In Breath of the Wild, Link, our player-controlled protagonist, must visit the villages of four mythical races to meet young champions in each and help wrangle control of the four Divine Beasts, gigantic mechanical weapon-creatures wreaking havoc in the corners of the world. These four races include the Goron, an orange, troll-like people who eat rocks and roll around and live in a volcano; the bird-like Rito, who have beaks and wings and live in houses built into the sides of a stone pillar that stretches into the sky; the fish-like Zora, who have fins protruding from their arms and whose heads taper off behind them into tails and who live in a beautiful, intricate city hidden in a nest of cliffs and waterfalls; and the Gerudo, women of color that live in a desert.
And so, like any videogame made by a staff of hundreds and sold for $60 in any year up to and including 2017, Breath of the Wild must, at some level, disappoint.
As an action-adventure videogame, Breath of the Wild is nearly peerless. It ruthlessly savages about a hundred other videogames and two or three whole genres; it’s pretty amazing how much stuff is left looking like total dogshit in its wake. A lot of us have always taken for granted that the top two solutions to the problems of these huge, rollicking open-world action-adventure games would be, one, to stop telling players where things are, and two, to make the act of navigating the space thrilling and tactile. The new Zelda, god help us, finally confirms we were right.
Maybe the dumbest, greatest, most crucial thing about this game’s design is that, when you get a quest to go find an item for someone, the quest marker leads you to the person you’re supposed to deliver the item to instead of to the item itself. Sometimes you’re supposed to find a special horse on a weird hill that you can’t find on your map, and then when you do find it, many hours later, you spot something nearby that you recognize from some old photographs you saw in an inventor’s hut many hours ago. Sometimes you jump on a raft on a whim and two hours later you’re literally stranded on an island, engaging obsessively with mechanics you’d otherwise been smoothing over. Sometimes you’re hanging out with a cool animal and starting to feel really sad that you’re going to have to leave it behind. Sometimes it’s nighttime and you’re hanging off the side of a cliff and the music is chill as hell and you spot a warm light on a distant mountaintop or, if you’re lucky, a gigantic serpent coiling lazily through the sky, miles away, and you get to decide exactly what you’re going to do right at that moment.
Each of these is a little sack of graceful and understated and frankly devastating game design, and this game is just stuffed with them. The surprises just keep coming; many come up organically out of the game’s bubbly, beautiful little mechanical pieces bumping into each other (its designers have referred to the game as a chemistry set, which is cute and great), and many more are deliberately designed little adventures, and both types are equally exciting. I kept thinking I knew everything BotW had in store for me, and then I would stumble onto something bombastic and/or tricky and/or mechanically novel, and often it would be something that would reshape the direction the game was taking. It does eventually buckle, but it’s really staggering how long it keeps it up.
The spots where it buckles can be a real drag, though. I wondered, while I was putting them off, if the chunks of the game surrounding the game’s main quests – stopping the four Divine Beasts – would exceed my expectations as thoroughly as the rest of the game had. They did not.
For one thing, oh my god, the writing just takes an immediate dive as soon as you start talking to any of these main plot characters. Dialogue with the dozens of minor characters you come across – vendors, treasure hunters, spies, quest-givers – is snappy and funny and terrific. They make fun of you and are mean to each other and are competitive and greedy and surprising and sweet.
Start talking to the heroes and elders of the four villages, though, and it’s quickly clear that you’ve stepped into a room full of different writers. One minute an enthusiastic vendor is turning down your rare beetle because he wants to really focus on taking care of the one you gave him earlier, and the next you’re being bluntly told how important these Main Characters are as you’re introduced to each one’s single personality trait, which is driven into the ground repeatedly over a series of cutscenes and events. One is cocky; one is young; one is a coward; one, I don’t know, flexes and looks into the camera sometimes.
Then you’re also introduced to each one’s ancestor ghost, each of which also fills a broad, obvious archetype. By the end of the game you’re watching them all dramatically gather their strength to assist you in the final battle against evil, and it’s like, man, why is the music swelling up like this? I only paid attention to these guys for, like, six minutes each, and those were the 24 most boring minutes of the game. (One nice touch is that their effect is ultimately as banal as their characterization; each takes away an eighth of the life bar of the first phase of the final boss.) (These sections of the game are also where most of the voice acting is, and traditionalist Zelda fanboys are vindicated; it is comfortably the worst voice acting in any high-profile videogame this decade.)
Anyway: There are four dungeons tied to the four strings of cutscenes, each preceded by a trench run action sequence that is elaborate on paper and paper-thin in execution. The dungeons themselves, it’s hard to know what to make of them. They’re lean, and each has its own cute mechanic where you can access some controls to cause parts of the dungeons to move in different ways – one has a large cylinder-shaped room in its center, and you can rotate individual slices of the room in 90 degree increments; another lets you tilt the entire dungeon to the left or right to make things slide around, giving you access to new areas.
For setpieces with such meaty plot build-up, though, they’re awfully brief little experiences, and rather than the fantastic and varied boss monsters at the ends of dungeons in other (worse) Zelda games they’re capped off with four riffs on the same easy, unusually generic boss, a kind of infected pseudo-mechanical incomprehensible demon-thing with a glowing weak point. Each dungeon also begins with an egregious bit of voiceover telling you you’ll be fucked if you don’t get the map, and it’s always accompanied by a slow camera pan directing you to the exact point where you’ll find it. This is a nightmare, and it also feels totally out of place in a game that has so little patience for this kind of bullshit in every other context, including lots of contexts where previous Zelda games would have been happy to indulge.
It’s hard to write the dungeons off entirely but it’s undeniable that they’re at least sort of disappointing, especially once you’ve taken a stab at infiltrating Hyrule Castle, which is hilariously great. Hyrule Castle is your ultimate goal, and it’s sitting right in the middle of the map, waiting for you, from the very beginning of the game. At any time you can fight your way through the main gate, try to fly in from a distant mountaintop, or swim around the perimeter looking for a hidden side entrance, and any of these approaches has their own challenges and rewards. There’s a little maze of side tunnels connecting the outer wall to the moat to the dungeons, there are storerooms and guard towers that you can approach from any angle or circumvent entirely, there’s a library you can sneak into early on to learn some ancient recipes that will help you complete a side quest, there are crazy-tough enemies looking to blast you around every corner; it’s ominous, and tense, and layered, and you can approach it any number of ways, and once you’ve landed within the walls it’s up to you to figure out what to do.
Oh, man, it’s so fantastic – it’s hard not to imagine what it would have been like had the four Divine Beast dungeons been similar. What if you had to dodge cannon fire as you flew or swam toward each mobile monster-fortress and then had to figure out in the moment, as you got close, how you were actually going to get inside? What if you got inside and a moron didn’t immediately tell you in voiceover exactly what to do? What if, instead, the interiors were threatening and mysterious, and you had to spend some time exploring to figure out how to take control? What if completing the quests in the associated villages would reward you with some sort of intel or some sort of assistance, some weapon that would be particularly useful inside or some key to unlocking a room that you wouldn’t be able to access otherwise, and you could choose whether or not to complete those quests before going for it?
What am I doing? Brainstorming the sequel? It’s just… the Hyrule Castle dungeon is, seriously, so great, and obviously it’s great that it’s this single immense challenge staring at you from the first moments of the game, but four more immense challenges is something that Breath of the Wild is definitely hungry for. Its mechanics and systems – cooking food to boost your abilities, enhancing different armor sets that give you unique advantages, collecting weird weapons and saving them for special occasions – are all super-compelling, but unfortunately there’s no real reason to indulge in any of them too deeply.
I never leveled up a single piece of armor to its highest level, and the game’s final sections were a cakewalk. I craved some sort of ominous postgame freakdungeon, something to gear up for and work toward; I craved a reason to track down rare dragon parts to enhance hidden pieces of armor or to go hunting rare ores for cash, because this is a game where doing things like that is satisfying and fun; I craved Big, Scary Secrets. Instead I went through a visually exciting but mechanically limp finale, and then I reloaded my file to be invited to track down the last of the heart containers, if I felt like it. Moving through this game’s world is a joyful, heady experience, but there’s a lot to be said for having a towering, demonic castle waiting for you at the center of it. Without that I don’t think I’ll find a reason to fire it back up, hard mode or not.
Uh, so, anyway: rock people, fish people, bird people, women of color. What an imaginative, exotic fantasy world the people at Nintendo have given us!
Furthermore: Gerudo women are preoccupied with finding husbands. (This is because there are no Gerudo men and, therefore, there’s pressure on them to venture out into the rest of the world to find mates, mumbled Hideo Kojima.) In one corner of the world you can find a Gerudo woman hanging out near a heart-shaped lake who is basically prepared to marry the first man who shows up and shows interest, and in another there’s one who is disappointed that her skills as a seamstress can’t seem to get her a man. You can actually find a husband for the latter in a branch of one of the game’s biggest sidequests.
If you explore the Gerudo city well enough you’ll find out that there’s a Gerudo woman who offers two daily lectures to the other residents. She teaches, I shit you not, a cooking class at night and a class on how to find a man during the day.
If you want to just ignore this altogether you can check out any of the hundreds of glowing perfect-score reviews you can find on any website that has any advertising at all. Maybe you’ll read more about the shrine puzzles, which are cool, or maybe you’ll read about how the weapons break (if someone complains about this, never go to their website again). You will definitely find next to nothing about Princess Zelda’s eye-rolling characterization – she’s a damsel in distress again, only this time she, uh, was conflicted about it in the past, or something, and also she wears pants instead of a dress – and very little about the openly transphobic sequence, featuring quintessential woman-with-beard goof, though at least that hasn’t escaped everyone’s attention.
It’s almost boring how hideously dumb this is, but of course you can’t really play a AAA vidcon without there being some kind of significant political blemish in there that nobody talks about. Whatever, man – fuck videogames, as usual. At least the brown desert women aren’t also thieves this time around?
Breath of the Wild really is unprecedented in a bunch of ways, and its shockwaves are going to be felt in videogame design for a fucking long time, and it’s hard not to recommend it on those grounds alone. But as the year goes on it’s important not to ignore the taste of clumsy bigotry that it leaves behind. To be blunt, this is a piece of media that will mostly be consumed by children and millennial gamer dudes, and these are the two groups of people who least need to see women of color portrayed as one of four races of fantasy creatures. If you sincerely love Big Game Design, Breath of the Wild is horrifically interesting, containing a host of blistering successes and a handful of bewildering failures. But let’s not ignore that it’s another casually racist entry in a casually sexist media franchise that’s part of maybe the most casually bigoted industry there is. If you want to skip that, it’s probably not the end of the world.
Great review. By far the best piece I’ve read on the game so far. You’ve articulated things I had only vague ruminations about and elucidated what I really loved about the game.
hell yeah! thanks