Breath of the Wild is a good game, but is it a masterpiece?
Before getting my Nintendo Switch earlier this year I hadn’t owned a home Nintendo console since the Wii or a handheld since the Gameboy Advance, so this was my chance to catch up on some good games, one of them being The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. I’d heard so many good things about this game from all the gaming media outlets I subscribe to and I was particularly looking forward to it as it was my first ever Zelda game. Looking at reviews online (especially Metacritic), this game has scored higher than or similar to some of my favourite open-world games; Red Dead Redemption 2, Spiderman PS4, Assassin’s Creed Odessey, Ghost of Tsushima and Horizon Zero Dawn, so I was expecting some amazing things from this game.
As you can tell by the title of this article my expectations were not met. I’ve sunk more than 35 hours into this game and I’m still expecting something to click, something that will make me see the greatness of this game, the things that people are shouting from the rooftops about. This game has supposedly revolutionised open-world games — really? Earlier this month I booted up Spiderman PS4 to amuse my 17-month-old daughter and I honestly had more fun swinging around New York and beating up enemies for 20 minutes than all my 35 hours playing Breath of the Wild (BOTW).
This is a good game but I personally don’t bring it up to the ‘masterpiece’ pedestal that most are putting it on. Let me explain why.
Please bear in mind everything I’m about to say is my own opinion which you are welcome not to agree with. Also, this article will contain spoilers of the game in question so please refrain from reading any further if you don’t want to be spoiled.
1. Story
This is by far the biggest complaint about the game for me personally. The main thing that drives me to play a game is its story. If the gameplay isn’t great but the story is amazing I’ll try and finish the game just to know the ending. BOTW doesn’t have a great story. Spoilers, you play as a character called Link and you have to save Zelda from Calamity Gannon. Link has been asleep for 100 and has forgotten everything so relies on other characters and his memories being unlocked to remember. You do meet other characters who tell you more about the past, the failed plan to defeat Gannon with the four champions and the divine beasts, but the story hasn’t got more interesting for me.
Bearing in mind this is my first ever Legend of Zelda game so I have loads of questions that series veterans might not have; What’s Link’s background? What makes him so special? Why was he chosen to guard princess Zelda? Why was link asleep for 100 years? Why not 50? Or 200? Why is he so loyal to Zelda? Honestly, you find out in the game that his love interest Mipha is dead (or is a spirit so sort of dead), and he doesn’t shed a tear for her but for some reason he has all the emotions for Zelda. Who is Gannon? Why is he bad? How did he get so powerful? When people die they turn into spirits, how does that work? The old man at the beginning of the game was actually a spirit the whole time, what other things can spirits do?
P.S. There is a chance some of these questions would be answered if I finish the ‘finding memories in different locations on the map by looking at photos’ mission but IMO, that’s the most tedious, long-winded fetch quest I’ve ever seen in my life.
To me, this story isn’t enough of a drive for me to want to see the game through. I can see where the game is going and imagine how it will end. So far there haven’t been any twists or surprises so I don’t expect them to pull one on me towards the latter stages.
2. The world
This continues from the first point. The world of BOTW is honestly gorgeous. I’ve seen some comments criticising the graphics but it’s one of the best looking games on the Switch. There are some interesting characters, towns and landmarks to explore, I could go on. My main issue with the world though is that from my point of view it seems to be doing okay, functioning as normal.
This is a stark contrast to what you’re led to believe at the beginning of the game where you learn Gannon is evil, has taken over the world of Hyrule with his evil monsters and the world is worse off for it. Apart from the monsters, the guardians and the possessed mechanical creatures (the divine beasts), who all conveniently appear outside of the towns, the world seems fine. People are going about their everyday lives. No one is suffering, no one is being killed and even the divine beasts are pretty much keeping to themselves. Does Hyrule actually need saving? What’s the urgency to free Zelda and defeat Gannon? What’s the point of even bothering with Gannon?
3. Side missions/quests
As mentioned in the points earlier there’s not a drive that’s pushing me to do the missions in the game. I’m mainly doing them because I’ve been told to by others. Link has lost his memory, people are telling him what to do and you just blindly believe them. Playing the game I kept on thinking, they could say anything and Link would believe them, they could be telling lies, they could have planted memories in Link’s head. Anyway, I won’t dwell on the point for too long, unfortunately the side quests aren’t more interesting.
I mean, they function okay as side missions but from my experience, it has just been; 'find this item' or 'get this number of these items or animals’, nothing really interesting. Nothing that brings the story forward or develops the characters. If this were the late 90s or early 2000s sure this would be good enough for a side mission but now they’ve gotten so much better.
In Ghost of Tsushima, the side missions exist for the main character, Jin, to develop more of a relationship with the people on his team, to form a stronger bond with them, and to learn more about the island of Tsushima. In Assassin’s Creed Odessey the story for the side missions are even better than the main missions. The side mission on the Silver Islands is one of my favourites. You go to help a rebel group overthrow the ruling tyrant, you later find out the tyrant is the father of the rebel leader and you as the player can decide if you want to reveal that information, or just kill the tyrant and leave the leader clueless. In Zelda BOTW one of the side missions is to find 9 chickens for someone, and once that’s done that’s it, you just move on.
In my 35 hours of playing the game, I’ve only completed a single number of side missions and I’m not inspired to do anymore. No story or character development, just something to pass the time with the possibility, not guarantee, of getting a reward at the end.
4. Combat
I don’t know if the combat mechanics in the game are just not that good, or I’m really bad at combat but for me, this can be very frustrating at times.
Your weapons don't last forever swords, shields and bows all have a shelf life that is unknown to the player, they'll just randomly break in the middle of battle. This actually isn't that big of a deal most of the time, it mainly becomes an issue during boss fights. Picture this, you're fighting a boss, your adrenaline and focus are at their highest, you're about to hit your adversary and just as you do, your weapon breaks. You're flustered, you need to find a new one as quickly as possible. Now imagine that happening multiple times during a fight not just when you're about to hit but when you block, or when you're about to shoot the killing arrow. Annoying right?
Now let’s talk about the combat itself. The majority of recent games I’ve played tend to have two buttons for melee attacks. One for a heavy and another for a light attack. BOTW has one attack button which, wouldn’t be that big of a deal if that’s how you started then throughout the game you upgraded your attacks but nope, there are no combat upgrades whatsoever. The only variety in attack comes from different weapons in the game, the same weapons that break after a while. The game also has a Dodge mechanic but I don’t think it helps. You can jump left or right to avoid enemy attacks but these will only work depending on the type of attack the enemy is doing. If they swing from the left and you jump left you’ll get hit, of course. This makes sense in theory but in the heat of an intense battle with more than one monster and I’m juggling between using runes (mainly bombs), the last thing I want is to figure out which way the enemy is swinging and dodge in a different direction, I just want to press a button to get out of harm’s way without thinking too much. There is a backflip or backwards dodge which is a more safe bet but only if an enemy swings once. If they have a combo where they hit you multiple times the backflip will evade one attack but you’ll get hit on the subsequent ones and there’s nothing you can do to avoid that. If you have good timing skills and backflip at the right time the game goes into slow motion which allows you to hit the enemy multiple times, but again in the heat of battle getting the timing isn’t always easy. Ghost of Tsushima has a similar timing mechanic but you can get an upgrade to increase the timing window which is something I would have loved in BOTW.
The game isn’t designed for you to fight multiple enemies at once (so I’ve been told), which would be fine if there weren’t parts in the game that have large groups of enemies. The game has a lock on mechanic but if there is more than one enemy you can’t easily lock on to one and move to the other, you have to release the lock on button, then look at the other enemy and press it again. As you can imagine this is super fiddly and doesn’t work most of the time. If there are groups of enemies, I tend to run away and hope only one chases me, then kill that enemy, and repeat. Runes are helpful too but the whole thing is fiddly. Honestly, I’ve never felt cool in this game fighting enemies, I always feel like I’m fumbling my way through.
But...this is a pretty good game
As much as I'm pointing out the bad points of this game I think it's a really good game, a solid 8 out of 10. The world is beautiful the weather system is great, raining making it difficult to climb, heat and cold requiring you to wear different clothes, thunder requires you to remove your metallic items and if you get shocked you drop your weapon. I really like the traversal, the fact you can climb any building, mountain and tree. The cooking system is clever, making food and elixirs to give you more health/temporary upgrades. Everything works well together. The game is smooth, I didn't experience any frame rate drops or any glitches. The world has some weird and wonderful characters who somehow manage to fit in the world of Hyrule.
I'm just annoyed because I went in expecting a 10 out of 10, a perfect game, a masterpiece. After all, that's what most people are saying. There are people out there on the internet saying this is the best game that has ever existed, seriously! It's a good game but everything this game does other games do better. Traversal/weather system, Death stranding, cooking, Monster Hunter, combat, Ghost of Tsuhima, story, Horizon Zero Dawn, side missions, Assassin's Creed Odessey, believable/alive world Red Dead Redemption 2. I'm mentioning single games that I have played but multiple games do these things better.
P.S. I know a lot of the games I’m mentioning came out after 2017 when BOTW was released. So maybe at the time this was released it might have been a perfect 10/10 game but I played this game in 2021 when these other games were released 🤷
So why do people like this game so much?
Like I said this is my first ever Zelda game and doing some research I found out this is the first-ever open world, Zelda. If I had played previous Zelda games before playing BOTW would blow my mind. Getting free reign to go to all the places you'd been to in the linear games gives the a new perspective and appreciation.
Speaking of freedom that is another thing people like about this game. That you can go anywhere, do anything. You can even go and fight the end boss at the beginning of the game which is cool, on paper that sounds like a really cool idea, on paper. But as I've said before I play games for the story, and if I'm picking up a book I don't read a few pages at the beginning, then read the end, then read a bit in the middle. There's a clear beginning, middle and end. For BOTW to give that sort of freedom the story has to be loose and shallow, not a deep developing one. The game can't really ramp up in difficulty the more you play because you can do things in any order, so the difficulty is more or less constant throughout.
People say the main character in the game is the land of Hyrule, that there's always something interesting to do or see in the game and it's fun to explore. I think this is true to a certain extent and the freedom the game gives contributes to this. I'd say half of the time I go off and explore on my own I find nothing interesting and it's just been a waste of time. I walk in one direction for about 10 minutes, fight a few enemies and see nothing interesting so fast travel to roughly where I was before and go online to find the exact location interesting things. I've had more success finding things in the world of Red Dead Redemption 2 than BOTW.
Nintendo has such goodwill with gamers that people are willing to overlook some of the flaws in their games. Nintendo gives people a warm fuzzy feeling inside, they make people feel nostalgic with their iconic characters and the child-friendly games. Contrast that with companies like EA, Activision/Blizzard and Ubisoft, these companies give people the corporate, money-grabbing, microtransaction, sour taste in your mouth feel. In my opinion, this means that any game made by Nintendo will get a higher score than it should simply because it was made by Nintendo. If you don't believe me the imagine this. BOTW never existed and a company like EA made the exact same game, 'Elf Boy Adventures'. With the same story, mechanics, graphics and made it a Nintendo Switch exclusive. I can bet you any amount of money it won't get a 10/10 from anyone or a 97 on Metacritic.
Conclusion
The legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is a good game, not a great game, not a perfect game and definitely not a masterpiece. Believe it or not, there are more (smaller) issues I have with the game; the puzzles, the many menus. But I don’t want this article to be any longer than it already is so I’ve left them out.
I've enjoyed what I've played so far but, I'm not going to complete it. I'm not motivated enough to want to kill Gannon and I don't know and care enough about princess Zelda to want to save her. My aim now is to do whatever it takes to get the unbreakable master sword, unlock all the towers in the game and then I may attempt Gannon just once, but after that, I'm calling it quits.
Maybe Zelda games just aren't for me and that's okay. But for those people who think this game is the greatest that has ever existed, do your homework. Play some other amazing games first before coming to jumping that conclusion.
