The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild

I keep on changing my mind about this game. My initial knee-jerk reaction was that it wasn't as good as everyone said it was - it wasn't The Greatest Game Ever, 10/10, the future of gaming, and so on. I instinctively recoil from that kind of hyperbole, and besides, I remember when Skyward Sword was getting similar levels of praise, and we know what that got us. So, on my first play-through, without meaning to, I know I was looking for flaws.

I found plenty. 

Most significantly - and I know this is a boring observation but it's true - there just aren't enough dungeons. The real meat of any Zelda game has always been the dungeons, those artfully-constructed puzzle-boxes, and there aren't any in Breath Of The Wild except maybe the four Divine Beasts. The much-vaunted freedom to go anywhere is actually a lack of the airtight construction that runs through every Zelda game - you don't see a cliff in the distance and have to puzzle out how to climb it, what tools you'll need, which dungeon you'll get them from: you just go climb it. 

It lacks direction. A game where you can go anywhere, anytime, is also a game where you don't have to do anything. Never before in a Zelda game have I been able to just say "Ah, screw it, I'm going to go do something else" when a boss fight got frustrating. The other games force you to improve yourself. In BOTW, you get all your abilities right away, and then you're on your own. 

Your weapons break with use and can't be repaired. There's some cool, useful armour out there, but you might never stumble across it, the map is so huge, and because the map is so huge, they can't make any one tool essential to the game. They have committed so fully to the ethos of total freedom that they have been forced to make every achievable aim in the game entirely optional. If you need the hookshot to get into a dungeon, you have to be directed to find the hookshot first. People complain about linearity in games, but it's like complaining that a platformer has levels or that, to play Tetris, the bricks have to fall down instead of just hovering in midair - playing, improving, achieving, there has to be some sort of structure to make any of that possible. 

In BOTW you can literally go straight to Hyrule Castle and try to kill Ganon after completing the first four shrines out of 120. You don't need to complete the Divine Beasts, you don't need to complete the rest of the Shrines, you don't need to talk to anyone in the villages. It's all pointless.

I complained about all of this while doing it all anyway, because apparently I'm an idiot. This game is so inessential and so lacking in anything that might motivate you to play that I actually can't stop playing it. 

If there are people out there who genuinely believe that because 116 of the shrines are not required to complete the game, then there is no point doing them, then what are those people doing playing in the first place? You do them because they're fun. You explore because you want to. You complete all four Divine Beasts because you're a completist. Defeating Ganon is not the point of the game. Sure, he's squatting in the middle of the map in a bubble of menacing fog, dominating the skyline, and Impa keeps banging on at you about how Zelda can't hold out much longer, but it almost feels like an afterthought. Nobody's going to come chasing you to hurry up.

What I didn't grasp at first is that the game does request an adjustment of expectations from the long-term Zelda fan. Don't misunderstand me, I do miss the full-size dungeons and the constructed progression, but what this game gives you is (no pun intended) breathtaking. By now, we all expect that progression, and by taking it away, BOTW creates something invigorating. It takes away all the safety nets and dumps you in the middle of nowhere and you have to fend for yourself.

Random enemy encounters are far riskier now. Early on, armed with a couple of sticks and an apple, you might try wading in against the first Bokoblin you meet, and you'll get your arse handed to you on a plate. So you have to strategise. Attack from a higher plane with your bombs, or drop a metal box onto them with your magnesis rune, or just run like hell and live to fight another day when you have better armour or more hearts. You might run into a mini-boss like a Hinox or, god forbid, a Lynel, and assume that, because you've encountered them early in the game, you must be able to defeat them. And then you can't.

It takes a while to learn to enjoy this new MO because this is simply not something Zelda games have ever really done before. That careful progression still exists, but you have to control it yourself, judging your readiness to take on a particular enemy. The game gives you many ways to do that - adding your hearts or stamina so you can endure battle longer, cooking meals and elixirs to give you increased stats, finding better weapons and choosing the right weapon for the right enemy, finding and upgrading armour. Shooting weapons from the air or riding past on horseback to jab someone with a spear. You might try all of these things, you might never think of them.

On my first playthrough - because this game genuinely does have replay value - I stuck pretty hard to the button-mashing, run-away method of battle, waiting until I had maxed out my hearts before even approaching a Hinox and then just battering them with bomb arrows so it would be over quickly. This time around, I'm exploring other ways to fight - setting fires to be able to catch an updraft and attack from the air, or trying to flip enemies by magicking an ice-block beneath them. I noticed that the Hinoxes tend to wear wooden shinpads, so I started attacking with a flameblade, or sneaking up and hitting them with fire-arrows to remove them. The more you allow yourself to experiment, the more you discover. 

I was wandering the Hebra Mountains when my daughter spotted a bear and said, "Can you ride that?" I said no, I doubt it - then tried it, and you can ride a bear. You can ride a deer. You can ride a Lynel, though not for long. This is a game that absolutely rewards experimentation, and the point of the experimentation is simply to give you joy. The game is stuffed with tiny details that you may not even notice, or even find, but the designers put them in anyway. Carry a flaming sword on your back, and it actually keeps you warmer in cold climates. Steal your enemy's weapon, and they may throw rocks at you or even another enemy.

Earlier, I had been aggrieved that all my exploration only yielded more Korok seeds or another breakable weapon, but I was (again) looking at the game the wrong way. The moments where you say "oh my god, I didn't know I could do that!" - that's what you're playing for. 

Admittedly, in five or ten years time when every game has achieved this much freedom, it may seem less impressive, but right now it's enormous fun. It's hard to stay mad at "aimless" exploration when it looks as beautiful as this. The first time I wandered into Faron Province and encountered a dragon rising out of the lake, floating off into the sky, it was incredible. Even now, after I-don't-know how many hours of gameplay, if I see a dragon floating by, I stop and watch. And then I try to shoot it because even grinding for collectables in BOTW is enjoyable and presents its own challenges. In most other games, "fly on updrafts to shoot a dragon to collect a chunk of its horn" would probably be a specific sidequest you do just once, but in BOTW it's like grocery shopping. 

Early on, I'd be ambushed by Taluses - rock-monsters that lie in wait, half-buried until you wander by. After a while, I'd learned to spot them and avoid them. Now I decide I want some precious stones to sell, and I go Talus-hunting. This is how progression works, in BOTW - it makes you want to keep playing and upgrading and improving even if you don't have to. And it's such a beautiful place, it doesn't matter that all you're doing it swimming around looking for ten special fish to give to a Fairy to make your stealth suit a bit stronger. The graphics are gorgeous: they've finally hit on the perfect blend of cel-shading, painterliness and realism that they've been chasing after since Twilight Princess. The music is thankfully limited to ambient tinkling, the sort of thing you'd get in a spa, because you simply spend too much time wandering in this game to endure a repeating loop of jolly music. Imagine the tune that plays in Ocarina as you cross Hyrule, playing for four hours at a time. You'd go insane. The music that hammers at you in Hyrule Castle here becomes maddening and oppressive because you spend so long in there.

And this Hyrule is huge. Absolutely enormous. It has deserts and mountains and snowy plains, lava falls and swamps and jungles. It has at least six villages and as many little stables, each with their own population of NPCs, many with clues and sidequests to interesting things to investigate. Each problem has a "correct" way to solve it, but you can find a half-dozen alternatives too. You can perfect your timing to fire a bomb through a chute at a moving target through a gust of wind that blows it off course, or you can say "sod that" and just fire a bomb arrow at it. You can take on the hardest enemies wearing only your underpants and brandishing a soup-ladle, should you wish, or you can upgrade your armour and your health to maximum until you're swatting Guardian scouts like flies. After a point, the game is as hard as you want it to be.

As for that dungeon complaint - yes, this Hyrule lacks dungeons, but it has 120 shrines. The Shrines are little mini-dungeons, usually just one room with one puzzle, or one Guardian to defeat. Yes, they're short, but there are 120 of them. Would it have satisfied players if these dungeons had been collected into, say, six separate dungeons?

There are flaws. I've said this elsewhere, but there is no Zelda game so good that it couldn't be improved. 

Firstly, it's obvious that the focus was all on the overworld, and though it's hard to feel let down by a playground this massive, it also seems odd that there is no underground to explore - no route through the mountains, no underground river to go rushing down. You can swim up waterfalls with the right armour, but you can't dive down to explore the seabed. Riding the rafts is painfully tedious - I stopped bothering. (It is, of course, marvellous that the game offers so many options that you can ignore some of them altogether. I'm sure there are people who love the rafts; I prefer to walk or glide. You can also ride the horses or surf downhill on your shield. You could replay the game endlessly by restricting yourself to certain modes of transport or never upgrading your stamina, if you wanted.) The more freedom the game gives you, the more you notice all the things you can't do.

The story is perfunctory at best. It's the bog-standard Link plus Princess plus Ganon, but here, Link has been in a healing sleep for a century while Zelda has been in Hyrule Castle fighting to contain Ganon. Link has to complete the mission they started a hundred years ago. Really, it doesn't matter - you don't experience the story in any kind of linear way, only stumbling across flashbacks (Link has forgotten his past), and it's hard to say that any of these recovered memories affect your actions. You don't suddenly recall a magic spell you once had, or anything like that.

It would have been more fun, arguably, to play the game that's depicted in the flashbacks - being Zelda's sidekick, earning her trust, gathering the Champions. It's not as if Present Day Link assembles a new team to take over the Divine Beasts - the new characters you meet only assist you in getting inside the Beasts, and from there, you're on your own. To pilot them, you literally re-enlist the dead Champions to do the job, and half the people you meet - like Impa or Sidon or Doraephan - are very long-lived and remember you from back then anyway.

I think the hundred-year-sleep was necessary just to get us to a post-apocalyptic Hyrule and emphasise the survival aspect, but really, not enough is made of that aspect anyway. There are ruins, but there are also thriving villages (and villagers who complain of the effect of the out-of-control Divine Beasts on their towns, though the towns seem absolutely fine, hardly any different after you defeat the Beasts than before). You're out on your own, but no more than if you were doing your Duke Of Edinburgh award or something. You can always pop to Hateno Village to get your clothes dyed a different colour, which is fun but doesn't really jibe with the "one man and his tree branch against the world" thing. You have to eat to survive, but you also manage to whip up crepes, for God's sake.

It's a bit of a half-and-half approach that is also detectable in the battle and upgrade systems. You're given surprisingly little information about exactly how durable your weapons are, or how much stronger your armour is. This sword has increased durability - but how much more is that? This or that armour may increase your attack or your stealth, but by how much is quite ill-defined. You get the gist, but it would be nice to be able to make precise calculations about your choices. As it is, the information is all internal to the game and little of it is available to the player. 

Wear your Champion's vest, and you can see the enemies' hit points instead of just their health bar. That's great, but why are the enemies using hit points where Link uses hearts? If the combat is edging into numbers-based RPG territory, can we please do it properly instead of the vague guesswork? Can Link level up as well as temporarily increasing his stats? Could he gain a reputation by helping the NPCs when they're attacked? What if the NPCs you've saved could come to your aid in future, instead of just giving you a risotto or something? That would be pretty good, and would make it more satisfying to help them. Instead, they're randomly grateful or rude or dismissive when you help, and they don't even react when you get annoyed and shoot them in the head with an arrow.

Even in terms of the landscape, things could be tweaked. The villages all have their own individual style, which is wonderful (I'm very fond of this version of Kakariko Village) but the Stables you find are all identical, no matter where they are - it would have been refreshing to find a ger or a yurt in the snowy regions, something unique to the landscape, or even some variety in the NPCs who - outside of the villages - tend to all wear the same style. The enemies you find are the same all over - yes, you get ice chuchus in snowy places and red Lizalfos in the volcano region, but they still lack variety. It would be nice to get some enemies that were unique to their region, rather than changing the hue and saturation on the same species wherever you go.

The most obvious complaint is that, while exploring for its own sake is rewarding, it would be nice to find a few more things out in the wild - something other than a Korok seed or an ore deposit. There's a hell of a lot in this game, but the sheer size of the game means that there's also a lot of empty space too.

Finally, my biggest issue - the voice acting is, unfortunately, terrible. Zelda could have gotten away with never having voice acting, and I wish they'd carried on doing so, because forcing these actors to try to fit this terrible dialogue to the lip-movements just doesn't work. Zelda herself - no offence to the actress - is a bad fit for the character, and sounds like an older woman affecting a whiny teenage voice. When most of the flashbacks are centred on Zelda's torment, it's hard to sympathise.

These are such minor gripes, though. Do I hope they put some actual, full-on, hardcore dungeons in the next Zelda? Do I hope they included some items like the Hookshot or the Stone Mask that aid you in your exploration? Do I hope they throw in a few rare, unbreakable weapons that are really worth hunting for? Yes, of course I do.

Until then, though, I'm going to be perfectly happy cutting my way across this beautiful world and finding new ways to pick off bad guys and just stopping to enjoy the scenery.

(SIDE NOTE: I've since played the DLC, and all I can say is that for new players, it is worth downloading the extras from the get-go, and finding certain masks ASAP. Without giving anything away, it feels as though Nintendo have responded very well to criticism, as the DLC includes items that improve the game, as well as several newer, bigger shrines, and some stripped-down quests a la Eventide Island that force players to rely on skill rather than just maxing-out on hearts and attack power.)