SPOILER WARNING.
Despite the fact that many of my reviews are clearly mired in spoilers, due to the very recent release of Breath of the Wild it would only be fair to warn all of you readers that this review will spoil the entirety of the game. I'll be discussing the plot in great detail, as well as several of the game's secrets and surprises. If you've already played the game or don't care about spoilers, then please grab a cup of coffee and enjoy my review.
After the success of A Link Between Worlds
, the ultimate fate of the Zelda
series was left uncertain. On the one hand, the game sold well and was received with open arms from critics and fans alike; on the other, Link Between Worlds
was still just the latest incarnation of the handheld titles, and more often than not the game steeped itself in tradition rather than innovating on the franchise. More pressingly, Nintendo's Wii U console had already failed by the time of A Link Between Worlds
released and no single game was going to save it--even though the console was merely two years old, Nintendo had all but given up on the poor thing. In 2014, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
was announced to roaring excitement, and to top things off Nintendo was dedicated to releasing the game on the Wii U. Breath of the Wild
was even going to release the very next year! But like all good things, this never came to pass. A new console launch crept up by necessity, and after an arduous development cycle the game finally released on both the Nintendo Switch and the ill-fated Wii U.
Review: The Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild
Breath of the Wild feels in many ways both a direct apology for the critically divisive
Skyward Sword as well as a spit in the eye to everyone who didn't like the previous console entry. The
Zelda franchise had been down a long, noticeable spiral toward linear and frankly mediocre gameplay for over a decade by the time of
Breath of the Wild's release. It almost seems like Nintendo caught wind of all the fan complaints and finally decided to take drastic measures to create a new title in an effort to blow away both new and old fans.
In a sense,
Breath of the Wild is something like Nintendo breaking the glass on a dormant idea: giving the
Zelda franchise a reboot. This concept has been swirling around the entertainment industry for a few years now and it's certainly not a new phenomenon, but recently creators have been utilizing this trick with unnerving frequency in, for example, movie sequels. The basic premise between a hard and soft reboot is that the former might keep concepts, character names and traits, while completely eliminating complete character and story arcs--if not the entire world. Marvel is famous for this type of reboot, though considering recent sales figures it's probably for the worst. A soft reboot, on the other hand, acknowledges the events and character arcs that constituted a franchise while introducing new characters or concepts. As a simple contrast,
DmC: Devil May Cry and
Ghostbusters 2016 are hard reboots while
Star Wars: The Force Awakens and now
Breath of the Wild can be considered soft reboots.
As in
The Force Awakens,
Breath of the Wild acknowledges several key events and characters from
Zelda history: Link's incarnations are referenced having fought "the twilight" and Ganon is such a consistent threat that the characters are now able to pinpoint his reincarnation nearly to the second. One of the focal points in the story, in fact, is the fact that Hyrule is seemingly over-prepared to fight Ganon: ancient weapons from the Shiekah known as Guardians are unearthed, and while Zelda trains a woefully unprepared Link to battle Ganon, Champions from Hyrule's four main races--the Rito, the Zora, the Gorons, and the Gerudo--are tasked with piloting the Divine Beasts, special Guardians designed by the Shiekah to help fight Ganon. When the battle begins, Ganon easily corrupts both the Guardians and the Divine Beasts, swarming them with manifestations of his Malice as well as copying himself to take control of the Beasts. The Champions are all killed, Link is mortally wounded, and Zelda seals herself and Ganon inside Hyrule Castle until Link can heal and try again.
A strange story element, and one of the most widely-speculated aspects of the game prior to its release, was the fact that Rito and Zora were portrayed alongside one another despite
The Wind Waker revealing the Rito as a distant evolution of Zora. The Rito are accustomed to subsisting on the various specks of land making up the Great Sea; why the Zora couldn't thrive in an ocean is completely beyond me--maybe they're freshwater fish--but the game made clear the fact that Rito were the evolved form of Zora, and the Zora likely no longer existed. Looking at the species representation of the game, it's clear only two major races didn't make the cut in
Breath of the Wild: the forest-dwelling Kokiri tribe and the woefully-underrepresented Minish. Concept art has since been revealed showing the Minish were planned to be in the game and were sadly scrapped, and it's not too far-fetched to believe the Kokiri were always going to evolve into Koroks at some point in time. Their forms were specific for
The Wind Waker because, like the Rito, it was easier for their seeds to spread across the ocean. That said, I'm not such a stickler that I wouldn't buy the notion that Koroks couldn't be the inevitable form of the Kokiri--they were children, after all--but it seemed instead like Nintendo wanted to be as safe and inclusive with this title as humanly possible.
The reasons for this are simple: for one, while
Skyward Sword reviewed well with critics, it's not as well-liked with fans. In fact, a quick check of the Metacritic score shows a user rating of 8.1--taking into consideration the negative review bombing which commonly takes place on Metacritic as well as what I'll refer to as the "
Zelda curve," this still seems like a fairly low number for a title in such a venerated franchise. Nintendo is extremely protective of their intellectual property; after
Metroid: Other M failed both critically and commercially, Nintendo all but scrubbed development of the series. While a cheap spinoff did release in 2016 (also to negative reviews), the company was so protective of the franchise that they sent a DMCA notice to a long-awaited fan remake of the second game in the series--a game so good I retroactively changed my game of the year list to place it at the second spot--simply to "protect their property." I'm more of the mind that this is just what Nintendo does when a franchise isn't doing gangbusters either critically or commercially. The
Metroid franchise has never been the greatest-selling IP in Nintendo's catalog, so it's not a surprise they ignored the
Metroid 25th Anniversary simply because the latest title didn't do so well.
But this isn't
Metroid we're talking about.
Zelda is about the biggest thing in the entirety of video games; in my review of
Ocarina of Time, I proclaimed that the search for "video game's
Citizen Kane" has long since been solved, and
Ocarina was that title. The franchise single-handedly created the Action RPG genre and ushered in an era of games that shaped the industry's landscape forever. That's not even to mention the ludicrous sales associated with each new
Zelda title; as I mentioned in my
Twilight Princess review, this is a series that sells consoles by itself. But like I also said in that review, this is a franchise that was suddenly imperfect in many people's eyes, a series which had long lost its way. While
Majora's Mask was a controversial title, it gained its reputation as an odd, daring side story which tackled dark subject matter in a heavily atmospheric world.
Twilight Princess, to some (me), was just bad. And with
Skyward Sword, that downward trend was only confirmed.
A Link Between Worlds brought back love for the series, but that was a handheld sequel to a game made two decades ago and not a sprawling, brand-new 3D
Zelda title. While many people hold at least one top-down
Zelda as a favorite game of the series, 3D
Zelda games are always met with a certain gravitas in the industry. After
Skyward Sword, Nintendo was left with the broken remains of their franchise, and with no thanks to the failure of the Wii U it would take desperate action to revitalize interest in their series. If you were in their shoes, what would you have done? That's not rhetorical, I'm literally asking that. On the one hand, it would have been simple to just go back and make another old sequel, but that presents another, more irritating problem:
 |
| This is how nightmares are born. |
The
Zelda timeline is a huge, distorted, ugly, intimidating mess. Callbacks to previous games in the series range from shallow reference to important world details and there's absolutely no consistency between games--even those in the same "timeline." The princess of
Zelda II is referred to as "Princess Zelda I," but I really doubt she's the princess from
Ocarina of Time--especially given that didn't take into account the princesses of
A Link to the Past or
A Link Between Worlds. Hyrule is apparently suffering from massive, world-destroying tectonic activity as the Hyrule from
Ocarina of Time and
Twilight Princess share almost no similarities, and that's not to mention the fact that the Gerudo tribe has apparently been exterminated entirely between
Ocarina of Time and
A Link to the Past.
What Nintendo needed to do was simply not encourage the drooling timeline idiots demanding an explanation to the shallow plot for their children's toy.
Zelda is like
Final Fantasy: each world is different, but concepts and characters can just exist with no explanation necessary. Just because a few of the games are canonical sequels doesn't mean the
entire franchise needs to be connected, which is further complicated by the fact that Hyrule was
completely eradicated by the gods prior to the events of
The Wind Waker. All that was needed was a simple throw-away line that the Great Ocean was the apocalyptic remains of Hyrule. I had no problem with the franchise being composed entirely of episodic vignettes about a kingdom besieged by monsters and a lone hero rising up to stop the tides of darkness with the help of a powerful princess and a magic triangle. Rather, Nintendo had to cave to the ravening horde by stitching together a patchwork mess and just calling it a day--which is why Link's hat, given to him by Ezlo, is suddenly just some stupid, impractical piece of armor for ancient bird-riding sky warriors. The amount of dumb inconsistencies this timeline creates is frankly too annoying to bother with, but the fact that it exists at all leads to an even bigger problem:
What do you do with a series with four detailed timelines, all with distinct races, art styles, mechanics, and tone?
The easy answer is to start from scratch, but at that point the game wouldn't really be
Zelda. While it would be easy to just throw a dart at a board and hit any one game to make a sequel to, it would just be that: another
Zelda sequel. If the series was given a hard reboot, then why bother calling it
Zelda? At that point it's just another open-world game with a blonde protagonist and elements of exploration.
The solution? Jump the plot forward
ten thousand years into the future and just do away with specific callbacks.
Breath of the Wild is full of references to past games, but they don't particularly feel like major pulls from the series past. Instead, they're just Easter Eggs. In a sense, it's exactly what I wanted from a
Zelda game in terms of story. The story is apocalyptic like
Wind Waker, there's a frightening moon like
Majora's Mask, species from
Ocarna of Time and
Wind Waker are present, the Master Sword shines in the face of evil like
A Link to the Past and
Twilight Princess, and Fi somehow still exists despite being a chunk of metal for several millennia.
The references to
Skyward Sword--the Goddess Statue, mentions of the Goddess Hylia, Fi being referenced in a flashback, the nearly-nonexistent presence of the Triforce and no mention of the Goddesses outside of those stupid
Twilight Princess provinces--are absolutely the most clear examples of references to past games, but this is what I meant when I say the game can feel like a spit in the eye to people who didn't like Nintendo's stupid robot waifu. It's like Aonuma himself looked at all the negative reception and created a game that was designed totally different than
Skyward Sword, but then sprinkled in references as if it was the most recent story in the franchise. The events of
Skyward Sword had been so long forgotten in even the next game in the timeline that suddenly cramming them into
Breath of the Wild feels horribly forced. If there was a sudden revival in worship of Hylia at some point in Hyrule, the developers should have included that as an element of world building--and if it actually
was in the game, then I completely missed it and it should have been conveyed more clearly. Rather, I'm of the mind that it's the former and Aonuma simply did not care.
Despite the very clear similarities between the plot of
Skyward Sword and
Breath of the Wild, the games could not possibly have been designed differently. As
Breath of the Wild begins, the player awakens as Link and is given very limited hints to where to go. After climbing from the opening cave and activating the first tower, King Rhoam tasks the player with tackling the first four shrines in exchange for the paraglider. The opening gives players a brief glimpse into the level of preparedness they'll need to take in approaching many of the game's challenges, as two of the shrines are located inside areas of extreme weather conditions. It's not strictly necessary to obtain the paraglider; some speedrunners have supposedly found methods to skip the "tutorial," but the paraglider is still a vital component to traversal. Whereas the first hour of
Skyward Sword tasked players with a linear tutorial and overly-written cutscenes,
Breath of the Wild drops players into a miniature version of the world before opening the far greater land mass of Hyrule.
Where
Skyward Sword draws out its opening and takes hours before introducing its antagonist,
Breath of the Wild gives the player the quest "Defeat Ganon" the moment they activate the first tower. Naturally, this quest is completed the moment the player beats the game, signifying that the first major quest is the most important. While many subplots and events occur between Ganon's first and final appearances, the goal of the game always leads back to the first quest to defeat Ganon. The biggest downside here, though, is that Ganon has been utterly ruined as a character. Not like he was always this terrifically-written character to begin with, especially as the series went along, but his characterization in games like
The Wind Waker made him one of the most memorable villains in video game history. Where the character was just a simple bandit who managed to come across great magical power in the games leading up to
Ocarina of Time, The Wind Waker managed to humanize the legendary villain by giving him a purpose and an extremely relatable motivation. In
Breath of the Wild, Ganon is literally just a manifestation of the most evil horror in history, prior character development be damned.
Tutorials still exist, but they're far more stripped down than in any other 3D title in the series. In most cases, a simple pop-up screen will detail button prompts and mechanics that players might miss out on such as parrying, but gone are the days of long-winded recaps and explanations of concepts which might take a whole one button press to accomplish. While I'm stoked that Nintendo seems to have learned their lesson after decades of fan complaints, the truth of the matter is that this is partly due to the fact that many mechanics from the previous games have been scrubbed clean. Granted, content bloat was certainly a serious problem of the
Zelda series by this point, but some missing features are just baffling.
A few returning skills are purely delightful; for example, the parry returns from
Skyward Sword, though this time the parry window is far more punishing: not only are monsters far more damaging than any in the series since the original
Zelda, but item degradation is a serious concern and missing parries can seriously damage shields. Item durability has been a sticking point in much of the criticism of
Breath of the Wild, and I don't have much to add. However, the problem is far more serious than most professional reviews would let on; if I rated games on a numerical scale, the poor implementation of weapon degradation would knock the game at least a full point immediately. Weapons feel like they're made of bread at best, and it's such an extreme departure from the direction mainstream games are taking in terms of durability mechanics that it seems like Nintendo was trying to go to the absolute breaking point--get it?
The point of durability in many games is to make sure players keep a variety of weapons on hand at any given time. For example, a player might be conflicted over their Spear of Ass Spankery for its insane damage or their Shortsword of Whatever because it can attack twenty times in a second; with durability, the player will be
forced into a situation where they will want to minimize the threat of their weapon breaking by simply alternating between their favorite weapons. It's almost a faux pas to make the comparison at this point, but an example of this is the later
Dark Souls games. While
Demon's, Dark 1 and
Bloodborne have slow-building durability,
Dark Souls II and
Dark Souls III contain durability meters that degrade much faster but fully recharge when visiting a bonfire. The player can choose to respawn enemies and restore both their health and weapon durability, but a skilled player will likely have a back-up alternate weapon in case a situation becomes dire. A simpler reason, of course, is just to add variety to playstyles which might become dull if the player sticks with the same weapon over the course of their adventure.
Breath of the Wild eschews this in such an insultingly stupid way that I have to wonder if Nintendo did it as yet another kick in the face to people complaining the series was too easy. Players might have weapons they gravitate toward or some weapons they outright cannot stand, but because of the durability mechanic in
Breath of the Wild there's always a very real threat that the player might only have access to the latter. All weapons of a specific type control the same: boomerangs and swords have short swipes and can charge a spin attack, though boomerangs can be thrown and caught; longswords, hammers, and great boomerangs attack much more slowly and have spin attacks that cause Link to spin around in a circle, followed by a ground slam. Spears will always attack in a jab with a flurry attack to charge, and finally wands can throw the element of their chosen type. I'm sure there are more weapons I'm forgetting, but these are the important ones. For my part, I couldn't stand the heavy weapon types--I replaced the weakest heavy weapon the instant I picked up another weapon I liked and actually had to force myself to use my surplus of heavy weapons to make sure I had my favorite weapons for situations I thought they'd come in useful. The point is this: I made myself have less fun because the alternative was to waste the weapons that I'd actually have fun with.
Aside from the fact that some weapon types might be outright dull or uninteresting for some players, there's also the irritating fact that all the weapons combined have less movesets than the sword from
Ocarina of Time. For example, the quick swipes of the standard sword can be further simplified as "horizontal swipes," though the finishing attack is (I believe) vertical. Simplified even further, the sword combo is always the same sword combo, the heavy combo is always the heavy combo, and so on. Ironically, bows have more variety and all you do with those is point a cursor and kill things. Compare
Breath of the Wild's standard four-hit combo with the various attacks from
Ocarina of Time:
If the player
only taps the attack button, Link swings his sword horizontally--and only horizontally. If the player holds the analog stick forward and taps attack, or if the player locks on, Link will attack with a vertical swing. A thrust attack can be utilized ending in a vertical slice upward by holding the stick forward and Z-targeting, and finally Link can release a short stab if the player holds up the shield and taps the attack button.
The point in these various attack modes is to give players a great deal of utility when fighting monsters in multiple scenarios. The player
could pull out their ranged weapon and attack a flying enemy like the keese, but an important component in every
Zelda game is the conservation of consumable items. Rather, the player will have a much easier time dispatching something like a keese if they simply lock on and take advantage of the game's built-in vertical slash.
Breath of the Wild is bafflingly much more simplistic in terms of combat, restricting attack combos to the same four-hit attack for each weapon type. To make matters even more stupid, none of these weapons have a simple vertical attack. Link does a decent job at aiming his sword at targets he's locked onto, but the fact that the only solution is an imperfect one when the same series did away with this problem in its first iteration is insulting. Again, it's like Aonuma saw that people rejected
Skyward Sword by the thousands and decided to take away that game's promise of swordplay by limiting the player's attack options to nothing. And don't give me some shit about just finding some arrows and shooting at keese; arrows are extremely expensive in
Breath of the Wild--well, compared to earlier games when they simply dropped from shrubs and grass.
Lock-on even takes a step back from prior games in the series. Z- or L-targeting didn't just give players the ability to focus on a single enemy at a time, it also intelligently framed combat in a cinematic and easily-understood image, completely doing away with the camera control issues which plagued the 5th generation of consoles. The targeting mode used in
Breath of the Wild is finicky at best and reminds me much more of the lock-on used for the
Monster Hunter series. While the camera does manage to stick to an enemy that doesn't move around much, it's far too easy for the camera to either get distracted or simply decide it doesn't want to track said enemy anymore.
This one problem turns the already-nightmarish Thunderblight Ganon boss into a busy, annoying, unintuitive nightmare. The boss zips around the arena, breaking lock-on at any given point and rushing in to deal several hearts' worth of damage as well as paralyzing Link in one hit. To make matters worse, players need to reorient themselves to face the boss if they want to raise their shield, but the best method of defeating this boss is to jump backward and use the flurry attack after dodging--though since the player is already unable to track the boss's movements, this makes what would be a fun battle of dodging and parrying into an eye-bleedingly horrible affair and easily one of the worst bosses in the history of the franchise.
Another problem in this fight stems from a removed mechanic, one which I absolutely dread thinking is gone forever: the dodge roll. Rolling has always been a great mobility option and given the more action-oriented direction of the series, a well-timed dodge roll could have worked in tandem with the dodge-jumping used for flurry attacks. There's literally no excuse for the roll to be completely removed, but here we are: the first 3D
Zelda without a dodge roll and it actually suffers from its removal. The developers could have found a thousand and one ways to both implement the roll and find creative uses for it in the context of
Breath of the Wild, but they went the easy route and just cut it completely. All in all, combat is functional and flows quickly, but this is largely due to the annoying durability problem and limited movesets for each weapon type. With more variety, this could have been one of the best in the franchise but as it is now, the combat in
Breath of the Wild is simply tedious. I found myself avoiding combat whenever possible, a negative trait for a game with this much polish.
Instead, the developers refined the stamina wheel from
Skyward Sword and I guess this is just permanently replacing the magic meter. Don't get me wrong,
Breath of the Wild does in fact benefit from the removal of magic, but the way stamina is handled in this game is completely wrong. The player begins the game with a shortened meter and are given the ability to increase their stamina by trading in "spirit orbs," rewards for completing shrine puzzles. Four orbs can be traded for one-fifth of a new stamina wheel, up to a maximum of three, or a new heart container. While players should naturally be tempted to go for more maximum health, the game's free-form climbing mechanics make exploration difficult if players aren't augmenting their stamina. The developers likely intended for players to increase both stats evenly, but the core theme of the game is to explore everything and that theme is hampered with a smaller stamina meter.
Confusing this point is the ludicrous damage enemies deal out to the player even from the start of the game, and rather than hearts dropping in the wild players need to instead gather and cook food. The prevalent theme of
Breath of the Wild is that of survival, and the necessity to cook food is one of the most notable examples. Ingredients give various effects such as increased stealth, extra stamina, stronger resistance to elements and so on. The game teaches the player the importance of cooking while still on the Great Plateau; the two shrines located in extreme weather conditions require the player to cook a hot meal with peppers, which are situated right outside of the gate leading into the cold area. Just slightly further away from the peppers is a small enemy encampment with a bowl used for cooking; given the cooking tutorial by Rhoam near the beginning of the game, the cooking element serves as a minor riddle in order to progress.
Naturally, armor sets are sprinkled throughout Hyrule which give players various resistances and defensive boosts. The need to cook, for example, warm meals or meals which increase the player's stealth capability can be entirely negated once the player picks up armor sets such as the Snowquill set--which boosts the player's cold resistance to its highest point--or the Stealth set. Most of these armor pieces can be bought in stores, and no armor is inherently better than another. I'd go so far as to say armor is one of my favorite aspects of
Breath of the Wild if only for the sense of progression it allows players; where cooking arduous meals is a core component in the early game, this is
completely removed once the respective elemental armor set is picked up. Cooking can be an irritating necessity when first starting the game since
Breath of the Wild does not contain a recipe book--a feature which desperately needs to be patched in--but retrieving helpful armor and negating the need to cook is a great reward.
Rather than spending time cooking meals just to survive, cooking in the later game ends up resembling alchemy from other open-world games. Elixirs can be created to give Link such boosts as attack and defense, as well as all manner of bonuses in between. While not necessary like the extreme weather recipes, players can benefit greatly by cooking up several elixirs before heading into battle; only one effect lasts at a time, but unlike past games
Breath of the Wild does not feature any sort of bottle system. Cooked food (EDIT: a good friend corrected me in this, apparently there is a limit to cooked food which is stupid), raw materials, key items, and armor have unlimited slots for the player, but in an annoying turn the player has a very limited amount of melee weapons, bows, and shields to equip.
Forcing the player into a situation where they might have to throw away a weapon they're attached to is a harsh-enough punishment for any game of this size, but given the game's already crushing durability mechanic this just comes off as cruel. Players might find a rare sword that vastly overpowers a weapon they quite like, but it could have a much lower durability than any of their other powerful weapons and end up being a liability instead. The fact that the player will be forced to make these kinds of decisions is an absurd limitation--if the game
only had severe durability or limited weapon slots, I feel it would have been a much better system. The mere act of carrying around gear to survive shouldn't lead to stressful situations, but Nintendo wanted to go all-in with the survival theme and this is the result. I also believe this could also have been slightly alleviated if the game had not made the move to the Switch at all; as a business decision I know it would have been too risky to leave the game on a dead platform, but too many useful quality of life improvements were dropped as a result. The touch screen could have trivialized much of the headache surrounding inventory management, and being able to look down at the screen for a map at any time would have been a godsend. As it is, the Wii U version utilizes its platform even worse than the superb HD Remasters of
The Wind Waker and
Twilight Princess.
An NPC named Hestu can be found throughout the world who can upgrade the player's maximum bag size in exchange for Korok Seeds. These seeds can be found by various means throughout the open world, often indicated by a telltale jingle somewhere in the open world. It's likely the developers never intended for players to seek out every single individual Korok--they wouldn't have thrown in
nine hundred of the little bastards if that were the case--but the puzzles they give players are short and fun. The rewards are well worth it, especially if the player is having problems managing their inventory.
One of my biggest complaints about Hestu is simply that his first appearance does not work with open-world game design. If players take the standard ground route to Kakariko village he'll be found on the side of the road, then later he's found closer to the center of the map. The big problem here comes from the open-ended design: in my first trek to Kakariko, I climbed a tower and used the paraglider to sail across to the side of a mountain overlooking the village, coming in through the back and foregoing the natural entry altogether. I didn't find Hestu until a bit later while searching for Link's Memories, and if I hadn't gotten lost taking an NPC's directions I likely would never have found him--or worse, I'd need to resort to a guide. Hestu gives me the idea that Nintendo is still thinking with an intended path in mind, despite the fact that the game so brazenly declares that the player can go anywhere and do anything. If Hestu is any indication, the developers still had a small inkling that they wanted players to go down an intended path. Of course, this is also indicated in the forced tutorial section on the Great Plateau which serves to naturally teach players how to use their Sheikah Slate powers naturally, but it's far from the free-roaming game the developers would have players believe.
Another problem stems from the game's insistence on following vague directions and hints. Don't get me wrong on this: I adore the fact that this game refuses to just set a waypoint in a fit of laziness. Even
The Witcher 3, my favorite open-world game, still sets waypoints for the player in many instances rather than respecting the player's comprehension and sense of direction. The problem with
Breath of the Wild is that directions given by many NPCs, especially with Link's Memories, are vague to a point of frustration Although I will admit that maybe I'm just coddled--I'm not too proud to admit that recent "innovations" in the genre have caused expectations for the player to be lazy, and I'm definitely guilty of this as well.
I don't mind the thought of
Zelda taking hints from genres like old roguelikes or the hardcore mode from
Fallout: New Vegas, but many survival aspects are implemented unevenly. The cooking mechanic only exists to give health, but at a certain point the player is likely going to only be cooking for mid-boss health items rather than for survival; because fast travel is so easy to use, bosses are the only times when a player will ever be in a dangerous situation. Furthermore, inns can be used to restore player health but there's no fatigue mechanic whatsoever. Fatigue would have gone a long way in immersing the player in the survival aspect, giving players incentive to find shelter and rest. The developers wanted to have their cake and eat it too, but tying everything to restoring health or giving stat bonuses is a shallow implementation of a mechanic that could have really helped the game to stand out.
Fast travel points are unlocked in three ways: the first is in discovering towers. Towers are becoming an annoying standard in open-world games but I believe
Breath of the Wild implements them fairly well; rather than unlocking a slew of check-list items across the in-game map, activating towers merely fills in the map and gives players a centralized fast-travel point. Because the paraglider uses a very small amount of Link's stamina, the player can easily stand at the top of a tower, pick a location, and freely glide to that point without much difficulty. The only time I ever found myself panicking when paragliding was when surrounded by a number of Guardians, but timing their shots and briefly letting go of the paraglider often dodged the bullets with time to spare.
Guardians serve as the Beamos in
Breath of the Wild, and unlike many of the other returning monsters from the franchise these enemies have seen a drastic overhaul. Beamos were always an annoying staple of
Zelda dungeons, but not in such a way that I wish they'd been removed. Rather, seeing a Beamos scanning a room in previous dungeons would always lead to situations where the player would have to tread carefully to avoid their gaze, but by the time the Beamos noticed it became more of a trick to avoiding their laser. Guardians take this concept and stretch it across miles of open land in Hyrule Field where cover is hard to come by. As Link has annoyingly been stripped of his dodge roll, avoiding beams can be extremely difficult even if the player is far away from the Guardians themselves. Additionally, Guardians can cover vast distances in seconds, vastly outpacing Link on foot.
Horses can be tamed and kept in stables and these are often the best method of outrunning a Guardian, but confrontations can still be very tense. Because traveling through the air is so much easier and less hazardous than simply running on the ground, horses have very limited utility and are typically only useful when the player needs to cover more land than the paraglider can cross, though taming horses can be tricky. If the player doesn't already have enough stamina, taming a horse once can take several minutes of mounting the horse, tapping the button to calm it, being knocked off and starting the process over multiple times. Taming a few horses when the player comes across them is usually a good idea, but seeking out a horse is often more trouble than it's worth especially when the player then has to lug them to the nearest stable, which might be miles away. One good horse can last the player the entire game, but otherwise it's mostly cosmetic. Taming a horse can lead to a pretty cool moment during the final boss, but only if the player has grown attached to their own horse and actually cares about that sort of thing.
The second method of fast travel is also useful in fighting the final boss: conquering each Divine Beast. Each of the four Divine Beasts will take a sliver off of the final boss's health up to a maximum of half his entire health bar, and because the boss can be extremely difficult it's not recommended fighting him until after all of the Beasts have been purified. Additionally, without defeating the Divine Beasts the player will be forced to face each of the Beasts' Blight Ganon bosses in a row before facing the final boss at full health--unless the player is ready for one of the most difficult boss rushes in all of video games, it's more of a hassle than it's worth. The Beasts themselves situate themselves in useful fast-travel locations, giving the player just that little extra incentive to tackle them before the final boss.
Not only do the Divine Beasts give access to new fast travel spots and help with the final boss, the Champions inside each Beast will bestow to Link a special spell, each with a multitude of gameplay perks. Mipha's Grace almost entirely does away with the need to cook healing food as it not only heals Link for his full health upon death, but also grants him extra hearts at once. Revali's Gale allows the player to create an enormous updraft which allows the player to skip massive vertical challenges in the world, which in turn greatly reduces the need to grind orbs for the stamina bar. The other two powers are purely combat-focused, and each one of the spells exist on a cooldown rather than being tied to magic meter. I'm also overjoyed with the return of big magic spells, of which the attack spell is almost directly similar to the lightning spell from
A Link to the Past.
The Divine Beasts serve as
Breath of the Wild's dungeons and they're somewhat interesting, though each of them is far too short and none of them have enough enemies to be challenging. That said, the puzzles in each Divine Beast require some very precise timing on the player's part, and many of the puzzles required to finish the dungeon are some of the best in the series. Players need to utilize all of their skills in tandem in order to clear most of the challenges in each dungeon; I mentioned in my review of
Majora's Mask that I appreciate the smaller dungeon count as it gives players a greater sense of accomplishment when finally overcoming them, as rather than feeling like a checklist it gives the player the sense that a large chunk of the map has been dominated. I'd have preferred a larger number of dungeons, but the four in
Breath of the Wild are some of the best in the series and the abilities they give serve as great power boosts. Regrettably,
Breath of the Wild does share one of my main complaints with
A Link Between Worlds: because no intended order exists for each dungeon, this means there's no sense of progression when deciding on an order to take on each Divine Beast. Some do feel harder than others--Thunderblight Ganon, for instance, is far harder than any of the other bosses in the game--but the game never gives an indication of which Beast might be more difficult. Since the Beasts can still be approached in any order though, the game's difficulty is balanced accordingly which completely throws off player progression.
Cooldowns are the new method of forcing the player to conserve their power, a holdover from the recharging magic system used in
A Link Between Worlds. Players are given two different types of bombs--each on their own cooldown--which greatly helps in narrowing down the dozens of items players would typically have to keep track of. Unlike previous games, every single spell and ability is tied to its own internal cooldown, some being much longer than others. Cooldowns also change depending on the strength of each power; Mipha's Grace takes an extremely long time to recharge, while bombs can be recharged in a matter of seconds. Magnesis and Cryonis have no cooldowns, while Stasis takes longer to recharge. An NPC can upgrade Runes to be more potent as well as reduce their cooldown timer, which might not seem like a major boost but can strengthen the player's abilities quite a bit. The only item from
A Link Between Worlds not tied to a cooldown is the bow and arrow, which suffer from the same paper-quality durability as every other weapon in the game. Ironically, bows last far longer than their melee counterparts, but this might have something to do with the less frequent uses for the bow and arrow. Arrows are also somewhat difficult to come by with some players opting to just stand around in enemy camps and run around while monsters shoot at them, picking up the resulting arrows after grinding for several minutes. Players can buy arrows from shops, but currency is better saved for more expensive items.
Rupees can still be dropped by enemies, though the amount found this way is generally low. Enemy encampments often feature a single chest which unlocks when the player clears the camp, and shrines will usually have one chest with a high number of rupees. What makes currency so annoying in
Breath of the Wild is the frankly ridiculous price of many important items; full armor sets can range anywhere from 1,500 rupees to a staggering 5,000 for every piece of gear. The fairies which are used to upgrade individual pieces of armor might not require rupees to upgrade gear pieces, but players still need to invest large sums of money in order to access each fairy. For the final fairy fountain, the player needs to drop
ten thousand rupees to unlock her. Each fairy upgrades items in the same way, but the player is only allowed to upgrade their gear in accordance with the number of fairies unlocked throughout the world. If the player only has three fairies unlocked, they can only upgrade their gear three times--if the player wants to upgrade all the way, they'd better start saving early. This also means eschewing other useful investments throughout the game, one being a quaint house which I actually never found until I read about it online.
Outright grinding has never been a problem in modern
Zelda games, barring the unfortunate Triforce hunt in the original version of
The Wind Waker. The original game arguably forced players into searching for rupees in order to buy some of the more ridiculous items, but this was a holdover from older role-playing games which forced players to constantly buy new pieces of gear throughout the adventure.
Breath of the Wild was co-developed by Monolith Studios, developers behind the enormous
Xenoblade and
Xenoblade X, both games which are heavily inspired by MMORPGs. That influence is felt most clearly in the late-game activites in
Breath of the Wild, not the least of which is seen in the game's massive rupee dumps like player housing and fairies. More insidiously, players will need to grind out raw materials in order to upgrade individual pieces of armor; for example, the Champion's Tunic is one of the first pieces of armor the player can find and it's even given for free, but in order to upgrade it players need to carve off parts of the three dragons roaming around the open world.
The dragons spawn at set intervals, often at night and always in one fixed location. These dragons will drop one item per spawn, and it's always the first body part the player shoots off. If the player is unable to get the pieces they need, they'll then have to go back to a rest point and start all over again. This is only for one upgrade, mind you, and even then only one of the two materials needed to upgrade. Not every piece of armor requires materials this annoying to procure, but many of the best pieces of armor do--the Barbarian Armor, Guardian Armor, and Champion's Tunic just so happen to be among the most infuriating and time-consuming.
To really make all this more annoying, by the time the player has fully upgraded these pieces of armor they'll likely have nothing to use it on. Ganon is the ultimate goal of the game and everything builds up to his and Link's confrontation; despite this, Ganon can easily be beaten with armor found early in the game without any upgrades. If the player has defeated every Divine Beast, Ganon is even easier; in fact, most of the more difficult parts of the Ganon boss battle can be completely trivialized with Urbosa's Fury and none of his attacks can completely break Daruk's Protection. Playing the game normally, as it were, is a far more lucrative use of the player's time than pointlessly grinding out upgrade materials. The reason being is that there is absolutely
no post-game to speak of.
Post-game content exists for players who both want to get the most out of a video game and have defeated every challenge found in the main game. Ganon is a mildly difficult boss, but he's nothing special; so long as the player finds the Master Sword and finishes the four dungeons, the final boss can be beaten without much effort. While Lynels and Guardians can be a fun distraction after the player has beaten the game, there's not much of a reason to fight them other than for the materials they drop. In many games, especially role-playing games of this type, the player will be collecting materials from some of the strongest enemies and rare monsters in order to build up to a secret or elusive target, one much harder than the main game can muster.
Xenoblade X is a great example of this with numerous monsters dozens of levels higher than the hard level cap, but no such trial exists in
Breath of the Wild. The obvious answer might be "they'll add in a superboss with the DLC," but downloadable content requiring a secondary purchase should never be the incentive to keep the player invested in the main game.
Breath of the Wild is in desperate need of super-bosses which only give rewards to players who can beat them, and even then they should be nigh-impossible to players without fully-upgraded armor. The only other alternative would be for higher difficulty options which basically force players to upgrade their armor.
Higher difficulty modes have been standard since
Skyward Sword, typically in the form of Hero Mode. Every single re-release of a 3D game, as well as
A Link Between Worlds, has featured a variation of Hero Mode with the sole exception being
Majora's Mask 3D, a game I already have very mixed feelings about. Hero Mode, or Second Quest in the original
Zelda, gave players a mode which allowed players to approach the game in a new context, often with much harder enemies and some element of the game being different. In
Ocarina of Time 3D and
Twilight Princess Remastered, for example, the different element was the entire game world being reversed.
Breath of the Wild, the most free-form game in the series, could have used Second Quest in order to revamp enemy placement as well as gear drops, giving the player an experience not unlike a roguelike game. Even concepts such as permadeath could have easily been implemented if the developers had taken the time to flesh out the concept.
Instead of Second Quest or Hero Mode, players are given nothing. There's nothing at all to do with the game after beating Ganon because there are no substantial rewards for continuing to play the game. Hero Mode could have given players reason to upgrade their materials and Second Quest could have been used to randomize parts of the world, but the only vague conclusion given by Nintendo was "wait for the DLC." I don't want to. I have no interest in playing
Breath of the Wild anymore, and I highly doubt the DLC will change that.
One of the biggest reasons I completely lost interest in the game lies in the third method of fast travel the player can unlock: the shrines. Shrines are introduced as soon as players activate the first tower, which Rhoam presses the player into completing in exchange for his paraglider. While these first four shrines give players access to their Runes, this also manipulates players into forming a sort of routine: find a shrine, complete its annoying puzzle, and get a small reward. Each shrine gives players a spirit orb and contain secret chests, but when activated each shrine also gives players a fast travel point. By the end of the game, players will be able to fast travel to nearly every square inch of the map so long as they've been scouring the landscape for shrines; while the fast travel aspect is a boon, I'm less satisfied with the implications of these shrines and their easily handed-out rewards.
About twenty hours in, I had already found the location of the Master Sword and made it a point to come back to it each time I upgraded my health. One dungeon down and six heart containers later, I returned sure of my chances of finally retrieving the sword. When I inevitably died, I became frustrated and took to the internet for answers. In order to obtain the Master Sword, the coolest sword in all of video games and the turning point in all
Zelda games since
A Link to the Past, the player was required to boost their maximum health to
thirteen heart containers. Even if the player finished every single Divine Beast, that still left them with five full heart containers before they were able to pull out the Master Sword, assuming they used the first four spirit orbs from the Great Plateau for a heart. In that case, the player would need to complete an additional twenty shrines before they could use the Master Sword.
Much like the confused grinding progression of the post-game in
Breath of the Wild, it makes no sense for the player to wait until they've beaten all four Divine Beasts before pulling out the Master Sword. As the Deku Tree tells the player, the sword is only at its fullest power when facing monsters corrupted by Malice; outside of Guardians on the world map, this means the Master Sword is only at full power when players are inside a dungeon. Not shrines,
only Divine Beasts--the Master Sword won't activate its full power even when facing Guardians in dungeons, so it is never going to be used to its full potential unless used in dungeons. So what's the point in finishing every dungeon first if the player is unable to use the best, most amazing sword in all of video games to clear them out? And don't forget, once a Divine Beast has been conquered there's no way for a player to return to the dungeon inside of it.
With this in mind, I started to scour the world for my shrines. Finding shrines is rarely a problem, especially once players climb enough towers and have the ability to scout them out from a distance. Since unvisited shrines glow orange, it's very easy to identify them against the landscape--with that in mind, I made my way through the rainy plains in the south. My first problem arose almost immediately: as soon as I hit the new area, it began raining.
Aside from the environment growing hot or cold, weather events like rain and thunderstorms can begin at random intervals throughout the world of Hyrule. Storms carry one of the biggest risks in the game, as any piece of metallic gear worn by Link can cause him to become struck by lightning. The game gives ample warning when the lightning is about to come down, and opening the player's inventory will show each dangerous item with a spark over its image. Lightning can kill a player even with a large amount of hearts, so it's advised to put away everything as soon as the weather indicator shows storms.
Part of the charm of
Breath of the Wild is the various ways in which the game's multiple mechanics will interact with each other in deep, unique ways. Lightning during thunderstorms is one example, but players can still use it to their advantage. If facing down an enemy in a storm, players can throw a sword at an enemy to trick them into picking it up. Given that most enemies will take the bait, it won't take long to have them fried with electricity the moment the weapon is picked up. Rain can also put out fires, but the player can start a fire of their own. Grass is highly flammable and if it spreads enough, the fire can grow at a rapid pace. Not only that, but a large brush fire can cause an updraft which the player can then use to jump over and activate their paraglider for a much higher jump. These are only a very few examples, but given the sheer scope of the game it's highly impressive just how many ways the developers were able to tie each mechanic into one another and create a vibrant and living world.
Rain also has one major side effect which greatly hampers exploration: walls that could normally be climbed by the player will cause them to slip and lose much of their progress, and since stamina is such a precious resource there might be times when the player is unable to proceed up sheer cliffs without waiting the rain out.
Thus did I find my next hurdle: shrines for days on the mountain above, but no way to actually reach them without waiting out the rain. My next course of action was to get out some firewood and use its ability to wait for time to pass to skip the rain. And there did my next problem arise: the southern plains were completely open without a canopy to wait under. The weather report showed that the rain would last for hours to come, and since I had only finished Divine Beast Vah Ruta I didn't have the incredibly important Revali's Gale to scale the cliff. The solution? Give up and go somewhere else.
Because I only had two heart containers from shrines and one from a Divine Beast, my search for twenty eight shrines had resulted in an hour of wasted effort and not a thing to show for it. Worse yet, if I decided to devote spirit orbs to stamina and make my quest a little easier, that would just increase the already annoying time investment spent looking for shrines for their heart containers. I eventually said screw it and went off in another direction. By the time I got halfway done with my stupid quest, over five hours had passed and I was officially done having fun with the game. Shrines almost always consist of physics puzzles and tests of strength, with the very rare case of a long mini-dungeon.
Breath of the Wild contains 120 shrines and almost all of them are single-room puzzles that use one Rune at a time, occasionally branching off to a second room for a few rupees. When faced with the same monotonous content over and over, a very real pattern starts emerging.
At this halfway point, I realized that I was level-grinding. Sure, it might not be exactly the same as fighting monsters and leveling up stats, but the exact same concept was being applied to my quest for the master sword. Level grinding.
Breath of the Wild returns to a concept from the original
Zelda: in order to obtain stronger weapons, the player must first prove their strength by obtaining hearts. With
The Legend of Zelda, players needed to obtain five hearts for the White Sword and twelve hearts for the Magical Sword. Five spare heart containers can be found in the wild, which means by the end of the game the player will have gained up to eleven hearts simply by clearing dungeons out normally. In order to prove their strength to the old man to obtain the Magical Sword, players only need to find
one extra heart container throughout the entire game, and the White Sword can even be retrieved before the first dungeon is entered.
The prerequisites for the Master Sword in
Breath of the Wild are so utterly absurd that part of me wonders why they even bothered. A much better alternative would have been to unlock the Master Sword at six hearts--if the player picked up a heart container from the Great Plateau and finished two dungeons normally, they'd be ready to pick up the sword. Additionally, the player could do eight shrines extra and go complete some dungeons afterward. This is supposed to be the biggest
Zelda game of all time, and you're going to tell me with a straight face it's a perfect ten despite taking steps back from the original game made three decades ago?
And don't say that the Master Sword would be too overpowered, because it absolutely is not. With a base attack power of 30, the Master Sword is one of the weakest end-game weapons in the game and there's no reason to use it other than taking out Guardians or using in dungeons. I found myself using the Master Sword more as fodder to pad out wasting my far superior weapons rather than its intended use as the baddest-assest sword of all time, the Blade of Evil's Bane, you get the idea.
Even more frustrating is the stupid idea that the developers couldn't have merely added more features to the Master Sword. As I mentioned in my review of
A Link to the Past, one of my favorite parts of the game was discovering the great side quest which allowed Link to temper the Master Sword through short side quests. Moreover, the second half of both
The Wind Waker and
Skyward Sword focused entirely on Link's quest to revive the Master Sword from its weakened state; it's clear by the frequent exhaustion of the sword that it is far weakened from its original state and I hope to god it's because Fi is dying a slow and arduous death, but the fact remains that this was a feature entirely forgotten about while developing
Breath of the Wild. Writing this, I have the sinking feeling that this mechanic was put on the table and rejected by Aonuma because it would have been too similar to the Goddess Flame portion of
Skyward Sword, though I'm going to ignore the possibility because it would be too utterly stupid if that was the case. The player should have been given the option to strengthen the sword's power, reduce its cooldown, give it the Evil's Bane power permanently, remove its cooldown completely, allow the player to shoot beams without maximum health, and strengthen it overall much further throughout the game. If that was the reward for thirteen hearts the sword would have been totally worth it, but instead the player must search out dozens of shrines just to be able to wield one of the most annoying, flimsy weapons in the entire game and still be expected to thank the developers for the cheap nostalgia grab. Why bother?
I just have to wonder how much of these problems came about because the game
needed to be open world. It's not just
Breath of the Wild, either: a large amount of Japanese games have been following the Western trend of open-world video games recently and few of them have been able to implement it well. Worse than that is the very real precedent which caused many Japanese developers to distance themselves from linear game design.
Breath of the Wild is a response to
Skyward Sword, one of the most notoriously linear games in the
Zelda franchise.
Final Fantasy XV was made open world entirely as a response to
Final Fantasy XIII being composed entirely of hallways, but for what reason? The game barely makes use of the open world and players have to constantly spend money on chocobos if they want to travel across the map at a reasonable pace. And what exactly went on with
Metal Gear Solid V? That game was clearly unfinished, but there was absolutely no reason to drop that game into two gigantic open maps. I don't think it's a very controversial claim that
Ground Zeroes, the much smaller prologue to
Metal Gear Solid V, was a far better-designed game as a result of its constrained environment and plethora of mechanics. If
The Phantom Pain had been designed in the same way with multiple Camp Omega-sized installations rather than a big empty map, it would have been a much better game.
The solution to each and every one of these games should have been to just do what worked rather than throw everything into a big pot and hope something stuck.
Breath of the Wild is at its best when the multitude of physics-based rendering and environmental details are working in tandem to create a world that feels believable, not when rushing through miles of empty plains looking for an ugly shrine to go grind out spirit orbs for an extra two seconds' worth of climbing. The shrines are absolutely not a decent substitute for dungeons, and just because they share similarities doesn't mean the frankly idiotic number of them should even exist. I'd take one extra dungeon if it meant the shrine number was cut in half, because frankly I hated doing shrines in the first place.
By the time I finished the game, I had somehow completed just over eighty shrines and of them, maybe a handful were memorable. Because of the gigantic size of the world,
Breath of the Wild also performs like a budget Unreal 3 game on the Playstation 3--the idiot journalists who gave this game a perfect score and completely overlooked the glaring, horrible optimization and unforgivably massive framerate drops no longer have any right to say they have standards for the industry. Where was this overlooking of framerate issues when
Drakengard 3--a game featuring strong female characters in control of a matriarchy, which one would think is exactly what Western game journalists have been bitching about wanting for years--was being shoved out the door by an impatient Square Enix? My guess is they were off fellating whatever unnecessarily beloved Western Indie Hipster Darling (WIHD, pronounced WEED, you're welcome) was out at the moment, or more likely heaping praise on some EA turd they were "encouraged" to score highly.
That's not to say the game is totally bad; in fact, the story is full of endearing characters and fully-fleshed out towns and environments. Well, if you're not considering the voice acting.
Breath of the Wild should forever remain the most damning example of why
Zelda should have never, ever featured voice acting throughout the franchise, and I hope to god Nintendo ditches it for the sequel. All of you morons clambering to hear Zelda say "open your eyes, Link" got your wish, and they even drugged the actress before they recorded her lines just like you wanted. Anyway, it looks great and the cel-shaded artstyle makes for one of the loveliest games I've ever played, especially one with this much variety. Truth be told, the open world aspect does little to impress me, because frankly I think the only way a game of this type will ever overtake the likes of
The Witcher 3 would be a game with the vast swathes of meaningful side quests of that title and the deep levels of interaction between mechanics like
Breath of the Wild. Still,
The Witcher 3 only lost to
Bloodborne for my game of the year list when it came out, and a big part of that was that
Bloodborne simply had the type of world I'd rather see in a game.
Bloodborne, Nier, Dark Souls, and
Ocarina of Time paint a picture of the types of worlds I would rather explore in video games: not massively open worlds, but massively
closed worlds. Video games don't need to imitate real life with these giant sandboxes for players to glaze their eyes over when it's entirely possible to get the same result out of a game one tenth the size of your
Skyrim or
Breath of the Wild types. How many people genuinely believe
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is actually better than any of its previous games? Even had it been completed with the Island of Flies area, nobody in their right mind would say it even touches any game in its legacy aside from maybe
Metal Gear Solid 4, but even then that's a more satisfying conclusion than anything in
The Phantom Pain. I'm not impressed by huge worlds anymore.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the closest possibility of me batting an eye at an open world game again, but even then it'll only be because CDProject Red took criticisms to heart and make the game as interactive as
Breath of the Wild.
Zelda is not impressive because of its scope, it's impressive because of the little things that bring it all together.
I'll leave you with one final note before wrapping up. Near the end of my adventure in Hyrule, I decided to start scrounging up money to upgrade my armor in case I decided to pick up the DLC. My log of side quests had been getting enormous at this point, and to be frank I had never touched any of the side content aside from shrines and material grinding. I thought, why not? I had just finished
Nier: Automata, one of the best games I think I've ever played in my entire life, and still had some time to go before
Persona 5 came out. I figured, I've got more
Zelda so I might as well go for it.
After taking the first quest--kill three Guardians for some guy I had only talked to once and didn't know at all--I went on my way. The Master Sword makes hunting Guardians much easier than they had been before, so I made my way to a valley where the guy told me to go hunting. I dispatched the monsters and returned to this random guy for my reward. After a curt thanks, he gave me fifty rupees and sent me on my way. Thinking this odd, I took another quest: rescue some sheep from bokoblins down a beach somewhere. Again, I slaughtered my foes and went back to hear more about what was going on with the sheep. A curt thanks and fifty rupees later, I felt my heart sink.
This is the same series with such great side content as the Kafei and Anju wedding mask from
Majora's Mask or the simple, lovely quest to heal Link's sick grandmother with a fairy. The side quests in previous
Zelda games might not have composed a giant checklist, but I'll always remember them for the feelings they left me with after all was said and done. And
Breath of the Wild does have some interesting side content, the Link's Memories main quest being a stellar example. But then you press the right directional button on the quest log and come across fifty checklist side quests given to you by Whocares Von Fuckoff for a hundred-rupee reward if you manage to kill eight thousand bears in the wild tundra which cost Nintendo eight thousand dollars to render because they forgot to fill it with any other meaningful content. Scouring this list for a single piece of content worth my time, I kept thinking back to my time with
The Witcher 3, when I could enter any single town on the map and become embroiled in the personal politics of the locale, inundated with rich writing and hours of optional side content.
And here's
Zelda, apathetically asking me to go kill a dozen bokoblins for one hundred rupees and we'll never talk about it again. Ten out of ten! Best game ever! I'm not human anymore because
Zelda made me forget how to feel! That'll be three hundred bucks for your Switch, please. Lord help you if you picked up the Wii U version, because all the useful options that could have made it the better version of the game were scooped out to keep parity with the Switch version which already has an advantage in framerate and resolution. Who cares? You'll buy it anyway. More people bought
Zelda than they did Switches. Buy it, you hungry fool!
Verdict
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild made me feel incredibly hollow inside. After eighty hours of bumbling around looking for pointless shrines and grinding money to build a house that did absolutely nothing, all I can say is that I like the terrific art style and am impressed by the depth of its mechanics. The characters are pretty likable and the game has one of the best backstories in the series, but the minute-to-minute action of Breath of the Wild is frustrating at its core. I can't believe I nearly bought a Switch for this game, because I'd hate to write a review this negative for the only game on a brand new console for the first five months of its release. It's two steps forward for the series, and dozens of steps back.
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