Breaking News: Breath of the Wild is not a bad game
If you haven’t already heard (I’m betting all of you have), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an amazing game. It radically shakes up the Zelda formula, offering an entirely new experience that retains the Zelda-charm. I’ve played Breath of the Wild for about 4 hours, just past the “prologue”, and cannot wait to get back into it.
The first thing that stands out about Breath of the Wild is what sets it apart from other open-world games. Everything in the world feels truly real. That sounds vague, but it’s noticeable as soon as you begin playing the game. In many other open-world games, you are limited in what you can do. Taking a chainsaw to a tree in Fallout won’t knock the tree over, for example. In Breath of the Wild, everything works just as it would in the real world, and that’s incredibly cool. Solving the dozens of puzzles you’ll experience every hour never grows tiresome because of this. Each enemy encounter is a chance to find a new way to defeat them.
For example, when I stumbled out of the Shrine of Resurrection (and I mean stumbled… I’m currently terrible at Breath of the Wild!), I found a well fortified enemy camp in the woods. I bravely let some arrows fly, missing my enemies terribly and drawing their attention. The Bokoblins stormed at me, so I drew my sword and prepared for combat. Combat never came, however, because when I drew my sword it hit a campfire by my feet. In seconds, the grassy field was burning around me. I stood and watched in amazement as the flames engulfed the fleeing Bokoblins, burning them to a crisp! I walked over the burned field, looted the camp, and thanked Hylia for her blessings.
That moment was the first of many that showed me just how special this game was. My own ineptitude resulted in a totally amazing destruction of the enemy; pure luck! I couldn’t help but imagine the cool stuff I could do once I master the game’s mechanics.
The realism has worked both ways, however. I scaled an icy mountain and found a huge river flowing with ice water. There was a raft I wanted to get to in the middle of the lake, but I needed to cut down some trees to create a makeshift bridge to get there. Despite knowing that to be the best course of action, I decided to try to swim for it and hope it didn’t wipe out my health. Bad choice. My hearts were gone as soon as I hit the water. It only took a second for my 3 hearts to vanish, and the river’s flow was too strong to escape. R.I.P.
Breath of the Wild, while close to perfection, isn’t quite flawless, however. I wish I could carry more things, and it would be nice to have a bit more stamina out of the gate. I know you can level the stamina up, but the inventory is actually annoying. Not being able to pick up weapons and constantly having to discard old ones is frustrating and extremely common.
All in all, Breath of the Wild may very well be the greatest console launch game of all-time, and the best Zelda game ever made. Heck, it might be the outright best game ever made! It’s premature to go that far, but from what I’ve experienced the hype for this game was absolutely warranted. For those wondering if they should get the Switch now to play this game, I’d have to say “absolutely, it’s worth it.” Breath of the Wild is captivating in a way that few games have ever achieved. Its first four hours are among the best in gaming, and now that I’ve got my paraglider, I can’t wait to experience the rest of it.
