Zelda: Breath of Frustration

After purchasing my new Nintendo Switch GameCube controller (one of the best Nintendo ideas in years) I took it for a spin by booting up “Zelda: Breath Of The Wild” for the Nintendo Switch. I had previously beaten this game on the Wii U…Likely the only person in the Vancouver area who bothered to buy and play the game for that disaster of a console, but I digress. The game was a ton of fun, but left me with a poor taste in my mouth. I had hoped a second run through on the console the game was designed for would improve my criticism.

It did not.

Zelda: Breath of The Wild (I shall henceforth call “BOTW” for brevity’s sake) drives me nuts. The game is extraordinarily fun. The first true open world Zelda game, since the original in the late 1980s, spawns you in a world where all you have is a shirt and a pair of pants to start. Everything, absolutely everything, you get has to be earned. You never randomly get money (rupees), weapons, armor, or items without earning them first. Everything has to be explored and then earned. You have a huge map – ironically NOT developed by Nintendo, they outsourced its creation – to explore, and the game gives you a unique feeling of freedom. Everything you need or want to do can usually be overcome in multiple ways. For example, near the beginning you need to access a shrine in a cold area but the cold could kill you over time. So what do you do?

Well, there are several ways around this. You can do a quest to earn a warm coat, or you can mix a potion or meal with spicy peppers to give cold resistance, or you can run towards it with a lit torch, or you can make “standard” meals that replenish hearts and simply tank the damage to and fro while using your food to keep you alive. Either way, the game lets you do it. It’s a ton of fun. The world is varied with a lot of collectibles and has a fun cooking system where meals can give you huge boosts to your defense, speed, stealth, attack, stamina, etc. You can, and I have both playthroughs, spent dozens of hours just exploring without doing any of the main quest or story.
And therein lies my frustrating problem with this game.
Zelda BOTW’s story is crap. I could barely piece it together for you to be honest. For those that don’t play, the Zelda story involves a curse where Link (the main character), the character Zelda (with power from the reincarnated goddess, Hylia), and the nemesis, Ganon, are locked in an eternal conflict. As are certain minor side characters also caught up in the curse. Every 100 to 1000, to, in this case, 10,000 years a new Link is awoken in a Hylian (elf like race) person and defeats a new Ganon with a new Zelda’s help. Now, in this game you’re disconnected 10,100 years from the past Zelda game. To start, you’re already so far ahead of the other games to basically not feel any connection with them. This is juxtaposed to the uber-cool idea used in Zelda: Twilight Princess where the most famous Link, “The Hero of Time” from Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, visits you as a skeleton ghost to teach you cool moves.

So already in this story you feel disconnected because it takes place so far in the future. Next, the story is only revealed in quick snippets of about 1-2 minutes of dialogue and cutscene. I believe in total there may be 12 scenes including the beginning and the end for, approximately, 24 minutes of story…For an entire game which could span easily 30-60 hours. There is certainly no more than 40 minutes of story in this entire game by any measure. What’s more, these snippets of story are non-linear because with an open world game, you can stumble upon them at any time. Sure, you can watch them together later with a “rewind” feature but it takes effort to put them in order and there’s simply not much there. I struggle to tell you what the story actually is, even having pieced it together.

The cool part is the story involves a Link who actually lost. He got his equipment, powered up, and fought Ganon (known here as “Calamity Ganon”) but then lost. Mortally wounded, he was placed in a secret shrine where it would take 100 years for his body to heal. In that time Zelda, somehow ageless, hides in the now corrupted Hyrule Castle. Link awakens with no memory, needs to power up to fight Ganon, and gets those 24 minutes of snippets (if you try, they’re not necessary) and goes to beat Ganon to beat the game. That’s really all there is to it.
My frustration is this: I have ranted before on the podcast how I felt Resident Evil 4 was a ton of fun but not “actually Resident Evil” in its action-orientated gameplay. I feel the same with Zelda BOTW. On the surface it is a return to Shigeru Miyamoto’s original idea for the series: and the core game and physics are a ton of fun! However, that comes at the cost of sacrificing the entire storyline, which was previously a strong point of the other Zeldas. It is a collection of great tools with no toolbox. And I need to call it for what it is.

-Moby