The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - One of the Largest Open World Games Experienced On The Go

Game Title: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Publisher: Nintendo
Year:  2017
ESRB Rating: E 10+
Platform:  Nintendo Switch
Genre:  Open World Adventure

Fun Factor

There is a reason that Breath of the Wild won The Game Award for Most Anticipated Game of 2016.  Not only was the game hyped seemingly more than the first manned mission to the moon, but in a rare turn of events, the game actually delivered and exceeded the expectations that most had for the game.

I paid $600 for the complete Zelda kit of the Nintendo Switch a few days after it launched, and for nearly a month and a half, I only had Breath of the Wild on my brand new console, but let me tell you something:  I don't regret it one bit. (Just so long as you don't keep saying 600...).

Breath of the Wild is a breath of fresh air in the ever growing, crowded market for open world games, and even for a Zelda game, the open world nature of the game perfectly fits the design of it.  Killing monsters is fun, mixing potions is fun, dungeons are unique and enjoyable, but most importantly, the focus on exploration and encouragement it gives to the player to find their way around the world and discover things without having a map hold their hand to every interesting destination is perhaps the most entertaining aspect of this game.

Because the only part of the game you must play in a sequential order is the Great Plateau tutorial, you are free to complete any of the major quests in whatever order you please, filling the remaining time fighting random monster camps, completing side quests, and even just getting lost in the massive world.  This feeling of pure freedom, combined with the all the potential that a world crafted so hugely can offer, allows for the player to feel in possession of Link, treating him as though he was them and actively driving him to do the things THEY want to do.  This contrasts with a large about of story-driven games these days that treat the character as more of an actor in the game world, set to follow a specific script with some time allocated with improvisation, though they are never really in control of what they choose to do.  

No matter how you spend your time, whether it be proactively attacking some objective or passively laundering about, you find yourself enjoying the experience, completely immersed in the lush scenery, and rarely bored, as there is just so much content packed into such a tiny cartridge.

Learning Curve

Something that Breath of the Wild balances extremely well is the learning curve.  The game starts off relatively easy, though it requires you to think, whether that be about how you will approach a new puzzle or making the decision of how you'll move in to attack a camp full of monsters.


In the beginning, you have very little in the way of mechanically being able to solve the problems you are faced with.  You can pick up a wooden club, and if you're lucky, a rusty old sword, but those are about your only choices at first.  You can make some basic potions, but they don't really do much to help out, and you have very little health and means to heal yourself, so you have to avoid taking hits too often if you want to survive.

But as you progress through the towns and shrines, you begin to collect more knowledge and items, and only grow more skilled.  At the start, you can hardly scale down a steep hill without losing your breath and rolling down the cliff side like a brain dead puppy without legs, whereas later in the game, you can glide miles with ease, before dropping an attack on an unsuspecting enemy from above with your flame sword and so many hearts you can hardly see the screen anymore.  Super cool stuff.

The difficulty scales very well.  As soon as you leave the tutorial area, you could technically charge straight up to Hyrule Castle and fight Ganon with a nothing but a tree branch and some old tattered rags on your back, but the monstrous Guardians would kill you long before you could even come close.  Similarly, you are free to explore any part of the world, providing you can actually survive it.  There are no restrictions or bounds on where you can go or what you can do, but if you try to challenge the bull, you're going to get the horns, prepared or not.

Enemies also scale extremely well.  It's simple, but as you move to more difficult areas, more difficult enemies are to be fought, with their levels of difficulty being denoted by the color of their skin.  Every few days in game, a Blood Moon arises, resetting all the enemy camps as to allow for no area to ever truly be cleared out for too long, keeping the combat frequent, but with a break of well earned rest if you defeat your enemies.

Graphics

The visuals in Breath of the Wild are easily one of it's strongest points.  Take out the engaging combat, the heart wrenching story, and even the thematic music, and you are still left with a gorgeous exploration/navigation simulator.

Breath of the Wild is most certainly not a photo realistic game, but its not supposed to be.  The aesthetic of the game is a beautiful, painted world with a focus on nature, and the art style reflects this perfect, even while being a bit cartoony.  Even with a dynamic lighting system, Breath of the Wild manages to create beautifully lit areas and landscapes, and I swear there is nothing more satisfying than the shader moving that grass over the long ranging hills in the breeze, so gentle and with such a light grace.

The game truly encompasses the beauty of the outdoors, and the wild atmosphere is peaceful and extravagant.  This is one of the best looking games I have ever played, and due to its visuals alone deserves recognition.

There isn't too much more to say about the graphics of this game other than how fantastically well done they are, and how much I suggest you look at it, because this game is pure eye candy for anyone with even a hint of love for nature.

Audio

The thing I love about Breath of the Wild is the audio, more particularly the music.  Each village you stumble upon has a distinct feeling, which is only enhanced and brought even further to life by the clever use of music to set a tone for a particular setting.  Goron city, a settlement full of rock-like mountain dwellers, is accompanied by a robust and heavy tune, while something like the bird town of the Rito Village is played to the tune of flutes and and wind instruments, giving a floaty, whimsical vibe to the town.























Even the background music that plays while wandering between significant destinations gives a heroic feeling of exploration and adventure, while sometimes cutting out entirely in order to help emphasize the chorus of nature, really adding a highlight to the "wild" aspect of the game.

The music of Breath of the Wild enhances the overall tone of the game substantially, and apart from being beautifully scored and cross fading perfectly between moments of combat, exploration, and village discovery, it is just awfully nice to listen to, even outside the game.

Controls

The controls for Breath of the Wild are fairly straightforward.  The only innovative piece to touch upon would be the use of motion controls for your magnet power and your bow, though we have seen this done before on other platforms, most notably of which has to be the late and great Wii.

Due to this, I'll take this section to talk a bit about how the game fairs on a more portable, mobile platform: the undocked Switch.  Now, the docked Switch is essentially a home console with a slightly different controller, but the mobile version is much more interesting.

The first interesting thing I noticed is that Breath of the Wild seems to have been built exclusively for the undocked Switch, as more detailed areas of the world, such as the Korok forest and certain villages, begin to lag when played on an external display.  Although, this lag is fairly minimal and is said to have been addressed in a recent patch.

Other than the issue of occasional lag, playing between either the Switch's screen or an external monitor has very little of an impact on the game itself.  A huge benefit to allowing players to experience this game on the go means whenever they feel like they want to play, they are able to pull it out of their bag and jump in, and while this might be a greatly exciting concept, it is sometimes difficult to pull off with a game like this, to no real fault of its own.  Many of the quests in Breath of the Wild are extensively drawn out, so unless a player has more than 20 minutes on their hands (and that's really cutting it close), it's really not even worth booting up the game as you'll only find yourself having to shut it down in the middle of something exciting, which can be a real source of frustration.

Again, this is to no fault of the game itself, but still remains a bit of an issue.  This game is best played when you dedicate a good chunk of time for each sitting, and is not easy to jump in and out of, therefore, for the most part, portability of the game has no huge advantages as it might for other shorter, more fast paced games.

Characters

The characters in Breath of the Wild really stand out.  Each character has a well developed personality, and a backstory that often intertwines with other characters in the game.  Some characters are humorous and fun, like the Korok, while others are ghastly and vicious, like the Bokoblins.

One of my favorite characters has to be the Prince of the Zora Domain, Prince Sidon.  Like most characters in the game, Prince Sidon has only a few lines of spoken dialogue at most, though the entirety of his personality is told not only through the text he says, but through the subtle sounds he makes as his text changes on screen, alongside the music and body language that accompanies him.

Without hardly speaking many actual words outside one or two dedicated cut scenes, Nintendo is able to paint Prince Sidon as a cocky, though loving and charismatic character, one who is boastful and eager to do all he can to help you, the newly arrived hero, to save his Domain from the one of the Divine Beasts.

Many characters, even ones that do not have a direct impact on the outcome of the story or the overall gameplay, are animated and alive in a similar fashion.  When spoken to (and sometimes even when not directly approached first!), many characters will speak a few lines of dialogue that while may not be entirely revealing to who they are allows for the player to have a grasp on a basic archetype of who they are speaking to, as well as a familiarity with the setting around them.  Often, hints are given in the way of characters speaking to Link, as opposed to the sadly more typical fashion of a blatant line of text on the screen telling you what to do.

Story

The story for Breath of the Wild is melancholy one, riddled with emotion and heartache, and plays an active part in the gameplay itself.  While the main story may be more on the heavier side of things, the various side quests and the charisma of specific characters help to add humor and more lighthearted, whimsical moments that other Zelda and Nintendo games are often known for.

The heroic tale of Link begins with a great awakening after having slumbered in silence for years away in a sealed off tomb.  Upon escaping from the rocky prison, you discover that all of Hyrule has been overrun by ancient spider-like robots, known as Guardians.  These Guardians, once meant to defeat the evil powers of an entity known as Calamity Ganon, now find themselves possessed by the very thing they were meant to oppose.

Through a fairly lengthy, though necessary, tutorial, you learn the basic mechanics of the game, such as cooking and brewing potions, as well as combat and how to take on a few of the many foes you will encounter on your journey.  One of the most important things taught are the puzzle dungeons, called Shrines, which allow for later opportunities to upgrade health and stamina upon completion.

After this introduction to the main conflict of the game (helping save Princess Zelda all the work of fighting Ganon alone for like a hundred years to protect your lazy, sleeping ass), you are free to roam about the world as you wish, collecting bits and pieces of story that help add depth to the overarching theme of the game, while not being absolutely needed, and therefore are not forced onto the player.

This adaptive story-telling mechanic, through the use of pictures that bring back memories as well as conversations you'll have with villages about their surroundings and history, really allows Breath of the Wild to drive home the main idea that it pushes from the very beginning: freedom of exploration and discovery.

You are free to discover the story as you wish, but you don't have to.  You can kill random camps of enemies for however long you want, although the game promises to give you more of a straight line purpose if you want it.

Breath of the Wild balances the heartbreak of slowly discovering the death of all of your friends nearly a hundred years ago with the satisfaction of avenging them each time you complete one of the main Divine Beast dungeons.  By doing this, the game allows for a wide range of emotions to be felt, only to be ever more supported by the layout of the world and the structure in which you can discover and play at your own pace, allowing for these emotions and experiences to cycle naturally, rather than being forced onto the player in a specific time frame.

Level Design

The world in Breath of the Wild is huge, nearly 1.5 times larger than Skyrim, which is famously known for it's large and detailed world.  This works to Breath of the Wild's advantage, as previously stated, exploration is one of the largest focuses in the game after all, and giving the player more to explore is effectively added more content without really having to do anything more than level design.

Something great about the giant world is that not only is it huge, but it is also rich.  I mean rich in terms of all the random stuff scattered about for you to do, stuff so trivial yet so engaging that you couldn't even classify it as a side quest.

One prime example of this is the 700 or so (or is it 900?  Not like I'll ever find them all anyways.) Korok that are hidden throughout the world.  These Korok give you tiny rewards that allow to to upgrade your carrying capacity for solving simple, though sometimes challenging puzzles.  Such puzzles can be as simple as "you lifted up this rock!  Good job, here's a seed!" to as complicated as "put that metal cube in the perfect position as to accurately match the metallic symbol directly adjacent to it" or "step on this leaf thingy and run over there as fast as you fucking can and don't even think about messing up or you're not getting shit."  As you might be able to tell from my way of explaining it, sometimes they can be a bit... frustrating.

All the same, the Korok are one of the many oddities that can be found on your adventure through Hyrule, adding depth and character to the world without having to take up too much of the player's or developer's time.

Changes

About 40 hours in (and yes, I know those are chump numbers, but I'm a busy guy and a developer myself), it is very hard to recommend any major changes to the game, except I wish it was longer, which is an impossible request to ask due to the fact that the game is already humongous and I haven't even scratched the surface of it all yet.

No, it's not a perfect game, and I'm sure there were many small features that I didn't appreciate in all my time playing, but off of the top of my head, I have no major gripes with Breath of the Wild.

The only suggestion I would have that might change the game a fair bit is the either rework the stealth system, or scrap it entirely.  There are many potions and combinations you can use to increase the overall stealth of Link, though I rarely found myself using this.  Part of the problem with the stealth system also lies in the detection system on the enemies.  Maybe I just suck at it, but I found that sneaking up on enemies was only as good as the first enemy you killed, because after that, there was almost no way to hide your kill, and now you have the whole camp pouncing on you.



Due to this fact, I strictly kept combat to a "run and gun" rush style of fighting, and if I wasn't strong enough to take on more than one enemy at a time, I found it pointless to attempt a sneak attack, as it had been fairly unsuccessful in past attempts.

But, again, I dislike most stealth games and I'm not very good at them either, so perhaps others got much more out of the system than I did.  As far as I'm concerned, the game would fair just as well without it.

Recommendation

I am always shocked to hear that someone has not been able to experience the magnificence of Skyrim, as the game is so dear to my heart, I could not fathom the idea that someone else has not had the pleasure of sitting through the adventurous and oh so captivating game.  That same feeling I told towards Skyrim is now applied to Breath of the Wild, for most all the same reasons.

The story is interesting and compels you to push forward, rather than just being something slapped on haphazardly at the last moment, the mechanics are new and fluent, working off one another allowing you to move, fight, and explore in connected arrays of button presses, and the immersion of the world is otherworldly.

If you have a Switch, I have no idea why you have denied yourself the absolute pleasure of playing this game.

If you don't have a Switch, this game allow is enough to pick one up.

Get this game, love it, and remember it forever, because there is no way in hell you're going to forget an experience like the one this masterpiece provides.