Caught Up – The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

We kinda lucked out into a Switch at release, and I’ve put something like… 90 hours in Breath of the Wild at this point, and I still feel like I’ve hardly scratched the surface.

I honestly wonder how I should be approaching this game conceptually. Any piece of negative criticism that surfaces, I try to read and engage. I’ve heard Jim Sterling’s opinions on it and I respect him, his opinions, and his position on a lot of the game’s design decisions, but it feels like we’re playing different games. I’m not going to go into his stance here, but I will go into mine.

Breath of the Wild isn’t perfect, and I think that it’s a mistake to assume that a 10/10 game is “perfect”. I think a 10/10 game conceptually is well-made from top to bottom, with thoughtful care put into every aspect by the developers and artists and anyone who touched the finished product. There’s no such thing as a perfect game, but great games are real. When I play Breath of the Wild, I see the lessons they took from Dark Souls and Skyrim and how they avoided some of the more agonizing pitfalls of those games.

Skyrim in particular is always fresh in mind. You couldn’t just try mixing ingredients in Skyrim. You either had what you needed to make XYZ or you didn’t. You also constantly found potions and you could just buy them, eliminating the need to craft them. You also couldn’t cook, which meant the tons of food you picked up just got stuffed in your mouth when you were out of potions. There was a fundamental disconnect between the existence of crafting components and the ability of the player to use those in meaningful ways. It feels like Nintendo got that right with Breath of the Wild in forcing the player to make anything they want or need themselves. Sometimes people will gift you food or potions if you save them from roaming enemies or bring them rare ingredients, and you can take the recipes from those and use them yourself, but there’s no recipe catalog to scroll through.

That’s one of the aspects of the game that, to me, reinforces the connection between you, the player, and Link, your avatar. Your armor is rarely obtained and powerful. Your other items are fleeting and ephemeral. Link does, has, and knows nothing that the player does not. When you open a chest, it opens. You, the player, see what is inside rather than watching Link marvel at it. You are in the middle of fucking nowhere on the fringes of what’s left of Hyrule and no one is around to see the look on Link’s face, and you, the player, don’t care what’s on his face. You care what’s in the chest, and the game gives you that.

In Breath of the Wild, you aren’t playing Link’s story along a set path. You’re playing your story, as Link.