The biggest video game mystery of the past decade. It's the most groundbreaking, medium-redefining experience of our generation - and nobody can explain why. I'm convinced this is all a conspiracy orchestrated by YouTube video essayists. The promise (yet unfulfilled) of The Great Open World Video Game blinds us to the fact that we've seen all of this many times before.

Fundamentally, Breath of the Wild is a pastiche of the safest, most focus-tested game design principles of the preceding decade. You could call it the 'Tower' type game. Climb a tower to unlock a new area on your map, which will reveal the repeatable skinner box activities you can complete there. Puzzles, dungeons, enemy camps, the usual. These activities give you something like XP, increased health, or a new item, which account for progression. Once you're done, you climb another tower and repeat the process until you're ready to fight the final boss (or more likely, until you're bored and ready to rush to the game's end).

That's the gameplay loop. And like every single other one of these games ever made, the loop eventually becomes a dull grind. Breath of the Wild does nothing to solve this problem endemic to open world games. Some have praised the game's traversal, which, other than shield surfing (which is cool to be fair), is really just climbing walls, riding a horse, using a glider, or fast travelling; the same traversal methods in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, released seven years earlier (Shadow of the Colossus is also a clear influence). Really I would challenge anyone to explain how Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece while Assassin's Creed is a soulless corporate product. You're playing the same game. What's the difference besides some nice vibes and a cell-shaded art style? Grass? At least Assassin's Creed has that cyberpunk meets ancient aliens meets secret societies meets historical fiction bullshit made up by French people. That's creativity.

Proponents of the game may praise the Shiekah slate physics abilities as an innovation, and that feels true at first. But eventually your enemies become too powerful for hitting them with rocks or whatever to do a thing; you'll need to use some bullshit level-scaled RPG weapon. And even if the Shiekah slate remained effective in combat, you would still end up doing this. Why? Because this game has so much dull, repeated content to wade through that it becomes easier to take the path of least resistance, the least thought required, and just hit them with your sword. 30 hours in, no player is using cool Shiekah slate tricks to clear those regenerating bokoblin camps.

Much discussion has already been had on the monotony of the 120 copy-pasted shrines, which make up the bulk of the game's content (its version of the side tasks from Assassin's Creed), and the 900 copy-pasted korok seed puzzles, which act as the collectibles obligatory of every Tower game. I won't rehash that too much here, copy-pasted content is already the most common criticism of open world games in general. But knowing that, I want to talk about something I've noticed with a lot of the praise for this game.

Some of the most common sentiments expressed toward Breath of the Wild are that it's "magical" and captures the "joy of discovery" and a sense of "childlike wonder". And I think if you play through the entire game and still feel this way, then that is a horror beyond comprehension. What was your childhood like? Did you spend it as a laboratory subject or something? Just completing mundane, repeated tasks and being awarded food pellets? Because that's what Breath of the Wild is: a world filled not with a sense of mystery or infinite possibility, but the exact opposite: A world where you know exactly what you will find under every rock, inside every strange ruin, over every next hill. A completely controlled, sterile environment of utilitarian systems for the player to exploit. Completely antithetical to anything "magical".

I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that video games fundamentally cannot represent anything magical, emotional, or spiritual. Depicting anything in interactive form drains it of all sacred meaning, makes it a joke; it's the "press f to pay respects" problem. The tenets of game design stipulate systems and mechanics that are rational and understandable to players. That might be the biggest sin of video games as an artistic medium: taking everything unquantifiable and beautiful in life and reducing it to man-made systems for a single individual to exploit (For more discussion of this issue, play the Metal Gear Solid series).

This is felt especially harshly in a Tower game like Breath of the Wild, where an entire open world is reduced to a few classes of interactive activities. Progressing through a game like this is a process of total disillusionment with the entire world; spiritual death. It accidentally replicates the central theme of Ocarina of Time: the transition from idyllic childhood to grim adulthood. But Ocarina ends with Link confronting the darkness of adulthood and returning to a childlike state of play with his adult wisdom integrated. Breath of the Wild, though, is a state of permanent adolescence - it never goes anywhere, and simply decays over time. Eventually, you exhaust all of this life's possibilities and choose to finally, mercifully end it. Deciding to face Ganon isn't about bringing the story to a climax; it's the gameplay equivalent of taking a plane to Switzerland to get euthanized. And the game practically spits in your face after you defeat him, simply reverting to an old save before the final fight. There is no salvation, no redemption for this world. Only the ceaseless march of content.

Early on I said this game's reputation is a mystery, and I actually lied; there's a pretty simple explanation, one that I briefly mentioned: grass vibes. The game has an incredible atmosphere when you're first starting out, and that's what people are talking about when they call it "a breath of fresh air" or whatever cliché they think of. It has nothing to do with any game design element found here. Because there is no common understanding of what that would even mean. There's no concept of the formal elements of game design, or the storytelling language of video games. We're all just making this shit up.

People only pay attention to, y'know, the actual art: music, animation, visuals. The game itself can be anything, nobody really cares. The discourse surrounding games as a medium of art in themselves is mostly bullshit. People appreciate the traditional artistic aspects of a game (music, animation, visuals, acting performances, writing) and then project that sense of artistry onto the game design itself, where there is none (and in fact, there is a profound dissonance between it and those elements). That's how people process games as an art form. And that's why games like Breath of the Wild are held up as the pinnacle of games as art.

(I'll also say that I have no respect for any open world game like this after the release of Metal Gear Solid V (2015). It correctly portrayed this breed of AAA open world game as something that cannot be revived or rejuvenated as Breath of the Wild attempts to do; this is all salted earth. If MGSV had been properly understood, we would have seen it as the just and merciful execution of games like this.)

The first 15 or so hours are magical. Then there's 30 more.

Breath of the Wild has a perfect opening couple of hours that give you these great physics tools and quickly set you loose in the open world. All of its intuitive physics and weather systems, as well as the controversial weapon durability system provide you with these great moments of thinking on your feet and out-of-the-box problem solving. Exploring the landscape and the flora and fauna that reside there is fun for its own sake, and the music and general atmosphere is enchanting enough to make simply being in the world enjoyable. I really think the vibe and beautiful art style of this game alone are what give it such a legendary reputation, rather than any kind of revolutionary game design. Nintendo knows how to nail the presentation of their games better than anyone, and it gives them the illusion of being groundbreaking and artfully designed. I really felt that way at the start of this one.

But after building a near-perfect open world experience in the first act, Breath of the Wild spends the rest of the game tearing it down through sheer tedium and repetition. Fighting the same three enemy types with the limited combat system (and being interrupted by the same combat music track), constantly breaking your weapons (which serves as no more than an annoyance once you build up an armory of weapons), doing dozens of nearly identical shrines and korok seed puzzles that just feel like chores... All of this is fun and fresh at the start, but the novelty wears off fast, and then the game just keeps going. Eventually you realize there is nothing mysterious or novel to be found in this world, really; Every cool place you find is just a container for a shrine or a korok seed. The first labyrinth you find is exciting. Then you realize there are three of them and they're all just shrine puzzles. Breath of the Wild is the joy of discovery turned into a formulaic, easily digestible skinner box.

The memorable moments that the game does manage to nail, like reaching Kakariko Village or Zora's Domain, fighting the first Divine Beast, finding the Master Sword, and fighting through Hyrule Castle are all spread too thin across so many hours of the same skinner box slop endemic to open world games. And soon, most of the systems that make the moment-to-moment gameplay interesting early on become irrelevant. Eventually you'll just be teleporting across the map, using abilities like Revali's Gale to skip the climbing, wearing clothes to ignore the weather, using food to ignore the stamina system, and using regular weapons to ignore the shiekah slate and physics system in combat. The gameplay can literally only lose depth as you go; your reward for progression is that you get to engage with the game less.

Getting a non-linear, open world game right is hard; I think very few games have managed to live up to such massive scope and breadth of possibility. Breath of the Wild has been hailed as the solution to this problem, but far from being a revolution in open world design, it falls into the same trap of wearing you down with hours and hours of the same copy-pasted activities. It has some ideas that show amazing potential early on, but in the end the experience reverts to the player turning their brain off to wade through a sea of filler content along the path of least resistance. Just like every shitty Ubisoft open world game that Breath of the Wild is supposed to be the answer to.