A Rare Gripe About Breath of the Wild

Living in the north of Scotland, I am no stranger to rain. The UK is one of those countries that love to complain about the weather, it’s a national fascination given how predictably unpredictable it is; as in, you can be sure that when it looks like it’ll be a nice sunny day, you will get a sudden, unexpected deluge to soak you through.

This is one of my very few gripes about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I feel that as someone who lives in a country famed for the weather being a little bit shit, I am entitled to speak on this. Simply, it rains too much!

The thing that makes this so annoying is that Breath of the Wild, at its core, is about freedom; this was supposed to be the single, biggest focus of the game. You could look at a place and you could go there, was the promise. Given that, it is incredibly annoying that Hyrule seems to be 90% inaccessible when it rains.

The majority of Hyrule seems to be made of sheer cliffs and steep rock climbs, so then my progress, my freedom, is dictated by an arbitrary, artificial weather system that seems to be totally inauthentic in the way it portrays rain. Rain is not an oil slick that suddenly makes any surface completely frictionless, as Breath of the Wild would have you believe, nor does it occur quite nearly as often as it does in Hyrule.

The rain in Zelda is not a game-breaking annoyance, by any means, nor is it impossible to find a workaround. But in a game where otherwise every design decision was made so wholeheartedly around the core idea of freedom, to have a mechanic that sends players grinding to a halt in the way that rain does, suddenly making areas inaccessible simply because of the poorly-designed decision of a poorly-designed weather system, is incredibly annoying, and jarring even. This seems to run in the face of the whole game’s ethos.

Breath of the Wild is a wonderful game, and one with nature and freedom at its core. However, the way in which rain works damages the whole design perspective of the game, and I wonder about the logic behind the decision to allow such an annoying issue into what is otherwise a masterpiece of how one can implement nature into a sandbox game. It is my sincere hope that soon, Nintendo find a way to patch this to make the rain just that little bit less limiting, as limits of any kind go totally against what Breath of the Wild stands for as a videogame.