Replayed the game, but in mastermode for the first time. It was difficult at the begining but wasn't too hard after a while. I also never used fast travel and instead just wandered around the map on foot/horse. It was fun to revisit it after tears of the kingdoms' release, and it still holds up I'd say. Its a lot simpler and lacks a few of the QOL changes in totk, but unless youre playing them back to back its not really something you notice or pay attention to, besides a few times where I wish i could use ascend.

Easily one of the greatest games of all time


This game consistently hovers around my 1-3 spot in my favorite games ever for numerous reasons, but anyone who's played the game before knows that the reason it's so good is the open world.
Breath of the Wild was one of the first AAA games to give players a truly free open world. Players could do anything they wanted to, however they wanted to, and whenever they wanted to. The only mandatory part of the game was the tutorial section and after that there was 100 hours of you being able to mess around however you want. Playing this game made me feel like a little kid out on a playground doing whatever I thought was fun. I didn't have any parents telling me to get down from there, or to do this quest before I go beat the boss. There weren't any parents yelling at me to get down from there or telling me that this area is too high level for me. Breath of the Wild was a truly free experience and it perfectly encapsulates what a videogame should be.

From the makers of the best tasting apples, comes the best tasting orange. Lucky for me, I like oranges too.

There are a lot of ways to go on an adventure. You can loosely follow the trail laid before you, you can do everything the helicopter parent of a tour guide tells you to, or, like in 1986’s The Legend of Zelda, you can go wherever you want, however you want, consequences for getting lost be damned.

2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild aims to be like that original Zelda that started it all.

This is one of my favorite Zelda games of all time. It has so much going for it.

Its Hyrule is enormous and exploring its massive expanse is an adventure all its own. It is SO much fun to go from one place to another. The ability to climb and glide is truly what makes exploration so satisfying, if you can climb high enough, you can go anywhere.

And the beautifully rendered places you can go are pocked with civilization. Hylians, Sheikah, Gorons, Gerudo, Koroks, Zoras, and (to the bafflement of people who care about the lore of the series) Rito, all continue to live after the apocalypse that Hyrule suffered a hundred years ago. And these beautifully designed people are as charming and interesting as ever. You can spend an in game day walking around any of the villages and watch a single person’s daily routine. Every creature, every plant, every item is so thoroughly considered that the game has a paragraph of lore for each of them in the Hyrule Compendium. But you only get that lore by taking a picture first, so you’re asked to employ a fair level of scrutiny to all these lush locations you explore. You will be rewarded with people to talk to, plants to learn about, and even plant people to do minor puzzles for. So, so many plant people…

Some of those villages sell armor and clothing to help you traverse Hyrule. There’s clothing for hot weather, cold weather, really hot weather, armor for fights, armor for avoiding fights, it’s great. There’s even a crossdressing outfit, which I feel was a cultural touchstone, if only because it awakened something in so many people. I love customizability and Breath of the Wild gives us that in spades. Everyone’s Link will now look different from each other because it’s YOUR Link wearing your favorite clothes.

You can even take the plants you’ve foraged and used them to dye your armor, further adding to the customizability of your Link. And despite being unable to name your Link, it is more Your Link than ever before.

There is truly so much to see and so much to do.

Exploration is the most important thing in the game, maybe to the detriment of other aspects of it.

It’s entirely possible that my love for this game would not diminish in the slightest if there wasn’t any combat. But, for better or worse, I think the controversial combat system is thematically, a crucial part of it.

Breath of the Wild is a game about how nothing lasts forever. Great kingdoms will fall. Valiant heroes will die. Your weapons will break. You must accept this fact of the world and press on to save it nonetheless, because the here and now is worth saving. Breath of the Wild is a game about letting go.

The weapon degradation is the most poisonous aspect of the goal of letting go. It goes against everything the Zelda series has done before. Every cool elemental weapon you find has an expiration date, which makes some players prefer not to use them, so that they last longer. But the game wants you to learn to let go. Use it and lose it and move on. You’ll find another fire sword, there’s dozens of them and they always come back.

Now personally, I don’t hate the weapon degradation of Breath of the Wild. Every early fight is tense, and the act of throwing an almost-broken weapon at an enemy to deal double damage when the weapon breaks is very satisfying. And since most enemies have a weapon already, you’re always close to a replacement.

My problems with the weapon degradation comes in at the endgame. By this point, enemies have gotten stronger and become serious damage sponges. Even the most minor enemy, the lowly Bokoblin, has a silver variant with enough health to cost you at least one weapon. At the very least, this forces the player to get creative and start killing monsters in more…thrifty ways. Back stabs deal more damage so be sneaky. Enemies that end in “blin” can’t swim, so get them into deep water. Shocking an enemy makes them drop their weapon so you can snatch it and run. You can also just wear a disguise and avoid combat altogether if you want.

Eventually, you’ll start marking down where good weapons are and returning to them whenever there’s a Blood Moon that resets Hyrule to its base state, and you can pick those weapons up again. So now you don’t have to be thrifty, but then you have a steady enough flow of weapons that you might as well just have unbreakable weapons.

The degradation system is fine, but it really only shines in the early game. And Breath of the Wild knows this, because the Eventide Island shrine challenge takes all your weapons and armor away. You’re back to square one, and it’s great. I remember a lot of people rightfully hyping up Eventide Island, but it’s kind of just the Great Plateau again. The system needed something to justify itself in the endgame.

My real problem with the weapon degradation system, the actual beef I have, is something I will not waver on, and it is that the Master Sword degrades too. You have to work hard for the most iconic sword in video games and it still breaks on you? Sure it comes back after a bit but I have to wait? Really? Would making the Master Sword an unbreakable but average damage weapon be such a game changer? Maybe. But I would have liked it more.

But there is so much more to Zelda games than the combat so I will move on.

Unfortunately, the Zelda-ness of Breath of the Wild is perhaps a bit estranged. Four visually indistinct main dungeons and 120 micro-dungeon Shrines make up the main trials of the game and I have no real qualms outside of everything looking samey for the main dungeons, the Divine Beasts. The bite sized shrines peppering the massive world is a pretty genius way to have a Zelda game this big. It’s a great way to get players exploring more of the map, and I respect that. 120 is a little excessive though.

Those shrines test not just combat, but your knowledge of a part the game I haven’t brought up yet, the Runes. Essentially half of the dungeon item equivalents of Breath of the Wild, the Runes are very interesting in how they let you manipulate the world. Magnesis is a particular favorite of mine, but upgrading Stasis to make it freeze enemies turns it into a vital ability. The Cryonis rune is a little less flashy than the others, but the ability to cross rivers with it makes it no less important.

To fill out the arsenal of tools, you get an ability from beating each of the Divine Beasts, and they’re all useful but Revali’s Gale, which can help you get higher faster, is by far the best of them. Revali isn’t my favorite champion but you gotta hand it to him.

I can imagine the complaints that these abilities and runes replace the dungeon item toys from previous Zeldas, and I am absolutely hurting for a hookshot here, but all of these tools are useful in many situations. There is no Spinner equivalent here. There’s no Gust Bellows. Maybe it makes me a bad Zelda fan but I think that’s a fair trade.

I would be an even worse Zelda fan if I said I didn’t like this game’s Princess Zelda. I like just about every character from this game, but Zelda is the mvp. This pouty bookworm with the big eyebrows joins the ranks of all the top tier Princess Zeldas, right up there with the one from Ocarina of Time and the one from Wind Waker and yeah I’ll say it, the one from Spirit Tracks.

I think I like this one best though.

The memory cutscenes in this game flesh Zelda out so much more than we’ve ever gotten before. This game even makes us think of Zelda when we see a certain flower in the wild, a simple collectible item, because we’re told it’s her favorite. It’s a little thing but it goes a long long way. Trust me.

Before I wrap this up, I want to talk about the DLC, which adds a few extra story beats, an upgrade to the Master Sword (but not an unlimited durability), a motorcycle (lmao) and a more classic-style Zelda dungeon (which I ultimately forgot about). It also adds Master Mode, which makes every regular enemy one level stronger than they normally are, as well as adding a new Gold level for the strongest of enemies, and then gives every enemy regenerating health.

On the one hand, I welcome Master Mode’s added challenge and additional replay value to a very long game. On the other hand, Master Mode shows us how ironically fragile the durability system can be. It becomes mathematically unviable to fight large groups of enemies. This is where I learned that campfires are actually your best weapon. Trapping an enemy into standing on a campfire will make them slowly die, saving your weapons for more important fights. I think that’s a cool thing that this game allows, but avoiding combat at all costs is a bit of a problem. Of course, this is Master Mode, and not the base game, where this isn’t quite as necessary. I still would have liked the ability to increase durability at a fairy fountain or blacksmith for a sum of rupees. You CAN do this with a particular Octorok, but it requires a lot of time and luck so I just don’t bother.

I have beaten The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild three times. Once on regular mode and twice in Master Mode, one of which I only used spears as my weapon (it wound up being a lot easier than I was expecting it to be). I never 100%-ed any of those playthroughs because when I found out what the reward for helping all the koroks was, I lost interest. But I can proudly say that first playthrough was a 99% completion playthrough. I played this game so much it ruined my first set of joycons.

I love Breath of the Wild.

And I recommend it to anyone, just learn to let go.

Nintendo kültürüne hakim birisi değilim ve bu oyunu aldığı puanlardan da etkilenerek denemek istedim. Açık dünya formülü gerçekten etkili lafım yok. Renk paleti, teması ve atmosferi gibi görsel dili de güçlü bir oyun. 10 saat civarı bir oynanış sonrası merak duygum nedense azaldı. 250 saat Elden Ring oynayıp o karanlık atmosferde kaybolmuş biriyim. Belki de o karanlık tema beni etkilemiştir ama bu oyundaki düşmanları ve dövüş sistemine nedense bir türlü ayak uyduramadım. Bazı bosslar ile karşılaşınca ve ilk denemede geçince çok tatmin oldum fakat bir şeyler bana eksik geldi. Belki de kötü bir dönemimde bu oyunu keşfettim onun da etkisi olabilir ama beni rahatlatmak yerine sürekli rahatsız eden bir yapıda ilerledi. Bir de o at sürme olayı neden bu kadar kötü. Bu oyunu ileride bir gün tüm bir haftamı ayırarak denemek isterim ama bugün çok yorgun hissediyorum.

I'm not a Nintendo person and I wanted to try this game because I was impressed by the scores. The open world formula is really effective, I can't argue with that. The visual language is strong, as is the color palette, theme and atmosphere. After about 10 hours of gameplay, my sense of curiosity diminished for some reason. I played 250 hours of Elden Ring and got lost in the dark atmosphere. Maybe that dark theme affected me, but for some reason I couldn't keep up with the enemies and combat system in this game. I was very satisfied when I encountered some bosses and beat them on the first try, but something felt missing. Maybe it's because I discovered this game during a bad period of my life, but instead of relaxing me, it kept bothering me. And why is that horse riding thing so bad? I would like to try this game someday in the future by dedicating a whole week to it, but I feel very tired today.)