The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017)

Revisiting BotW now, I realize that the gear upgrade changes in TotK are actually worse than I thought at the time of playing the latter. I was annoyed by the level of grinding required to upgrade gear but I erroneously thought they had just increased the base upgrade costs in rupees. Playing BotW again and I realize, there is no rupee cost for upgrading gear, just a materials cost. So while you have to grind a tiny bit in this game, TotK is an abysmal grind fest. Some people defend it saying g you don’t need to upgrade every price of gear. And while I agree, just upgrading a few is a huge pain compared to BotW. It does feel like Nintendo doesn’t want players to upgrade all their gear, because I can’t figure out why else they’d make TotK such a miserable grind.

And the sad thing is, that grind is probably why I’m not likely to play TotK again, even though I enjoyed it.

When the Nintendo Switch was revealed in its first trailer, I knew, it was going to be massive. Especially so, when rumors of Breath of the Wild's greatness started to unfold.

One of my largest regrets is not following my gut and invest everything I had in NTDOY. It was a trigger I didn't have it in me to pull. Anything of the sort strikes my fear of financial risk. Yes - hindsight is blistering. Yes, its extremely stupid etc etc etc.

That said, I still thought about it. I talked about it and I sat on it... The aftermath of the Nintendo Switch release arrived and the stock price doubled. I've been thinking about it ever since.

This sort of Hail Mary, Wolf of World 1-1, was a notion I never had before nor could have about anything else. If the investment worked out, I wouldn't have been well off, at all, but it would've left me with the satisfaction of putting myself on the line for something I understand and be safer for it.

With the Switch 2 coming, I don't think lightning will strike twice, but I'm sure not betting against Nintendo. I can't do that to them if I'm right, or to myself if I'm wrong. Too much risk.

I don't really need diamond hands. I only need to know I'm safe, with a controller in them.

Didn't think I'd finish this game this weekend yet here we are, and it's barely the afternoon.

I was hesitating to storm the castle and face Calamity Ganon because I wasn't sure if I was already strong enough. I'm still two levels away from maximum equipment upgrades, and I haven't reached the maximum number of hearts and stamina level. I already struggled a lot with Thunderblight Ganon so I thought Calamity Ganon would leave me miserable. Turns out, sneaking around the castle, or even fighting the guardians and monsters there, was manageable, and the boss fight was less difficult for me than that with Thunderblight. Shoutout to the champions and their gifts. I prepared so many weapons but I didn't even use most of them. I should have brought more cooked food.

This is such an amazing game. It is rich but not overwhelmingly so. However, I'm not sure if I'll pick it up again to do the remaining shrines, quests, and upgrades. When I tried to do that last week, it was not very fun. I think that was because I was following a guide instead of exploring on my own. Right now, I'm 90+ hours in, and not following a guide for the rest would take me tens of hours more. I've already been itching to move on to another game for some time now, mostly because there's so many great ones out there, and I'm already overly satisfied with my experience with this one so maybe it's time.

Highly likely that I'll play Tears of the Kingdom although I can't tell when yet.

I played 120 hours of this game and am rating it lower than most things....but part of that is because it's a zelda game, I want to see what it has to offer and I hold it to a higher standard.

This is just my rating for me, I can definitely see why this is a 5 star game for a lot of people.

I just feel like the main "dungeon" grind of the shrines (and the beasts really) was just really, really boring. Everything looks the same. Half the puzzles could be cheesed (and in a lot of cases the cheese was more obvious). Finally getting to the castle was the best part of the game for me because it felt unique and vast, more like zelda dungeons from the past.

The game also doesn't respect your time, and some of this is old zelda stuff. Like so so so many unskippable animations or slowly fading in items that you've received dozens of times before in this game (and the others usually). I feel like at least 10 of my 120 hours are just waiting for stuff to finish that I had already seen a million times already.

Almost none of the side quests (with one or two main exceptions) felt important. You do a fetch quest for someone, they give you 50-300 rupees. Usually 100. Which is almost nothing. No major decisions, almost never any major change to the world, no big puzzle,....just bring me this thing...or worse, 10-55 of these things...thanks, here's 100 rupees.

You also have every major item/power you really need from like 3 hours into the game. The reward cycle is lacking so so so much. The progression feels irrelevant.

The story is the same as ever, but I didn't really expect anything different there...but I wasn't super engaged.

Having the master sword locked behind several steps of progression and then it still running out of energy just really felt bad. Having a weapon break mid boss battle (multiple times) felt bad. Just, why? Like the weapons never felt like good rewards because I had gotten them before and they were just going to be gone in 2-3 minutes anyway.

The world was great. I was compelled to explore it. Would have appreciated the expansion motorcycle not being locked until the end of the game since horses are next to useless for most of the game as well. I don't care if it is realistic whether my horse can hear me or survive in severe heat or traverse this mountain, I want to go faster and I'm willing to let go of some realistic elements to have more fun. Finally getting the expansion saddle which lets the horse warp to you, helped a little, but still too many times where I was stuck walking because my horse couldn't negotiate a 1 foot change in terrain.

Combat is fine and felt more engaging longer than in previous zelda games for me....but I still avoided it as often as possible because I hated losing my best weapons and having to default to the overly abundant rusted and royal weapons just because a bokoblin was hanging around, it was usually easier and more fun just to go around.

I know this will not be a popular opinion. If you love open world games and you love zelda and you have the patience to play a game that feels 5 years behind games that came out 2 years before it (Witcher 3 specifically), this will probably be an amazing time for you. Also hopefully this review will make you less hyped. Not having a way to play this game for 6 years and letting the hype train make my expectations sky high is almost certainly an element here as well....but I feel like my complaints are valid for a main franchise game as storied as Zelda.

Following Polygon’s perfect score for Breath of the Wild (back when they gave scores), I sent a bit of skepticism to @tylerisrandom:

The 10 minutes or so of gameplay I’ve seen look okay, but not amazing. There must be something to the feel of the game that makes people love it. I still think it looks super washed out (at least in the over world).

Skeptical or not, I bought it for the family Switch and watched my kids dive into their Hyrylian adventure. I didn’t even start my own save, I just tried to come to the rescue when they got stuck. Sadly, and for the first time, I could barely play a Zelda game. The jump button was wrong, I kept forgetting how to switch weapons. Ultimately, I could fumble through, but the further the kids got the worse I was at helping.

Still, they had a great time and I started to understand why everyone over at Polygon was raving about it. Once they lost interest after taking out the first divine beast I intended to pick it up their save, but I just couldn’t make my fingers press the right buttons.

Over the next few years I watched so many let’s plays and speedruns, I’d entirely forgotten that I hadn’t actually finished it.

Finally, this year I restarted the game, got myself used to the jump button (no remapping for me), and went to work. While I was not prepared for a souls-like Zelda in 2017, I was ready in 2023. I died a lot but always pushed further and felt the game reward me for it. I was delighted to find the Lost Woods, the weird great fairies, and a host of other familiar Zelda staples.

In the end, I spent 65 hours on my first real play through and beat it just ahead of Tears of the Kingdom’s release. Of which, I played about 45 minutes before the kids took the cartridge (they haven’t given it back yet). Expect my Tears of the Kingdom review whenever Breath of the Wild 3 comes out.

One of the best examples I have ever seen of an open-world game. Every corner felt filled with content whether it was mini-quests, enemies, shrines, or just scenery. The world just felt so alive and fully optimized. In addition, the characters are so memorable and well designed. The art style was also a huge refresher for the franchise that has gone through so many. The gameplay was very fun with its variety of weapons, fighting styles, and mechanics once you start getting more and more abilities. There is a reason why this game is held in such high regard, now that I have played it, I can totally agree. One of the best games ever made from its beginning to the grand final, there is much riding on the sequel for whenever it comes out.

So I decided that maybe my abandonment of the game originally was because of my high expectations and that I overreacted. But I am so stunned that this is the game people love so much.

It is probably the most boring experience I’ve ever had in a game. Setting, dialogue, progressions, combat, puzzles, exploration, story. It is all so bland and lifeless and -pointless. I really truly hated the experience of the game, I made it maybe 15 hours or so.

Love almost every other entry, this is just so sad. Glad everyone else enjoyed it, but I’m sorta speechless at this point.

I've played so many of games throughout my life, only few of them i've enjoyed so much. Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is one of them. Everything about the game is absolutely perfect. The visuals, the story, the gameplay, the setting, the sound design. I honestly can't find one flaw at all. Everything comes together so well.

Hats off to the development team for creating such a breathtaking experience.

I think this game is perfect. It is hard to write reviews for things that are perfect. There isn't anything to critique, and instead, it is just glowing. But this game makes me glow. What can I say?

I named my son Link. To be fair, his full name is Lincoln, but it was clear from its inception that Link would be his nickname. He was still a baby when this game came out. He would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, so I would set him on my lap and play BotW. I would point at the screen and say "That's you!"

Lincoln is three now. He sees me and his sister play games and he gets excited. He really wants to play Pokemon right now, but he's a little young to understand the controls. Although he hasn't come knocking for Zelda yet, he likes watching me play BotW (for the second time now, this time on Hero mode). Sometimes when he sees me playing, he'll point at the screen and say "That's me!" I'm excited for the day I get to put this game in his hands and make it true.

I'd give this 100 out of 10 if I could. Beautiful, breathtaking, and infinitely liberating in the things you constantly find out Link can do. However, I have to say I do agree with the common criticism of the lack of dungeons that can quickly make the game stale, as shrines are plentiful but very similar to one another. But....I loved the design of the Divine Beasts so much, I'll forgive it.

Breath of the Wild is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise typical formula. I love when games change it up, and Zelda was a franchise in dire need of a change. Open world games are often very intimidating, and I usually enjoy them, but BOTW manages to strike a perfect chord between open world and story. There's an incentive to go to Ganon right away, but you can't - and then the world will take you.

Breath of the Wild is the Greatest Game Ever Made, and that is not hyperbole. Somehow Nintendo's first open world game is now the standard to which we will hold open world games. It forgets (or never learned?) the conventions that most open world games have, like a strict main questline and iterative sidequests, and fills every bit of its 80-hour runtime with fresh content.

Compared to other Zelda games, Breath of the Wild is the natural progression from aLBW, where you have access to every tool at the very start of the game. Unlike aLBW, which still has the Zelda tradition of having a "dungeon item," there is no such thought here. Every other Zelda game uses "hotspots" to show that an item is usable here - an eye meant it was an arrow target, or a bull's-eye a hookshot target, but items in BotW aren't constrained to hotspots, they can interact with many more targets. There are four tools: Magnesis (control over metal objects), Bombs, Stasis (being able to freeze an object in place, give it momentum by hitting it, and then letting it fly afterwards), and Cryonis (creation of ice pillars over liquids). This makes the tools feel universally useful. You also have the basics: your sword, shield, bow, and glider. By two hours in, you have everything, which means you can go anywhere and do anything in the game after that. This includes waltzing up to the final boss and beating the game!

The fun in Breath of the Wild is the exploration. Like in most open world games, exploration will get you collectibles, with which you buy upgrades. Traditionally, they're found lying on the ground, but BotW manages to keep the collecting fresh. There are two kinds of collectible: Shrines and Seeds. Shrines are short dungeons, each of the 100+ of them unique and fulfilling. May of these are puzzles, and because of how free you are in their solution, you more often feel that "aha!" moment when you've figured out a solution. Seeds are rewards for exploring quirks in the environment. There might be a rock up in a tree -- rocks shouldn't be in trees! -- so moving the rock rewards you with a seed. There might be a set of three apple trees, two of which have one apple in the same place and the third which has four. By making the three trees look the same, you are rewarded a seed. You begin to notice the motifs by which they spawn, and you feel smart for noticing them.

What about dungeons? In addition to the shrines, BotW has four dungeons, each being an animal-shaped ancient weapon we are trying to regain control of in order to aid us. The dungeon is the weapon itself - and the extra mechanic of each of the dungeons is that you can physically control a part of the machine to help you progress. The interactions between the dungeon mechanic and the rest of the dungeon are really neat. For instance, one is an elephant, and we have control over the position of its trunk. The trunk is continuously spouting water, and by changing its position we can create waterfalls which will help us progress. Or, we might have access to the rotation of the dungeon itself, causing the entire room to rotate (in real time!) at our command.

What about combat? In addition to regular sword swinging, Link can parry attacks by either doing a perfect dodge or shield striking an enemy attack. The timings are fairly tight, and the attack opening you get is pretty good, making them essential for taking down some of the tougher enemies and bosses.

There have been a host of content about the making of BotW, I especially like the GDC talk they gave where they lay out their ideas in designing BotW. The gist is that the game should be built on foundations of physics (in addition to movement, add things like electrical conductance, wind) and chemistry (how elements like fire/hotness, ice/coldness, and electricity interact with objects). By setting up this system, the way the world works clicks - everything reacts the way they should in a natural, unforced manner. This also creates a lot of potential solutions for puzzles, which is the most satisfying part of BotW - figuring out your solution to the problem, not the solution.

I like to ask anybody who's played BotW how they got past one of the earliest puzzles: having to scale a snowy mountain. When it's too cold, Link takes damage (about 1/4 heart per two seconds -- Link right now has three hearts, and cant scale it without help). So, you need to find a way to keep Link warm. Or do you? One of my friends amassed a load of food and tanked all of the damage. I decided to take a lit torch all the way up - this involved first having to prepare a walkable path and take the torch up the mountain. Torches don't stay lit when you put them away, which meant that I could not actually fight! You can also fulfill a miniquest of sorts and get some warmer clothes with which you can survive the cold. Nothing in the game explicitly directs you, either: you see there's a shrine you need to go to in the mountain, and you notice as you approach the mountain's foot, Link takes damage from the cold. The rest is up to you.

Another part of the fun of BotW is just talking about the game. After playing for twenty hours, I sustained a 2 hour conversation with another friend who was about the same spot as I. Comparing strategies, neat finds, theorycrafting alternative solutions, etc- there's so much to see and find and so many ways to go about doing so that you will have a completely different experience than someone else playing this game. You'll decide on what tactics suit you, and carve out the gameplay you like.

I spent 80 hours in BotW, finding all the shrines and (I think) most of the other content.

Let me start by saying that I was pretty disappointed with Breath of the Wild. It seems as if the world is currently hailing it as GotM (Game of the Millennium), which is some of the motivation for me to write this; I thought I'd give a slightly different account of things.

First a disclaimer. As you can see I have given the game 4/5 stars. It is obviously still a good game by most standards, but I won't focus too much on the positive parts. You can read basically every other review of it to get that aspect. To mention a few, the world is colourful and beautiful, the story is marginally better than OoT (Ocarina of Time), although there is less of it, the terrain is nice and varied.

So, my biggest disappointment with this game is that it is a Zelda game with no dungeons, which is insane when you think about it. Some people might try correct me, bringing up the shrines and the divine beasts. However I would argue that the only reason one would make that comparison is that the game is titled "The Legend of Zelda". The shrines, of which there are probably 80+ (I thought I'd not check the wiki in case this is considered spoilery), are basically one room puzzles, and there are not really any connection between them (I know there is the one on the mountain tops). There are no prerequisites for any of the shrines as far as I found, and one can technically beat any one of them at the beginning of the game. Similarly, the divine beasts, which are the main "dungeons" of the game, unfortunately also lack the arch typical Zelda trope of Dungeon + Item = Victory, and can also be tackled in any order. Calling them dungeons is also a bit of a stretch though, they all have the same design, and they take around 10-30 minutes to beat, including boss and cut scenes.

My second complaint comes from it being open world. I understand that a lot of people enjoy open world games, and there is nothing wrong with that. You might even say “Why did you even play this if you know you don’t like open world games?”, which is a fair question. The answer is that having been a Zelda fan my entire life, I should at least give it a try, and even if I didn’t like the open world aspect (which I prayed I would), I could at least just mainline the story, and get my Zelda fix from there. This is basically what happened, and it thus turned into a game where every bit of content is separated by 30-60 minutes of Link running. I never really stumbled upon anything interesting, and I’d say the world feels empty. I also tried side questing, but it didn’t feel very rewarding, and the quests themselves weren’t particularly engaging. They even chucked in a Skyrim-style house for you to buy and fill with pre-positioned furniture. The only purpose of the house for me was to leave a particularly good weapon I had saved for the final boss, only to forget it until the moment I actually could have needed it.

Other minor gripes include: the fact that equipment breaks makes it so that no piece of gear ever feels special, the combat is less interesting than it is in Wind Waker, most characters I encountered were fairly shallow (although that is pretty common in Zelda games), there is no interesting way of getting rupees, at least compared to the amounts one need to do the main story.

After 40 hours of trying to appreciate it I finally went and finished it. After having beat the final boss I went back to finish one last side quest I felt I had invested too much time to leave undone. It rewarded me with 3 diamonds, and I turned off the game for good.

I may have found the game that tops my personal favourite, A Link to the Past. It's early to tell given how recent the game is, but what a wonderful game. Beautiful, engaging, exciting and breathtakingly vast with a level of world building I have seldom seen. It will be hard to find anything that tops this game for a while (and here I was expecting Mass Effect Andromeda to be my highlight of the year—there's still time yet, but we'll have to see).

While I am finished the game in one sense, I anticipate continuing on for some time, collecting the various items, secrets and stories that I have yet to discover. I'm excited for every additional moment I have left in this new wondrous vision of Hyrule.

Breath of the Wild is Nintendo's attempt at injecting a much needed breath of fresh air into their core Zelda series. While only someone with an irrational hatred for Nintendo would call Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword bad games, they were incredibly formulaic and unsurprising. The top-notch dungeon design, charm, and Nintendo polish was all the series had left. The art and the magic was gone.

Breath of the Wild brings that back in full force by going back to the series' roots. And I mean all the way back. I'm talking The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on the Nintendo Entertainment System. A Link to the Past marked a turning point in the series, and there hasn't been a Zelda game like the first two since, until now. Breath of the Wild once again pushes you out into the world with very little preamble. The return of a character named simply "Old Man," who gives you advice and gear at the start is an obvious homage to the first game and makes Nintendo's vision for the game clear. He will force you to do four puzzle shrines, each of which will give you one of the four powers you will use to solve every future puzzle you encounter in the game, and then he will give you his paraglider, and then you're on your own. You have all the tools you will need by the time you leave the tutorial area.

Once you're pushed out into the world, nothing stands in your way. Hyrule Castle and Ganon sit in the distance, visible from almost every vista in the game world, and you can go there straight out of the tutorial if you want. The few traditional Zelda dungeons that exist in this game can be completed in any order, or not at all. Much smaller puzzle shrines like those you completed in the tutorial dot the landscape, and are how you upgrade your health and stamina, which stands in for experience points and leveling up in a more traditional RPG. They are also (along with towers) your only way of creating fast travel points to warp around the game world.

Beyond the dungeons and shrines, which are full of Zelda puzzle goodness, very little of this game resembles a Zelda game at all. There's a huge open world filled with side quests. There's cooking. There's stealth. There's a freaking shield parry that looks exactly like the parry from Dark Souls. It's a hodgepodge of ideas and mechanics from other games that have been combined into something we've never quite seen before. It reminds me in turns of Dark Souls, Dragon's Dogma, Shadow of the Colossus, Monster Hunter, Morrowind, and Assassin's Creed. Surely this can't work? Oh, but it does.

This game brilliantly solves almost every complaint I have had with open world games for years, specifically those that follow the ubisoft model. It has towers like an Assassin's Creed game, but they only fill in the background of the map. They don't put any markers down for you. You have to do that yourself by physically seeing something interesting and marking it manually. The game even gives you a selection of icons to use and trusts you to settle on a system that works and remember it. One person might use stars for shrines, another might be a crazy person and use the cooking pot icon instead. This turns something that feels like busywork in others games into an important aspect of exploration that you can have ownership over, because you did it yourself. That design philosophy extends to the entire game. Breath of the Wild wants you to do things for yourself for once, and in the current gaming climate nothing could be more refreshing.

Two other complaints I have about open world games are solved by the game's most controversial design decision--weapons that break. Like many, I hated this idea at first. Why would I want my weapons to break? What purpose does it serve? It's just busywork! And yet, the more I played the less it bothered me. After playing for a long time I had come to see that not only is it not a problem, it's a brilliant solution to actual problems we've been dealing with for years.

Consider a game like Morrowind. Like Breath of the Wild, it allows you to go anywhere in the game world from the start. Like Breath of the Wild (and unlike Oblivion), the enemies don't scale to your strength, and certain areas have enemies that will absolutely destroy you. The difference is that in Morrowind, this is to a large extent an illusion of choice. You can't actually accomplish anything in these high level areas. It's cool that you can go there, but that's about it. Leave and come back when you're stronger. Breath of the Wild, in contrast, isn't so cut and dry. It's entirely possible for a player to discover a very powerful weapon right after leaving the tutorial. You can save that weapon to use as a trump card, or you can use it to actually accomplish things in difficult areas you're "not supposed to be at yet," assuming you're good enough at the combat to not get hit. And the kicker is, they can do this without breaking the entire balance of the game, because you won't have that weapon forever. It's going to break. This is a revelation in game design that allows for a much more freeform and organic experience. The ups and downs you will have by finding powerful weapons and having them break is unreal. It feels amazing. I've seen people dip their toes into Hyrule Castle from the start of the game, not to attempt fighting Ganon, but to abscond with some end-game loot that will make the first few hours of the game a cakewalk.

Treating weapons as a consumable resource also solves another problem that Elder Scrolls games tend to have. Namely, you will always reach a point where nothing you find is going to be better than what you're already using. Everything becomes vendor trash, and since gold is largely useless in those games, the incentive to keep playing and keep exploring quickly wanes. Not so in Breath of the Wild. You will always need more weapons. You will always need more shields. You will always need more crafting materials and ingredients. Everything you find in this game is something that you will, theoretically, use. This makes exploration feel so much more rewarding.

Beyond that, the thing that makes the game so special is the, "oh wow, you can really do that?" factor. You have a magnesis power to lift metal objects. A stasis power that lets you lock objects in place and hit them with a weapon to store momentum in them so that they rocket off when stasis runs out. You have two different bombs, a round one for rolling and a square one for staying put. That perfectly exemplifies how physics-based the combat in this game gets. Everything in the game interacts with everything else in some way. If you think of something, you can probably do it. Lighting grass on fire creates an updraft that lets you shoot up into the air on your paraglider. Stasis lets you entirely bypass the "intended" solution to many puzzles by sending things flying with momentum. Hell, there's one puzzle where I counted four entirely different ways of solving it. Enemy encampments can be wiped out with boulders rolled down cliffs. My personal favorite is that during thunderstorms you will get struck by lightning if you're holding a metal weapon. If you're holding a metal boomerang, though, you can throw it right before the lightning strikes and lay waste to enemies with the bolt of lightning that was meant to kill you.

Bottom line, this game is incredible. A refreshing new style of open world game that at once feels completely out of time and like a direct reaction to and subversion of the the trends of the day. It's the best thing Nintendo has made in many, many years.