What makes The Legend of Zelda:
Breath of the Wild great
It’s hard to believe we’ve officially
hit the first anniversary for the Nintendo Switch. One year ago today we were
introduced to the system that was destined to make or break Nintendo after the
Wii U bombed tremendously. These days it’s funny to even think there was a time
when the Switch was perceived as anything less than an unqualified success,
especially after it spent 2017 delivering us hit after hit after hit.
And this winning streak started on Day
1 with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the
Wild. Right out of the gates the game was celebrated as a rejuvenation of
the franchise, a celebration of all things Nintendo, and one of the greatest
open-world adventure games ever created.
But what’s the secret ingredient here?
How did Nintendo take a franchise with a 3D formula set in stone since 1998 and
turn it into something that felt completely new, yet still old and nostalgic?
The answer lies in the game’s biggest
component: the open world. Breath of the
Wild prides itself on a sense of adventure that doesn’t really exist in any
other game of the genre. While the game does have a start and end point, it’s
how you get there that’s up to you.
A lot of this is thanks to how
everything in the game is available to you once you’ve left the tutorial area.
All shrines, dungeons, towers, story beats and sidequests are available the
second you leap off that plateau and enter the world for real. Wanna go climb
Death Mountain? You can. Wanna go find as many shrines as possible? Sure. Maybe
you’d prefer to keep sticking to the story? You can do that too. Your only
limit is your imagination.
The shrines especially help with this.
With 120 of them sprinkled all across the game world, it’s nearly impossible to
experience this game the same way twice. You can do them all in different
orders, you can go straight to your favourites and do those first, you can do a
few here and there over the course of the story. It’s your adventure. You can
experience it however you want.
And that’s the key to why Breath of the Wild works so well. While
there are plenty of fantastic open-world games that have more linear-based questlines,
Breath of the Wild’s beauty lies in
its freedom of player choice. A lot of the game’s fun is picking a point on the
map and going there, and then seeing what you’ll be rewarded with.
The other big key element that pushes Breath of the Wild is the element of
surprise and discovery. Yeah, you could explore
a massive world for hours on end, but if there’s never anything to find you’ll
just get bored pretty quickly. That isn’t the case here. Breath of the Wild always has something new to find around every
corner that encourages you to explore more, like a ruined coliseum full of
enemies or a giant maze hidden deep in the frozen north.
Breath
of the Wild’s massive open world could’ve felt like a giant plain of
repetitive shrines and stables repeated ad nauseum, but instead it’s hiding
plenty of cool secrets for players to stumble upon on their journeys. There’s
plenty to do and discover while on your way to the next destination, and once
you arrive there there’s even more to find.
Like I said at the top of this
article, this game is your adventure.
You decide what to do next, from the order of the main story dungeons you visit
to just which shrine you’ll be visiting next. This is truly a game that gives
all power to the players, and that’s what makes Breath of the Wild great.
No comments:
Post a Comment