Big Yeasty Draws

Ok, let’s get the big stuff out of the way: I like this game. Even if you haven’t played it, if you’ve so much as searched Zelda within the past month, this near universal opinion shouldn’t be unfamiliar to you. You could go anywhere on the internet around its release and see overwhelming praise, 10/10, a “masterpiece” or even “the best game of all time”. I’m kind of opposed to scores and big statements like that because they have the power to label a game as perfect or flawless, even if they don’t mean to; but the acclaim isn’t necessarily undeserved, this is a great Zelda game, and a really good video game in general. One of the biggest reasons for this praise is attributed to how big of a departure it is, it really sets itself apart from past Zelda games; However, that’s also what inclines me to dissect this title far more than any of its predecessors.

Since this isn’t really a proper review, and I’m assuming most of the people reading this have already played the game in some capacity, I’m just gonna quickly summarize what I like about it. If you want more in depth conversations about the positives you should go ahead and find something on IGN...or Youtube or something I dunno, honestly anywhere, this game has gotten nothing but glowing reviews, it’s not too hard to find something better constructed than my stuff.

-It’s gorgeous, the cel shading and overall homage to japanese animated films *cough* Ghibli *cough* is wholeheartedly welcome and beautiful to look at. This is the first Zelda game where I didn’t want to cut the grass because it was just so damn pretty. I’d constantly find myself placing link in compositionally pleasing settings to just watch the world teem with life and wonder.

-The runes and their implementation with shrines and the divine beasts make for some clever puzzles, even if they are a lot of the times maybe a little too easy and kind of short. When the puzzles are at their best, you can’t help but smile.

-I like the basic concept of the story, it’s nice to see Zelda explored as a character. (Though I will say that Link not being as expressive in this title was a bit of a let down, he’s expressive in the world and not in the cutscenes which is odd. I know there’s a canon reason for this but still, I miss the personality from previous titles. I hope they weren’t trying to reel back on his facial expressions for fear of breaking “immersion” or something silly like that, no one I know sees link as themselves, I’d like to think most people really do see him as his own character.)

-The outfits are great.

-Different weapon types are super cool.

-I actually ended up not hating the voice acting, in fact, I feel like there should have been more of it.

-I love how the world is constantly being traversed by characters that always have something funny or useful to say. I remember one guy telling me that his name was Spinch and his horse was named Spinch too; so completely random. You engage with him further and he’s just like: “We’re both Spinch and I don’t even care.” It killed me, and it’s stuff like that that was part of what made exploring fun.

-It acknowledges the series’ timeline and lore in the most direct way yet. I particularly love how they sprinkled Fi’s theme into scenes with the Master Sword, it gave me chills. Makes you feel like all your past adventures really mattered.

-Music is beautiful, the main theme and Hateno village are some of my new favorites and I can’t wait to hear them Live. Gotta love that Dragon Roost callback too.

-Character design is great. Even the most insignificant npcs have great character designs. This particular reincarnation of Zelda is definitely my favorite appearance wise, the developers did a great job with making her look adorable, dignified, and adventurous all at the same time.

-I like the return of character schedules from Majora’s Mask, makes the world feel alive.

-The champions are all great personalities, but it sucks we couldn’t spend more time with them. (more on this later)

- Prince Sidon is hilarious and really charming.

-Paya is disgustingly cute.

- Bolson is the best god damn npc in the game, that gay ass motherfucker.

-Climbing is fun, unless it rains.

- Fighting is fun (until you’re about 50 hours in and it starts being a little less creative. Once you have a ton of money and really good weapons, the incentive to fight and raid camps isn’t really there anymore unless it's fighting for just fighting’s sake. This made be a bit sad.)

-Based on its basic game mechanics alone, Breath of the Wild is, in general, pretty fun. There’s a lot more I could say, but I feel like it’s fairly obvious what the really good things are in this game.

The list goes on and on and on...but these are my main take aways without getting TOO entrenched into a stream of consciousness. I don’t really feel the need to go too in depth about the games positives, because they’re widely discussed and loudly appreciated across the board; I wanted to be brief with my addition to the echo chamber. With that said, I actually have a few fairly substantial grievances with this game that prevent it from being a masterpiece for me.

Saying this feels like betraying a best friend, especially after waiting 6 years for this game. But I think it’s necessary to put these thoughts out there when a game gets universally good reviews, I want Zelda to grow and improve beyond this point. It’s obvious Nintendo won’t see this shit, but it’s good to get a conversation going, especially when every single Zelda game gets widespread acclaim upon release and only a year or so later do people tend to tone it down a little. This is fairly ironic in my case, as Skyward Sword is one of my favorite games and it seems to have the starkest contrast between its initial opinions and those that popped up a year after. I just have some things that really irk me about this game, which sucks because I actually love it a great deal, I’m super torn.

My biggest takeaway from 200 hours of traveling across Breath of the Wild’s world was that its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Nintendo set out to spread its wings and build this immense world that inspires wonder and awe, and it certainly does that, but I feel like that’s mostly all the game is at times.  It’s funny, because as soon as I start to say stuff like this, I can’t help but think, “Wow that’s actually really great, I’m glad the game went this direction.” But I also feel heavily conflicted about that direction’s consequences. This may sound strange and it’s not really bad, but I felt like the world is almost so open ended with itself that its identity is spread a little thin.  

I’m kind of going against my own logic here, because I’ve always wanted a Zelda game with an immense amount of side quests to beef up the experience outside of the main quest. I’ve prayed for a huge world to explore, to really feel the enormity of this land that needed to be saved. And there really is a lot to do, there's a ton, but only a handful of the sidequests outside the shrines have much heft. The game doesn’t really have a set pace as a result, which can be seen as a good thing I guess. I can agree with the sentiment that this choice was necessary as a stepping stone going forward, I think Zelda definitely benefits from the nonlinearity approach, and Nintendo going as far as they did with it this time will help them see its advantages and disadvantages. If Skyward Sword was an extreme in linearity, Breath of the Wild is an extreme in the exact opposite direction. In my opinion, they both still work well in their own regards, albeit in incredibly different ways.

When I say that the game doesn’t have as much of an identity compared to past Zelda’s, I mean that in a way where the identity of the game is largely shaped by the player’s own experience and not by the narrative itself. This can be seen as a huge triumph in player agency, where the power (or in this case courage) really is in the hands of the player. But you can’t curate nonlinearity, at least not entirely. As a result, we tend to lose some of the pacing that made past titles feel “epic”. I guess what I’m getting at is that my main gripe has to do with how the game’s narrative structure comes together.

The developers were definitely aware of a narrative problem, as they needed a way to glue the game together story wise, and the memories were a pretty clever way to do it; honestly, I don’t know how else they could have made it work with their open air concept. But as much as I find the story compelling and interesting, there’s simply not enough of it, which is a real shame because you feel a need to get closer to these characters, especially the champions. Much of this game feels like you are showing up late to the party. There's a weird dichotomy between the past and present as a result. You end up feeling like you need to care more about the champions in the past, but characters in the present end up getting more development, just less emotional weight attributed to them. It’s a weird flip flop, because I loved Prince Sidon as a character, and thought he was the most developed out of all the main quest based npcs, but Mipha kind of steals the climax of the Zora’s Domain story. What sucks about this is that Mipha has, what appears to be on the surface, a tragic and emotionally affecting story, but we don’t get enough time to dwell on it really, so we’re in this weird flux. This past and present problem actually has made me feel the most disconnected from Link than I ever have, and if I was gonna be disconnected I would have at least liked to have seen him show a little more personality, but he only does this in small instances in the present.

This formula disappointed me more and more with each main questline, especially when all the others tended to be less concerned with getting you familiar with or attached to their respective characters. The worst offender is the Rito area, which I swear can be completed in an hour. It really cheats Rivali out of getting any meaningful development, which is a huge missed opportunity because he was funny, quippy, and a nice rival character for Link. Imagine meeting Groose at the beginning of Skyward Sword, except at the end of the tutorial someone pushes him off Skyloft and he straight up dies, the end. Think about how big of a missed opportunity that would be. That’s kind of how this felt.

Now I know that you can argue that Zelda has never been about the story, but honestly I still thinks that’s up to the player, no matter how simple these stories tend to be. It’s mostly less about story and more about how much time is spent on the fun characters Zelda is known for, and the game loses a bit of its heart as a result. A lot of people, like me, are super into the lore and the characters this franchise has to offer; things don’t need to be convoluted like Kingdom Hearts or emotionally complex like the Last of Us. Many players enjoy the adventure of befriending characters, helping them with their problems, and feeling fulfilled by that alone.

Quests that had this fulfillment element were my favorite, such as cooking a rock for a malnourished Goron to help him regain his strength, or building a town from the ground up with a bizarre cast of carpenters that you can’t help but adore. These are rewarding for me, not because of the loot, but because it’s simply just entertaining and makes me feel like I really accomplished something. Once I reached about 90 hours, I didn’t need rupees, or another royal claymore, what I was really looking for was a reflection of how I impacted the world around me. I wanted to suspend my disbelief and truly get absorbed in this world not only for its beauty and sheer size, I wanted to feel like I mattered to its inhabitants too. And the game does this enough to be fairly satisfactory. Though, there are plenty of quests that get halfway there but end up feeling more like fetch quests, which aren’t so bad if they have a nice reward, but they’re still kind of bland and sometimes a chore.

To kind of wrap all this up, I want to say that Breath of the Wild’s biggest and most glaring problem is that its main quest is severely lacking. There is a lot to do in this game, just not a lot of “big” and memorable things. There’s an almost endless list of small challenges, but few end up feeling all that compelling. I know a lot of people have been talking about the dungeons being a huge weakness, and I think that's definitely part of the problem. There really needed to be more substantial dungeons in this game, I’d say there’s about a dungeon and a half in this title. Maybe we can have a discussion about how the shrines make up for that, but I feel like at least for me, most of them were very simple and too many of them were rewards for easy feats or tests of strength. All things considered, the breadth of this game is impressive, but imagine if you fit a main quest from The Wind Waker or Twilight Princess on top of this huge world; imagine big dungeons with a well paced main quest, along with all these sidequests and a beautiful landscape, that would be amazing! I know this comparison has been made a bit too much, but Skyrim found a way to have a good linear main quest packed into a non linear world, you could in fact avoid it altogether and just do “side quests”. Many of its sidequests had significant weight to them that made them feel like they could've been part of the main mission, you weren’t left with a sense of emptiness if you avoided the main route. I think Zelda could learn a lot from this kind of approach to open world games.

Now I will say that there’s a lot to Breath of the Wild’s main quest that I really love (i’ll be doing a lot of fan art because of it!), I just think it needs to be expounded upon a bit more. There’s all the makings of a true masterpiece here, but the center of it feels a bit fragmented. Bigger dungeons, bigger story, more enemy types, more villages etc. I think the game needs more of these large central elements. There's so much I could say about this game, but that would take forever, these are more or less my biggest criticisms. I once again want to reiterate that I like Breath of the Wild and I really love Zelda as a series, I can’t stress that enough. Feel free to disagree with me and maybe start up a dialogue through messages or something, I’m always willing to discuss! I’m not super focused on checking this for structural issues, it’s not really an organized essay, sorry if it was a bit rambly.

Thanks for reading!!!