We got a Switch, for the exercise games really, but it gave me the excuse to buy a game for myself. I picked up this one, and three weeks later emerged, pastel-shaded but happier, thoroughly happy with my purchase.
After a string of gritty, bloody open-world games like “Skyrim” and “Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt” it was nice to play something almost innocent like Breath of the Wild for a change.
I say it’s innocent, and overall it is, though the setup is a little dark. You see, the backstory is an ancient evil returned to the world (they way they inevitably do, as foretold by the prophecy) and … the good guys lost. Your four closest friends were all killed, the princess you swore to protect is now locked in an eternal, stalemated battle with the ancient evil, and you were so badly injured you had to spend 100 years in a bacta tank recovering. The five races of the kingdom were brutally slaughtered by an army of relentless, soulless, pitiless robots. Also, you can get your inventory space increased by a fat green fairy who plays the maracas. The whimsy sometimes jives oddly with the post-apocalyptic setting, is all I’m saying.
As Link, the princess’s champion, your task is to visit the four non-human races and free their “Divine Beasts”—giant animal-shaped war machines—before the final confrontation with the Big Bad, called “Calamity Ganon.” In parallel, you can also try to restore Link’s memories by visiting 12 places of special importance to him. It being an open world you can, of course, just piss about the whole time or attempt to kill the big bad while still completely amnesiac and armed only with a pointed stick. It’s really up to you.
The four races are the birdlike Rito, the boulder-shaped Goron, a bunch of fish with heads shaped like porpoises, and a desert-dwelling tribe of redheaded Amazons with washboard abs and ski jump noses. The four thus neatly map onto the four ancient elements, namely wind, earth, water and gingers.
Getting them onto your side requires you board one of the Divine Beasts (a bird, a salamander, an elephant and a camel) and solve a series of puzzles before fighting a mini-boss. These were fun to figure out, but by the time you get to the fourth one, the near carbon-copy nature gets a little wearying.
The RPG mechanics are fairly limited. You only have two stats: health and stamina. Instead of being raised through experience, you need to collect tokens from a series of hidden shrines, each of which requires you to solve a puzzle. These puzzles generally hit the sweet spot of being engaging without being frustrating—fairly straightforward, but you still feel like a bloody genius when you figure them out. The only thing that was a little annoying was that each shrine involved about three identical cutscenes every single time you entered one.
Combat I found a lot less satisfactory. On the plus side you have complete freedom to approach any encounter the way you want. The game gives you a set of potentially useful abilities, including remote-detonated bombs, a magnet, an ice-maker and the ability to freeze time, and these allow some creative solutions like knocking enemies off cliffs with levitating metal boxes or firing boulders at them. You can also find melee weapons—one handed, two-handed and spears—as well as bows, but melee combat in particular was dependent on split-second timing which, at 45, I can do about once in every five attempts.
Your conversation choices are about as limited as the RPG elements. The people encounter along the way are mostly bland NPCs there only to give out quests, mixed with some very idiosyncratic personalities, such as a scientist who has regressed to childhood and another who (in the Japanese version of the game) speaks English, but the English of a Japanese person who doesn’t speak English very well. These NPCs offer you dozens of side quests you can take or leave, but frankly I left most of them, as they tended to be rather long and involved, frustratingly hard to understand what you were supposed to be doing, and rewarded you with little more than a pat on the head. Balance wasn’t quite so well done there.
The other major task you'll find yourself doing is finding and activating a series of Towers, each of which reveals a portion of the map of the world to you. All the towers look almost identical and you go through an identical cutscene to activate them and after the Divine Beasts and the shrines I think you can probably guess what I'm going to complain about at the end of this review.
But let's talk about the good stuff first. The area where the game really shines is the art design and the world itself. Breath of the Wild has a wonderfully stylized sort of comic-book look to it, neither too childish nor too realistic, that is unique, distinctive, and genuinely lovely to look at. The map covers a range of terrain, from rolling grasslands to a lava-spewing volcano, from blistering desert to snow-capped mountains. Traveling about them is sped up by giving you access to horses and a kind of parachute/hang glider that lets you swoop down from cliffs or mountains. At the beginning, at least, there’s a lot of fun to be had just peacefully wandering about and looking at things. There’s a lot of empty space, but that serves to space out the action and gives you the chance to appreciate this world.
Of course, even that can wear thin after a bit, so it’s time to face that nasty old Calamity Ganon and give him a jolly good thrashing.
The final climactic showdown is a little bizarre, in that there are two phases. Phase One is a floaty spider thing which combines elements from the four Divine Beast mini-bosses. Sure, you think, okay, builds up nicely. Once you beat that, Phase Two begins. In Phase Two, the big bad transforms into a giant pig that. Um. Kind of stands there. You shoot it full of arrows and win! Yay!
You are then reunited with Princess Zelda in a very sweet yet chaste scene (c’mon, she’s 17 guys—well, 117 I suppose, which is also kind of weird). Fade to black.
It’s a glorious, gorgeous, light-hearted game, that suffers only in some of the samey locations and the repetitive nature of the four main quests. Still, after so much grim darkness, it’s a breath of fresh air. Ha!
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