#also as for its linearness. in botw you could pick which divine beast to go for furst

[tealfruit]

totk has flaws like any game but tbh it has easily met and perhaps exceeded my expectations. BOTW was like my fav game ever but totk is EXCELLENT and has so much more to do in it too

[irandrura]

Breath of the Wild Review

In other news, everyone, I finished Breath of the Wild. I can expand on this if anyone is interested, but in brief:

This is a good game, but it is not a good Zelda game.

The problem with Breath of the Wild, I think, is that its mechanics and its systems lead it to be a particular type of game, but its aesthetic and its series legacy lead it to be a different type of game. The result is an awkward hybrid that is fun to play, but falls short of greatness.

Or to put it another way, this is a good game, but it could be a great game if it had an original IP and a more focused design.

There will be spoilers after the cut, of course:

What BotW wants to be, in its structures and systems, is an open world exploration and survival game. Its continuous open world is a genuinely impressive technological achievement, and its systems are great for just wandering around the countryside, doing side-quests, and scavenging. If the game was able to focus on those systems and sharpen them further, it could be much better.

What’s surprising, actually, is just how many open world features the game leaves out. You cannot repair weapons or items. You can’t really craft items beyond food and potions. There isn’t very much to do with buying and selling: no haggling or trading. There are no factions or tribes to join or work with, and no longer quest lines. There is no stash or item storage, for saving any gear you might like to use later. You can’t recruit NPCs, build anything, or acquire any property.

So the open world side of the game feels underutilised. We have a great mechanical foundation for an open world game, but it’s not explored. What you can do is wander around the countryside, collect food, cook it, obtain weapons, use those weapons until they break, replace them with new ones, and so on. The game lets you be a nomadic scavenger, but that’s about it. This is a good starting point, but without additional systems lacks the depth of an open world game over the long term.

Why aren’t those systems more developed? My guess there would be the other half of the game. This is still on some level trying to be a Zelda game, and the problem here is that everything in the Zelda formula pushes the game away from an open world.

Take the plot, for instance. Traditionally Zelda games have had quite linear journeys, depicting a heroic quest. The games are usually framed as legends. You are a hero on a legendary quest. The open world format of the game doesn’t work with this for several reasons.

BotW’s open structure requires that the game’s plot be firstly broken into non-linear chunks that can be acquired in any order, and secondly totally optional. The game doesn’t know which order you’ll do the four tribes in, or even whether you’ll go to the tribes and do their divine beasts at all. It doesn’t know what order you’ll collect the memories in, or if you’ll collect them at all. It doesn’t know when you’ll obtain the Master Sword, or if you will at all. The game’s plot needs to make sense even though every single piece of the plot is technically skippable. As a result, the game is structurally incapable of telling the story of a heroic journey.

This is important, I think, because the best Zelda games usually have a very strong focus on the hero’s journey. The Legend of Zelda is a legend, and legends have coherent narratives. If you play through Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, or Skyward Sword, they’re all paced quite carefully, linking up (pun unintended) Link’s development as a hero and his relationships with characters and societies with your mechanical progress through the game. TP would not work without your evolving friendship with Midna to contextualise it. SS’ series of purificatory quests wouldn’t make sense without the overall frame of Link and Zelda’s relationships as they grow into the princess and the hero.

To take a concrete example, consider the Master Sword. In OoT, discovering the Master Sword is the bridge between past and future, the defining moment that transports you between the game’s two phases. By taking the Master Sword, Link undergoes the next phase of his character development. When the child takes that sword, he takes it upon himself to become the hero, and it seals him away until he can achieve that. In SS, obtaining the Master Sword is a spiritual quest spread across three dungeons, as you seek out sacred fires dedicated to the three goddesses. There is a very real sense that as Link forges the sword, he is also forging himself. The sword grows alongside the hero. In BotW, by contrast, you can go and get the Master Sword at any time, and the only thing that matters is whether you’ve done enough shrine grinding to be able to draw it. You can draw it at any time, and as a result the time that you do draw it cannot be satisfyingly contextualised in the way that it could be in previous linear games.

And so on for other plot elements. OoT requires you face the temples in a particular order, first retreading the societies you visited as a child, and only infiltrating the fortress of Ganondorf’s own people at the end. TP is broken up into multiple phases with different primary villains (roughly King Bulblin, Zant, and finally Ganondorf), because it wants to have plot twists, and because it knows that it can’t introduce the later villains until Link’s relationship with Midna has reached a certain stage. (That is, Midna is practically a villain at the start of the game. You don’t want to introduce Zant until the player has reached a point where they will be emotionally invested enough to take Midna’s side.)

BotW’s non-linear structure requires that it can’t really have character development, because character development needs to be linear. Someone needs to grow in one way before they can grow in another way. It also requires that BotW have no plot twists. You can’t have a plot twist if you can’t control the information available to the player before and after. As a result, BotW’s plot is incredibly threadbare.

I felt this was particularly the case when it came to the villains, and would even characterise BotW as a game without a villain. Calamity Ganon is not a character: he is a natural disaster. That says some things that I find interesting, for what it’s worth – that after all this time Ganondorf cannot be the proud tyrant or mighty sorcerer that he was when he began, but he has been consumed by rage to the point where there is nothing he can be but an incoherent, wordless force of destruction – but it also means that the game doesn’t have a villain character. I mean, hell, I thought Demise was pretty thinly characterised, but at least Demise could speak. I knew who Demise was and what he wanted, and he had the much-better-characterised Ghirahim as a representative. BotW has nothing, and indeed BotW must have nothing, because it cannot present any linear character arcs. Even the likes of Ghirahim’s gradually increasing frustration and hatred for Link can’t be done without some linear structure. (In principle, BotW could have had a villain like Ghirahim and just slotted in the next part of his development whenever he appears, but that’s a kludgy fix at best.)

So the only place BotW is able to have a character arc is in the flashbacks, where Zelda does indeed have a fairly short character arc: she’s frustrated by the destiny that is thrust upon her, she’s interested in ancient technology, she eventually realises her power in order to defend the one she loves (though the series is characteristically coy about any actual romantic relationship). But this is rather thin, and it is a character arc that the player never gets to participate in.

Many of these observations came together for me after I defeated Calamity Ganon. I was not trying to dislike BotW, and indeed I don’t dislike it. It’s a good game. It just has the potential to be a better game. In any case, I found myself not quite as satisfied as I was in previous games. Twilight Princess has not lost its crown: it still has easily the best final battle of any Zelda game. But even OoT or SS left me feeling much more accomplished. Why was this? As best I can tell, it’s because those games contextualised the coming battle through an entire hero’s journey. In BotW, you can fight Calamity Ganon from the very beginning of the game, which means BotW can’t take into account the hero’s development. In OoT, WW, TP, and SS, there is a real journey that got me from the beginning to the end of the game. By the end of those games, Link and the player both have grown a great deal. I lack that sense in BotW.

I would also suggest that many of the open world mechanics I described above, while a good foundation for an open world game, don’t mesh well with a game about a heroic legend. Take the scavenging, for instance. Legendary heroes, well, don’t scavenge. You don’t find a bit in the Iliad where Achilles breaks his sword smashing a Trojan soldier in the head and pulls out another of the half-dozen swords he keeps in his pack. King Arthur isn’t constantly trading swords. (Yes, I know he breaks his original sword fighting King Pellinore.) You can’t really imagine reading a Norse saga where the bulk of the story is Thor gathering herbs, cooking dinner, and trying on new outfits. This is not what you focus on if you’re trying to tell a legend.

Basically: the open world formula requires that the game lack a strong sense of direction. The legendary journey frame of the Zelda series requires that the game have a strong sense of direction. BotW is unable to reconcile these competing requirements. I feel that the game needed to pick one element and stick with it.

You might say to me, “Ira, what about games like Skyrim? There are lots of open world games that have a main plot where you’re an epic hero of legend. They do this quite well.” My response would be twofold: firstly, in a game like Skyrim, the main plot is totally optional, and indeed removable, and secondly, Skyrim’s main quest is actually a linear story. This is actually one of my criticisms of Skyrim: all its faction quest-lines are as linear as any conventional RPG’s story, and this doesn’t play to Skyrim’s strengths. (Compare Morrowind’s faction quest-lines, which are more modular.) Skyrim has many more open world mechanics as well, and emphasises the main story less. Skyrim wants you to inhabit its world, explore, get loot, buy a house, and so on. It is, at its core, a game about aimlessly mucking about. This is true for all TES games since Daggerfall, and for Bethesda’s two Fallout offerings.

I don’t think BotW is committed to being a game that’s about aimlessly mucking about in the same way. BotW doesn’t commit to open world wandering in the same way.

Now, to be clear, if BotW did fully commit to be an open world game, I would probably also cry foul and declare it a terrible misuse of the license. I hope you can understand why, though.

BotW, as it is, is a schizophrenic game that has within it the seeds of two different, better games. Those two games are an immersive open world exploration and survival game with an original IP, and a linear Zelda game in the tradition of the series’ previous flagship titles. (I tend to think LttP-OoT-WW-TP-SS as the core titles in this light.)

Breath of the Wild is a good game, but a bad Zelda game, and it’s a pity, because it could have been a great game.

That’s my take, at least.