Originally published January 2018

Let's get this disclaimer out of the way: I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Zelda fan party. I have always appreciated what The Legend of Zelda franchise has done for video games, as a whole, by setting new standards and inspiring developers to make more interesting and risky games. There's no denying the importance of games like Ocarina of Time and the impact it has had in the years since it was released. That being said, I've always felt that Zelda was a bit overrated and that the people who raved about how great The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was were the same ones who raved about how great the others were—a tradition that has been repeated over the ages with each new Zelda game. I rarely got the impression that the games were amazing from anyone who didn't already have an Epona in this horse race.

The cracks in the flawless facade of the beloved fantasy franchise started to finally show even for the die-hard fans a few console generations ago when the public was split over what they actually wanted out of a Zelda game. There were those who immediately loved The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker, a game that I was very interested in trying myself. There were also plenty of people who hated it, simply for its aesthetic. Since then, there have been a lot of social splits over the quality of each new Zelda game, be it on handheld devices or home consoles. In 2017, the world seemed to come together, once again, and collectively unite under the Zelda banner, raving about the return of genius, brilliance, and innovation to the franchise. With the whole gaming community up in arms about how great this game was, I decided to try it out before it was old news. This is probably the first Zelda game that I have obtained within a year of its release since the original back on the NES.

Now, it has been a while since I did an Initial Impressions article here on DagonDogs.com instead of a full review, and you might be asking, "Why now?" The purpose of doing an Initial Impressions piece was to be upfront about the fact that, while I had some distinct opinions about the game that I wanted to publish immediately, I hadn't yet finished the game at the time of writing it all down. More to the point, I wanted to write these pieces in the hopes that if and when I did finish the game, the negatives I saw in it might have diminished by completion. Breath of the Wild is one of those games where I can see the greatness in it, but the negatives are such turnoffs to me that I don't really want to play it. I have some opinions about this game I want to share while they're fresh in my mind, but I have no idea if or when I'll finish the game to make it a full review. Thus, here are my opinions about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, having not yet completed it.

The Short of It

What I've Played (so far):

Over 20 hours
2 of the Beast dungeons completed
60% of the map uncovered
20% of Link's memory recovered
30+ shrines completed

Pros

The combat is more diverse than it's ever been in the franchise with different types of weapons to use
Shrines provide a majority of the entertainment with some creative and complicated puzzles that are satisfying to solve, most of the time
Writing has some great lines and clever humor sprinkled throughout the world
Same old charm of the Zelda series
A little more effort paid to the storytelling, for better or worse
Music is subtle instead of bombastic
Multiple methods to resolve problems and conflicts give players a chance to really experiment and explore the world and its mechanics

Cons

Some of the most inconvenient and outdated mechanics are a core part of the experience
Progression is slow, arduous, and tedious
The combat, with all its new weapons, is still not very interesting or exciting
Hyrule is still not the most interesting fantasy land
Music, while subtle, is also forgettable
Still don't care about Link or Zelda

The Rest of It

Story

If you've ever played a Legend of Zelda game, aside from the occasional spin-offs, you know who the key players are in the story already: Zelda, Link, and Ganon. These characters have been involved in every primary story of the franchise since the very beginning. Usually, the overall plot is simply that Ganon is a threat to the world of Hyrule and the heroes must stop him, be it with magic from Zelda or the sword from Link. Where the games differ is in how these characters and Hyrule are presented. The same is true for Breath of the Wild.

Similar to how Windwaker starts, with Hyrule having already experienced a cataclysmic disaster, Breath of the Wild begins with Link waking up inside a mountain cave in Hyrule, which is on the verge of collapse, sort of. The world seems to be in okay shape, but a lot of bad things have happened in the past 100 years while Link has been asleep. After meeting the series staple, the Old Man, you learn that Ganon isn't just a horrible pig man, but an unrelenting force of evil that appears every so often—he's far more ethereal now. The Hyrulians prepared for his arrival by digging up some old relics and ancient weapons to combat him. However, he turned the tables on them and used the ancient weapons against them. While it's certainly been proven by skilled speed-runners that you can go straight to Ganon and beat him within the first hour of the game, the story tells you that you have to journey through the land and reclaim the ancient weapons before confronting him.

It's still the familiar Zelda story, but there are some more unique twists and qualities to the tale to set it apart from the rest. The process of reclaiming the ancient weapons leads you to different villages that are usually filled with charm. The writing in this is not bad and it's effective at adding personality to the various inhabitants of each town. It's all relatively superficial, as there is usually not much else left to discover about each town or inhabitant than a few details, but sometimes you find some significant surprises in talking to the people. This, along with what you discover with Link by journeying across the land in search of the ancient relics and his lost memories give the story a little more weight and polish than I think other Zelda games have accomplished in the past. That being said, I still don't think the story that is there is all that interesting.

While more effort has been paid to the story of Breath of the Wild, I can't say I really like the approach or that it makes me any more interested in the plot of a Zelda game than I have been in the past. Since Link has the convenient affliction of amnesia, he gets to discover Hyrle and all its secrets with us, the players. It certainly makes a little more canonical sense to have him learning about legendary heroes of his world and various events in the past tense if he can't remember any of them, but it's still amnesia. I'm willing to let that slide because not every story that has used amnesia is terrible because of it. However, I can't say that I really dig the method they chose to tell the story.

There are moments where you will interact with important characters and get the story in the traditional format, which is fine. However, you also have to travel through Hyrule and take pictures of the landscape in specific spots to trigger a memory for Link and start a cutscene. These moments are rarely worth the effort of the search, due to uninspired voice-acting and dull delivery of the plot points, which has made me far less interested in seeking them out. I frankly don't get much out of picture-taking modes in games other than to create a wallpaper for my computer, and I can tell you that forcing me to use it to discover more story pieces isn't going to change my mind.

So, without the story for the fantasy RPG to rely on, what else does Breath of the Wild have?

Gameplay

I am torn on the gameplay of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. On the one hand, there are some things that it does that I like in video games in general. On the other hand, there are numerous qualities about it that annoy me and make me not want to play it. Admittedly, I don't think I would want to finish this game if not for the fact that I haven't finished a Zelda game since the original and I wanted to see why everyone was calling this one of the greatest games of all time. I might have felt that way had this come out a decade ago and had it been responsible for inventing a lot of the mechanics on display here, but a lot of other games have innovated since then and Breath of the Wild is mostly copying what's already been done, for better or worse.

Discovery & Progression

Let's start with something I like. I like games that give freedom to the player. Freedom to explore. Freedom of combat style. Freedom of choice. When a game lets me play the game how I want to play, at the pace I like, I'm usually a great deal happier. I usually just want a basic tutorial to get me started and then I want to be left alone to go discover everything else. Breath of the Wild is completely on board with this idea. Having taken a lot of heat for their last Zelda game, Skyward Sword, Nintendo clearly looked at the criticism for the hours-long tutorial section and decided to trim it down. Breath of the Wild has a very minimalist approach to telling the player what to do. It gives you some basic instructions and simple goals that you can do at your own pace, even during the tutorial section.

When you get out of the opening area into the rest of Hyrule, there's still plenty to discover, but the game is not going to bombard you with instructions or directions. This makes everything far more satisfying when you figure out a puzzle in a more unconventional way, or when you use the environment in a way that is somewhat unexpected. In loading screens, the game gives you little tips you can completely miss or ignore, like how a metal weapon acts as a conductor in the middle of a lightning storm, so you may want to equip a different weapon during those moments. It doesn't tell you that you can throw those metal weapons into a group of enemies who can then be electrocuted by the storm. Those sorts of discoveries are extremely satisfying and help make the world feel a little more alive, simply because it doesn't feel quite like the typical video game scenario of pressing a button to make something happen. It's that intangible layer of randomness where you are manipulating the systems in the game to achieve your goals in creative ways. It makes Breath of the Wild a true sandbox in that regard.

The only problem with this freedom in exploration is that I still don't think Hyrule is that interesting of a place. There are certainly creatures that wander the land and weird encounters that appear in the form of enemy encampments, giants, bosses, wildlife, and secret puzzles with Koroks. Yet, each of these things that make the world more interesting is hindered in some way by the mechanics of the game to the point that I don't want to interact with them. I'm more than willing to praise Breath of the Wild's mechanics of climbing almost any surface and using the glider to get around the landscape, so getting around to the different areas isn't a problem. It's what you find once you're there.

There are details that pepper the landscape like ancient battlegrounds and graveyards, or distant mysterious islands. There are regions on the map that vastly contrast others with their environmental touches, like deserts, volcanoes, damp marshes, and windy glacial mountains. However, a lot of that feels empty and shallow. Part of that has to do with the lack of interesting wildlife and part of that has to do with the lack of meaningful rewards. It's not all empty, though. There are towns sprinkled across the landscape that add the personality to the world that it so desperately needs. When it comes down to it, however, I really was only exploring the world to find the next shrine to complete.

Shrines

Shrines are crucial to the experience in Breath of the Wild, in multiple ways. For one thing, they act as fast-travel points, so once you access one, you can use it to jump around the massive world. For another thing, they are probably one of the more interesting parts of the game. Shrines come in different formats, varying from maze, to puzzle, to combat arena. The combat arena ones are the least interesting since they don't change much from shrine to shrine, except in difficulty. The puzzles and the mazes, however, are cleverly crafted to force you to think of ways of solving them with Link’s skills and magic abilities. While there are certainly some basic ones that require little effort, some were real mind-benders that gave me more insight into methods of using the mechanics.

There is another reason to complete shrines besides just the satisfaction of completing puzzles. They are the primary source of improving Link's stats. There is no level system where you can improve a bunch of different attributes of your protagonist like in a typical RPG. Instead, you can improve either Link's maximum health or maximum stamina. While health is an obvious improvement, stamina is just as important as it governs your ability to climb steeper and taller environments or travel farther on your glider. In many ways, stamina is the stat that determines where you can go in the world because if you don't have enough stamina to climb a tall wall, you are completely gated. However, you cannot improve these stats with every completed shrine, you have to complete 4 each time to do so, which makes the progression rather slow.

Nonetheless, there are a lot of shrines in the game and they are scattered around the environment in clever ways. Kudos to the designers for coming up with a special color identifier for each shrine because, regardless of the weather conditions, you can see a shrine in the distance and know whether or not you've discovered it yet. Unlike games like Skyrim or Horizon: Zero Dawn, Breath of the Wild does not fill up your map with icons. You have to climb towers or mountains and survey the land yourself to then mark it on your map. Of the various mechanics the developers chose to leave at its most basic level, rather than making it easier like everything else, this is the one I appreciate. It's convenient to be able to fast travel or see everything on your map immediately after surveying the land, like climbing a tower in Assassin's Creed, but there's a bit more satisfaction in doing it manually.

Dungeons

I don't have a lot to say about the dungeons other than they are the biggest highlight of Breath of the Wild. While shrines provide small-scale diversions and puzzles that teach you how to use the mechanics of the games in interesting ways, the dungeons are where the real challenge is. Unlike dungeons in previous games, these are moving, practically living dungeons in the form of giant beasts, similar to the colossi from Shadow of the Colossus. Inside each of these beasts are various puzzles that require you to use a variety of tools to solve. Some are more straightforward, while others require you to control the beast itself and shift the entire dungeon, sometimes rotating it around completely to access an area. These sections of the game are fantastically clever and well-crafted. They're usually closed out by a boss fight that isn't much fun, but I still think these sections are the best part of the game.

Biggest Gripes: Weapons & Combat

Of course, with every bit of praise I give Breath of the Wild, I am reminded of something else that bothered me. While it was a good decision to make path-finding on maps a manual experience, more reminiscent of the limited mechanics in older games, the same cannot be said for other mechanics. I dislike inventory management. I dislike status-effect management. I dislike weapon durability. All of these pet peeves of mine are on display here and a major hindrance to my enjoyment. Let's start with my biggest issue.

Every weapon you find in Breath of the Wild, except the Master Sword, has a durability stat; and even the Master Sword has some sort of stupid, arbitrary handicap. Hit enough enemies, rocks, or tree branches with the weapon, it breaks. Bows break over time as well, as do shields that get hit enough. When the item breaks, that's it. It's gone forever. This certainly increases the power and value of the Master Sword with its uniquely (in)convenient quality, but since the Master Sword is not a weapon you get right off the bat, you may end up without a weapon if all of what you have suddenly breaks. How do you get more weapons? You can steal them from enemies, find them in chests, or buy them from stores. Every one of those weapons, however, will break and it won't take long to do so.

Unlike in other games, like Dark Souls, where most of the weapons could be repaired after they broke, Zelda decides to use the more outdated method of providing permadeath for your weapons. This is a problem for several reasons. One reason is that the speed at which each weapon breaks is way too fast; even the sturdiest weapons are already on the brink after half a dozen battles. This makes me care a lot less about the weapons I'm picking up because I know it's going to be gone in a few minutes, which leads to the next problem.

Weapons as rewards for clearing out enemy encampments don't feel like much of a reward, regardless of the quality of the weapon, since it's just going to break. This causes me to avoid most enemy encounters entirely, and not just because the combat is dull. I might be missing out on more important or useful rewards, but the chances of breaking at least two weapons in the process of clearing out an enemy encampment for another weapon that might actually be weaker than the ones I used to get are extremely high. Remember, Link's stats cannot be directly improved other than stamina or health, so his attack and defense are tied directly to the weapons and armor he has equipped. When I break two good weapons and am rewarded with a much weaker one, it doesn't leave me happy. It actually makes me not even use the "good" weapons, for fear of it breaking at an inopportune moment and using generally weaker ones that take longer to do the job, thus using up an inventory slot. This leads me to another big annoyance about the weapons.

You have a limited amount of space for weapons in your inventory. Since weapons are constantly breaking, you'd like to have as many as possible so it's less of an issue, but you cannot increase your weapon inventory without completing Korok puzzles and cashing in the reward seeds at a specific location that takes a while to find. Fun as the puzzles may be, tying them to the weapon inventory when it's already such a pain in the ass is more irritating because now you have to constantly be on the lookout for a random puzzle or rock that's out of place so you have a chance of making the game suck less. Maybe, when you have collected enough Korok seeds and increased the capacity of your weapon inventory, or have simply gotten the Master Sword, this is less of an issue, but it still heavily and negatively impacted my experience.

And that was all just my complaining about the weapon durability. Never mind the fact that the combat is rote and unsatisfying. We've had amazing games with basic combat that is surprisingly deep, like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, or games that go all out, like Devil May Cry, or games that manage to do one combat style really well to make up for their other failings, like Horizon: Zero Dawn. Yet, Breath of the Wild is still using Ocarina of Time's 20-year-old combat system. Sure, you can throw your weapons now if you want to just break them immediately, but it's still mostly the same thing of locking on, jumping back and forth, and attacking.

Since Link can use weapons other than the usual sword and shield, like spears or two-handed clubs, he has different animations to take into account. You certainly have to plan out your attacks more depending on the weapon you equip. You also need to learn to time your dodges so that you can do the Bayonetta just-dodge. If you avoid an enemy's attack at the right moment, you get to riposte with a flurry of strikes. Unfortunately, the feedback for the dodge movement and the timing felt inconsistent and awkward, so I never quite figured out when the right time to dodge was for most enemies. The weapon variety and the dodge buff breathe a small amount of life into the 20-year-old combat, and eventually, you unlock special abilities to spice it up, but it's not enough to make me any more interested.

Biggest Gripes: Managing Link's Bull$%*&

Breath of the Wild constantly forces you to go through menus and I hate it. Nintendo has added crafting to this game, which means there's a lot of crap in the world to pick up and hoard until you can cash it in for something useful. It's, thankfully, not as absurd and terrible as crafting in Dragon's Dogma, but it's still following the same general idea. Most of what you actually craft is food. Food can simply heal Link's wounds. Food that's been cooked with special ingredients, however, can add special status effects. This can range from temporarily higher defense, to temporarily faster movement, to a temporary increase in health capacity, to a temporary resistance to extreme weather conditions. Since extreme weather conditions can stop you in your tracks when you're trying to explore, and since the combat can be surprisingly difficult if you don't have enough weapons or strong enough armor, eating these strengthening meals is a mandatory part of the experience. However, you can't simply select the items and smash them together like in most games. You have to bring them to a pot over a lit fire, drop them into it in batches of 5 or fewer, and watch a cooking animation. In other words, at some point in the game, you are going to have to devote a significant chunk of your time to making some fancy meals so you can be prepared for various encounters. Nothing reminds me more of a true adventure into the mystical land of Hyrule like playing Cooking Mama for 30 minutes.

You might feel like I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, and that's fine. Some people liked the cooking and the ability to experiment with different ingredients. However, if the best thing about your game is exploring the world and certain areas prevent passage without the proper clothes or food, I don't really like having to spend a bunch of time tossing food into a pot so I can survive the harsh conditions. There are different pieces of clothing you can get to navigate this terrain, but as I've said, the clothing is what determines Link's defense. So if you're trying to explore the hot desert and fighting tough enemies, you have to either tough it out with armor that allows Link to last in the sun but doesn't protect well, or you have to eat some food that will cool you down so you can equip better armor. All of this translates to spending more time looking at menus. I appreciate all the little tooltips and descriptions of each item in the menus since Nintendo has usually been pretty good about that, but it doesn't make me want to spend more time sorting through all of my pig-goblin bones and apples I've collected.

Presentation

I dig the way Nintendo has presented their flagship RPG franchise in this outing. While the art style of the Zelda series has never really grabbed me, Breath of the Wild, nonetheless, does a great job of presenting Hyrule and giving it a unique look. As though Nintendo was thinking of the controversial stylistic split between audiences over the presentation of Twilight Princess and Windwaker, they managed to bridge the gap between the cell-shaded, colorful, cartoonish look of Windwaker to the dark and ominous "realism" of Twilight Princess. While it still leans harder towards Windwaker in its physical presentation, there's still a wealth of details to be noticed in the world and its design.

Nintendo put extensive effort into adding details to the various parts of the world, at least the ones that were populated with characters and critters. While I still found Hyrule to be a mostly empty environment devoid of much personality, there was still a significant amount of detail in the areas that had something. The writing added to the personality of these places with characters spouting some clever bits of dialogue. The overall designs of the characters, enemies, clothing, and weapons add a lot of the same level of detail and personality to the game. The explosions, magic spells, blasts, and effects all shine under the new aesthetic of the game and definitely add some much-needed life and color to the experience.

The music is a much more subdued experience than previous Zelda games. While most of them had big iconic themes and exuberant orchestral scores, Breath of the Wild uses softer tones and short little injections of sound to construct its musical experience. While I like this in some respects, I think it also added to the overall emptiness of the world itself. Not to mention, when the music picked up for combat, it didn't really pick up. If there was any emotion it was effective at generating, it was relaxed and mild boredom; it was basically the opposite of what Doom's soundtrack did.

The last thing I'll mention is the UI. To its credit, the interface is relatively minimal. Considering how much time you have to spend looking at it, it's definitely for the best that Nintendo didn't give an overly detailed UI that would slow down the game's performance. In a lot of ways, you can say that Breath of the Wild is a very minimalist approach to the series, both in terms of look and feel. While I tend to enjoy minimalism, I think you can run the risk of teetering into boring emptiness with it. As I've mentioned, this doesn't quite succeed in walking the razor's edge for me, but I wouldn't say it's a failure.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

It's fine. Once again, I think the world has overreacted and given The Legend of Zelda more credit than it's due. It is certainly the game that has departed the tropes of the franchise the most, and it should be rewarded for trying something different, but it has also done a lot of things that other games have already done, or have discarded as obsolete. There are a lot of inconvenient mechanics that are there to make the world feel more immersive and alive, which tend to get in the way of me enjoying it more. If I had never played, Dark Souls, Skyrim, The Witcher, Dishonored, Fable, or any other RPG with rich worlds and mechanics that interlaced with each other in different ways in the past 10 years, I would have been floored with Breath of the Wild like the rest of the world. However, I just think it's just a well-made game with a lot of design choices that I don't agree with.

Do you agree or disagree? Am I out of my mind, or on the money? Let me know in the comments.

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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Initial Impressions