Minor spoilers ahead for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
When I think about what makes the Zelda series so popular, what becomes undeniable is its reputation as the gold standard for adventure gaming. I find it hard to believe that there are many boys and girls who haven’t at some point in their younger days dreamed of a life of daring and discovery. Great dragons to slay. A damsel to rescue. Knights in shining armor. It’s a life, at first glance, of unbridled freedom and wonder.
Whatever Nintendo’s faults as a business may be, I believe it’s safe to say that they’ve always known how to make video games. The Zelda titles have been scratching the adventurous itch for gamers for nearly three decades now, with a consistency in quality that most franchises its size would commit cold-blooded murder for. As a die-hard Zelda fan ever since the 64 came out, I am one of the many gamers to have seen first-hand what all the fuss is about, and it’s always a special occasion when Nintendo’s Zelda team reveals a brand new addition to its legacy. I speak no hyperbole when I say every new mainline Zelda release date sees me dropping everything that isn’t work or family on my way out the door to the nearest retailer. So I always expect great things when a new Zelda hits the streets. Earlier this year, we got a particularly interesting one.
Let’s wind the clocks back a bit first: I liked Skyward Sword. I didn’t really get the divisive attitude many of my friends had towards it, but hindsight is 20/20 and I think I can see their point. I still like it. A lot. In my mind, Nintendo managed to achieve its goal of translating motion control into mainstream gaming, something it had been tinkering with since Metroid Prime 3. The controversially linear nature of the game also provided a tightness of focus on its new combat system, fully utilizing the controller’s one-to-one tracking for every weapon and gadget. As much as Zelda boasts of its prowess as an epic adventure, I’ve also seen it as a puzzle game, with all kinds of brain teasers sprinkled throughout each game’s dungeons. Skyward Sword had the bright idea to take this concept and apply it to its combat system as well, with every different enemy pushing you to adopt a new approach and encouraging the player to refrain from waggling the controller carelessly. It was this commitment to design that I respected and enjoyed so much about the game when it came out.
But as most of you know, not everyone shared this point of view. Nintendo may have even been one of those people. Longtime Zelda producer & manager Eiji Aonuma had long been imagining a truly “open-air” Zelda, a title that would truly return the series to its roots as what series creator Shigeru Miyamoto once described as a “miniature garden” for players to explore and discover. But like many projects, imagination can be kept on a leash by time and resources, and the technology just hadn’t quite caught up to the idea yet. Now though, with open world games coming out a dime a dozen each year and the launch of Nintendo’s first high definition console, the Zelda team decided to give the concept a proper go.
So what’d they come up with?
What first struck me about Breath of the Wild was the abrupt lack of any sort of hand-holding system included in the older 3D Zelda games, usually in the form of the almost universally panned “partner” characters present. Here, though, there’s a noticeable absence of any sort of extraneous help, only a quick cutscene, a brief tutorial, a few words from the princess, then the game says “go.”
Which brings me to what strikes me as the title’s greatest strength, and what I believe makes Breath of the Wild a true achievement in gaming. The game absolutely nails the difficult idea of “if you can see it you can touch it” games, a long-pursued concept for every open world game that had come before it. While we’ve had no shortage of wide-open, lively worlds in the past (Skyrim says hi), Breath of the Wild makes a valiant attempt to break any mechanic or concept holding back the player from truly exploring the world at their own pace. Getting sidetracked into finding a skull-shaped cave with goodies in it or spotting something worthwhile after climbing a mountain peak is nothing new to games, but still pretty neat in this one.
Every major tool in the game is obtainable within the first hour of play, a major departure from the Zelda tradition of opening the world gradually through the drip-feeding of items. On the one hand, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer size of this map (which has been said to be modeled after the Japanese city of Kyoto in terms of its vastness). On the other, the player has few instructions to follow other than “beat the main bad guy, now pick a direction.” In a world demanding more player choice, this is a very good thing. Every situation requires the player to make a decision. Every choice contributes to the player’s growth, tying everything in beautifully to the age-old Zelda theme of getting stronger to beat the aforementioned main bad guy. It’s this execution and understanding of decades of game design that makes Breath of the Wild such a success.
As mentioned above, Zelda has boasted a wide variety of puzzles requiring exploration and critical thinking, but Breath of the Wild tackles this series staple in a bit of a different way. Gone are the traditional Zelda dungeons (STILL NOT SURE I’M OKAY WITH THIS), and in its place are numerous smaller “shrines,” each holding a unique puzzle and uninspired aesthetics (think TRON with weaker music). Each give the player a good look at the wonderful work Nintendo’s level designers can do when it comes to creating brain teasers, and completing each shrine adds a little bit more to your overall strength in-game.
The puzzle-solving isn’t limited to these shrines, however. Nearly every encounter in the game shares a level of problem solving, a concept that seems to take a page from Skyward Sword’s smaller, more focused surface areas. In Breath of the Wild, it’s difficult to go more than a few yards without running into a buried treasure, a secret cavity, or (most likely) an enemy camp filled with some hilarious baddies. In-game enemies may suffer from a bad case of palette swapping, but their interactions with you as the player has been overhauled from previous titles, and serve as some fantastic visual comedy (try knocking the weapon out of their hand and see what happens). The possible approaches to combat have been beefed up as well. You can do what I did through most of my playthrough and shoot a few bad guys from afar before recklessly rushing in with your sword raised. Or take a stealthier approach and stab everyone in their sleep at night before taking all their food. Or dropping a metal box on their head with magnesis. Or lighting the grass on fire, creating an updraft to glide on before diving headfirst on their captain. Or. Or. Or. In this vein, Zelda can get endlessly creative… for the most part. More on that later.
The land is dotted with things to do and people to meet, packed with content and quests ranging from entertaining assaults on an enemy base to throwaway fetch quests to some truly bizarre tasks… maybe not bizarre for Zelda, but still. You have to draw some kind of line when a game asks you to cross-dress as a woman, break into a desert-dweller’s home and eavesdrop on a bar-goer in order to learn a password into an adult-only shop (not that kind, you creep.) So.
There are problems. A game with the number of framerate drops and sudden freezes that Breath of the Wild suffers from should not be a prefect 10, no matter who you are. And while the game strips away a ton of the weakest aspects of open-world gaming, it sours the dish by throwing in a few bad ingredients of its own. The game’s stamina bar, which dictates nearly every action you take, is just far too anemic at the start of the experience to be terribly useful. What was once a clever bit of problem solving spice added in Skyward Sword now becomes a frustrating shackle for the player without first upgrading the stamina bar (at the expense of upgrading health… by the way.) The number of times I’ve been unable to climb up a cliffside because of my character’s poor endurance is just a tad irritating. Oh, and when it was raining, climbing was impossible anyway since the surface lost all traction too, so there’s that.
Arguably worst of all is the game’s new weapon durability system. You’ve probably heard about it by now… every weapon and shield in the game is now limited to a number of uses before breaking. I can understand Nintendo’s desire to include a wider variety of weapons into this game (which does make the experience better), but the overall longevity of some of these weapons is simply unacceptable. I had more than one encounter where I was forced to burn three weapons in order to kill one dude. THREE.
On the one hand, this does force players to use weapons and tactics out of their comfort zone and get used to improving their skills with an item they wouldn’t normally use. But therein lies the kicker: force players. It doesn’t seem quite right to promise a world of absolute freedom in almost every way, only to yank the player’s enjoyment away just because their favorite weapon broke after five hits (a couple weapons actually last that briefly, yes). The entire combat experience for me ended up ranging from grudging acceptance of the new system and planning around it, to frustrating dullness as I would wail on an enemy and break one weapon… after another… after another.
And yet, despite all that…
The result of the game’s achievements can be felt within every circle of the gaming community. Breath of the Wild has received critical acclaim across the board, tremendous financial success worldwide, and responses from fans that have ranged from over the moon with gratitude to… well, let’s call them “passionate.”
Despite my initial apprehension of the many series’ conventions broken at first, I feel like this title is really where Zelda as a series was always headed. Zelda had always been influenced by Miyamoto’s memories of his childhood exploring caves and hiking through the woods. I think it’s safe to say that the team once under his supervision has truly achieved both a gold standard for open-world gaming and his vision of introducing players to the joys and wonders one experiences on the open road.
With Breath of the Wild, we discover that it’s a road well worth taking.
References:
https://w w w .youtube. com/watch?v=vLMGrmf4xaY
https://web.archive.org/web/20110831131810/http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/video/hist_zelda/index.html