K-SCORE: 80
Publisher/Developer: Nintendo
Director: Hidemaro Fujibayashi
“My fight was Ganon... was a hundred times easier than the time I tried to ride that bear.”
Writer: Akihito Toda
Spoiler Level: Minor
Loot glut? Gameplay exhaustion? Gear irritation? In a Zelda game? Come on!
Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a fantastic game, but simultaneously the embodiment of many of my great frustrations with the modern video game industry. In the past decade we’ve seen games get bigger, but not better. The worlds have become more massive, the side quests more numerous, the inventories more crowded with swords, halberds, fungi, butterflies, star fragments, and the harvested organs of slain enemies, but the narratives aren’t lengthened and improved to match the new size, and the gameplay gimmicks get boring, dull from overuse, far before one can experience everything in the gargantuan land of New Boston Pandoriel. In-game economies are often essential to progression yet are easily broken. Fast travel systems erode a sense of adventure and exploration. Free roaming forces designers to standardize the difficulty of most enemies leading to a severe challenge spike early on and then an experience that becomes easier and easier until it's utterly trivial often as early as halfway through. Any lapses in content at the game’s launch are supposedly rectified with downloadable content, however too often this becomes an excuse for publishers to put out a lazier, less-complete version of their product and then add to their profits by filling in the holes. At least Breath of the Wild steered entirely clear of microtransactions and the terror they have wrought on game design, empowering developers to replace quality content with the same methodologies crack dealers use to expand and keep their customer base.
Hyrule has never been so breathtaking. Nintendo has finally managed to create a world they’ve hinted at, told about, and occasionally drawn for twenty years. The difference in experiencing Hyrule, Death Mountain and the Gorons, Zora River and the Zora, the Gerudo Desert, the Temple of Time, Hyrule Castle, Lake Hylia, shrines of the goddesses, Kakariko Village, Great Fairy Fountains, in Zelda: Breath of the Wild compared to Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the difference between dreaming of a world and living in it. Ocarina of Time still stands as perhaps the greatest game I’ve ever played, but looking at its locations now and I feel I was offered but a mere impression of a video game world. Breath of the Wild gives the real thing. It’s beyond beautiful. I could have roamed for days doing nothing but taking hundreds of screenshots and been satisfied with my time. Nintendo struck a balance between the cartoony Zelda entries like Wind Waker and the more photorealistic entries like Twilight Princess and in the place between they’ve thrived. The world perfectly matches the style of the game and the stories they’re trying to tell. It’s stunning and mastering these lands as Link makes you feel epic.
“an ungodly amount of small annoying tasks”
Exploration of this world is also excellent. Nintendo, a company that has held the hand of its players far too much in the past, stands you up and says, “Okay, go wherever, do whatever. We think east would be best, but we don’t really care if you head west and die horribly to some centaur roaming around.” And that’s really satisfying. Link can climb almost anything, but it’s slow, which encourages you to take the roads without forcing you to do so. Sometimes when you veer off because you noticed a weird imperfection in the landscape in the distance, you’ll be rewarded with a new shrine or a mini boss or at the very least one of the nine hundred hidden koroks, and other times you’ll just wish you’d stayed on horseback and gotten to the next town more quickly. That feeling that you’re pillaging a nice handful of secrets in a world too massive to completely know and sometimes making terrible mistakes that make you want to turn back is a great one, and in Breath of the Wild, it lasts a really long time. Longer than any Fallout game, longer than The Witcher, certainly the feeling lasts longer than something like Assassin’s Creed or Grand Theft Auto, and that feeling is at the heart of open world games. But it doesn’t last forever. It dies eventually and with it your sense of adventure and fun. Eventually in Breath of the Wild, you unlock enough fast travel points and have completed some 90% of the main content and yet have an ungodly amount of small annoying tasks you could do and you just end up zipping from one place to the next magically, trying to maximize efficiency while giving strangers multiple varieties of dragonfly and completing 3D block puzzles missing but a single piece. By then it's gone.
Here’s a rough graph of the difficulty in Breath of the Wild:
I’m pretty good at video games, so maybe the amount of time it took me to reach these highs and lows would vary from someone who doesn’t play as much as I do, but the structure of the graph will be the same for anyone.
Now here’s a graph of my enjoyment with the game:
That’s the real problem. As the game became so easy as to be trivial, so too did I lose interest in it. The content stops being challenges to overcome and starts becoming chores to check off of a massive list. These games expect that you won’t complete them, certainly not all the way through, and thus they’re designed so that any random 30% contains 100% of the kinds of things you can find in the game. As you inch your way closer to that full-completion barrier, the idea that you’ll find something completely new - a brand new monster design or a completely fresh puzzle - becomes absurd. You’ve seen it all even if you haven’t done it all. And thus the decision to finish the game becomes just that, a conscious decision. You tell yourself, “Okay, I’m bored. Let’s wrap this up,” which is way less satisfying than, “I better get over to Hyrule Castle and kill Ganon or else he’s going to reign terror across the land for all eternity! Yes! Got him! Champion! What other games do I have?” When I decided to call it on my game, I’d done all 120 shrines, beaten all 4 Divine Beasts, upgraded a few sets of gear to max, collected 210 of 900 korok seeds, and completed all memories and side quests. Too much, evidently. My fight with Ganon was ten times easier than the first time I engaged a group of Bokoblins in a camp. It was a hundred times easier than that time I tried to ride a bear in the woods southeast of Kakariko Village and kept getting attacked by the skeletal cyclops. And it was a thousand times easier than collecting the adequate number of star fragments needed to upgrade all my earrings and tiaras - they land fortnight, usually when you’re not paying attention, and strike some unknown location in the mountains five miles away. And I need 20? Yikes.
I’ve gotten used to this gameplay exhaustion lately. It’s also more forgivable in my mind because it’s much more difficult for a big budget multi-year development project to perfectly match the game’s gameplay with its length. Too short has even greater blowback from fans than too long does, so they err on the side of inflation. The problems with loot and gear are worse. Zelda games in the past have had the very satisfying mechanic of giving Link exactly the tools he needs to advance and complete his adventure as he needs them, and with each new tool comes a new layer of complexity to the combat and the puzzles. As you go further and your arsenal expands, you raise the bar on how clever and skilled you can be with everything in your bag of tricks. Thought you were slick with the boomerang? Try taking lightning arrow shots on your spinner while you’ve got a bomb frozen in time and fire keeses coming at you. Breath of the Wild loses this entirely, instead substituting a more common and worse gameplay decision of turning your hero into a hoarder with magically endless pockets. If you want to, you can beat the entirety of the combat in Breath of the Wild by farming up Hearty Durians and cooking them into simmering fruit stews that heal you fully and expand your total hearts to the maximum. Don’t. Breath of the Wild’s substitutes for the hookshot, the hammer, the lens of truth, and the pegasus boots are tricks that freeze time, freeze water, lift metal objects, and take selfies, and you get them all right away, thus you’re not likely to find a mind-bending puzzle more than halfway through your journey. Even sadder than that, the application of these tools in combat is minimal. It’s almost always better to just dodge, block, or spam slashes with your weapon than to try to raise an ice barrier in your defense or slam a metal ball into a Lizalfo.
“every piece of gear, three per set, can be upgraded four times, using a gargantuan amount of raw materials”
Armor and weapons are worse than ever, taking a huge leap back from the franchise’s elegant solutions in the past into the expectations set by Skyrim where a new set of armor or new weapon is in every treasure chest or can be looted from every slain enemy, and carried around like your hero is gathering the arsenal for an entire army and not just one guy who only needs to wear one set of clothes at a time. Instead of red, green, and blue armor, Breath of the Wild has three sets of gear that provide no bonuses, multiple different types of cold weather armor, heat-resistant gear that’s only good for the desert in the day, armor that makes you immune to the spontaneous combustion effects of Death Mountain, armor that increases your resistance to guardian enemies, armor that makes you swim faster, armor that makes you climb faster (which you’ll constantly have to change in and out of while scaling cliffs), armor that makes you resistant to becoming struck by lightning, and armor that makes you look like a girl. Really? Link already looks… ah, never mind. But all of these pieces are a hassle and would have been much more fun as passive bonuses slowly acquired instead of gear you have to adjust in the inventory screens every few minutes. The actual armor Link wears could have been purely cosmetic, and you could have developed a way to swim at max speed and climb at max speed at the same time, since you’re never swimming up a mountain - actually that’s not quite true. You’re rarely swimming up a mountain. To make matters even worse, every piece of gear, three per set, can be upgraded four times, using a gargantuan amount of raw materials found in specific regions across the huge world. Would you rather be punished because you hadn’t yet learned the timing on the sword swings of a large monster so you can outwit and out-fight him or be punished because you forgot to change from your Desert Voe headpiece to your amber earrings because the Desert Voe headpiece has only three defense because you hadn’t collected enough simmerwing butterflies to enhance it before the last time you visited a great fairy?
The weapon system they implemented was bold. Repairing damaged gear has been an annoyance in video games for a generation, but something developers have felt they need to insert for reasons unknown. Breath of the Wild does away with that, but they don’t do away with degrading gear condition. Your weapons break constantly, and you just keep going. Grab a new one. It’s fun for a while, so long as you don’t get too attached to something particularly good you’ve found. Shuffling the weapons around your inventory is annoying right from the start, but the break and replace system encourages diversifying your combat. However after a time you realize that there are only four different weapons masquerading as two hundred. You have wands, which are nearly useless because you can’t really aim them, a two-handed axe or sword (functionally identical), a two-handed spear, and a one-handed sword, which is by far the best since it let’s you use your shield. If you defeat a really strong enemy, he’ll drop really strong weapons, but those break just as quickly and you end up feeling like you’re wasting them on weak enemies. If you don’t use them, they take up precious weapon inventory slots and frustrate you as you try to find ways to continue to gather weapons. Ultimately it’s a pain, and not in the spirit of Zelda. I would have rather they gave you steadfast tools you grew attached to and gave you specific reasons to use one thing over the others.
And the rest of the inventory is taken up by miscellaneous materials and cooking supplies. Do not - do not - cook. Just figure out how to grab some hearty mushrooms or fish and call it at some health potions. Cooking is almost as time consuming as real life cooking and far less satisfying. To make any dish you have to gather a set of ingredients, goats butter from the store in Rito village, Goron spice from Death Mountain, Tabantha wheat from the grasslands of wherever, and then scroll through your materials list and select “hold” and then choose up to five individual items, exit the screen, walk around with those things in your hands, find a pot, light a fire under it, (regather your ingredients because you forgot to light the fire before you started holding them and now have to do that again), throw everything in, and wait while everything bounces around to end up with something that provides marginal bonuses that aren’t worth constantly micromanaging.
“ If inventories get any bigger, they’re going to need their own search functions and indices.”
These massive inventories naturally punish you for progress. At first it seems reasonable to do something like make hot buttered apples because your inventory only has apples, butter, and a few other ingredients in it. But that’s in the first hour of the game. By hour twenty, scrolling through your list of bows just to find which one you want to drop so you can pick up this forest dweller’s bow from the shrine of Oot Natek takes entire minutes. If inventories get any bigger, they’re going to need their own search functions and indices. I just don’t understand. Developers hear my cry, let the natural impossibility of a person literally carrying 107 pieces of flint, 48 mighty bananas, a barbarian’s helmet, a lightning-infused greatsword, and 700 eyes, ears, horns, hoofs, and guts torn from dead monsters be a warning that you should not include the ability to do so in your game. Why do they let this happen and at the same time make it so Link’s horse can’t hear a whistle summons more than a hundred yards away? Great job in the realism. Now I can’t use my horse. That’s alright, I’ll just turn into blue stardust and teleport to the top of a tower half a world away while in the middle of fighting six enemies.
Zelda: Breath of the Wild is beautiful and insanely frustrating. The worst part of it is that all its faults are pervasive faults that have infected the entire industry like a virus. I’m writing the same complaints again and again as I play more and more games. Voices like mine that are trying to fight back against these trends are weirdly few. It’s as if a symptom of the virus is ignorance of infection. And Zelda is a tragic franchise to get so sick. If I look at a screenshot of my time with Breath of the Wild, I will smile because it’ll inevitably be so pretty. If I think back on it, I’ll remember that there were only four temples, all with very similar mechanics, all short, with underwhelming, undersized, bosses of similar design. I’ll remember that they made gear annoying, that I had to chase shooting stars in the distance and wait in-game hours to farm up dragon horns to upgrade my champion’s tunic. And I’ll remember that I got bored with it so vanquished Calamity Ganon as easily as one might flick a spider off a table. If this land of Hyrule had 25 or 30 dungeons, which would easily fit in the beautiful landscape, all as complex and creative as Ocarina of Time’s Shadow Temple, Majora’s Mask’s Stone Tower, Twilight Princess’s City in the Sky, or A Link to the Past’s everything, I wouldn’t be writing these disappointed paragraphs. I’d still be playing and loving every minute of it. Keep the world, scrap the rest of this bullshit.
Oh, the story! I forgot to mention the story!
The story is the same as always.