Loading…Review of Legend of Zelda—Breath of the Wild

For the last 9 months or so, I’ve spent a good chunk of my spare time riding horses, paragliding, cutting grass with a sword, scaling cliffs, falling shrieking to my death off cliffs, shooting scales off dragons, moving car-sized metal blocks around with a magnet, foraging mushrooms, fending off unwanted advances from giant fairies, changing outfits in mid-air, and cooking lots of dubious dishes in a wood-fired wok. Yep, that’s right—I’ve been playing BOTW.

My friends Jen and Jason gave me a Nintendo Switch with a couple of games on it—including BOTW—before I got on the plane to Berlin back in February—quite the lavish going-away present. As I mentioned before, I’ve played video games since my dad loaded the first text-based version of Zork on our 8088. I’d even played a couple of Zelda games before. But none of that prepared me for BOTW. It’s honestly been one of the best experiences of my life, and I’m going to try to explain why.

First, I’m in awe of what the game designers at Nintendo accomplished. They basically fit an entire world on a chip the size of my thumbprint. BOTW is an open-world role-playing game, which means you can go pretty much anywhere and do anything you want within the confines of Hyrule—a virtual kingdom roughly the size of Lake Tahoe (by some estimates—they vary pretty widely). You can move quite realistically in any direction—including up trees, down cliffs, through rivers, etc. As you do, the game camera tracks you smoothly, and the relative position of all objects around you—including dense forests, distant mountains, and dragons undulating through the air overhead—shifts accordingly. On top of this, the atmosphere is constantly changing—the sun rising and setting, clouds rolling through, snow swirling. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around all the code that had to be written to visualize those physics. Not to mention those involved with grasping and manipulating objects, fighting, and tracking projectiles. For instance, if in the game you shoot an arrow at a target and miss, you can hunt around behind the target along your sightline and find your arrow lying in the grass at the appropriate distance—even if it’s a hundred yards away. It’s just mind-blowing. Playing the game gave me so much respect for the brilliance of the designers and programmers, and the thousands of hours of effort they put into the game.

Not to mention the world-building. Hyrule is stunningly gorgeous. Jen and I would both stop in our tracks while playing to take screenshots of stormy mountains, rainbows, iridescent dragons, tide pools, regal herds of elk, and wind blown meadows of wildflowers. And you can use your ears just as much as your eyes in the game. Sounds clue you into the presence of different wildlife, or mischievous forest spirits called Koroks. The background music shifts subtly to let you know you’ve reached the safe harbor of a village or stable, or that an enemy is approaching, or that your horse has settled into a comfortable canter and you can look around to enjoy the view. The cultural landscape is intricately designed as well—with at least 6 distinct people-groups whose customs you have to get to know in order to progress in the game, not to mention the tantalizing ruins of at least 2 more prior civilizations.

The storyline connecting all these dots is pretty standard Zelda fare: Ganon is back (again!), and Link must help Princess Zelda defeat him with the help of allies from the 6 tribes of Hyrule. But whenever you need a break from that storyline, you can wander off to Satori Mountain and watch a statuesque cherry scatter its pink blossoms over the surface of a pond. Or you can engage with any of the hundreds of charming, enigmatic, or grouchy non-player characters (NPCs) and take on the fun (and sometimes frustrating) side quests they challenge you to. The game helps you keep track of these quests—plus your armor, food, and other possessions, your location, and your main objectives—through an elegant inventory system that avoids cluttering your view by hiding behind a button click. (The controls did take a little getting used to for me, but that’s only because I haven’t played many Nintendo games before.)

I also, as I have said before, have terrible hand-eye coordination and reaction time. Which leads me to the next reason that BOTW was such an awesome experience for me: it really built my confidence as a gamer (and one over the age of 50 at that!). In a month of playing, I went from routinely walking off the edge of cliffs and getting plastered by the lowest-level monsters to pulling off tricky combat moves and solving puzzles that required deft handling of the controls. And just a couple weeks ago, I actually beat the game—on accident, unprepared, after I wandered into the final fight with Ganon while searching for a missing shrine. True, BOTW has a reputation for being pretty easy overall and especially in terms of combat. But still I was chuffed. The credit here again largely goes to the game designers: BOTW is a game that intentionally teaches you how to play it as you go. You don’t have to complete the storyline in any particular time or order, but no matter which direction you turn, you’ll bump into nicely scaffolded tasks, challenges, and puzzles that build up your confidence and dexterity with the game mechanics.

Credit also goes to Jen and the legion of other BOTW players who offered helpful advice and moral support online. That’s another big reason I enjoyed the game so much: even though you can’t play it with others, there’s a huge and supportive community of Zelda fanatics out there—making their own Lynel costumes, exploiting glitches in the game physics to walk underwater, coming up with silly speed runs like seeing how quickly you can put a stick of butter on every dog in the game. It’s an exuberant space on the Internet—and Lord knows we need that these days. That’s likely because the game itself is uplifting: I almost invariably felt better after playing—whether because of the beauty of the world, the sweet interactions with NPCs and animals (I spent a lot of time riding horses, petting dogs, and picking up chickens), or the sense of accomplishment from having completed a tough side quest.

Which leads me to a short list of life lessons I learned (or had reinforced) playing BOTW:

• As my mom used to say: If the chopping gets tough, sharpen your axe. Or, as the game gently admonishes in the tips it displays while loading a new region, “Don’t throw yourself at a stronger enemy over and over again; instead, train yourself up, upgrade your weapons and armor, and come back when you’re ready.” I’m finding that the best way to solve a problem is usually not to work on it but on myself. When I come back to the problem afterward, it’s often gone.
• Sometimes you need to walk a mile in a Lizalfos mask (see pic above—with my Gerudo bra top and my climbing pants; I honestly don’t know how I ended up in that outfit). Lizalfos are these really annoying monsters in BOTW. They’re like overgrown chameleons that shriek and scuttle around and shoot you with shock arrows for no reason. But partway through the game you meet this nutty NPC named Kilton who sells you a mask that fools Lizalfos into thinking you’re one of them. You can walk right by them, you can hang out with them around the fire. You can even feed them fish. After I got the mask, I found I felt differently about Lizalfos when I ran into them in the game. Instead of dread or annoyance, I felt a kind of indulgent sympathy. I tried to avoid fighting them if I could, letting them go about their business pacing around or doing their goofy burpees or blending into the rocks. It’s so interesting how, when you start seeing an opponent as a person, like you, they stop being an opponent.
• Don’t count yourself out. As I mentioned above, there were many times while I was playing BOTW that I thought, “This is it. I’m never going to be able to make it past this enemy/puzzle/quest. I’m never going to win this game.” But I did. Which just goes to show that the only thing holding me back in those moments was the story I was telling myself about myself.