I'm finished at last. What a game. Stats:
Version: Wii U (first ~90 hours on 1.1.0, last ~40 hours on 1.1.1)
Total Playtime: 132 hours
Shrines: 120
Korok seeds: 445
Glitches found: 4
Equipment used while delivering the final blow on Ganon: Mop, Boko Bow, pot lid, and no clothes
Favorite quote: "I must dance!"
Times I made Beedle fall over by blowing up a bomb next to him: countless
Thoughts/critique:
I can't remember the last time a video game has commanded my attention for so long while retaining a constant level of quality throughout. Open world games have never appealed to me because they always felt like a chore after the first few hours, a feeling BotW did not evoke until very late when scouring the world for Korok seeds (totally optional, of course).
I decided to play the game by sharing a save file with my brother, as we both wanted to play it but can only have one current save file for whatever godforsaken reason. He also has more of a taste for open world games like Skyrim and Fallout, so I figured that trading off control would help alleviate the burnout I normally feel playing an open world game. That burnout never happened with BotW. Still, we traded control every few hours or so, which ended up working really well for this type of game. It was nice having another person to bounce ideas off of for solving puzzles or noticing something in the environment that would have been missed otherwise. It was also extremely interesting to see how drastically the flavor of the game changes when a different person takes over - something that can't be said about every game.
Strangely enough, the Zelda this one reminded me most of was Majora's Mask. Both have a rather abbreviated main quest, which seems to be a common criticism of both. If you play either game by beelining to main quest points then calling it quits once the credits roll, then of course they're going to feel underwhelming compared to other Zeldas. But that's the beauty of MM and BotW: it's not the core trunk of the game that's interesting, it's the world that's been built around it. As strange as it sounds, the "main quest" is not actually the meat and potatoes of BotW, it's the world itself. The "main quest" simply exists to drive exploration for those who need some sort of objective to function. I've always respected MM for having the balls to deviate from the norm of Zelda conventions, and BotW feels like it's following in MM's footsteps in that regard. The fact that BotW, like MM, retains the flavor of Zelda while successfully breaking new ground is something to be commended.
Shades of Mario 64 are present in its sense of freedom and experimentation. Someone ITT compared the plateau to Peach's castle courtyard, which is an excellent analogy. The great plateau is one of the best, if not THE best, tutorial sections in all of gaming, and effortlessly teaches you how the game works without resorting to the heavy handed dialog of Zeldas past. It evokes that sense of possibility that Mario 64's courtyard did, by allowing the player to freely experiment with the game's systems until they're ready to move on.
A comparison to Just Cause 2 can be made in the kinetic and satisfying sensation of movement. JC2 is always fun to revisit simply to dick around grappling, parachuting, and stunt jumping effortlessly across its vast world; it was just too bad that almost all of its world wasn't worth exploring. BotW employs equally satisfying movement techniques like climbing to make you feel a sense of mastery over the world without resorting to skill trees or XP bars - and here the world is absolutely worth exploring.
Everything in BotW feeds into exploration, including weapon degradation. At first I found it annoying and agreed with the common criticism against it, but the more I played I realized how indispensable it was to the core gameplay loop that is so addicting. It's really a non-issue once you learn to manage your resources, just like Metroid Prime 2's ammo system and Majora's Mask's 3 day cycle before it. Approaching this game with an open mind and no expectations based on previous Zeldas is absolutely the best way to go.
With all that said, the part of BotW that surprised me the most is how it truly is about the adventure you forge. Literally the only requirements the game enforces are completing the plateau and defeating Ganon. The rest is up to you, and you can call it quits whenever you've had your fill. This allows the game to be as grindy or as checklist heavy as you make it out to be. Nintendo has flirted with this design philosophy since the Wii days, usually saving harder, more grindy content for post-credits gameplay, but here they've pulled out all the stops. This is YOUR adventure.
One of my IRL hobbies is taking long bike rides to random locations - not because the destination is particularily interesting, but because the journey there is intrinsically rewarding in its own right. Nintendo has created a open world game around this intrinsic value of exploration - a profound design decision in an era where open worlds simply serve as a hub to get from point A to point B. To feel the same sensation of IRL adventure in a game world is nothing short of astounding. Not only that, but they succeeded so much at what they set out to accomplish that its brilliant design shines through its rather apparent flaws. Breath of the Wild has done to open world games what Halo did to FPSes: it reinvents the genre completely and makes you wonder how you ever put up with the old paradigm of game design.
10/10, no question. Simply magical.
