Breath of the Wild

No doubt by now that you know what 2017’s Game of the Year is. It’s been showered with perfect scores and praises from critics all over the world and is being hailed as Nintendo’s finest masterpiece ever. It’s The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild, reinventing open-world gameplay like no other game has before it.

I was waiting on buying the Switch until Nintendo announced the Pokemon game on it, but given all the great things I was hearing about it from friends who owned it and looking at all the amazing games already coming out on it, I decided to impulse buy on it a random November evening. I played through Super Mario Odyssey for about a couple of weeks until a friend gave me The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild to play on the Switch.

That was three weeks ago. I have since clocked in nearly 150 hours into the game and am wrapping up the DLC for it just now. Yes, 150 hours in 3 weeks (there wasn’t much to do over the holidays). I’ve played games for 100+ hours before, but I’ve never quite done it as fast as I did with Breath of the Wild. From the very first hours, the game became an obsession, and every waking moment when I wasn’t playing it turned into daydreaming about where I should go next and what I should do in Hyrule. Needless to say, I loved the time I spent with the game.

It’s important to understand why it’s so good. Until now, “open-world RPGs” have followed a very strict formula when it comes to how players progress through it and discover the world. It’s one thing to create a vast and expansive world, and it’s an entirely different thing to actually plan out the gameplay in it so that players discover it bit-by-bit, either organically through exploration or naturally through scripted story beats that take place in specific locations.

Take the Assassin’s Creed series for example. In every iteration of the game, the player has to climb and scale tall towers or monuments to reach the peak, from where the map for that region is unlocked. The game then dots the map with hundreds of icons: it marks the NPCs that give you sidequests, it shows you the locations of armor/weapons stores, it labels interesting spots or vaguely drops a question mark at a certain location, encouraging you to go that spot and check it out. When a quest is active, the game even drops a footpath trail to follow to tell you where to go in order to get to your next objective.

Breath of the Wild has similar tower-like structures that you must scale in order to reveal certain chunks of the map. But with a big twist. You don’t get any information about gameplay by unlocking the map. There are no dotted objectives and no informational icons at all. All you get is a topographical relief map of the area with some essential geographical features like forests, lakes, or cliffs labeled by name. From here, it’s up to you, the player, to mark interesting things to explore from the top of the tower. These can be things like shrines (the game’s mini puzzle-dungeons), towns, an interesting looking rock face, a waterfall, a random house, or some ancient ruins. You’re setting your own objectives as a player and you’re defining your own path through the world. You might discover a hidden shrine in that rock face, or find some treasure chests with great loot at the bottom of the waterfall, or stumble upon a tough enemy in the ruins from which you can get better weapons and gear. Exploration is its own reward. The game nails this so perfectly that it’s hard to believe it even pulls it off so flawlessly.

As you organically stumble upon areas, the in-game map gives the area a label on the map and names it so that you can remember it and come back to it later (the areas are not labeled or named until you actually go to them). This exploratory gameplay loop of spotting a tower in the distance, finding a path to it, fighting your way to its base around all the enemies and threats that each tower possesses unique to itself, managing your stamina adequately to climb to its peak, unlocking the map, and spotting various interesting sights to check out next is an extremely addictive gameplay mechanic. This was by far the most fun part of the game for me. Discovering the world of Hyrule for myself and planning my path through it was half the joy of the game.

Outside of the exploration and discovery realm, the game breaks further open-world design conventions by not giving the player much information at all when it comes to objectives and quests. Nearly every open-world game I’ve played so far (Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher, GTA) will dot the location of the objective on the player’s map and provide a path of the shortest route to get to it. Not with Breath of the Wild. The game will just drop a dot on the map where the main “clue” for the quest is. That clue could either be a cryptic song that you have to decode or a character making a reference to a specific landmark in the overworld. That’s all you get. From there on, it’s up to you to figure out where you’re supposed to go and how you want to get there. You could either put on your armor that enables you to swim faster and swim downstream of the longest river, or you could scale the tallest nearby cliff you can find by eating some stamina-boosting meals and paraglide off of it to get to your destination, or you could get on your horse and gallop your way through the mountains to the destination while checking out even more interesting things along the way. It’s totally up to you.

This kind of freeform movement has never really existed in a video game before, and that’s why it’s such a big deal. Open-world games like to tout the familiar mantra of “See that mountain in the distance? You can go there if you want.” But getting there involves navigating your way around world objectives or obstacles in your path or temporary narrative blocks that prevent you from really getting there. Not so in Zelda. You can quite literally climb anything in the world given you have enough stamina to do so. The stamina management combined with surveying the cliff you’re climbing for a spot to catch your breath makes for such an exciting and tense mini-game in itself with the climbing mechanic. It’s perfectly executed certainly makes other games where you don’t have this kind of freedom feel lackluster.

Given how vast the world is and how much there is to do, it’s a miracle that the game is even able to coach the player through all this in the first few hours of the game. The game’s introductory area, The Great Plateau, is one of the best tutorial areas I’ve ever seen in a game. When I started playing, I was shocked at how little handholding there was in the beginning, especially given that it’s a Nintendo game geared towards “all players”. The game doesn’t tell you how anything works. It’s all very woven in to the world and is discovered by the players themselves. The first thing I saw was a tree branch so I picked it up. I saw a red pig-like enemy coming at me so I whacked him with the tree branch. It seemed to do damage. It soon broke, but the pig dropped his weapon. I rushed in to see if I could grab it, and I did. I then whacked him to death with his own club. I had just learned how to fight without reading a single tutorial message.

There’s countless examples of this style of environment-based player coaching that happens on The Great Plateau. There are large round boulders placed on the edge of a hill with enemies right underneath it deliberately designed to make the player go “Hmm…I wonder if I try this…” or there’s bee hives on a tree with enemies nearby or there’s a way to set explosive barrels on fire that encourage player experimentation so well in the early game that it sets the tone for the entirety of the game. It clearly communicates to the player that there’s more than a few ways to deal with threats and you have many options at your disposal when you engage enemies. It teaches the player to survey their surroundings before initiating a fight to take advantage of anything in the environment. It tells players to be clever and try out new things instead of simply running in with a sword that will likely break during the encounter.

Perhaps the highlight of The Great Plateau for me was figuring out how the cooking system in the game works. I stumbled upon a house with a cooking pot outside and didn’t think much of it. Inside the house, I found a book that laid out a recipe for a meal that would provide cold resistance. I had been collecting raw materials in random spots so far, so I figured those could potentially be used as ingredients in the recipe. The recipe ingredients were raw meat, some spicy peppers, and “some kind of seafood”. There were spicy peppers already on the table right next to the book, so I grabbed those. I recalled seeing a lake near where the game had started, so I backtracked all the way to the lake in hopes of finding “some kind of seafood” and caught a couple of fish in the lake. I had no idea where to get raw meat and stumbled around aimlessly for about an hour until I saw a wild boar in a forest I randomly walked into. Wondering if I could hunt it, I aimed my bow at it from a distance and fired at its head. And voila! My reward was raw meat. Exhilarated, I rushed back to the house with the cooking pot to stir up those ingredients together and see if I got the right kind of seafood. And sure enough, it was! I now had a cold-resistant meal to survive the frigid temperatures on the mountainous regions of The Great Plateau. The game doesn’t really tell you how to cook. It doesn’t even tell you that you can go into a “hold items” mode from your raw materials, pick a bunch of ingredients, and toss them into a cooking pot to make a meal. It’s something you discover for yourself by tinkering with the game’s clues and menus. It’s so much more rewarding for it and the game does an excellent job of teaching this to you by actually having you do all the work yourself.

Aside from exploration and combat, puzzles are the game’s final main gameplay element. There are over a hundred shrines scattered across Hyrule each involving a self-contained puzzle that tests your skills with your powers. You’ve got the ability to move metal objects, to freeze time for specific objects, to create pillars of ice from bodies of water, and to throw remotely detonated bombs. A good amount of them are interesting and fun. I loved one where you had to carry a blue flame from the beginning to the end of the shrine either with a lit torch or arrows to continuously light the next objective on your path, and another one where you had to keep a steady electric current across the entire shrine by connecting metal objects to keep the circuit alive and not break it. However, the vast majority of them feel like they barely scratch the surface of an interesting puzzle mechanic before the shrine simply ends. There were many shrines where I felt like the game was about to present me with a series of challenges that would build upon a core mechanic like setting dry leaves on fire to reveal hidden passages, or progressively hitting a large object with more and more force to unlock different levels of a path, or use wind updrafts to time my landing with a moving puzzle elements in just the right order to get to the exit. But most of them are dead simple and are done within 2-5 minutes, which is in stark contrast to all previous Zelda titles and is perhaps longtime Zelda fans’ biggest criticism of the game.

In place of traditional dungeons, the game has four large “divine beasts” that the player has to complete by solving connected puzzles inside of it. I’ll admit, the first time I fought a divine beast and discovered I could actually enter it, I was very impressed. It felt like a full-on massive interlocked puzzle that I would have to unravel for myself. And when I discovered I could actually control parts of the beast myself, my jaw dropped. I did the elephant beast first and my mind was blown when I found out that you had to use the water flowing from the elephant’s trunk by positioning it correctly to solve some of the puzzles inside of it. I spent about two hours inside of it making sure I found every single treasure chest and only decided to engage the boss fight when I felt I had explored everything in its entirety. The rest of the divine beasts felt like a letdown after you realize that they all have the same gimmick — you enter it, you rotate some things, and you solve some puzzles involving the element of the area you’re in (water, fire, wind, or electricity). My favorite was the camel in the desert, as it had the most intricate puzzles that were all somewhat linked together.

The game’s boss fights were a bit of a letdown as well. In every divine beast, you face the elemental versions of Ganon, and they’re somewhat of a joke. Most players beat them all on their first try, and moved on. Previous Zelda titles were known for having very unique bosses with vastly varied designs and combat specialties that challenged players in different ways. Here, we get four re-skins of pretty much the same thing and they’re all super easy (save for maybe Thunderblight Ganon, who was decently challenging). Even the Calamity Ganon boss fight was fairly do-able and easy on the first go for something that the game was hyping up for literally ten thousand years. The whole story also just feels very light and tacked on. It’s the same thing we’ve seen in every Zelda game and it barely feels like it even exists for the playthrough of the game. Aside from some short cutscenes you get for collecting memories scattered throughout Hyrule, there’s really not much in terms of a true narrative. The most interesting part of it all for me was learning about the champions and their backgrounds.

Despite the somewhat disappointing bosses, the lackluster story, and no challenging dungeons, Breath of the Wild has found a spot in my top five video games of all time. The core gameplay loops are so satisfying and the general movement and combat mechanics are so enjoyable. It’s the little things that really seal the deal for me, like how Link actually moves his head to longingly gaze at the weapons lying next to or around him, his stance when he’s having conversations with NPCs, and his facial animations when hot or cold. Honestly, it’s amazing how much work they put into making him feel like a believable and worthy protagonist. I love the dumb recurring jokes the game makes about how much the Yiga Clan loves bananas or how NPCs poke fun at Link being mute all the time. I love the stupid dance that Hetsu does whenever your inventory space is being expanded or the hilariously silly things the children running around in the towns say when you interact with them. Most importantly of all, I love that the game felt fresh all the way through. Even as I was nearing the end of the game, I was discovering brand new enemies in the desert and a new way to traverse the vast wasteland on seals. Most RPGs lose steam halfway through and causes players to lose interest as they’ve discovered most of the content in the game by that point, but Breath of the WIld sustains its momentum all the way throughout and never lets up.

Overall, as a package, this isn’t a perfect game. There’s many flaws with it when you start looking beyond the core gameplay elements. But I think it’s best enjoyed when you look at it as a foundational corner-stone for what the future of open-world games could look like. Treat it as the benchmark with which all coming open-world sandbox RPGs will be evaluated against, and they will no doubt have to improve upon what this game does in order to succeed. Eventually, some game out there will perfect this new style of open-world game mechanics (similar to how The Witcher III: Wild Hunt and Horizon: Zero Dawn did with the current generation’s open-world game mechanics), and that will be the perfect game that we all want it to be. Until then though, I’ve got many more shield surfing trails to try out in Hyrule and really want this Master Cycle to jump off of the tallest cliffs I can find and see what stunts I can pull off. I still can’t believe this game even exists and am truly grateful to have played it at all. If you don’t own a Switch yet, I can safely say that this game warrants a purchase of the console itself just to play it. I should probably also catch up on the backlog of games that I bought on sale from the Nintendo Switch eShop over the holidays and finally finish Super Mario Odyssey. I’m just very impressed with this title and cannot wait to see what Nintendo does with Pokemon next!