I've owned this game since release, and it constantly conflicts me. Surely this isn't the worst game to exist but it's absolutely far from being the best. So many things brought to the table here that just feel... underwhelming or disappointing. The game feels very empty. There doesn't feel like a whole lot to offer, not necessarily content wise, but as an experience. The game's aesthetic is very quiet, which feels weird a lot of the time. A very empty environment. Not many interactions with characters and such throughout the map. I feel alone for almost the entire game, which feels sort of off for a Zelda title. The map, is kinda boring, not so much to offer imo. The combat was just okay. The boss fights were really easy but sort of... fun? They just weren't boring despite them taking less than a minute. That even applies to the Illusory Ganon fights, too easy. The story feels like it's not even there. I just feel like a clueless mf running along a dead civilization recovering "memories" to serve as a "how did this happen" aspect of the plot. The plot literally is, kill Ganon. That's it. Hardly anything happening in between that then characters taking Link on a trip through memory lane. It feels weird, and doesn't provide any sort of enjoyment to me

Overall, the game again isn't bad, it isn't good either. It's just... odd. I really hope the sequel finds ways to improve upon the empty feel of its predecessor. What I mean is, new gameplay mechanics (nothing crazy, just something that makes me feel like I'm playing a sequel and not the same game copy&paste), good progressing story (stick away from memories and have an ongoing present plot), and a more entertaining combat system (not mashy, as BotW feels)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I spent three years listening to people heap endless praise on this thing, from favored game critics to message board fanboys to seemingly never-ending "42 Things You Didn't Know About Breath of the Wild" Youtube videos. It was always going to be impossible to approach this game with anything like a clean slate, and it's common knowledge that hype of that magnitude can just as often lead to disappointment as satisfaction.

This is the most fraught 4-star review I'll likely ever write, because there is so much about Breath of the Wild to love. It moves great, it's a frankly ridiculous game to be able to play anywhere at anytime on a mobile device, it has a deep sense of fun and adventure and most of all it gave so many who played it such happiness.

Unfortunately, I've never been great at "finding the fun" and Breath of the Wild is very much that sort of game. While I sank nearly 90 hours into it (probably a decent amount of idle time, knowing me), finished all the dungeons and dozens and dozens of shrines, when the game got serious I felt left in the wilderness. Whether it was the big maze off shore, the challenge island, the DX challenges or anything involving the ancient guardians I couldn't hang at all. Sure, I could've looked things up online for a kickstart, but I wanted as pure an experience as I could have considering I already knew as much about the game as I did and it just never fully came to me like that.

Eventually, when I felt done with the game, it came down to even more basic elements: the constant resetting of the map and enemy placements makes sense if you're the sort to want to constantly explore and experiment in the play space, but I wanted to defeat those big trolls and have it mean something. I wanted to stumble upon a cool lightning infused sword and always remember the moment I found that sword every time I looked at it, rather than mark that spot on my map to return to once I inevitably broke the sword and the blood moon inevitably replaced it on the cliffside.

In other words, while I can admire all that was brilliant about this game, I ultimately came to find this was not the game I personally needed it to be. Breath of the Wild has many tasks and goals to check off, but it ultimately is a bit of a forever game, meant to be played over and over with different goals hatched entirely in the player's own mind.

While admirable and brave in its design, ambition and execution, this means that for ME it was quite an easy game to just let go of when I was done with it, carrying very few specific memories along with me.

While I was playing it, I thought Breath of the Wild was going to be the design touchstone of every big game made after it. Going through it for the first time on release was a truly magical experience, and it made me feel like I was playing a game from the future.

As I'm writing this four years later, I'm in a weird spot. My brain says it's one of my favorite games of all time and probably one of the best games ever made, but my heart just doesn't seem to believe any of that. And when I listen to what my heart is saying, my current opinion is a lot more mixed.

I think the tipping point might have been trying to do the Trial of the Sword in the first DLC and realizing that, up until that point, I avoided combat in Breath of the Wild as much as I possibly could. Not because of weapon durability or resource drain or anything like that, but just because I didn't like to spend time doing it. And if you remove combat, the five dungeons/big dungeon-like areas and their bosses don't really have much going for them. Considering those are some of the only big "event" locations in the game, that's a pretty big hit to the overall experience.

I dunno, I'm just cooling towards Breath of the Wild as time goes on. It's fine, it happens. Being honest about when I've changed my mind on something is good for my mental health anyway.

(And in that spirit of honesty, I edited this review down to a more accurate feeling 3.5 stars literally minutes after publishing it lol. And edited it again a day later cause it's really feeling like a 3 now.)