As hard as Breath of the Wild hit on release, there actually were a few aspects that disappointed me about it, and it’s not the stuff people usually discuss. My initial expectation was that this would be a full post-apocalypse in the style of the original Zelda, where the pacing is completely hands-off and dungeons are just random caves you stumble into. As well-done as Breath’s towns and set pieces and characters were, it all ran pretty directly against what I wanted out of it.

Still, the game’s magic would draw me back in for another replay time and again over the years, and it wasn’t until I sincerely held it up against its rigid and limited predecessors that I started to appreciate just what a quantum leap it was over not just the rest of the Zelda series, but many modern games in general. I still consider myself a fan of those older Zeldas, but whatever tonal preferences I may have with some of them, they’re so effortlessly eclipsed by Breath’s smooth free-form mechanics that give me a feeling of innate, childlike fun that is strangely uncommon in this type of atmospheric open world. It’s wild to think this game may still be topped by its upcoming sequel, because it’s already making the whole rest of the industry look dated by comparison and combines virtually everything I look for in games in a package that’s entirely unique.

Reviewed on Mar 16, 2021


Comments


2 years ago

This comment was deleted