discovery turned into a formulaic, easily digestible skinner box.

The memorable moments that the game does manage to nail, like reaching Kakariko Village or Zora's Domain, fighting the first Divine Beast, finding the Master Sword, and fighting through Hyrule Castle are all spread too thin across so many hours of the same skinner box slop endemic to open world games. And soon, most of the systems that make the moment-to-moment gameplay interesting early on become irrelevant. Eventually you'll just be teleporting across the map, using abilities like Revali's Gale to skip the climbing, wearing clothes to ignore the weather, using food to ignore the stamina system, and using regular weapons to ignore the shiekah slate and physics system in combat. The gameplay can literally only lose depth as you go; your reward for progression is that you get to engage with the game less.

Getting a non-linear, open world game right is hard; I think very few games have managed to live up to such massive scope and breadth of possibility. Breath of the Wild has been hailed as the solution to this problem, but far from being a revolution in open world design, it falls into the same trap of wearing you down with hours and hours of the same copy-pasted activities. It has some ideas that show amazing potential early on, but in the end the experience reverts to the player turning their brain off to wade through a sea of filler content along the path of least resistance. Just like every shitty Ubisoft open world game that Breath of the Wild is supposed to be the answer to.

One of my favorite games that I never want to play again. When I originally played Breath of the Wild, it was a truly special experience. The sense of exploration and discovery was unlike any game I had played prior. That first blind playthrough was something special, which is a double-edged sword. I usually don't replay games so that isn't something that would really affect me but this game sticks in my mind. Breath of the Wild does not hold up on subsequent playthroughs because you can only play a game for the first time once. However, I believe there is more to how I feel beyond that.

I jumped into each DLC as they came out but never finished them. With each DLC that came out, I was having an increasingly less enjoyable time. Maybe if I played them from the beginning of a fresh save file, things may have been different. But then that leads to the first problem of not being able to play the game blind again. The DLC doesn't feel like it should be played from an existing file, but to enhance a new playthrough. But enough about the DLC itself, whenever I jumped back in, the experience felt hollow and the things to do were tedious. These were feelings that I never felt in my initial 100+ hour playthrough of the base game.

These were all feelings that I felt in Tears of the Kingdom and made me look back on how I actually feel about Breath of the Wild. I have around 50 hours in Tears of the Kingdom and this feeling of hollowness crept in far sooner than its prequel. After the honeymoon phase wore off, I just felt bored with it; copy-pasted activities, Ubisoft towers, and resource gathering. All of these things that I criticize in other games, but I didn't criticize in Breath of the Wild. It made me reflect on Breath of the Wild and wonder how would I feel if I played it for the first time now.

Would I have gushed about it as much as I did when it was new, I don't know. Maybe the hype of getting a new console, that at the time was being scalped to high hell, carried my enjoyment, again I don't know. Another thing that is worth noting, is that this is the first Zelda game I finished. I played many prior but this was the first one to get me to finish, why? Again, I don't know, my feelings are so cloudy on this title. All I know is that Breath of the Wild is one of my favorite games that I never want to play again.

P.S. Weapon durability is fine, you're just too attached to some generic weapon that you'll replace in the next ten seconds.

Since its inception the Zelda series has coasted on getting the player to ask two questions: "What do I do?" and "How do I do it?" In Breath of the Wild, the first question is almost completely absent. This isn't necessarily a problem, as the game markets itself heavily on the second. However, while the "how do I do it" has brief flashes of greatness, it quickly fades away into nothing. The first time you defeat a guardian, it's exhilarating. Once you master parrying lasers, which doesn't take long, it becomes tiresome. Planning out how to take out a band of bokoblins is engrossing initially, but realizing that it'll only result in a dent in your stash of good weapons and the enemies respawning in a few days makes it more of a chore than anything. The champions' abilities are the worst offenders- each of them simply makes the gameplay less complex, the opposite of what upgrades should do. Revali's gale makes figuring out how to gain height almost a non-issue, avoiding damage is trivial once you have dozens of hearts, a second life, and a shield than can block any blow, and Urbosa's fury is just a win-this-fight-for-me button. They wouldn't even be that bad if there was some task you had to do to earn using them, but it's bafflingly just a cooldown.

In short, Breath of the Wild is filled with great "firsts." The first time you find one of the dragons just flying around the open sky, it's mesmerizing, but it becomes less so when you realize that it's one of the few unique entities in the massive world that you can just stumble upon. I feel like these first experiences are why people connect with the game so much- I'd consider it a great game too if the entire experience was like the first few hours. This definitely seems like an impossible task, but it's also the reason I'm optimistic about the fact that Breath of the Wild is getting a direct sequel. I just hope Nintendo takes some risks with the next one.

Watching my SO play this game after getting it set up for her on her PC has been a full appreciation hours experience. I realized the many limits and sides of the game I never would've sincerely done on my own. When I played, I was a very objectives focused player at the time. Not exactly check all the boxes but I did mostly head towards Shrines, Divine Beasts, Memories. I did a little bit extra here and there, but generally it was just that.

She plays differently of course, far more observant explorer than I for example. She ended up finding a ton of korok seeds so far, simply because she loved just looking around the environments. It's become a common phrase just for me to hear by earshot "there's something suspicious around here" and then the familiar jingle. She also just talks to every single npc, something I'd certainly do now were I playing for the first time but experiencing all the first time dialogue with her together has been sincerely charming. There's a profuse amount of work to make all of the characters just dotting the little villages you find endearing and earnest. I never really touched the quests and she's filling them out as she finds them. It's genuinely astounding how nothing that I see here feels too trodden or familiar to me just watching her play, I'm just watching with her and feeling a heavy surge of joy. I honestly wish there was co-op!!!

Both our birthdays are coming up this week, and living this game again together crafts a warm blanket, a sincere coziness to the days ahead. Bless

Breath of the Wild. I don’t think I’ve ever been this conflicted on what angle to approach a game from. There’s so many aspects I could start with, each of them encompassing an important part of the game that’s worth critique. And that makes sense - Breath of the Wild is easily, definitively the largest game I’ve ever finished in terms of scope.

I understand that I sound like a bit of a casual gamer video game player, a normie, a Nintendrone, and… well, in some ways I definitely am, and if I had a bit more experience with open world games (my only other time with the genre was having tried Assassin’s Creed 2 shortly after I started and fell in love with Breath of the Wild. I got frustrated that the game would present such a beautiful, expansive map with such gatekeeping, hand-holding and comparatively superficial parkour and exploration; I have yet to return to the game), I probably would have a better understanding of what triumphs and missteps Breath of the Wild makes for a game of its genre.

But… I think I won’t worry about that. I’ve experienced this game on its own merits, as who I am. I think by writing about this game on a site where people occasionally check in on my writing (hi, everyone who dropped by to wish me well. i can’t thank you enough; i’m doing better for now, though the road ahead is still rocky), I’m proclaiming that I have something worth saying, so I suppose I might as well make it a little personal.


Breath of the Wild had me absolutely hooked when I first experienced it blind in 2020, near the onset of the pandemic. Somehow I’d remained completely oblivious to the Nintendo Switch’s two signature games for years, and just like with Super Mario Odyssey, my reclusiveness found itself rewarded. Up until very recently, I’d thought that there hasn’t been a single Nintendo console for which the flagship Zelda was better than the flagship Mario - in fact, Zelda in general is a franchise I’m pretty mixed on, with most of the games in the series seemingly completely misunderstanding what I like about Zelda and becoming bloated, tedious experiences that in my opinion didn’t respect my time.
In that regard, Breath of the Wild was a breath of fresh air.

So when my cousin who lives with me told me that she’d borrowed a copy of Breath of the Wild from her friend, didn’t gel with it at all and offered me to try it, I approached it with a cautious optimism at best. What followed was me becoming absolutely glued to my Switch for hours on end. I still remember little moments here and there, like the first time I’d gotten Link up to the Plateau tower and couldn’t tell the various other towers and shrines apart; or when after finally marking the four shrines, I accidentally had Link walk off the tower like an idiot and frantically paused the game to warp him back to safety (I think Mirror’s Edge had left me pretty acrophobic in video games; though I want to think I’m over it now); or how I completely failed to pick up the hint when the Old Man would try to teach you about how to cut down trees to use their trunks as makeshift bridges, instead stocking up on some stamina foods and having Link climb around the abyss that separates the Old Man’s house and the Stasis shrine.

But I loved that that was a possible solution at all! The impression I’ve always gotten from Zelda puzzle design post-1992 was that there was only one solution ever intended by the developers for any one puzzle, and that players would (or, at least, I would) get punished for not thinking and approaching the puzzle from exactly the same angles as the designers intended. It’s a suffocating kind of design that’s always turned me of from the Zelda series as its temples transitioned from dungeon crawling to puzzle solving; it’s not that Breath of the Wild is completely exempt from it, but so much more of the game lets you solve it any way you can find within its own rules than any other Zelda game, and video games in general in my experience, that Breath of the Wild was genuinely wonderful to play.

I don’t think a Breath of the Wild review would be complete without a mention of the Great Plateau - it does so much right to set the game up in a bite-sized piece that’s exactly big enough to feel big, especially coming off of Mario games. Not only are individual objectives within the Plateau just as open-ended as the rest of the game is (just look at speedrunner stasis launching Link and bomb shield jumping him all across the place), but the sheer sense of minimalism it provided was amazing, with the Old Man giving the bare minimum of handholding and exposition.

It’s kind of like a great reset manifested as a soft exhale: aside from the Bokoblins (who look so different so as to be unrecognizable), the only familiar Zelda elements I noticed from the Plateau was Hyrule Castle, way off in the distance, and the Temple of Time, left in ruins, its melody fragmented, to prove a bold point.
Not a rupee, not a town or even a single human soul besides Link and the Old Man; I didn’t even encounter Koroks until Link had left the Plateau. In terms of sheer utopian post-apocalyptic atmosphere, the Plateau is simply unparalleled by the rest of the game, and like Pikmin, it’s a sort of beauty that’s unfortunately a little too good to last.
Still, even then, I’d say Breath of the Wild is a sort of rarity for modern Nintendo in how little it relies on rote nostalgia, how it takes an iconoclastic approach to a lot of Zelda tradition, and makes use of what it keeps mostly for deliberate impact and effect.

All these experiences, not to mention the two hundred hours that ensued once I actually got Link off of the plateau, were probably perfect to experience for the first time during the pandemic, being offered a sense of freedom and outdoors exploration that I craved more than ever in a particularly suffocating period of my life, for more reasons than just the novel virus itself.
I know a handful of my reviews across the past year have said “I liked it because I played it during the pandemic”, but Breath of the Wild might be my most sincere, most unreserved nomination for that title.


Which is not to say that I don’t have any reservations about Breath of the Wild. Bear with me, you’ll hate me after I say this: in some ways, I think the 2017 Zelda game is all breath… but no depth.

I feel a little bad saying that about Breath of the Wild on account of what it does accomplish, honestly. But there are a lot of small issues I have with each individual nuance of the game that add up and creep in as a sort of mild dissatisfaction that detriments from my overall experience.

A lot of them will sound like familiar nitpicks - what’s with rain and climbing being so at odds in such a clumsy way, and why does Revali’s Gale remove half of the complexity provided by both mechanics? Is the way they handled weapon durability really the best way they could have gone about it? Don’t the infinite material limit and expandable equipment slots incentivise hoarding? Are extra temporary health/stamina foods not straight-up better than restorative foods? Does the Master Sword (and Urbosa’s Fury) make weapon durability pointless once unlocked?

But I think you can agree with me that in 2021, these seem like pretty uninteresting thoughts to explore. So maybe let’s not do that, and look at the bigger picture once again.

On paper, I really love the idea of how Breath of the Wild decides to paint its story and central conflict, where most of the story has already taken place, and you’re mostly going through the post-mortem of everything and slowly building up Link’s power until he’s ready to go and set things right. With the conflict against Ganon being looming but never present until Link actually goes to confront him, Breath of the Wild presents itself as the most peaceful and beautiful apocalypse ever.


But, as much as I resonated with Zelda’s struggle to keep her composure under overwhelming impostor syndrome, being forbidden from exploring her true passions, how much responsibility was put on her to the brink of straight up breaking, and how her father clearly struggled himself throughout the entire ordeal, how much grief there is to be found if you look around in aspects of Breath of the Wild’s story, especially family-related grief…
I couldn’t tell you I actually cried through any of it - and I’m a person who’s moved to tears by the slightest instance of family-related loss in fiction.

On one hand, I think it’d make sense to be able to approach all these events from some distance - a hundred years’ worth, in fact - but the thing is that with the memories, Nintendo wanted players to be able to experience these key moments themselves. And maybe this was better than going through the entire story and having to bear watching Zelda under so much anxiety through every moment of uninterrupted storytelling? I’m not sure.
And I don’t think Nintendo was entirely sure about how much show and how much tell they wanted, exactly how detached or attached they wanted players to be from the events of Hyrule’s past. It’s the Super Mario Galaxy issue again: Nintendo not being sure how minimalist or maximalist they wanted to be.

A lot of these issues communicate an underlying unconfidence to me as to how Nintendo felt about moving past a lot of Zelda conventions. I feel like the swordplay and weapon-based combat is a big sign - neither Flurry Rush nor Sneakstrike feel like actually interesting mechanics, and while it’s clear that Nintendo wanted to revolutionize swordplay in Zelda, the impression I get is just that… it’s shallow breathing. I would honestly have liked to see them go even further. Ditch the idea that Link has to be a swordsman. It’s called Breath of the Wild. Maybe let Link be the breath of the wild - the wind. Maybe his rune powers could revolve around controlling air flow and wind, and become a mainstay of his kit. Maybe combat could involve deflecting enemy projectiles and blowing them back into them - kind of like an equivalent of perfect shielding for physical projectiles, and less inconsistent.

Maybe they could even (gasp) let Link be anything other than a white blond boy. I’ve literally never understood Nintendo’s thinking regarding Link as a player avatar, and a lot of related points affect how I enjoy games in general (not even just Zelda) more than I honestly care to admit.
Am I ready to completely tank my credibility as a video game critic? I am. Let’s do this.


“You’ve acquired the legendary Master Sword, that which seals the darkness. You feel that the sword itself delights to be in your possession…”

...what?

”You scurry back to the Pokémon Center, protecting your exhausted Pokémon from any further harm…”

huh?

”YOU GOT A MOON!
Bench Friends”

I think you get where I’m getting at with this. Who is you? Who is this you that video games talk to? Is it the player character? Is it the player? Do video games know how to tell the difference? Do video games even recognize that there is a distinction to be made?

There are basically two examples I can think of that are consciously exempt from this, both by the one same person dog: Undertale and Deltarune. A lot of other games seem to conflate the concepts of the player character and the player in how they address them, even in cases where multiple player characters are involved. And honestly? It frustrates me quite a bit.
I have a bit of an irrational obsession against the original Dragon Quest, for example - and that’s because the NES script constantly refers to the Hero as “you”, in a position that I have no connection to whatsoever. I’m a bit more comfortable with Pokémon games by contrast partly because the older games at least have the courtesy to refer to the player character only by the name players choose for them, letting them detach from the player character if they wish; and the newer games at least make the process of relating to the player character more natural by letting players customize their characters to better represent how they wish to present within the game world.

But by far the worst case I have about it is with Zelda, because of how the series insists that Link is a one-for-one representation of the player: making him silent so that players can supposedly imagine what he says, and what his personality is like; coming from humble backgrounds so that players can imagine themselves being the underdog just like Link, triumphing despite not having any inherent advantages; his name (customizable in most entries, even those with Link in the name) is at least partly based on his role in connecting the player to the game; Eiji Aonuma even making the extremely audacious claim that they intended him to be gender neutral in various incarnations.

To which I will always quote the single reason why Romani insists Link should train with her to fight off the aliens in Majora’s Mask:

“You’re a boy, won’t you try?”

Breath of the Wild does break a lot of conventions regarding Link. Link’s chronological earliest appearance is after already having been knighted, with the Master Sword in his possession; his name is fixed, though that probably has more to do with the fact that cutscenes are fully voiced now; and his dialogue options display more character than ever, and even provides monologue at times (the Japanese and Korean scripts present the Adventure Log entirely from Link’s own point of view, in fact). In a lot of senses, Link is more of an autonomous character than ever before, and a lot of the snags in player/character incongruence that remain can be bypassed with how much choice Breath of the Wild provides.

So it feels all the more incongruent when an essential part of the Divine Beasts quest has Link thrown out from Gerudo Town for being male, only being allowed entry under the specific understanding that he engages in crossdressing, doing something he shouldn’t be doing. Comparing it to Super Mario Odyssey, where Mario literally only tries on (a version of) Peach’s wedding dress because he feels like it, and the only two responses he gets are a “You’re getting married and you didn’t tell me?!” from Luigi and a “You look amazing! Love the outfit!” from Bowser, it feels particularly out of touch by contrast.

You might have noticed I’ve referred to Link specifically as himself throughout this review without conflating him with me or you. Call it a nitpick, call it worse things, but this matters to me, you know?

I think Breath of the Wild is definitely going in a direction where I want to see the Zelda franchise going, and even as a snapshot of a work in progress, I’m hooked. It’s just that I think Zelda is capable of a lot more, and I think it’s capable of being even more meaningful to video games than it already has been in the past four years. I’m not worried about that. The sequel already looks like it’s checking a lot of boxes that I’m really excited about, so let’s wait and see.

I’m holding my breath, Nintendo. Your move.

Rating this game and then discussing said ratings for this game always feels like an intensely difficult thing to talk about without anyone from any side of the scale looking at you like you're batshit insane.

Personally, I really loved this game as of finishing my first playthrough. I was able to confidently say it was a 5/5 without doubt. Seeing the sights, completing shrines, fulfilling NPC quests, and overall just appreciating what goes into the game all around. It was quite the experience. Opening that map for the first time and getting hit with a wave of sheer excitement, wonder, and intrigue. For me, imagination has always been my driving factor for finding interest and gleaning enjoyment from the game. How could I not? This is the first truly open-world Zelda, for crying out loud, this shit was ground-breaking. Unlocking towers and scouting out the area looking for as much stuff to do before setting off and envisioning what crazy adventures await me next was definitely a HUGE motivation.

Unfortunately, this is where my enjoyment with the game staggers a bit.

Once I had completed the game, I sat on my thoughts of it being perfect for a LONG time. I had no reason to revisit for any reason, and I never really paid it much thought to think of the game in its totality. That is, until, Tears of The Kingdom's release date drew near. I immediately hit the game up and created a new save file to start all over again. As I progressed through the game, it became blatantly obvious just how much of the game relied upon my own imagination to theory craft about what could possibly come next. Knowing the limited enemy variety, tiny boss variety, and limited combat ability left me a bit perplexed as to WHY I enjoyed the game as much as I did. All of this, in conjunction with the sheer scope of the world and other various mechanics, it became obvious that the game is—for the most part—a one and done deal for me. Exploration is a key part of the game, to its own detriment, and I see it as a main source of enjoyment when I put the pieces together. All other aspects of the game pale in comparison. The story is cool, the combat is alright, etc. etc. but I truly think none of it compares to the feeling of exploration on a blind playthrough. When the learning phase finally reaches its conclusion, all that you're left is with a set of OK mechanics that aren't quite exactly shitty, but they aren't the cream of the crop either.

Don't misunderstand, I love this game. But it's hard to say that without a plethora of problems spawning in my mind. I am proud to say that I still regard my first playthrough of the game to have been a 5/5 experience. Unfortunately, I am unable to say the same when it comes to revisiting the game or looking at it as a whole retrospectively. I'm still able to appreciate this game for what it manages to accomplish as it is the first truly open world for the Zelda series, and I can definitely understand why others are able to regard it so highly. I am unable to say the same on retrospection.

“You can't expect to be surprised by a mystery novel twice.”

baby's first immersive sim¹

wonderful game. loved it way more than i thinked i would -- not a big fan of open world games. best princess zelda, love the history and THAT ENDING was really emotional.

made me think how good zelda actually is, not only as a franchise, but as a mythos.

¹i am baby

Then, Now and Forever

Then:

Breath of the wild has never really struck me as a ‘masterpiece’. Is it a good game? Definitely, but it has always been given titles that I’ve never thought have truly described the game properly. ‘Innovative’, ‘legendary’, ‘revolutionary’, and the list goes on. But what did I think of the game when it came out? It’s alright I guess. Nothing that hasn’t been done before…

You play as link yet again, with Zelda being trapped with calamity ganon. Your mission is to defeat ganon and put an end to the calamity in hyrule. A pretty simple plot which has been described as simple yet expansive and I couldn’t agree more. After the tutorial you’re basically allowed to do whatever you want. You want to go to the other side of the world? Go for it. You want to go straight to the castle and finish the game? Sure. You want to get killed by enemies and guardians every few meters? I don’t think you have a choice on that one. The game is free for you to do whatever you want. But it’s not like this is anything new right?

The problem I have is that people declare botw to be this ‘revolutionary’ and ‘timeless’ game when it’s just taken ideas from other games and refined them to not only fit Zelda, but to fit a wide audience. I’m not complaining about it, I admire the idea that they took ideas from Zelda and other games and almost refined them and meshed them together…but it isn’t necessarily revolutionary. Take the idea of going straight to the final boss. It seems quite cool and unique, but If you think about it then it’s just a really extreme version of skipping side quests and sticking with the main scenario. Things like climbing, stamina, weapon durability, wet surfaces, gliding with a glider, mini dungeons, and crafting have all been done before. So in my humble opinion botw shouldn’t be seen as this ‘revolutionary’ title. It’s great, and I’m not challenging that. But it just might not be what people label it as.

There was something I once said to a friend of mine. I distinctly remember him saying that botw was timeless and is a modern day masterpiece. I agreed it was a good game but I also said that as an open world game, something will always come along and overshadow it. I knew for a fact that when the right open world game came, it would blow botw out of the water and finally show that it’s not all these titles it was displayed as. Maybe at the time they were correct, but nothing stays like that forever.

Now:

I called it. 5 years ago I called it but I never expected it to be overshadowed by its own sequel, and definitely not this well. Tears of the kingdom has truly shown that bigger probably does mean better. But where does this leave botw? Well, I thought I’d have another look and see how different the game is and see if any of my points were proven 5 years ago.

As I had said before, breath of the wild has many systems that have been done before…just not as well. Tears of the kingdom also takes this approach, taking ideas from other games and refining them. But the best part about it is they genuinely do feel revolutionary. The ability to attach things to weapons is a cool and exciting way of doing things and building vehicles is also very cool. So going back to botw almost feels like a joke. Your movement feels very limited compared to totk and I’m surprised about it if I’m quite honest. Battling also feels quite tame and monotonous compared to totk’s ideas. Coming back to botw feels honestly like a chore when you’ve played totk and it honestly feels quite sad. A game that was so highly regarded is probably going to sink because of its sequels success.

The story of botw is still great but I feel it doesn’t carry the game as much as you think it would. It’s an open world game, the story isn’t going to be that big of a part other than lore and world building. The gameplay is always going to be the main selling point of an open world game and unfortunately compared to totk it feels quite tame and pathetic compared to it. If I said ‘I told you so’ I’d seem like someone very big for my boots and trust me when I say I’m not. I’m surprised as everyone else that’s its sequel could be this good. It’s a shame because I do feel that botw does have some great aspects, but they’ve become highly overshadowed.

Forever:

So is breath of the wild still as good as people say? Kind of.
Sure it has been outdone by its sequel and completely put it in its place but it still has something there. If people were going to go into the series I would still recommend them playing it first. Botw is a very strong first Zelda game and one I think still kind of stands the test of time. As a Zelda game it is almost like a modern day ocarina of time. But, even oot has its flaws and it has aged. But that can go for any game and botw nor oot is just ‘any game’.
So is botw still a ‘timeless and ‘revolutionary’ game? No, but it has heart, and that isn’t something you can say about every game.

Great story, decent gameplay, cool world, nothing new, currently overshadowed, and fuck those korok seeds

Trying to play this again after taking a bit of a break from it.

I'm gonna come back to this eventually because I really do want to see it through but I just become so uninterested in so much of it that even the wonderful and lonely exploration can't save the frankly terrible combat and extremely boring storytelling.

What it excels at is very well done but what it fails at absolutely taints the experience to an almost unbearable degree for me.

Breath of the Wild is a game I absolutely adore the direction of. I will sing nothing but praises for its ideas, for its impact on the gaming landscape, for rejuvenating a franchise that had long past worn out its formula. But... I feel Breath of the Wild is reputed at a surface level. People praise what it is, rather than how it is.

The first 5 to 10-hours of BotW are magical. Open-world games have long since been content to copy-paste the same 5 activities across the whole map, with the most surface-level gameplay imaginable (the Ubisoft standard). Breath of the Wild eschews this by making the moment to moment gameplay of interacting with the world itself engaging. When you set a patch of grass ablaze the first time, you wonder why every game doesn't work this way. Why every game doesn't have a robust, believable chemistry system. Why almost every game only uses complicated physics for show, rather than gameplay possibilities like BotW. Why every game isn't this open. It's in those first hours that Breath of the Wild genuinely feels like a masterpiece.

But then those 10-hours come and pass. Another 10 are added. Then another 10. It wasn't until 50-hours in, after completing all content related to the main story, I tackled Ganon. During the time (somewhere 10 to 20-hours in) BotW transitioned from a breath of fresh air to a complete drag. After enough playtime, one learns the inner workings of the mechanics. One has ample equipment to tackle any challenge the game affords. Too cold? Put on your winter gear. A storm? Unequip your metal weapons so you don't get blasted by lighting. What was once novel & interesting becomes trite, more of the same. At that point what is one left with?

A boring, underdeveloped world. Where most of the notable content is shrines, the most uninspired thing that could fill the land. Where biomes, rather than have their own bespoke enemy types, use the same palette swapped pool of enemies from the other side of the map. Where even the main quest reuses the same general structure 4-times.
Link walks into place with environmental hazard. Meets ancestor of long-dead warrior. Completes quest to prove he's worthy. Assault sequence with ancestor. Rummages through divine beast. Get power-up. Done. Repeat 3-more times. That is the main quest of Breath of the Wild.

Ultimately, after the novelty and beauty of BotW's mechanical and chemistry systems wear off, you're left with a world bereft of wanderlust. Where you don't want to explore those mountains, because you already know what awaits. The same that was in the coppices. The same that was in the marshlands. The same handful of enemy types. The same simple puzzle shrines. Long stretches of vaguely similar content, to the point where the monotony borders on insanity. It all blends together after a while, because there's too little too few distinguishable traits strewn about. It's all the same.

Here's hoping BotW 2 takes the excellent framework established here and becomes the masterpiece I wish BotW 1 was.