Game Review: ゼルダの伝説：ブレス オブ ザ ワイルド
2019-May-23, Thursday 21:05![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
This is it. The end of the road. The final step on the journey.
I replayed the original Legend of Zelda on a whim after beating Dracula's Curse, to see if it was a fluke or not and whether I really could play games in Japanese. Once Breath of the Wild was announced at E3 2016, that was when I came up with the plan to play as many Legend of Zelda games as I could on the way up to its release. Originally, I thought I would just play up to Ocarina of Time. Then, I thought I would play up to Twilight Princess. And once I got that far, I figured, why not see it all the way through?
Of course, it meant that it took me until almost a year and a half after the game came out before I got to it, and then seven months playing on and off to beat it, while I beat seven other games in the same time (including Darkest Dungeon, which itself took me 70 hours). All told, one third of the total time I spent playing Legend of Zelda to this point was spent playing Breath of the Wild, which took me 180 hours, compared to 365 for all other Zelda games combined.
But the thing is, I was having fun the whole time. That's a miracle for any game, and especially for a Zelda game after the series had gone in the direction of Skyward Sword and Tri Force Heroes. The games had taken the Ocarina of Time formula about as far as it could be taken and were getting increasingly ossified, and required something drastic to shake them up and provide something new and exciting. And, well. They delivered.
The Japanese is just a transliteration of the English "Breath of the Wild."
It even looks like a Ghibli title piece.
There are two stars of Breath of the Wild, and the first is the world.
There's a great YouTube video about how Studio Ghibli inspired Breath of the Wild, but it's pretty obvious from the first glimpse of the world. It's mostly lush, unspoiled nature with birds flying through the sky, deer and squirrels and foxes in the forests, and plants everywhere. Every sunrise and sunset bathes the land in red-gold light, and I took probably hundreds of screenshots from the top of buildings, or mountains, or from the eastern shore of Hyrule when the sun was coming up out of the ocean. I took over ten thousand screenshots of this game. It's gorgeous.
The food also looks great, the way it does in every Ghibli movie, and some fans are making a Legend of Zelda cookbook that very carefully avoids mentioning the series in any way.
The terrain is varied, from the plains of Hyrule Field in the center of the map, crawling with Guardians and the shadow-shrouded ruin of Hyrule Castle, to the jungles of Firōne giving way to tropical beaches in the south, to the slopes of Death Mountain riddled with pools of lava, to the mountain aeries of the Rito. The Zora Homeland is full of flowing water and unique, coral-derived flora, and the trackless Gerudo desert, where the days are burning hot and the nights are freezing cold, is choked with sandstorms except for a few spots where life clings to water buried beneath the sands.
I remember when I first found Lake Hylia, spanned by an enormous crumbling bridge, islands dotting its waters, and saw the enormous form of Furodora (Eng: Farosh) climbing into the sky out of the waters. "What is that?" I thought. "Do I have to fight that? Are they like the Skyward Sword dragons, or the dragon boss from the original Legend of Zelda?"
I spent ninety hours exploring Hyrule, walking over every nook and cranny, exploring and fighting and solving puzzles, before I ever engaged the main quest, and I had fun for every one of them.
Two shrines, something on that hill in the center, the hills to the left, and in the distance, a flying mystery.
I was able to do this because Breath of the Wild avoids both of the common problems with open world games: either overwhelming the player with content or nothing mattering. Like the Assassin's Creed games, there are towers that Link can climb to reveal the map and surrounding terrain, but unlike Assassin's Creed, the terrain is all that's revealed. If there's somewhat that looks interesting, or that looks plot-important, it's up to the player to find where it is and mark it on the map themselves. There's no chance of feeling like there's too much to do because almost all goals are player-directed.
And it's not just the towers that are climbable. One of the biggest aspects of Breath of the Wild I remember people talking about when it came out was that Link could climb everything--trees, cliffs, snowy mountains, enemies, sheer castle walls, everything. That means there's always an incentive to climb to the top of something and see what else is out there, and Nintendo designed the game to take advantage of that impulse. Climb a hill and there might be something up there, like a korogu seed or a treasure chest. And from the hill there might be a shrine visible, or an interesting terrain feature like the mushroom forest in Seres Field or the statues of the ancient warriors in the Eastern Gerudo Ruins, or a camp of enemies. There's always something to find.
Link's Sheikah Stone (Eng: Sheikah Slate) was obviously designed to be the WiiU gamepad back when Breath of the Wild was a WiiU game, but its presence provides a diagetic method for marking up the map, looking through it like a telescope, and marking distant locations. In addition to the map markers, it's possible to set beacons that shine light into the air by looking at that location through the telescope mode, so it's easy to see an interesting feature, mark it, check the map and see how far and in what direction it is, and then decide how best to get there.
There are roads running all through the game, but I almost never followed them until I had already explored everywhere else. I was too busy running through fields, climbing trees and mountains, fording rivers, and otherwise getting lost in the wilderness. And later, when I caught a horse and rode it around the map, I found things by the roads that I had completely missed due to my tendency to strike off into the wilds. Exploration was always rewarded.
How many bodies lie here, with no grave to mark them?
The land of Hyrule has obviously suffered some terrible fate, but it's hard to tell that from the surface. For people in the West, raised on ideas of nuclear winter or global warming as the most likely apocalypse, and with imagery drawn from Mad Max and Fallout, the verdant landscapes of Hyrule seem serene in comparison. And they are, and honestly it's a bit jarring.
Throughout my travels through Hyrule, I found seven cities: the homelands of the four allied tribes of the Gerudo, the Gorons, the Rito, and the Zora; the Hylian towns of Hateno (from 果て hate, "uttermost end, extremity") and Uotorī (from 魚取り uotori, "fishing," Eng: Lurelin"); and the Sheikah town of Kakariko. But throughout the landscape are dozens of other ruins, some quite extensive. And when I finally snuck past the Guardians and entered Hyrule Castle Town, I found it utterly devastated, with barely a single stone standing on another. When I visited the ruins of Akkare Fortress in the northeast, I found a man named Nerufin (Eng: Nell) who was staring at the ruins, watching the Guardians patrol the skies around it, and told Link:
Well, unless that warrior is chosen by the Goddess, anyway.
I couldn't help but think of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and the Ghibli connections when I was wandering around post-Calamity Hyrule. Both works feature a post-apocalyptic world with a small habitable area and a larger area given over to uninhabited wilderness, and while in Nausicaä another disaster occurs that kills off one entire nation and nearly everyone in it, the tone of the manga never descends into despair. Studio Ghibli, and Nintendo, aren't about despair. New life blossoms in the aftermath of the Calamity, and on the borders, the people of Hyrule survive.
Happier times.
If the first star of Breath of the Wild is the world itself and what Link does as you're climbing all over, picking up rocks looking for korogu seeds, or firing your last fire arrow at an exploding barrel so you can run in and grab a weapon before the bokoblins do, the second is Princess Zelda. Zelda has been in almost all of the games--it's her legend, after all--but to a greater or lesser degree. In Spirit Tracks she followed Link through the whole game, whereas in Twilight Princess she was barely part of the game at all. She doesn't appear in person until the very end of Breath of the Wild, but almost the entire story is about her.
When Link awakens from the Shrine of Resurrection, he remembers almost nothing. The ghost of King Rhoam has to explain the basics of the threat Ganon poses, the fall of Hyrule, and his mission. Recovering the rest of Link's memories occurs during gameplay. Since Link himself is still a silent protagonist, Zelda appears in almost all of the memories and has most of the lines, and it's her character that gets all the development.
Born a descendant of the Goddess, Zelda was the heir to the power to seal the darkness. She was raised on the legend of the first Calamity ten thousand years ago, where the Hero, wielding the sword of evil's bane, and the Princess, wielding the power to seal the darkness, fought together with champions of the four tribes who controlled powerful mechanical vehicles called Divine Beasts (神獣 shinjū) and with autonomous artifacts called Guardians, to defeat Ganon. When the signs indicate that Ganon will return, Zelda is sent to the four tribes to gather champions once again and the Kingdom of Hyrule begins a study into the Sheikah relics littered around Hyrule that might provide a clue to controlling the Guardians. Though Zelda's primary interest is in the Sheikah relics, her father insists she pray and devote herself to unlocking the power to seal the darkness, since her mother died before Zelda was old enough to learn from her. Eventually, in the face of her continued failure, her father forbids her to study Sheikah technology at all and orders her to devote all her time to prayer and contemplation to unlock her power, and reluctantly she agrees.
By the time Ganon returns, she still doesn't know how to unlock her powers, so the champions spring into action. They call on their divine beasts and battle Ganon--but without the power to seal the darkness, the Calamity is too strong. Its Malice (怨念 on'nen) corrupts and suborns the Divine Beasts and the Guardians, turning them against the people of Hyrule, and the Kingdom of Hyrule, with its shining castle and its armies, its towns and research centers, and along with almost all of its people, is utterly destroyed.
Despair.
There's a memory where Link and Zelda are fleeing, injured and alone through a forest along the Hylia River, when Zelda stumbles and falls. Link goes back for her, and Zelda says:
That last line she says is in causative tense, and the thing about Japanese is that causative tense can refer to permission--"I let them die"--but as the name indicates, it can also refer to being the source of the action--"I caused their deaths."
As speedrunners have shown, it's possible to leave the Great Plateau, go straight to Hyrule Castle and defeat Ganon. There's a memory where Link is still alive, albeit gravely injured, after having defeated dozens of Guardians. He and the champions might have been able to defeat Ganon by themselves.
But without Zelda's power, Ganon would have returned. Ganon always returns. Its singleminded devotion to reincarnation is evident in the Red Moon (赤き月 akaki tsuki, Eng: "Blood Moon"), which returns the spirits of defeated enemies to their bodies again and prevents the surviving people of Hyrule from ever fully retaking their land, and the comments Zelda makes after its defeat that its overwhelming need to return is what caused it to rampage out of control.
The people of Hyrule know this too, and they clearly see the power to seal the darkness as the true determinant of the right to rule. King Rhoam tells Zelda that in the castle, the people call her "the defective princess" (出来損ないの姫, dekisokonai no hime), and when Link finds her diary in the ruins of Hyrule Castle, there's one passage that reads:
I didn't create those flames. This battle ended poorly for me.
In many ways, Breath of the Wild is a remake of the original Legend of Zelda with modern design sensibilities and scope. Both games take place in a post-apocalypse, with civilization on the fringes. Both games encourage experimentation and exploration over having a guided path the way later Zelda games like Skyward Sword did. And both games aren't afraid to kill Link.
I died plenty of times playing the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II, but after that I'm not sure I ever died in a Legend of Zelda game until Breath of the Wild. The ability to carry a fairy or potions, systems like the defense elixir in Skyward Sword, all of it made Zelda games easier and easier as time went on. But Breath of the Wild wasn't afraid to kill Link without warning. I died over a dozen times in the starting plateau, and then died repeatedly throughout the rest of the game. I blew myself up with bombs, I was ambushed by lizalfos, I drowned, I froze to death, I fell from a great height, I was smashed flat by a hinox club, I was blown to pieces by a Guardian laser...just a progression of deaths. It lessened as it went on, and Link gained ways to avoid it, including the trusty fairy in a bottle (without which my death count would be a couple dozen higher than it was), but it was never entirely absent.
This never bothered me partially because I've already played Dark Souls, but mostly because Breath of the Wild has an autosave that's constantly running in the background. No death ever took me more than a couple minutes' back, and sometimes it returned me to moments before. I was far more willing to experiment and try different things when I knew that only penalty I would pay was a couple minutes of time. Unlike Dark Souls, there's no chance to permanently affect the game by taking actions without knowing the consequences. Link is the Hero chosen by the Goddess--he's not going to turn evil and start murdering merchants, and while he can set everything on fire, it's not possible to burn down the Lost Woods. Fail a physics puzzle? The solution is to leave and come back. It'll be reset when you return.
People talk about choice and consequences in games, and those are important. But the easy availability of guides means that often when players are confronted with an important decision, they'll spoil everything about that decision in order to avoid making the "wrong" choice. I've done it. Maybe you have too. The Legend of Zelda series has never really had choice and consequences at all, and often that's been considered a bad thing. But with Breath of the Wild it's part of the spirit of experimentation, that no choice the player makes is irrevocable, and that's part of the reason I explored every inch of Hyrule before I even thought of continuing on the main quest.
It's been a hundred years since the downfall of Hyrule. They can wait a few more weeks.
Holding back the tide.
In most Legend of Zelda games, there's a group of long puzzle-filled dungeons and each dungeon provides a tool, like the slingshot, the magic jar (Eng: gust bellows), the whip, the bow, the boomerang, etc. Solving the dungeon requires using that dungeon's tool, and afterwards the tools are more or less useful. The bow is always useful, the chain hammer is good for killing ReDeads and not much else, and the lantern is good in the dark. Link gradually increases his capabilities over the course of the game, which means that there's a set progression of dungeons and content. A Link to the Past even helpfully numbers the dungeons on the map.
Breath of the Wild completely overturns that. After finding the Sheikah Stone, Link is told to explore four shrines on the Great Plateau, each of which gives him a new capability: Magnicatch (Eng: Magnesis), Remote-Control Bomb (Eng: Remote Bomb), Ice Maker (Eng: Cryonis), and Vitalock (eng: Stasis). All of these are useable freely, with no limit other than short cooldowns. That means that Link has infinite bombs for the entire game, and I definitely took full advantage of that to bomb everything I possibly could.
These are the only tools Link has for the majority of the game, and so there are no real dungeons. Instead of long dungeons, Hyrule has 120 smaller shrines, each of which has a single puzzle or mystery to solve. One shrine involves using the two types of remote-control bomb simultaneously to trigger switches and reach a door. One shrine requiers Link to hit a ball into a hole with a hammer, controlled using the Switch's motion controls. Two shrines at the Twin Peaks (Eng: Dueling Peaks) are paired, with the solution to one found in the other. One shrine involves transporting a blue flame from torch to torch to reach the end, and one has Link carry a block of ice through a bunch of flames without melting it. One shrine requires building a moving stairway using ice maker pillars and metal boxes moved with magnicatch.
That last shrine is one of the most memorable for me, because it shows the versatility of Breath of the Wild's physics system and tools. After ten frustrating minutes of trying to climb the wall and repeatedly failing the timing of raising the metal box, using vitalock on it to stop it, and then making an ice pillar to hold it up higher, eventually I used vitalock on a metal pillar, smashed it a bunch to build up momentum, then detonated a bomb under it to change the direction of the momentum to straight up. It launched Link into the air and I used the parasail to glide over to the door. Victory.
There's a shrine with a maze like the old children's game Labyrinth, requiring motion controls to navigate a ball through without dropping it into a hole or getting it stuck, and I beat it by flipping the entire maze over and rolling the ball to the end. There are shrines involving electricity puzzles that can be easily overcome by dropping metal weapons and using them to complete a circuit. Link can't climb walls in shrines, but it's possible to use bomb shield surfing to jump high into the air and then glide to the end. Breath of the Wild embraces the open-ended consequences of its tools and physics engine and allows players to find their own way to accomplish their goals.
If you completely hate motion controls, you can always ragdoll bomb yourself over the wall into the goal. Or use shield surfing as a kind of double-jump. After all, if the Hero chosen by the Goddess is willing to put in that much effort to circumvent the trails, isn't that simply another way of overcoming the trials?
Do do do dooooo
In contrast to the very limited number of tools that Link obtains in Breath of the Wild, in a first for the Legend of Zelda series, there is a dizzying variety of weapons and armor to wear. Link starts off grabbing a fallen tree branch and picks up broken swords, discarded weapons from the Hyrule Army, ancient Sheikah technology, enchanted spears that freeze those they strike, brooms, rakes, and the Master Sword, the blade of evil's bane. There's a similarly-large variety of bows, shields, and armor to be found, bought, stolen, or looted across the land of Hyrule. And don't get attached to any of the weapon because they break.
Armor doesn't break, fortunately. That would have been infuriating. But one of the most controversial aspects of the the game is weapon durability. There's no way to repair weapons and most weapons break in a battle or less, so constantly switching weapons is a core aspect of the game. In contrast to the four tools, there's no attachment to any of the weapons. There were battles where I'd charge into a bokoblin camp, kill the first one and have my weapon break, pick up the axe the first bokoblin dropped, drop a bomb and send the others flying, throw the axe at one that was just getting up and knock him down a hill...when perfectly orchestrated it was like a sequence from Superhot. When imperfectly orchestrated the soundtrack might as well have changed to Yakety Sax as I dropped a bomb and blew myself up, or set everything on fire, or my perfect stealth approach was spotted and I ran away with a whole camp of lizalfos chasing me
, but I was never frustrated.
If there were any weapons that were unbreakable, or if it were possible to make weapons unbreakable, the whole system would fall apart. Even the Master Sword isn't unbreakable in Breath of the Wild--its power was drained in the Calamity a hundred years ago and so it sometimes fails and needs to recharge. Even completing all of the Trials of the Sword, while greatly increasing the Master Sword's power and durability, doesn't make it everlasting. Previous games had the Master Sword and perhaps a couple predecessor swords and that was all Link ever used. Even at the end, when I spent 95% of my time using the Master Sword, I still kept a variety of weapons around for when the Master Sword's power ran out. And of course, there's no indestructible bow, and I didn't learn about the near-indestructible shield until almost the very end of the game.
I went through a lot of shields parrying--or more often, failing to parry--Guardian lasers.
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I don't often get emotional in Legend of Zelda games. It's only happened twice that I can think of. Once is during the opening theme and intro cutscene of Wind Waker. The other is during Breath of the Wild.
There's one memory, the second-to-last, where Zelda and Link are alone. Link is mortally wounded after having defeated dozens of Guardians by himself, but there are still more Guardians looking for them. Zelda, having spent years uselessly praying and having watched her friends, family, and entire kingdom die, urges Link to run and save himself, and then a Guardian finds them. It looms over them and then lurches forward as its primary weapon focuses on Link. And Zelda, alone, weaponless, desperate, reaches out for anything that can possibly save the one person she cares about who is still alive, and as the Triforce blazes on her hand, she invokes the power to seal the darkness and purges Ganon's Malice from the Guardians.
There's a great short version of "Zelda's Lullaby" that plays as the Guardians collapse.
I originally wasn't a fan of the music in Breath of the Wild because a lot of it is understated piano, but 180 hours of constant driving Ocarina of Time Hyrule Field would have been far too much to handle. Understated piano actually worked really well, and there were a lot of callbacks to previous Zelda games. The Rito Village Theme invokes Wind Waker's Dragon Roost Island. The main Hyrule Field theme has an extremely-slow piano version of Zelda's Lullaby. The entering Hyrule Castle riff didn't play when I actually went to Hyrule Castle, but it did play in the memory that took place there.
My favorite piece is the dragon theme. Long after the first time I saw a dragon over Lake Hylia, I found a shrine in a waterfall and when I came out and stood outside, that theme kicked in. I looked around, confused, and then I looked up and saw Furodora flying majestically down the waterfall. I just stood and watched it undulate through the air, the sound of erhus filling my ears.
Then I got blasted with lightning, fell in the water, and died. Humans rarely come away from contact with divinity unscathed.
Mimoza (Eng: Moza): "Then I fry up all of my monster parts!"
Link: "...that sounds disgusting."
None of the other moments touched me quite the way those did, but there's so much that's memorable in Breath of the Wild. Most of the sidequests are pointless to do for the rewards, since they just offer a hundred rupees or a single gem, but they're worth it for the story.
The most extensive sidequest is building いちから村 (ichikara mura, "Starting-from-scratch Town," Eng: "Tarrey Town"). After Link buys a house in Hateno, one of the carpenters leaves to go to the Akkare Region to start his own town, and Link decides to help. He needs resources to build houses and people to populate the village, but due to union rules, he's only allowed to bring in people whose names end in ダ (da, Eng: -son). So he sends Link to scour the world for people who fit those rule and brings in more and more people until there's a new town in Hyrule. It's a little strange that they're not worried about the monsters roaming Hyrule and don't seem to have any guards, but really, no one in Hyrule is as worried as they should be by the Calamity. And in the end I helped another Gerudo find her vōi, so everything ended happily.
It's not a single sidequest, but all the encounters with Kasshīwa (Eng: Kass) were memorable. He's a traveling Rito bard who wanders the land, collecting experiences to try to finish the songs left to him by his mentor. Each encounter, he'll sing a song to Link that reveals some ancient secret, which is usually the entrance to a shrine. Whenever I heard the accordion music as I was traveling around Hyrule, I knew I was about to stumble on an old friend with a tale to tell.
Torotto (Eng: Trott), at one of the stables, loves meat and demands that Link sell him some. He also speaks in a bumpkin dialect and Link, proving that he does have a sense of humor, starts imitating him during the conversation, answering いいっス (ii ssu, something like "You betcha") when offering meat.
I wrote a whole post about Cid (Eng: Saidon) already.
In the Gerudo Town, there's a secret shop that requires a password to enter, and inside they sell clothing for men even though men are barred from entry to Gerudo Town. There's another quest to help a Gerudo child start a garden. There's a quest to find a descendant of Zelda's horse and bring it back to a stable. There's a quest, near the beginning of the game, to find a recipe of the Hyrulian royal family in the ruins of Hyrule Castle. I left that one to the end, but I've heard of people who snuck into the castle and got into all kinds of shenanigans within the first few hours of play.
And of course, the various travellers who talk about how beautiful the scenery and then say it would be more beautiful if it were red, or who ask Link if he likes bananas and then, when he answers no, fly into a homicidal rage. I love the Ganon-worshipping Yiga Clan's banana obsession, I love that they're nowhere near the jungle but have a banana shrine in their secret hideout, and I love how no reason for this is ever given. Some things are beyond the ken of even the Hero chosen by the Goddess.
R.I.P. Satoru Iwata
Even though it was almost eight months ago, one of my clearest memories of the game was when Link climbed to the top of the ruined Temple of Time on the Great Plateau and the ghost of King Rhoam Bosphoramus Hyrule explained what happened a century prior, why Link was asleep, and what he had to do to save Hyrule. Link, wearing tattered pants, a ragged shirt, and carrying a nicked sword and simple wooden shield, listened intently. And then a new quest popped up.
ガノン討伐 ganon tōbatsu, it said. "Defeat Ganon."
It took me a hundred and seventy hours to complete that quest, and when Link stood victorious on the field of battle, the last of Ganon's Malice purged by Zelda's power, another message popped up: ガノン討伐 COMPLETE. Breath of the Wild is very devoted to its systems.
There's so much more I could talk about. I've written thousands of words here and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of all this game has to offer. The musical sting that plays when a Guardian notices Link. The way horses automatically follow the roads, allowing you to view the terrain. サイハテノ島 (saihatenotō, "The Uttermost Island", Eng: "Eventide Island") and the way it strips all weapons and armor from Link and forces him to solve puzzles to get them back. The final battle against the Calamity. All the location callbacks to previous games, much like Super Mario Odyssey does for the Mario series.
Breath of the Wild is a game where the player can make their own fun and there is so much fun to be made. There's minimal story, but what story is there is well-told and mostly only available if people want to seek it out. This is my favorite Zelda, and the first Legend of Zelda game that I felt really deserved that name because it really was her story. This is my favorite Legend of Zelda game, hands down, and the best game I've played in years. I don't regret any of the time I spent wandering around Hyrule, starting fires, sneaking past moblins, throwing scavenged weapons at people, riding past travellers, and following in the footsteps of the champions.
Now, I just need Nintendo to use the same engine and make Breath of the Wild's Majora's Mask. I'd gladly play another 180 hours of this!
⏮ back to Legend of Zelda reviews index
I replayed the original Legend of Zelda on a whim after beating Dracula's Curse, to see if it was a fluke or not and whether I really could play games in Japanese. Once Breath of the Wild was announced at E3 2016, that was when I came up with the plan to play as many Legend of Zelda games as I could on the way up to its release. Originally, I thought I would just play up to Ocarina of Time. Then, I thought I would play up to Twilight Princess. And once I got that far, I figured, why not see it all the way through?
Of course, it meant that it took me until almost a year and a half after the game came out before I got to it, and then seven months playing on and off to beat it, while I beat seven other games in the same time (including Darkest Dungeon, which itself took me 70 hours). All told, one third of the total time I spent playing Legend of Zelda to this point was spent playing Breath of the Wild, which took me 180 hours, compared to 365 for all other Zelda games combined.
But the thing is, I was having fun the whole time. That's a miracle for any game, and especially for a Zelda game after the series had gone in the direction of Skyward Sword and Tri Force Heroes. The games had taken the Ocarina of Time formula about as far as it could be taken and were getting increasingly ossified, and required something drastic to shake them up and provide something new and exciting. And, well. They delivered.
The Japanese is just a transliteration of the English "Breath of the Wild."
It even looks like a Ghibli title piece.
There are two stars of Breath of the Wild, and the first is the world.
There's a great YouTube video about how Studio Ghibli inspired Breath of the Wild, but it's pretty obvious from the first glimpse of the world. It's mostly lush, unspoiled nature with birds flying through the sky, deer and squirrels and foxes in the forests, and plants everywhere. Every sunrise and sunset bathes the land in red-gold light, and I took probably hundreds of screenshots from the top of buildings, or mountains, or from the eastern shore of Hyrule when the sun was coming up out of the ocean. I took over ten thousand screenshots of this game. It's gorgeous.
The food also looks great, the way it does in every Ghibli movie, and some fans are making a Legend of Zelda cookbook that very carefully avoids mentioning the series in any way.
The terrain is varied, from the plains of Hyrule Field in the center of the map, crawling with Guardians and the shadow-shrouded ruin of Hyrule Castle, to the jungles of Firōne giving way to tropical beaches in the south, to the slopes of Death Mountain riddled with pools of lava, to the mountain aeries of the Rito. The Zora Homeland is full of flowing water and unique, coral-derived flora, and the trackless Gerudo desert, where the days are burning hot and the nights are freezing cold, is choked with sandstorms except for a few spots where life clings to water buried beneath the sands.
I remember when I first found Lake Hylia, spanned by an enormous crumbling bridge, islands dotting its waters, and saw the enormous form of Furodora (Eng: Farosh) climbing into the sky out of the waters. "What is that?" I thought. "Do I have to fight that? Are they like the Skyward Sword dragons, or the dragon boss from the original Legend of Zelda?"
I spent ninety hours exploring Hyrule, walking over every nook and cranny, exploring and fighting and solving puzzles, before I ever engaged the main quest, and I had fun for every one of them.
Two shrines, something on that hill in the center, the hills to the left, and in the distance, a flying mystery.
I was able to do this because Breath of the Wild avoids both of the common problems with open world games: either overwhelming the player with content or nothing mattering. Like the Assassin's Creed games, there are towers that Link can climb to reveal the map and surrounding terrain, but unlike Assassin's Creed, the terrain is all that's revealed. If there's somewhat that looks interesting, or that looks plot-important, it's up to the player to find where it is and mark it on the map themselves. There's no chance of feeling like there's too much to do because almost all goals are player-directed.
And it's not just the towers that are climbable. One of the biggest aspects of Breath of the Wild I remember people talking about when it came out was that Link could climb everything--trees, cliffs, snowy mountains, enemies, sheer castle walls, everything. That means there's always an incentive to climb to the top of something and see what else is out there, and Nintendo designed the game to take advantage of that impulse. Climb a hill and there might be something up there, like a korogu seed or a treasure chest. And from the hill there might be a shrine visible, or an interesting terrain feature like the mushroom forest in Seres Field or the statues of the ancient warriors in the Eastern Gerudo Ruins, or a camp of enemies. There's always something to find.
Link's Sheikah Stone (Eng: Sheikah Slate) was obviously designed to be the WiiU gamepad back when Breath of the Wild was a WiiU game, but its presence provides a diagetic method for marking up the map, looking through it like a telescope, and marking distant locations. In addition to the map markers, it's possible to set beacons that shine light into the air by looking at that location through the telescope mode, so it's easy to see an interesting feature, mark it, check the map and see how far and in what direction it is, and then decide how best to get there.
There are roads running all through the game, but I almost never followed them until I had already explored everywhere else. I was too busy running through fields, climbing trees and mountains, fording rivers, and otherwise getting lost in the wilderness. And later, when I caught a horse and rode it around the map, I found things by the roads that I had completely missed due to my tendency to strike off into the wilds. Exploration was always rewarded.
How many bodies lie here, with no grave to mark them?
The land of Hyrule has obviously suffered some terrible fate, but it's hard to tell that from the surface. For people in the West, raised on ideas of nuclear winter or global warming as the most likely apocalypse, and with imagery drawn from Mad Max and Fallout, the verdant landscapes of Hyrule seem serene in comparison. And they are, and honestly it's a bit jarring.
Throughout my travels through Hyrule, I found seven cities: the homelands of the four allied tribes of the Gerudo, the Gorons, the Rito, and the Zora; the Hylian towns of Hateno (from 果て hate, "uttermost end, extremity") and Uotorī (from 魚取り uotori, "fishing," Eng: Lurelin"); and the Sheikah town of Kakariko. But throughout the landscape are dozens of other ruins, some quite extensive. And when I finally snuck past the Guardians and entered Hyrule Castle Town, I found it utterly devastated, with barely a single stone standing on another. When I visited the ruins of Akkare Fortress in the northeast, I found a man named Nerufin (Eng: Nell) who was staring at the ruins, watching the Guardians patrol the skies around it, and told Link:
いわばここはハイラル王国が滅んだ最後の地だThere's a bit of a thematic clash between the portrayals of the Calamity, where tens of thousands of people died and the land of Hyrule was shattered into a handful of independent towns, with the lands in between crawling with monsters and the ruins left uncleared a hundred years later because it is far too dangerous to enter them, and the way that life seems to actually work in the modern era of the game. People travel the roads alone all the time, or go into the forest for mushrooms, or go treasure hunting in ruins. There's a network of stables, indicating enough horse traffic that they're profitable. There are Gerudo women looking for boyfriends in all corners of Hyrule, and while the Gerudo are fierce warriors, there are camps of lizalfos and blins near some of the major roads that could easily defeat a lone warrior just through sheer numbers.
"You could say that this place was the last part of the Kingdom of Hyrule to fall."
Well, unless that warrior is chosen by the Goddess, anyway.
I couldn't help but think of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and the Ghibli connections when I was wandering around post-Calamity Hyrule. Both works feature a post-apocalyptic world with a small habitable area and a larger area given over to uninhabited wilderness, and while in Nausicaä another disaster occurs that kills off one entire nation and nearly everyone in it, the tone of the manga never descends into despair. Studio Ghibli, and Nintendo, aren't about despair. New life blossoms in the aftermath of the Calamity, and on the borders, the people of Hyrule survive.
Happier times.
If the first star of Breath of the Wild is the world itself and what Link does as you're climbing all over, picking up rocks looking for korogu seeds, or firing your last fire arrow at an exploding barrel so you can run in and grab a weapon before the bokoblins do, the second is Princess Zelda. Zelda has been in almost all of the games--it's her legend, after all--but to a greater or lesser degree. In Spirit Tracks she followed Link through the whole game, whereas in Twilight Princess she was barely part of the game at all. She doesn't appear in person until the very end of Breath of the Wild, but almost the entire story is about her.
When Link awakens from the Shrine of Resurrection, he remembers almost nothing. The ghost of King Rhoam has to explain the basics of the threat Ganon poses, the fall of Hyrule, and his mission. Recovering the rest of Link's memories occurs during gameplay. Since Link himself is still a silent protagonist, Zelda appears in almost all of the memories and has most of the lines, and it's her character that gets all the development.
Born a descendant of the Goddess, Zelda was the heir to the power to seal the darkness. She was raised on the legend of the first Calamity ten thousand years ago, where the Hero, wielding the sword of evil's bane, and the Princess, wielding the power to seal the darkness, fought together with champions of the four tribes who controlled powerful mechanical vehicles called Divine Beasts (神獣 shinjū) and with autonomous artifacts called Guardians, to defeat Ganon. When the signs indicate that Ganon will return, Zelda is sent to the four tribes to gather champions once again and the Kingdom of Hyrule begins a study into the Sheikah relics littered around Hyrule that might provide a clue to controlling the Guardians. Though Zelda's primary interest is in the Sheikah relics, her father insists she pray and devote herself to unlocking the power to seal the darkness, since her mother died before Zelda was old enough to learn from her. Eventually, in the face of her continued failure, her father forbids her to study Sheikah technology at all and orders her to devote all her time to prayer and contemplation to unlock her power, and reluctantly she agrees.
By the time Ganon returns, she still doesn't know how to unlock her powers, so the champions spring into action. They call on their divine beasts and battle Ganon--but without the power to seal the darkness, the Calamity is too strong. Its Malice (怨念 on'nen) corrupts and suborns the Divine Beasts and the Guardians, turning them against the people of Hyrule, and the Kingdom of Hyrule, with its shining castle and its armies, its towns and research centers, and along with almost all of its people, is utterly destroyed.
Despair.
There's a memory where Link and Zelda are fleeing, injured and alone through a forest along the Hylia River, when Zelda stumbles and falls. Link goes back for her, and Zelda says:
私のせいです！わたしが今までして来た事は、何の役にも立たなかった！だから大切な人たちを、民を、仲間を、お父様を、死なせてしまった！And the tragedy is that she's not entirely wrong. It's true that without her mother's teaching she had no way of learning how to access her powers. It's true that she was still a child, only seventeen when Ganon returned. But it's also true that without the power to seal the darkness, all the other preparations that Hyrule took were worthless. Some of them were actively detrimental--unearthing the Guardians allowed them to run amok and slaughter most of Hyrule's defenses, and the Divine Beasts couldn't have been turned against Hyrule if they were never activated.
"It's my fault! Everything that I've done until now, all of it was pointless! Everyone I value the most, my people, my friends, my father, I let them all die!"
That last line she says is in causative tense, and the thing about Japanese is that causative tense can refer to permission--"I let them die"--but as the name indicates, it can also refer to being the source of the action--"I caused their deaths."
As speedrunners have shown, it's possible to leave the Great Plateau, go straight to Hyrule Castle and defeat Ganon. There's a memory where Link is still alive, albeit gravely injured, after having defeated dozens of Guardians. He and the champions might have been able to defeat Ganon by themselves.
But without Zelda's power, Ganon would have returned. Ganon always returns. Its singleminded devotion to reincarnation is evident in the Red Moon (赤き月 akaki tsuki, Eng: "Blood Moon"), which returns the spirits of defeated enemies to their bodies again and prevents the surviving people of Hyrule from ever fully retaking their land, and the comments Zelda makes after its defeat that its overwhelming need to return is what caused it to rampage out of control. The people of Hyrule know this too, and they clearly see the power to seal the darkness as the true determinant of the right to rule. King Rhoam tells Zelda that in the castle, the people call her "the defective princess" (出来損ないの姫, dekisokonai no hime), and when Link finds her diary in the ruins of Hyrule Castle, there's one passage that reads:
ハイラル王家の娘に生まれながら封印の力を使えない私を...彼は蔑んでいないだろうか？Does he? Link is silent. That part is for the player to decide.
"A daughter of the royal family who can't use the power to seal [the darkness]...he must despise me."
I didn't create those flames. This battle ended poorly for me.
In many ways, Breath of the Wild is a remake of the original Legend of Zelda with modern design sensibilities and scope. Both games take place in a post-apocalypse, with civilization on the fringes. Both games encourage experimentation and exploration over having a guided path the way later Zelda games like Skyward Sword did. And both games aren't afraid to kill Link.
I died plenty of times playing the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II, but after that I'm not sure I ever died in a Legend of Zelda game until Breath of the Wild. The ability to carry a fairy or potions, systems like the defense elixir in Skyward Sword, all of it made Zelda games easier and easier as time went on. But Breath of the Wild wasn't afraid to kill Link without warning. I died over a dozen times in the starting plateau, and then died repeatedly throughout the rest of the game. I blew myself up with bombs, I was ambushed by lizalfos, I drowned, I froze to death, I fell from a great height, I was smashed flat by a hinox club, I was blown to pieces by a Guardian laser...just a progression of deaths. It lessened as it went on, and Link gained ways to avoid it, including the trusty fairy in a bottle (without which my death count would be a couple dozen higher than it was), but it was never entirely absent.
This never bothered me partially because I've already played Dark Souls, but mostly because Breath of the Wild has an autosave that's constantly running in the background. No death ever took me more than a couple minutes' back, and sometimes it returned me to moments before. I was far more willing to experiment and try different things when I knew that only penalty I would pay was a couple minutes of time. Unlike Dark Souls, there's no chance to permanently affect the game by taking actions without knowing the consequences. Link is the Hero chosen by the Goddess--he's not going to turn evil and start murdering merchants, and while he can set everything on fire, it's not possible to burn down the Lost Woods. Fail a physics puzzle? The solution is to leave and come back. It'll be reset when you return.
People talk about choice and consequences in games, and those are important. But the easy availability of guides means that often when players are confronted with an important decision, they'll spoil everything about that decision in order to avoid making the "wrong" choice. I've done it. Maybe you have too. The Legend of Zelda series has never really had choice and consequences at all, and often that's been considered a bad thing. But with Breath of the Wild it's part of the spirit of experimentation, that no choice the player makes is irrevocable, and that's part of the reason I explored every inch of Hyrule before I even thought of continuing on the main quest.
It's been a hundred years since the downfall of Hyrule. They can wait a few more weeks.
Holding back the tide.
In most Legend of Zelda games, there's a group of long puzzle-filled dungeons and each dungeon provides a tool, like the slingshot, the magic jar (Eng: gust bellows), the whip, the bow, the boomerang, etc. Solving the dungeon requires using that dungeon's tool, and afterwards the tools are more or less useful. The bow is always useful, the chain hammer is good for killing ReDeads and not much else, and the lantern is good in the dark. Link gradually increases his capabilities over the course of the game, which means that there's a set progression of dungeons and content. A Link to the Past even helpfully numbers the dungeons on the map.
Breath of the Wild completely overturns that. After finding the Sheikah Stone, Link is told to explore four shrines on the Great Plateau, each of which gives him a new capability: Magnicatch (Eng: Magnesis), Remote-Control Bomb (Eng: Remote Bomb), Ice Maker (Eng: Cryonis), and Vitalock (eng: Stasis). All of these are useable freely, with no limit other than short cooldowns. That means that Link has infinite bombs for the entire game, and I definitely took full advantage of that to bomb everything I possibly could.
These are the only tools Link has for the majority of the game, and so there are no real dungeons. Instead of long dungeons, Hyrule has 120 smaller shrines, each of which has a single puzzle or mystery to solve. One shrine involves using the two types of remote-control bomb simultaneously to trigger switches and reach a door. One shrine requiers Link to hit a ball into a hole with a hammer, controlled using the Switch's motion controls. Two shrines at the Twin Peaks (Eng: Dueling Peaks) are paired, with the solution to one found in the other. One shrine involves transporting a blue flame from torch to torch to reach the end, and one has Link carry a block of ice through a bunch of flames without melting it. One shrine requires building a moving stairway using ice maker pillars and metal boxes moved with magnicatch.
That last shrine is one of the most memorable for me, because it shows the versatility of Breath of the Wild's physics system and tools. After ten frustrating minutes of trying to climb the wall and repeatedly failing the timing of raising the metal box, using vitalock on it to stop it, and then making an ice pillar to hold it up higher, eventually I used vitalock on a metal pillar, smashed it a bunch to build up momentum, then detonated a bomb under it to change the direction of the momentum to straight up. It launched Link into the air and I used the parasail to glide over to the door. Victory.
There's a shrine with a maze like the old children's game Labyrinth, requiring motion controls to navigate a ball through without dropping it into a hole or getting it stuck, and I beat it by flipping the entire maze over and rolling the ball to the end. There are shrines involving electricity puzzles that can be easily overcome by dropping metal weapons and using them to complete a circuit. Link can't climb walls in shrines, but it's possible to use bomb shield surfing to jump high into the air and then glide to the end. Breath of the Wild embraces the open-ended consequences of its tools and physics engine and allows players to find their own way to accomplish their goals.
If you completely hate motion controls, you can always ragdoll bomb yourself over the wall into the goal. Or use shield surfing as a kind of double-jump. After all, if the Hero chosen by the Goddess is willing to put in that much effort to circumvent the trails, isn't that simply another way of overcoming the trials?
Do do do dooooo
In contrast to the very limited number of tools that Link obtains in Breath of the Wild, in a first for the Legend of Zelda series, there is a dizzying variety of weapons and armor to wear. Link starts off grabbing a fallen tree branch and picks up broken swords, discarded weapons from the Hyrule Army, ancient Sheikah technology, enchanted spears that freeze those they strike, brooms, rakes, and the Master Sword, the blade of evil's bane. There's a similarly-large variety of bows, shields, and armor to be found, bought, stolen, or looted across the land of Hyrule. And don't get attached to any of the weapon because they break.
Armor doesn't break, fortunately. That would have been infuriating. But one of the most controversial aspects of the the game is weapon durability. There's no way to repair weapons and most weapons break in a battle or less, so constantly switching weapons is a core aspect of the game. In contrast to the four tools, there's no attachment to any of the weapons. There were battles where I'd charge into a bokoblin camp, kill the first one and have my weapon break, pick up the axe the first bokoblin dropped, drop a bomb and send the others flying, throw the axe at one that was just getting up and knock him down a hill...when perfectly orchestrated it was like a sequence from Superhot. When imperfectly orchestrated the soundtrack might as well have changed to Yakety Sax as I dropped a bomb and blew myself up, or set everything on fire, or my perfect stealth approach was spotted and I ran away with a whole camp of lizalfos chasing me
, but I was never frustrated.If there were any weapons that were unbreakable, or if it were possible to make weapons unbreakable, the whole system would fall apart. Even the Master Sword isn't unbreakable in Breath of the Wild--its power was drained in the Calamity a hundred years ago and so it sometimes fails and needs to recharge. Even completing all of the Trials of the Sword, while greatly increasing the Master Sword's power and durability, doesn't make it everlasting. Previous games had the Master Sword and perhaps a couple predecessor swords and that was all Link ever used. Even at the end, when I spent 95% of my time using the Master Sword, I still kept a variety of weapons around for when the Master Sword's power ran out. And of course, there's no indestructible bow, and I didn't learn about the near-indestructible shield until almost the very end of the game.
I went through a lot of shields parrying--or more often, failing to parry--Guardian lasers.
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I don't often get emotional in Legend of Zelda games. It's only happened twice that I can think of. Once is during the opening theme and intro cutscene of Wind Waker. The other is during Breath of the Wild.
There's one memory, the second-to-last, where Zelda and Link are alone. Link is mortally wounded after having defeated dozens of Guardians by himself, but there are still more Guardians looking for them. Zelda, having spent years uselessly praying and having watched her friends, family, and entire kingdom die, urges Link to run and save himself, and then a Guardian finds them. It looms over them and then lurches forward as its primary weapon focuses on Link. And Zelda, alone, weaponless, desperate, reaches out for anything that can possibly save the one person she cares about who is still alive, and as the Triforce blazes on her hand, she invokes the power to seal the darkness and purges Ganon's Malice from the Guardians.
There's a great short version of "Zelda's Lullaby" that plays as the Guardians collapse.
I originally wasn't a fan of the music in Breath of the Wild because a lot of it is understated piano, but 180 hours of constant driving Ocarina of Time Hyrule Field would have been far too much to handle. Understated piano actually worked really well, and there were a lot of callbacks to previous Zelda games. The Rito Village Theme invokes Wind Waker's Dragon Roost Island. The main Hyrule Field theme has an extremely-slow piano version of Zelda's Lullaby. The entering Hyrule Castle riff didn't play when I actually went to Hyrule Castle, but it did play in the memory that took place there.
My favorite piece is the dragon theme. Long after the first time I saw a dragon over Lake Hylia, I found a shrine in a waterfall and when I came out and stood outside, that theme kicked in. I looked around, confused, and then I looked up and saw Furodora flying majestically down the waterfall. I just stood and watched it undulate through the air, the sound of erhus filling my ears.
Then I got blasted with lightning, fell in the water, and died. Humans rarely come away from contact with divinity unscathed.
Mimoza (Eng: Moza): "Then I fry up all of my monster parts!"
Link: "...that sounds disgusting."
None of the other moments touched me quite the way those did, but there's so much that's memorable in Breath of the Wild. Most of the sidequests are pointless to do for the rewards, since they just offer a hundred rupees or a single gem, but they're worth it for the story.
The most extensive sidequest is building いちから村 (ichikara mura, "Starting-from-scratch Town," Eng: "Tarrey Town"). After Link buys a house in Hateno, one of the carpenters leaves to go to the Akkare Region to start his own town, and Link decides to help. He needs resources to build houses and people to populate the village, but due to union rules, he's only allowed to bring in people whose names end in ダ (da, Eng: -son). So he sends Link to scour the world for people who fit those rule and brings in more and more people until there's a new town in Hyrule. It's a little strange that they're not worried about the monsters roaming Hyrule and don't seem to have any guards, but really, no one in Hyrule is as worried as they should be by the Calamity. And in the end I helped another Gerudo find her vōi, so everything ended happily.
It's not a single sidequest, but all the encounters with Kasshīwa (Eng: Kass) were memorable. He's a traveling Rito bard who wanders the land, collecting experiences to try to finish the songs left to him by his mentor. Each encounter, he'll sing a song to Link that reveals some ancient secret, which is usually the entrance to a shrine. Whenever I heard the accordion music as I was traveling around Hyrule, I knew I was about to stumble on an old friend with a tale to tell.
Torotto (Eng: Trott), at one of the stables, loves meat and demands that Link sell him some. He also speaks in a bumpkin dialect and Link, proving that he does have a sense of humor, starts imitating him during the conversation, answering いいっス (ii ssu, something like "You betcha") when offering meat.
I wrote a whole post about Cid (Eng: Saidon) already.
In the Gerudo Town, there's a secret shop that requires a password to enter, and inside they sell clothing for men even though men are barred from entry to Gerudo Town. There's another quest to help a Gerudo child start a garden. There's a quest to find a descendant of Zelda's horse and bring it back to a stable. There's a quest, near the beginning of the game, to find a recipe of the Hyrulian royal family in the ruins of Hyrule Castle. I left that one to the end, but I've heard of people who snuck into the castle and got into all kinds of shenanigans within the first few hours of play.
And of course, the various travellers who talk about how beautiful the scenery and then say it would be more beautiful if it were red, or who ask Link if he likes bananas and then, when he answers no, fly into a homicidal rage. I love the Ganon-worshipping Yiga Clan's banana obsession, I love that they're nowhere near the jungle but have a banana shrine in their secret hideout, and I love how no reason for this is ever given. Some things are beyond the ken of even the Hero chosen by the Goddess.
R.I.P. Satoru Iwata
Even though it was almost eight months ago, one of my clearest memories of the game was when Link climbed to the top of the ruined Temple of Time on the Great Plateau and the ghost of King Rhoam Bosphoramus Hyrule explained what happened a century prior, why Link was asleep, and what he had to do to save Hyrule. Link, wearing tattered pants, a ragged shirt, and carrying a nicked sword and simple wooden shield, listened intently. And then a new quest popped up.
ガノン討伐 ganon tōbatsu, it said. "Defeat Ganon."
It took me a hundred and seventy hours to complete that quest, and when Link stood victorious on the field of battle, the last of Ganon's Malice purged by Zelda's power, another message popped up: ガノン討伐 COMPLETE. Breath of the Wild is very devoted to its systems.
There's so much more I could talk about. I've written thousands of words here and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of all this game has to offer. The musical sting that plays when a Guardian notices Link. The way horses automatically follow the roads, allowing you to view the terrain. サイハテノ島 (saihatenotō, "The Uttermost Island", Eng: "Eventide Island") and the way it strips all weapons and armor from Link and forces him to solve puzzles to get them back. The final battle against the Calamity. All the location callbacks to previous games, much like Super Mario Odyssey does for the Mario series.
Breath of the Wild is a game where the player can make their own fun and there is so much fun to be made. There's minimal story, but what story is there is well-told and mostly only available if people want to seek it out. This is my favorite Zelda, and the first Legend of Zelda game that I felt really deserved that name because it really was her story. This is my favorite Legend of Zelda game, hands down, and the best game I've played in years. I don't regret any of the time I spent wandering around Hyrule, starting fires, sneaking past moblins, throwing scavenged weapons at people, riding past travellers, and following in the footsteps of the champions.
Now, I just need Nintendo to use the same engine and make Breath of the Wild's Majora's Mask. I'd gladly play another 180 hours of this!
⏮ back to Legend of Zelda reviews index
no subject
Date: 2019-May-24, Friday 07:31 (UTC)"My Zelda" was link to the past, I have no nostalgia for Ocarina as I skipped the N64. I did play it later but I never really got on with it. This however is fantastic, and I'm very glad that a generation is coming up with this is their childhood zelda.
Of course there are aspects I don't like. The puzzle "dungeons" (ok shrines) are really cool, but i'd sure like more random indoor spaces which are a bit more distinctive. The monotone of those is a bit gamey and I'd prefer it if they were mixed with something else. Still that's pretty minor, given the world is such a joy and such a massive sandbox to play in.
Adding this post to my memories so I can digest it properly when/if I finally finish the game :)
no subject
Date: 2019-May-24, Friday 14:13 (UTC)My first Zelda was the original Legend of Zelda, and I'm glad that Nintendo went back to that well and updated it based on thirty years of game development. I still remember that freedom and uncertainty of wandering around in a world full of dangers that seemed gigantic, and I got that exact same sensation when I started Breath of the Wild.
Also in both games, the first person I talked to was a bearded old man in a cave.
no subject
Date: 2019-May-24, Friday 15:29 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-May-26, Sunday 03:41 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-May-24, Friday 16:24 (UTC)This all happened before (nearly) any of them were born. Even to the old folks, the way Hyrule used to be is something their parents and grandparents used to natter about when they were kids, that they tuned out because who wants to hear that story AGAIN? Clearly Ganon hasn't done anything in the past 100 years, so why worry?
I mean, it's a little strange that for the past 50 years we haven't been more worried about climate change but....
no subject
Date: 2019-May-24, Friday 19:16 (UTC)Like, the people in Kakariko Village or Riverside Stable can can walk for a few minutes and see the ruins of Hyrule Castle swirling with Malice on the horizon. It's a bit more imminent than the threat of climate change.
no subject
Date: 2019-May-26, Sunday 13:40 (UTC)But most people have a really good ability to put off worrying about things they can't change.
no subject
Date: 2019-May-26, Sunday 13:40 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-May-27, Monday 20:35 (UTC)Though I thought Breath of the Wild did a good job of providing interesting reasons to talk to the kids that were there. Like Nabu (Eng: Nebb), who wants to show his grandfather all the weapons he never found when he was alive, or the story with Kokona and Puriko's (Eng: Koko and Cottla) mother and what happened to her.
A lot of times I just ignore kids in games, if they're even there at all, but I didn't this time.
no subject
Date: 2019-May-27, Monday 23:00 (UTC)