The Open World Game I've Always Wanted
Breath of the Wild is Nintendo's attempt at injecting a much needed breath of fresh air into their core Zelda series. While only someone with an irrational hatred for Nintendo would call Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword bad games, they were incredibly formulaic and unsurprising. The top-notch dungeon design, charm, and Nintendo polish was all the series had left. The art and the magic was gone.
Breath of the Wild brings that back in full force by going back to the series' roots. And I mean all the way back. I'm talking The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on the Nintendo Entertainment System. A Link to the Past marked a turning point in the series, and there hasn't been a Zelda game like the first two since, until now. Breath of the Wild once again pushes you out into the world with very little preamble. The return of a character named simply "Old Man," who gives you advice and gear at the start is an obvious homage to the first game and makes Nintendo's vision for the game clear. He will force you to do four puzzle shrines, each of which will give you one of the four powers you will use to solve every future puzzle you encounter in the game, and then he will give you his paraglider, and then you're on your own. You have all the tools you will need by the time you leave the tutorial area.
Once you're pushed out into the world, nothing stands in your way. Hyrule Castle and Ganon sit in the distance, visible from almost every vista in the game world, and you can go there straight out of the tutorial if you want. The few traditional Zelda dungeons that exist in this game can be completed in any order, or not at all. Much smaller puzzle shrines like those you completed in the tutorial dot the landscape, and are how you upgrade your health and stamina, which stands in for experience points and leveling up in a more traditional RPG. They are also (along with towers) your only way of creating fast travel points to warp around the game world.
Beyond the dungeons and shrines, which are full of Zelda puzzle goodness, very little of this game resembles a Zelda game at all. There's a huge open world filled with side quests. There's cooking. There's stealth. There's a freaking shield parry that looks exactly like the parry from Dark Souls. It's a hodgepodge of ideas and mechanics from other games that have been combined into something we've never quite seen before. It reminds me in turns of Dark Souls, Dragon's Dogma, Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter, Morrowind, and Assassin's Creed. Surely this can't work? Oh, but it does.
This game brilliantly solves almost every complaint I have had with open world games for years, specifically those that follow the ubisoft model. It has towers like an Assassin's Creed game, but they only fill in the background of the map. They don't put any markers down for you. You have to do that yourself by physically seeing something interesting and marking it manually. The game even gives you a selection of icons to use and trusts you to settle on a system that works and remember it. One person might use stars for shrines, another might be a crazy person and use the cooking pot icon instead. This turns something that feels like busywork in others games into an important aspect of exploration that you can have ownership over, because you did it yourself. That design philosophy extends to the entire game. Breath of the Wild wants you to do things for yourself for once, and in the current gaming climate nothing could be more refreshing.
Two other complaints I have about open world games are solved by the game's most controversial design decision--weapons that break. Like many, I hated this idea at first. Why would I want my weapons to break? What purpose does it serve? It's just busywork! And yet, the more I played the less it bothered me. After playing for a long time I had come to see that not only is it not a problem, it's a brilliant solution to actual problems we've been dealing with for years.
Consider a game like Morrowind. Like Breath of the Wild, it allows you to go anywhere in the game world from the start. Like Breath of the Wild (and unlike Oblivion), the enemies don't scale to your strength, and certain areas have enemies that will absolutely destroy you. The difference is that in Morrowind, this is to a large extent an illusion of choice. You can't actually accomplish anything in these high level areas. It's cool that you can go there, but that's about it. Leave and come back when you're stronger. Breath of the Wild, in contrast, isn't so cut and dry. It's entirely possible for a player to discover a very powerful weapon right after leaving the tutorial. You can save that weapon to use as a trump card, or you can use it to actually accomplish things in difficult areas you're "not supposed to be at yet," assuming you're good enough at the combat to not get hit. And the kicker is, they can do this without breaking the entire balance of the game, because you won't have that weapon forever. It's going to break. This is a revelation in game design that allows for a much more freeform and organic experience. The ups and downs you will have by finding powerful weapons and having them break is unreal. It feels amazing. I've seen people dip their toes into Hyrule Castle from the start of the game, not to attempt fighting Ganon, but to abscond with some end-game loot that will make the first few hours of the game a cakewalk.
Treating weapons as a consumable resource also solves another problem that Elder Scrolls games tend to have. Namely, you will always reach a point where nothing you find is going to be better than what you're already using. Everything becomes vendor trash, and since gold is largely useless in those games, the incentive to keep playing and keep exploring quickly wanes. Not so in Breath of the Wild. You will always need more weapons. You will always need more shields. You will always need more crafting materials and ingredients. Everything you find in this game is something that you will, theoretically, use. This makes exploration feel so much more rewarding.
Beyond that, the thing that makes the game so special is the, "oh wow, you can really do that?" factor. You have a magnesis power to lift metal objects. A stasis power that lets you lock objects in place and hit them with a weapon to store momentum in them so that they rocket off when stasis runs out. You have two different bombs, a round one for rolling and a square one for staying put. That perfectly exemplifies how physics-based the combat in this game gets. Everything in the game interacts with everything else in some way. If you think of something, you can probably do it. Lighting grass on fire creates an updraft that lets you shoot up into the air on your paraglider. Stasis lets you entirely bypass the "intended" solution to many puzzles by sending things flying with momentum. Hell, there's one puzzle where I counted four entirely different ways of solving it. Enemy encampments can be wiped out with boulders rolled down cliffs. My personal favorite is that during thunderstorms you will get struck by lightning if you're holding a metal weapon. If you're holding a metal boomerang, though, you can throw it right before the lightning strikes and lay waste to enemies with the bolt of lightning that was meant to kill you.
Bottom line, this game is incredible. A refreshing new style of open world game that at once feels completely out of time and like a direct reaction to and subversion of the the trends of the day. It's the best thing Nintendo has made in many, many years.
