I suppose I should start off with the disclaimer that I am, in general, not a fan of open world games. I have still traditionally enjoyed games with open world elements such as Metroid and Zelda but being thrust into a world with no aim has never really been my cup of tea. I was very apprehensive of the new Zelda game because of this but I’m happy to say that it exceeded all my expectations. It’s a really, really good game.
That said, I want to highlight some particularly notable parts of my experience. I gave the disclaimer at the start because I believe that this game is a personal one for a lot of people - it’s very difficult to be objective about certain things in this game and everybody played the game in such a different way that it’s also hard to fully relate to one another on our experience.
Full spoilers for the entire game will follow. I will only talk about the game’s ending at the end of the review but I still recommend playing everything before reading. If you don’t want to be spoiled, go play the game first. Tl;dr it’s pretty damn good.
Breath of the Wild’s tutorial section is an extremely solid introduction to the game. One of the game’s core design philosophies is that the player has to do everything on their own and the Plateau is no exception. As the player steps out, they see a massive world and the camera pans slowly over to show the old man walking away from them. One thing that a player may not even notice is that you don’t even have to talk to this guy but it’s pretty hard to go by him and not do this. The path is pretty narrow and, at this point in the game, all the player will have done is press A to interact things in the Cave of Resurrection. If you pick up his items, it prompts a conversation with him where he shouts at you as a joke. Even if you don’t care about talking to him, the game still forces you into a conversation in a way that doesn’t feel hand hold-y.
This is something that is very common throughout the game. The layout of the world gently goads you into the direction of important things. Three of the four major towns are reached by going through a valley or some sort of linear path. You can reach all of them through other means, of course - the game is non-linear, after all - but I’d be surprised if somebody made their way to Rito Village without going over the main bridge. The exception to this, Gerudo Town, is still reached by going through the only major point of interest at a glance in the entire desert on the map. It’s also on the main road. The two research facilities are also located on the tops of hills that encourage you to travel from one specific direction at the end of a road. Korok Forest and the Master Sword can only be entered from one direction at the end of a road as well.
The point I’m trying to make here is that the world isn’t just laid out in a way that makes geographical sense - the world is quietly pointing you in the direction of major points on the map. Now, you could argue that the game gives you markers on the map for all of these things besides the Master Sword anyway but I’d make an argument right back - a friend of mine somehow managed to skip the conversation with Impa and still found all of these things despite having no map marker. When I heard this (and got past my initial disbelief that you could find the Master Sword before Impa even explained what the fuck it was), I started to think about how he had managed to find every point of interest on the map without the assistance of markers.
The world of the Breath of the Wild has not been designed randomly. When the player reaches the top of a mountain, they look out and see a point of interest to mark on their map. The designers were very aware of this. It seems like vantage points are often surrounded by more points of interest. It’s very easy to spend hours and hours travelling to one place you’ve seen just because of all the things you’ve distracted yourself with on the way there. Elements that draw the player’s attention are placed at a very strategic distance from each other so that you’ll constantly be bouncing from enemy camp to shrine to mountain to cave to world boss to enemy camp before you reach the shrine you were initially aiming for. While the player does spend large chunks of time between these points of interest essentially doing nothing, there’s a sense of excitement when the player clambers over the edge of a hill and sees what that interesting looking monster was.
I think most of us would agree that in order for an open world game to succeed, a player has to want to explore its world. Previous Zelda games often struggled with this by essentially locking out areas of the world until you had completed previous tasks. On my most recent playthrough of Wind Waker, I gave up on exploring because so many islands required items I hadn’t acquired yet. In Ocarina of Time, you’re flat out not allowed access to many areas When I was playing Breath of the Wild, I came across a giant green dragon called Farosh very early on. As a Zelda veteran, my initial thought was “I’ll deal with that later” before I suddenly realised that I didn’t have to. I could just deal with it there and then.
This was a very exciting realisation and one of the game’s biggest strengths. There is very little in the game that’s locked out from you until you do other things. Anything you can see, you can do as long as you prepare yourself accordingly. The game is extremely punishing (early on, at least - more on that later) but it very rarely feels unfair. Early on in the game, there’s a shrine in the Plateau you need to use Magnesis to get to. When I arrived, I didn’t see the metal door and simply jumped into the river like an idiot and promptly died. A decently quick respawn time along with the total lack of punishment for my death told me flatly all I needed to know - “there’s another solution here” and “don’t jump into a freezing river you idiot”.
So we have an open world game that makes the player want to explore and allows the player the freedom to do things in any way and any order they want. This is a pretty perfect combination and I’d wager that these two goals alone being met is probably what earned Breath of the Wild its endless sea of perfect scores. During my first fifty or sixty hours with the game, I almost agreed with them as well. I found myself losing upwards of five hours of my life on play sessions without pauses just because I was so enthralled in what I was doing. You’re always doing something in this game. There is always a task at hand - a shrine to find, a sidequest to complete, a monster to kill.
To its credit, most games don’t last a whopping sixty hours before they dry up a bit, so Breath of the Wild earns points there. Before I dive into my issue with the game’s longevity, I want to discuss shrines as a goal for the player.
As a big fan of Zelda dungeons, I was hugely appreciative of the news that we were getting over a hundred shrines in the game that were going to be essentially mini-dungeons. As a mechanic, shrines couldn’t fit into the game’s overall design better. The player is told right from the start that they need to get stronger so they can fight Ganon. As you probably know, you can actually just run straight to Ganon and fight him right off the bat if you really want to - but you’ll probably get your ass handed to you. Every important NPC stresses the fact that you need to get stronger before you fight Ganon. How do you get stronger? By completing shrines, the tests set by the ancient Sheikahs to strengthen the hero. Shrines are found how? By exploring the world. Shrines just work perfectly as a goal for the player on so many levels. The player wants to explore the world and wants to get strong enough to fight Ganon and shrines offer both of those while also offering neat little puzzles. Not only that but they also serve as warp points for fast travel so finding them yields benefits even after you’re finished with them.
I think that the problem with shrines is, strangely enough, that they work too well. Finding a shrine is by far the best reward you can possibly get on the map that everything else feels quite unfulfilling. When I reach a peak and find only a Korok seed or a rare monster, it’s a bit disappointing. The other problem with this is that there are simply too many shrines. As the game is totally open world, the developers clearly wanted to make it so every shrine could be done as if it was one of the first you came to. Naturally, shrines further out from the Plateau are a bit more complicated but, for the most part, they’re all pretty simple. The tools that you are able to use in shrines are very limited and all given to you at the start of the game. While the development team was very creative, there are only so many ways you can use those tools - especially nearly a hundred times. After doing enough of them, I began to get a good idea of how the development team thought and now I’m basically just blasting through shrines with no worries at all.
One of the great strengths of the series’ dungeons was their linearity. As they were (generally) completed in a set order, the development team could expand on their ideas as they went along. In each individual dungeon, the same thing was possible - a general pattern would be to introduce an idea, give a twist on the idea and then resolve the idea. The shrines all being mini-dungeons doesn’t allow for this. Quite often, they will start off with a neat puzzle idea and then… that’ll be it. Some shrines can be solved in just a few seconds by working out what the trick you’re meant to do is. Some of them do expand their initial ideas and go on for quite some time but I can’t really work out why only some of them are like this. I think it would have been much better if all of them had this kind of depth that allowed for the development of puzzles past a base idea. One of the ways that shrines are designed to alleviate this is to have optional chests that use the puzzle’s theme in an alternative way to reward players for ‘mastering’ the puzzle but also not punish players who couldn’t figure it out. I can imagine the designers’ thought process - imagine reaching a really tricky shrine and then not being able to work out the puzzle. It would feel really horrible for the player, for sure. I have two counterarguments to this. The first is that the player should get good. The second is that the rewards from treasure chests, on average, simply aren’t good enough to warrant the amount of effort they can sometimes take. More on that when I get to covering weapon durability.
When you enter a shrine, you essentially have seven tools that a shrine is going to ask you to use - sword, bombs, stasis, magnesis, cryonis, arrows or your mind (in the case of riddles). The way I see it is that there are simply only so many ways you can use all of these tools together, especially when the puzzles are so basic. Once you magnesis a chest for the first time, you’ll do it to every single metal chest. Once you use fire arrows to burn down a wooden ledge, you’ll do it to every single wooden ledge. That’s not to mention the fact that you’ll be nearly constantly using all of these powers out in the overworld and during the divine beasts too. The thing is, all of these realisations on their own are brilliant. There’s a shrine where I had to shoot through a lit torch I’d made to burn down a wooden ledge to get the chest. The game hadn’t explain this was a mechanic but it made total sense. That’s actually one of Breath of the Wild’s strongest points but, again, more on that later.
So, what am I saying here, exactly? The first thing to jump to mind is that it’d be neat to have another rune but I’m sure the development team settled on having only four for a very good reason. Maybe it could have been possible that there were ‘series’ of shrines that you could enter out of order - for example, if one was in Eldin and one was in Faron, you would always get the easier of the two first and then the harder one in the other location regardless of the order you chose them in. It would allow the team to create a difficulty curve that I feel the shrines desperately need and the story could definitely explain it away with some Sheikah technology crap. Honestly, though, I think the real solution is to simply cut down on the number of shrines and bump up the number of other objects worth finding. As it is, there really isn’t that much to find in remote locations - when I explore, I am rewarded with shrines, Korok seeds or a pretty view. Side quests encourage you to explore too, often without direction, but I found that these often felt unrewarding compared to shrines. Shrines being one of the most common discoverable objects as well as the most rewarding ones makes other side quests feel almost like a waste of time.
For example, I saw a heart-shaped pond on my map and immediately headed there out of interest. I found a neat little sidequest at the top that was somewhat charming but still only gave me a hundred and twenty rupees as my reward. On the other hand, some shrines give even more money than that and all of them give me what is essentially a piece of heart.
As it is, you already end up with so many hearts that it’s beyond ridiculous. It begins to reach a point where even finding shrines doesn’t feel like much of a reward - I haven’t come close to dying in my last ten hours of gameplay. I don’t think that shrines should be lessened in value but making them rarer and making different objectives would probably be a good idea. Maybe it’s just me but I feel a player should never be disappointed by what they find when exploring in an open world game. Again, though, I want to stress that this is quite a personal game so it’s very possible you’re reading this and thinking “wow, I thought shrines were awesome from start to finish”.
One thing I think we can all agree on sucking though is the weapon limit and durability system. Hear me out, now, before you say that “oh actually I did like it” - I’m not suggesting that weapon durability on its own is dumb and terrible. Taking on enemy camps early on and picking weapons up off of corpses to continue fighting felt really great. Similarly, having to use my entire arsenal to take down bosses was also intense - for the water boss, I was actually throwing my weapons at it by the end of it which I think is really neat. I think it’s a good idea to use weapon durability to essentially gate the player away from just using one insane weapon for the whole game and never experimenting with anything else - the game’s combat naturally encourages you to take on enemies in as many different ways as possible so I can understand using weapon durability to encourage this. However, there are three main, glaring issues I have with the durability system.
The first is how weapons break for doing utility-based actions. I believe that bows are tied to how long you hold the string back for how they break and I believe this should have been changed to simply only break whenever an arrow hits an enemy. I feel there should never be a point where I am essentially punished for finding something of interest or solving a puzzle. For example, there are those small rocks that contain ores like Luminous Stones and the like which you have to break open using your weapons… but the weapons break in doing so. Why? If I have found a reward, I should just have the reward. There is no challenge here - the only decision making involved is that I have to swap to a weaker weapon that pathetically breaks upon hitting rocks. This is a fairly small issue but I still find it quite irritating to be in a shrine and having my bows break as I use fire arrows and the like. Incidentally, I would have liked it if all the shrines that require the bow gave you arrows in a chest as you entered. It can be quite irritating to find a shrine, get halfway into it, run out of arrows, exit the shrine, buy more arrows and return.
The second issue I have with the weapon durability system is the total lack of attachment to each weapon you find. Let me give you an example to explain what I mean. If you’re in a shrine, you may need to do an extra challenge to acquire a chest. When you do that and obtain rupees, ore, a guardian part or, better yet, a piece of armour, it’s generally quite rewarding. Receiving a weapon from a chest feels flat as hell to me. I’m not suggesting that the player gets attached to some diamonds but at least that diamond will be useful to you in a unique way, be it by being sold for lots of money or being used to craft stuff. A weapon will soon break at best and be weaker than your whole arsenal at worst. If you don’t get a chest from a shrine, there’s a little marker to show you never got the chest. So when I opened up a chest and got a twenty six strength bow weaker than all of my current bows, I still dropped a bow just to open the chest to get rid of that marker. I don’t think it should be possible to do an optional, more difficult task and receive a prize that is literally completely useless. The only times I found myself excited at receiving weapons was when I received really strong ones for the first time, like my first Guardian Sword or Edge of Duality. After that first initial wow, though, I don’t think any weapons ever became exciting again. I feel this problem would still be around even if weapon durability didn’t exist - the player could still very much open a weapon weaker than all of theirs - but I feel even opening a strong weapon doesn’t really matter too much because you know it’s just going to break. It’s especially odd to me because the Master Sword in Zelda has always been a brilliant example of building up and matching player expectations whereas picking up a sick new weapon in Breath of the Wild doesn’t make me very excited. Obtaining Daruk’s legendary Boulder Breaker, it feels kind of ridiculous that I’m apprehensive about using it for fear of it breaking.
What I’m trying to say is that I should never feel disappointed for obtaining a new strong weapon. Moving on.
My last issue with the system is definitely a more subjective one - I think weapons just simply break too quickly. I don’t have the numbers off hand but it feels like my weapons are snapping to pieces after just a few rotations with each. This kind of goes against the core design of the game which I believe is the ability to do anything the player wants to do. In general, the only limiting factor on the player’s ability to do something is their own skill (or, in some cases, a lack of equipment that they can purchase like the Fireproof Armour). Weapons snapping like twigs is really odd, then, because I think it’s entirely possible for an early game player to find an endgame monster and be physically unable to win purely because of their weapons breaking. I’m not familiar enough with other open world games to know how they deal with this issue - and, to some, it may not even be an issue - but I definitely found it irritating.
Let’s talk about Breath of the Wild’s difficulty curve. A lot of my friends (myself included) were talking about how difficult the game was when we all first got our hands on it. After spending a lot of time with it, the game has now become laughably easy. This is, of course, intentional - the player wakes up in a post apocalyptic Hyrule that one shots them and has to become stronger to fight Ganon. The enemies being so strong is a really good way of building up Ganon, too - if regular mobs are one shotting you, just how strong is Ganon? I think placing Guardians in the initial area and near the Plateau was a stroke of genius. When you see an enemy, the natural instinct is to fight them but I would be very surprised if a new player was able to take down a Guardian without spending a LOT of time at the activity. They flat out one shot you - and these are the immobile ones?! Personally, I find it quite disappointing in games when the story builds up a legendary monster who then ends up kind of whatever. The final boss of Spirit Tracks dealing half a heart comes to mind. Guardians, on the other hand, I could definitely imagine those destroying Hyrule. When I learnt how to deal with them - and, like every enemy in the game, they become quite easy after you do learn how to - I could still understand how they destroyed Hyrule. You telling me a villager is gonna pick up a pot lit and be parrying their laser beams?
Back to the topic of difficulty curve. Considering that the world is so sprawling and intimidating, it makes a lot of sense for things to get easier the more you play. The world becomes less intimidating as you begin to know more about it. The way that the game accommodates this is by having enemies do scaling damage. The guardians in the Tests of Strength do a percentage of the player’s hearts rather than a flat amount. This is a great solution to the obvious problem of “what if the player has too many hearts”?
Typically, the difficulty curve of the game is balanced around two things - the player’s improving skill and the character’s improving skills. As the player plays more, they get better at the game. That much is obvious. In addition, the character will frequently obtain more abilities or become stronger. A good example of this is Pokemon. At the start of the game, you’ll just be spamming Tackle on the starter of your choice but by late game, you’ll have access to a whole team of Pokemon with four different moves each. You are gradually given access to more complex moves and ideas while the AI’s teams are also made more complex. By late game, you are expected to use all of your character’s new skills in conjunction with all of the skills you have picked up as a player throughout the game - you’ve learnt when to switch out, when to go for non-attack moves and so on.
In Breath of the Wild, I feel this isn’t really as possible as the character is given all of his skills right at the start. This means that the only thing left for the difficulty curve is to take into account how much better the player has become. To its credit, this is done pretty well - late game enemies expect you to parry whereas early game enemies expect you to just hold shield. In addition to this, Link becomes exponentially more powerful throughout the game, going from holding a random club and beating up bokoblins with three hearts to having upwards of fifteen while decked out with weapons all as strong as the Master Sword. I think this is fine, too. It’s incredibly satisfying to just one shot enemies that previously gave you trouble. It also feels really neat to come across world bosses that tower over you and just annihilate them with the power of the goddess and all that jazz. Over seventy hours or so, you go from a weak, scrawny little Hylian to the most powerful being in Hyrule.
While I like the difficulty curve in general, I do think it goes a little bit too far. In my fight with Molduga, the sand worm near Gerudo, I was racing around on my sand seal and struggling to get hits. It hit me and, while gliding, I pumped an endless sea of arrows into it. I landed, got hit again and just repeated, fairies and Mipha’s Grace keeping me healed. As they ran out, I just ate food. Basically, I just brute forced my way through and dodged nothing because I’d lost my sand seal and the thing eventually went down. Maybe I’m at fault here for killing the thing in such a lame way? Regardless, I think that the problem with the game’s difficulty curve is that you just become too overpowered. I think that the numbers go up just a little too high. Your weapon’s damage doesn’t just double, late game weapons are eight times more powerful than early game weapons. You have five times more hearts than early game. Your armour is five times more powerful than early game. Enemies do not become five or eight times more powerful than early game.
Personally, I think the solution to this would be to do away with the conventional three hearts we start with and instead start with ten hearts that each represent ten hitpoints - basically giving us a hundred health but keeping the heart aesthetic. Each heart container should then give you an extra ten health. At the moment, the player doubles his hearts after only twelve shrines - that’s only an ninth of all of the shrines - and so early game enemies are completely trivialised after this small amount of time. Link becomes too powerful too quickly. I believe by increasing all of the base numbers, the game’s difficulty curve becomes a little bit more natural. I don’t think that initial “holy shit everything is killing me” should stick around forever but you understand what I mean. I think the same thing about weapons and armour - they should start off at numbers a little bit higher and then increase slightly throughout. Armour in particular combined with hearts makes it so even guardians are lightly scratching me in the late game. Again, I’m okay with Link becoming the most powerful being in Hyrule but he just becomes that too quickly.
Difficulty curve in open world games is always very difficult to balance. I don’t doubt that the team were well aware of how their difficulty curve works and I’m sure it was a conscious design decision to sacrifice the difficulty curve in exchange for the ability to go anywhere at any point. I agree with this sacrifice even if it’s something I personally enjoy less because I know how much other players love open world things but I still think some aspects of the difficulty could be addressed.
The reason I say that the first fifty to sixty hours of Breath of the Wild are golden compared to the rest is that the game is almost too big. Simply put, there isn’t enough actual variety in the world to match the sheer size of things. Every enemy I came across was extremely threatening the first time I fought one but, after the first few times, I kind of learnt what to do and wasn’t intimidated any more. The game doesn’t really have enough variety to constantly make the player learn new things. This is fine to an extent - even linear games reuse enemies, obviously - but I would have liked to have seen more different types of enemies in the game.
Most enemy types in the game are vaguely humanoid and drop a weapon. This makes sense - the player will be using up weapon durability to kill an enemy so they either have to drop a weapon to replace the one you used or come with extremely worthwhile gear like the world bosses. It’s quite telling that the most common non-humanoid enemies are the Keese and ChuChus found right at the start of the game. I think this could have been addressed by giving monster parts a bit more value. At the moment, all they do is make elixirs and upgrade equipment. For elixirs, the player will have so many monster parts that they’ll very rarely be grinding for more. For equipment, this is a good idea - having to fight Lynels to upgrade the Berserker gear gives me a reason to go back and fight an extremely intimidating enemy I may otherwise skip. I think it would have been nice to have other uses for monster parts outside of these two and the sidequest involving that one guy near Eldin I forget the name of.
As for enemy types themselves, I don’t actually mind there being mostly humanoid enemies. I also don’t mind recolours of enemies… to an extent. I may be wrong here but I feel like the only enemies I’ve come across with regularity are mokoblins, moblins, lizalfos, wizzrobes, lynels, octorocks, keese, chuchus, pebbits and the various guardian types. There are other enemies like the hinox and talus world bosses too. With nearly all of these enemies, I can remember my excitement and apprehension when first fighting them but it’s all just vanished now that I know their tricks. My first hinox boss fight felt extremely rewarding, my tenth did not. Recolouring enemies to make them more powerful and make their AI slightly better is a pretty neat idea that allows the team to reuse the same enemy but to its full potential but I can’t help but feel it was relied on too much here. Simply put, there aren’t enough enemy types in the game. I would have liked to have seen more unique world bosses or rare monster types in each area. I remember exploring Faron and coming across a strong Lynel at the top of a mountain. Twenty hours later, I was exploring the Hebra Mountains on the other side of Hyrule and… came across a strong Lynel at the top of a mountain. Both fights are fun but one felt considerably more dramatic than the other.
I’ve come across as overly negative so far so let me shift onto a few really good things about Breath of the Wild’s design. The obvious problem with allowing the player to do anything is that they may not figure out exactly what it is they have to actually do. I don’t even think there’s a case to be made for the game teaching the player its mechanics really well or something - the mechanics are just all so sensible and obvious that it comes across as effortless. An example from my playthrough I’m sure a lot of players relate with is how I reached one of the shrines on the Plateau. It was across a gap from me and I didn’t really see any way I could have gone. There were a few trees around and I had a woodcutter’s axe so I put two and two together, cut down the tree to make a bridge and - holy shit that actually worked?!
I can’t stress enough how excited I was over this small revelation. I believe the woodcutter’s axe mentions that it can cut down trees but at no point did it say they can make bridges. It was just something that made sense and so I did it. Nearly all of Breath of the Wild’s mechanics are like this. Electricity is never explained but metal conducts electricity so of course using a metal block, weapon or chest would conduct it. Vines in shrines are never explained but of course using fire on the vines burns them. I could give countless other examples but you get the idea.
It’s been said a lot that Zelda games are never played for their story and, while I agree, I don’t think that’s all there is to it. There’s a difference between the game’s story and the context for the player. If you’ve somehow read up to here and are now scared about spoilers, now’s the time to turn back.
Breath of the Wild tells its story in a rather peculiar way. There are two major, standard cutscenes towards the start of the game and, from there, it becomes completely open. The rest of the story is told through memory flashbacks either found in key locations by the player or at Divine Beast quests. As a long time Zelda player, first stepping foot in Hyrule Field had quite the peculiar feeling for me. Gone was the bright, vibrant world from Ocarina or Wind Waker with their catchy overworld themes. The sky was bleak, the ground grey and the piano melancholy. It struck quite a chord with me - this was a game in which the heroes failed to save the day. The memories are particularly good because, with the exception of the last two, they all take place before anything goes wrong. The story told during these memories is exactly the kind of thing you would expect during a Zelda game or, indeed, any story about a hero. The hero and all his friends are gearing up to save the day and stop Ganon, no problem!
And then Link is yanked out of the memory and stares at the faded, often forgotten fragments of something that used to be great. They didn’t save the day. All of those friends that you loved in those memories - yeah, they all died. And now you have to work to make it all right again.
I apologise for sounding dramatic. The story in the Breath of the Wild, while simple, is extremely effective at making the player want to do things. Even if you don’t care about the characters or their writing, I think the world itself is something to care about enough to want to help it. There’s something somewhat painful about the memories in the game - looking at what once was a great kingdom and then being shown what it was allowed to become is honestly quite sad just because the world was so beautiful and idyllic. Every character tells you to get stronger and to destroy Ganon and the memories you see show a confident cast of characters who all thought they could do it themselves. Everything you do in the game builds Link up to be able to fight Ganon and avenge his fallen comrades. There’s still an argument to be made that the game has the typical Zelda weirdness of “Oh the world’s in trouble but gimme a sec to go fishing” but the majority of the playtime will be spent exploring everything and finding shrines to become strong enough to fight Ganon. While exploring, you come across memories that tell you more about the story and make you want to destroy Ganon even more.
I separate player’s context and the story because I’m not personally a fan of the writing. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the way that Zelda’s character is developed - she behaves quite realistically of the girl with the enormous pressure of fate on her shoulders that can’t do as she was fated to do. I like her internal struggles that go on for the first few memories before she quietly accepts that she just can’t do it and has to rely on Link. I’m also a huge sucker for games explaining why silent protagonists are silent - Zelda’s diary in Hyrule gives a brief explanation that I really love. I could make an argument that this could have been presented slightly better - tons of expository, static text boxes don’t make for the strongest reveal - but the ideas here are fine. I personally say the story isn’t too great because it is one that quite clearly wants me to focus on its characters first and foremost but the characters' writing is quite stilted.
The way that the four other heroes talk to Link feels very… forced to me. There’s odd peculiarities in the writing that nobody would actually say. Mipha’s “I would always heal your wounds for you like I am doing right now” is probably the worst example - I can see you’re healing me right now, why would you say that…? Could you imagine if you were eating food with an old friend or something and they said “we used to always eat food together like we are doing right now”? This is what I mean when I say it comes across as forced. I’m expected to believe that, with the exception of Revali’s (the best) cutscene, these characters have been friends or at least acquaintances of Link’s for a long time but they talk in a way that is clearly intended for the audience’s benefit. After all, these scenes are the first time the audience will see any of them but I find it hard to believe that Link has been friends with Mipha for so long when she talks like that.
I do quite like the post-dungeon cutscenes where the hero stands atop their Divine Beast and monologues. The characters here are all quite sad but still focused on their task, exactly as it should be. Mipha wondering if she could see her father is a really nice touch. It ties into that idea I was talking about earlier where the characters clearly failed early on and now Link has to set aside his grief to get on with the job. Everyone does. Nobody outright says “wow we were way too confident and look what we’ve done” but you can kind of tell that everybody is thinking it.
Other examples of weird writing are how every single character insists on saying “one hundred years ago” in the same kind of way. All of the heroes say that the bosses killed them a hundred years ago, Impa says a hundred years ago multiple times, the king says a hundred years ago, random NPCs talking about the calamity say a hundred years ago - is it getting annoying yet? I kind of understand why this has to be - each of these NPCs could be among the first you come across so they really have to clarify but it feels weird to me that people feel the need to say “the great calamity a hundred years ago”. As opposed to a different great calamity? I’m pretty sure there was only one.
This brings me to the topic of the Divine Beasts themselves. These are basically the dungeons of the previous Zelda games. Seeing as my favourite Zelda games are Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time solely because they have the best dungeons, I find the Divine Beasts something of a let down… but still not outright bad by any means.
It seems that these dungeons were designed the same way as the game in that you can do any of the challenges in them in any order. Like I’ve said before, though, I think this is detrimental to difficulty curve and balance within the dungeon. It means that the designers can only use a neat idea once instead of using it and then expanding on it. This does still happen to extent, of course - going through the Zora Divine Beast, the player is going to realise the multitude of different ways you can use the thing’s trunk to control the dungeon. While I’m on the topic, by the way, I struggle to imagine just how many hours each of these must have taken to make. Making a dungeon that’s shaped like an animal and then using that animal’s movement as a gimmick while also keeping the whole thing cohesive must have been a massive challenge. I’m extremely impressed that the dungeons are all as good as they are. I feel the Rito one is the weakest due to being too simple and the Gerudo one is the strongest due to having the most content and the most progression. This seems very subjective, though, as I know plenty of people who really dislike the Gerudo dungeon, so I’ll talk more about some other things in the dungeons.
The Divine Beasts, on their own, are all designed extremely well but I can’t help but feel they’re a little bit samey. This was clearly intentional as they were all designed by the Sheikah and all that but I think it would have been nice to have them set up slightly differently in some way. Maybe make one of them only require one terminal right at the end, maybe make one of them only give you the ability to tilt the thing halfway through. I understand that I come from a biased perspective here but two great things about previous Zelda dungeons are just missing here - the feeling of discovery and the feeling of threat.
When going through previous Zelda dungeons, one would be introduced to a foreign concept and then use it frequently throughout the dungeon. They would often see some things that they couldn’t really use but were notable enough to catch their eye. The player then receives an item, the whole dungeon clicks and everything makes sense. Even though the player doesn’t necessarily work out anything, there’s still a very satisfying feeling as everything slots into place and the player feels intelligent. While this isn’t entirely absent from Breath of the Wild and I don’t suggest that the series should continue with its traditions of giving an item to use on the boss forever, I do find the game’s dungeons to be quite shallow compared to the rest of itself and to the rest of the series. When going through my first one (the Zora one), I was really impressed by the design of the place and I still am. Going through my second one (the Goron one), I had the same feeling but I found it much easier due to familiarity with the mechanics. By the time I reached the later ones, I’d kind of just worked out how they work. This is a common problem with Breath of the Wild as a whole - it’s lack of variety after the first few hurdles - so it’s not too surprising to see it here. I think the heroes’ dialogue all being so similar is very damaging to the feeling of the dungeons. Every hero tells you to get the map, tells you how many terminals there are and tells you that this boss bested them “one hundred years ago”. I came into later dungeons with a sense of familiarity which just did not exist with previous Zelda titles.
The second aspect - the feeling of threat - is probably much more objective. Previous Zelda games had dungeons littered with enemies, large gaps and intimidating hazards. The Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild just have weird dark goop and floating skulls. While I don’t believe that rooms have to be littered with enemies to be entertaining - God knows that puzzle rooms would be hell with them - it is kind of jarring that the story builds up how insanely dangerous it would be to enter a Divine Beast and then, once you’re inside, there’s next to no risk of death. I speculate this is because you can do the terminals in any way, the team wanted the player to experiment with the tilting mechanics as much as possible and focus less on combat. It was also probably difficult to make enemy layouts that were able to stay intact with the dungeon itself tilting so much - hence the main enemy type is stuck to surfaces and sends out flying skulls. Again, this could have been solved with slightly different variety in the dungeons but I understand why these sacrifices were made.
The last thing to talk about on Divine Beasts are their bosses. I’ve seen extremely mixed opinions on these - personally, I thought all of the bosses were at least good. I think it’s really neat to fight the bosses in areas that were already used in the dungeon (with the exception of Waterblight) and the fights generally evolve in a fairly natural way. Thunderblight in particular stands out as good fight that forces you to dodge its cool looking attacks on strange flooring. I don’t really have much to say about these fights - I don’t think they can really have the depth of the other fights in the game due to the fact that you can’t sneak up on them. They’re definitely a step up from the “use an item and hit them three times” but maybe they could use a bit more changing up in how they actually fight. Most of them come down to working out a strategy and then wailing on them which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it could use some more depth.
It occurs to me now that I haven’t actually talked about the graphics and sound. Everything looks fucking amazing and I know nothing else about graphics really so yeah. Soundtrack-wise, I like the idea of atmospheric piano but I’m not so sure it worked well in practice. I could compare it to Super Metroid, another game with a feeling of isolation and an atmospheric soundtrack. Super Metroid (and other Metroid games, for that matter) just have so many more memorable themes in the game. Even though everything is quiet and dreary, the soft Maridia theme sets an incredible tone of total loneliness that just isn’t present in Breath of the Wild while also being a good song in its own right. Breath of the Wild just doesn’t have songs in it outside of boss themes. These boss themes are generally pretty good but, to me, the best songs in the game are the ones that play in Hyrule Castle and during the fight with Calamity Ganon - both of which use songs from previous games. Maybe it’s just nostalgia but I’m not a massive fan of any of the other boss themes. They’re all good but no more than that which, from a Zelda game, just isn’t enough. As for the areas, I think they could have benefited from slightly more intrusive soundtrack. A lot of people I know have praised the songs in Zora’s Domain and Rito’s Village but, honestly, I didn’t even notice them while playing. I guess this was also the intent of the developers and maybe I’m just an idiot but those songs didn’t really stand out to me. They’re both good as well, don’t get me wrong, but I just wonder why so many of the areas in the game sound so similar. I couldn’t hum you any of the tracks in the game outside of maybe the boss theme.
I’ll put it another way. When I think of exploring Gerudo Valley, I hear a guitar in my head. When I think of exploring Goron City, I hear those… weird… sounds in my head. When I think of Hateno Village, Central Hyrule, the Flight Range, Faron, Eldin… I just think of pretty visuals. I can’t remember the songs of any of these. Maybe it’s better this way? Like I said, I loved touching down in a destroyed Hyrule Field and hearing just a quiet piano accompanying me but not every area had to be like this.
The final thing I want to discuss is Hyrule Castle, the final boss and the ending. Hyrule Castle as a final level I think actually perfectly compliments the design of the game while also giving a straightforward goal that I really like personally. There are a lot of different ways to get through Hyrule Castle, all of which reward you in different ways. Going underground takes longer but is safer and rewards you with the Hyrule Shield, going directly makes you fight multiple guardians and white-maned lynels. You can use waterfalls if you want, climb up different pathways, use Revali’s Gale. Revali’s Gale kinda breaking the final dungeon could be seen as a let down but I think it’s kind of cool - to me, Ganon is underestimating people and people are showing they can take that bitch down. Dramatic again, I know, I’m sorry. Anyway, Hyrule Castle really feels like the ultimatum of what the game was building up to. The fights are brutal - it’s properly threatening unlike the dungeons - the music is epic, the environment is incredible, you’ll have to use all of your tools to get everything and it rewards exploration. Perfect.
As for the final boss… hmm. Calamity Ganon phase one is generally pretty good I’d say. He has good variety in his attacks but is kind of rendered obsolete if the player knows how to parry really well. I’d say parrying in general is actually something that could have used a bit of nerfing as it’s just too powerful but I dunno. I don’t think the fight is a cakewalk but I did beat it on my first try and I only beat it after fifty shrines or something. I think the fight that I fought - somewhat challenging but still doable on my first try - should have been the fight I got if I had every shrine. Ganon is meant to be world destroying but was still beaten somewhat comfortably by a Link with half the shrines. I can only imagine how much of a cakewalk he’d be for people who had everything. I’m fine with him eventually ending up weaker than the player - Link is being blessed by the Goddess and I think it’s fair enough to not expect every player to get every shrine - but I think he’s maybe a little bit too easy. Making him a bit harder by doing more damage, attacking quicker and moving around more could have gone a long way into making this fight more memorable.
Also, why is he a spider. I don’t understand.
The fight after this, Beast Ganon, is definitely way too easy. I’m generally not a fan of final bosses dramatically changing the gameplay for the final boss a la Sonic but you could argue that you’re still using skills you picked up in the game by using a horse so it doesn’t really matter too much. Beast Ganon just isn’t very aggressive. The attacks he shoots out are laughably easy to avoid and don’t one shot you as the manifestation of hate definitely should. Using the light arrows is neat and all and it’s a great spectacle but it’s just so easy. It’s embarrassing to admit I got hit at all. Finishing him off with the matrix-style arrow shot is really cool, though, and something that makes a lot of sense as the finisher considering the player may not have the Master Sword. I think this fight would have been cooler if Ganon was more mobile and aggressive, chasing the player down and forcing them to use all of their skills. Beast Ganon is a little bit too big for this fight to have worked on foot so maybe making him smaller and having the player take out his limbs first would have helped? I dunno. This fight came during my initial fifty to sixty hours of childlike wonder and was the first thing that just straight up disappointed me. I’d be hard pressed to find anybody who thinks this is a hard boss fight.
The game has two endings but I’m not really sure why they bothered. In one ending, Zelda playfully asks if you remember her, encouraging you to get the rest of the memories. Neat. Naturally, I rushed and got the last two I needed, came back, fought Ganon and got… nearly the exact same ending…? Nothing happens in that extra ending besides showing that Link and Zelda are friends restoring the kingdom. No shit, that’s what I would have expected from the first second of gameplay. If the true ending had shown the effects of defeating Ganon on the rest of the world or (wishful thinking, I know) another boss, maybe it would have been worth it. As it is, I don’t think it was worth the effort of the dev team. I guess it’s neat to see a green, restored Hyrule that we see in the memory cutscenes but that’s just it - we see it. We don’t experience it. It’s no different to imagining the restored Hyrule.
This is already clocking in at nearly nine thousand words for what I initially started as a way to get my thoughts down on paper and there’s still a ton I didn’t cover - combat’s versatility, the spiritual powers, the balance issues with food, the extremely good town sidequest, the fairy fountains being amazing and so on. I may do another post after I’ve played everything in the game - I already feel a bit dodgy writing so much about a game I haven’t done a hundred percent of yet.
Besides Korok Seeds. Fuck the Korok Seeds.
To avoid ending on a negative note, I want to have a little thought exercise on what the next Zelda can learn from Breath of the Wild. If we see another open world Zelda game, I expect it to take place on a different continent. I think Hyrule has been well and truly fully explored in this game so I really doubt another open world Hyrule could be anywhere near as compelling. I expect the next game to be more in line with a traditional Zelda game, actually, similar to the reasons that Majora’s Mask was so different to regular Zelda games - how can you top something that’s getting perfect scores? The answer is to move in a different direction as Zelda always does. I do think that future open world games have the potential to be even better but it would require a very fresh approach. Climbing mountains in Hyrule is brilliant but I’m not sure if climbing the exact same mountains in another game would be as good, even if it doesn’t take place in Hyrule. A forest is a forest regardless of which game world it’s in.
All that said, Breath of the Wild gives me complete faith that whatever Nintendo crack up next for Zelda, it’s going to be good. One thing you may have noticed throughout this article is that next to all of the issues had the disclaimer that I understood what the development team were thinking. This is extraordinarily rare when it comes to game design. Most games have issues that the devs are fully aware of but are unable to fix due to it being an inherent issue with the game or the game being too far in development by the time they catch it. Everything I personally dislike about Breath of the Wild is something the team were actively aware of and just disagreed with me on. I tried to stay objective where I could but I did title this essay “My thoughts on” for a reason. This is going to be a very personal game to a lot of people because all of us experienced it in vastly different ways. We’ve all put tens and hundreds of hours into it and still explored far off reaches that others may not have even touched. My brother only just got his hands on the game but was telling me about a shrine I hadn’t even found after all of my gameplay.
Despite all of the racing thoughts I have in my head about the game from a critical perspective, I don’t think anything will ever change the sheer magical feeling this game provided me with. It set out with a clear design goal and it didn’t just hit it, it smashed it so far out of the park that it landed in a different country. Breath of the Wild is a masterclass in design and leaves me extremely optimistic for the future.
