'Breath of the Wild’ Will Leave You In A State of Rapturous, Awestruck Bliss

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a masterclass in open-world design and with its release comes a true watershed moment in gaming history. The result is nothing less than magical.

Author: Dale Worrell | Date 23/1/17

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a masterclass in open-world design and with its release comes a true watershed moment in gaming history. The result is nothing less than magical. It artfully blends the best bits of the franchise’s thirty-plus year history and produces a sandbox so full of mystery and so full of adventure, it could take you well over 100 hours to uncover most of its secrets. There’s just so much to do that publishing a full review this early would do the game an injustice. What we have here is the most ambitious title in the history of the franchise; an epic journey that quivers with anticipation, wonder, surprise and excitement. It never gets old. It never gets tiring. There’s not a minute that goes by in which you’ll want to put down the controller because Breath of the Wild keeps players constantly curious and fascinated by the world around them. There’s truly something unusually, haunting and engrossing about the game and whatever your opinion on the Nintendo Switch, Breath of the Wild is arguably one of the greatest games ever made.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about Breath of the Wild is just how familiar yet simultaneously refreshing it feels. Breath of the Wild may be the biggest Zelda game to date, but it still feels like a Zelda adventure — in spirit, story, tone and in gameplay. You play as the young courageous Link, the hero of Hyrule, awaken from a cryogenic sleep chamber inside of a small cave who teams up with the eponymous princess (so to speak) and sets out on an adventure to destroy the horrible fanged, boar-faced Calamity Ganon, a megalomaniac holding Princess Zelda hostage and bent on destroying Hyrule. The narrative setup is more or less standard for a Zelda game, but Breath of the Wild has something that’s been missing from the series for far too long — perhaps since the original title was released back in 1986.

Perhaps the greatest calling for the original NES title lies in how the game unfolds. It’s clear from the moment it starts that the game won’t be holding your hand. That is to say, the game provides no direction, and players can choose to explore Hyrule in whatever way they want. The Legend of Zelda introduced an open world adventure to gamers across the globe before that term had any meaning and that open world feeling is really what made the original Zelda stand out. It conjured the illusion that you could explore a boundless world and let your imagination do most of the work and those that enjoyed exploration in its purest form couldn’t find a better experience on Nintendo Entertainment System. Even decades later, the 8-bit version granted players more freedom than any other game in the series – that is, until now.

Nintendo has also yet to provide official sales numbers in any market; it’s impossible to know for sure how many units the company has sold and how that compares to previous hardware launches. Right now, the data is telling us more about regional allocation and manufacturing capability than giving us anything close to a prediction about overall success.

For instance, Famitsu is reporting that the Nintendo Switch sold an estimated 330,637 units in Japan in its first three days of available, which places it between the first two days of Wii sales at 371,936 consoles and Wii U’s 308,570 consoles in that country. That’s not a wide spread, considering the Wii went on to sell 101.63 million units worldwide. The Wii U has only sold 13.56 million units to date, according to Nintendo’s own numbers. Selling well during a weekend in March is something to be proud of, but it’s not enough to stake a claim that the Switch is on pace to make up for Nintendo’s previous console. And keeping up sales momentum could be tricky — just look at the Wii U.

Much like that original, Breath of the Wild is a game that begs you to keep exploring and it does this right from the start, immediately instilling a real sense of mystery, no matter how familiar you are with the series. This time around, Nintendo wisely skips over the prolonged prologue that usually includes tiresome tutorials and laying out the plot we all know so well. As soon as you emerge from that opening cave, you’ll find yourself on a vista, looking out at the beautiful mountains and ruins of a post-apocalyptic, techno-plagued world. And from that moment on, the world is your oyster. What elevates Breath of Wild above any other game in the series is its sheer freedom, both in its non-linear structure and in your ability to reach almost any surface. Breath of the Wild isn’t interested in telling you where to go. In fact, it rarely gives you explicit directions as to what to do. Instead, much like the original Zelda, it dares you to probe and gives players the ability to decide in what order they complete each mission. Where most recent Zelda games have become bogged down with needless hand-holding, Breath of the Wild lets players do what they want, how they want, when they want. There are numerous ways to defeat certain enemies, various options to solve the hundreds of puzzles you come across and countless combinations when forging weapons or cooking food. If you’re one to criticize past Zelda adventures for being too formulaic, you’re in for a surprise because Breath of the Wild doesn’t abide by a rigid structure. It is far more open and natural than its predecessors, letting you discover everything on your own (like understanding why you can be instantly struck by lightning or lit on fire and how to prevent this from happening again). I wouldn’t say it changes the Zelda formula in dramatic ways since this isn’t the first time Zelda has tried to go non-linear, but five and a half years since 2011’s Skyward Sword, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild brings with it a massive change in design philosophy and expands on virtually everything we’ve come to expect in a Zelda game.