"It's dangerous to go alone! Take these twelve swords made out of glass!"
One of the joke meme Instagram accounts I follow every now and then lapses into trenchant video game critique, and one day he shared a few opinions about Skyrim that has given me a lot to think about, namely, that Skyrim turned everything into Skyrim. While I’ve never played it and therefore can’t agree or disagree too hard with his position, I do think that over the years since oh, 2011 or so, games are pretty much all made on a basis of (to the tune of “Holding Out for a Hero”) “they’ve gotta be long, and they’ve gotta be hard!” He does mention that the same has happened to Zelda, and I think that in making Zelda big long and hard, they made something, to me anyway, that is just so very not Zelda.
The Zelda games I grew up with had a distinct world, full of distinct dungeons where you get distinct treasures that allow you distinct abilities, and plenty of distinct enemies and a distinct spooky boss at the end, often requiring you to figure out a strategy to defeat it using a new distinct item you just got. Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, is an open world full of fields, mountains, and rivers, full of exactly these monsters: bumpachumplin grunts, elite bumpachumplins, skeleton bumpachumplins, lizard korkaborks, sparkly korkaborks, ligers, big boy cyclopses, glow robots, and #bats (not an entirely fair assessment, as a longer playthrough revealed standard slimes, fire lighting and ice iterations of those slimes, big rocks, little rocks, desert fish, wizard babies, jumpin octopuses, and lgbt ninjas). The spooky dungeon masters you encounter include the ever present threat of cloudy Ganon and his four friends: sparkly cloud Ganon, fiery cloud Ganon, windy cloud Ganon, and wet cloud Ganon. There are 120 of the same instance of fifteen-minute shrines and four bigger shrines that you have to navigate to fight the cloudy Ganons. And it’s this, over and over again, open world drudgery for a hundred hours. Find a shrine. Kill an elite archer crumbudger and lose your third shield. Try to find one of the cloudy ganon dungeons. All until you decide it’s time to fight the big Cloudy Ganon once and for all.
The actual towns with Zoras and Gorons and Gerudos, all holdovers from prior games, are the only time I ever feel like I’m in an actual Zelda game. That, and places like Death Mountain or Lake Hylia are the only places I recognize, and also only because they’re from previous Zeldas. Everything else is just open worldiness for its own sake named with nonsense Zelda language. Maybe don’t be so caught up with shrines then, you might say, just explore for a while. Okay. Explore what? It’s all the same shit, the shleepadeep mountains are exactly like grimpgamp plateau, the shady quimpylimplimp forest is just like the bromblebromble grove. Trust no one who says they like to just wander around this world and look for stuff, they’re lying to either you, to themselves, or to both. Anyone who goes exploring is doing so because they’re on their way to a shrine or a town or to farm for something, and when you do you either get more anonymous wilderness, the shrine you’re looking for, or my favorite thing of all, a super powered enemy that will murder you because you’re not ready to fight it yet. Fun! Just like my playthrough of Hollow Knight, I have no motivation to get out there and get lost if it means I’ll gain nothing and possibly lose progress.
Remember ludonarrative dissonance? I mostly think it’s bullshit pseudo-criticism and it doesn’t really exist but I often find myself lapsing into something like it, specifically when a gameplay element isn’t fun (and in this case, as Delta pointed out in the mentions, I mistook it for petulant cinemasins-nitpicking for plot holes because sometimes I’m not smart when I’m grumpy. Anyway that’s what I meant, I don’t like to over-analyze how gameplay mechanics would work in the real-world narrative unless that mechanic isn’t fun). Like yeah, it’s unrealistic for Agent 47 to get into the disguises so fast, but Hitman is fun, so who cares. Now weapon durability in this game is not fun, so let’s go crazy with it: why on goddam earth are every single one of these so brittle? Why does every sword break after ten swings off the bristly hide of a blue-backed borkobompglomp, why do the bows break after twenty arrows into a sparkling krockenbocken? Why is every weapon so laughably incompetently forged in post-Hyrule? Did cloudy Ganon purge all the blacksmiths like Stalin and the doctors? Who gave Link a Felix the Cat-ass magic bag to stuff all those cheap weapons into? What disparate and unlikely forces had to be moved and shaked at exactly the right time to allow this asinine feature, other than “the developers want you to GeT GoOd?” There is no good reason, is the answer, and if you like this feature then the truth is you don’t actually like it, you just think you do, because you want to believe that Skyrim-Zelda is so Greatest Game of All Time that you’re willing to lie to yourself that you like your shield breaking in the middle of a guardian fight. “It’s a divisive issue?” Okay, fine. I’m on the divide that thinks it sucks.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a Zelda where you always have the same sword, the same boomerang, the same bow, and you get to wield those well-made weapons and many others in cool dungeons and fight cool enemies and bosses. I like a Zelda game where Ganon looks like a big pig sorcerer. As it stands now, I’m far from convinced Breath of the Wild is even the best Zelda, let alone one of the greatest games ever made, I’m disappointed that it seems like this is the direction it’s going in from now on, I’m absolutely not even going to sneeze at another one of these if I have to carry twelve wooden grumpgrump clubs just in case, and while I’m shelving it now the only real reason I have to finish the game I started is because, I have to hand it to them, they did make Link really hot. Like stupid goddamn hot.
UPDATE: okay, I’m playing the game more and I like it just a little better. It was three stars before but maybe three and a half now. I like this the same way I like The Wolf of Wall Street: it’s fun while I’m in the moment but as soon as I turn it off I’m frustrated that it exists and it has to be this way from now on. It’s still a long game that’s long for it’s own sake, it’s still “you get out of it how many chores you put in.” I guess the difference between then and now is I just did the chores. The moral of this story is do not underestimate the power of making Link stupid hot.
I also like the memories side quest a lot. It’s very funny to me that in such a massive hundred hour game with so much to do they went and put “the whole actual narrative” into a side quest that you can hardly be arsed to do. “Push F to care about the story for two minutes”-ass game. Also pretty much all of these scenes land like a wet towel because Link is a silent protagonist. People baring their damn souls to Link and he just sits there like 🫤. It works in early Zelda games, and to a point in like Nintendo 64-era Zelda where there’s no voice acting anyway, but it does not work at all in this triple-A ass fancypants Zelda. If you’re really gonna break all these other traditions like “swords that don’t shatter” and “fun, interesting dungeons and bosses,” then why is “Link can’t speak ever” such a sacred cow? It’s 2023, start talking!
One of the joke meme Instagram accounts I follow every now and then lapses into trenchant video game critique, and one day he shared a few opinions about Skyrim that has given me a lot to think about, namely, that Skyrim turned everything into Skyrim. While I’ve never played it and therefore can’t agree or disagree too hard with his position, I do think that over the years since oh, 2011 or so, games are pretty much all made on a basis of (to the tune of “Holding Out for a Hero”) “they’ve gotta be long, and they’ve gotta be hard!” He does mention that the same has happened to Zelda, and I think that in making Zelda big long and hard, they made something, to me anyway, that is just so very not Zelda.
The Zelda games I grew up with had a distinct world, full of distinct dungeons where you get distinct treasures that allow you distinct abilities, and plenty of distinct enemies and a distinct spooky boss at the end, often requiring you to figure out a strategy to defeat it using a new distinct item you just got. Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, is an open world full of fields, mountains, and rivers, full of exactly these monsters: bumpachumplin grunts, elite bumpachumplins, skeleton bumpachumplins, lizard korkaborks, sparkly korkaborks, ligers, big boy cyclopses, glow robots, and #bats (not an entirely fair assessment, as a longer playthrough revealed standard slimes, fire lighting and ice iterations of those slimes, big rocks, little rocks, desert fish, wizard babies, jumpin octopuses, and lgbt ninjas). The spooky dungeon masters you encounter include the ever present threat of cloudy Ganon and his four friends: sparkly cloud Ganon, fiery cloud Ganon, windy cloud Ganon, and wet cloud Ganon. There are 120 of the same instance of fifteen-minute shrines and four bigger shrines that you have to navigate to fight the cloudy Ganons. And it’s this, over and over again, open world drudgery for a hundred hours. Find a shrine. Kill an elite archer crumbudger and lose your third shield. Try to find one of the cloudy ganon dungeons. All until you decide it’s time to fight the big Cloudy Ganon once and for all.
The actual towns with Zoras and Gorons and Gerudos, all holdovers from prior games, are the only time I ever feel like I’m in an actual Zelda game. That, and places like Death Mountain or Lake Hylia are the only places I recognize, and also only because they’re from previous Zeldas. Everything else is just open worldiness for its own sake named with nonsense Zelda language. Maybe don’t be so caught up with shrines then, you might say, just explore for a while. Okay. Explore what? It’s all the same shit, the shleepadeep mountains are exactly like grimpgamp plateau, the shady quimpylimplimp forest is just like the bromblebromble grove. Trust no one who says they like to just wander around this world and look for stuff, they’re lying to either you, to themselves, or to both. Anyone who goes exploring is doing so because they’re on their way to a shrine or a town or to farm for something, and when you do you either get more anonymous wilderness, the shrine you’re looking for, or my favorite thing of all, a super powered enemy that will murder you because you’re not ready to fight it yet. Fun! Just like my playthrough of Hollow Knight, I have no motivation to get out there and get lost if it means I’ll gain nothing and possibly lose progress.
Remember ludonarrative dissonance? I mostly think it’s bullshit pseudo-criticism and it doesn’t really exist but I often find myself lapsing into something like it, specifically when a gameplay element isn’t fun (and in this case, as Delta pointed out in the mentions, I mistook it for petulant cinemasins-nitpicking for plot holes because sometimes I’m not smart when I’m grumpy. Anyway that’s what I meant, I don’t like to over-analyze how gameplay mechanics would work in the real-world narrative unless that mechanic isn’t fun). Like yeah, it’s unrealistic for Agent 47 to get into the disguises so fast, but Hitman is fun, so who cares. Now weapon durability in this game is not fun, so let’s go crazy with it: why on goddam earth are every single one of these so brittle? Why does every sword break after ten swings off the bristly hide of a blue-backed borkobompglomp, why do the bows break after twenty arrows into a sparkling krockenbocken? Why is every weapon so laughably incompetently forged in post-Hyrule? Did cloudy Ganon purge all the blacksmiths like Stalin and the doctors? Who gave Link a Felix the Cat-ass magic bag to stuff all those cheap weapons into? What disparate and unlikely forces had to be moved and shaked at exactly the right time to allow this asinine feature, other than “the developers want you to GeT GoOd?” There is no good reason, is the answer, and if you like this feature then the truth is you don’t actually like it, you just think you do, because you want to believe that Skyrim-Zelda is so Greatest Game of All Time that you’re willing to lie to yourself that you like your shield breaking in the middle of a guardian fight. “It’s a divisive issue?” Okay, fine. I’m on the divide that thinks it sucks.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a Zelda where you always have the same sword, the same boomerang, the same bow, and you get to wield those well-made weapons and many others in cool dungeons and fight cool enemies and bosses. I like a Zelda game where Ganon looks like a big pig sorcerer. As it stands now, I’m far from convinced Breath of the Wild is even the best Zelda, let alone one of the greatest games ever made, I’m disappointed that it seems like this is the direction it’s going in from now on, I’m absolutely not even going to sneeze at another one of these if I have to carry twelve wooden grumpgrump clubs just in case, and while I’m shelving it now the only real reason I have to finish the game I started is because, I have to hand it to them, they did make Link really hot. Like stupid goddamn hot.
UPDATE: okay, I’m playing the game more and I like it just a little better. It was three stars before but maybe three and a half now. I like this the same way I like The Wolf of Wall Street: it’s fun while I’m in the moment but as soon as I turn it off I’m frustrated that it exists and it has to be this way from now on. It’s still a long game that’s long for it’s own sake, it’s still “you get out of it how many chores you put in.” I guess the difference between then and now is I just did the chores. The moral of this story is do not underestimate the power of making Link stupid hot.
I also like the memories side quest a lot. It’s very funny to me that in such a massive hundred hour game with so much to do they went and put “the whole actual narrative” into a side quest that you can hardly be arsed to do. “Push F to care about the story for two minutes”-ass game. Also pretty much all of these scenes land like a wet towel because Link is a silent protagonist. People baring their damn souls to Link and he just sits there like 🫤. It works in early Zelda games, and to a point in like Nintendo 64-era Zelda where there’s no voice acting anyway, but it does not work at all in this triple-A ass fancypants Zelda. If you’re really gonna break all these other traditions like “swords that don’t shatter” and “fun, interesting dungeons and bosses,” then why is “Link can’t speak ever” such a sacred cow? It’s 2023, start talking!
3 Comments
@deltawdunn I suppose I can own that “an enormous amount of stupid shit in the narrative has to happen for a bad gameplay mechanic to work” isn’t quite the same thing as LD. I’ll have to coin a new term
@deltawdunn also I’m playing DQ 11 and I like the silent protagonist way better there, he feels like a person who’s talking to his party and reacting to shit happening
DeltaWDunn
8 months ago
Agree on silent protagonists. Some modern games make it work by still making the character expressive without voices, but they can often irk me if the game insists that there is a kind of personal connection with the story and other characters.