The Zelda Cycle and Popularity Backlash

Looking up a few more things about Breath of the Wild, I noted significant backlash from a few camps, those rare people that believe the game is complete trash. Murphy’s Law applies here, of course, that some people are just satirising the games community, but I also believe that many of Breath of the Wild’s detractors are serious in their disdain for a game that I believe is hard to hate.

It’s pretty interesting to watch the backlash from some of these people regarding Breath of the Wild and, while some can dispute the occurrence, ‘Metabombing’ has occasionally occurred, as with any other game, where a vocal minority of people are hitting the game’s Metacritic page with zero-reviews, as if changing an arbitrary number on a flawed site is going to make their lives qualitatively better somehow. This is an unusual occurrence, but it is one that I believe has reasoning behind it, that I like to call popularity backlash.

Taking a step back, however, people have also wrapped this up in something called ‘The Zelda Cycle’; the idea that says a Zelda game is reviewed with critical acclaim at its launch, only to be viewed with disdain in hindsight. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20, and many have decried Skyward Sword as one of the worst Zelda games ever made, which seems strange given its almost universal love from critics that it received at the time.

I think some may take the backlash and occasional Metabomb as an aspect of the Zelda Cycle, that now that some time has passed, people are looking back at Breath of the Wild with a more critical eye, but I don’t believe this is the case, nor do I believe that the Zelda Cycle exists in the way that most view it.

Instead, I think that the Zelda Cycle is more to do with the aforementioned popularity backlash. To use a painful example, look at Frozen; the movie was viewed with love by most when it first came out, but over time, that almost universal praise turned to scorn and even backlash. Over the repeated ‘Let It Go’ references, memes and rehashes, people just got annoyed at the thing that was popular. A significant backlash occurred and now, Frozen is the butt of many jokes that are aimed toward such elements. A similar thing occurred with Minions from Despicable Me; those little yellow shits once thought of as harmless slapstick elements in a relatively harmless film, thanks to over-marketing have now become this toxic gimmick viewed with scorn.

Now, I am not suggesting that Zelda is anywhere near the level of Minions, but what I am suggesting is that near-universal praise and popularity can in some cases be a massive turn off for people in its own right. Thanks to hipsters and the ‘I liked it before it was cool’ mentality, or the ‘I never liked that new popular thing, look how cultured I am’ trend, I think that universal acclaim for any property makes it suddenly the cool thing to hate, as an anti-culture trend. People think it’s cool to stand out from the crowd, just because, and dislike arbitrary things as a result of this strange phenomenon.

I do think there are parts of Breath of the Wild that I didn’t see before that make the game less enjoyable in my view, especially rain, those creepy fairy animations that occur once you start upgrading high level gear, or a dubious Gerudo section that so far is giving me nothing to enjoy, but I do believe that at its core, Breath of the Wild is a good game. Building further on that point, I believe that most Zelda titles are good games.

I think we have to take a step back and look at what older, now-disliked Zelda titles really are; they are more highly polished than most games, offer a reasonable challenge and are well-designed at their core, so I don’t think that any could be considered truly bad, not even Skyward Sword for all of its disdain; it’s just that critics were looking at the technical quality of the game, not the use of the tropes within the game that departed from the Zelda formula. Certain Zelda games may not have felt particularly Zelda-like, but they were undeniably well-made experiences.

I think we need to take a step back when we’re viewing popular items with such disdain, and try to look at what we are actually trying to say. Of course, in the case of Minions, popularity backlash was ultimately accurate in the way that the final disdain for the film was perfectly justified and the marketing was so cynical that many were left feeling disgusted, but Breath of the Wild is a different creature. It is, at its core, an enjoyable experience that admirably tried to capture classic Zelda tropes, while at the same time iterating and improving upon open-world design. Whether or not the game is deserving of the total acclaim that it has received is up for debate, but I do believe that at its core, like many before it, Breath of the Wild is a good game.