Making Love to the Mountain
Link has come back from the dead to embrace the love of his life, A curvy shimmering beauty known as...Death Mountain?
Breath of a Wild is Nintendo's first foray into the world of open world games. There are hundreds of people to meet, thousands of weapons to pick up, and a countless miles to explore. Breath of The Wild is a marvel to behold dwarfing all other Zelda games before it in stature, unfortunately for all its grandeur it has half the personality of its predecessors and none of the heart.
Breath of the Wild is a gigantic game, there are mountains, volcanoes, evergreens, palm trees, desert and tundra, all of which can be explored by and climbed on by our secret Spider-man protege, Link, who is on a quest to save the princess of Hyrule castle. The scenery is by far the star of the game there is always a new river to sail upon or mountain to climb up, all of which is beautifully rendered and does a good job of immersing the player into the game world, equally massive however is the numerous number of systems in the game which are constantly pulling the the player out of the game world and into the inventory screen.
Systems, there are many in Breath of the Wild, all of which have their own unique quirks one has to get use to. For starters there is the weapon durability system. The swords of Hyrull will break... constantly, unrelentingly, to the point that one may very well start avoiding enemies so you can spare your equipment as the math just doesn't seem to quite work out in your favor. Then there is the stamina system which dictates how long you can run, climb, and swim, thus making exploring painfully slow at times. Now none of these systems are broken they are just quirky and add some resistance to the game, which is fine as long as there is a reward for your perseverance....
Which leads us to the biggest problem with Breath of the Wild, it never feels like you are properly reward or compensated for the time you invest into the game. For all the time you spend running away from Centaurs, stranded on mountains because its raining (yes, our hero who can climb up sheer ice-cubes and swim in two ton armor can't climb in the rain!) or all the time you spend walking over vast barren deserts and trekking over empty planes of grass because you misplaced your horse, you always think its going to be worth it. You think sooner or later I'll have the Pegasus Boots and I'll be running coast to coast with ease. Soon I'll have the Hook Shot and these mountains will be nothing. In no time I'll have the Master Sword and those half horse half lion people will be going down lickity split! Nope. Never happens the game stays roughly the same from hour 1 to hour 151. Even the Master Sword, for all the effort it takes to pull it from its resting place is more of a stop-gap sword than the world ender you'd expect it to be. There is just a sever lack of progression and growth in the game, a constant repetition and routine that perpetrates through out everything you do, this could have been forgiven if the characters and story where up to the standards of the previous games entry's but as it stands this game feels like the cliff notes of a great Zelda tale which have been explicitly stretched thinly out over a 1000 page epic all the while being read upside down and backwards.
Breath of the Wild is a interesting game and is sure to divide fans of the series much in the same way Ocarina of Time did back in the day, as it shows a clear breaking point from its predecessors. As a open world game this is actually one of the better ones, the combat is serviceable, the puzzles are fine, the exploring elements work, and the game world is gorgeous and diverse, but as a Zelda game it's one of the weaker entries in the storied franchise, as its embrace has little in the way of warmth and tenderness and is mostly cold and hard....much like making love to a mountain....in the rain.
