Breath of the Wild. I don’t think I’ve ever been this conflicted on what angle to approach a game from. There’s so many aspects I could start with, each of them encompassing an important part of the game that’s worth critique. And that makes sense - Breath of the Wild is easily, definitively the largest game I’ve ever finished in terms of scope.

I understand that I sound like a bit of a casual gamer video game player, a normie, a Nintendrone, and… well, in some ways I definitely am, and if I had a bit more experience with open world games (my only other time with the genre was having tried Assassin’s Creed 2 shortly after I started and fell in love with Breath of the Wild. I got frustrated that the game would present such a beautiful, expansive map with such gatekeeping, hand-holding and comparatively superficial parkour and exploration; I have yet to return to the game), I probably would have a better understanding of what triumphs and missteps Breath of the Wild makes for a game of its genre.

But… I think I won’t worry about that. I’ve experienced this game on its own merits, as who I am. I think by writing about this game on a site where people occasionally check in on my writing (hi, everyone who dropped by to wish me well. i can’t thank you enough; i’m doing better for now, though the road ahead is still rocky), I’m proclaiming that I have something worth saying, so I suppose I might as well make it a little personal.


Breath of the Wild had me absolutely hooked when I first experienced it blind in 2020, near the onset of the pandemic. Somehow I’d remained completely oblivious to the Nintendo Switch’s two signature games for years, and just like with Super Mario Odyssey, my reclusiveness found itself rewarded. Up until very recently, I’d thought that there hasn’t been a single Nintendo console for which the flagship Zelda was better than the flagship Mario - in fact, Zelda in general is a franchise I’m pretty mixed on, with most of the games in the series seemingly completely misunderstanding what I like about Zelda and becoming bloated, tedious experiences that in my opinion didn’t respect my time.
In that regard, Breath of the Wild was a breath of fresh air.

So when my cousin who lives with me told me that she’d borrowed a copy of Breath of the Wild from her friend, didn’t gel with it at all and offered me to try it, I approached it with a cautious optimism at best. What followed was me becoming absolutely glued to my Switch for hours on end. I still remember little moments here and there, like the first time I’d gotten Link up to the Plateau tower and couldn’t tell the various other towers and shrines apart; or when after finally marking the four shrines, I accidentally had Link walk off the tower like an idiot and frantically paused the game to warp him back to safety (I think Mirror’s Edge had left me pretty acrophobic in video games; though I want to think I’m over it now); or how I completely failed to pick up the hint when the Old Man would try to teach you about how to cut down trees to use their trunks as makeshift bridges, instead stocking up on some stamina foods and having Link climb around the abyss that separates the Old Man’s house and the Stasis shrine.

But I loved that that was a possible solution at all! The impression I’ve always gotten from Zelda puzzle design post-1992 was that there was only one solution ever intended by the developers for any one puzzle, and that players would (or, at least, I would) get punished for not thinking and approaching the puzzle from exactly the same angles as the designers intended. It’s a suffocating kind of design that’s always turned me of from the Zelda series as its temples transitioned from dungeon crawling to puzzle solving; it’s not that Breath of the Wild is completely exempt from it, but so much more of the game lets you solve it any way you can find within its own rules than any other Zelda game, and video games in general in my experience, that Breath of the Wild was genuinely wonderful to play.

I don’t think a Breath of the Wild review would be complete without a mention of the Great Plateau - it does so much right to set the game up in a bite-sized piece that’s exactly big enough to feel big, especially coming off of Mario games. Not only are individual objectives within the Plateau just as open-ended as the rest of the game is (just look at speedrunner stasis launching Link and bomb shield jumping him all across the place), but the sheer sense of minimalism it provided was amazing, with the Old Man giving the bare minimum of handholding and exposition.

It’s kind of like a great reset manifested as a soft exhale: aside from the Bokoblins (who look so different so as to be unrecognizable), the only familiar Zelda elements I noticed from the Plateau was Hyrule Castle, way off in the distance, and the Temple of Time, left in ruins, its melody fragmented, to prove a bold point.
Not a rupee, not a town or even a single human soul besides Link and the Old Man; I didn’t even encounter Koroks until Link had left the Plateau. In terms of sheer utopian post-apocalyptic atmosphere, the Plateau is simply unparalleled by the rest of the game, and like Pikmin, it’s a sort of beauty that’s unfortunately a little too good to last.
Still, even then, I’d say Breath of the Wild is a sort of rarity for modern Nintendo in how little it relies on rote nostalgia, how it takes an iconoclastic approach to a lot of Zelda tradition, and makes use of what it keeps mostly for deliberate impact and effect.

All these experiences, not to mention the two hundred hours that ensued once I actually got Link off of the plateau, were probably perfect to experience for the first time during the pandemic, being offered a sense of freedom and outdoors exploration that I craved more than ever in a particularly suffocating period of my life, for more reasons than just the novel virus itself.
I know a handful of my reviews across the past year have said “I liked it because I played it during the pandemic”, but Breath of the Wild might be my most sincere, most unreserved nomination for that title.


Which is not to say that I don’t have any reservations about Breath of the Wild. Bear with me, you’ll hate me after I say this: in some ways, I think the 2017 Zelda game is all breath… but no depth.

I feel a little bad saying that about Breath of the Wild on account of what it does accomplish, honestly. But there are a lot of small issues I have with each individual nuance of the game that add up and creep in as a sort of mild dissatisfaction that detriments from my overall experience.

A lot of them will sound like familiar nitpicks - what’s with rain and climbing being so at odds in such a clumsy way, and why does Revali’s Gale remove half of the complexity provided by both mechanics? Is the way they handled weapon durability really the best way they could have gone about it? Don’t the infinite material limit and expandable equipment slots incentivise hoarding? Are extra temporary health/stamina foods not straight-up better than restorative foods? Does the Master Sword (and Urbosa’s Fury) make weapon durability pointless once unlocked?

But I think you can agree with me that in 2021, these seem like pretty uninteresting thoughts to explore. So maybe let’s not do that, and look at the bigger picture once again.

On paper, I really love the idea of how Breath of the Wild decides to paint its story and central conflict, where most of the story has already taken place, and you’re mostly going through the post-mortem of everything and slowly building up Link’s power until he’s ready to go and set things right. With the conflict against Ganon being looming but never present until Link actually goes to confront him, Breath of the Wild presents itself as the most peaceful and beautiful apocalypse ever.


But, as much as I resonated with Zelda’s struggle to keep her composure under overwhelming impostor syndrome, being forbidden from exploring her true passions, how much responsibility was put on her to the brink of straight up breaking, and how her father clearly struggled himself throughout the entire ordeal, how much grief there is to be found if you look around in aspects of Breath of the Wild’s story, especially family-related grief…
I couldn’t tell you I actually cried through any of it - and I’m a person who’s moved to tears by the slightest instance of family-related loss in fiction.

On one hand, I think it’d make sense to be able to approach all these events from some distance - a hundred years’ worth, in fact - but the thing is that with the memories, Nintendo wanted players to be able to experience these key moments themselves. And maybe this was better than going through the entire story and having to bear watching Zelda under so much anxiety through every moment of uninterrupted storytelling? I’m not sure.
And I don’t think Nintendo was entirely sure about how much show and how much tell they wanted, exactly how detached or attached they wanted players to be from the events of Hyrule’s past. It’s the Super Mario Galaxy issue again: Nintendo not being sure how minimalist or maximalist they wanted to be.

A lot of these issues communicate an underlying unconfidence to me as to how Nintendo felt about moving past a lot of Zelda conventions. I feel like the swordplay and weapon-based combat is a big sign - neither Flurry Rush nor Sneakstrike feel like actually interesting mechanics, and while it’s clear that Nintendo wanted to revolutionize swordplay in Zelda, the impression I get is just that… it’s shallow breathing. I would honestly have liked to see them go even further. Ditch the idea that Link has to be a swordsman. It’s called Breath of the Wild. Maybe let Link be the breath of the wild - the wind. Maybe his rune powers could revolve around controlling air flow and wind, and become a mainstay of his kit. Maybe combat could involve deflecting enemy projectiles and blowing them back into them - kind of like an equivalent of perfect shielding for physical projectiles, and less inconsistent.

Maybe they could even (gasp) let Link be anything other than a white blond boy. I’ve literally never understood Nintendo’s thinking regarding Link as a player avatar, and a lot of related points affect how I enjoy games in general (not even just Zelda) more than I honestly care to admit.
Am I ready to completely tank my credibility as a video game critic? I am. Let’s do this.


“You’ve acquired the legendary Master Sword, that which seals the darkness. You feel that the sword itself delights to be in your possession…”

...what?

”You scurry back to the Pokémon Center, protecting your exhausted Pokémon from any further harm…”

huh?

”YOU GOT A MOON!
Bench Friends”

I think you get where I’m getting at with this. Who is you? Who is this you that video games talk to? Is it the player character? Is it the player? Do video games know how to tell the difference? Do video games even recognize that there is a distinction to be made?

There are basically two examples I can think of that are consciously exempt from this, both by the one same person dog: Undertale and Deltarune. A lot of other games seem to conflate the concepts of the player character and the player in how they address them, even in cases where multiple player characters are involved. And honestly? It frustrates me quite a bit.
I have a bit of an irrational obsession against the original Dragon Quest, for example - and that’s because the NES script constantly refers to the Hero as “you”, in a position that I have no connection to whatsoever. I’m a bit more comfortable with Pokémon games by contrast partly because the older games at least have the courtesy to refer to the player character only by the name players choose for them, letting them detach from the player character if they wish; and the newer games at least make the process of relating to the player character more natural by letting players customize their characters to better represent how they wish to present within the game world.

But by far the worst case I have about it is with Zelda, because of how the series insists that Link is a one-for-one representation of the player: making him silent so that players can supposedly imagine what he says, and what his personality is like; coming from humble backgrounds so that players can imagine themselves being the underdog just like Link, triumphing despite not having any inherent advantages; his name (customizable in most entries, even those with Link in the name) is at least partly based on his role in connecting the player to the game; Eiji Aonuma even making the extremely audacious claim that they intended him to be gender neutral in various incarnations.

To which I will always quote the single reason why Romani insists Link should train with her to fight off the aliens in Majora’s Mask:

“You’re a boy, won’t you try?”

Breath of the Wild does break a lot of conventions regarding Link. Link’s chronological earliest appearance is after already having been knighted, with the Master Sword in his possession; his name is fixed, though that probably has more to do with the fact that cutscenes are fully voiced now; and his dialogue options display more character than ever, and even provides monologue at times (the Japanese and Korean scripts present the Adventure Log entirely from Link’s own point of view, in fact). In a lot of senses, Link is more of an autonomous character than ever before, and a lot of the snags in player/character incongruence that remain can be bypassed with how much choice Breath of the Wild provides.

So it feels all the more incongruent when an essential part of the Divine Beasts quest has Link thrown out from Gerudo Town for being male, only being allowed entry under the specific understanding that he engages in crossdressing, doing something he shouldn’t be doing. Comparing it to Super Mario Odyssey, where Mario literally only tries on (a version of) Peach’s wedding dress because he feels like it, and the only two responses he gets are a “You’re getting married and you didn’t tell me?!” from Luigi and a “You look amazing! Love the outfit!” from Bowser, it feels particularly out of touch by contrast.

You might have noticed I’ve referred to Link specifically as himself throughout this review without conflating him with me or you. Call it a nitpick, call it worse things, but this matters to me, you know?

I think Breath of the Wild is definitely going in a direction where I want to see the Zelda franchise going, and even as a snapshot of a work in progress, I’m hooked. It’s just that I think Zelda is capable of a lot more, and I think it’s capable of being even more meaningful to video games than it already has been in the past four years. I’m not worried about that. The sequel already looks like it’s checking a lot of boxes that I’m really excited about, so let’s wait and see.

I’m holding my breath, Nintendo. Your move.