(Played on Wii U)
97 on Metacritic. That's unhealthy. Scores that high breed unmanageable expectations, and they indicate a uniformity of opinion which could make it hard to find a review to identify with if you're less fond of the game. Going into Breath of the Wild, I was unable to shake the expectations which the absurdly glowing reviews had bestowed upon me, and all of the claims that it "rejuvinated" the series had little meaning for someone like me who thinks that 2011's Skyward Sword is one of the best Zelda games to date, and who prefers a guided experience to a free open world.
So while I still don't consider this the greatest of the Zeldas, it says a lot about its quality that I still loved it in spite of those biases. Spoilers will follow.
Breath of the Wild's most immediate success is in its atmosphere. In perhaps its most shocking departure from series conventions, the game's music is overwhelmingly made of ambient piano notes, only supplying proper musical accompaniment in towns, in battle, in dungeons, and on horseback. When simply walking along the overworld, the game is as quiet as any Zelda to date, and at best this contributes to a feeling of serenity even when traversing dangerous environments. In large swathes of the overworld, the player is alone, their solitude only broken up by the occasional enemy encampment, and although it's a huge difference from the epic sweep of titles like Twilight Princess, it's remarkable in its own right, and the soundtrack is appropriately grand when the moment calls for it.
Even as early as the Great Plateau, the ambiance lends a feeling of fluidity to the varying environments, and its unintrusive nature strongly complements the game's style of exploration. This time around, the immensity of Hyrule is unprecedented, and the sheer number of hours which can be spent on this gameplay demands music which won't wear itself thin over time. Whether you're climbing a large cliff face, overlooking a region from a tall peak, or paragliding to a distant isle, exploration is always calm and inviting, and this owes a lot to that fluidity. Almost anything seen in the distance can be reached, and with few exceptions the world feels both organic and lived in. What hurts fluidity is the game's weather system. Rain has benefits for ingredient collection, shopping, and even combat to an extent, but when trying to travel or complete side quests, it's a major nuisance. Climbing becomes much harder in the rain, and any task involving a torch suddenly becomes impossible. The rain occurs with absurd frequency, and it always spoils the mood. Also aggravating is the stamina system, which requires significant upgrades to allow long-distance running or climbing, and does a lot to decrease the viability of foot travel. Many climbable surfaces have rest points to recharge your stamina, but this only drags out the process.
You're not the only traveller walking the roads. You'll find adventurers and wandering merchants aplenty, and while once again the towns are themed around the game's fictional races, Breath of the Wild fills its settings with visitors from other groups - not only explorers and merchants, but simple tourists as well. This human element amounts for a good amount of the game's charm, as a good number of the NPCs have endearing personalities even in their tiny collection of lines. One location has a character who obsessively studies the moon, and another has a man so fond of running that he has boots to run in the desert. Talking to people is rarely dull - which makes the dry nature of the game's sidequests all the more unfortunate.
The last Zelda to take such an open approach to its gameplay was the beloved Majora's Mask, and that game owes its popularity largely to high-quality sidequests. That game presents its side content as a series of miniature stories, and its most powerful and memorable moments come not from the main quest but from these sidequests. Nobody will say the same of Breath of the Wild, which presents almost every single one of its sidequests as a checklist to fill out. At best, this is simply an extra incentive for exploration, but getting to items on these checklists can involve extensive transit times, often with almost nothing interesting in between, and for the fetch quests this is made worse by the relative scarcity of certain items. A common item can be picked up through normal gameplay and deposited later, but other items might be out of your way or even hard to find, and at that point the game begins to look like an unappealing grind. Admittedly, I was put off enough that I did very few of these fetch quests, but that they even exist in such abundance is disappointing, and they rarely have a terribly exciting story to tell. Getting from point A to point B in the game is already a time consuming process, and while at best this aids the atmosphere and allows time to soak in the game's sheer beauty, it can become incredibly dry if you're traversing a familiar or comparatively barren region, and hunting for collectibles isn't a very strong motivation.
Even traversing new terrain can be tiring, and to lessen the tedium, the world is now filled with Korok seeds. These are acquired through the completion of a brief puzzle, and can be used to expand inventory space. There are as many as 900 of them, and while each puzzle type is compelling at first, the game recycles them to the point of exhaustion. Not every area is equally rewarding to explore, and the twentieth time you climb a mountain to find nothing but a Korok under a rock waiting for you is genuinely irritating. While new inventory space is very helpful early in the game, before long, collecting seeds turns into little more than collectible fluff on par with the feathers in Assassin's Creed. Exploration in the game can often be underwhelming because of this, especially because it can cause the game's many mountain peaks to blend into each other.
This tendency towards anticlimax is perhaps the game's biggest issue. Out of all the rewards it has to offer, exactly one has any kind of permanence, and that's armour. New outfits are found seemingly at random from certain side quests and shrines, and many of them can make your life a lot easier. One set, for example, increases your climbing speed, but actually knowing which shrines offer it is impossible without a guide or outside help. This might not have been a problem if even one of the game's other rewards was particularly satisfying, but the vast majority of the time, you'll be rewarded with a collectible, Rupees, arrows, or weapons, and yes, this is where the durability system becomes a problem. Completing shrines will cause the game to feed you far more cool weapons than you know what to do with, and they all shatter after under a minute of use to make room for more weapons. Because of this, gaining weapons rapidly comes to feel less like a reward and more like mere upkeep, and arrows feel the same way. Any reward aside from weapons and armor exists exclusively to be dumped into sidequests, shopping, or crafting, and as such it never feels satisfying to acquire anything.
Every single collectible can be either exchanged for rupees, used for sidequests, used for upgrades, or used in cooking. Upgrades are done by the Great Fairies, and some of the most useful upgrades require such specific items that they inevitably turn into a pure fetch quest. For example, upgrading the Champion's Tunic requires dragon horns, and to find those horns, you need to wait in a spawn position for a dragon to fly by, find some way to glide near it, shoot an arrow at its horn - if you don't have arrows, you're straight out of luck - and then, once the dragon drops a horn shard, you need to follow it as it shoots off to some distant bit of ground, and then glide over to it, hopefully not losing track of where it is. Cooking involves much less grinding, but the game makes it way more complicated than it needs to be. Once you find a cooking pot, you can't simply open a specialized menu. Instead, the game requires you to go through your inventory and manually make Link hold ingredients, then press a button to put them in the pot, and then skip a repeated cutscene which grows very, very old.
Of all the changes the game makes to the series, it's surprising that it didn't do anything about all of the needless cutscenes. The camera still zooms in on an opening door, and it repeats the same handful of cutscenes whenever you cook, upgrade your armour or inventory, enter a shrine, exit a shrine, or gain a map or power. In a game of this size, it quickly becomes tiring. Load times between areas are impressively few in number, and even entering a town is a seamless transition, and yet any time a shrine is entered, the game shows a whole minute's worth of cutscenes and loading before you can leave, even when those cutscenes are skipped. It also splits these cutscenes in such a way that you need to press the skip button five entire times just to get through all of them. The most disappointing of these is the map expansion cutscene, which attempts to emulate the experience of opening a special chest in the earlier games, yet cannot come close to the sense of wonder which the other five 3D Zeldas conjure up, if only because watching a droplet fall on a tablet is far less exciting than watching Link dig into a chest.
Still, shrines are the best of the game's optional content, and they consist of the vast majority of the game's puzzles. Some take the form of miniature dungeons, others contain just a single puzzle room, and still others are rewards for solving overworld puzzles. Those overworld puzzles, most of which are discovered simply by stumbling upon them, are perhaps the best of the game's side content, and with the exception of a few dry mazes and the occasional bit of appalling busywork, these are consistently both mechanically and visually inventive. These are filed under the "shrine quests" folder, and almost all of the game's decent sidequests fall under this category. Completing a shrine earns you a spirit orb, which can be exchanged for hearts or stamina, and while these are perhaps the most useful of the game's collectibles, they're still yet another currency to dump into improvements, and the fact that every shrine gives you one isn't helped by the fact that every shrine uses the same set of textures.
The repetitive nature of shrines' visuals and rewards is lessened significantly by the puzzles within, however, and while they rarely escalate significantly over the course of a shrine, they're often creative and clever, and have a surprising amount of variety considering the game's limited number of items and open structure. Some are opaque to the point of frustration, but more often than not, I struggled with a puzzle because I simply wasn't experimenting enough. Because shrines provide the most useful rewards in the form of spirit orbs and weapon replacements, they're often the main driving force behind exploration, and they're strategically placed to provide at least some motivation for every small bit of travel. At the very least, Breath of the Wild always gives you a target to move towards, be it a shrine found in the distance or simply the direction of your Sheikah Sensor, a radar which beeps once you get close to a shrine.
The mixed quality of the Breath of the Wild's side content makes its lack of nagging particularly relieving. In the mold of Ubisoft's open-world titles, the map of Hyrule is filled in by climbing prominent towers, which in this case are further distinguished by an unmistakable orange glow. Early on, you're led to believe that you can see most content from the top of towers, but the majority of shrines are hidden beneath outcrops or in caves, so it's common to climb a tower, reveal the map, and find almost nothing of interest when looking around. This aids the sense of discovery, but it also forces it, as finding interesting content then mandates yet more of the game's extensive transit times over terrain with nothing in it. On the flipside, the game makes it very easy to bypass anything which the player might not find interesting. The positive side of having so many Korok Seeds to collect is that you can easily bypass any puzzle which seems boring while still building a comfortable inventory size, and while you'll need a certain number of heart upgrades to complete the main quest and stay alive, the game gives you a lot of freedom for how you go about that, and the blank map makes it easy to ignore any content which doesn't catch your interest. It's just too bad that the towers themselves tend to keep all of their variety in their immediate surroundings rather than on the tower itself.
The closest thing the game has to proper dungeons is its four Divine Beasts, four massive mechanical animals which Link must climb into over the main story. Unfortunately, this is one of the weakest sets of dungeons in the entire franchise. Like the shrines, all four Beasts use nearly identical textures, and said textures don't strongly reflect the dungeon's elemental theme. Replacing dungeon items is the ability to manipulate the Beasts' movement from the map screen, but of these, only Ruta provides a genuinely unique idea, as both Rudania and Medoh utilize some form of gravity mechanic and Naboris simply expands on an idea already seen in the shrines. Each Beast has a character reminding you of your progress, but the dungeons are structured identically to one another, so this too becomes repetitive. The final dungeon is the sprawling Hyrule Castle, which is focused more on combat and exploration than puzzle solving. The Beasts are already nonlinear, but most of the Castle's rooms are entirely optional, and this provides an interesting alternative from the Zelda norm, although as a final challenge it can be more than a little underwhelming.
Unlike other Zelda games, boss battles aren't solely confined to dungeons. There's a handful of repeating "overworld bosses" which can be found amidst regular enemies, although they're all less challenging than the dungeon bosses. Only the five dungeon bosses are unique, and even these look relatively similar to one another, which is disappointing after the visually dynamic bosses of earlier titles. The usual Zelda boss formula has been replaced with a more varied approach, and almost none of them require any use of Link's abilities. Instead, you can determine your own strategy from a variety of viable options, and that's perhaps Breath of the Wild's greatest strength. Any task has a high degree of plausible solutions. Enemies can be defeated with arrows, or with bombs, or with any combination of melee weapons, and the width of nearly every combat environment gives a lot of room for varied strategies. This same openness also applies to puzzles, several of which have multiple valid solutions. With all the dynamism of the combat, however, it's a shame that the game has such a low enemy variety, and working through enemy camps is yet another type of side content which repeats itself to the point where it's easy to tire of fighting the same collections of Moblins, Bokoblins, and Lizalfos.
Breath of the Wild continues the franchise's shift away from focusing on narrative, and most of the storytelling in the game is conveyed through the environment and small character interactions rather than an overarching story. There still is a story to be found, but it's told entirely through flashbacks which must be found throughout the game world. This is part of the main quest, and yet it's difficult to be motivated by it, because it's all happened in the past and it struggles to build a meaningful connection to the player character. The present adventure and the story in the flashbacks are related yet distant, but the narrative does have its emotional moments, especially when put back into sequential order. If nothing else, it's a huge step up from 2013's A Link Between Worlds, if only because the story doesn't seem like an excuse. Unfortunately, even at its best, it's fragmented and filled with redundant information, and although its introduction of voice acting is commendable, the quality of that acting is average at best.
The environmental storytelling is often intriguing, as Hyrule is filled with ruined structures, fragments of ancient lore, unidentified skeletons, and devastated fields where a battle clearly transpired. As interesting as all of this is, however, it's often cold and detached, since this kind of storytelling doesn't feature characters to be invested in or motivation for your quest. My favourite bits of story in the game are the individual parts of the main quest, where you visit four of Hyrule's races and solve their problems to gain access to the Divine Beasts. Having a distant target and some sort of story motivation does wonders for motivating exploration, and it's these parts which make it easiest to settle into a flow of exploring the region and completing shrines. Furthermore, while the voice acting is heavily flawed, the actual focus characters of these main quests are truly endearing, and each culminates in an exciting sequence where you need to damage a Divine Beast's defenses in order to gain access. The general arc of these sequences doesn't change significantly, but each of them is so charming on its own that it's hard to complain about a working formula. Some of the best stories, however, are those which arise from emergent gameplay. At one point, I was trying to solve a puzzle involving apples, when a wild horse I rode to that location began eating them as I was setting them down. That's the memory of this game which stands out to me most.
Breath of the Wild is an intriguing new direction for the Zelda series, and in many ways it's one which pays off. For all of its repetition and redundancy, it's also a beautiful, creative world with no shortage of charm, and the open structure allows players to craft their experiment as they see fit and curate only that content which is exciting to them. My experience was focused heavily on shrines, completing the main quest, and taking photos (oh yeah, you can take selfies in this game, and it is great). But I find this genre overwhelming even at the best of times, and the lack of involving storytelling or meaningful rewards led me having little motivation to head outside of the beaten path, and often when I did I found the results unsatisfying. Much of the world has relatively little to do, and the more time I spent on side content, the less I felt I was making progress. Outside of multiplayer games, that kind of gameplay simply isn't for me, but the charms of Breath of the Wild are hard to resist, and I found myself falling in love with its beautiful, endearing world and its intoxicating freedom anyway. My favourite Zelda? Hardly, but the franchise's winning streak remains unbroken, and with better storytelling and more motivating factors, a sequel to this could easily come close.
Sucks that you can't pet dogs, though.
8/10
Even as early as the Great Plateau, the ambiance lends a feeling of fluidity to the varying environments, and its unintrusive nature strongly complements the game's style of exploration. This time around, the immensity of Hyrule is unprecedented, and the sheer number of hours which can be spent on this gameplay demands music which won't wear itself thin over time. Whether you're climbing a large cliff face, overlooking a region from a tall peak, or paragliding to a distant isle, exploration is always calm and inviting, and this owes a lot to that fluidity. Almost anything seen in the distance can be reached, and with few exceptions the world feels both organic and lived in. What hurts fluidity is the game's weather system. Rain has benefits for ingredient collection, shopping, and even combat to an extent, but when trying to travel or complete side quests, it's a major nuisance. Climbing becomes much harder in the rain, and any task involving a torch suddenly becomes impossible. The rain occurs with absurd frequency, and it always spoils the mood. Also aggravating is the stamina system, which requires significant upgrades to allow long-distance running or climbing, and does a lot to decrease the viability of foot travel. Many climbable surfaces have rest points to recharge your stamina, but this only drags out the process.
You're not the only traveller walking the roads. You'll find adventurers and wandering merchants aplenty, and while once again the towns are themed around the game's fictional races, Breath of the Wild fills its settings with visitors from other groups - not only explorers and merchants, but simple tourists as well. This human element amounts for a good amount of the game's charm, as a good number of the NPCs have endearing personalities even in their tiny collection of lines. One location has a character who obsessively studies the moon, and another has a man so fond of running that he has boots to run in the desert. Talking to people is rarely dull - which makes the dry nature of the game's sidequests all the more unfortunate.
The last Zelda to take such an open approach to its gameplay was the beloved Majora's Mask, and that game owes its popularity largely to high-quality sidequests. That game presents its side content as a series of miniature stories, and its most powerful and memorable moments come not from the main quest but from these sidequests. Nobody will say the same of Breath of the Wild, which presents almost every single one of its sidequests as a checklist to fill out. At best, this is simply an extra incentive for exploration, but getting to items on these checklists can involve extensive transit times, often with almost nothing interesting in between, and for the fetch quests this is made worse by the relative scarcity of certain items. A common item can be picked up through normal gameplay and deposited later, but other items might be out of your way or even hard to find, and at that point the game begins to look like an unappealing grind. Admittedly, I was put off enough that I did very few of these fetch quests, but that they even exist in such abundance is disappointing, and they rarely have a terribly exciting story to tell. Getting from point A to point B in the game is already a time consuming process, and while at best this aids the atmosphere and allows time to soak in the game's sheer beauty, it can become incredibly dry if you're traversing a familiar or comparatively barren region, and hunting for collectibles isn't a very strong motivation.
Even traversing new terrain can be tiring, and to lessen the tedium, the world is now filled with Korok seeds. These are acquired through the completion of a brief puzzle, and can be used to expand inventory space. There are as many as 900 of them, and while each puzzle type is compelling at first, the game recycles them to the point of exhaustion. Not every area is equally rewarding to explore, and the twentieth time you climb a mountain to find nothing but a Korok under a rock waiting for you is genuinely irritating. While new inventory space is very helpful early in the game, before long, collecting seeds turns into little more than collectible fluff on par with the feathers in Assassin's Creed. Exploration in the game can often be underwhelming because of this, especially because it can cause the game's many mountain peaks to blend into each other.
This tendency towards anticlimax is perhaps the game's biggest issue. Out of all the rewards it has to offer, exactly one has any kind of permanence, and that's armour. New outfits are found seemingly at random from certain side quests and shrines, and many of them can make your life a lot easier. One set, for example, increases your climbing speed, but actually knowing which shrines offer it is impossible without a guide or outside help. This might not have been a problem if even one of the game's other rewards was particularly satisfying, but the vast majority of the time, you'll be rewarded with a collectible, Rupees, arrows, or weapons, and yes, this is where the durability system becomes a problem. Completing shrines will cause the game to feed you far more cool weapons than you know what to do with, and they all shatter after under a minute of use to make room for more weapons. Because of this, gaining weapons rapidly comes to feel less like a reward and more like mere upkeep, and arrows feel the same way. Any reward aside from weapons and armor exists exclusively to be dumped into sidequests, shopping, or crafting, and as such it never feels satisfying to acquire anything.
Every single collectible can be either exchanged for rupees, used for sidequests, used for upgrades, or used in cooking. Upgrades are done by the Great Fairies, and some of the most useful upgrades require such specific items that they inevitably turn into a pure fetch quest. For example, upgrading the Champion's Tunic requires dragon horns, and to find those horns, you need to wait in a spawn position for a dragon to fly by, find some way to glide near it, shoot an arrow at its horn - if you don't have arrows, you're straight out of luck - and then, once the dragon drops a horn shard, you need to follow it as it shoots off to some distant bit of ground, and then glide over to it, hopefully not losing track of where it is. Cooking involves much less grinding, but the game makes it way more complicated than it needs to be. Once you find a cooking pot, you can't simply open a specialized menu. Instead, the game requires you to go through your inventory and manually make Link hold ingredients, then press a button to put them in the pot, and then skip a repeated cutscene which grows very, very old.
Of all the changes the game makes to the series, it's surprising that it didn't do anything about all of the needless cutscenes. The camera still zooms in on an opening door, and it repeats the same handful of cutscenes whenever you cook, upgrade your armour or inventory, enter a shrine, exit a shrine, or gain a map or power. In a game of this size, it quickly becomes tiring. Load times between areas are impressively few in number, and even entering a town is a seamless transition, and yet any time a shrine is entered, the game shows a whole minute's worth of cutscenes and loading before you can leave, even when those cutscenes are skipped. It also splits these cutscenes in such a way that you need to press the skip button five entire times just to get through all of them. The most disappointing of these is the map expansion cutscene, which attempts to emulate the experience of opening a special chest in the earlier games, yet cannot come close to the sense of wonder which the other five 3D Zeldas conjure up, if only because watching a droplet fall on a tablet is far less exciting than watching Link dig into a chest.
Still, shrines are the best of the game's optional content, and they consist of the vast majority of the game's puzzles. Some take the form of miniature dungeons, others contain just a single puzzle room, and still others are rewards for solving overworld puzzles. Those overworld puzzles, most of which are discovered simply by stumbling upon them, are perhaps the best of the game's side content, and with the exception of a few dry mazes and the occasional bit of appalling busywork, these are consistently both mechanically and visually inventive. These are filed under the "shrine quests" folder, and almost all of the game's decent sidequests fall under this category. Completing a shrine earns you a spirit orb, which can be exchanged for hearts or stamina, and while these are perhaps the most useful of the game's collectibles, they're still yet another currency to dump into improvements, and the fact that every shrine gives you one isn't helped by the fact that every shrine uses the same set of textures.
The repetitive nature of shrines' visuals and rewards is lessened significantly by the puzzles within, however, and while they rarely escalate significantly over the course of a shrine, they're often creative and clever, and have a surprising amount of variety considering the game's limited number of items and open structure. Some are opaque to the point of frustration, but more often than not, I struggled with a puzzle because I simply wasn't experimenting enough. Because shrines provide the most useful rewards in the form of spirit orbs and weapon replacements, they're often the main driving force behind exploration, and they're strategically placed to provide at least some motivation for every small bit of travel. At the very least, Breath of the Wild always gives you a target to move towards, be it a shrine found in the distance or simply the direction of your Sheikah Sensor, a radar which beeps once you get close to a shrine.
The mixed quality of the Breath of the Wild's side content makes its lack of nagging particularly relieving. In the mold of Ubisoft's open-world titles, the map of Hyrule is filled in by climbing prominent towers, which in this case are further distinguished by an unmistakable orange glow. Early on, you're led to believe that you can see most content from the top of towers, but the majority of shrines are hidden beneath outcrops or in caves, so it's common to climb a tower, reveal the map, and find almost nothing of interest when looking around. This aids the sense of discovery, but it also forces it, as finding interesting content then mandates yet more of the game's extensive transit times over terrain with nothing in it. On the flipside, the game makes it very easy to bypass anything which the player might not find interesting. The positive side of having so many Korok Seeds to collect is that you can easily bypass any puzzle which seems boring while still building a comfortable inventory size, and while you'll need a certain number of heart upgrades to complete the main quest and stay alive, the game gives you a lot of freedom for how you go about that, and the blank map makes it easy to ignore any content which doesn't catch your interest. It's just too bad that the towers themselves tend to keep all of their variety in their immediate surroundings rather than on the tower itself.
The closest thing the game has to proper dungeons is its four Divine Beasts, four massive mechanical animals which Link must climb into over the main story. Unfortunately, this is one of the weakest sets of dungeons in the entire franchise. Like the shrines, all four Beasts use nearly identical textures, and said textures don't strongly reflect the dungeon's elemental theme. Replacing dungeon items is the ability to manipulate the Beasts' movement from the map screen, but of these, only Ruta provides a genuinely unique idea, as both Rudania and Medoh utilize some form of gravity mechanic and Naboris simply expands on an idea already seen in the shrines. Each Beast has a character reminding you of your progress, but the dungeons are structured identically to one another, so this too becomes repetitive. The final dungeon is the sprawling Hyrule Castle, which is focused more on combat and exploration than puzzle solving. The Beasts are already nonlinear, but most of the Castle's rooms are entirely optional, and this provides an interesting alternative from the Zelda norm, although as a final challenge it can be more than a little underwhelming.
Unlike other Zelda games, boss battles aren't solely confined to dungeons. There's a handful of repeating "overworld bosses" which can be found amidst regular enemies, although they're all less challenging than the dungeon bosses. Only the five dungeon bosses are unique, and even these look relatively similar to one another, which is disappointing after the visually dynamic bosses of earlier titles. The usual Zelda boss formula has been replaced with a more varied approach, and almost none of them require any use of Link's abilities. Instead, you can determine your own strategy from a variety of viable options, and that's perhaps Breath of the Wild's greatest strength. Any task has a high degree of plausible solutions. Enemies can be defeated with arrows, or with bombs, or with any combination of melee weapons, and the width of nearly every combat environment gives a lot of room for varied strategies. This same openness also applies to puzzles, several of which have multiple valid solutions. With all the dynamism of the combat, however, it's a shame that the game has such a low enemy variety, and working through enemy camps is yet another type of side content which repeats itself to the point where it's easy to tire of fighting the same collections of Moblins, Bokoblins, and Lizalfos.
Breath of the Wild continues the franchise's shift away from focusing on narrative, and most of the storytelling in the game is conveyed through the environment and small character interactions rather than an overarching story. There still is a story to be found, but it's told entirely through flashbacks which must be found throughout the game world. This is part of the main quest, and yet it's difficult to be motivated by it, because it's all happened in the past and it struggles to build a meaningful connection to the player character. The present adventure and the story in the flashbacks are related yet distant, but the narrative does have its emotional moments, especially when put back into sequential order. If nothing else, it's a huge step up from 2013's A Link Between Worlds, if only because the story doesn't seem like an excuse. Unfortunately, even at its best, it's fragmented and filled with redundant information, and although its introduction of voice acting is commendable, the quality of that acting is average at best.
The environmental storytelling is often intriguing, as Hyrule is filled with ruined structures, fragments of ancient lore, unidentified skeletons, and devastated fields where a battle clearly transpired. As interesting as all of this is, however, it's often cold and detached, since this kind of storytelling doesn't feature characters to be invested in or motivation for your quest. My favourite bits of story in the game are the individual parts of the main quest, where you visit four of Hyrule's races and solve their problems to gain access to the Divine Beasts. Having a distant target and some sort of story motivation does wonders for motivating exploration, and it's these parts which make it easiest to settle into a flow of exploring the region and completing shrines. Furthermore, while the voice acting is heavily flawed, the actual focus characters of these main quests are truly endearing, and each culminates in an exciting sequence where you need to damage a Divine Beast's defenses in order to gain access. The general arc of these sequences doesn't change significantly, but each of them is so charming on its own that it's hard to complain about a working formula. Some of the best stories, however, are those which arise from emergent gameplay. At one point, I was trying to solve a puzzle involving apples, when a wild horse I rode to that location began eating them as I was setting them down. That's the memory of this game which stands out to me most.
Breath of the Wild is an intriguing new direction for the Zelda series, and in many ways it's one which pays off. For all of its repetition and redundancy, it's also a beautiful, creative world with no shortage of charm, and the open structure allows players to craft their experiment as they see fit and curate only that content which is exciting to them. My experience was focused heavily on shrines, completing the main quest, and taking photos (oh yeah, you can take selfies in this game, and it is great). But I find this genre overwhelming even at the best of times, and the lack of involving storytelling or meaningful rewards led me having little motivation to head outside of the beaten path, and often when I did I found the results unsatisfying. Much of the world has relatively little to do, and the more time I spent on side content, the less I felt I was making progress. Outside of multiplayer games, that kind of gameplay simply isn't for me, but the charms of Breath of the Wild are hard to resist, and I found myself falling in love with its beautiful, endearing world and its intoxicating freedom anyway. My favourite Zelda? Hardly, but the franchise's winning streak remains unbroken, and with better storytelling and more motivating factors, a sequel to this could easily come close.
Sucks that you can't pet dogs, though.
8/10
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