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.
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.