I’m going to start this off by admitting that I never intended to do an analysis of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW). Something of such a massive scale was a little intimidating to write on, especially considering that it’s been months since I finished the game, and my memory isn’t exactly great. However, thanks to some pointless promotional DLC being added recently, it gave me a reason to get back into the game. The scarce few minutes I played to get the new armor that I’ll never use, however, made me want more. Sadly, I’d already done everything the game had to offer, 100% complete. There was nothing left to do. So, being the sadist that I am, I decided to play through the game’s Master Mode. Having just finished that, I figured now would be a perfect time to do an analysis on this fantastic, albeit flawed, game.
The Zelda franchise has been around for over 30 years now, and because of its age, people have mostly come to know what to expect from a Zelda game. You start out with little more than a sword, you’re suddenly tasked with saving Princess Zelda (and in turn, the world), then you need to find a number of dungeons (or temples), get a new awesome item from each dungeon, beat the boss (usually with the new item found), then move on to the next dungeon on the path of progression, until you reach the final dungeon, fight Ganon, and save the princess. I’m not bashing on that formula at all, mind you. It works incredibly well. If it didn’t, the series wouldn’t have lasted as long as it has. But with each new Zelda game, there has always been some new innovative idea that came along with it to make it fresh.
Well, innovation must have been the word of the day when they came up with BotW. Turning the series on its head, Nintendo managed to do the unthinkable, and completely changed the format of Zelda games. Linear progression, going from dungeon to dungeon, gone. Earning many new and unique weapons, gone. Starting out with a sword, gone. Defeating Ganon and saving the princess… still there (they couldn’t change it all, now could they?). BotW seems to take its inspiration from the very first Legend of Zelda. That game had no official set path, letting the player choose to go where they wanted, completing whatever dungeon they chose in whatever order (although there was certainly a preferred order, it was never enforced). As far as I’m aware, it was the first real “open world” game. Well, BotW took that concept of open world exploration, and just went to town.
When you start the game, you have a vague direction of what to do, Link has been asleep for 100 years, Zelda is in trouble, you need to help her. After leaving the small cave you start out in, you are directed to an old man just down the way. It’s totally the player’s choice whether to go talk with him or not, though. The game never tries to force your hand. Eventually, though, you will need to interact with him, because he is the only way of escaping the plateau that you are currently on (the game’s tutorial section). To make a long story short, you are tasked with going to four different shrines on the plateau. These shrines act as extremely compact dungeons (much more on that later) and will unlock the only powers you will have for the entirety of the game. Remote detonated bombs, Magnesis (an ability to move metal objects), Stasis (an ability to freeze certain objects in time), and Freeze (an ability to create pillars of ice from pools of water). With these few abilities in hand, the main plot of the game is revealed to you by the old man (who turns out to be the ghost of the King of Hyrule). As I said previously, it all boils down to Ganon destroying the world, and you needing to stop him and save Princess Zelda, who has been keeping Ganon at bay in Hyrule castle for 100 years now. After that bit of narrative, you are given the glider (which works exactly as you might think), and are now free to explore the entirety of Hyrule however you wish. You are given main narrative quests, and general ideas of where to go to accomplish them, but that is totally up to the player. You can do anything you want, in any order you want. Those who are skilled (or foolish) enough, could technically go straight to Hyrule castle and face off against Ganon, right after finishing the tutorial.
It’s all in embracing the concept of open world freedom. I’ve seen plenty of open world games before, but never have I seen the concept so realized as it is in BotW. Usually, in an open world game, you unlock a portion of a map, and then all these quests, tasks, and chores appear for you to finish. In BotW, you do unlock portions of the map, but nothing suddenly pops up when you do. It is left to the player to discover the many side quests throughout the game, or not. It is completely up to the player to find the 120 shrines, littered about the kingdom, or not. It’s up to the player to find the game’s main “dungeons,” or not. Absolutely nothing is forced upon the player, and nothing short of defeating Ganon is required to finish the game. Of course, by choosing not to do some of these things, you will have an extremely tough go of it, but that’s your choice.
I’ve always greatly disliked open world games, for the most part. They always make the promise of go anywhere and do anything. But almost always, when you “go anywhere,” there’s nothing worthwhile to do. It’s just a bunch of boring empty space. I never got bored playing BotW. Hyrule is massive, make no mistake. It is a colossal, beautiful world in which you are free to explore. And thankfully, it is chock full of things to do. I recall in my first play through, always wondering, what’s around the next mountain? Because there was always something. Maybe it was a shrine, maybe it was an enemy encampment protecting a treasure chest, maybe it was a new town or village, maybe it was a great fairy fountain, maybe it was a horrifying monster that I was nowhere near ready to face off against yet. The world was full of possibilities. All unknown. I had a map that marked topography, but not much else. It was totally up to me to find out what was really there. And it kept pushing me to explore in a way that no game has ever done.
I will remark, that in all this exploration, even the standard controls for Zelda have been changed up. In this game, Link can jump (a series first, Link has never been able to jump, unless it was from the aid of some item or if he was hopping from one platform to the next) and climb. And when I say climb, I mean virtually anything. All you need to do is run or jump up to a vertical surface (a mountain, a house, a tree, even the walls of Hyrule castle), and Link will begin to climb up it. There is one annoying caveat though, one that has been brought over from Skyward Sword (a mechanic I was none too fond of then, and even less fond of now), stamina. In order to climb, or run, or swim, or perform certain other actions, Link must use stamina, which is depicted by way of a green circle. It depletes when used, and refreshes when not being used. The stamina bar can be upgraded (either permanently or temporarily), but it still irks me, no matter how much stamina I have. Nintendo presents this massive open world, and says “go wherever you want!” But you’re severely limited in where you can go (at first, anyway) because of your stamina. Sure, you can climb a mountain… if you have enough stamina. And even if you do have enough stamina, wo be unto you should you be climbing a mountain when it starts to rain (and it rains a lot), because man does that surface get slick! What’s more irksome, though, is that stamina can so easily be regenerated, through food (another new concept in BotW, Link can collect, cook, and eat food; depending on the type, it will do different things, such as replenish hearts or stamina for example) making the stamina meter pointless. It’s all an exercise in futility, in my opinion. BotW gains nothing from having stamina as a mechanic, and would lose nothing if they got rid of it.
Ironically, because there is so much climbing involved in this game, it rendered another mechanic useless: Horses. Because so much of the game encourages you to travel off the beaten path, I almost never used a horse to travel. You can’t climb mountains with a horse. You can’t swim across lakes or rivers with a horse. The minor convenience of faster travel is pointless, when you are constantly in areas that the horse can’t get to. There’s also the fact that any Shrine you access can be used as a fast travel waypoint… Not to mention, getting a horse in the first place is a pain (unless you have a Link Amiibo). You need to catch it in the wild, register it with a stable, then tame it constantly before it will even listen to your directions. It’s so realistic! Get your realism out of my video game Nintendo… No one wants that, especially for such a useless mechanic.
But I think I’ve said enough on that topic. As I’ve said, the second you start the game, the world is your oyster. But there’s a small problem, this time, when you start the game. Link doesn’t have a sword, or any equipment whatsoever, not even any clothes. And this is another huge idea behind BotW, changing up the Zelda formula. In addition to being an open world Action/Adventure game, BotW is almost a survival game as well. The player will constantly need to use whatever equipment he can find to survive, especially early game. Your first weapon will most likely be a tree branch, a torch, or a wooden club. Certainly not a sword. And even when you do manage to find a sword, don’t get attached, because that sucker will break.
Ah weapon durability, yet another Skyward Sword mechanic that was better left in the past (Skyward Sword had durability on their shields, but nothing else)… what a wonderfully HORRIBLE idea! This was absolutely my biggest complaint with BotW. Any and all equipment you acquire, no matter how good it is, will break eventually, through use. Even when you get the freakin’ Master Sword, that legendary blade, the sword that’s been a part of almost every Zelda game since A Link to the Past, will “lose power” (see: break temporarily, needing a 10 minute cool down before you can use it again) if you use it too much. Even if you completed the Trial of the Sword (a DLC mission consisting of a ridiculously difficult gauntlet, which made the Master Sword more powerful), the thing still breaks. And I find that unacceptable.
I just need to ask, why? Why on earth did anyone think weapons breaking was a “fun” concept? I get the desire to obtain better gear, pushing the player to tackle bigger and better challenges, but there are better ways to do that. What’s worse, is that even the “best” weapons break so dang easily. Which led me to almost never using them. I’ve never avoided combat in a Zelda game as much as I have in BotW, simply for the fact that I didn’t want my good weapons to break on me (of course, I also usually avoided the Guardians, because those laser shooting robot spiders were terrifying, but that’s neither here nor there). In late game, many of the enemies take a ludicrous amount of hits to kill, which means I could easily break one or two very good weapons trying to kill a single moblin (and don’t even get me started on Master Mode’s “Golden” enemies). That’s not fun. Not at all.
And it truly is a shame, too. Because combat is fun. Once again, Nintendo took a Zelda concept, and amped it up. Dodging properly now opens up chances to rush your opponent with a flurry of hits (usually leading to the weapon breaking, of course). Using the shield, you can parry blows and even reflect certain projectiles back at the enemy. Using a bow and arrow has never felt so good, making a headshot will result in a critical hit. And fighting a lynel (notoriously one of Zelda’s most powerful enemies), well, that’s just an exhilarating rush unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in a Zelda game before.
Also, it is baffling to me, that in a game where weapons break like porcelain, that you cannot buy weapons at any of the game’s shops. You can buy arrows (but not nearly enough, as this game has decided that their shops will only carry a limited stock of everything, and not restock for a very long time). But not weapons. I get needing to scrounge for equipment on the great plateau, and early on, but when I finally reach a town, an option to restock would be nice.
On a final note, I need to mention the other extremely annoying problem with weapons, bows, and shields. Inventory space. You start with an extremely limited amount of inventory space to keep these crappy weapons. And there is only one way to expand the space. Korok seeds. Throughout the game, you will find, little things in the world that seem out of place. A near finished circle of rocks, a strange colored flower, a sparkling spot under the ground. These are all mini-puzzles, and when solved, they produce a Korok. A small forest spirit introduced in Wind Waker. The Korok will then give you seed (which smells extremely bad…). If you find him, there is a giant Korok named Hestu, and he will expand your inventory by one slot for a predetermined number of Korok seeds. In order to expand your inventory completely, you will need 441 seeds in total. That is a lot. And it takes a good amount of exploration to find that many. Although expanding inventory space for a game like this has no right being that laborious, I found myself enjoying the process, strangely, because Hyrule was such a vivid and fun place to explore. In my original run, I even went above and beyond that, and collected all 900 Korok seeds, simply because I wanted to explore more of this world. Technically speaking, there shouldn’t be more seeds than is necessary to expand inventory, so I have no idea why there were 900 of them. The reward for getting all 900 is worthless (it is literally a gold pile of Korok crap). But I knew this going in. I never did it for the reward, though. It was truly for the journey, not the destination. And perhaps that’s why there were 900 of them.
Of course, weapons and inventory expansions aren’t the only things you collect in this game. There are ingredients abound, for cooking and whatnot. Foraged food items, meat from animals, monster parts, bugs, frogs, etcetera. All having their own specific uses. All giving certain temporary boons if cooked with the right ingredients. Which is interesting to me. Usually, in a Zelda game, you’ve got a maximum of 4 empty bottles, in which you can store fairies or potions. That’s your last line of defense so to speak, if you run out of potions or fairies and you’re in the middle of a boss fight, that would be it for you. But in BotW, you can cook a ton of meals, meaning, as long as you’re at least semi aware of how many hearts you have left, you’ll almost never die. There are even some meals that give you temporary hearts (if you haven’t maxed them out yet). In this, the game’s combat was almost insultingly easy. Very few enemies presented any real threat (unless of course, I was low on weapons), because I always had food on hand. I died more to environmental cheap deaths (ran out of stamina climbing a tall cliff, when it started to rain, etc.) than I ever did to any monster. In addition to cooking food, these ingredients had another important use: upgrading your armor.
Botw has more armor choices than any Zelda game to date. And almost all of them have very unique traits. The Zora armor can upgrade your swim speed, the climbing gear lets you climb faster, the rubber armor can make you immune to electricity, the Snowquill armor lets you explore freezing areas without taking cold damage, and so on and so on.
All armors start out with relatively low defense ratings, but, with the right ingredients, can be upgraded through the great fairies (yet another Zelda mainstay, and they’re just as horrifying in this game as any other 3D Zelda game). Not only do the fairies upgrade the defense rating (up to four times), but after upgrading a full set (head, chest, pants) twice, you’ll usually get some sort of extra bonus along with the armor’s default bonus. I found this a lot of fun, making different armors useful for different situations. And I really appreciated the choice of changing out my armor (because that new sky blue shirt that’s set as “the iconic armor” for this game is ugly as sin, and the less said about Link’s incredibly stupid new pony tail, the better [seriously, I want to rip that thing out of his skull every time i see it…]).
So, as I’ve said, the game is massive. There is so much to see and do. So many side quests to take up. So many monsters to kill. So many armor sets to find and upgrade. But none of that is what really stood out to me as the defining gameplay moment. Where BotW truly shined, for me, was the shrines and divine beasts.
I mentioned before that shrines are compact dungeons, but I’ll expand on that here. Each shrine contains a dead monk, which gives you a spirit orb (four spirit orbs will either net you a new permanent heart or a new portion of stamina) upon completion of the shrine. Shrines can be divided up into three categories. Blessings, Combat, and Puzzles.
Blessings are the most dull of the three, and I always bemoaned the fact that it was a blessing shrine, when I entered it. Blessing shrines, usually only appear after you solved some sort of puzzle outside of the shrine, in Hyrule’s environment. Considering that your challenge, once you enter, you are given a chest with some random reward (a weapon, an armor piece, a rare ingredient, etc.), and then given the orb, and that’s it. Boring.
Combat shrines were no better in my opinion, and, like blessing shrines, they were far too numerous. Entering a “Test of Strength” shrine meant that you would do battle with a single small guardian (see: robot). The difficulty varied from minor, moderate, and major. And by difficulty, I mean how many whacks of a sword it would take to kill the guardian, as they did not vary much at all in way of combat. I will note that the more difficult combat trials forced you to make better use of your environment. Minor tests of strength have plenty of pillars to use to your advantage. Major tests of strength have no pillars, but the industrious player might notice the floor covered in water (meaning you can use Freeze, to create your own pillars), or there might be metal blocks in the floor (which you can use Magnesis on to raise them, as temporary cover). While I found fighting the guardians over and over boring, this small little touch was a clever addition, and I did appreciate it.
The puzzle shrines, however, were in a league of their own. And I was happiest when I was in a good puzzle shrine. These shrines were set up as one (usually) large room, often cordoned off by walls and room-like boxes, but always contained in one large room. They definitely had a feel of the old dungeons of games past, but they were also unique. No shrine was ever too big. And each shrine always had its own theme (Magnesis, Stasis, Bombs, etc.). And by figuring out that theme, you could understand how you were to go about solving the puzzles. Usually, there was only one puzzle per shrine, but if you were up to it, you could solve other puzzles within the shrine for a chance at a chest. This was awesome to me. Even in the “dungeons,” freedom of choice was still paramount. And most of the puzzles were so much fun, I would usually go for the extra loot, even when I knew I wouldn’t need it, just for the chance to solve more puzzles.
These shrines had a strange zen-like quality to them. It was rare that there would be enemies in a shrine, and if there were, it was usually only a couple small guardians. Because of this, I was free to solve the shrines at my pace. Free of distractions. It was great. I would happily play a game of nothing but puzzle shrines. But not the motion control puzzle shrines. Those were just awful (and thankfully, few).
Moving on to the divine beasts. These served as the game’s main dungeons/temples. But, just like everything else in this game, they acted unlike any past Zelda dungeon, ever. Even entering the divine beast was a unique challenge. And mostly a lot of fun. Narratively, in game the divine beasts were four giant, robotic (sort of) beasts, supposed to fight Ganon, but Ganon corrupted them, and now they were terrorizing four regions of Hyrule (Zora’s Domain [which is breathtaking, by the way], Rito Village [another awesome place], Goron City, and Gerudo Town. After hearing the plight of the different people, you team up with one of each unique race to take on their divine beast. Riding on the back of the Zora prince, Sidon, swimming up waterfalls to shoot a giant robot elephant was amazing. Riding on the back of a Rito, soaring through the air, attacking a giant robot eagle was so much fun. Riding a sand seal with a Gerudo chieftain, avoiding lightning strikes from a robot camel was okay. Climbing a mountain stealthily, shooting a Goron out of a cannon, at a robot lizard, was… meh.
Once you disabled a divine beast, you could then enter it, like a dungeon. You then need to solve puzzles and activate certain consoles, which will in turn, allow you to face off against the boss. Although these divine beasts are set up to be like the main dungeons of the game, they are so very different from usual. Much like the shrines, there are shockingly few enemies in divine beasts. In my first divine beast, I thought I was being set up for an ambush because there were virtually no enemies. But, like the shrines, the divine beast’s purpose wasn’t so much about combat, as it was about solving puzzles. And thankfully, the puzzles in the divine beasts were very unique.
Each divine beast allows you to control it in some way, once you get the map for it. The elephant could move its trunk, which constantly spouted water, which in turn could be used in unique ways to move water wheels, or put out fires, etc. The lizard could rotate its whole body, making the wall, suddenly the floor. The eagle could tilt its axis left and right, making use of a lot of “sliding” puzzles. And the Camel could rotate its middle section a complete 360 degrees, making for its own unique puzzles.
Upon completing the task of activating the consoles, you’d face off against the divine beast’s boss (all of which were named and designed after Ganon, making for little variation in appearance). These boss fights were surprisingly difficult at times. As I said before, you don’t get dungeon treasures like in old Zelda games, so there’s no obvious way to fight these bosses. Using the four runes you’ve had from the beginning, along with your wits, you must find ways to counter their attacks, and beat them.
Once you do, you free the spirit trapped within the divine beast (the ones originally tasked with piloting them 100 years ago, before Ganon came around and killed everyone). Said spirit will give you a unique power, which was an awesome (and mostly game breaking) reward. These powers could be used at will, a number of times, before needing a rather lengthy cooldown. Cooldown or not, though, they were still extremely useful.
Revali, the Rito, gives the power of Revali’s gale. Using this, you can hold the jump button, to create a gust of wind underneath you, shooting you into the air. When used properly, this power could easily break a game that is based on exploration. I’ve even used it to bypass all of Hyrule castle, to get straight at Ganon.
Mipha, the Zora, gives Mipha’s Grace. This acts like a fairy, refilling your hearts when you lose your last one, only it gives way more than a normal fairy would.
Daruk, the Goron, gives Daruk’s protection. A shield that forms around Link, and can block any hit, three times, before needing to recharge.
And finally, Urbosa, the Gerudo, gives Urbosa’s Fury. When you charge a spin attack, you now cause lightning to strike all around. Admittedly, this was the least impressive of the four for me, and I did not use it often. I actually used it by mistake more than I ever did intentionally. Needing to charge a weapon is used for more than just combat, so this one was actually pretty annoying.
There’s so much more I could say about this game, it’s just such a massive thing. But I feel like I’ve said enough, talked on the main points of the design, its biggest changes to the formula, what I found good and bad. BotW is a fantastic game. It allows freedom unlike anything I’ve seen. It rewards the player by way of the journey, not so much the destination (even the ending is pretty dull, which disappointed me slightly. I mean, come on, a Zelda ending should have a little fanfare, right?), and yet, it kept me going throughout. Because it was such a great journey.
