Breath of the Wild

Okay, so it's been a few days for BotW to sink in, so I think I can express my thoughts properly.

Breath of the Wild is an amazing game. While there are many aspects of the game that were really good, what stood out the most to me was its vast overworld. Just looking around at the overworld from literally any outdoor location provides a beautiful view, one that never fails to incite me to just go out and explore. I may have been motivated by gameplay intentions at the beginning, but those were quickly replaced by a desire to travel across the world just because it's out there. I'm not even much of a fan of outdoor exploration irl, but that didn't stop me from relishing every second of journeying through Hyrule.

I honestly don't know how the game pulled this off; perhaps it was the pleasing visuals, the ambient sounds, or the careful details crafted into every part of Hyrule, but I was completely sucked into it. Even with activities that would probably sound really boring and tedious on paper, like climbing a mountain, felt really satisfying. I thought Wind Waker did a great job with invoking a sense of exploration, but BotW managed to take it much further.

One of the things that may have helped was the strong foundation of gameplay mechanics. Unlike other Zelda games, you don't really progress in any manner that affects gameplay mechanics after the first 10 hours or so. You start with a simple set of 4 runes that are really well-designed with completely natural mechanics, while still being versatile and relevant for the rest of the long journey. On a related note, the Physics engine is handled extremely well too. Pretty much everything works exactly the way you would realistically expect it to work.

I have mixed feelings about the shrines. On one hand, they provided nice milestones to add further significance to my exploration across Hyrule, and some of them had nice puzzles as well. A shrine never felt boring, and only one out of 135 shrines managed to really frustrate me. The music and atmosphere fit rather well, and it was really refreshing to constantly discover new rune applications to solve puzzles that felt completely natural within the world.

On the other hand, I actually found the vast majority of the shrines to be really forgettable. While the design and atmosphere never got old, they stopped impressing me rather quickly and I'd go in without caring about much more besides solving the puzzles to clear the shrine and collect the treasure chests.

The Divine Beasts weren't very appealing either. Moving parts of the Divine Beast was pretty cool at first, but the puzzles associated with them were pretty straightforward. At some points, they even felt like mindless padding (even the shrines never felt this way). The DLC Beast was my favorite of the five, but it still couldn't hold a candle to the better dungeons of earlier games. I'd even go as far as say that the dungeon designs were more unremarkable than Wind Waker.

The combat system is pretty nice in principle, leading to fun and engaging battles at first, though it's rather simple and straightforward. Despite there being a ton of options and relevant mechanics for combat at any given situation, I never felt like there was much depth or strategy to combat. While the simplicity made it easy to get into, it was also its downfall, since the game couldn't really provide meaningful difficulty progression and resorted to simply making enemies hit harder while having more HP, causing combat to eventually become a mindless chore. The short lifespan of even the most durable melee weapons really didn't help either, even after getting the Master Sword. Thankfully, combat is mostly avoidable in the game, but it can still be annoying when it gets in the way of the exploration component of the game.

The story and characters got the short end of the stick as well. While Mipha shone brightly in my eyes despite her limited screentime, and I was really interested in Revali with how he was the only Champion that apparently acquired his supernatural ability from pure skill alone, the game really didn't delve deeply into its cast of characters. Even Zelda, who monopolizes most of the cutscenes, was reduced to a simple inner conflict that gets hammered in over and over again with each memory fragment. But what was probably the most disappointing of all for me was how Ganon was presented as nothing more than a generic evil monster, without a speck of characterization even during the final battle. It's really sad that Master Kohga has more character than Ganon here.

Despite the shortcomings in the overall story and main characters, the game did pretty well with their NPCs. Many of the NPCs were pretty interesting, with a nice diversity of characters. Dorian and his daughters were especially notable, but the NPCs in general were still really good.

Overall, I find Breath of the Wild to be an excellent game, even by Zelda standards. It's easily one of my Top Five Zelda games, and I think I'd even put it in my Top Three. The overworld exploration alone is enough to carry the game, and it did a lot of other things really well. While it does have its shortcomings, they didn't affect the gameplay experience too much. At the very least, this is a very promising direction for the Legend of Zelda series as a whole, and I have high hopes that future Zelda instalments will build up on Breath of the Wild's success while refining its weak points to reach even more extraordinary heights... ~~literally~~