I finally got around to it. I had some flex in my gaming schedule due to the fact that I'd already cleared out so many game by November, so I went ahead and dove into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and spent so much time in it that I had to scramble a touch to clear out enough games to hit my annual goal of 50, which I ended up doing comfortably anyway.
My history with Zelda goes all the way back to the beginning. The gold cartridge was one of the original games I had with my NES, and frankly I didn't quite get it. I would have enjoyed it much more had I had a manual with the map, I think, but my 6 year old brain wasn't quite able to take in the scope and vision of what was going on, and ended up spending far more time playing Mario (good choice) and Bases Loaded (bad choice). I then got The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past along with the Super Nintendo I received for a birthday, and had finally attained the sophistication necessary to understand what was going on. The more linear game design certainly helped in that regard, too, and the game is still one of my favorite Super Nintendo games, and one of my favorite of all time. I had friends who had The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which was truly mindblowing in context, although I find it quite flawed today for a few reasons. I've beaten about half of the Zelda games in the series now, with a few more to check off (Zelda II, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, and Spirit Tracks). So when every gaming publication from here to Shanghai was promising an extraordinary Zelda experience, I was really rather dubious. I've seen most of it, and really loved almost all of it, so I wasn't sure quite where they were going to go with it. It also seemed like they were overblowing the open world, user choice nature of the game a bit. After all, isn't that almost exactly what they did in 1986 with The Legend of Zelda? And isn't that one of my least favorite games in the series? And didn't they really master that in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds?
My cynicism was somewhat grounded. The concept of an open Zelda world is not as earthshaking as the breathless critics would have us believe. If the NES game introduced that concept, the 3DS one really mastered it. But boy, did they ever just cram a ton of STUFF into this game! They took so many swings for the fences, and the vast majority of them were at least doubles in the game. There are really three great leaps forward for Zelda, with the first game being one, Ocarina of Time being the second, and this game being the third. And honestly, I think that 20 years from now, we'll remember this game even more fondly than those other two.
So what all did they do? First, they really mastered the open world concept here in terms of completely throwing open everything to the player, but also giving him clear and attainable objectives. From the beginning, you'll never really struggle with what the first game struggled, the great question of "what do I do"? There is a clear map for you, the basic concept and design of the game are clearly explained in the first half hour, and all of the tools in your toolkit are freely available within the first 3 hours. What's more, the world around you is so gorgeous, with so much to do, that it's very difficult to ever grow bored with it.
Second, the physics engine is completely brilliant, even if it's a little silly at times. Everything in Hyrule has properties, and behaves in a predictable and interesting way when you force items to interact with each other. The system is, however, so deep that you'll be discovering brand new things about how this world operates into the end of your game. For example, you'll learn that when you wear metal armor out in a thunderstorm, you get hit by lightning, necessitating you taking that armor. However, you may forget this relationship during an electricity themed boss fight, and get cooked. Then later, you'll realize that there aren't enough metal objects in a puzzle to complete an electric circuit, so you'll try to drop metal weapons on the ground to serve as conductors (it works!) Sometimes the world behaves in a goofy fashion, which is something Nintendo can work on in future games in this style. For example, when you kill an enemy on a slight slope, his items will slide down a hill in a manner that far exceeds what you would predict given the angle of that slope.
The combat is the most fun it's even been in a 3D Zelda, and really uses the dual sticks of the Switch to great effect for dodging and movement, and even uses motion controls well. I found myself exclusively aiming my bow and arrows with the motion controls, which I really never do. But it just felt incredibly precise, and makes me excited for what they can do with the technology going forward. The motion controls weren't always fantastic, however. When trying to aim with the sticks, the controller would also register tiny movements in the controller, which made using the sticks more futile than it would have needed to be. I wish they had made the motion controls so that they could be toggled on and off so that people could follow their own control scheme preference. The little motion controlled minigames were also not as precise as they could have been as well.
The music was honestly disappointing to me as well. I understand that Skyrim was a big influence for the developers, but I do wish there had been more grand operatic style themes, in keeping with Zelda tradition, as opposed to the more environmental and ambient musical stylings of a lot of modern games. There are still some times in which you'll hear snatches of familiar Zelda tunes, but I wish there had been more.
I also found the weapon durability to be prohibitively irritating. Eschewing a typical Zelda approach in which you get one indestructible sword near the beginning of the game, and replace it with more powerful versions along the way, you now can fight with a huge range of different weapons, including tree branches, Moblin arms, boomerangs, spears, and giant two handed greatswords. This allows you to pick a combat style that works for you, but dang it all if the things don't break. All. The. Time. This gets extremely irritating, and forces you to ration your most loved weapons for times in which you really need them, which means you'll spend most of your time fighting in a manner that irritates and annoys. The durability should have been roughly doubled, keeping the basic idea in place, but also allowing you to spend a little more time with your favorites before they shatter in half.
I think of Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as two sides of the same coin. Both took risks in design, but Super Mario Odyssey was the safer play. They polished up the formula, tweaked a couple of things, and let you play Mario the way it has been played for a long time. Breath of the Wild really took huge risks, and the vast majority of them paid off to produce my favorite 3D Zelda ever, and it's not particularly close. Both to me are perfect 10s for 2019's video game enthusiast, largely because Zelda takes massive risks to get bonus credit, while Super Mario Odyssey just does everything right. If forced to choose today, I'd probably pick Zelda, but I'd guess that will flip in 10 years when a polished child of Breath of the Wild comes out and shows off some of the flaws in its predecessor, while Super Mario Odyssey stays shiny and delightful.
Up next on the home version of What I'm Playing is a little jaunt I took down training lane recently...
-TRO
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