Yet Another Glowing Breath of The Wild Review

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the best open world game that I have ever played. The preceding statement is a bold one to make, considering we live in a world of Assassin’s Creeds, Shadow of Mordors, Far Crys and Grand Theft Autos, but the latest of Link’s outings learned from them all and surpasses its rivals by leaps and bounds, setting a new high bar for the genre that may be unsurpassed for years to come.

It is not surprising that I love this game, and many on the internet will agree with me wholeheartedly when I say the preceding paragraph. So I warn any readers now that I loved this game and I am still loving it, so my review of it is more praise than critique.

It is difficult to say what hasn’t already been said about Breath of the Wild. While in sheer power the Wii U and Switch undoubtedly pale in comparison to their contemporaries, the game looks gorgeous and, uh, breath-taking. I have spoken many times about my love for aesthetics over graphics; while hardcore processing power and technological leaps are impressive, making a game where graphics are based purely on the technology of the time dooms it to looking awfully dated years later.

On the other hand, in Breath of the Wild, bright colours assault your senses with sheer joy, the cel-shaded, anime-styled designs evoke emotions effortlessly and everything about the game is beautiful, especially with the draw distance, where players are baited into staring towards the horizon in wonder.

It is a shame that at times, the technology of the consoles just doesn’t stand up to the task. Frame drops are frequent, while not enough to ruin a gameplay experience such drops are noticeable and jarring, at their worst in the opening area. It will never live up to the 60FPS standard and here, I am afraid we will have to settle for ‘good enough’.

Sound design is not particularly pleasing on its own. The music just doesn’t quite live up to the standards set by preceding Zelda titles, although popular songs make cameo appearances, there just isn’t enough iconic music. Additionally, the sound effects of the wildlife can be irksome at times, the mocking ‘hoo-hoo!’ of a distant owl being a constant niggle that makes me roll my eyes in mild annoyance.

Gameplay-wise, the game is wonderful. It is the first game that truly embodies the concept of Zelda. While earlier titles in the series have tried, Breath of the Wild is the first that succeeds in this vision, encouraging the kind of freeform experimentation that the series has dreamed about since the days of the NES.

I simply love how full the world is. While other games have issues with giving players a big empty sandbox, Breath of the Wild is packed to bursting point. A large part of the game is finding hidden shrines that reward the player with tokens necessary for character development. It’s stated that they are optional past the first four you must visit, but given the high difficulty level, visiting at least a few of these shrines is pretty much a necessity if you want to have any realistic chance of surviving in the new, brutal Hyrule.

Difficulty is an important thing in this new game, in embracing its past, I feel that Breath of the Wild took that intent one step further with a step back to the hardcore roots of the first Legend of Zelda. You will die, and you will die often. The game is packed with monsters armed to the teeth with ever-improving weapons, not to mention the imposing Guardians that can hit you with an exploding beam and kill you in one hit. Combat is rewarding and, while not as deep as Dark Souls, deep enough to give players a layer of skill to master.

A large part of the gameplay is in its survival elements. It is impressive just how well the game has integrated survival tropes into its gameplay in a way that is not to its detriment, but is a fun and enjoying metagame being played throughout. Cooking food that Link can gather on his journey either by hunting or foraging gives the player various buffs beyond just health recovery, and it is an enjoying game of experimentation testing out all the different recipies that one can make.

The game is just so elegantly designed in that it presents Mother Nature as the sandbox. The world operates to a set of consistent rules and just about anything you can expect would happen will happen. The attention to detail is astounding in that the player can manipulate the world around them to give them favourable outcomes; you can go from simply rolling rocks down hills to smash into an enemy camp, to setting nearby grass on fire, harnessing the resulting updraft of wind with the paraglider to then get a birds-eye view of an enemy camp, before dropping in using the slow-motion bow-firing mechanic and laying waste to monsters with a hail of arrows.

The world is truly your playground and you can attack problems any way you see fit, even if the solution you come up with is not the one that the game intended. I had fun with a motion-controlled ball-in-a-maze puzzle in one of the aforementioned shrines, where instead of rolling the ball to the end of the maze I simply flipped the maze upside down and back again to land the ball onto the right point.

Using your ingenuity to cheat a puzzle and then finding success is just about the best thing that I find with this game. It does not follow the typical logic of other games, where there are locked doors meaning you cannot access a room without a key even though you pack enough firepower to blast the door to smithereens, in this game, it’s a case of ‘if you can, do’.

It is a shame about the weapon durability, however. Weapons break a lot, and it is a very frustrating experience that one’s arsenal can be fully depleted simply by going through a single camp. Many times I have been discouraged and made to run away from combat not because I lacked the skills to win but because I didn’t want to ‘waste’ my weapons on garden-variety mobs. This is somewhat improved later in the game by weapons with better durability but it is a niggling problem throughout that weapons just don’t last long enough.

In addition, one of the most annoying things about the gameplay is the rain. Hyrule seems to be made up of about 90% mountain and sheer cliff, and so you spend a lot of your time slowly climbing. This is a bit of an annoyance in itself, as I find the climbing just not entertaining in the slightest given that every time you are slowed to a crawl as you painstakingly scale up a mountain with no end in sight, but then the game rains. It seems that Hyrule is located in Scotland, given that on any day you can expect at least about 23 hours of it to be a downpour. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but when you are climbing the rain makes the task all but impossible, which is incredibly frustrating given that the rain. Just. Never. Stops.

Don’t let this issue rain on your parade, however, because taken as a whole the package of Breath of the Wild is near-perfect. I have many, many niggles that are simply cancelled out because the game has captured that sense of wonder and exploration. I have a new game that I wish I could forget so I could play it again for the first time.

While it has many flaws as an open world game, Breath of the Wild is an important leap forward for the series and for the genre as a whole, and I would whole-heartedly recommend the experience, fantastic and powerful as it is, to anyone. It is simply a masterpiece, although a flawed one. At first glance, the niggles and issues of the game stand to make one dislike the game, it is impossible not to love the overall package and sense of amazement and wonder, and the realization of the sandbox in its purest form. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the new high bar for any open-world game to come, and possibly the greatest video game that I have ever played.