Breath of the Wild: Great Game, Bad Zelda

We've all heard of Breath of the Wild. Swan song for the WiiU, launch title for the Nintendo Switch, universal acclaim, a must play, etc. We've all played a game in this "category", if it can be called that. Genre-defining, generation-launching titles that redefine what it means to be a video game, that pushes the limits of what gaming is.

Breath of the Wild was a lot of things when it came out. It was a farewell to the WiiU, an introduction to the Nintendo Switch, an entry point for many into The Legend of Zelda, and for me, it was a justification of the open world genre.

It's easy to say at this point that open world games are tired and boring. It's been enough years with enough games, that's a far easier idea to express than it was 5, 10, 15 years ago. Skyrim, Red Dead, Fallout, open world games don't carry as much weight to them as a smartly designed, more linear progression kind of game, or even a Metroidvania, which I feel does the idea of open world better than a proper open world ever could. Breath of the Wild was the first and only open world game that has ever justified its design to me. In spite of the open-ended design of the gameplay and world, I felt that it was still smartly designed and had a unique goal for the player at every step, giving you the freedom to fuck around and find out, or a clear and present path to help guide you through the massive, detailed world that the team had built for you to experience.

Here's the thing: I love Breath of the Wild. I've played this game to death, on the TV and in handheld, with the Joy-cons and Pro controller and GameCube controller, in normal and Master modes, all totally a few hundred hours of gameplay. It's easily the most-played game on my Switch, competing with the likes of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (which I want to write about sometime soon), Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate; some of my most-played games in my collection. That's no small feat for Breath of the Wild to climb to in terms of my play hours, but because of that, here's the other thing: Breath of the Wild also sucks.

Well, more specifically, it sucks in one major way: it's an awful Zelda game. I've held this opinion since I played it for the first time, and the more time passes, the more I think on my time with this game, the more Zelda games I play, the more it solidifies in my mind. Breath of the Wild is easily the weakest Zelda game on just about every front, and when you break it down, it's a lot easier to see why.

Fair warning, this post will discuss details on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, its gameplay, story, etc. If you want to avoid these things, come back once you've played it are satisfied with your experience before reading ahead.

Breath of the Wild really broke the mold for the Zelda franchise in a lot of ways. It simplified Link's toolset, giving it all to you right at the beginning. It opened the world, de-emphasized dungeons, and moved a lot of formerly required staples of the series into the category of Optional. Oh yeah, and there's voice acting now. That's actually pretty cool and pretty good.

These are all really interesting ideas for an open world game. Defying the Metroidvania formula of exploration and progression, instead of coming across an obstacle and returning later to use a new item you uncovered (which is loosely the formula all previous Zelda games have follow), Breath of the Wild opts to give you every tool you will ever unlock, right at the start, and allow you to do any challenge and overcome any obstacle that you happen to come across along the way. You can upgrade these abilities later for convenience and ease, but every challenge and truly the entire game is fully possible without ever getting a single upgrade. Actually, it's fully beatable without every meeting the NPC that offers those upgrades. Or going to that town. Or exploring that region.

You can beat Breath of the Wild within an hour of booting it up for the first time.

Granted, most didn't, but this isn't just a niche speedrunning thing; Breath of the Wild is fully beatable as soon as you clear the tutorial area. Upon clearing the Great Plateau, the king of Hyrule tells you your ultimate mission: defeat Calamity Ganon. As soon as he stops talking and you leave, you can go do that, with nothing but a torn shirt and a pocket full of tree branches. Hyrule Castle, the final challenges, and the final boss fight against Calamity Ganon himself are all opened as soon as you leave the Plateau. The game encourages you not to, forcing you to face all four of the Blights in a row if you have not cleared the main campaign missions across Hyrule, but this is ultimately a minor deterrent if beating the game right away is truly your goal. It's four extra fights, and then the final boss is still open to you. You can finish this game and watch the staff credits roll without even meeting this game's Zelda, spending exactly zero time with this game's Link, seeing none of the villages or regions, fighting none of the major enemies, exploring none of the dungeons, nothing. This is like starting A Link to the Past, and then just going to the Dark World pyramid and killing Ganon.

So why does the game do this? Simple: open world. The game allows you to go anywhere and do anything right from the start, and even gives you every tool right away so you can do that. As a result, it only makes sense for you to allow to player to tackle Hyrule Castle, and by extension stumble into Ganon's chamber, at any time they choose to. This, I think, is the fatal flaw of Breath of the Wild, and shows why open world games simply do not work in practice.

When you break open a world in a video game and allow the player true freedom to do anything they want, you must design the world and its goals to meet the player where they're at when they decide to take on any given section of the game. Because they did this, Breath of the Wild is what I consider to be the first truly open world game, but to that extent, it also shows you the cracks that start to form when you follow this path.

The plot to Breath of the Wild is incredibly sparse, and almost entirely optional. Aside from learning about Calamity Ganon and your ultimate goal to defeat him in Hyrule Castle, you are not required to discover, explore, or complete any of the other main story quests in the game. Despite this, there is a specific path laid out for the player if they choose to follow along. The king of Hyrule directs Link to seek out Impa in Kakariko Village to learn more of his lost memories of 100 years ago. From the Great Plateau, there is a direct highway that leads through the countryside and into the mountains to Kakariko Village, allowing you to settle into the gameplay loop of exploration, discovery, and collecting. This also allows to meet Hestu along the way, and learn more about the purpose of Korok seeds and inventory upgrades. Once you speak to Impa, you then add the main story goal of unlocking Link's lost memories by visiting important locations from his past. Impa also directs you to visit Hateno Village and meet with Purah, who can repair/upgrade youe Shiekah Slate to add new features (also an optional questline to follow). Another similar path traces out from Kakariko, out to Hateno, and finally to Purah's Lab. This exploratory questline does so much for the experience of Breath of the Wild, for its world, its characters, and most importantly, for the player to learn what the game expects of them moving forward. This integral part of the Breath of the Wild introduction, is entirely optional. All of it's locations, its characters, its upgrades and mechanics, all optional. The game has to meet the player where they're at, right? So if the player decides not to follow along, the rest of the world has to be completely disconnected. The story has to be unrelated. The characters and dialogue have to be inconsequential. To do that is to disregard the design that has made the Zelda series so interesting and so beloved for so many years.

This includes the de-emphasis of dungeons and their role in the world, as well as the other "main characters" and their roles. Meeting the player where they're at again requires the disconnection of the world, the stories, the dialogue, the characters. The melded regions of this interconnected world don't matter when the characters, plotlines, etc. don't venture beyond their restrictive borders. In order to allow the player to do or not do anything they want, every has to be disconnected. Discordant. Unimportant.

Zelda games have long been praised not only for their story, but for their depth, their worldbuilding, the shared universe that these drastically different games have. To that point, Zelda has for years had a (somewhat complex) timeline with three branches, that explains how every Zelda game is connected in the chronology of Hyrule. Breath of the Wild officially throws all of it out the window, and unifies the timelines together for the first time since Ocarina of Time split them. Ideally, a game that unifies the timelines would be amazing! It allows the writers and designers to create a new iteration of Hyrule that draws on the entire 30+ years of Zelda games, mechanics, stories, characters, lore, etc. in order to have true freedom in what they make.

Breath of the Wild does the exact opposite of this.

Despite having the entirety of Zelda history at their fingertips to design this new Hyrule, they opt instead to throw most of it entirely out the window, and despite the wonder and scale, create the most basic and generic-feeling Hyrule to date. There's very few defining Zelda features, and the ones that are there generally have a new look that doesn't match anything in the series history, or attend to any of the lore and worldbuilding of the previous entries. Essentially every major settlement that references Zelda staples have a new design that not only is original, but also specifically discards historic depictions and lore established in Zelda history, and refusing to acknowledge prior incarnations, like the Rito's Dragonroost Island (Although there is a minor homage to that island's main melody in the Rito Village night theme). This goes against everything that Zelda games are.

And this extends to something else I've mentioned several times: the de-emphasis of dungeons. The length of Zelda games is often measured in number of dungeons, and by the logic, Breath of the Wild would be one of the shortest Zelda games ever made. There are only four main dungeons, one in each region, and Hyrule Castle as a debatable fifth. These dungeons are not only weaker than the dungeon designs in most previous games, there's barely any of them. And, say it with me now, they're all optional. You don't have to explore any of them except Hyrule Castle in order to finish the game. These dungeons introduce the main characters of each race in Hyrule, the regional storylines, and unlock new abilities for Link that aid in combat and mobility. These abilities are incredibly useful, and can be toggled on or off from the inventory whenever you want, so they're fairly non-obtrusive as well. They're somewhat this game's replacement for Link's ever-expanding cavalcade of tools in the older games, but they mostly fall short of that goal and serve mainly as nice bonuses for doing optional story quests.

So, what then? Breath of the Wild falls short of the Zelda name at every turn, it disappoints on ever front that you can analyze, it's underwhelming, underutilized, unrealized, so what then? What exactly does this game do right? Why is it so acclaimed? In short, it's because it's fun.

I said it before and I'll say it again: I love Breath of the Wild. The combat mechanics I found to be incredibly engaging, with plenty of time and space to practice and master it. In particular the modern take on the Lynal enemy from the original NES Zelda were intimidating to fight, and very satisfying to defeat. In fact, traveling around and dueling Lynals was one of my favorite things to do when I ran out of things to run around for. The presence of enemy camps dotted around Hyrule adds to this, allowing you ample opportunities to practice stealth, combat, and creative ways to get rid of your enemies. Later in the game however, they can tend to be more annoying that useful, when they have nothing to offer and only serve to bother you while doing tasks nearby.

The other thing I love about Breath of the Wild is the exploration. There is a lot of empty space around Hyrule, which is a negative. However, there are so many small corners of the world that someone handcrafted with love and intention, and finding those spots is one of the most rewarding things you can do in this game. Goddess offerings protected by a tree atop a hill. The ruins of a burned-out farm house nestled deep in a young forest. A Shiekah statue abandoned at the peak of a mountaintop. Finding weird marks on your map that aren't labeled, and going there to see what's what is incredibly fun. Even a lot of the named locations are fascinating to just go and walk around, even if nothing's there. For example, did you know that the ruins of Lon Lon Ranch is in the Hyrule Field? Look it up, it's such a minor location that no one ever notes on, but it's there. Picking a direction and walking until you find some small, weird thing is what Breath of the Wild does best. The developers specifically measured out the map so that there would always be something to find without too much space between. I'd say they half did this, as some areas really feel like attention was paid in that sense to making the map fun to navigate, and some areas are incredibly barren and just a time-waister to get through.

Breath of the Wild is unique in a lot of ways, not just for the Zelda series, but also for games as a whole. I stand by my thought that it is the first truly open world game, and it takes that idea to its inevitable conclusion. Unfortunately, this shows you exactly how poorly this concept works in execution. The story is nonexistent, not a single non-character NPC is memorable, and the overall design both evolves and suffers from the format of the game. I honestly feel like I could write posts about each of the shortcomings I mentioned, doing a deep-dive into why exactly they bring this game down in the ways that they do. Breath of the Wild fails to build on the overall Zelda lore, the timeline, or even have an interesting story of its own. It fails to fully justify the open world genre by evolving it to its ultimate form, but also showing exactly how open world games don't work and will always fall short in key ways. This game fails to have an identity of it's own. Despite these things, it manages to be a well-designed world with deep, engaging gameplay, and hours upon hours of activities for you to get lost in an enjoy exploring. Breath of the Wild is a wonderful game and worth your time and money. Unfortunately, as a part of the Legend of Zelda series, this is a bad game. It fails in every criteria for a good Zelda game, and fails to integrate itself into the series proper.

"The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" is a bad Zelda game that suffers from cashing in on the gaming industry's obsession with open world as a game concept and the demonization of traditional game design. "Breath of the Wild", as a hypothetical standalone game, is a wonderful open world game that works well within the limitations and downsides the genre brings with it, and manages to give both the WiiU and the Nintendo Switch a vast fantasy world to explore, and engaging gameplay that keeps you exploring it for hundreds of hours. What does that make this game then? I think ultimately that's up to you.

~ Alex Amelia Pine

This post is a part of the series Game Reviews