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The Legend of Zelda - Breath of The Wild Pathways to the Ancient Arrows

Zelda’s divine arrows began as the silver arrows in the first game, found in the final dungeon and necessary to destroy Ganon and save the world. They appeared again in Link to the Past, and from there on were eclipsed by the Light Arrows in the 3d games, where Link’s ultimate weapon now stuns Ganon rather than destroys him outright. These light arrows do exist in Breath of the Wild, as a gift from a sleep deprived Zelda in the final battle. Here though they serve a symbolic, almost ritualistic purpose - the real mechanical prize for your efforts are the Ancient Arrows.

Obtaining these arrows is a great case study in how Wild coaxes you through its challenges. At first they’re a whisper from villagers, rumors of an old method to get rid of the machines roaming the land. Eventually you can find the needed researcher in Akkala, and realize that you need machine parts to make them. To get enough you’ll either be searching a long time - or perhaps find enough courage to fight the guardians that you were previously no match against. The rarer option is finding these arrows in chests deep in Hyrule Castle - a reward for braving dozens of machines and almost definitely escaping by the skin of your teeth. Unlike the crafting option, this is a high risk, reflexive adventure that requires a lot of courage in a small amount of time.

No matter what pathway brings you to the arrows, you’re presented with their description. “To be struck with one is to be consigned to oblivion in an instant.” Nothing else in the game functions like them. If you haven’t already braved the guardians, this is your cue to try one out, and see them fall immediately. As with everything else, the sound effects and visuals show off the destructive magic that’s seeped into Hyrule. Only this time, you get to choose when and where it strikes.

The ancient arrows serve as one of many inflection points in the game - moments when you feel your powers, choices, and agency grow. They hit that old Zelda itch of a new tool opening new possibilities you couldn’t do any other way. But instead of seeing an obvious barrier in the world, marking it for later, exploring the dungeon like a good player, and grabbing the inevitable googaw, you have to seek out the means to acquire it yourself. Whether it’s nabbed in a dusty corridor while running through Hyrule Castle’s den of destruction, or by proving your own destructive scholarship against guardians living and dead, you earn the right to know of, and use the arrows. Though they don’t serve as the Ganon killer, they do serve as a mark of mastery. The mystery of how to deal with guardians is solved not with just an answer but also an excitement for what you can now achieve.

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A study in blue

Medium: obligations, unexplored corridors, wonder

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- Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Who said Link never had time for anything but being a hero

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- Bound

This game’s photo mode lets you continue the game 1 frame at a time, so all the graceful postures get full spotlight, as do the grief metaphors

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-Battle Chef Brigade

Only a chunk through this game, but the characters are already quite endearing, gruff and full of varying levels of anxious earnestness 

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- Super Mario Odyssey

I love that last one

like Mario has dealt with plants that eat people and dinosaurs that lay mushrooms and riding giant shows, but this goggle and scarf combo is just not making it work

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The growth of guardians in this game from colossal demon spiders hunting your every move to “hold my potion I’m gonna muck ‘em up” is probably one of the greatest character arcs in this series

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hello I would like-a to check out this acorn

of course sir I just need proof of registration for your library account

...

...

SIR PLEASE I JUST NEED YOUR PROOF OF ADDRESS BEFORE YOU PERUSE THE SEED LIBRARY

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- Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Gotta love family reunions

especially ones through sepia tinted glasses

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Florence

A World Of Color

(Some details of the experience follow - I highly recommend you play this game for yourself before reading.)

As mentioned previously, Florence does things differently than most games. My favorite manifestation of this is how art and artistry is presented and played with. Your first interaction with art is a flashback to young Florence playing with construction paper. You get an outline of a butterfly or a boat, a bunch of simple shapes with patterns to glue on, and a button that changes the colors of everything. You’re asked to play around and experiment, just seeing what you can make. So few games actually allow you to create art (outside of banners for your personal strike team), and with no impetus other than experimentation and joy. (Tearaway is another great example of this.) Through your art, Florence is creating her own magic in an imagined world of her personal design.

This scene of a small Florence is the only part of the game that gives the player full freedom on a canvas, but it’s not the last time art is involved. As you continue, art gets presented in a sketchbook, with swipes of your finger revealing the picture - like brushing away sand, but instead you are brushing lines into existence. These sketches all have the subject of Florence’s boyfriend Krish. They are flattering, beatifying even, images of his face and his body creating his own art through the cello. She seems to channel her hopes for the relationship into these images, focusing on happy moments and tender looks. As you continue and their relationship degrades, this interaction is used for a key shift in outlook. The previous sketch of a sun-dappled young man vibrant with energy is brushed away to show him disheveled and languid. Florence’s art is no longer capturing musings, hopes, and ambitions, but the hollows of a schedule humdrum.

After everything fades and Krish’s old pictures are put away, Florence finds her old childhood drawings - your childhood drawings - exactly as you left them at the start of the game. This catalyzes her towards the path of art as a career. Using Krish’s old present of a paint kit, long hidden behind ignored documents, she begins forming her own life and livelihood through her art. Those same imagined worlds now exist in frames all over her house, again bursting with color. The game’s wordless tendencies make it hard for any interpretation to be encompassing, but it’s possible to read Florence’s story as someone building the confidence to let her aspirational eye face inward. She ends by validating her own images and goals instead of another person’s. Her worth is found through her art, which is found through her own personal, and now trusted, sense of the world around her.

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A great set of examples for dead cell’s Just in Time jumps and auto grabs for maneuvering, as well as slight auto aims to make attacks land more consistently.

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Shadow of the Colossus

The Price of a Hero’s Journey

In a year when video games were known for God of War, Guitar Hero, and Grand Theft Auto’s secret mod that removed women’s clothing, Shadow of the Colossus was a comparative literary opera. It let music and a few spoken words carry its story, followed by hours of consuming stillness across the forbidden land. There were three things to do in this game, in massively decreasing order. Journey, from one side of its then enormous space to the other. Think, about why you continue this quest. And of course, kill.

Wander saves the girl, too late, and wishes to revive her from death. Dormin offers its godly powers, in exchange for killing 16 colossi, and warns of a high price. Wander gets on his horse, Aggro, and declares there is no price too high. This is the entirety of the game’s context until its final act. You are left with nothing but a nagging at your conscience about your actions. It grows with each creature you fell. Their attacks are in self-defense; their bodies look and twitch like animals, with no small amount of aggression and eventually fear. Their eyes glow, and they squirm and scream as you stab them down. And Wander himself grows dimmer and darker with each felled. There’s no explanation or easy way out. There is only returning to the pedestal the princess resides on, the omnipresent sun, and continuing on to the next target.

Before morality systems asked you binary questions and changed your character’s hair to show how evil they had become, before Mass Effect tasked you with varying needs of a crew, before Witcher showed you the consequences of any and every action you took through its world, Shadow of the Colossus tasked you with saving the princess, and it made you watch the blood drip from your hands every step of the way. Its genius was in never judging you. It simply showed your actions in harsh, unedited light, and gave you a long walk to think about each of the creatures you had seen roaming the world, each one, you knew, never to move again.

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One of the board games that’s indelibly linked to a screen and app companion as you play, which seems like a neat way to get around a slow start. It provides its own music too, which for Lord of the Rings is probably a great time.

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Florence

How to Support Your Protagonist

(Some details of the experience follow - I highly recommend you play this game for yourself before reading.)

Florence is a phenomenal game that makes its own rulebook so quickly and cleverly it can go on to break its own rules for emotional surprises. Ken Wong and his team rewrite how you think about interaction, and what kinds of things count as rewards in games, so subtly that you are taught them without ever realizing it. The story of Florence and Krish’s relationship with each other is buoyed with puzzles that are all in service of the main character, creating a world where your goal is to help and create instead of destroy and conquer.

You don’t hear a single word Krish and Florence say to each other, instead seeing their history, their possessions, and their choices. Conversations play out as speech bubbles made of jigsaw puzzles - at first, hard to fill in, as Florence has trouble conversing. As she gets more comfortable, your job gets easier - and you see a healthier conversation, and a happier main character. At all times, Florence lets you take a small piece of agency alongside her life, making all your work in service of her contentedness. Her job is boring, you can see, because you have to match numbers. You physically turn the clock in most scenes to continue her story. You even pick which items these people will display as they move in together. Every action is not in service of power, or mastery, as it is with so many games - it’s in service of Florence’s emotional state.

This, along with the fantastic music and color palettes, is why the second half of the relationship can be so affecting. During fights, the same puzzle speech bubble mechanic is turned into a contest, with the winning arguer taking up more of the screen. This return to adversarial stances is unnatural under the rules you know, and it’s damaging to the relationship you’ve been trying to help prop up. Unlike most games, there’s no winner - and there’s no winning state, as the game continues onward after a time. Another prominent scene shows the two scattered in various puzzle pieces drifting in a sleep deprived haze. They appear to be facing each other, but in putting the pieces together, you realize not only that they are turned away, their respective sides of the puzzle has pieces that don’t fit together. The agency you had to help Florence has nowhere to go, and neither of you in that moment can see a path forward.

Florence’s story ends with more distance between you and her than before - you have been acting as her conscience, her desires, and you are delegated to maintenance and a sort of housekeeper. By then Florence has found her own agency. Your work is in finalizing the stages of her new growth, and simply cheering her on.

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I really like her seafoam hair

My take on Toon Zelda wearing the Phantom’s armor!

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Persona 5

Take Your Time - Or Don’t

Persona 5 is the only Persona I’ve played, and one of the few RPGs (role playing game) I’ve seen through to the credits. The biggest reason for this is how the game lets you chunk the tasks in the game as you become familiar with them, taking over constantly needed actions. Because of specific shortcuts, battles that could feel rote or grindy condense into continual proof of your growing skill in the game.

Unlike many J(apanese)RPG’s flow of automatically starting a battle after a random amount of steps, every potential battle in P5 is encompassed by a figure in the world. A scan ability lets you see if they will be pushovers (blue), challenging (yellow), tough (red), or really tough - red and on fire. True to the thieving team’s sneaking theme, players can slink around potential fights and avoid them entirely. Alternatively, you can sprint through the environment, which will attract foes faster and set you up for an ambush if you get caught. If you know where you’re going, they can be easily outrun. No more feelings of dread when considering if an unexplored hallway is worth the 10 minutes of mandatory battling it’ll take to see.

In fights, characters can rush the opponent for a quick win, so long as they’re powerful enough to do so - otherwise, they’ll lose health quickly. You’re free to pick attacks as normal, but a single button press will auto-choose strong attacks against the current enemy, so the player won’t need to run through as many as 12 different sets of potential attacks to find the right one. Best of all, each action is assigned to its own button - attack, guard, item, etc - which means every battle is likely to have less than half the button presses of games in a similar vein. Once battles are done, there’s an auto-heal button that will use various spells instantly.

So each battle is a series of interesting decisions, and mainly only interesting decisions. Instead of pressing down 4 times to reach the guard option, players press circle then x to confirm. Instead of fighting 12 enemies down the corridor every time, players can sprint through. Instead of scrolling through all available personas to find your lightning spell, one button finds it and aims it at the enemy it will hurt the most. Players are left with the tactics of the battle - who will damage what, and how, while the game mops up a lot of repetitive actions. Everything about this system allows for the usual strategies and forethought these games require, while letting players speed up whenever they feel comfortable doing so.

By the time you’re taking advantage of these options, there’s a high chance you’ve earned party abilities that win fights against weaker enemies instantly, letting you sneak up on foes and destroy them completely. Even if you haven’t, weaker enemies will start running away from you in fear, letting you get around with with no trouble. At the same time, your team gets more confident with their thieving abilities, from cowering in the first palace to boldly running heists across the later ones. As they feel cooler and more accomplished, they show it through your enhanced and speedy play.

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Dan Root takes a look at use cases of parallax scrolling, that crazy thing where the background moves faster than you to make depth. Good visual examples!