The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

The Legend of Zelda series has always had a focus on exploration, and Breath of the Wild is no different. Its major selling point is that it is the most open game in the series since its debut on the NES, allowing the player to go wherever they like whenever they like. Breath of the Wild received quite a lot of praise upon release - and even still today - with many fans calling it their new favorite game of the series, or even their favorite game of all time. I've been a fan of the series myself for most of my life, and I have to say: it's not that good. That's not to say I hate Breath of the Wild or that I think it's bad, but it's certainly not "best game of all time" material.

Before I continue, I must mention that this review is going to be comprehensive, and Breath of the Wild is best experienced fresh with no prior knowledge. If this is something you're concerned with preserving, then leave this review with these parting words: Breath of the Wild is great for providing an environment in which to explore, but is good for little else, and the exploration comes with much tedium. Combat, story, and even dungeon-delving leave much to be desired. Now, if you're not concerned with playing the game without prior knowledge, read on, and I will explain my thoughts in greater detail.

First of all, let's go into detail about the game's strong suit: its world. Hyrule has never been more beautiful than it is in Breath of the Wild. The box art doesn't lie; that's what the game actually looks like at times. The game makes excellent use of colors in its environments, sky included, which make nearly every view picturesque. That's not even the aspect of Hyrule that has so many players enamored with the game, however; players are most enraptured by the sheer size of the game. Starting off, Breath of the Wild will lock you into a specific region until a certain point, and while this area is only a small portion of the land, it still leaves plenty of land to explore. I started a second playthrough to help me write notes for this review, and even in this considerably small tutorial area, I found myself still exploring, not knowing exactly what I'd find.

The amount of care that went into designing the world is also rather impressive. Plants and insects - which can be used for cooking and potion brewing respectively - are placed around the world in a way that makes sense, with some plants and insects only appearing or appearing more commonly in some regions over others. In addition, each area of Hyrule has its own climate, forcing the player to equip special armor pieces or apply temporary effects via food or potions. One moment, the climate could be fine, but the next, it could be getting cold because of how high up you're getting, or because you've entered a colder area of Hyrule. My favorite part of the world design is the towns that each of Hyrule's races have for themselves. Each one has a particular style to it and is built in different ways, which really sells the fact that each one was built around different cultures.

Of course, the game is not without a reason to explore. All throughout Hyrule are numerous items to collect: weapons, armor sets, Sheikah Towers that fill in regions of your map, Memories that fill in parts of the story, and the two major collectibles, Shrines and Korok Seeds. For everything nice I can say about each of these collectibles, I have something negative to say. Let's start with weapons. Unlike previous games, where Link is mostly limited to a longsword as his main weapon, Breath of the Wild gives Link three types of main weapons: longswords, broadswords, and spears, which all have a standard attack and a charge attack, and can be thrown at an enemy. In addition, Link can use bows, which have their own dedicated equip slot. To a similar extent, Link also has an equip slot for shields just as he always has, which he can shield-bash with to counter enemy attacks. However, Link can only use them in tandem with longswords; any other weapon must be put away first before Link with put up his shield. Furthermore, there are addition weapon sub-types, like Boomerangs, which are treated like longswords, and axes, which are treated as greatswords. While it's nice that Link has such diversity to his weapon set, these weapons don't last forever, as they have a finite amount of durability to them.

Weapon durability is a point of contention for many fans. Some fans claim that this is the developers' way of encouraging the player to use the Runes - Breath of the Wild's equivalent of traditional items - in creative ways to kill enemies without using weapons, or that it's a mechanic meant to encourage the use of all weapons rather than just the best or coolest weapons. Others, however, firmly believe that the durability of all the weapons in the game is too low, and that they break like they're made out of toothpicks and glue. I stand in the middle of this argument. I can see how people might say that the weapons are too fragile. They do break very often early on in the game, and it's really lame that even special weapons break after enough use. However, the mechanic did encourage me to use weapons I likely wouldn't have either because I had no choice, or because I was going with the flow of battle and stole it off of an enemy just to throw back in their face, breaking it immediately. What I don't understand is that why, in a game all about doing things how you like, there would exist a mechanic that actively discourages the player from using their favorite weapons all the time. Furthermore, this mechanic also discourages the player from using certain weapons at all. In my personal playthrough, I never used legendary weapons the first time around because I didn't know if I could ever get them back, and I also never used weapons that specialized in throw range because they effectively specialized in something that gets them destroyed immediately, and thus weren't as valuable to me as weapons that would deal more damage and last me more fights.

I also disagree with the idea that the player should actively avoid using their weapons as much as they can in favor of using the Runes instead. While there are many times where enemies can be preemptively attacked with nearby explosive barrels or metal objects that can be moved via the Magnesis Rune, these opportunities are not always present, and they don't secure kills later on in the game when enemies have more health. I wouldn't say that you outright can't or shouldn't try to end fights through other means, but it simply isn't practical for the average player.

The Great Plateau

Scenery 1

Scenery 2

Scenery 3

Speaking of which, let's talk about the Runes for a moment. Throughout the game, Link will receive several Runes that stand in the place of traditional equipable items. While they aren't too terribly different to what fans may be used too, they are more so concepts than full-fledged items; they're like spells, but not magical. The reason I call them "concepts" is that they're not as restrictive as past items have been, so their effectiveness relies on how you use them rather than what they actually do. Personally, I don't like the runes. They're cool, sure, but they just don't quite feel like proper items. They're hard to use against enemies, and no enemy has any sort of weakness to any particular Rune, so there's little point in trying. Link does get a Bomb Rune, but even that is terribly under-powered, likely due to them being infinite, which makes them less satisfying to use.

Armor sets are thankfully a different story from weapons, but unfortunately, it's a similar story to Runes. Link can equip three pieces of armor, one on his head, chest, and legs, with each one providing a different level of defense and some sort of passive attribute. Unlike weapons, armor pieces never break, and they can be upgraded to increase their defense stat. Eventually, the player will even be allowed to dye armor pieces, which gives the player a rather large amount of customization options for Link's appearance. Now, here come the negatives: because of the game's difficulty balance, there is a constant nagging demand for high defense numbers, which can be hard to keep up with. In addition, the temperature mechanic can often force the player into specific armor sets that negate the extreme conditions, and said sets of armor have lower possible defense stats than other sets. Thus, the player will be forced into having a lower defense stat simply because of the climate.

To my disappointment, most of the armor attributes are simply reductions, increases, or negations applied to certain effects, such as an increase to Link's swim speed or reduced damage from electric attacks. There is a single piece of armor that gives Link an outright new ability, which got my hopes up for more armor pieces like this. While this isn't a true flaw counted against the game, I must say that it's very disappointing that nearly all of the armor pieces only give Link new stats. It feels like a missed opportunity to me.

Another thing I found myself disappointed with is the dungeons, or perhaps, lack thereof. Rather than having traditional dungeons, Breath of the Wild strays from the formula to try out two new concepts: Shrines and Divine Beasts. As mentioned previously, Shrines are one of the major collectibles and are one of the biggest reasons to explore. Shrines play out like this: in your travels, you may stumble across the entrance to a Shrine. Activating it will both mark it as a fast-travel point and open its gate to allow you to enter via an elevator. Once inside, you will be placed inside what is effectively an Aperture Science testing chamber - a puzzle completely isolated from the rest of the world and any other puzzle. Completing the Shrine will reward you with a Spirit Orb - in addition to any sorts of other treasure you may find inside. Spirit Orbs are used in sets of four to increase Link's maximum health or stamina, so this is effectively your motivation to find and complete as many Shrines as you can.

Armors

Great Fairy

Lost Woods

Link Demands a Reward

Celebration

While the puzzles inside of these Shrines are all fairly well done, I dislike the Shrines themselves. Because of their design, there is a complete disconnect between a vast majority of the game's puzzles and the environment that they take place in. They don't feel as natural as they do in other games; they're just puzzles that are there because reasons. This is made especially so because they all have the same interior visual design. I once spent so long inside a Shrine trying to solve its puzzle that I was surprised by the outside terrain because I forgot I was in that area.

The issue here isn't the copy-paste nature of the Shrines, but rather how blatant it is. Bethesda uses Lego-esq pieces to build the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games - or at least, the more recent ones - but the reason they can get away with it is how the reuse these pieces. You could be exploring a Nordic ruin in Skyrim one moment and suddenly find yourself in a cave the next, or you could be going through a cave and suddenly find yourself in Dwarven ruins. Breath of the Wild hides no such surprises in its Shrines; you go into a Shrine, you find nothing but more Shrine. Like I said before, the puzzles within are always good, but it's disappointing that the same interior design is used for every single one of the 120 Shrines in the game. You see one, you've seen them all.

Divine Beasts are similar, but not exactly so. They are more like traditional dungeons, but more open than that. Every Divine Beast is a giant, well, beast that is also a mobile dungeon. Each one has a quest line that deals with gaining access to it, since they all have some sort of defense system that prevents one from simply walking right in. Once inside, the player must activate several Terminals to gain access to the boss. Immediately, one of the traits that the Divine Beasts have over Shrines should become apparent: you can see outside. Two of them even resume patrolling their environments once you've entered them. The simple fact that you can see outside helps the Divine Beasts feel more natural than the Shrines do. Even if all of the Divine Beasts share the same interior design, it's a slight improvement that they actually feel like parts of the world rather than cells that the game loads.

The Divine Beasts also have a trait that makes them both better than Shrines and a little bit more interesting that more traditional dungeons: command over the beast. Before you can activate any Terminals, you must gain control over the beast by activating its Guidance Stone. This also gives you a 3D map of the beast, complete with markers for the Terminals, and also allows you to control some part of the Divine Beast. For example, Vah Rudania is a Divine Beast modeled after a lizard. Activating its Guidance Stone will give the player control over its position in Death Mountain, allowing the player to rotate the entire dungeon 90 digrees. While this idea is cool, I find that ultimately it over-complicates some puzzles and creates an unnecessary need to pop in and out of the map screen - an issue rather similar to the problem many fans have with the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. Overall, the focus on openness is what kills the Divine Beasts for me. Much like Shrines, they don't feel like actual dungeons, but rather a series of puzzles that need to be solved to make progress. This is especially the case for two reasons: the goal being to activate several Terminals, which feels video-gamey; and the supreme openness of the whole game undermining the overall importance of the Divine Beasts themselves, since they aren't required at all to beat the game, and have little to no importance to the story unfolding under the player's control.

Three of my favorite places in Breath of the Wild were the optional labyrinths. Not because they were particularly spectacular, but because they felt like traditional fantasy dungeons. These labyrinths were exactly that; labyrinths - mazes with huge walls that contain enemies and potential treasure alike. Unfortunately, there are only three of these in the whole game, and not many more places like them. Breath of the Wild has a disappointing lack of optional dungeons - or really any sort of dungeon-esq interiors that aren't Shrines. Again, going back to the Skyrim comparison, where that game rewards exploration with decently varied interiors to explore - such as caves, Nordic and Dwarven ruins, forts, and any mix of such - Breath of the Wild rewards exploration the exact same way; with a Shrine. Even the aforementioned labyrinths and other similar places inevitably bring the player to a Shrine, if nothing else but to give the player a single treasure chest and one of many Spirit Orbs. No secret items, no optional Runes, and rarely ever anything that the player couldn't find elsewhere.

Because of this lack of unique locations to explore, the overworld felt really empty to me. Rather than feeling like Hyrule was a massive land packed with lots of adventure to be had and discoveries to be made, it felt like a large field with busywork strewn about, as if it were a more scenic, thematically diverse version of the Great Sea from Wind Waker. Anything of relevance is doted about the land, with very little in between; but even the Great Sea had a sense of discovery to everything it had, evoking feelings of excitement whenever something comes into view. In some ways, this sense of emptiness makes the collectibles feel even smaller and worthless. Practically every collectible is just one of hundreds, completely undermining its value and disrespecting the amount of time the player spent gathering them. Korok Seeds are easily the biggest offended in this regard; they're used to expand Link's weapon, shield, and bow inventories, with the cost going up after each expansion. Why does it do that, you may wonder? It's because there's 900 of them, of course! They have to make you need them somehow - even though you only actually need around half of them. Korok Seeds are not fun to collect because of the size of Hyrule in relation to the size of what you need to interact with to obtain them. To find them all, you either need a guide, or you need to scour every single inch of Hyrule. Every. Single. Inch.

It doesn't help that there are certain types of terrain that can make scouring every inch of Hyrule more tedious than fun: high cliff walls that must be slowly scaled, molten lava that is impassable on foot, and water, which may as well be lava in some instances. Even simple fields can be annoying to traverse thanks in tandem to Link's slow on-foot travel speed and the vast amounts of space left between content. Of course, there's always the option to ride a horse, but you may often need to abandon your horse to climb a cliff or glide across a chasm in an attempt to scour the land for its numerous collectibles, and thanks to the ridiculously short horse call range, getting back to it is a pain, which is why I found myself frequently abandoning my horses in my playthough of the game. Furthermore, the whether also makes exploration tedious - not just the extreme temperatures that some locations have, but rain and thunderstorms, too. Rain makes surfaces wet, causing Link to frequently slip, losing both his climbing progress and a chunk of his stamina too (on top of the stamina spent to make the progress lost). Thunderstorms, which not only bring rain with them, also bring a chance of metal weapons and crates being struck by lightning, forcing the player to equip wooden weapons lest they risk being struck themselves. It would've been nice if there were some way to control the weather or reduce your chances of slipping from wet surfaces, but sadly, there just isn't. There is nothing to make climbing in the rain easier, and the only way to change the weather is to wait it out by using a campfire - which requires a dry place to light the fire.

Now we've come to the final part of the game to critique: the story - spoilers inbound, obviously. Much like everything else, I have little nice to say about it and mostly negative things to say. First, the nice: this game's incarnation of Princess Zelda is one of - if not the - most developed incarnations of the character the series has ever had. Now for the bad: Zelda is the only character in the entire game who gets any development. The main story mostly focuses on Zelda and her troubles, so the other main characters fall to the wayside. This is made worse by the fact that the Champions are all dead prior to the events of the game, which makes it hard to grow attached to them, thus diminishing the impact of their deaths and making them less valuable as parts of the story. Sure, there's always the memories - literally, clips of the past are viewed through Link's memories - but they just don't help enough. The story as a whole is almost entirely all in the past, and the player mostly just gets to witness the aftermath. Part of what makes storytelling in games unique from other mediums is involvement in the story. Breath of the Wild lack that involvement, at least in terms of character deaths. I'd be lying if I said that was the whole game, though, since each of the Divine Beasts are causing troubles that can be solved by the player, but that's about it. Any other sort of story in the game is not nearly developed enough to be any interesting or meaningful.

It's quite a shame that for such a large game, there is so little going on in it. There are no real side stories, and very little environmental storytelling. To compare to Fallout once more, that series packs many different stories in its games - both big stories and little ones. Fallout 4, for example, does what Breath of the Wild tried to do with its story but actually succeeds at it. It's main story involves the player getting cryogenically frozen for 200 years after nuclear war begins. This somewhat parallels Breath of the Wild's story in that Link is put in a recovery chamber for 100 years after Hyrule gets decimated by Ganon. The difference is, however, that Fallout 4's main story isn't mainly in the past, and in addition, has several side stories to discover. Not only does Fallout 4 have side story lines, it also has many stories tied to locations that aren't even tied to quests. I would never say that every game should be the same, but for a game of its size, Breath of the Wild really doesn't offer a whole lot in the way of story content - even when compared to previous entries in the series like Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess.

As much as I wish it weren't so, I have to give Breath of the Wild a 3 out of 5. The game has a lot of really good design decisions that are weighed down by some near equally questionable or outright bad design decisions. The game's attention to detail is a double edged sword that it frequently cuts itself on. In some ways, I feel like the abandonment of the series formula in favor of something more open was a bad idea. I feel that it resulted in the game's lifeblood being drained out. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of awe to discover, but it also has a lot of crap to find as well - 900 pieces of crap, to be precise. Ultimately, whether or not you should buy this game depends on your patience and tolerance for tedium. Does your desire for exploration outweigh your tolerance for tedium?

(Screenshots were capture in the Switch's Handheld mode and thus may not represent the quality of the game's graphics while Docked.)

Box Art Source - Zelda Wiki: https://zelda.gamepedia.com/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Breath_of_the_Wild