The Legend of Zelda Title

Geek Errant Reviews: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend Of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a love letter to the venerable series. It is a summation of everything that makes the Zelda games wonderful, whilst also making the gameplay fun and approachable for older and newer players alike.

 

Once upon a time, there was a kingdom. The kingdom was under threat by the approach of an ancient evil. History and myth said that it was the role of the Princess and her Appointed Knight to defeat the evil and seal it away once more.
Fearing the calamity that the evil would cause, the Kingdom gathered ancient and powerful machines to defend the people and assist the heroes.
And on the day that the evil came… it triumphed.
The machines were turned on the kingdom.
The Knight was mortally wounded.

The Kingdom was lost.

Knowing that she was the last hope for her people, the Princess sent the Knight away to save him. And she faced the evil alone.

For 100 years, the princess held the evil at bay. Until the Knight would wake once more.

That is the Legend of Zelda in Breath of The Wild.

You play Link. Who has been awoken 100 years after the fall of Hyrule. You awake in a world that is nothing like the world he knew. Or the games you know.

Instead, everything is changed.
Gone is the formula codified in A Link to The Past and Ocarina of Time. An overworld, with set dungeons that need specific tools to defeat in a certain order. Gone are the pieces of the triforce or sages you need to collect to progress the story.
Now, Link is in a vast open world, where he can go anywhere, at any time. Do anything.

As has been pointed out, that means that once you complete the very short mechanics tutorial in the game’s introduction, you’re free to go fight the final boss.

I mean, you can. But you’ll probably lose. (Again)

Instead the game suggests that you go and gather your strength, and find support in the wilds of the game map.

And I would too. Because in order to do that, you’ll have to play one of the most engrossing and charming games I’ve ever played.  

Every aspect of Zelda is crafted in a way most other huge open world games just aren’t. The graphical style, which blends several themes into something very ghibli-esque, has no truck with photo realism. Instead, the world is made to feel like a piece of painted art. Fantastical, yet immersive. Filled with colour and brightness.  
Each frame could be hand drawn and it all solid and cohesive, even as you travel between mountain slopes, volcanic wastes and icy tundras. Each of the different groups in this land, including the monsters, have their own style of architecture and design that is thematically appropriate. The visual distinction between areas really helps to reinforce that this world is not a grand civilisation, but disparate groups trying to rebuild after the calamity.

Kakariko Village Tour

Everything about Breath of the Wild feels effortless yet carefully considered. There are dozens of systems in play in any moment of the game. The player will be using all of them without even thinking. If the player wants to do something, they can. The game encourages experimentation and exploration. The gameplay loop is designed to offer the player an exceptional freedom of choice.

If you just want to walk in a straight line from the starting point until you hit the end of the world map, you can do that. If there’s a mountain in the way, you can climb it. There are multiple approaches to every situation in the game.

The core of what makes Breath of the Wild fantastic is the care poured into every individual option in the game.  

At one point, a woman asked me if I’d seen her son on my travels. I told her no, left her for a few minutes to root around her house and then immediately selected the other option when I returned to her.
She called me out on it, and I was left surprised and smiling at the fact that the developers had been aware that I would try that path.

Later in the game, I acquired a piece of unique equipment, and as a reward for that, I got slightly different dialogue options than I would have otherwise been given.
It’s a very simple trick, and it only works once as a surprise, but BotW is stuffed full of little moments like that. Brief asides to fill the vast world.

The world map in Breath of the Wild is indeed vast. Some reports have it at four times the size of Skyrim. There’s a chance this could run into the perennial open world problem.

Plenty of space, nothing to fill it with.

Breath of the Wild Map

The obvious difference in this game is apparent straight off the bat. The map initially shows you the starting region, and that’s it. There are towers to climb which add maps of new regions to the world map, but these do not highlight all of the shrines and towns and areas of interest. Instead, you find them. You can spot things from across the map. Sometimes fellow travellers will tell you that there’s a place you should check out. Sometimes you literally stumble across them as you were aiming for an entirely different objective.

The stamina bar and climbing abilities, paired with the parasail really make this easy. You can climb any object or fly from any height, providing your stamina lasts long enough. There’s plenty of ways to extend it artificially too, through crafting or resource collection. Even the temperature changes in the world, which can cause the player to take damage, are designed to be gotten around.
If you don’t have warm clothes for Link to change into, hold a weapon that’s flame based. You can find workarounds for most situations in this fashion.
It means the player is utterly free to explore in their own way.
If you walk in a straight line for five minutes, something will catch your interest. Like one of the many overworld puzzles or shrines.

The dungeons of the past games are gone. Mostly. There’s a few large areas in Breath of the Wild  that have their own unique spin on traditional dungeon design, including some very impressive 3D maps. Instead of 8-12 Large dungeons, there’s 120 puzzle shrines scattered across the world. Some will require you to solve riddles in the overworld, while other will test your skills with your tool set. A couple are combat trials to see how far you’ve gathered your strength. Each takes about 10-15 minutes to complete, and most have optional puzzles within to solve for extra treasure.
Korok Celebration

Even beyond the shrines, there are world based puzzles everywhere. If you see an odd pattern of stones, or a flower that looks out of place, that will be a Korok Puzzle. A momentary aside to solve that will give resources that allow for inventory expansion.
Expanded Inventory will be a great boon for combat in this game.

There are two things to know about combat in Breath of the Wild.

Weapons and Combat Mechanics. Much has been made of the fact that Link is scavenging weapons and items in this game. Early on, this means you’ll be grabbing rusty swords and spears out of the ground, or stealing them from enemies. These weapons are flimsy, and only last a little while, so you’re constantly switching and changing, finding different methods for attacking.  There is a big focus on actually learning the moves of opponents, and side-dodging/back-flipping out of the way, or using a carefully timed shield to parry. Get these moves perfected and you’ll be rewarded with a chance to conduct a “flurry strike”, and rapidly deal damage in slow motion. Initially, combat has a very desperate air about it. Link is refinding his skill. With your weaker equipment, often the player will be finding themselves scrambling for dropped gear or desperately dodging to cover for a broken shield.

There are options though. Throwing your weapons is always hilarious (even if opponents do sometimes grab them) and for weapons like boomerangs, getting used to throwing and catching is essential. Weapon variety is excellent, with axes/swords/hammers/two handed weapons/boomerangs/magic wands and spears. All function in fairly common ways, but with vastly different timing and strength. Until the player gets a bigger weapon inventory, it’s often the case that their favourite weapon type may be kept in reserve until a big threat appears.
As the game progresses, stronger and more durable weapons become available freely, so there’s a sense of progression to be found in Breath of the Wild’s combat too. This nicely mirrors the growing strength of Link as he prepares his efforts to face the final boss. 
The nature of the mechanics in the game means that there are often multiple solutions to any combat encounter. Opponents at the bottom of a hill can have bombs or giant rocks rolled on top of them. If it starts to lightning storm, throwing a metal weapon near to an enemy can cause them serious harm. If there are monsters asleep in a camp, sneak in and steal all their weapons before they wake up and attack.

Or in the worst case scenario, when you bit off more than you can chew, just jump off a cliff and float away on your parasail.

Combat feels natural and fluid. It’s just another state of the game world, supporting the game as a whole.

In terms of defining the world though, a couple of points stand out. 

The music was initially a sticking point for me. The introductory area has a big focus on very simple piano melodies that feel quite sparse in a series that is so well known for the musical elements. There’s stirs of the traditional series theme as you begin exploring, but initially it seems very barren. But, as the world expands, the music becomes more and more enjoyable, and my fears fell away. Places where people have gathered are filled with music. Only the wilds are silent, and even those are punctuated with the discordance of world bosses and enemy themes. Each of the regions appears to have a different signature instrument too, delineating the areas of the world even by sound alone.  In particular, one moment in the Tabantha Province, and the reprise of a familiar song from Wind Waker, just had me set my controller down and listen for a while as I watched the horizon with joy.


The voice acting probably won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. I can see long term fans having issues with the voices for certain characters not quite matching up to what they’ve codified in their heads. This is not to say that the voice acting is bad, there’s some delightfully evocative work being done, especially by the voice actress for Zelda. It just might be a shock to have traditionally silent characters talk.

This game makes plenty of changes, like the attitude to music or voice acting. Almost all of them are great. The narrative about the Princess Zelda stands as one of my favourite elements of the whole story. Each person in the game has their own name and personality, and many of them present little quests and storylines for the player to find and explore.  There’s so much i haven’t even fully explored here yet, like the cooking system that’s way too enjoyable for an open world crafting system. The masterfully crafted animation in the game that convinces you that every single person and creature exists fully in this world. 

I want to tell you about so many things.

Like the story of building Tarrey Town.

The time that I was fighting a rock monster and worked out I could climb on it’s back, Shadow of the Colossus style.

The moment where I thought I was walking into a fairy fountain, and instead engaged in a fifteen minute fight against a boss across several miles of map.
The revelation that I could drop metal weapons to cheat an electricity based puzzle.

The secret of Eventide island.

The many, many references to the older games in the series, while never locking new players out of this game’s story.

Breath of the Wild is captivating in so many ways. When playing it, the hours just melted away. Nintendo have gone to great pains to revitalise the Zelda Franchise, while ensuring that the heart of the games are still there. This is a game that is worth sinking dozens of hours into. Discovering and Exploring in this game is such a delightfully refreshing experience that it’s very hard to not get lost in the game world.

This is a game that is about the Legend of Zelda first and foremost. That narrative, paired with astoundingly detailed yet approachable game mechanics, makes this game very special. And I cannot think of a better way to bring new fans to the series, while still having the heart of the series that older fans love.

 

NB: There are supposedly only minor frame rate problems and a few graphical changes making the difference between the WiiU and Switch versions of the game. I played on the Switch, and the novelty of playing a fully featured 3D Zelda game on a portable system was very enjoyable.

 

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