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.

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.

i really tried to see this one through, but i couldnt.
it was fun at first! but it quickly turned into me pushing myself to play for sake of completion rather than actual enjoyment
open world is hard to get right, and i just dont think botw put the pieces together to make it work. the side quests often felt meaningless and there wasnt ever really much reward for my exploration. every character i met felt really one-dimensional too, so i had no reason to actually care about them or the story
all in all, botw just felt really underwhelming compared to the hype around it and im really glad i borrowed a friends copy rather than shelling out 60 usd for my own

Spending a year and a half slowly navigating the empty framework of botw world has been, an experience to say the least. Tens upon hundreds of hours spent scaling every nook and crany of a cyclical world where each element builds upon itself into a world that feels boundless yet is also, limited in its constituents. The first few hours are agony because the game is designed to let you loose into a world where you don't really know what's going on. It brings a sense of adventure like none other but also takes away the safe feeling of pop up tutorials that tell you "hey dont do this! hey dont do that!" so your hero's path looks like if sisyphus decided to hop onto the game and fight Boroklins with a twig and kept doing that for 2 hours straight hoping that something would change. (another reason why the game was so difficult to navigate was because I didn't set my emulator up properly so it was essentially running at 10 fps for the first 18 hours 😭) It's a wonder that I never dropped this game and kept coming back to it from time to time, week after week or month after month like a moth to a flame. Eventually I realise that everything I ever needed to know was already told to me from the beginning. After that realization struck, the journey became a lot more bearable until it eventually became so that I couldn't stop thinking about it for hours, even days on end. The quiet soundtrack, the sorrowful tales of hyrule, the interactions with all its colourful and eccentric habitants. The emptiness itself became my home, something I never wanted to sever myself from.

The game works. It just works. There's no lengthy essay than can properly state how homogeneous every tiny aspect of the world is. How each individual element can be extrapolated and experimented on. Complete with a set of wonderfully realised score and a timeless story that deals with loss, grief, tragedy and heroism in a world of inspired mythology. It wears its influence on its sleeves. Just take on look at the Koroks or Ganon's second form. It's basically a Princess Mononoke open world game and if that doesn't sound like the best thing ever then I don't know what to tell you. The detractors confound me, claiming that the game loses its sheen after the first few hours or that they don't understand why the game is so celebrated. But botw simply offers creative freedom unlike any other and it only becomes more evident to the player the more they spend time on it. It's just a creative firework and every game that has copied it since is all the better for it. For those who argue that the only reason BOTW is popular is because of the Zelda tag, I present to you: Genshin Impact. Exact same game down to the minutest details but without the Zelda tag and it won best mobile game.

Is it flawless? No. But that's a redundant question to begin with. Is it the best an open world formula has ever been implemented? That entirely depends on you. For me however, Breath of the Wild stands head and shoulder above its peers. There's nothing quite like it. It offered a liberating escape from the shackles of my mundane life and I'm eternally grateful for it.

Let's see if Tears of the Kingdom can shift my opinion.

10/10

O melhor: Não é sobre poder escalar aquela montanha distante, é sobre QUERER escalar aquela montanha distante
O pior: Apesar de eventualmente acostumar, por vez ou outra o sistema de durabilidade ainda incomodava
Objeto dos sonhos: Sheikah Slate? Claro que não... estou me referindo à panela de comida instantânea!

Esse é apenas o segundo Zelda que jogo até o final, sendo que o primeiro, Link's Awakening (a versão DX de Game Boy Color), está com certeza entre alguns dos melhores jogos que já joguei na vida. E o mesmo acontece com Breath of the Wild, o que indica que talvez eu devesse explorar melhor o resto da série no futuro... Mas por enquanto seguem as impressões daquele que, entre todos os jogos já lançados que simultaneamente encerram o ciclo de um console, e iniciam o do seu sucessor, provavelmente é o melhor deles.

As horas iniciais de Breath of the Wild são muito impressionantes, pelo simples volume de conteúdo que é apresentado. Em pouco tempo, Link já possui suas quatro principais habilidades do Sheikah Slate e o seu planador, o objetivo principal é apresentado e vários elementos como a escalada, comida, durabilidade de equipamentos, clima, e a própria física que rege o mundo são demonstrados de formas naturais e intuitivas. Confesso que tinha uma preocupação inicial em relação aos Shrines, no sentido de que a exploração do mapa fosse resumida em "ache os pontos brilhantes", mas essa impressão passa rapidamente ao entender que vários lugares de Hyrule funcionam como puzzles próprios. O mapa é vasto, mas fácil de se localizar por pontos de referência espalhados em cada direção, e do entendimento do cenário e de como navegar por ele, utilizando tudo o que foi mostrado já desde o começo do jogo, é de onde vem muito da minha apreciação por essa obra.

Para uma história que te coloca no papel do herói, que tem como grande objetivo lutar contra as forças do mal e resgatar uma princesa, Breath of the Wild é, curiosamente, por muitas vezes melancólico. Se a ambientação "pós-apocalíptica" facilita o jogo ser um mundo aberto por questões técnicas, ela também traz uma constante lembrança dos eventos que precedem a história principal. Alguns desses momentos são apresentados através de breves cutscenes que podem até passar despercebidas para quem não tem o interesse de procurá-las, o que é uma pena pois os personagens retratados nelas (tanto os Campeões quanto a própria Zelda) são muito interessantes. Mesmo tendo jogado a ótima DLC The Champions' Ballad, sinto que eles poderiam ser ainda melhor explorados. É o constante conflito entre a narrativa e uma estrutura de jogo não linear, mas eu consigo apreciar o que é feito aqui, mesmo querendo mais.

Uma mesma apreciação vem justamente dos momentos mais únicos e épicos da jornada. As quatro Divine Beasts, que a história introduz como passos necessários para o confronto final, funcionam bem como os "arcos" de cada uma das regiões do mapa, muito únicas tanto em design quanto pelos diferentes e carismáticos personagens em que nelas vivem. Essas "dungeons vivas" são incríveis visual e mecanicamente, além de apresentarem alguns dos maiores desafios de combate do jogo. Falando em combate, é provavelmente nele onde mais ficam minhas (poucas) críticas ao jogo, principalmente quando é necessário abordar vários inimigos ao mesmo tempo. Sinto que, nessas situações, a mira e a câmera por vezes não entram em acordo, e o melhor a se fazer é tomar uma distância para ter um respiro (ou nem isso, já que alguns inimigos são bem rápidos). Num todo não foi algo que afetou minha experiência negativamente, já que é fácil evitar boa parte dos combates (ou resolver eles de formas mais criativas, o que acaba sendo mais divertido), apenas sinto que esse aspecto não está no mesmo (alto) nível dos demais. A durabilidade das armas, arcos e escudos acrescenta uma tensão maior em certos momentos, sendo que às vezes uma situação pode sair do controle bem rápido. Felizmente, não é difícil se equipar bem o suficiente para encarar a maior parte das ameaças das forças de Ganon, mas fica aquela sensação de que o ideal é não se apegar a uma determinada arma, o que pode ser um pouco chato.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild é um dos poucos jogos que, mesmo após várias dezenas de horas, não tinha nenhuma pressa para terminar. Despertar curiosidade é um mérito, e o mapa de Hyrule faz isso constantemente, de modo que eu me importava menos se iria encontrar um Shrine, um baú, um Korok ou qualquer outra coisa, eu realmente só precisava chegar naquela montanha de formato único, naquela ilha mais afastada ou naquela planície de clima próprio. Há tantos momentos únicos que podem acontecer em uma jornada do ponto A ao ponto B (que geralmente vira do ponto A ao ponto C,D,E... sem previsão de chegar no B) que é curioso imaginar o quão diferente podem ser as memórias favoritas desse jogo para cada pessoa. Encontrar uma criatura fantástica ou um inimigo poderoso sem estar preparado, apreciar uma vista ao entardecer ou temer uma lua vermelha num mau momento. Para um jogo onde o ato de recuperar memórias passadas é apresentado como um dos desafios principais, a jornada pelo presente de Hyrule se torna nada menos que inesquecível.

Honestly I'm just writing this review because I remembered how much I enjoyed the game and needed to write it somewhere.

It's a game where it rewards you for doing (almost) whatever you wanted to do and I very much enjoyed the feeling of just being curious and exploring everywhere. It really made me realize how much I love open world exploration and made me want to look more into open world games too.

Fuck the Korok Seeds though, all 900 of them

(im on a mission to finish some left over reviews from the games ive played and post them before the end of the year or else theyre gonna show up in the game count of 2024 dont talk to me so its been a while since ive played \insert current game\ have fun with what i remember about it)


it's weird that a game that they always deemed a masterpiece is actually a masterpiece like where did my nonconformist maverick eccentric oddball sense of self went

ive been a fan of the legend of zelda since I was younger a statement that everyone on this planet would say (the first one was twilight princess and I still think that game is above breath of the wild im sorry yall but twilight princess absolutely stole my heart there's not one moment in my life when I don't think about wolf link and midna scouring through the dark realm of hyrule you iust can't replicate something like that you can make a game like that only once frfr)

meticulously the developers created a game bigger than life itself they just faced the god of creation like that to make the ultimate child and I think the mighty lord needs to watch their back period

following titular character link who I think its the first time you cant change his name because the protagonists actually call him link because they can talk unlike the gibberish of the other games (not derogatory I fucking love midna speaking her shit) waking up after a 100 years slumber with princess zelda going リンク 起きて OH also you guys can't fucking believe what I did for this game basically i was playing it in italian ok the greatest language of the world but since I fucking hate italian dub (actually its not that bad compared to english dub that ones pitiful but I still prefer to play japanese games in japanese because 1) i love japanese dub 2) maybe I'd learn more japanese from it (I don't because the subtitles get all my attention)) i took the japanese audio files online and put it into the italian version of the game to go over the italian audio files just to have the voices in japanese like this is some dedication yall so apparently you've been in a deep sleep and after some tutorial (great tutorial) of the main mechanics of the game you get some infodump and lore from one of the previous champions of hyrule (all terrifically dead) who looks like a fortune teller or a shaman she got a big ball that she doesn't want you to touch maybe that's where she gets her visions from the future but whatever so she tell you link! everyone's dead hyrule is gonna be destroyed by calamity ganon (have no idea how its called in english) and also it stole the colossi and princess zelda has been waiting patiently for your return do something apart from wearing some slutwear

majestic start so what you're gonna do is travel through the entirety of the land of hyrule with the objective of getting some sense into the colossi with philosophy also known as hitting their sweet spots with bomb arrows and solving their inner puzzles . ? weird but anyway

so now you got the whole world to explore . bomb long story short youre gonna do everything apart from the main quest thats whats gonna happen basically most of the gameplay loop surrounds a huge sense of exploration thats probably one of the biggest highlight of the game its basically oper world and you can do whatever you want traverse big plains or climb mountains or glide through the air theres a lot of stuff you can do and to actually aid the open world theres a lot of different shrines around hyrule and theyre basically small sized dungeons from the other games that actually use all the main mechanics from the game they usually range from pretty fun to actually unbearable like who thought i wanted to make a ball go out of a maze with motion controls anyhow theyre usually pretty interesting then they give you some collectibles and then you can spend them to either increase health or stamina im a big bitch and i wanted to have more time to run and climb so i spent most of the gems for the stamina gauge and what happened is that most monsters absolutely fucking killed me and i could not get the master sword for a damn wild thats what happens when youre stupid

so yeah this is probably the best part of the game for me apart from exploring but this game is genuinely HUGE you got some incredible amount of weapons and items to loot from around the world most people hate the breaking weapons mechanic i didnt particularly care for it it was pretty fun all around and most of the time i had huge amounts of weapons anyway cooking is also a thing and this can help you make some recipes to give you stat boosts or protection to weather or just heal some hearts and then you can get a horse and then you can get a house and then you can do a lot of side quests and then you can get koroks around hyrule while theyre hiding in the most stupid spots ever then you can increase the effectiveness of your equipment which is useless because enemies are still gonna fuck you up anyway and then you can explore every single part of the map to get a lot of different chests with stuff like arrows and shit and then you can sell stuff and then you can get a femboy attire theres A LOT you can do so im definitely not gonna get into it i dont have time new years eve is almost here i gotta be fast

while most of these elements are legitimately so different from the usual zelda experience that it made me pretty weirded out at first like the whole sense of exploration is unmatched to me and theres nothing that is gonna make me re evaluate the experience it was such a fucking wonderful emotion that few games actually managed to replicate im sorry uwu (i dont play a lot of open world games)

now what i do really think this game excels in is actually making the ocarina of time type of hyrule design into a intertwined operworld where you can get from the zora domain to the goron domain going through a lot of different biomes does that make sense and even the characterization of these places is incredibly iconic while they definitely dont feel as nostalgic as the one in ocarina i LOVE the zora domain or the gerudo desert or literally everything else in this game and this also elicits such a perfect rooster or main characters

apart from link and zelda ok whatever and also paya i love paya she wants to fuck link like really fuck him like really really fuck him most of the other characters are SOOOOO good in the rito village you get to know teba which is the new champion and the most gorgeous bird ive ever seen in my life i want to see his dick uhhhhhhhhhhh i meant i want to see him ride m mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm i want to see him do some backflips in the air yeah that one and even revali is actually such a good character most of the guys on the internet hate him because hes hot and theyre not uwu go cry hes rude because hes traumatised then you get kass which is ,.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, i dont think you actually want to know what i think about kass because im probably gonna get reported so i will leave it at that now the goron guys are actually the most anonymous ones for me since i dont really fuck with the personality of the new champion and ive never even wanted to be a babysitter in the first place then you have the gerudos with urbosa being the greatest lesbian ive ever seen in my life literally i can feel her she loves sports and she dresses like a boy and she fancies all other women and she hates men and she doesnt shave and she loves astrology but the one i really do love is riju i have no idea how they managed to make such a charming kid govern over the gerudos but they made the right decision i love her archetype and i love her energy good girl last but not least the zoras so umh every time i think about mipha i have a crying fit im not laughing this is not a joke have you seen the memory of link where mipha says “i hope that when this war ends you can be back her so we can play together like we did when we were kids” do you hear somebody crying rn because thats me im literally a corpse dont talk to me and then you have sidon now im not gonna say anything about sidon im just gonna put a copypasta and then youre gonna tell me what i think about him

I-I want your creamy warm cum inside of me I-I want u to choke me and use toys like vibrators~! I want to feel you deep down inside of me I want u to make me scream~ I want u to give me hickeys and bruises all over i-i want u to give it to me hard and dont hold back I wanna be soaked in your cum and my sweat I want u to fuck me for days and hours please daddy’s please! I-I want u t-to use all your s-sex toys on me e-every s-single o-one t-the vibrater t-the sex s-swing t-the whips a-all of t-them~ A-ah shit... Y-your cock is so big and in my ass already~? Mnn... Faster... Harder! Turn me into your dream slut~! Penetrate me until i burst! Mmmm~ Soothe me~ Caress me~ Fuck me~ Breed me~ Probe your thick, wet, throbbing cock deeper and deeper into my p***y Ahhh... Ahhh~ I-Im cumming Im cumming! Cum with me too! Drench me! Ill do the same~ Ill swallow your sticky essence along with you~ Im your personal cumbucket~!! I want you to touch me real good. damn..~ beat me I want you to make me leak and cum inside me I hope you cum all over me..pleasure me real good..~ you make me wet all day..~ eat me all you want...~ D..daddy..~ your going too f..fast..~ H..harder..!~You make me feel wet everyday..~A..ah..!! D..daddy..~ g..go rough..~ A..ahh..!!~ M..mm..~ I..I’m going to leak..!!~ A..ah..!~ G..gentle..~! Ahh..~ j..just a little deeper daddy!~ p..punish me d..daddy..~ I.. I. Feel so wet and j...juicy.~ mhmmmm~ to- to hard.. ahhhh~ m.. more p-please~!

moving on since you cant actually ONLY explore in this game the colossi are gonna act as the “true” dungeons of the game and in my honest opinion ????? they such ASS im so sorry im definitely not a fan of the colossi dungeons theyre completely unbearable for me because im dumb stupid absolutely ignorant i have no idea how to actually traverse a dungeon while actually tridimensionally move a damn colossus to activate 5 terminals i have NO idea how to do that ok dont talk to me and all this actually escalates into 4 copy and paste boss fights yeah umh as you can guess im not a huge fan of these parts of the game but at least theyre an interesting change of pace

another interesting change of pace is when you actually get to hyrule castle and theres like an incredibly big dungeon to explore with so many enemies against you and if you get in there when youre not well equipped trust they are gonna OWN your ASS so yada yada you battle some monsters get to the final boss realise you have to actually parry with the shield and double realise that you actually spent 60 hours in game without using the parry mechanic a single time so you now have to repeat the boss fight 5 times until you actually hone the technique (FUN) then fuck his ass up and then get into a shadow of the colossus boss fight completely out of nowhere then you fuck that bitch up and when hes dead the game ends

wow umh that sounded way less epic than it actually is but trust me as someone who loves shadow of the colossus . THAT ??? was epic

so even though this game has a lot of different problems i completely ignored every single one of them because sidon is in this game and i want to do the shape of water with him this is definitely such a different experience from the usual zelda formula and because its probably the most highly regarded game of this decade of course they would replicate the formula in tears of the kingdom but this is still such an incredible experience and the first playthrough in it was nothing short of magic and to those who actually think this games OST is hollow and sucks you honestly dont deserve a family have you LISTENED ??? to the final boss battle theme ??? im gonna throw hands

so yeah everybody thinks its a masterpiece and its actually a masterpiece i love everything in it lets wrap this up since this is the LAST GAME IM GONNA SPEEDWRITE AND TO WHOEVERS READING THIS HAPPY NEW YEAR YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH i hope im gonna have a sidon on me action in tears of the kingdom stay tuned im definitely gonna have a lot to say about that bye bye

also ive never played the dlcs and i dont plan to !!!!! good vibes !!!!!

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.”

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

HYRULE FANTASIES: A Long Essay about Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, and Moving Around a World

Part One: Breath of the Wild

I. Central Hyrule

As a child, when my family went to the beach that usually meant going to Kennington Cove. Driving southeast from our house, one often experiences the bizarre local phenomenon where temperatures drop 5+ degrees en route and fog banks creep over clear skies during the half hour drive. The road underneath narrows and grows more twisty and turns to dirt as you get closer: pine trees thicken around you, with the exception of the marsh over which English forces dragged cannons to siege the French Fortress of Louisbourg during the Seven Years War. Then finally the woods clear and you descend a hill and see the beach: pounding North Atlantic waves that once knocked off a cousin's swimming trunks; a creek and pond where my sister traumatically got a leech on her; and a high (to a child) outcrop that blocks the view east. After working your way around the base of the outcrop, you'll find the rocky part of the cove with a beautiful little corridor between high rectangular slabs and a cairn noting the landing of General Wolfe for the aforementioned siege, a year and a half before his painterly death on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec.

I have been inordinately lucky in how much of the world I have been to in just under three decades of life. As a child, I looked at the horizon from the Denver airport and slowly realized those were not some unified wave of massive clouds: those were the Rockies. As a teenager, I stood near the Pyramids of Giza looking down into the pit from which archaeologists had exhumed Pharoah Khufu's millennia-old solar barque, less than a year before revolution would erupt in Cairo. As a young adult, I’ve walked through Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden at sunset and knew instantly I would never see anywhere more beautiful; I’ve eaten wild boar ragu pappardelle on a warm night in San Gimignano; I’ve walked the canal in Dotonbori while thinking about my fading relationship and my looming return to academia.

All that said, I am not the sort of person to mention travel in a dating app bio or try to go somewhere new every year. Those trips I just mentioned were almost exclusively taken with and planned by my family; I tend to take travel opportunities when they are offered to me rather than seeking them out myself. After all, it’s hard to not feel somewhat uncomfortable about tourism growing up somewhere that clung to it like a lifeboat after the collapse of its industrial economy; extraction of coal from the earth transfiguring into extraction of folk culture from communities. As I’ve grown and my relationship to my home has changed from daily habitat to semi-annual refuge, it’s forced me to confront why I go anywhere new or old to me and what I hope to feel and do there.

When I go somewhere new, I hope to find the sort of things I described in Kennington Cove: somewhere to walk, somewhere to sit, somewhere to swim. Nature and humanity and the history of their overlap. Some beautiful things with marks of how people can make them ugly. Somewhere I can get lost, get my bearings, and get back on track. A place I can come back from and have a story to share with friends.

Now, this is not where I say "Breath of the Wild captures all this in video game form." Because it does not. I could feel you rolling your eyes thinking that I might say that: writing is fun! This is instead where I say that I still cannot believe a game gets decently close to the feelings I get from going somewhere I’ve never been.

Breath of the Wild condenses the feeling of traversing hills, roads, rocks, water, sand, snow, fog and rain, objectifying their essence without losing it. It simplifies the acts of climbing and paragliding in service of making every inch of the world reachable, necessarily swapping out the series' puzzle-solving progression for problem-solving. Layering its vistas with a keen eye for sparking intrigue and refusing to write any cheques it cannot cash, this version of Hyrule becomes a garden of forking paths that necessarily demands a player take up some authorial interest in the type of adventure they wish to have. It does not do anything video games had never done before, and it undeniably trades on the goodwill of a series that has been a constant presence in my life. This is not a review or critique, rather an appreciation of a work that brought me back into the fold of video games and fundamentally altered how I engage with them.

I have a lot to say about it, but I think it's worth starting with what others said about Breath of the Wild before it ever came about.

II. Necluda

One can find a fair amount of youtubers who cut their teeth on the Legend of Zelda series. Generating opinions about Zelda and finding an audience for those opinions are pretty straightforward matters given the series' reputation, availability, and iterative nature. This sort of thing was my own introduction to discussions around game design, though looking back I find a lot of them treat critiquing a game as "identifying stretches of the game that weren't exactly what I wanted them to be" without much deeper consideration of what that says about the game or—more importantly—about the reviewer. As I get older and have become increasingly annoyed by the conflation between critique and complaint, I have tried my best to distinguish between that which is not to my taste and that which I think is genuinely flawed.

Through these sorts of people (notably Egoraptor and Matthewmatosis), it became fashionable in the period between Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild to argue that Zelda needed to go back to its roots and ditch the formula that had governed since A Link To The Past. Stop hand-holding, embrace non-linearity and challenge, let story justification take a back seat to player curiosity. Certainly I agreed that Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword represented a downturn, but the originalist sentiment positioned as the ideal alternative never resonated with me.

I had (and have) no problem with Zelda games being formulaic, because the formula is rock solid. Upon that foundation Aonuma & Co. could construct thoughtful deviations and iterations that took calculated risks. Application of this formula produced games about the relationship between author and audience, about the fear of adulthood, about the question of how to commit ourselves to helping people in a dying world. This formula allowed for robust experiments in game design: dropping the player in an ocean, allowing them to merge into walls, or having four distinct versions of the overworld to consider in traversal. Revisiting each game remained fun in the way one enjoys relistening to a favourite album, but it also offered chances to reflect and reconsider in fuller understanding of where the series had been and where it would go. Prior to Breath of the Wild, I would no sooner have asked the Zelda team to stop making games in that formula than I would have asked Phoenix to stop making ten-track pop albums with jangly guitars and evocative lyrics that don't make much sense.

What was holding the series back in the decade between Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild was less an issue with the formula and more an issue with the variables. Every Zelda game makes space to try out some new ideas and forge its own mechanical identity, but this era of shrinking down or becoming a wolf or incorporating motion controls lacked verve. A Link Between Worlds’ rocky development reflected the mounting tension: Kentaro Tominaga basically pitched the concept of puzzle shrines built around wall-merging in lieu of dungeons while Miyamoto pushed for A Link To The Past But Different. Aonuma found a middle ground, and Hiromasa Shikata shepherded in an excellent game, illustrating that thoughtful variables make it hard to complain about the formula.

Enter Breath of the Wild: both a strict originalist and a sentimentalist for the series as a whole; both a fundamental rethinking of the formula and a wildly inventive riff on it; both a safe bet and a desperate gamble. It sold like hotcakes attached to a table that lets you eat hotcakes anywhere, which is to say better than all prior hotcake sales. I watched this happening from afar, having all but abandoned video games for my undergraduate years which concluded on November 8, 2016 (one of the all-time worst days to graduate) on top of having only owned a Wii for 2007 to 2012. After some personal accounting both spiritual and financial, I figured Breath of the Wild on its own was worth the cost of buying a Switch--even if the console proved to be a dud beyond this one game. In October 2017, I bought in.

My first playthrough reflected my disconnect from the intervening years of open-world games and my desire for A New Zelda. I adopted each lesson from the Great Plateau as isolated solutions to singular overworld puzzles in the spirit of how items operated in Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. When I acquired the paraglider and the world opened, I dutifully followed the main questline to see my old pal Impa. You know the first time I saw a horse that looked like Epona I did everything I could to tame it. When I reached Lanayru and found it impossible to climb in the rain and a charming NPC was requesting my help, I felt comforted: this is what I know how to do.

Gradually, I opened up to the more free-form and improvisational spirit of the game. I found it hard to articulate the appeal beyond how it let me do almost everything games I’d played up until that point had routinely denied me, Zelda included. No more walls, just surfaces. But having sated my main quest completion instinct before confronting Hyrule Castle, I found I could just Zora swim up a few waterfalls and bypass the entire thing. This gave me pause. Was I being rewarded for diligent play, or was I cheating myself out of a good time? Before I had finished the target practice finale, the gears were turning faster: had I been cheating myself out of a better time all along?

This was not an album to replay when I wanted to hear it again. This was a piano. And I could keep playing the notes in the book at the pace of the metronome, or I could learn to make my own music.

When I went looking for insights into Breath of the Wild, I found a lot of complaint-as-critique, a lot of “it’s a great game but not a great Zelda game,” and a lot of general praise. To find people with something smarter to say, I’d have to go to new places.

III. Faron

For all my life, a constant joy has been going over rocky terrain. Yes, I recognize this makes me sound like Russell Crowe saying he loves to see how things relate to each other topographically (which is to say “very cool”). At Kennington Cove there were rocks of all sizes below the cliffs, and I found it endlessly fun to try and hop from one to the other as quickly as I could, making dozens of microdecisions fluidly: will this surface let me stand or will I slide off it, can I hop up to that higher rock, what if I maintain my momentum by immediately jumping off that one, what if I do that on that steep one to change direction, on and on. Going hiking on more rugged trails gives a similar sensation with roots and grass and soil and planks. I still do this sort of bounding now and I’m old enough to know that I’ll do it until I can’t. I don’t really like climbing because I have meringue for arms, but had I the upper body strength I imagine I’d get a similar rush from bouldering.

Naturally, the first game I played that could virtually replicate this sensation irretrievably won me over.

Traversal in Breath of the Wild—be it climbing, hiking, jumping, paragliding, swimming, shield surfing or horseback riding—requires you read the land and place your feet and hands accordingly. Every time you stumble, you get a better feel for Link’s limits and think about how it would have gone had you done it a little differently. Over time you pick up a dozen habits to optimize movement when necessary, but ambling along never loses its charm. Amplifying all of this is the ability to prioritize stamina upgrades over increased hearts, prepare stamina consumables for difficult climbs, and augment speed with clothing sets. Every time you crest a height, you can spot a new challenge. Refreshingly, the Zelda team prioritized intrinsic motivation for such traversal over extrinsic. The most you’ll ever mechanically get for satisfying your natural curiosity is a shrine or a Korok seed, which never feels as good as a vista to soak in.

What separates this from movement in similar games? It is tight and responsive with the requisite Nintendo polish, but it is more grounded than a Mario or Metroid. It maps its adaptable inputs onto dependable surfaces, never raising the Assassin’s Creed issue of snapping to some nearby target or catching a non-interactable edge and getting thrown off course. Yet it also does not demand such technical precision seen in Mirror’s Edge or Death Stranding, as this would inhibit the impulsive “what’s over there” nature of the game. For a while it seemed they had even defeated the series-fostered compulsion to roll/backstep/side-hop/sprint between stamina fruit for the sake of speed, but people eventually found the whistling glitch because old habits die hard.

For my money, this stamina system is the sturdiest spine you could wrap the flesh of a game around. Tuned expertly for moment-to-moment enjoyment, tailored carefully for thematic cohesion. If they’d built Kingdom Hearts or Bioshock or Rance around this sort of movement, I could probably hold my nose and have a good time despite them otherwise being diametrically opposite my personal taste. Mercifully, they instead made it for one of my favourite little green guys.

As you travel out from the rolling hills of Central Hyrule, the environments complicate traversal in satisfying ways. Faron is a solid example. You wander through thick jungle that’s already an unfamiliar biome for the series, beckoning you to leave the path. Trees obstruct your vision. The whole region is prone to thunderstorms that inhibit climbing or sparking updrafts to easily bypass these obstacles. You realize how reliant you’ve become on the ability to see ahead and plan your next five minutes or so of progress. Maybe you feel an echo of NES Zelda screens: deal with immediate threats, pick a direction to proceed, rinse and repeat. All this makes the need for the map more pressing. Maybe you thought to drop a marker from a nearby peak and have the general direction, maybe you’re fumbling around. Maybe you noticed the dragon rise from the jungle, maybe you didn’t. There’s ruins, lakes, rivers, and the map’s southern edge all luring you into little adventures.

Admirably, just about everywhere in Hyrule feels like it got enough attention to make it as compelling to explore first time through as Faron. Not all regions were created equal with respect to their quests and rewards, but in terms of environment design you really can’t go wrong whichever direction you take from the Great Plateau. It’s only in a Master Mode playthrough or when playing with self-imposed restrictions that it becomes somewhat necessary to think strategically rather than following your interest.

All that said, consider how you were playing late in your first playthrough. Were you still playing as deliberately as I describe in this section? Probably not, and why would you? You’ve got like a hundred warp points, the whole map revealed, all your major to-do items checked off. At any point you could materialize at the most convenient spot from which to get to anywhere you have your sights on. Based on conversations I’ve had with various people over the years, it’s typically around this point that burnout sets in. While this is a latent defect of open world game design, I would argue that losing the early game deliberateness sucks the joy from this game and a game designer can only do so much to remind someone to play interestingly. Eventide Island is often spoken of in terms of how it rejuvenated players’ enthusiasm, probably because it gets you navigating deliberately again while feeling much more capable and knowledgeable than they were on the Great Plateau.

My own repeat playthroughs have affirmed that Breath of the Wild is absolutely better when played with as little warping as possible and HUD off. Never let Revali say his gale is ready. Leave those towers untapped and your Sheikah Slate unmapped. Get your eyes off the bottom left corner and read the land all around you, then place your feet and hands accordingly. Remember what it was like to deal with scarcity, and drill down into that sensation. This should have been the basis for the game’s Master Mode: options like the Draconian Quest in Dragon Quest XI or the Pact of Punishment in Hades whose restrictions foster more attentive play. That said, none of those options should have been “enemies regenerate health whenever you aren’t attacking them”, good lord it makes fighting in that mode so tedious.

IV. Lanayru

Speaking of ways people get fed up with this game, let’s talk about those Divine Beasts. Probably the most commonly cited reason Breath of the Wild is “a great game but not a great Zelda game,” they are its iteration on the Zelda formula’s crown jewel: dungeons. They have been discussed to death. Truthfully, I don’t have much to say about any in isolation. GMTK summed up most of what I’d say were I to talk about them as Zelda dungeons. Instead, let’s talk about those Divine Beasts as examples of Breath of the Wild’s defamiliarization of Zelda puzzle-solving into Zelda problem-solving.

Puzzles have fairly rigid solutions, and one of the most reliable components of the Zelda formula was its approach to puzzle-solving: see things you can’t interact with, find an item, learn everything it can interact with, interact and feel smart. It was exceedingly rare to encounter a puzzle that just needed you to apply actual logic rather than Zelda logic. The Sacred Grove giants in Twilight Princess blindsided me growing up and the tile floor puzzles in the Oracle games still hassled me as an adult, but they were outliers. Most of the time, the difficulty was in knowing what an item could do. As the series reused items it tended to reuse their puzzles in tandem, kneecapping difficulty for returning players. Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword in particular suffered with their new items; half-baked As Seen On TV kitchen tools with one narrow function that were largely dropped after their respective dungeon (if not made obsolete by a later item). What was more consistently distinct game-to-game were the dungeons. Each room was a vessel for a puzzle or two or a combat encounter, or in the best dungeons the architecture made for a global puzzle. You find keys, open locks, kill a boss, feel good.

Breath of the Wild took a big step away from such puzzles. Shrines stuck closest to the old ways (or at least roughly 60% of the base-game shrines did), but its puzzles were more system-based than solution-based. Completing an electrical circuit is not solved by using the Cane of Electro to manifest wires. Instead, you can take any metal object from your surroundings or your inventory and bridge the gaps. As noted by Matthewmatosis, when coupled with the aesthetic sterility of shrines and Divine Beasts, the noise to signal ratio is nearly zero; it is almost always readily apparent what the end goal is, it’s just a matter of applying one of multiple things in your toolkit to reach that goal. You can feel the difference between being told “untie this knot” when all you have on hand are your hands and must make the right choices, and being told “make it so this knotted rope doesn’t bind these two things together” when you have your hands and a lighter and a knife and the ability to freeze water into a block of ice. You are problem-solving more than puzzle-solving.

The difference is even more obvious when you are navigating the overworld. Problem: get up that cliff. Solutions: set fire to grass for an updraft, use a stamina or speed consumable, wear climbing clothes, stasis-launch a tree trunk to get height, etc. Problem: big purple smoke pig surrounded by death lasers. Solution: [OVERFLOW ERROR]. Shrine problems are largely the same, but with a few more restrictions imposed. If anything, the worst shrines tend to be those that hew closest to traditional Zelda puzzle design with the fewest options for how to solve them, though in most of those cases that comes down to their simplicity. As an overarching design goal, the shift to problem-solving was cohesive with the rest of the game and had tremendous promise.

Based on conversations I’ve had over the years about this game, I find lot of people treat Breath of the Wild’s problem-solving gameplay within shrines and Divine Beasts as failed puzzle-solving gameplay. I argue that these approaches are structurally different and stoke different parts of your brain, so solving a problem doesn’t feel the same as solving a puzzle. In puzzle-solving, I find the moment of satisfaction hits when the solution that overcomes the catch occurs to me and execution is just reflexive. In problem-solving, I tend to sift through potential moves that could cohere into a solution if executed properly; the satisfaction thus hits when I see my chosen response through to completion. However, as the player gets their head around all the possible applications of their myriad tools, they are increasingly aware of the quick and easy fixes. And when the execution isn’t very complicated, there isn’t much satisfaction.

Enter a Divine Beast and you are given an overarching problem: activating five terminals. In addition to your existing toolset, you are given the ability to manipulate the architecture in some way. These are all at their core navigation problems, though some with more intermediate steps than others and with some theming. Furthermore, two of the five Divine Beasts (Vah Rudania and the DLC dungeon) have only two states while Vah Medoh only has three; only Vah Naboris and Vah Ruta involve more taxing thought than flipping a switch on or off. Experienced players will not spend much time on any of them, which seems to be somewhat intentional. Many noted the brevity of shrines and Divine Beasts was well-suited to the Switch’s portability: any time you resume your game, you can get something substantive done. But this also served to flatten out the experience somewhat. Every region has similarly distributed pockets of difficulty, and few adhere to a consistent theme for shrines throughout.

As with the Zelda formula, I don’t think Divine Beasts or Shrines were flawed and in need of fixing. Lord knows Zelda had dud dungeons before, and (for what they aim to be) the Divine Beasts are about as consistent in quality as Twilight Princess or Minish Cap. Some very good, some weak, on the whole a bit uninspired. But at first blush, they were a bag of sand swapped in for the golden idol of Classic Zelda Dungeons. While I get the knee-jerk dismissal at the time, I would hope most people have come to realize they were not a mistake. Shrines and Divine Beasts felt as prototypical as dungeons in the original Zelda did, with about as much room to grow.

Of all the things I could do with an essay about a Zelda game, the last thing I want is to tut-tut a bold idea handled messily. But that’s getting 6 years, 2 months and 9 days ahead of myself.

V. Akkala

Many discussions of Breath of the Wild upon release noted that this Zelda game was not afraid to kill you. Plenty of times that meant plummeting to your death or the weather catching you unprepared, but most jarringly it meant basic enemies could be lethal after decades of Zelda games whittling them down to minor inconveniences. Interlocked with this phenomenon was the weapon durability system, whose discourse has proven as resilient and appealing as cockroaches. Of all the aspects of the game and how much I appreciate them, durability and combat have undergone the most drastic positive shift.

No, the combat in Breath of the Wild is not as demanding, rich, nuanced, satisfying, or spectacular as plenty of games against which it is compared. That much is obvious to anyone and largely beside the point. What it is is a robust vein of expressive gameplay. That you will find a limited number of enemy camp layouts throughout the game is an invitation to hone certain strategies and experiment with others. That the game has decreased the number of discrete enemy types while vastly increasing the range of potential enemy behaviours is a salve on the late-game irritation that sets in towards the end of most Zelda games. And yes, all your shit breaks pretty quickly to get you to keep picking up new shit.

What I think cools a lot of players on the combat aside from not playing expressively (either from lack of creativity or not finding that type of play satisfying) is that you can frequently find yourself with a hard cap on how much damage you can output. Approach a camp with higher-level enemies and under-leveled weapons and you may just break everything you have without winning. You can also find yourself in situations where you can reliably get enough damage out but only through somewhat tedious means; doing chip damage with bombs and arrows until an enemy drops its superior weapon then dashing for it. Both issues undermine the dynamism and improv spirit felt when the combat is thriving.

Compared to the stamina system, where you will find almost everywhere in the world carefully tuned to allow for a smart player with minimal resources to get where they want to go, this feels poorly balanced. How anyone would try to balance such a combat system is well outside my area of expertise. Yet what irritated me more about the durability system upon my first playthrough was the thing that continues to irritate many about it: where was My Stuff?

Players love to have Their Stuff. We love a lightsaber in our chosen colour, a whip that vaporizes vampires, a sword that is also a gun. We love to have things our enemies don’t, that make us look like the protagonist and make them dead. And we want to keep these things to form an identity for our avatar. Most games succeed on this front either by having fixed characters and Stuff that are thoughtfully linked, or by having blank slate characters and an abundance of Stuff so any outcome feels meaningful by virtue of being personal. Breath of the Wild chose a different path, one littered with broken Stuff no different from what your enemies use against you. Even the freaks who bought Amiibo to get Their Amiibo Stuff found it shattering on the shields of Moblins. A handful of times I’ve seen this celebrated as some mono no aware motif, but that doesn’t ring true for me.

When it works, the durability system makes a player less attached to Their Stuff and more attached to Their Stories. The time you tried out a boomerang and forgot to catch it and an enemy behind you picked it up. The time you knocked a bokoblin backward into the kicking hind legs of your horse, sending it skyrocketing (after a slight delay where the game seemed to think “should this work?”). The time you leaped off a pillar right as a Guardian laser launched and entered bullet time with your bow, seeing the beam narrowly pass over your shoulder. Your Stuff is unremarkable and breakable because it fosters such remarkable and inimitable Stories; by this same stroke, Your Stuff becomes ill-suited for puzzles and much better suited for problems and Your Album becomes Your Instrument.

Though there are certainly parallels to how one’s items were used in the original Zelda, credit must be paid to director Hidemaro Fujibayashi. Combat in the Oracle games stood in stark contrast to the arcade qualities of the original they initially intended to remake by opening up the possibilities of Your Stuff. You can still shoot a projectile, but now that projectile can ricochet or have modifiers added to it. You still need to avoid incoming attacks, but you can now jump and block and increase your speed to more easily reposition. Restricting all this was the Game Boy’s two-button design, forcing you to make the most of your chosen combination lest you be forced in and out of menus repeatedly. Skyward Sword served as a false start in translating this more expressive gameplay to a 3D title, adding meters and upgrades to a combat system that never ended up needing them (if you broke any shield in Skyward Sword, how did you do that). Breath of the Wild found its juice by more fully embracing durability and making Your Stuff less special.

Returning to Breath of the Wild after playing both the Oracle games and Tears of the Kingdom, I find myself completely unattached to My Stuff and far more invested in My Stories. Taken on these terms, you are always able to rediscover an area even if you know where every enemy and chest and Korok will be. This section is under this heading because I love going around Akkala in both games: the autumnal colours and charm of Tarrey Town make it inviting and nostalgic, but also the dangerous citadel and towering chain of islands and Skull Lake enrich the combat encounters tremendously. Whenever the game presents such striking arenas, both in Akkala and elsewhere, the combat system sang and forged some of my most visceral memories in Hyrule.

Every time I come to this region, I find myself reminded of My Best Stories from these games. The stories I made myself and shared with others, resonating all the more when because of how Their Stories went differently.

VI. Eldin

The Game’s Story leaves more to be desired. At least, the overarching story it tells about Link does. We know Link less as a character of consistent personality or values and more as a vessel for familiar trials and tribulations. We see him venture into the unknown, find allies, encounter injustices and tragedies, struggle to right wrongs, and become strong enough to overcome some form of evil. Breath of the Wild’s Link experiences a singular tragedy upon introduction—the world he lived in was largely destroyed—then he sets out to grow strong enough to rescue Zelda. In a sense, this is another break from tradition and convention, but what grew from these cracks is of a more nebulous quality than most aforementioned sprouts of newness.

In its opening vista, Breath of the Wild cashed the cheque written by the NES original’s manual art: forests, plains, Death Mountain, all waiting for you to venture forth. Yet this environment is so bucolic, it begs the question: does this world actually need Link to save it? The Calamity is not a tragedy we guide Link through like giving Ganon access to the Triforce by mistake in Ocarina or seeing the kidnapping of Aryll in Wind Waker. We don’t feel culpable or helpless for our lack of involvement, and the century since has left Hyrule in surprisingly good shape. Sure it’s sad all those people got killed a century ago, yeah some spots are kind of hard to travel through now, and maybe we feel a bit melancholic seeing some ruined houses. But every village is doing fine: there’s no internal strife or intrigue, everyone is pretty cheery, and nowhere actually incurs damage from the looming Divine Beasts. Progressing the main quests achieves little besides stopping rain in Lanayru and quelling the sandstorm at the edges of Gerudo Desert. For the first time, Link feels incidental to the world.

Most of the story beats one expects from Link are instead bestowed on Zelda. We learn through location-specific flashbacks that she was burdened with unbearable pressure to fulfill her prophesied role, which clashed with her own curiosity and intelligence. Being a pious and proper princess got her nowhere with the distant goddesses, and doomed much of the kingdom. She instead found strength through a visceral desire to protect people she cared about, and managed to contain Calamity Ganon using this strength. Rescuing her is the one thing that feels truly necessary, and it resonates with the mechanical theme of charting one’s own course. Nothing mind-blowing, but it’s a resonant story told with touching subtlety.

It’s certainly laudable that no MacGuffins are required to defeat Calamity Ganon; he’s right where he’s always been and he’s only got so many hit points. There’s an interesting sense of non-linear excavation to finding memories and piecing together environmental context. But it all pales in comparison to the experiential narratives formed through play and discovery, and the weird tiny character nuggets found well off the beaten path. It is jarring how much more I care about a guy who tells me his name is Spinch and his horse’s name is Spinch and he doesn’t care if that confuses me than Yunobo; the only thing I remember about Yunobo is how annoying he sounded. The fastball the Zelda team has had for charming NPC weirdos has not diminished since we first met Error, but this underscores the appeal of the game’s stories are in their piecemeal nature.

A common critique is that Hyrule is underseasoned with content for its size, or that areas of the game are “empty”. While I don’t think people are misidentifying how much there is to do—plenty of spaces don’t have enemies, don’t overlap with any quest, and don’t present any unique traversal challenge—it does feel like a misunderstanding of the function of the game’s “empty” spaces. Even if you set aside the context that this is a post-apocalyptic landscape or that liminal zones give players breathing room to look around and find distant points of interest, there is the meditative quality one gets from being lonely on a rocky outcrop or in a quiet field. If you expect every inch of a game’s world to be giving something back to you, you will be disappointed in Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule. Over time I’ve come to appreciate this emptiness on the game’s part for leaving me room to make something, that it is provoking dialogue with the player rather than lecturing to them.

A national park does not come with a story, and perhaps it’s best to think of Breath of the Wild as not coming with one either. We visit it and tour through it, sometimes guided and sometimes not. We can stop to read the plaques if we want, but it is enough to give our own meaning to the terrain instead. Its appeal is in its difference from what we see in our daily life, and that it is preserved for whenever we return. Of course, this is not truly The Wild either; it is managed and mediated and selected for its picturesque scenery. Whatever we find there is what we bring with us, whatever we take back was always supposed to leave.

VII. Hebra

For my entire adolescence, video games were treated by most people I talked to and observed as products to either be avoided entirely or disposed of when rendered obsolete. To this day, many conversations about games are haunted by this churn: it didn’t age well, it’s obsolete, etc. Certain games are retired from the gladiatorial arena by critical consensus, but effigies of them can always be found burning and pin-stuffed behind closed doors. By virtue of its sequel reusing its overworld and its substantive overlap with many acclaimed releases of the last five years, the hour has come round at last for the rough beast of “is Breath of the Wild still worth playing?”

Part of the criticism you tend to see against Zelda games broadly is in the vein of "this game doesn't do anything new" and "this isn't any different from other games that aren't universally acclaimed". Breath of the Wild is no exception. These points dovetail nicely because yes, they often are doing something different though no, they are rarely doing something new. Ocarina of Time was not the first 3D action adventure game, Wind Waker was not the first cel-shaded video game, Breath of the Wild was not the first open world game where you could go straight to the endgame after the tutorial. Since its inception, Zelda has opted to arrive late to trends and take advantage of others' awkward steps onto new soil in striding more stably. And yes, it does so with the further advantage of nearly four decades of audience good-will to find deeper meaning in ordinary things and overlook technical frustrations, plus many fans who are not well-versed in video games outside the Nintendo-heavy canon.

Among contemporaries in the increasingly-maligned open-world adventure genre, Breath of the Wild is refreshingly honest in its promises. Hyrule is a verdant, idealized slice of nature rather than a blighted wasteland where people still have all the food and drink they need, or a bustling city with only a handful of buildings you can enter, or a faithful recreation of a historical time period where the only thing you can do is kill people. At no point do you improbably acquire a huge volume of data about the location of quests and collectibles and shops, or get locked into a sequence that causes a game over for reasons other than player death, or otherwise hit a wall of dissonance between the main quest and the self-directed exploration. Almost everything you need to know about the game can be learned within the first half hour, much of it following from basic intuition about how things behave in nature. Yes it has towers that give you maps and a lot of collectibles, but if you can’t tell the difference between this and a Ubisoft game you should try thinking harder.

There are no new ideas in Breath of the Wild, just great ideas. As such, it is always worth playing. In the six years since we have seen various games that were being developed in parallel were jamming on a similar beat (Outer Wilds, Death Stranding) or that began development afterward and found ways to incorporate that rhythm into their own playing (Elden Ring, Monster Hunter Rise). Independent developers have made striking efforts at emulating that mechanical freedom (Sable, A Short Hike) and this shows no signs of stopping. It is trite to credit Breath of the Wild with any industry-wide shift, but it would be equally ridiculous to act as if it had no impact. Beyond influence on developers, it serves to influence audience taste: welcoming newcomers to games, pointing passive observers to more diverse genres, pushing experienced players to reconsider what they thought they knew about this series.

Everything Aonuma, Fujibayashi, and the rest of the Zelda team committed to in Breath of the Wild was a tightrope walk. Its approach to storytelling, combat, exploration, and problem-solving systems all risked leaving newcomers and veterans out in the cold. Though they were sure to never veer so hard as to become inscrutable and thus unpopular, they picked their path and saw it through. They made the game they wanted, one that stands out from what came before without abandoning what endeared it to its audience. Standing on the summit they reached, one can see how they got here and imagine how much higher they could go. The appetite for the sequel set in, and the longer it took the more it gnawed at people. Some wanted to trek a bit back along the way to their ideal view, some wanted to find the next peak, some began imagining things that weren’t really feasible for the aging Tegra X1. After I came around to the full vision of the game, I was happy where it stood and would follow wherever it decided to go next.

Evergreenness is elusive, and certainly nothing can be for everyone. But Breath of the Wild feels like a landmark, worth visiting even if only so you can scoff and say it doesn’t live up to the hype. Like any lasting landmark, its spirit is old and its roots run deep. Veteran hands crafted this robust game that feeds simple desires, harkening back to early video games and childhood daydreaming. It is traditional in the way a snowball fight is traditional: not as a cultural practice, but as an organic consequence of humans responding to their environment. It is a game for all seasons and climates, of which we have only one more to visit.

VIII. Gerudo

Six years ago, I bought a Switch and Breath of the Wild. What I thought would be a nostalgic capstone on my relationship with video games turned out to be the foundation of my new interest in the medium. Everything it would teach me, suddenly and gradually, about how I thought about games has guided me to more interesting works to engage with and people to talk to. When I had effectively stopped following games as a medium in undergrad, the landscape still felt dominated by consumerist values and juvenile notions of objectivity in criticism. When I returned, it had splintered into both a more vitriolic and trashy thunderdome of attention and a more thoughtful and inquisitive space for creators and audiences, depending on where one chose to spend their time. Breath of the Wild received its near-customary adulation from established gaming media, but proved to have a far longer tail of speed-running, clip-sharing, and video-essaying than prior Zeldas. From where I’ve been standing, it’s seemingly never left current discourse, still standing as a peak for many and a trash-heap for others.

Most of this essay has tried to unpack what it means to me now. Like I said at the top, an appreciation. I hope it has conveyed a sentiment that has grown in me over the past six years: namely, that analyzing something for flaws in something you love isn’t very interesting.

Take a look on this website, on youtube, in forums and discords, and you’ll find countless takes on how Breath of the Wild is a flawed masterpiece, not a great Zelda game, overrated, lacking content, etc. You’ll find people who claim to want to fix its flaws, or that its sequel solved all their problems with it, or that both it and its sequels were mistakes. Over the years, I’ve engaged with a good chunk of this sort of stuff, and I revisited as much of it as I could while writing this in the hopes of not parroting others and sharpening my own perspective. What happened was I spent a lot of time bored, also kind of amazed people still complain about the Korok seeds good lord just do as many as you want to and avoid any you don’t and for the love of god understand that there are that many so wherever a player goes they are getting enough to upgrade consistently and you absolutely shouldn’t do all of them and Zelda games have never really intended players to get all the collectibles.

I was bored because a lot of people don’t know what a flaw is, don’t respect that a work of art is often smarter than the audience and the authors alike. Such conversations are especially condescending for a series that has retained a considerable amount of its core talent over decades; they know what they’re doing. The reason this whole thing is so long is to show that basically anything one person can read as a mistake, another can read as a virtue. Realistically, they are all consequences of achieving the vision the game’s designers strove for. I don’t know anyone who has nothing bad to say about Breath of the Wild, but personally I would rather celebrate what it is than lament what it is not. It is a great game and a great Zelda game, proving that the series is ultimately whatever its makers want it to be and not whatever fans imagine it to be.

Just as some people grow to scoff at The Beatles once they grow and learn they were not inventing rock music from the aether, some people abandon their interest in Zelda for its messier inspirations and offshoots. Circling back to their own introduction to the series, they might argue Zelda lost its way at some point and it no longer contains what made it appealing to them. Some take this further and misinterpret their preference for some platonic ideal, often based on that introduction or the one that hit them hardest. This instinct is borne out of a desire for constant progress and validation: I must be finding the authentic, the original, the ideal. I’ve given up on that.

Discourse around this game has run dry for me. If you think it’s not a great Zelda, or not a great open-world game, overrated and empty and a blight on the industry, go nuts. I have processed my doubts about this game and am beyond your help. Undoubtedly, somewhere people will think thoughtful things not yet said and find the words for them. However, I don’t think any will sound better than this game speaking for itself. The sound of footsteps, rainfall, and wind across every inch of a scenic world. Of placing your feet and hands accordingly. It helped me to trust myself, and in so doing I would find the right people to talk to when it came time to reconsider it alongside its sequel.

After a long journey we stand at the edge of the map. Verily, it be the nature of dreams to end. Though we can see the sands extending before us, text cuts us off: “You can’t go any further.” We turn around and go back, to find the world has changed.

We go further.

Sometimes people want to be a part of the thing. Particularly, people want to be a part of the the BIG thing. Even MORE specifically, people want to be part of the CURRENT BIG thing. It is some sort of vital ingrained compulsion that those connected to the internet or larger social circles through whatever vector develop innately. A lot of people call this compulsion FOMO, but I think it's worse than that. I think it's a human colonial impulse to want to stake some kind of ownership on the act of being- to say "this moment in time is mine and I exist. No one can take away this moment that everyone experienced and since this moment is at least partially mine, I am important and relevant and wanted. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be on the same page as your friends or whatever, but I'm talking about something else.

Breath of the Wild felt manufactured with the intent to create vapid marvel movie spectacle and crossbreed it with this "of-the-moment" impermanent obsession; it became a hybridized experiencesociety chimera. You can see this in a lot of the marketing for Tears of the Kingdom: tweets asking "are you ready to join all your friends and play more Tears of the Kingdom after a day away?" posted on a monday morning after the game's weekend release run. They do the thing all too-big-to-fail mega titles do where they put up a screengrab of the world map, the sheer amount of game in the game, and say "here we stand, towering over everything else. Look at all these 10/10s. We are beloved. Come be with us in our belovedness."

Which is all not a criticism of the game as much as it is a consequence of what the market generates. They want you to want them, like Fiona Apple wants you to love her on that one song where she starts making sounds like a gibbon. The difference is that Fiona Apple is a particular human being and BotW is a product and Link doesn't make funny gibbon sounds.

This game does initially feel magical and mystical, widescreen and arresting. It then quickly descends into a directionless IRS collection call job, running the world and ripping up its stones for your precious prizes with no real purpose other than the vague sense of seeing the number go up. Which is my main point of criticism for this game: it is an idle game that requires fantastic amounts of input. The gameplay loop is shallow and one dimensional, recycled challenges ad nauseum with nearly no shift in basic theming or even challenge. Everything is about as hard as everything else, the dungeons are footnotes at best, and the story borders on non-existent. None of these things are damning on their own, but combining them with the now ubiquitous presence of mechanic imitators and the virulent breathless exaltation of the game atop every possible "cool thing" list, and the fact that it seems to have earned this status for simply being unobtrusive, inoffensive and obscenely expansive in its vanilla nothingvoid- it makes me start to wonder if a lot of this weird culture was a deliberately induced by nintendo.

Maybe that's nuts. Maybe it's crazy to assume that Nintendo is happily creating a culture of expensive and time-consuming mediocrity to bring in the largest audience, to create some sort of universal group think that makes the property unassailable and infinitely valuable. Maybe that's nuts.

I think Link should be a girl

I was very sceptical when I heard it was massive open world, pick what way you go etc, very different from a traditional Zelda game.
After going in with an open mind, I found myself loving it, being lost in it, immersed in it!
Dont get me wrong, it can be extremely overwhelming with how much it throws at you when you are just exploring but youll find your self picking it up about 5 hours into it properly.

I'm fine with the lack of dungeons because with the way it plays it would feel very strange.
Bosses were kind of a let down though, but still enjoyed the challenge of them, as they are supposed to be difficult.

the exploration in this game is magical. on that first playthrough when you are exploring the great plateau and then find out how big the world actually is was crazy. going towards a story quest only to be distracted by a million different things but still having fun is what makes this game special. the dungeons aren't perfect and they kind of fumbled the bag at the end but the exploration where you can spend hours doing all this crazy stuff is what really sticks in my mind about this game. a must play for all switch owners