Breath of the Wild Review
To say I’ve enjoyed my time in Breath of the Wild is a gross understatement. The latest entry in Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series is dynamically engaging, and very few games grab me in the way Breath of the Wild has. I’ll plan on playing for thirty minutes, but then four hours go by. One minute I’ll be saying, “Oh, just one more shrine and then I’ll quit… Just one more dungeon then I’ll quit… Let me beat Ganon and then I’ll quit,” and then the game’s over. One of Nintendo’s most ambitious projects yet should certainly be praised for its innovation, and for ‘breathing’ new life into a series that fans have felt had grown stagnant in recent years. That’s not to say every change to the formula is great, in fact, there are some system level changes that have had me shaking my head in confusion and frustration wondering who in charge thought a specific change was a good one. Gameplay mechanics are sometimes executed in a masterful way, except when they aren’t, and the game completely fails you. Breath of the Wild is certainly an enjoyable, engrossing experience, but does that excuse its frequent, yet admittedly small missteps?
As soon as you begin Breath of the Wild, you will immediately notice the departure from previous Zelda games; after a short cutscene, you are practically pushed right into the action. With older entries in the franchise, like Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword, it took hours to truly get into the narrative thrust of the story. While it still takes anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours in order to truly experience Breath of the Wild’s full, magnificent open world, you’re introduced to mechanics and systems that you will be using for the rest of the game.
After getting your bearings in the new, huge open space, it might take you some time to get acquainted with the controls. While I certainly got accustomed to the controls after a while, they are not what I’d call intuitive. Jump is in an awkward position at the top button pad, and while the player can easily switch it with the run button, neither of these control schemes feel quite right. Even at 100+ hours, I still fumble around with jump, run, and crouch. It’s not quite bad enough to break immersion, especially now that I’m so deep into the game, but it’s not seamless either.
There’s so many systems in place in Breath of the Wild, many of which are probably unfamiliar territory for long time fans of the series. One mechanic, while not completely new to the series, but expanded upon here, the stamina wheel, is something you’ll have to worry about as soon as you start the game. Remembering this feature from Skyward Sword, I was not looking forward to having to even think about my stamina in Breath of the Wild, but I was pleasantly surprised. A new mechanic introduced here is Link’s ability to climb virtually any surface - an awesome addition that brings another layer of depth to exploration in Zelda. Climbing those surfaces feels especially rewarding with the stamina wheel, which is an almost perfectly refined mechanic. ‘Almost’ being the keyword there. Nearly every action Link performs uses stamina. Climbing, running, swimming, and paragliding will all drain your stamina wheel, which, when separated make sense, but when combined lead to some frustrating circumstances. If Link runs out of stamina while climbing a mountain or paragliding, he’ll fall, and, if Link falls into a body of water, now without any stamina, he immediately drowns. Logic tells me that falling into a body of water should not drain my stamina wheel, because I could just float without exerting myself in the real world, but that’s not the case here. The game’s not very gracious with its stamina either. Even with a fully upgraded wheel, I still don’t feel like it’s quite enough for me in certain situations.
Speaking of logic, the game introduces some very real world logic in its mechanics. If Link starts a fire, there’ll be an updraft, he can cut trees and use them as bridges, wearing any piece of metal during a lightning storm will electrify him, and oftentimes instantly kill him. Most of this stuff is pretty neat, and makes sense. The only thing that is just a complete annoyance is rain. When it rains, Link’s not able to climb at all, which is such an essential part of discovery in Breath of the Wild. You can’t even skip forward in time unless you’re near cover, because that requires you to sit at a fire, and you can’t start a fire in the rain. There’s no mechanic for Link to control weather or time, like in previous entries in the series, which is kind of a bummer, considering it’s so much more essential here.
In addition to the weather, players will also need to worry about inventory management and weapon durability in Breath of the Wild. Out of all of the new changes and mechanics, this has been my least favorite. Every weapon, shield, and bow breaks in this game, and they will break constantly. There wasn’t a single fight I got into where I didn’t break at least one thing. It made me think about encounters differently, but it didn’t feel rewarding when I would come out of a battle net negative. I could never have a prefered weapon, shield, or bow combination, because my favorite weapons always broke. This could have been remedied by having, say, blacksmithing, as crafting is such a big component of Breath of the Wild, but there’s no way to repair the majority of broken weapons. I also probably wouldn’t feel too burnt on broken weapons if it wasn’t in addition to a substandard inventory management system. Too much time in the game was spent changing out weapons in the middle of a fight, and even outside of fights. There’s also not an easy way, if you come across a better weapon in your travels, to swap it out for one of your worse weapons. You can throw certain melee weapons, but not all of them, and for all the ones you can’t, and all the bows and shields, you need to go into the menu and manually drop them before you can pick new weapons up. You can upgrade the amount of weapons you can hold, and pretty easily considering how generous they are with the amount of upgrade ‘points’ you can find, but like the stamina wheel, it never feels like it’s enough. This doesn’t sound too bad on paper, but considering how many times you need to do it, it really adds up. Would this system be better if it took the Fallout or Skyrim approach of carrying capacity? I dunno. I’m not crazy about that system either, but it feels more functional than this one.
Luckily, you don’t need to manage your inventory when it comes to crafting materials, which is great, because there is a lot of stuff to craft, and a lot of materials to craft them. A new mechanic that not everyone will be fully on board with in Breath of the Wild, is crafting and cooking. Instead of finding hearts out in the wild, like in previous Zelda games, Link needs to cook his meals before he goes out this time around. Depending on the ingredients you choose, it affects the stats of the dish. Some give you more hearts, some restore stamina, some can even help you survive harsh weather conditions. I found cooking to be fun and rewarding, but it’s not a system that is fully perfected, and also not a system I think many players will fall in love with. Discovering new dishes by throwing strange ingredients together was plenty of fun, but without a way to catalog these dishes into some kind of recipe book made it frustrating. I remembered most of the recipes that mattered, but a recipe book might also help creating batches of dishes. Every time you want to cook a dish, you need to go into the menu, pick the ingredients, exit the menu, carry the ingredients to a cooking pot, and then wait for the animation to create one food item. It’s a long, tedious process that feels antiquated in design. Link also needs to be near a cooking pot if he wants to cook the really good foods, but those are only at the occasional mokoblin camp or at the major villages, a process that could have been easily remedied by having a cooking pot be an item.
All of these new systems are overwhelming at first, but I was surprised at how quickly I grew accustomed to them. The game does a great job at making these systems, and encounters with enemies feel rewarding if you decide to just try something and see if it works. I remember scattering a bunch of my old rusty swords around an enemy camp in a lightning storm, and watching as they picked up the weapons, and then were immediately electrocuted, or replacing all of their weapons with Korok leafs, so the best they could do was push me away. It may not be the fastest way to deal with a group of moblins, as swinging Link’s sword still seems to be the best approach, but it’s definitely fun and exhilarating when you take a puzzle-like approach to these encounters. These deep system mechanics add a lot of lasting power to this game, and it’s more than likely the reason I’m still so drawn to the game, even after I’ve done virtually everything there is to do.
It wouldn’t be a Legend of Zelda game without puzzles, and Breath of the Wild has them in abundance. Puzzles take a bit of a different form in this game though. Instead of being just relegated to giant dungeons, Breath of the Wild introduces Shrines, which are like mini dungeon experiences. There are 120 shrines in the game, and having been to each one, they all offer a unique challenge, with the exception being the occasional combat shrine. These shrines can be anything from a golf minigame to giant labyrinthian mazes. Shrines have a unique way of keeping you on your toes, and I rarely knew what I was getting into when I entered one. They feel almost Portal inspired, yet also completely at home in a Zelda game. The only problem I have with them is how similar the atmosphere feels in each one. The music will always be the same, the reward will always be the same, the environments will always be the same, and the cutscene at the end and beginning is always the same. I had a blast going through them, but considering how mechanically different each one was, it was disappointing that didn’t extend to the atmosphere as well.
Dungeons are not completely gone in favor of Shrines either, there is still a dungeon experience in Breath of the Wild. I don’t want to spoil what this entails, because Breath of the Wild does something fun and interesting with its version of dungeons. That being said, they’re very short experiences. Most of the dungeons didn’t take me as long as some of the shrines did, and I was expecting something a little longer form, based on previous outings in the Zelda series. Taking dungeons in a different direction isn’t a bad idea, but it feels as though we didn’t get those classic Zelda dungeons because we got the shrines.
Like in previous games, dungeons do provide boss battles, but I was disappointed by boss battles this time around. The main bosses of the game are all variations on the same theme, and visually they look very similar. I even have trouble telling them apart. That’s not to say the boss battles aren’t fun or challenging, but they don’t provide the same awesome set pieces that previous Zelda games were known for. They’re all relatively small scale fights, which is inconsistent with the rest of the game, considering just how massive everything else is. With the addition of the stamina wheel, I assumed we would be using that mechanic in boss battles - not entirely unlike Shadow of the Colossus, but besides a mini boss you fight frequently, they never make use of that mechanic or the scale of the open world. Another problem with the boss encounters, is that they seldom feel unique. There’s not a single enemy in the game that you don’t encounter more of at some point, which is more than likely a result of their loot drops being tied to the upgrade system. Even the game’s final boss I felt was a let down, and I would have liked a little more story and character with it. I got more depth out of previous Zelda antagonists, than Breath of the Wild’s ultimate villain. While this final boss has something there in terms of history and connection to the world of Hyrule, it doesn’t have any character to back it up.
The story has a fascinating setup for Link’s latest adventure, but it never quite lives up to the promise of its premise. The narrative unravels and unfolds as Link slowly begins to remember what happened long ago through optional, fully-voiced cutscenes. It’s a neat idea, but set-ups never quite pay off the way you want them to. The framing for the story is unconventional and unique, but the story itself relies on very typical Zelda tropes and ideas, with few twists or turns along the way. Ideas they plant early on are sometimes forgotten, or altogether abandoned when you reach the finale, instead relying on traditional narrative beats from the franchise’s history. There was never a moment in the main story where Breath of the Wild surprised me in the same way that I was often surprised by the gameplay or open world. Zelda doesn’t need a great story, but Breath of the Wild’s story is probably one of the weaker ones. It’s also a very short story, which wouldn’t be a problem, especially considering how much time I’ve put into the game, as long as they earned it, or paid the story off in an interesting way. In my experience, Breath of the Wild did not.
Yes, you read that correctly, a Legend of Zelda game has fully voiced cutscenes, and it mostly doesn’t work out. The voiced cutscenes are such a small part of the game, yet they stick out horrendously. A handful of the voice actors are fine, and usually work better if they go full ham on it, but the voice actors that really should deliver, the ones that are the biggest part of the narrative, are usually distractingly bad. Voice acting typically does nothing to affect my enjoyment of a product, but it’s rough here. The main problems are with the titular character, Zelda, an old man, and an old woman. Zelda sounds like she isn’t quite sure what a Hylian accent is supposed to sound like, and often sounds exactly like the old woman, making it hard to tell their voices apart. The old man, a character you meet early on, mumbles through most of his dialogue, and doesn’t have the gravitas that character probably should. It’s possible that some of the writing was lost in translation when dubbing the japanese dialogue, and certain things simply don’t play as well in English. That said, for the first time a main series Zelda game has had voice over beyond ‘Hey, listen!’, I’m not impressed.
There’s one cutscene in particular that you’ll see multiple times throughout your journey that is a seemingly random occurrence. You’ll need to see the cutscene for yourself, but it resets everything on the map for you. It’s a really great cutscene… the first time you see it, but I was not able to go for more than thirty minutes without seeing it twice. On multiple occasions, this cutscene killed me by respawning dead NPCs, but the worst was when it completely reset a rare spawn I was hunting. There’s not an easy way to skip this cutscene, at least as far as I know. Every time I hit the option to ‘skip’, there was a long load time, and a few minutes later I would have to watch the cutscene again until I went inside a house or a shrine. With most of the cutscenes in the game, it’s almost more worth it to just watch them, considering how long the load time takes if you choose to skip.
Where the narrative really delivers most, is with the game’s side quests and with its world. Not every side quest is golden, quite a few of them are simple fetch quests, but there is such an abundance of them, that I spent hours going around helping the people of Hyrule. Each one, even the ones with the more menial tasks, at least delivered a quirky, interesting encounter that Zelda is known for. The side characters are unique and funny in a way that only this franchise really brings to the table, and I was happy to see that was still present in Nintendo’s reevaluation of what Zelda means.
The worldbuilding is very strong here, giving you story from areas in the environment, and its diverse communities. There are areas of the map that are exact recreations, down to the location of the trees or rocks, of areas in previous Zelda games. There are ruins of a fallen society everywhere throughout the map, and I often found myself just looking around in awe. I was reminded of Majora’s Mask when I entered a town, because, like that game, every npc has a routine throughout the day. You can spend hours following villagers around, and sometimes the game even rewards you for doing so, giving you side quests or other small incentives. Hyrule has never felt more fully realized than in this game. The scale makes the distance of locations believable, but rarely inconvenient like certain open world games, helped in part by the ability to warp to any shrine previously visited. While it’s true that much of the map is devoid of any encounters or enemies, there are surprises and collectibles almost everywhere. If I came across something I thought was a secret, nine out of ten times, it was.
Despite having a great fast travel system, I rarely used my horse to get around in the world at all. Horses are not fast enough nor versatile enough to be worth it. So much time is spent climbing and exploring, and since horses can’t climb, I rarely found myself in need of a horse. When I did need a horse, it's not as simple as playing a song or using an item, like in previous Zelda games. You can whistle for your horse, but the range is so small, and the world is so big, that it rarely works. To get your horse you have to travel to stables, a new addition to Zelda games, and talk to the people there in order to retrieve your horse. There's stables all over Hyrule, but this just isn't as convenient as using an item or a song to call your horse.
Even with all of the problems I had with Breath of the Wild, I still think very fondly of the game, which I think is a testament to the experience of Zelda’s latest entry. As I write this, I want to shut my computer down and just get lost in the world of Hyrule for a few hours. There are very few new systems introduced that don’t have a flaw or several, but despite the flaws the changes made to the formula seem mostly good. The world, the deep, interconnected systems, and fresh gameplay, are only slightly hindered by an insubstantial plot, repetitive encounters, some frustrating mechanics, and bad bosses. There’s just so much to love in Breath of the Wild, and I’ve enjoyed my time with the game more than I can fully put into words. That being said, this game has me more excited for the potential of future Zelda games. The little blemishes Breath of the Wild has do take away from the ultimate experience. As a foundation and as a template to grow on, there’s something really special here, and I can’t wait to see where this franchise goes next.
