87 reviews liked by DeviousJinjo


If you’re short on time or haven’t played it, here’s what I’ll say: 1991’s SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy IV is, in my opinion, best enjoyed by those who can appreciate a short, dense, no-frills, melodramatic JRPG. It’s an essential game in the genre and, for whatever my judgement is worth, good. If that sounds like your cup of tea and you don’t know anything else, then I’d recommend playing it and forming an opinion before reading (if you regret it, you can bug me later).

This is a retrospective of where I was when I first played Final Fantasy IV, and a rundown of where I'm at now. I'll try not to spoil too many other games in the process.

On Final Fantasy IV (Or — "Jumping the Lunar Shark”)

It was all Chrono Trigger’s fault. A series of coincidences had guided me toward that prolific blend of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and I waltzed into 2019 wide-eyed and fascinated by a genre I'd once thought laughable. So now, having marveled at the results of their combined effort, it was time to pick a side for my next adventure. Yuji Horii beckoned to me from across the void, his latest Dragon Quest installment due on my game console that Fall, but Hironobu Sakaguchi leapt in with an ace up his sleeve. Not only would the ridiculously popular Final Fantasy VII release on Switch by March, but he’d recently converted a good friend of mine with its Steam version. So, in anticipation of that day, I began the new year with (let’s face it) the series’ foundation.

Dusk had settled over the city skyline, silhouettes of heavy coats retreated into apartments for blankets and coffee, and I was conjuring meteors to blow up an incarnation of living hatred. Final Fantasy IV had been my winter game, a boundless ongoing saga, and at last I’d arrived at the end. It should’ve been triumphant, the climactic conclusion to an epic quest spanning countries, realms, transcending even the planet itself. Finally I’d experienced a classic that meant so much to so many, that had contributed massively to the development of a genre and a generation of video game players. As Cecil and Rosa stood before their beloved crew of allies turned friends turned surrogate family members during their coronation, I felt a wave of relief as I realized it was finally…over with. I’d crossed Final Fantasy IV off of my bucket list.

But something about it lingered, and still does. I think back to Final Fantasy IV all the time. When ruminating in quiet moments, I sometimes rewind and play back the burning of Mist, the bombing of Damcyan and the death of Anna, the raid on Fabul and Rydia's return, and I can appreciate how pieces of the narrative seem to hold more layers than its charmingly chunky sprites let on. It’s hard not to notice specks of its influence in nearly every successive game in the genre, to say nothing of the groundwork it laid for the future of its own series. Though I can pinpoint the precise moment when my fascination clambered its way up and into a fat chocobo, there’s a lot to admire, even love about its dizzying ambition. It’s evident from the moment Uematsu’s incredible John Williams-inflected Red Wings theme booms over its soaring intro. Here’s where it got its hooks in me:

An earth-shattering event in the opening hour of the game has the player guiding a condemned Cecil Harvey through a scorching desert, burdened by the weight of his armor and an unconscious orphan while fending off hordes of vicious monsters. Until now the player has only seen flashes of the Dark Knight’s festering conscience over the atrocities he’s committed, but now he becomes decisive. Despite injury and lack of direction, with nobody to hold him to a moral standard, Cecil takes his first steps toward redemption by taking responsibility for the last surviving member of a village he’s inadvertently incinerated. It’s a powerful and understated gesture, represented only through the player’s own desire to press on through the overworld map and clobber goblins in intermittent random battles (curiously, a blue-clad hero would usher a green-haired girl to a desert oasis following an act of terrorism a second time just two games later). Subtle pieces of characterization like this permeate the battle mechanics. Cecil’s special ability as the Dark Knight is to cut a fraction of his own health for the sake of unleashing a powerful attack, evocative of his self-hatred, which is countered by Rosa’s potent healing spells. It even develops when Cecil becomes a Paladin and, effectively, becomes more like her. This is one of the key elements which makes Final Fantasy IV and other games of its ilk so fascinating to me. Since the developers were working in a time of abstractions, they had to find ways to use the language of the genre to convey their intent. How do you make a character feel like a person in a role-playing game? Square took to the tools they’d developed over the three previous installments and rearranged them in the shape of a drama.

Where previous entries in the series (and the next) would be content to keep classes significant only for strategic purposes, Final Fantasy IV uses them for character development as well. Palom’s rambunctious attitude is evident when he’s casting devastating offensive spells as a black mage, and even though he has a rocky relationship with his sister Porom, their “Twincast” ability assured me that they could get along when necessary. Yang’s focused and calculated physical combat maneuvers are emblematic of his discipline, which take time to build, but pay off in spades. Rydia refuses to cast fire spells until Rosa can help her come to terms with the aforementioned arson of her village, and eventually matures to the point at which she’s willing to trade in her aptitude in white magic for greater proficiency in those offensive abilities. Kain's bouncing between both sides as he’s repeatedly mind-controlled by Zemus is reflected in his elongated disappearances during battle as a leaping Dragoon. I’m half-joking with that last one, but this stuff really is all over the place. You might say I’m giving it too much credit given the simplicity of the characters, most of them are little more than archetypes, but the handful of ways those archetypes are expressed (and in some cases developed) still leaves an impression when every battle becomes an opportunity to participate in characterization.

If the DS remake is any indication, with its cinematic cutscenes, voice acting and the like (which nuke the pace from orbit), the Square Enix of today doesn't value these techniques as I do, but this is precisely the sort of thing that makes classic RPGs so special, and particularly Final Fantasy IV. It takes advantage of its game-dom to find routes to the player’s empathy using interactive systems. I mentioned that Cecil’s metamorphosis was one of my favorite sequences, and it’s not just the implication for his character, but the execution which makes it so memorable.

The setup is fantastic. A lone, weary Cecil is left to take refuge in Mysidia (the very place he pillaged as captain of the Red Wings), and the villagers try to tear him apart until the elder advises him to take to Mount Ordeals. Only there can he be purified of his sins and become a holy Paladin.

On arrival, the shambling undead who stalk Mount Ordeals take minimal damage from Cecil’s sword, emphasizing his nature as an agent of evil, unable to stand against it. He has to rely on the support of his allies, twin mages Palom and Porom and the elderly sage Tellah, to help him find redemption. His dependence reaches its apex as they stand against one of the Four Elemental Dante’s Inferno references and resident spelling bee stumper “Scarmiglione” (or Milon, if you like being wrong) and kick him off of a bridge to the beat of The Dreadful Fight. At the summit, the group crosses a rift into a mysterious chamber, and just as Cecil receives the Paladin’s blade and transforms, a manifestation of his past wrongdoings, fully clad in the armor of the Dark Knight, emerges from his reflection to face him. No matter what the player tosses at their doppelgänger, it cannot be defeated. “A true paladin will sheath his sword,” a voice whispers into the text box at the top of the screen. Cecil’s evil half pummels him again and again, and it can easily kill the player if they aren’t careful. It’s only when they recognize the metaphorically and mechanically self-destructive nature of the Dark Knight that they hold back to defend and heal themselves with Cecil’s newfound power, and his shadow dies expending the last of its violent energy. The player wins by refusing to fight, rejecting self-destruction and embracing love, and they do it using Final Fantasy IV’s battle mechanics. He takes up the Paladin armor and he returns to level one, but quickly ascends beyond his previous limits. It’s awesome. It’s Final Fantasy IV at its best. Just seventeen hours to go.

So yeah, here comes the heel turn. If you want a gauntlet of battles that’ll put your RPG combat skills to the test in a world of exhilarating twists and turns, you’ll find what you’re looking for in Final Fantasy IV. Part of me loves that about it, that I can boot it up and know exactly what I’m getting myself into, that I won’t have to bother with character customization or stat manipulation and just get the dungeon-crawling monster-fightin’ show on the road. That strict attention to pacing, party composition and encounter design is a quality it shares with MOTHER 3, Dragon Quest V and Chrono Trigger, but it’s all about the execution. These games weave the story into progression in meaningful ways, carefully constructing both elements alongside one another to great effect. FFIV was slated to do exactly that.

But in one hilarious moment, it became all-too clear to me that Sakaguchi had no idea where this was going.

Co-writer and director Takashi Tokita would tell you that they were only able to cram one measly fourth of Final Fantasy IV’s sprawling, epic script into the original cartridge. As Patrick Roesle of socksmakepeoplesexy.net once said (in an excellent write-up on the topic), “even though Square Enix proclaims itself a shaper of unique multimedia interactive art experiences, the SquareSoft that created Final Fantasy IV in 1991 made video games.” Which is to say, “bull[crap].” You can’t tell me that Sakaguchi had carefully and painstakingly deliberated over the implications of a man leaping off of an airship and strapping himself to a bomb to “seal the entrance” of a colossal chasm in the Earth and surviving. “JUST THROW IT, YOU MORON,” I howled (telepathically) at the screen. This guy had a daughter at home.

Final Fantasy IV began as a tale of self-reflection, revolt and redemption, and it is that for a good while. Cecil travels the world, proves himself to those he’s failed, and recruits a group of companions from across a variety of cultures and kingdoms, all to stand against the corruption of his homeland. Then they return to Baron, and so begins the slow descent into the Twilight Zone. I made a face when the evil king was revealed to be Cagnazzo all along, having killed and supplanted the real king. But wait, wasn’t that real king still the guy responsible for raising Cecil as a Dark Knight? Maybe Golbez had a hand in that, he seems to know what he’s doing. I thought the revelation that Kain had been mind-controlled the entire time was silly, but it was nice having him back in the party. Then, after a fierce fight with Barbariccia (Valvalis sounds cooler) and a thrilling escape to…Cecil’s room(?)…Kain’s gotta break the news. Golbez only has four crystals. Only? Whaddaya mean, isn’t that four outta four? Cid drops this gem of a quote, “So the legends are true after all!” (“Legends,” to which not one character has even tangentially referred over the course of this entire game), and this could’ve been anything. Instead, there are four more crystals underground. But, ya know…They’re dark crystals. They're darker.

Tellah died and took the story with him.

That was my first impression as a recently-converted Chrono Trigger shill in 2019, but even that wasn’t entirely fair. All of this plotting, this attention to the staging of events with animated characters and personalities whose crisscrossing actions and motivations contextualized the adventure, was completely unheard of. Dragon Quests I through IV were less “narratively-driven” and instead centered around exploring worlds whose goals and scenarios provided players the thread to weave their own experiential stories. Nobody does it like Yuji Horii, and if Final Fantasy had stayed its course, it’d have remained an awkward, lesser Dragon Quest. And so, Sakaguchi sought out and studied under Shonen Jump editor Kazuhiko Torishima in an effort to distinguish Final Fantasy from that philosophy. Tokita leapt at the chance to lend his theatrical expertise, and the result speaks for itself. The story may have commitment issues, but its manga-like attention to escalation and efficient characterization can’t be denied. In no previous JRPG did the party sit around a campfire mid-dungeon to discuss their worries, hopes, and doubts. Rarely did the player’s units bicker amongst themselves, turn against each other, or change their minds. Everyone is given their own animated identity, especially impressive given how few overworld sprites there are. It’s just unfortunate that the game’s chosen structural devices are horribly, goofily brittle.

I didn’t feel the need to mention the crystals up until now because…what’s there to say? Cecil just needed something precious to steal from the Mysidians. Baron needed justification for conquest aside from “just cuz”. They gave our heroes an urgent, tangible reason to seek out and protect other countries and people. Now you can forget about that whole theme of agency and redemption because it’s crystal time. It’s far less graceful about swapping party members around (now they all die (except not really)), Kain gets mind-controlled a second time, they recruit an edgy ninja named Edge whose parents have been turned into monsters by a mad scientist, they go inside a giant robot (and hear the best song in the game), we find out that Golbez was also mind-controlled so he’s a good guy and he’s Cecil’s brother and their dad was an alien, and one of the aliens has been behind everything from the very beginning so they take a spaceship to the moon to kill him (if you squint, you might notice that almost all of these points made their way into Final Fantasy VII in some form or another).

The tonal whiplash of fighting aliens with Cecil, the man who burned down a village, rescued an orphan, and spent the first quarter of Final Fantasy IV paying recompense for war crimes and becoming a holy knight, never left me. In fact, the sheer strangeness of later events got me to start poking holes in earlier bits of the story. What’s the point of Rydia’s mother’s soul being connected to the Mist Dragon? Cecil incinerated the entire village, I could’ve believed that she’d burned to death. How did Rosa reach Kaipo on foot? Couldn’t Cid have just taken her there on an airship? How did Edward end up all the way in Troia if he drowned in the ocean? Why does Leviathan attack the party if he’s actually a sapient, moral being? Why does Cecil sleep in his armor? How did Yang get captured and mind-controlled if he drowned in the ocean? I'm being deliberately facetious here, but the point stands. The magic began to evaporate as soon as I realized that SquareSoft had no interest in developing the premise that got me invested.

But in its place, something different bubbled into being. In spite of all I’ve said, I’ll admit that the longer I spent with Final Fantasy IV, the more appreciation and affection I developed for its bizarre, freewheeling narrative approach. It may not hold together on a literary level, but, strange as it might sound, there’s something endearing about that. The way its theatrical setup and dramatic cast dissolves further and further into incoherent chaos brings to mind a late-night tabletop campaign gone horribly wrong in all the right ways. The Dark Crystals exist because you and your buddies are having too much fun, the contrived reveals and sacrifices and even the fake-outs feel epic when the group is coming up with them on the fly around an empty pizza box, and, even as I was picking it apart with a scalpel, I couldn’t deny that familiar energy. While one half of me was laughing at the stupid alien spaceship, the other was laughing with it. Make no mistake, Final Fantasy IV is a videogame. It’s a digital monument to the joys of role-playing. If the first Final Fantasy is the manual, the fourth is the first to demonstrate its potential. There’s a reason why nearly all subsequent entries (in the entire genre) look to it for inspiration — it represents the unfiltered imaginative spirit of a team wading into their first generational leap. Final Fantasy IV is absolutely bursting with ideas, and it’s easy to get swept up in the fun of its exquisite corpse of an adventure.

And yet, it was just as easy for me to become detached from its increasingly preposterous twists and turns, and my inability to reconcile these two perspectives on my initial playthrough became exhausting. Time and reflection and revisits have tempered my judgement, but even if I never found it in my heart to forgive Cid’s idiotic sacrifice, I’d have more than enough reason to see it through.

Because I kept at it anyway, all the way to the end. I even decided to complete a handful of optional side-quests to add Odin, Leviathan and Asura to Rydia’s summons. I conquered the PSP’s Cave of Trials to get Yang, Palom, Porom, and Cid back up to speed (c’mon, I couldn’t keep Edge in the party). I had a rough go of it too, this was my first Final Fantasy. I did a frustrating amount of grinding before the Tower of Zot, a whole lot more before I could survive encounters on the moon, and had yet another sprawling session before I could give Zeromus so much as a sidelong glance without instant annihilation. Definitely a far cry from Chrono Trigger, where a rearrangement of equipment and a bit of tactical reconsideration was preparation enough, but something kept me going. Maybe it was a feeling of obligation, maybe it was the awesome ludo-narrative characterization, or maybe I’d come to appreciate the dissonant story in all of its Silver Age comic book-ish glory. I’d like to say it was the music, and I’ll get to that, but Uematsu couldn’t have done it alone. No, I think it was because, despite it all, Sakaguchi and co. had succeeded at making exactly what they’d envisioned. The game was kicking my ass, but settings and level designs were varied, enemy strategies kept me on my toes, I always felt like I had to discover and conquer whatever came next, no matter how stupid the narrative justification. I wanted to find treasure, see what was on the other side of that door, explore dungeons and vanquish monsters. Something clicked.

This wasn’t technically my first brush with Hirouki Ito’s Active Time Battle system, but it was dramatically different from the one I’d become used to. My first thought was that I preferred Chrono Trigger’s iteration of the concept, with its dynamically wandering enemies and tech system, but there is something to be said for this heavier, more direct style. You know how it goes, you’ve gotta think fast or you’ll get clobbered. Some enemies and bosses make use of it by requiring the player to bolt in during a rare opening in their defenses or wait until they let their guard down to avoid a massive counterattack. In one weird, memorable battle, a demonic wall (with a Xenomorph stuck inside?) creeps closer to the party in real time in an attempt to crush them. If it closes in, it’ll annihilate all five party members at once. Yeah, five.

This remains the only RPG I’ve played to use a five character setup, and if the ATB didn’t make things tense enough, managing five different characters at once took a bit of getting used to for a novice like me (especially after Chrono Trigger’s three character format). Still, I insisted on using “active” mode instead of “wait,” which essentially pauses the game while the player cycles through spell books and darts through their inventory, because I really came to enjoy the momentum it brought. You’d think that five characters would make things easier, but battles can get pretty frantic. If your experience was anything like mine, you found that the FFIV crew isn’t a particularly durable bunch. There’s not much the player can do to shape them, so they’ve gotta learn to deal with each character’s weaknesses by figuring out how to juggle their skills in the heat of the moment. Powerful abilities take time to perform, adding another layer of strategy to their use, and retaining the weaker abilities’ utility. Learning when and how to arrange characters in either the front or back row (and knowing who to select to strike which enemies, who abide by a similar system) according to their strengths is essential to minimizing damage taken and maximizing output (the dreaded “back attacks” made that all too clear). 

With time, my appreciation for FFIV’s combat design has deepened. It may not be as solid as Dragon Quest, but they certainly hit on something here. It's energetic and nerve-wracking, patient and explosive in equal measure. FFIV is still absorbing on replays, still able to generate a brand of momentum that effortlessly carries me through its various setpieces, dungeons, and boss encounters. With better planning and more decisive strategy, I’ve never had to spend as much time grinding levels as I did on that first attempt. It’s edging toward that prolific marriage of action game design and RPG mechanics that Chrono Trigger would eventually master, and what’s here is still blood-pumping when all of its ingredients gel. No doubt Uematsu’s contributions have more than a little to do with that.

I’ve made no secret of my love for Final Fantasy IV’s soundtrack, and it’d be criminal not to dedicate even a small paragraph to it. When I emerged onto the overworld for the first time and heard the Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV, I was still for at least a minute. I’d already been exposed to Nobuo Uematsu’s work intermittently throughout Chrono Trigger and had heard some of his stuff out of context (the classic victory fanfare, Final Fantasy VII’s battle and boss themes, etc.), but not until playing FFIV had I been hit with the full force of his talent. Final Fantasy IV’s overworld track might just be my favorite in the series, maybe because of that staggering first impression, and it continues to impress me now. Like a rising shepherd tone, it’s a melody that only seems to ascend with every loop. When I finally did move, that classic bass line (the very best in video games) ushered me into Fight 1, and I was blown away all over again.

Where most RPGs use their battle themes to heighten the dread of combat and the threat of the enemy (and the boss themes certainly accomplish that), Final Fantasy IV’s always sounded to me like an expression of hope that the heroes will overcome this trial and prevail against any obstacle. The airship theme lasts only twenty two seconds, but beautifully elicits the feeling of soaring through the mode seven skies, an exclamation of joy for the party’s newly-earned freedom. Even when I was rolling my eyes as the story reached the peak of its lunacy, I couldn’t deny the power of The Lunar Whale. Without voice acting, Uematsu’s music serves as something of a narrator for the adventure, managing to make even the story’s worst contrivances sound incredible. That the last dungeon features the triple whammy of Fight 2 during every enemy encounter, Within the Giant, and The Final Battle almost makes up for everything I’d groaned about.

Notice the past tense.

My first playthrough of Final Fantasy IV left me torn and unsure how to feel about the game as a whole, but time has been kind to it. On every revisit, especially since becoming more seasoned in the conventions of the genre, I find more to love. FFIV is a daring game, and even where it fails, it fails with passion. It’s easy to sneer at the fake-out sacrifices (and god knows I do) but I feel that the consequence of each sacrifice, whether the character lives or not, belies a little something about the game’s philosophy. That so many of the character deaths are fake-outs draws attention to the party members who truly die. The one who does.

Tellah destroys himself failing to avenge his daughter Anna, a moment during which he’s completely overcome with hatred. Palom, Porom, Yang, and Cid all survive (and succeed) in their sacrifices because all of them are concerned with keeping others alive. Edward lives after Leviathan’s attack because he was able to grow beyond his cowardice, honoring Anna’s memory by helping those in need. Rydia has to overcome her fear of fire because, tragically, she can’t do anything about those she’s lost, and that frightening power can still be leveraged for the benefit of humankind. FFIV spends its entirety teaching the player the same lesson Cecil had to learn in that chamber on the peak of Mount Ordeals: one should not fight for the purpose of bringing death, but to nurture and cherish those whom we can still protect. Maybe the team picked up this idea as they went along, but Sakaguchi ’n pals would spend the rest of their careers zeroing in on and more deeply exploring this concept.

I have to admit, wild though it was, I did feel something triumphant when Edward revealed that all of those dead party members were still alive. However idiotic the instruments of their demise, they all deserved to live.

A better future is possible, but a better past is not. Wake from the dream and be free...

Whenever Sinistar isn’t on screen, everyone should be asking, “Where’s Sinistar?”

[distant chanting slowly growing louder] bug game bug game bug game bug game BUG GAME BUG GAME BUG GAME BU

A group of senators are revealed to have exploited people’s religious faith in order to spread racism towards multiple groups and cause a genocide, which is something that would thankfully never happen in the real world.

I finished Silent Hill 2 in October, and I had a dream in November that compelled me to write about it in March. However benign, edgy, or vague this may sound, I'm trying to communicate something I think might be true. Take this as an invitation to scrutinize.



When I think about “you”, my mind recedes into its own fog. I can’t help this ugly feeling that I’ll always be waiting to meet “you”. That I’m going to stay “here” between the walls of this empty room, knowing but never internalizing that “you” aren’t coming. And it’s such a stupid, agonizing quirk of my programming. I can stare hard into the flesh of my eyes and explain to the face in the bathroom that “you” exist in the moments between the moments I’ve felt loved by anything, but I won’t believe that. Do you?

And I’m afraid that I’ll never stop waiting. Even though I’m holding the key. Even though the handcuffs are on the floor. I miss you, even when I’m not alone.

And they tell me you’ll be here, any day now. The wallpaper is peeling and the halls are flooding and some sort of droning noise is sinking a knife into the meat of the air, and I’m sitting crossed-legged in the mold on the carpet. Any day now. And I’m trying not to burn a hole in the door.

This review contains spoilers

Man, this game is a mess. My main problem from my first playthrough is realising that I barely knew anything new about Apollo at the end of the game. That same issue arises here.

A story that's supposed to introduce your new attorney that ends up spending 75% of its plot tying up loose ends of the previous one.

The best moments come from when you are free from that gosh darned ex-lawyer Phoenix Wright. I don't even think he's written poorly; hell, it's kinda interesting as a premise. The problem is shoehorning in a old character's redemption arc with the first entry of a new trilogy. With only four cases in the game, it's bound to get cluttered.

And the cases? Oof, it's mixed. Turnabout Corner and Turnabout Trump are pretty good cases, especially the latter. Trump breaks the mold by having a longer-than-average intro case with some pretty challenging elements to it off the bat. It ends on a stark note and really sets up the mystery of the game.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game falls flat. Turnabout Corner is a decent case. By which I mean, the crime is interesting, but the characters and crime-family-drama don't really engage me compared to past cases. It gives me similar vibes to Recipe for Turnabout from T&T, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

One of Apollo Justice's best additions that thankfully stays in the series is interactive evidence. Using the touch screen to analyze fingerprint and blueprints, as well as rotating evidence for more precise clues has great potential.

And you know what? It does pay off a lot of the time! The game doesn't outright say what makes a piece of evidence unique. You really need to go digging in your court record to find out the quirks.
At the same time, there are still a lot of growing pains. I think that's most evident in Turnabout Serenade.

Mechnically speaking, this case is all over the place. One of the better moments is using a sound mixer to isolate a dud note in a song (foreshadowing a later point where you use it to detect a gunshot; it's really well handled imo).

But then you have the video tape. That accursed FMV. That siren song. I close my eyes and I see it. It echoes in my ears. This video is the bane of my existence. Seeing a single frame of it sets off my fight-or-flight response.

It just never ends. You have to examine it so many times, presenting it in court, re-watching it, with minimal playback control. Rise from the Ashes had something similar, but at least that was used more sparingly (and had more than one or two clues to suss out).

Along with generally tedious investigation segments, a lacklustre story and an almost nonsensical choice of defendant, it's not a great case in the slightest.

But it's not even the worst case in the game.

That infamy belongs to Turnabout Succession. It has the potential to be the sloppiest case in the entire series. In real-time, you get to see the game crumble under the weight of its ambitious storyline. Phoenix is redeemed, Apollo gets the bad guy, we have a new court system.

And that's it I guess? Barely anything feels satisfying. You don't really grow with Apollo like Phoenix in AA1; you discover just how shallow the main villain is; you discover the (very questionable) disbarrment of Phoenix Wright; and you have to go between the future and past in a semi-simulation, semi-recollection using the MASON system. To top it all off, you don't deduce anything major for the final section of this case; you have a button that says Good Ending/Bad Ending.

I finished this game with a feeling of wanting less. If this was how the rest of the new trilogy was going to go, I might've just been content with the original games. Thankfully, this game is a hurdle worth getting over for its sequel.






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.

What an enjoyable tasty treat of a game this is. Ear-to-ear grin-tastic experience. Feeling like a number in a crowd amongst a bedlam of bumper cars from that initial start, to extreme elation of holding first place for even just a few sweet seconds.

Presentation is squeaky clean, with the charm of re-using all those lovely F-Zero comic book concept arts. The Rivals system fosters individual glory and there's just about enough tertiary content to chew through. With all the original tracks on their way (they're in the practice menu) there certainly will be more content coming to F-Zero 99. But I do hope we get some extra-sauce for the game, something to raise an eyebrow at. Like, some new race cars? While I appreciate keeping to the purity and balance of the SNES original, it would be more cool to see some later F-Zero vehicles adapted into sprite work.

It also succeeds in keeping your personal achievements relevant, showing where you placed among everyone driving the same car, silly profile customisation and the aforementioned rival system. I'm also a big fan of LUCKY BUMPER BONUS which allows you to disrupt others after you crash out for some delicious revenge racing.

I also need to give HUGE praise to the Grand Prix mode. While it may seem a tad off-putting that you need to earn "tickets" to enter these, and they are on a timed rotation these are absolutely worth extra playtime to experience. It should also help maintain a healthy player base said Design Lead of Long-term Player Engagement and Progression. 5 tracks, with an ever decreasing top cut. Only the final 20 get to see the whole thing through. Watching that start line grow thinner and thinner, as both the races and the racers become more intimate. Just to glimpse that final finish line feels wonderous.

Some people don't see loop-de-loops and cylindrical tracks, so may not recognise this form of F-Zero. The GX is a hardcore-freakcore pillar of the videogame canon, and rightly so. But my time with 99 has shown me that essence was as present in that original 1990 release, as it is throughout the small much-revered series. High octane risk-reward racing is F-Zero's absolute core, and F-Zero 99 provides all the thrills and chills to shock you to the core.

(and they wont take it down if you play it lol. real shame you cant queue up with friends too)

Playing LA Noire you can feel it being pulled in a dozen directions at all times. Its core plot is reaching for noir, police procedural, period drama, and crime epic. Its mechanics attempt to combine GTA navigation, Ace Attorney puzzle-solving, Assassin's Creed tailing, and a much-hyped interrogation system. It aspires to be cinematic but authentic, literary but ludic, grand but focused. None of these are problems in isolation, and a handful of times it feels like it is achieving most of what it's aiming for. Yet rather than feeling like a cohesive meld, we have a hospital ward where each element lies on a bed of Procrustes; stretched out or cut down to fit a meagre pattern.

Let's look at the narrative genres it dips into. Noir was described by Roger Ebert as "[t]he most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic." LA Noire has plenty of the dark but little of the light, though I do wonder how well video games can present such a worldview. How can you insinuate there is seediness behind every door when 99% of doors can be seen and walked up to but never opened because nothing is behind them? How much can it feel like the player is in a naked city with eight million stories, when there's only about twenty NPC voice lines looping everywhere Phelps goes? The degree of openness and detail LA Noire aims for feels incompatible with maintaining the illusions and fogginess of noir; there are no ambiguities to fill with imagination or implication, something is either there fully realized or it's a cheap facade.

This lack of a sense of noirish possibility is further complicated by the game's aim to be historical fiction about the Los Angeles Police Department. Anyone aspiring to some degree of honesty should strive to represent the LAPD for what it is: one of the worst peacetime institutions ever organized by humans. LA Noire obliges in the broad strokes but pulls too many punches to be true to history. Phelps and his partners are racist, sexist, violent, and corrupt, though it's all ultimately superficial. We witness some slurs and beatings, but also every act of violence is provoked and in self-defense. There's blackmail and threats, but evidence is never planted nor false confessions coerced. We are aware of graft and misconduct but only in connection to the main plot and not as a daily function of the LAPD. My point is not that the game should be Dirty Cop Simulator 1947. Rather, by not actually shocking the player with just how evil the LAPD could be, the player is not actually made to question what they thought they knew. I would also maybe feel less affronted if not for the timing of the game's setting, a few years before Dragnet would forge the foundation of post-WWII copaganda around the LAPD. What came out in the wash is merely a somewhat critical piece of detective fiction with some nods to history.

Except is it good detective fiction? The game is predominantly structured as an episodic police procedural, with connections between cases gradually emerging in fairly predictable ways (with significant deflation from the non-diegetic newspaper scenes). When faced with either embracing the detailed tedium of The Wire or the sensational mystery-solving of Sherlock Holmes, the game doesn't commit to either. Again there is the noir angle, but it disposes of supporting characters too rapidly to make the ongoing mystery cut through the noise of "drive to scene, find reference to location, call R&I for address, drive there, talk to someone, repeat". To the extent that LA Noire subverts the procedural through its homicide and arson desk sequences, it feels somewhat hollow. At no point did I feel anything Phelps might conceivably feel: pressure to lock someone up, a weight on my conscience over how a case was handled, a need to break procedure to catch the culprit. Instead of being a game that's compellingly mundane or full of engaging puzzles, LA Noire is just about mundane puzzles.

Much of these issues coalesce around LA Noire's interrogation system--its sui generis mechanic. My problems lie less with the facial animation (which is usually good and occasionally great even a decade-plus on) or the simplicity (the difficulty curve flattens early when you realize it all boils down to accusing when you have evidence to contradict what they just said or doubting when you don't but they won't meet your gaze and otherwise choosing truth), both of which weaken the effectiveness but forgivably so. The damning sin is the music cue and the ✓or X appearing immediately after you finish a question, worsened by the many occasions where a correct choice doesn't give you much more than an incorrect choice. It undermines the ambiguity of noir, the immersion of historical fiction, and the suspense of detective gaming all in one fell swoop. Added to the tedium of actually proceeding through cases--which, again, could be saved by a deeper faithfulness to history or procedural structures--and you have a golden opportunity fumbled multiple times over.

Finally, the gap between how much of 1947 Los Angeles is represented physically and atmospherically versus how much of it is represented socially, economically, and institutionally is palpable. Everywhere you look, you'll find assets with remarkably immersive period detail and lovingly rendered interiors. I pulled into a parking lot and an episode of the Jack Benny Program began playing on the car radio and just... didn't stop. It was a full episode, minus the Lucky Strike ads. I probably listened for half the run-time, genuinely amazed a game would simulate something like this. Films and novels basically cannot replicate this sort of beguiling closeness to the past; it reminded me more of handling archival material than watching The Master. If nothing else, LA Noire deserves praise for these moments and details. But stand anywhere for a similar amount of time to observe the people of this world and you'll get whiplash.

Obviously, as already discussed, there is the omnipresent issue of the world being facades all the way down. But consider the NPC chatter. This is the one technical arena where I feel justified ragging on LA Noire because it is in no way a studio being hampered by budget or technology. They got people in the booth to record lines. Could have had them say anything! Yet they chose to make said chatter completely facile and atonal, predominantly acknowledgements of Cole's recent exploits and jokes ripped from an Uncle John's Bathroom Reader or spent Christmas crackers. I could have forgiven stiff animations or minimal interactivity, but neglecting to give this chatter any hint of a larger world is hugely disappointing. Every diner being an immersive theatre production unto itself would be unreasonable, but chatter that at least implies a communal presence could have gone a long way. I have to imagine by the fifteenth time playtesters heard a cop express a desire for a .45 so they can stop them in one round, they felt the missed opportunity.

Despite all this, I consider LA Noire more a noble failure than a trainwreck. You simply do not get games that reach like this or wade into these themes often. And for one shining case--the Studio Secretary Murder--it managed to pull the stars into alignment and showcase the vision they were seemingly going for. Noah Caldwell-Gervais described it as a genre orphan, and that is far more tragic than any of the game's own shortcomings. Some team should have revisited and refined these ideas, finding a more thoughtful balance of themes and mechanics. My guess is if they ever do, it probably won't be by having you play as a cop.

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