i’ve been saying i would talk about why i don’t think botw works for years now so here’s that.

Breath of the Wild has frustrated me for the better part of four years now. I remember getting it as a late birthday present in 2017 on the Wii U, a console I didn’t even own. I started it three times in that 72 hour haze — once with a friend on Friday, once with my younger sister who’s been on the Zelda hype train with me since day one on Saturday night, and my full playthrough when I returned to uni on Sunday via my roommate’s console.

By the time I hit the final Ganon fight, what felt like some fifty hours later, I paused it to watch my roommate go through Ending E in NieR: Automata — I’d thoroughly checked out with BotW by this point and really just finished it as a formality because it was getting late, I was already there, and I wanted to talk about this completely different game I didn’t even experience fully.

This shouldn’t happen, I thought to myself. Why don’t I care about this? Zelda is literally my favorite franchise, Wind Waker is one of my favorite pieces of media ever, I would not have wanted to get into game design without my aunt sending us a copy of Wind Waker, a GameCube to play it on, and a GameFAQS guide based on a imported Japanese copy of the game printed out and put into a three ring binder. What is causing me to not enjoy this?

I’ve spent a good chunk of energy trying to figure out my thoughts and feelings on Breath of the Wild and I think I can finally answer the question “Why isn’t the new Zelda working for me?” Hopefully when I can get this essay done, I can throw the link at someone and I won’t have to continually type the same reasons over and over when I say Breath of the Wild didn’t do it for me and how I think it fails at being…anything other than okay? Yeah, anything other than okay.

BotW turns the story into a collectible like we’re playing Banjo-Kazooie and need two more jiggies to get to the next level.

I’m gonna start swinging out the gate; this is the real killer for me. At least, it’s always the thing I go on and on and on about whenever someone lets me talk about this game. Like, that’s the Problem I have with this game. Every other problem I have with it comes right back around to this problem. You see, The Legend of Zelda, as a named series with a specific framework, is fairly straightforward when you break it down into core parts. It’s not hard to deconstruct and see the gears and gizmos moving once you know them. So here’s the gears and gizmos.

1. Start with a prologue that sets up the world and introduces the stakes — Ordinarily talks about the big bad Ganon and how you’re Link and you have an adventure on your hands. Great stuff.
2. Introduce people to the world, small stakes stuff before a much bigger threat arrives and pushes Link to action. Goblin raids on Ordon Village, the Helmaroc King confuses a pirate for your sister and kidnaps her, your uncle goes off in a storm towards the castle and dies.
3. Have a brief gameplay segment before you’re introduced to the main title gimmick — Minish Cap makes you small with the help of Ezlo, Majora’s Mask has you turn into a Deku kid through the masks, Link Between Worlds lets you become two dimensional on walls, and Adventure of Link is a sidescroller.
4. Go into a dungeon, fight a miniboss, get a cool new tool that that dungeon highlights for fun puzzles and combat encounters, get a big key, fight the dungeon boss, get a heart container.
5. Rinse repeat for about 7–15 times. Along the way learn more about the side-characters you meet, do side content, and progress the story. This is the main core of every Zelda game.
6. Fight the big bad guy, probably Ganon as a big man or a cop.

So, here’s the rub. What happens when you remove steps 4 and 5? Well, what happens if you build a bridge with nothing underneath it? There is no support. Breath of the Wild makes a fairly radical change and turns most of its content into a thing that the player can choose to do at any point in their journey. Dungeons are morphed into the Divine Beasts with their fun puzzles and combat encounters becoming individual shrines, so they broke up steps 4 and 5 and scattered it all across Hyrule.

and it’s a big ass place to throw this stuff all over

This isn’t inherently a problem. Functionally, we still have the same style of stuff as before, just placed differently; we aren’t losing anything. Where the problem comes in and rears its nasty head is how they handled the context of the stuff we’re doing.

In the event you haven’t played Breath of the Wild, here’s a super duper mega quick plot summary — Link wakes up on a massive plateau, gets a Wii U gamepad and meets an old man who cryptically guides him through various challenges that jailbreak his gamepad with neat tools and the promise of a glider at the end. The old man reveals himself as the old ghost King of Hyrule and says that about 100 years ago from this moment, Hyrule fell when Ganon took over technology, wiped out the champions of the land (including you) and that his daughter Zelda is keeping Ganon in a perpetual stalemate that she’s now starting to lose. Go save Zelda, maybe go to Kakariko, you’re free now.

Cool, neat, we’re on our way. We got our first three steps in, altered slightly, but every game in the series makes alterations — it’s why I think Zelda is more of a framework for Nintendo’s action adventure titles than a specific formula it does every entry. It’s why it get away with significant changes without it exploding in your face. From here, we have a couple choices.

We can opt to do three things.

1. Charge Hyrule Castle on three/four hearts with base or slightly upgraded stamina and die.
2. Go to Kakariko Village and seek out the village elder.
3. Ignore everything and explore the world at our leisure.

We’re gonna go with a story-focused playthrough as the example, pick option 2, and go to Kakariko for the sake of this argument. In Kakariko, Impa tells us that we lost our memories and that maybe if we upgrade our gamepad, we might find something to help us. One “main quest” later and hey, there’s a bunch of pictures in our gamepad that might jog Link’s memory of himself 100 years ago. Go find them.

So. About that. These memories provide the tangible story for BotW. They inform us about the character of our Champions, of Zelda, of her relationship with Link and how her reluctance on magic and faith in technology let Ganon have the opportunity to win; the thoughts and feelings of almost every main character are all told through the memories. Even when you’re approaching each Divine Beast, you get a vignette with its old pilot and how these brave heroes inspire the soon-to-be Champions of the now. The drama of the story is all flashbacks. Optional flashbacks.

This is kind of what the game did to the importance of the vast majority of its story content.

By segmenting and spreading out the context of what we fight for, you inadvertently transform your narrative into a collectible. On the same level as collecting Korok poo to expand your inventory space, on the same level as solving puzzles to get health and stamina upgrades. Do X shrine, reward is a spirit orb. Do Y micro puzzle, reward is a Korok seed. Find Z, reward is story. All of these collectibles that the game does not require you to do. In giving the player the choice to engage or disengage from any element of the game at their whim, you diminish the strength and value inherent in each item. It itemizes the story in the same way that completing all 120 shrines, collecting all 900 poops, and exploring each part of the world all adds up to a 100% completion.

It really weakens your written narrative in favor of the player narrative, the stories that the player has dynamically in the world while playing. On paper, that doesn’t seem bad at all! It’s a shift in priority, in focus — the stuff you can get into in BotW is dynamic and always unknown! In execution, it introduces problems the series has never had before…

Because Zelda games have been really good at combining story and gameplay.

In my head, a good adventure story is all about the throughline — the events that actually take you from section to section, set piece to set piece. It ought to look like an effortless domino line. I feel like I’m just describing motivation and following through on investment, but I point it out specifically because I think Zelda games are, like, prime AAA examples of this.

Take Wind Waker as an example, that’s really easy for me to rattle off plot wise so let’s do this rapid fire real quick.

You start off waking up on an island. No threat, all is good. Happenstance causes you to take up a sword when a girl falls out of a giant bird’s talons because of a pirate ship shooting at it. Cool, we got an initial conflict that causes us to seek information.

That girl’s a pirate, that ship out there is hers. You leave the upper island with pirates trailing behind, your sister runs out to meet you on a bridge and woops! That giant bird kidnaps your sister. You now have a reason to leave your home — save your sister. Pirates take you with them to the FORSAKEN FORTRESS.

You try to save your sister, end up failing, meet the mysterious villain who’s behind kidnapping girls, and get flung out to sea. A talking boat saves you and oh baby we’ve got a quest to do.

I’ll spare the rest, but each event we have so far is really good at driving adventure. You get this immediate threat, only for it to be resolved and blossom into this even bigger threat. You’re not strong enough, so you go to different places to gain power and solve local troubles, go to that bigger threat, beat it and then you find an even bigger threat. Link is always constantly on the backfoot, so it’s engaging to gain power and rise to the occasion.

Your first major threat is the Helmaroc King — that’s the sonuvabitch who kidnapped your sister. You fight a giant worm harassing a dragon, a parasite in a tree, and brave a horrific storm to be able to summon a tower, test your valor and allows you to acquire the Master Sword! You’re strong enough to go back to beat the Helmaroc King, and after rescuing your sister, you go to fight Ganondorf aaaaand you’re horrifically outmatched. The Master Sword isn’t fully powered, and now you let the guy who pummeled you into dirt into Hyrule + he knows who Zelda is now + ratio. You’re strong enough for that first major threat, but not for the next.

that’s not the look of someone who is currently equipped to do literally anything to get himself out of this predicament.

By the same token, not only are you not prepared, you now have a different end goal in mind. You rescued your sister along with some other kidnapped girls, now you’re trying to stop the person from ever kidnapping another girl. Because you’re the hero. Link’s built enough fiber to realize that it won’t stop with the Helmaroc king. Certainly not now that the door is wide open for Ganondorf to waltz into Hyrule and get what he desires.

The story grows and evolves naturally, and it enables interesting detours and sections of the game to unfold. This is for Wind Waker, but every Zelda does something akin to this. They all use this framework to some extent and while I’m not asking for every game to be formulaic and the exact same, I do think these games work best when they all have a really good core sense of progression.

Breath of the Wild don’t got that core. It’s less of a Zelda game and more of a true blue open world game, same with most modern trappings of that formula. This might be something I have to accept, I think, that this is the furthest place we’ve been in the franchise from pre-established notions of what the series should be. So yeah, we’re more of a modern open world game now. And it’s fairly obvious because it takes a lot of the problems from other recent games in the past decade since Skyward Sword dropped.

The end of the world is waiting for your permission and that’s lame.

I really dislike Skyrim. Always have. Not a big fan. I think it’s a lame duck of a follow up to Oblivion, which in turn was a lame duck of a follow up to Morrowind but at least Oblivion was good. I bring it up because Skyrim has this kind of major problem. It introduces this world-ending threat right away, a big ass dragon that wipes the floor with you. You’re told “dragons are bad, the world is ending”. Cool cool. You find out you’re this prophesized hero who can fight them and eat their souls, you’re a Dragonborn. Cool, still kind of on board. Then some ancient monks tell you that you need to come to them and train because this world is going to end any day now and you need to solve the problem.

Queue 300+ hours doing everything but solving the problem. All because the world opens up after Whiterun (really it opens up after you escape from Helgen). You can ignore the main quest and do anything you fancy, whenever you fancy! That’s normally a big selling point of these games; the whole “See that mountain in the distance? You can go there!” thing that can be used to show how big the world is. While that’s very neat and cool, it lends to a problem in structure — you can blow anything and everything off at any point in time to chase a different butterfly.

for real, we could be here with death in our face for awhile

Now, imagine a world-ending dragon threatening to actually do what’s described in its job title? Like, it’s gonna do it any day. It’s gonna eat the world or some shit, this calamitous threat is going to make good on its promise. Any day now. Except any day won’t come. This is the nature of how these sorts of stories go, video games won’t progress without you unless specifically designed to (oh hey a zelda game did that already it’s majora’s mask).

Generally, not a problem! The player has some incentive to continue with the main quest, like additional story-locked powers, armor, equipment, or really just the promise of stopping the threat — you know, doing the story! That’s a generally good idea but it doesn’t really stop the main story from having its urgency dictated by the player. I think we could go back and forth on this particular point, but if you’ve gathered anything from this, it ought to be that making the story beats an optional part of a list of things to do doesn’t do it for me. Especially if the story involves the end of the world.

It robs it of any threat! Alduin doesn’t mean shit, if he did then he’d continue unabated and end the world! It sucks! A worldender does not wait around for the hero to decide that next Tuesday at 8pm, he’ll go meet the anti-dragon monks to learn swears to upset the worldender! These main story quests only work under the presumption that the player is going to be actively, constantly engaging with them.

It doesn’t work for Skyrim or any Ubi Tower™ open world game, but at least when these games do it, it kind of goes into with the expectation that players will engage when they want and it’s entirely serious throughout that time like there was no pause in story.

But we’re not an Ubisoft open world game, or Skyrim. This is the Legend of Zelda. This is gonna be Nintendo’s take on the type of game, so their big play is putting the emphasis on whatever the player whims at any point, so they put the story in the past. The game itself takes place one hundred years after the bad guy nearly won, only to be stopped by the sacrifice of one person (who is not you) and countless deaths (including you). The same bad guy is holed up in the castle looming on the horizon, a location you can visit at any point, and a hundred years later is still fighting the princess for control of Hyrule. More over, we’re told explicitly this princess is going to be overpowered very soon, so if she slips up, you better go save the fucking day, Link.

This isn’t snark or anything, Rhoam legitimately tells Link that his “daughter’s power will soon be exhausted [and] once that happens, Ganon will freely regenerate himself and nothing will stop him from consuming the land.”

There’s finality to that statement. In Skyrim, the dragons are very very recently getting into the country. Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, those games typically start off with low stakes so it’s okay if you don’t do story quests right away. We’re already at the endgame of Breath of the Wild, because…

You’re playing the epilogue of the story and that’s even more lame.

All of the story we get in the current “now” of BotW is explicitly after the events already happened. We can’t influence them, we can’t interact with them, there’s nothing we can do to prevent this (except play a time travel sequel that’s a Dynasty Warriors game that sold itself as the story we got to see in the memories with no changes, but lmao it’s actually stopping Ganon before he could ever kill the Champions and Link look Age of Calamity makes me upset because it’s what I wanted from BotW story wise until this whole time travel shit made me drop it).

I really don’t think this would be a problem if the end of the world was at stake. I feel like I’m hammering away at this, but for real, I really don’t think it’s a good idea to have the stakes that absurdly high in a non-linear game. I’d drive the motivation to go save Zelda and the world by telling the player that Zelda has the ability to go the distance with Ganon until the end of time because she has the goddess Hylia backing her up, and she’s exactly as strong as Ganon.

It diminishes our immediate threat a lot, sure, but now we can tell the player “Hey, it’s okay if you take your time and explore and do whatever you want! Zelda has this handled. Go get strong and help her defeat Ganon”! Putting it another way, something like this would work really nicely I think.

“Princess Zelda with her Triforce of Wisdom is locked in eternal struggle with Prince of Darkness Ganon with the stolen Triforce of Power. Go regain your memories and strength to save her, Link!”

Because that’s a slightly reworded opening of Zelda on the NES and it did this right way back then. I really don’t think there is any reason this had to include such a cataclysmic threat right off the bat, because I don’t think it does the game any favors. None of these pieces fit together into a nice little complete puzzle — the collectible memories, the weirdly high stakes, the fact that we are playing out the ending of a much bigger story; it solidly states that the gameplay and the story are no longer intermingling in a way that enhances each other. Instead, the story is here entirely to serve the gameplay.

After 3380 words of complaining about what I think BotW did wrong, I’m going to see what I can take from this and lay it out in a hopefully concise way so that at the very least, if it doesn’t work for you, it can at least work for me.

It’s no good for you, no better for me if I don’t actually think of ways to avoid what I think are pitfalls and look forward to what’s coming next and solidify what I value in adventure games. I also want to respect the time you’ve put into reading this at the same time so hopefully, you can at least walk away with “I don’t agree with any of this, but I can understand it.” Take these as my own personal mantras, things I want to learn from and apply to my own work so that down the line.

If I’m going to tie the story to something the player collects, then there ought to be a promised big reward at the end.

I don’t think story for story’s sake is good. In this case, it’s the memories. Using BotW as a hypothetical, I think it’d be far more satisfying to know that Link couldn’t get the Master Sword until he collected all of his memories because that thing doesn’t recognize Link as its true wielder. But that’s not the point — it’s that I’d want to offer something in contrast to any other rewards that the player might receive in gameplay.

Don’t tell a story for story’s sake. Please, Aaron. Remember this always.

If the story has some nonlinearity to it, don’t attach story-ending threats to it — at the very least, do it at a point of no return.

I like what Yakuza does in this regard — it has a nice open world with a lot of the same things that I called out Breath of the Wild for, but Yakuza structures its story in chapters with points of no return. Ordinarily, it’s a character saying “Hey, we’re gonna go into the Tojo headquarters, you better prepare”. It lets the player know that we are getting to another serious junction, if you’re gonna goof around, do it now because we’re back to the crime drama.

i think dungeons normally serve as these, and the divine beasts do to a certain point as well, but not as defined as normal ass dungeons (i also didn’t have this on hand so i pulled a snapshot from here)

I don’t think there’s anything with worldending plot lines I dislike (I’m fairly sure a sRPG I’m working on will go down this path) but there needs to be weight and gravity actually given to the events at hand so the player can go “oh shit yeah let me do that now before it’s too late.”

Something I’d like to explore in an adventure game like this is taking something like BotW shrines or the Fire and Ice Dungeons in Wind Waker, making the player do them in any order they want before bringing them back for a Big Dungeon™ that uses all of those items. It’d allow for the same freedom that BotW could offer, but still bring some urgency and weight to going into that Big Dungeon™ so it’s not without impact.

Our protagonist needs a tangible sense of progression beyond abstract mechanics.

Whether it’s through tools gained throughout, or some sort of cosmetic change, or upgrades to their weaponry and defenses — I don’t think you can have a good adventure game without a real sense of being in a different place than where you were in the beginning. I was mostly focused on narrative throughout this, so this is where I’ll bring up how I think frontloading Link’s tools in the tutorial flattens his power curve and makes that sensation of doing cool unique stuff limited to things that the player might not do because again this game has a lot of optional stuff that the player might see and that’s fine but I don’t like it and I’m gonna drop it because this is a whole ass different thing now.

Point is, have the protagonist actually grow and change along with the events they’re experiencing. Lose to a bear, beat it, find out there was an even bigger bear, lose to it, repeat until you beat THE LORD OF BEARS BEARRENDORF or some shit like that.

look at this kid, he’s in his pjs

whoa, damn, now he has a big ass sword and a shield, he’s not in his pjs anymore, he’s gonna save the world

Gameplay ought to be driving every narrative moment of the game — don’t do flashbacks unless the player has control, save cutscenes for the BIG moments that can’t absolutely be done with gameplay. Also don’t tell me it’s urgent, make it urgent.

I never said I was an expert. I’m relatively new to game design with only two student projects and a handful of game jam projects but this is something I don’t think the game did well for its planned, written content and it’s something I hope the sequel can do better.

Like, we get told repeatedly by the game that Zelda’s losing strength, maybe we can introduce more beasties as time goes on? Get a Divine Beast down, Ganon gets stronger and now things get more powerful as a whole — more monsters, stronger monsters, more stuff in the wilderness? Anything to actually show the impact that our villain is having and that our actions matter? Please? Thanks.

Let me name the character (and save file) something.

Entirely personal reason here — the aunt I was talking about way back at the beginning of this passed from cancer in my freshman year of highschool, I made a habit on my replays to name the file after her so I could at least play the games with her again. I was really saddened by it in BotW, I don’t see the reason why you couldn’t name the save file, please let me name my save file Peggy goddamn it. At least I could do it in Link’s Awakening Remake.

Look, I didn’t go into Breath of the Wild expecting to hate it. I try not to be contrarian for the sake of it. I was exactly like every other fan at launch, eagerly awaiting the release so I can get the same hit of happy chemicals my body craves every time this franchise has a brand new release. I look at this game and feel disappointed now because it has the potential for so much more. So yeah, whenever the sequel comes out, I’ll play it and hope that the change in framework they wanna do going forward is ironed out and better constructed.

So remember at the start of this, how I was all about how I think this doesn’t work for me and it doesn’t do much for me? and I spent all that time on only the story and next to nothing on gameplay? It’s mostly because at the end of all of this,

I also don’t think the rest of the package is that remarkable.

Gameplay is fine and fun from time to time. Some of the shrines are neat little puzzles. I really hate breakable weapons and think they’re stinky dumb bad but it can work for what the game is going for in de-emphasizing Link’s arsenal in lieu of impromptu recognition of situations at hand (which I mentioned like four paragraphs ago about how it didn’t work for me). The actual guts of the story stuff has some stuff going for it like the dynamic it presents between Link and Zelda but I already gave my thoughts on most of the story — waves at the whole article about this point.

These two halves do not mesh at all and are very much at odds with each other. It wants to be a vibe-y relaxed open world game about comfy exploration, and also be a thrilling dramatic story of faith and resentment with a lot of death and heavy character development. It wants to encourage doing whatever you feel like at your own pace, but also really impress upon you the seriousness of this conflict. It tries to combine story and gameplay by completely detaching the story from the gameplay and treating the whole reason why you’re on this adventure as another item on a checklist. It’s trying to be the biggest Zelda game to date, while also failing at the reason why these games are good to begin with.

I earnestly think that if this was some other open world game that Nintendo tried to do, I wouldn’t be so hard on it and be like “oh, it’s fine, some issues but mostly fine!” but it’s Zelda. It is the pinnacle of the genre for a lot of people. Every release is this massive tentpole, and because of decades of expectation, we expect each one to be amazing. It’s the goddamn Zelda Cycle that comes to fruition every release.

(i’ll be honest, i found this specific image after i wrote this next paragraph so i’m feeling called out intensely but i digress because even my favorite game in the franchise has problems as does everything because nothing is perfect blablabla back to what i was saying)

Maybe it’s my fault for being too attached, but I don’t think it’s okay to overlook problems with something because it’s beloved. Wind Waker seriously drags in the third act and the HD port didn’t really manage to make it that much better, just make it manageable in a lazy way. Twilight Princess goes on for a really long time and would have been a whole lot better actually if we just didn’t have Ganon and Zelda and focused on the Twili conflict but that’s me; and like, these games since the 3D era start to overstay their welcome by the very end, but right at the very end so it’s fine.

I wanted to really enjoy all of my time with Breath of the Wild, and it’d be disingenuous of me to say I didn’t have any fun. It soured on me in a way I absolutely didn’t expect, and it has me hoping that BotW2 can sand off the particularly rough edges. And if it’s just more of the same, then I can hope that we get more remakes of the GB games and if it’s not that, well.

I’ll make my own Zelda game and see if I can be happier with what I make because what we have right now inspires me to do better.

Part of me really wants to do that dumb cheesy YOUTUBE VIDOEGAEM ESSAYIST sign off and be like “oh boy, i hope it does because Breath of the Wild was not the BREATH of fresh air the series needed” but I think pointing it out is funnier so hi, I’m Aaron, thanks for reading what I thought of Breath of the Wild.

Keep it easy. I’m on Twitter and Itch.io here and there. Thanks.