The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild -- Better Than Expected, But Still Overrated

Breath of the Wild took the world by storm last year, with many people proclaiming it to be not only the best game of the year, but also the best Zelda game of all time and the best open-world game ever made. Those are some pretty lofty claims, so naturally I was skeptical that it would actually live up to that kind of hype. I've played a fair number of open-world games, after all, and while I generally enjoy the genre, they're difficult to pull off well and usually leave me feeling unsatisfied. Meanwhile, there's only been one Zelda game in the last 15 years that I've actually enjoyed (that being A Link Between Worlds, mostly because of its classic non-linear design and it being an homage to A Link to the Past), so I didn't exactly have confidence that Nintendo would hit such a home run with a new Zelda. Even watching streams and gameplay footage, it all looked kind of boring to me. Still, when the opportunity presented itself to borrow a coworker's Switch for a few weeks (thank you Dom), I couldn't pass on the chance to play it and see for myself.

I'm pleased to say that Breath of the Wild is indeed one of the best Zelda games that I've played in a long time. Although it deviates from the typical "Zelda formula" we've grown accustomed to lately, the open-world exploration feels reminiscent of older games in the series (specifically the original Legend of Zelda, and to a lesser extent A Link to the Past), but on a much bigger and more sophisticated scale. It's also one of the better open-world games to have come out recently, with a world that feels mysteriously intriguing and therefore genuinely interesting to explore; other open-world designers could learn a few lessons from Nintendo. I certainly enjoyed Breath of the Wild, but unlike seemingly every other person in the world, I didn't love it -- it's not my new favorite Zelda game (it might not even crack my top five), and I've enjoyed other open-world games better. And even despite liking the game, it has some major issues that seriously disappointed me.

HUGE WORLD, HUGE WASTE OF TIME

The first thing people usually talk about with BOTW is how incredibly huge its world is, so of course that means it's the first thing I have to address. Yes, it's the biggest world ever created for a Zelda game, rivaling the likes of a typical Bethesda game in sheer size, and yes there's a ton of sights to see and things to do in this world, but it's all spread out to such a degree that you have to spend serious chunks of time in tediously shallow, boring gameplay simply traversing from point A to point B, doing little more than holding the joystick forward for 30-60 seconds (or more) at a time. It's especially boring when it comes to climbing -- while the new "climb anything" mechanic opens up a tremendous amount of verticality in exploration, it isn't very fun to sit there for prolonged periods of time doing nothing with the controller while you watch your character ascend a wall with the speed of a slightly energized sloth. Depending on where you go, you'll find huge, sprawling fields and mountain ranges (or deserts, or tundras, or bodies of water) that feel practically empty and that force you to waste your time wandering around just looking for something to do, or waiting passively until you can reach the next thing worth doing.

Huge, wide open fields with nothing but grass.

The size of the world isn't necessarily the problem, here. I actually kind of like the world being so massive and so spread out, with mountains towering over the landscape like skyscrapers and with you having to trek long distances to reach a destination, because it creates a more epic sense of scale where you feel like a tiny speck against the backdrop of this colossal world. Climbing to the top of a mountain feels like a tremendous accomplishment perhaps for the sole fact that it takes so much time and effort and to do so, and the satisfaction of being able to look out over a sprawling landscape that seems to stretch on for miles, and knowing that you can go anywhere and everywhere you see, is rewarding in and of itself. Conquering a world this size is an epic feat, and the euphoria of doing so is similar to felling a boss in Shadow of the Colossus simply because the thing you're up against is so much bigger than you, and because the game doesn't give you an inflated sense of ego by making you feel any bigger than you are -- it actually does the opposite by emphasizing how small and insignificant you are, which again makes each achievement feel that much more monumental because of the sheer distance you had to travel (literally and metaphorically) to overcome an obstacle.

The issue, therefore, has less to do with size and more to do with how the world is populated with content. There are some truly awesome, breath-taking things to discover in this world, but you typically have to wade through a ton of repetitive, shallow, boring, and tedious filler to find them. The vast majority of what you can do in the world (besides wandering around spaciously open fields of nothing) is fight groups of bokoblins/moblins/lizalfos, solve one-room puzzles in "mini-dungeon" shrines, complete mini-challenges to collect korok seeds, and collect random rocks/plants/critters -- all of which is either pretty short, simple, or repetitively copy-pasted across the map. Once you've encountered a single "rearrange the blocks" puzzle to obtain a korok seed, you'll have basically seen every one like it for the rest of the game, and while there are hundreds of korok seeds to find they all fall into one of maybe a dozen different categories, in terms of what you have to do to obtain them. There's a general lack of enemy variety in the world, and so the majority of what you'll encounter, from one corner of the world map to the other, are basic varieties of the same basic enemies. Shrines all have the same look and feel, and all use the exact same puzzle mechanics. So, basically, after the first dozen or so hours of gameplay you'll have seen a lot of what the game has to offer already, and then you're just repeatedly going through the same motions for the next 100 hours, doing the same things over and over again, but in new locations.

About to get a face-full of boko-stick and boko-nuts.

One might say "if something is boring or repetitive, then just don't do it, and only focus on the good parts of the game that you like," but a lot of this stuff is kind of required if you want to get the most out of the game. A lot of other activities require large sums of resources that you gain from these simple, repetitive actions, so if you want to upgrade your armor to achieve fun new set bonuses you'll need a ton of resources collected from killing enemies, and collecting random items; if you pick up a quest from someone they'll probably ask for a bunch of resources, and if you want to see where that story goes then you have to go collect them all. If you want to dye your clothes, you'll need resources; if you want to climb a huge mountain, you'll need more stamina so you'll need to do as many shrines as possible; if you want to fight tougher enemies, you'll need more hearts so do more shrines; if you want to actually be able to carry all the cool new equipment you'll find then you'll need more inventory space, so make sure to collect as many korok seeds as possible; if you want to be able to heal yourself and actually survive then you'll need a bunch of cooking ingredients. As such, when you see random enemies, or plants, or critters, or shrines, or korok puzzles, you'll likely feel compelled to do them all because you'll likely be needing their rewards at some point in the future.

A freshly discovered shrine entrance.

None of this is particularly fun or interesting after a while (with shrines being the one exception, though they too can feel shallow and repetitive), and so exploring the world can sometimes feel like a huge waste of time because you simply aren't finding a lot of interesting, worthwhile content. I'd often play for 20-30 minutes at a time and feel like I'd accomplished nothing at all. "Well, I picked some apples, fought some bokoblins, found a treasure chest on top of a pillar with five arrows in it, cooked some mushrooms, and put a rock in the missing spot of a circle." I once spent 30 minutes exploring a stretch of mountains in the north, and all I really did was mine some ore, fight some random chuchus, avoid some lynels, and collect a few korok seeds -- there wasn't even a shrine to complete, and the one interesting thing I found (a massive dinosaur-looking skeleton, many times bigger than King Dodongo from OOT) had absolutely nothing going on with it, except a bunch of random bokoblins to fight and a moderately decent sword to loot. So yes, while the world is huge and you can spend hundreds of hours exploring everything there is to see and do within it, it's not necessarily time well spent because so much of that time is spent traversing vacant areas that only exist to spread the world out, or wading through filler that only exists as content padding.

UNSATISFYING PROGRESSION

Zelda games typically rely on a progression system where you gain new items, abilities, and power-ups throughout the game that not only make you feel stronger, but that also unlock new avenues for exploration and new gameplay possibilities. In games like Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, these act as hard gates that prevent you from going to certain areas or doing certain things until the game allows it, typically in a highly prescribed order -- you can't go to Zora's Domain until you get the bombs from Death Mountain, and you can't enter the Great Bay until you get your horse Epona (which requires getting the powder kegs from Snowhead). Other games like A Link Between Worlds, A Link to the Past, and the original Legend of Zelda still use gated progression where you need certain upgrades to do certain things, but they're far less strict about the order in which you do things, allowing you far more freedom to decide where you go while allowing the world to open up based on how you choose to interact with the world, as opposed to whether or not you're following the game's intended script.

A Great Fairy Fountain, where you can upgrade your armor.

Breath of the Wild's calling card is its truly open world where you can go anywhere and do anything at any time. It accomplishes this by giving you all of the tools at the start of the game and by ensuring there are no hard gates to restrict progress or exploration -- you can do the four dungeons in any order, and you can even go fight the final boss as soon as you finish the tutorial area, if you so desire. Even the side content, from the assorted side quests to the 120 mini-dungeon shrines can be done whenever you desire -- there are no restrictions whatsoever, except that some enemies may be a little too strong to fight at the beginning, which is a much softer gate because you can usually find ways around them, or alternate ways to deal with them. This incredible amount of freedom may seem like a good thing, but that also means there’s no feeling of progression and no satisfaction that comes from opening the world up as you play, because the entire world is already completely unlocked before you even set foot in it.

All of the exploration and all of the game’s content is based around the starting toolset they give to every player, and nothing you gain after the tutorial area has any kind of radically game-altering effect because they want to make sure there’s an equal opportunity to do all the content you might come across, and not be locked out of something by not having the correct “key” to unlock it. Most of the upgrades you acquire simply enhance actions you’re already doing by simply tweaking some numbers -- you find a sword that does more damage, you get some korok seeds that let you carry more swords, you get some spirit orbs that let you have more health or stamina, you find clothes that make you swim faster, etc. Even the special powers that you gain from completing the four main dungeons generally act as passive upgrades to existing actions; Daruuk’s Protection adds a counter-attack to your normal shield block, Mipha’s Grace acts like a supercharged fairy that resurrects you on death, and Urbosa’s Fury causes lightning strikes when you charge a spin attack with your sword. None of these change the way you play the game, and none of them open new areas for exploration or gameplay -- they just make you stronger. The only fun, game-changing upgrades you get are Ravioli's Revali's Gale, which creates an updraft so that you can ride your paraglider straight up in the air, and the zora's tunic which lets you swim up waterfalls.

The Korok guy who upgrades your inventory spaces.

Progression, therefore, feels awfully stagnant. You certainly get stronger over the course of the game, and it’s arguably required that you get stronger before exploring certain areas or doing certain things (for instance, you stand practically no chance of beating Ganon until you get strong enough weapons and gain enough hearts to survive some hits), but it all happens so slowly and in such small increments at a time that it rarely feels like you’re actually getting stronger, with basically no tangible rewards for exploration. Most of what you’re rewarded with are korok seeds, which aren’t very exciting since they just give you extra inventory space, but also because they become less valuable the more of them you find because it costs more and more seeds the more you upgrade your inventory, to the point that you find a korok seed and say “great, I’m 1/35th of the way to a new inventory slot,” or you get new weapons that will break in one or two fights and which basically only replace the ones you just broke getting them, or spirit orbs that act like heart piece containers (that can also upgrade your stamina, instead of health), except you always know exactly where to find them because they can only be found in shrines. Otherwise, all you really get are rupees and random supplies/ingredients, and that’s about it.

Getting an item that allows you to go places and do things that you couldn’t previously is a big part of the Zelda experience for me, and there’s practically none of that in BOTW. To be clear, I’m not advocating for the Ocarina of Time approach, here, because I find that game’s gated progression too restricting because you’re forced to go through the game in a relatively linear fashion. Rather, I feel like A Link Between Worlds serves as a good template for open-world exploration in a Zelda game, because even though they give you all of the important tools right at the start of the game and allow you to go pretty much anywhere and complete dungeons in any order, there are still tons of interesting, practical, and game-changing rewards to be found in the open world, as well as in dungeons. Things like the flippers that let you swim, the power gloves that let you lift huge boulders, the pegasus boots that allow you to sprint and bash into things, the net that lets you catch fairies and insects, and bottles that let you carry things are all acquired progressively via your own exploration, and they all open up new quests and new areas for exploration in addition to leading to extra rewards like heart pieces and equipment upgrades.

Exchanging spirit orbs for heart containers and stamina vessels.

Practically nothing new gets added to the world or to your arsenal as you play; you fight basically the same enemies with basically the same equipment the whole game, except all of the common enemies (which comprise maybe 80% of what you encounter) scale with you in level (the game introduces stronger versions of the same enemies as you kill more of them) so you’re always on a roughly even footing with the rest of the world, and all that really happens is some numbers get tweaked until you’re just stronger than pretty much everything. There’s a steep difficulty curve at the beginning when seemingly everything can one-shot you and you have hardly any equipment or resources to do much of anything, but once you get past that initial difficulty hurdle the curve flattens out tremendously, with only guardians and lynels posing any real threat. Consequently, the game just gets easier and easier as you play. That’s a good thing in the sense that it makes you feel like you’re getting stronger when common enemies are no longer a danger to you and you can actually defeat guardians and lynels, but there aren’t enough thresholds of “getting stronger” because there aren’t enough different types of enemies; you overcome the initial difficulty hurdle and then it’s pretty much a status quo until you can fight guardians and lynels, so you spend large chunks of time not actually feeling like you’re getting stronger.

DISAPPOINTING, UNDERWHELMING DUNGEONS

Dungeons are a big part of the Zelda formula for me, and it’s here that BOTW disappoints the most. To me, a large part of the charm in a Zelda game is how the gameplay alternates between relatively free-form overworld exploration and more-structured dungeons, each of which introduces new gameplay mechanisms (usually via a new item) and has some kind of story and unique theme surrounding it. In BOTW, all four of the main dungeons are giant piloted mechs built to resemble different types of animals (kind of like zords in Power Rangers), but while the exterior shapes and interior layouts are different, they all look and feel the same, especially once you're inside, because they all have the same textures and models and aesthetic designs. The only real difference is in how they're controlled, since each one allows you to manipulate the shape or layout of the dungeon by moving different parts of the divine beast. For example, you can raise or lower the trunk of the elephant, tilt the bird's wingspan left or right, rotate the cylinders of the camel's body, and turn the lizard horizontal or vertical. This is a neat idea, but it's literally the only thing differentiating the four dungeons with any kind of unique personality, because everything else about them is pretty much identical, with the exception of the lizard whose interior is initially bathed in complete darkness.

Looking up at the bird Divine Beast, flying high in the sky.

Consider in Ocarina of Time, for instance, where each dungeon had a unique theme which granted it a unique visual design, unique music, unique enemies, unique puzzles, and a unique boss. This not only gave a uniquely interesting charm and personality to each dungeon, but it also helped to keep the gameplay feeling fresh with constant new twists. Being inside the Great Deku Tree shooting spiders with the sling shot and burning webs with torch-lit deku sticks is both mechanically and aesthetically different from being inside Dodongo's Cavern stabbing dodongos in the tail and blowing up walls with bombs. The puzzles all tie directly into the area's theme and are based heavily around a new item, like using the hookshot and iron boots to navigate the Water Temple, which is mechanically different from using the hover boots and lens of truth to navigate the Shadow Temple. More importantly, these areas feel like what they're supposed to represent; the Forest Temple feels like, well, a forest temple. In BOTW, being inside a giant mechanical camel doesn't feel like being inside a camel because it all looks and feels like every other beast; you fight the same lesser guardians and floating skull monsters in every dungeon, you fight similar variations on the same boss in every dungeon, you have the same "activate five terminals" objective in every dungeon, and you solve a lot of similar puzzles. Except for the unique way in which your rotate or manipulate the dungeon's orientation, I feel like you could swap pretty much everything else between dungeons (even the music) and it wouldn't make a difference.

Each dungeon follows the same formulaic script: arrive at the local town hosting the divine beast, talk to the elder, go find someone/something, follow a highly scripted "get inside the beast" sequence with a temporary companion, then once inside get to the map terminal that shows the layout of the beast and lets you manipulate it, then find five more terminals, then fight the boss. The bosses are perhaps some of the least challenging, least enjoyable, and least memorable in any Zelda game ever since they're all just purple blobs and they can all be defeated with the exact same strategy, of just shooting them repeatedly with arrows. The “get inside” portions are all pretty lame because they're just gimmicky rail-shooter mini-games that remove a lot of your own creativity and input. The only one that’s kind of good is when you have to escort a goron through a quasi-stealth section up a mountain because you have actual control over what you’re doing and have some freedom to choose how you get past the patrolling sentry guardians. Inside the divine beasts, there are practically no enemies and all of the puzzles pretty much consist of “rotate the dungeon to get to the platform.” It’s kind of cool being able to manipulate the layout/orientation of the dungeon, but “reach the five terminals” feels like a pretty simple and straightforward objective, especially considering the dungeons are all pretty short -- I was in and out of most of them in about 20 minutes.

Inside one of the divine beasts.

There's a bit of a story and buildup leading to each divine beast, with the beasts having been built 100 years ago to fight Ganon, but having since become corrupted while they now terrorize their former hosts; while you're ostensibly trying to regain control of them to fight Ganon, you're also doing it to help out the local populations, except that the divine beasts aren't really much of a threat and so the story element here falls completely flat in a classic case of a game "telling" you something rather than "showing" it to you. In each case, they tell you about some horrible thing happening with each beast, but it rarely affects gameplay and you never really see it causing problems for them, either. The camel in the Gerudo desert is causing devastating sand storms, but it stays way off in the distance the entire time and never affects anything except its immediate surroundings, so just stay away from it and there's no problem; the bird flying around the Rito village does absolutely nothing except shoot the Rito down if they fly too high, so just don't fly so high and there's no problem; and so on. In most cases, the problems actually seem more like minor inconveniences than any serious threat they need saving from, and regaining control of the beast ends up effecting no practical change in the world. (The main exception here is the elephant in Zora's Domain, which will make it stop raining in the area so that you can actually climb things.)

Compare this to Majora's Mask, for instance, where you see gorons literally frozen solid and you help individual NPCs directly deal with those issues, like by unfreezing them and rescuing their friends, bringing them food when they're trapped and can't get back to town, reuniting a crying baby with his father, and so on, and then when you clear the dungeon you bring spring back to the mountain, which also opens up new gameplay opportunities for you in the form of goron racing and the blacksmith, in addition to just thawing out the ice and giving you new areas to explore that were previously blocked by snow and ice. Helping the gorons in Breath of the Wild, in contrast, amounts to rescuing one goron who somehow got himself trapped in a cave-in, and then making it so fireballs (which are pretty easy to dodge, do very little damage, and never seem to hit the goron city) will stop occasionally falling from the sky. Consequently, there's no narrative or mechanical thrust behind doing the dungeons and so they come off feeling incredibly hollow.

The camel Divine Beast, way off in the distance.

The dungeons no longer grant you a new item to be used solving puzzles within the dungeon, or against the dungeon's boss for that matter, so the puzzles all rely on similar mechanics based mostly around manipulating the level orientation. Typically this boils down to "move the dungeon to reach a new area, then move it back to reach another new area," which doesn't always feel like a puzzle to me because it's often just a short, simple one-or-two-step process where you reach the solution and go "that's it? That's all I had to do?" The dungeons themselves aren't that big, either, and with the absence of things like door keys and mini-bosses you don't get that feeling of progression you'd get in a typical Zelda dungeon. That is to say, they're more open-ended and less linear in the sense that you can go after the five terminals in any order you want, generally, as once you've gained the map (the very first thing you do in the dungeon) the whole level is pretty much open to you. That's certainly in keeping with the game's emphasis on open-ended freedom, but in a world that's already overflowing with an excessively abundant amount of freedom, I think it would've been nice to have some elements of more linear structure in the dungeons, which only comprise a tiny percentage of the game's content, anyway.

With only four dungeons tying a record low for the series (and these four are all-around shorter and smaller than the four in Majora's Mask), BOTW makes up for it with 120 shrines spread throughout the overworld, which act like "mini-dungeons" that typically contain just a single puzzle. These facilitate a satisfyingly brisk pace during exploration since they give you an appetizing little challenge without forcing you to spend too much time on them (they typically only last 5-10 minutes), which is especially good if you're playing the Switch handheld on-the-go where you might only be able to play in shorter increments. However, much like the full divine beast dungeons, they suffer from monotonous repetition because they all use the exact same textures, models, assets, puzzles, and music. It's impressive how many different puzzles they were able to create using the same limited toolset, but there's quite a bit of repetition here as well, as it often feels like you're just playing slight variations on something you've already done before. I don't care much for their aesthetic design, either, since they all look pretty bland with their perfectly right-angle edges and everything being a drab tan color. With there being 120 of them it means you could be spending up to 20 hours solving puzzles in a bunch of similar ways in the exact same environment, which needless to say gets to feel awfully shallow and repetitive after a while, and can make them feel a bit like a chore.

Inside a shrine, classic puzzle mechanisms at work.

The one cool dungeon/area that I actually liked is Hyrule Castle, which acts kind of like a final dungeon on your way to fighting Ganon. It's probably the most realistic-feeling castle in any Zelda game, with it being a sprawling network of interconnected rooms, tunnels, towers, and courtyards, each of which seems to serve some logical function -- the guard barracks, the armory, the library, the dining hall, the dungeon, Zelda's bedroom, and so on, all leading up to the castle proper where you arrive in the throne room to fight Ganon. It's pretty friggin' big, and unlike other dungeons in the game you feel like there's actual progression as you work your way from the lowly outskirts of the main gate up the ramparts, past bastions, and through the interior to reach the throne room. There's a ton of cool loot and secrets to find if you're inclined to explore, and it's a lot of fun just taking in the sights and seeing what all you can find. Interestingly, the entire Hyrule Castle is pretty much optional, as you don't need to find any keys or defeat any mini-bosses to reach the throne room -- you can pretty much just walk straight into the throne room, ignoring everything else -- so while this area has more of the general structure of a traditional Zelda dungeon, it doesn't quite feel like it mechanically.

BORING QUESTS, CHARACTERS, AND STORY

Side quests are yet another staple of the Zelda formula for me, and while they usually take more of a backseat role to other, more important things (like item progression and dungeons) I think they're incredibly important for fleshing out the world and giving you more adventurous things to do besides killing random enemies and collecting rupees. Sometimes these side quests deal with a lot of human interaction (e.g., Anju and Kafei in Majora's Mask), or item collecting (e.g., maimai in A Link Between Worlds), or trading sequences (e.g., getting the Biggoron Sword in Ocarina of Time), or mini-games (e.g., digging for treasure in A Link to the Past), or just present you with random challenges (e.g., the Savage Labyrinth in Wind Waker), but there's almost always an interesting story involved, or at the very least an interesting reward. With BOTW almost completely removing all forms of upgrades and relegating heart piece containers exclusively to shrines, side quests rarely give you any kind of worthwhile reward -- usually you get a sword or a shield that will immediately break, or rupees that you can get pretty much everywhere.

"Now fetch me 30 wood and 3000 rupees!"

Too many quests in BOTW unfortunately amount to tedious, shallow, MMO-style item collecting. A guy in town has a crush on the inn keeper, and we're supposed to play cupid by finding out what she likes so that he has a way to talk to her; instead of doing something interesting like observing her on her daily routine, or sneaking into her room to look at her belongings or diary, you just walk up to her and ask what she likes, and then go collect 10 crickets, and the guy gives you 100 rupees. Nothing else ever happens from that quest, as the guy will never leave his spot to actually talk to the inn keeper and she'll never comment on it. An old man talks about how he used to be a champion mountain climber or some such story, but now that he's older he's lost his edge and needs performance enhancing drugs 55 rushrooms, so you fetch him 55 rushrooms and he gives you a diamond. A newlywed Hylian couple has arrived at the Rito village on a honeymoon, but it doesn't seem to be going well for either of them, and the solution to their pending divorce is ... to bring the husband some flint and the wife some baked apples, and they each pay you 100 rupees. There's potential in all of these quests for unique stories and gameplay possibilities, but they all amount to essentially the same thing -- boring gameplay, with practically no story, and unrewarding rewards.

Basically none of the characters have any kind of interesting backstory or personality, as most of the ones you can interact with are only there to hand out these tedious, shallow fetch quests, or to provide a service. They're all instantly forgettable, except for the handful of characters who recur across the map like Beedle the merchant, who shows up at every stable, or Pikango the painter who gives you hints about where to find memory locations, or Kass the Rito musician who hands out most of the riddles for the shrine quests. I have vague memories of Purah, the scientist of ancient tech who accidentally turned herself into an anime loli girl, the flamboyantly effeminate construction leader Bolson, Impa's handmaiden (though I can't remember her name) who has an awkward sense of duty to Link, the comically clown-like leader of the Yiga clan, and that's about it, as far as side characters go -- the rest may as well be cardboard cutouts. Main characters aren't much better; most of them are perfunctory and only stand out because of the role they play in the main story, and if they have any sort of personality it's entirely one-dimensional and over-played, like the zora prince's overwhelming charm and confidence, or the goron companion's skittish cowardice.

A memory cutscene featuring Girl Zelda and Boy Zelda Link.

I actually really like the approach they took with BOTW by giving the main characters voice acting and leaving everyone else silent, as I feel like it's the perfect way of injecting more personality into important characters while not having to deal with the headache of voicing every single NPC. Unfortunately I don't think they did the voice acting quite right. Zelda's voice, in particular, bugs me to no end because it sounds like the actress is trying too hard to put on an air of refined regality by using an awkwardly forced, posh British accent, which comes off feeling cheesy and cliche to me. Not to mention, I don't care much for the general timbre of her voice -- it's too high pitched and thin, and sounds a bit like a young girly-girl voice to me, which is not what I've imagined it to sound like for all these decades. Maybe it's just me, but I've always pictured her as a bit of a tomboy (a gossip stone in OOT specifically says this, and she does have a propensity for being depicted in more tomboyish roles like Sheik and Tetra) and a rebel who doesn't necessarily embrace the princess lifestyle, which doesn't match the voice they gave her. Mipha's voice, for the female zora champion, is in a similar boat where it's that high-pitched, refined, soft-spoken, ultra-feminine sound that maybe isn't appropriate for a fish-person? The Great Deku Tree's voice sounds like he could be any random Hylian dude and doesn't at all strike me as being that of a massive anthropomorphic tree.

The main story is practically non-existent, though that's not necessarily a knock against BOTW because I don't play Zelda games for the story, but it's a bit disappointing that there isn't one. The actual story in BOTW happened 100 years ago, and you spend most of the game simply picking up scattered pieces of it as you go around the world regaining your lost memories. Due to the game's non-linear open-world design, it means you can pick these memories up in any order, and so they all represent random snapshots in time and what happens in one cutscene doesn't really affect your perception of other cutscenes, because they're designed to be intentionally unrelated. Except for the character development of Zelda (which depicts her budding relationship with Link and her inadequate attempts to live up to her heritage and legacy as the holder of the Triforce of Wisdom), they don't really tell a story -- they're just thematic window dressing, a bit like audio logs that only exist in games to flesh out some of the lore. Meanwhile, the whole point of the game is to defeat Ganon, per usual, but there's absolutely zero characterization for Ganon -- he's just a swirling reddish-purple blob sitting around Hyrule Castle doing nothing. In fact, it kind of seems like he's no real threat at all, since all of the civilizations around Hyrule Castle seem to be doing just fine 100 years later as they're almost completely unaffected by Ganon.

The spirit of the king, aka Exposition Man.

Thus, there's no real weight to the main story. It makes sense that the story would take a backseat role to the open-world exploration because you can't have impending doom looming over the world and then have the player free to spend two months of in-game time cutting grass and catching lizards, because then you've effectively undermined your own story, but I think doing the opposite and pushing the story so far into the background that it doesn't even exist is just as bad. I like the idea that the story is set 100 years after a catastrophic failure, and that you're now going around seeing the after-effects and trying to set everything right, but they don't even capitalize on this basic idea. As I mentioned previously in the section on dungeons, freeing the divine beasts from Ganon's corruption has no practical effect on the world (except for making it stop raining in Zora's Domain so that you can actually climb things) so you're not really saving people and you're not even changing the world, like you do with every region for every dungeon in Majora's Mask. You see glimpses of what the world used to be like through the memory flashbacks, so it would've been cool if they made it so your actions would actually revert parts of the world back to the way it used to be, even if only superficially. As it is, there's practically no narrative purpose to any of the gameplay, which makes most of it feel like obligatory video game objectives like "defeat four bosses so you can defeat the final boss" or "collect 13 hearts so you can gain the Master Sword." 

EXPLORATION IS ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD

My one major compliment for BOTW (and I think the reason is deserves a lot of the praise it's received) is how good the exploration actually is, and how much interesting stuff there is to discover in this world. There's still a lot of empty space and a lot of time wasted on tedious filler, but it's almost worth it because the good stuff in this game feels so magical and special. The world is simply gorgeous to observe, in large part because of the art style that blends realistic Twilight Princess graphics with the cel-shaded Wind Waker art style, not to mention the rustic charm of a verdant, run-down world after 100 years of decay, where much of the world is overrun by wild lands while the former glory of man-made structures sit unattended, uninhabited, and crumbling into ruins. Add to this the highly varied topography of the world with tons of mountains, cliffs, hills, canyons, and ravines, with a lot of diverse environments ranging from green grasslands to snowy tundras to arid deserts to tropical forests to volcanic mountains, and you could have hours of enjoyment just playing BOTW as a walking simulator, simply wandering around and appreciating the landscapes and all the majestic vistas, irrespective of whatever gameplay content you might hope to find inhabiting the world.

A gorgeous sunrise over an enormous landscape.

You can play the game with a mini-map to help with navigation, but fortunately the game doesn't bombard you with icons that lead you directly to every one of its hidden mysteries, like a lot of open-world games tend to do. That's something I really appreciate, because it makes each discovery feel that much more rewarding when it's something you found all on your own, based on your own curiosity of what that strange thing might be, or what might lie on the other side of that turn, in combination with your determination to overcome steep hurdles and long distance treks. For once in a mainstream production, the game doesn't care if you experience all of its content and won't drag you by the nose to show you everything -- a lot of things in this world are so discreetly hidden, either behind physical obstructions or through enigmatic riddles that you could spend a hundred or more hours exploring the world and still not find (or solve) a bunch of things.

It almost takes me back to a more sanguine time in gaming history, back before we had the internet to reveal all the secrets and spoil everything for us, just a click or two away, when finding secret areas was meant to feel like an actual accomplishment that not everyone would achieve. I remember playing games in my childhood with a sense of wonder about what kind of discoveries I'd find in the world and being in awe when I realized how certain aspects of the game worked, like making something unexpected happen by doing something completely unconventional. There was a sense of euphoria at figuring these things out. All of the solutions to BOTW's secrets are, of course, spoiled online if you care to seek them out, but the way they're handled in-game made me want to solve them on my own, which made seeking the answers out online feel like cheating. And because there are no icons telling where to go to find everything, or stats screens telling you what percentage of things you've collected or whatever, I never got struck by obsessive-compulsive completionism to do literally everything possible. Consequently, there's a lot of stuff that I simply never figured out and had to leave unfinished when I decided it was time to face Ganon. It was actually quite refreshing to feel that level of fulfillment where I could walk away from the game feeling satisfied, even knowing there was still a ton of stuff I never completed.

A shrine pops out at you over the cliff top.

I’m particularly surprised by how much organized structure actually exists in this world. It’s a common problem for huge open-world games to feel like an unorganized mess of random features, which makes them almost completely un-navigable without a mini-map and quest markers guiding you. Most of BOTW’s quests don’t even give you GPS markers; when you bring up a quest in your journal, you get one or two sentences describing a location (e.g., “near the top of the twin summits, under a tree with rocks at its base”) which is surprisingly all you need to find that exact location. One of the major story quests shows you photographs of landscapes with some notable feature in both the foreground and background, and tasks you with finding the exact spot that that photo was taken from (without a quest marker), and this is surprisingly doable as well because it’s usually pretty easy to identify a major landmark in the photo; once you recognize that landmark you start using context clues to help guide you (e.g., the shape makes it look like you should be viewing it from the left, and it’s from a higher vantage point looking down, so maybe start looking over in this direction and see if things start lining up). The map, likewise, labels a lot of specific areas which helps point you in the right direction when a quest says something is in a specific region, without ever leading you straight to your destination.

Maybe this is where the map feeling so big and empty a lot of times actually works in the game’s favor, since that makes it easier to pick out specific locations on your own when they aren’t buried under mountains of pointless crap. For example, when you’re looking for a giant statue of a goddess that’s supposedly been lost somewhere in the snowy mountains, it could be seemingly anywhere because those mountains are absolutely huge and cover a pretty wide area, but it’s pretty easy to run up a hill and survey a wide swath of land and realize that it isn’t there, and then you can move on to the next area and try again. Even though it’s a daunting and time-consuming task, it doesn’t feel impossible because you can make easy progress surveying terrain until you find it. It also helps, of course, that these locations actually stand out from the environment (when they aren’t deliberately hidden, that is); often times you’ll be wandering around and see something seemingly pop out at you on the horizon, and so you naturally gravitate towards that interesting structure. 

"What is this weird painting on the face of this mountain?"

The shrine quests may be some of my favorite things in the open world, since they provide you with cryptic riddles of some task that you need to do to access the shrine, like solving a puzzle. Most shrines end up feeling pretty similar because they always put you in the same environment to solve similar puzzles, but the shrine quests happen in the open world and usually involve a unique scenario you won’t encounter elsewhere. Some of these riddles are pretty obvious and just take some effort finding the intended solution (like the one where you have to find the correct vantage point that will let you shoot an arrow through two rock holes), while others are more vague and take some creative interpretation to figure out what you’re supposed to do (like when it hints at requiring a certain type of shadow to be cast on an object, and you have to figure out what kind of object and at what time of day). Others involve a more elaborate setup, like Eventide Isle where they strip you of all your items and equipment and force you to make due with limited options, or the forest that’s bathed in complete darkness where you have to use a torch to navigate and set up bonfires as guiding points. These are usually pretty satisfying, in part due to their creativity, but they also provide you with interesting gameplay scenarios that you don’t find in other open-world games. 

Dinraal, one of the three dragons. 

Other things in the world are just so mysterious that they have a certain intriguing allure, and I love that they tease you with their existence for so long while not presenting a quick or easy answer to what they are or why they’re there. The first time I saw a dragon randomly flying around the sky, for instance, came as a complete surprise to me -- “What is that thing? Is it hostile? Where’s it going, and what’s it doing?” It looked so majestic and awe-inspiring that I had to know more, but it disappeared into a vortex in the sky before I could get closer. I kept seeing them appear occasionally but could never get close enough to do anything. Eventually I stumbled upon another one flying towards me while cutting through a river canyon and across a waterfall; I finally got close enough to shoot an arrow at it and something sparkly dropped from its hide and started washing away in the river, leading to a frantic chase as I go “Ooh, what’s that?” Other times, I’d randomly see a huge glowing light on a mountain top, and when I eventually went to investigate I became even more intrigued when I found a congregation of spirit animals who scattered as soon as I arrived. These kinds of things are just so weird and unexpected that they make you want to keep playing, just to figure them out.

SOME SMALLER OBSERVATIONS

Not enough emphasis on climbing

For a game who’s main gimmick seems to be “you can climb [nearly] anything,” I wish it served more utility besides being essentially a shortcut to let you get around or up mountains more easily. I would’ve liked, for instance, to see more battles with larger enemies that allowed (or even required) you to climb them to reach their weak spots, Shadow of the Colossus style. You can do this with Stone Taluses, but that’s about it. The Divine Beasts, for instance, would’ve been a lot cooler if you’d have had to scale them from the ground up to get inside, as some sort of puzzle-platforming sequence with actual climbing involved, as opposed to just following a dumb scripted rail-shooter sequence where you get dropped off at the entrance in a cutscene.

Weather is more annoying than atmospheric

Whenever it rains you become basically unable to climb because surfaces become too slick to grip onto, and you will inevitably slide down further than you were able to climb. And whenever you’re in a thunderstorm, you’ll get struck by lightning if you have any metal equipped, which is pretty much most of the equipment in the game. I think the idea of these weather patterns is to force you to randomly have to change your strategy and adapt to changing circumstances, but in practice it just means “stop playing the game for a while and wait for it to stop.” You can still climb, of course, but way less efficiently, and you can still fight if you have wooden equipment, but I usually found that it wasn't worth dealing with these things, and thought it was more of a nuisance like the game was saying "stop having fun." 

Bokoblins getting boko-blowed up by lightning.

Annoying hand-holding

Another serious ding against the Divine Beasts as dungeons is that your temporary companion characters (both the physical ones who help you get into the beast as well as the spirits of the beasts' former champions) are obnoxious about telling you things that should either be blatantly obvious, or that would be more fun to figure out on your own. You see four glowing points on the beast's feet and the character yells "Shoot him in the feet!" As soon as the dungeon boss gets introduced the companion yells "Watch out for his spear! It has a long reach!" and then the boss immediately does a lunging thrust attack at you. Like, thanks, I kind of enjoy figuring these things out for myself, and you're ruining that experience. At least they don't pause the game to tell you these things, but it's still annoying.

No pretense about heroes and legends

Other Zelda games like to set up Link as an ordinary boy who is suddenly thrust into the role of the hero, who has to muster the courage to save the day, but it's usually in vain when it's later revealed that he's the Chosen Hero after all, and it's kind of pointless to begin with since Link is an established character -- even if this Link is different we already know he's going to rise to power and fulfill some divine prophesy. BOTW cuts out any pretense that this is anything other than a typical Zelda game plot by saying upfront "you are the legendary Link, the hero who will save us all," while also acknowledging that this is a basic premise of "destroy Ganon, rescue Zelda." You don't even get to name your character, because you're just straight up Link in this game. I kind of like that because it cuts right to the chase and doesn't waste our time with pointless buildup.

Why is Link Spider-Man?

This is a minor point, but it bugs me that it's never explained how or why Link is able to grip onto surfaces so easily. Realistically, he shouldn't be able to do anything remotely close to what he does in this game, and it just seems to be an innate ability -- they don't even give you Ancient Climbing Gloves or anything like that at the start of the game. I really wish they would've done this, just for the sake of making logical sense, but they could've also then let you upgrade your climbing equipment to make climbing better, like giving you a hook shot that would let you zip up a distance before climbing, or a grapple hook that you could throw and then climb the rope, or a gun that would let you shoot hand-holds onto walls. I get that there's already the climbing armor set, but that's kind of boring because it's just passive number tweaking.

Is he strong? Listen bud; he's got radioactive blood.

Horses and seals control poorly

Instead of being assigned or earning the iconic Epona horse, you tame wild horses and build a bond with them the longer you use them, as you soothe them and pat them for doing what you want. It's an interesting mechanism, but as part of the Horse Bond system, they act far more independently of you and tend to do their own thing, sometimes veering off in a direction you didn't intend or coming to an abrupt stop, sometimes even refusing to move without the right coaxing. This happens even when you maximize your bond with them, albeit to a lesser extent. So they don't handle very well, and since you obviously can't climb with them anywhere, or fast-travel with them, I found myself often leaving them behind because it was more hassle to keep track of them than it was worth. Sand seals, meanwhile, are just a nuisance, and I was pretty pissed off when I went into a shrine in the middle of the desert and had my seal disappear when I came back out, leaving me with no transportation.

Gyroscopic tilting puzzles suck

Some of the shrine puzzles involve using the motion controls on the switch controls, and they're pretty much the worst thing ever. I dislike motion controls in general because I find they disrupt immersion, but also because there's usually not enough tactile feedback to make accurate movements with the controller (the one exception where I like motion controls is aiming projectile weapons). Fortunately BOTW doesn't cram motion controls down our throats like Skyward Sword did, but man those tilting puzzles just suck. They were particularly bad for me because I was using the Switch as a handheld tablet, and when you're rotating the device it becomes harder to see the screen, until you're eventually contorting your whole body to see, or else you remove the controllers and rest the Switch in your lap where it's less secure.

Burn it with fire, then smash the Switch device.

Target sensor

One cool feature I really like is how you can take photographs of different things in the world, ranging from plants to monsters to weapons, and then set your map to scan for a specific type of thing and alert you when one is near. So, when I was trying to find hightail lizards so that I could upgrade my climbing gear, I didn't have to waste a bunch of time hunting them down with no idea where to find them; I could just go about my business and go grab one when the sensor started chirping. Unfortunately, the sensor doesn't give you any indication of how close you are to the thing, just if you're heading in the correct direction, which can lead you really far off course of where you were going, and kind of forces you to move slowly or sneak for longer distances because you don't know when it'll appear and you don't want to scare it off by moving too quickly or too loudly.

Combat system and weapon durability

I'm not a huge fan of the combat system. It's fine and generally pretty functional for a Zelda game (though I dislike how inconsistent the flurry rush dodge mechanism is), but I don't really care for how much of the game's difficulty progression is based on equipment. Tough enemies like lynels and guardians are difficult in the early game primarily because they're huge damage sponges and you simply don't have enough weapons that will do enough damage or last long enough to kill them -- you basically run out of offense long before you can beat those enemies, even if you perfectly execute all of your attacks and dodges, and that's a bit disappointing that personal skill plays arguably less of a role in success than your gear. I actually kind of like that weapons can break, but it does take away some of the satisfaction of finding new weapons when you know they're just going to break, and it makes combat somewhat pointless when a lot of the time you're just breaking your own weapons to be rewarded with similar replacements.

Enjoy spamming this shallow mechanism for the entire game.

The final boss is pretty lame

The whole game builds up to fighting Calamity Ganon, and he ends up being a complete push-over. Not only is he weaker than some of the regular enemies you can encounter in the wild (I'm pretty sure savage lynels deal more damage and are harder to dodge), if you've done the four Divine Beasts then he starts at half health, making an already easy fight even easier. For his final phase, when he assumes the Dark Beast form and you ride around on your horse shooting light arrows at him, he just kind of stands there doing nothing while you wait for targeting spots to appear from Zelda. It's kind of boring and anticlimactic.

Lame, underwhelming music

Music has always been an iconic element of the Zelda games, with many of them featuring musical instruments as key items in your tool belt. Generally speaking, though, the Zelda games tend to have prominent soundtracks that set a particular mood for specific areas and that really help to bring certain areas or emotions to life. It's hard not to feel a nostalgic pull at the heart strings when you hear Saria's song in Twilight Princess while chasing a skull kid through the Sacred Grove, for example. BOTW has pretty much no music whatsoever, and what little music actually exists in the game is usually some type of minimalistic thing with hardly any melody or rhythm. Most of the time in the wild you're just hearing random plinking of piano chords, and other more prominent themes just sound generic to me. The only music I actually remember is Kass's accordion, the shrine music (mostly because I spent 12-15 hours listening to that same 2-minute track), the stable music (which is loosely based on Epona's theme, an already familiar theme), and the medley/mashups in Hyrule Castle (which again calls back to familiar themes like Ganondorf's organ, Zelda's Lullaby, the original overworld theme, etc). I couldn't even recall what BOTW's main theme sounds like, and I don't recognize it when I listen to it now.

Cooking is pointless

Another major addition to BOTW is cooking; as part of living off the (breath of the) wild, you’re able to collect a lot of random ingredients and materials and then cook food and brew elixirs, which will help you to restore lost health or give you stat bonuses like dealing extra damage or granting extra protection against cold environments, among many other things. There are a ton of different ingredients that you can use to make a ton of different recipes, but it’s all pretty much pointless. You don’t need recipes for environmental protection because there’s always a set of armor available to counteract extreme environments, and you don’t need to cook any of the more advanced recipes for healing items because all you really need is one hearty vegetable to restore full health, and until you get to the point where it's worth using hearty vegetables you'll find more than enough meat and regular vegetables that you can throw them in a pot and cook them by themselves. 

Even this recipe goes above and beyond what you'd ever need.

Why are arrows so expensive?

The bow and arrow is supposed to be one of your primary weapons in the game, but I often found myself running out of arrows and having seemingly no way to replenish my supply. As is tradition in Zelda games, if you need more bombs or arrows or whatever, you go smash some pots or cut some grass, but now you can only get arrows by buying them from stores, where they're really expensive or not sold in large enough quantities, or you have to farm bokoblin archers and hope they drop arrows. Sometimes I randomly found myself with hundreds of arrows just from exploring the world, whereas other times I found myself completely strapped for arrows and having to shell out hundreds of rupees just to buy a small amount to get by. For something as essential as arrows, I feel like they should be pretty much always available to you -- you always have an infinite supply of bombs, for example, so why should arrows be limited? Maybe it's because of balance, but you can cheese pretty much every enemy in the game by spamming bombs, so I don't get what the harm would be in making arrows cheaper or more readily available.

Long, tedious load times and cutscenes

The world is obviously huge so obviously it's going to take a bit of time to load the game, but fortunately you don't have to go through any load screens to cross from one side of the map to the other. Unfortunately, you do have to load every time you enter and exit a shrine, any time you fast-travel, and any time you die. That's still not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things (at least we don't have to sit through load screens every time we open a door, like in Bethesda's games), but the load screens for the shrines get to be pretty unbearable, because you have to sit through load screens and unskippable cutscenes in such quick succession -- on entering the shrine, on obtaining the spirit orb, and on exiting. It's even more annoying for the shrine quests where you solve the puzzle in the open world, then sit through load screens and unskippable cutscenes just to grab the immediate reward in a matter of seconds, then sit through those same load screens and unskippable cutscenes again.

Get used to seeing this screen. 

Why are Great Fairies prostitutes?

So you find a great fairy fountain, and they're feverishly begging for money. You just see a hand stick out of a giant bulb and they're like "Give me your rupees! Hand them over, quickly!" Which is a little odd and off-putting, but then when you get your armor upgraded they literally blow you and make oddly sexual noises. I guess they were already kind of sexualized when they appeared in OOT, but it seems a little on-the-nose in BOTW, especially with having to pay them money for their services. I don't really mind it, but it's odd, to say the least. I especially hate that unlocking them is simply a matter of "give them a bunch of rupees," when there could've been a more interesting quest involved, like solving a shrine riddle or finding her lesser fairies, like other Zelda games have done.

No comment.

IN CONCLUSION

I went into BOTW expecting to be utterly bored and disappointed by it; while I did experience a lot of boredom and disappointment, I'd say I generally enjoyed my time with BOTW -- I just wasn't completely enamored with it like a lot of other people were. I was surprised at how much fun the exploration could be, and I was also really impressed with the world design, not to mention how special and magical some of its content can be, but that's about where my praise for the game begins and ends; everything else about it was either mediocre or downright bad to me. The dungeons were all disappointing, the progression didn't feel satisfying, there wasn't enough unique, interesting content populating its huge open world, and the story, quests, and characters were all underwhelming. Some of this is particularly surprising to me, because I'd consider some of these things to be highly important, staple Zelda elements, and to see them get such poor treatment is alarming. There's enough good stuff in this game to warrant a favorable review score, and enough to warrant a playthrough, but I kind of regret spending so much time on it. While it's a decent game, and one of the better Zelda games I've played in a long time, it definitely doesn't qualify to me as one of the best Zelda games of all time; time will tell, but I'd be very surprised if it ever cracked my top five.

(None of these screenshots are mine, since I was playing on a borrowed Switch; all of these are from IGN, Nintendo Life, GiantBomb, and Zelda Dungeon.)