I’ve had the thought for a while that many gamers, reviewers and journalists these days are frequently cynical, dismissal and seldom share any real surprise or joy in the gaming field unless they’re paid to specifically have such feelings - Barring that, they only have temporary joy in one product before the magic wears off and they’re back to being crabby. I’ll be the first and last to admit that I’m a beacon of constant negativity, but Breath of the Wild (BotW) has delivered something that I feel many gamers are in dire need of that the Legend of Zelda games have succeeded in delivering time and time again - An honest to goodness adventure. Not a campaign found in a shooter or an indie game that’s over in three hours and tries to hamfist a moral lesson down your throat, but a grand adventure that satiates wanderlust and the urge to explore - In every nook and cranny if you’re the completionist type.

My earliest memory of playing a game that felt like a grand adventure was with Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon on the Nintendo 64, which had been compared to Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time in terms of environments to traverse and puzzles to tackle respectively. It was also my first real experience of Japanese game design that could be wildly colorful and comedic - Nevermind that it was a telling of what was essentially Japanese Robin Hood, but also featured a battle with a mind-controlling robot on the back of a dragon, had you getting giant batteries for your robo-ninja companion, revealing ghosts using a feudal camera and, above all else, being able to summon a giant robot named Impact to battle other giant boss robots, complete with his own theme song that’d make any anime blush. The game was certainly ridiculous but to my young brain, this was the stuff of impossible imagination and sparked a kindling of interest that made me seek out the weird, different and just plain wonderful in gaming - Bonus points abound if there was a world to explore along with it.

This probably sounds like the portfolio to any fedora-wearing games journalist full of starry-eyes and pixie dust, but this ‘magic’ to older action/adventure games has been relatively lost in today's game design - This isn’t me slapping on nostalgia goggles and raising my nose in the air, but there’s been fewer cases these days about games that people can positively rant and rave about without looking like a lunatic or being accused of taking bribes. For everything bad I can say about BotW and criticism I can throw at it, there’s no escaping that a giant, massive adventure full of things to find and stuff to learn is before me - Same for everyone else who’s enjoying it as much as I am. Once you hop off of the starter area in BotW and hit the first region, all bets are off regarding hand holding or hallway-based tutorials; it’s you, a map to fill and dozens of directions to go. I’ve lost track from the number of times I’ve scaled a tall structure and looked across the vista before me, on one hand taking in the sight with splendour but on the other hand wondering how the hell I was going to finish this game before 2020.

You may ask why I haven’t felt the same about other open world games with so much to do, see and experience; Grand Theft Auto? Elder Scrolls? Fallout? I’ll be honest with you, I’ll credit this to a definite bias I had regarding those old games that were so whimsical and bright. Maybe I’d be singing a different tune if these experiences in my youth were credited to JRPGs like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to go on an adventure full of color, good ideas and just stuff to do for hours on end. Nintendo hasn’t reinvented the wheel with BotW by any stretch in terms of open world gaming, but first party Nintendo games have been proven forces to be reckoned with. So for them to tackle the genre, especially with the Legend of Zelda IP, was bound to be a massive success along with copious amounts of sales. For me, for something to be ‘genre defining’ is when a game takes all the good things about the genre and dumps the bad to the curb… BotW mostly gets it right. Maybe not genre defining, but it certainly has set a new bar for future open world games to come.

Despite the joy and praise the game has bestowed and received, I can’t help but feel like the title of ‘masterpiece’ is ill-placed. Campy voice-acting, consistent frame rate issues, hit detection with Stasis puzzles not wanting to play nice, stealth being ruined by enemies having too perfect of timing looking your way at the last second… For my money, a masterpiece must be flawless; by that metric, BotW is no masterpiece. We could sit here and argue to the point of exhaustion whether or not it deserves the slew of perfect scores awarded by reviewers, but the biggest thing to take away from BotW is how we’ve been needing a proper, fulfilling adventure for a mighty long time - At least, one that -I’ve- been needing for a mighty long time. Perhaps you’ve found your source of brain-tickling joy in other games or genres as of late, but I can say with good confidence that BotW brings that ‘magic’ back that I, and likely many others, have been looking for.