The Legend of Zelda:
Breath of the Wild

OK, so I have debated for 2 days whether or not to write this review, because I had kind of made a vow to myself that I would keep this website a positive place. However, I am recanting on that, because I feel like this is an issue of toxic positivity to the point that it is a public health concern, and that the brand loyalty cultivated over decades has created an environment where Nintendo, similar to Disney, has become a company held on a sacred pedestal, and I'm not here for it.

I didn't like this game. I'm going to try to think of at least one good thing to say, but right now I am genuinely coming up empty. I finished this game 2 days ago, and it is the first Zelda game, ever, like since Zelda 1, that I didn't 100% complete. I am so content to put this game up on a shelf and never look at it again in my life.

Let's talk about the bait and switch this company did. This game was sold to me, consistently, as a return to form, as Zelda 1 in 3D. I believed that. I bought the game with that expectation. It was the entire marketing of the game, every interview, every commercial, every word out of Nintendo's mouth was, "return to form," and "back to our roots,". The comparisons were constant, that is what I was sold.

I got a tech demo for a physics engine. No dungeons, no real items (everything except the Master Sword is temporary), no plot (the only story elements are flashbacks that have to be unlocked by going to random locations, rather than by progressing through a plot). They straight up didn't put a game in their video game. And they charged full price for it. So we're already coming in disappointed.

And then, Nintendo hits us with the biggest tone problem I've ever seen in a video game. This game begins with a father telling you, the player, that his child is dying, and he can't protect her, because he is a ghost. He urges you to hurry, because his only child is fighting a powerful mage who will absolutely kill her the second she slips up even a little bit. He is desperate, pleading, and scared beyond words, the kind of emotions that embody the single worst thing that can ever happen to a human being- your child is in mortal danger, and you can't save them. This is a dying man's plea to save his child.

Then, you jump towards the castle where his child is fighting for his life, and the music cuts to ambience, and the pace slows to a crawl, and the game wants you to dick around with a physics engine. Parents play this game, Nintendo. The average video game consumer, according to ESA, at the time of this writing is 41 years of age.

This is statistically the most likely demographic to be parents of young to adolescent children. You told parents that a child was dying. In the opening cutscene. And then immediately told them to dick around in a field. I'm an atheist, but ain't y'all at least a little bit scared that there might be a hell? This isn't the kind of thing you forget, it's the kind of thing that sticks with you to your deathbed. This is inexcusable.

This is not a video game. Point blank. This is a giant, empty map with scant content that would, if compressed to a manageable size, fit on the Great Plateau. It's not enough content to justify the price. This should have been $20 at most. The vast majority of the game is just running around an empty field with recycled textures, waiting for a beacon to go off (the gameplay is identical to the Knuckles levels in Sonic Adventure, if you're familiar with that game) hoping to stumble upon a shrine. The shrines themselves are single rooms, with either a puzzle, or, for 20 of them, fighting the same robot. 20 times.

It's extremely obvious to anyone familiar with the Zelda series that these shrine rooms were meant to be rooms in dungeons (of which the game has none), but the team ran out of time and budget, and thus had to scatter them. Winning a shrine has no effect on the world at all, and every single one of them can be skipped and the game can be completed without them. The game's core content is optional. Because it's not a game, it's a tech demo.

So you would think, from some other reviews I read, that at least the giant empty map is pretty. At least it's a beautiful, surreal, fantasy landscape, with a falling moon or underwater cities, something to get you out of the drudgery of Appalachia, something beyond poverty stricken hollers and an endless expanse of mountains and trees. It's literally an endless expanse of mountains and trees. It's literally just the exact same environment as regular outside. It even has the shittiest parts of being outside, mountains, and you spend a HUGE, an unforgivably huge part of the game just pushing up on the control stick so Link can climb up a mountain, watching a stamina wheel deplete, hoping you don't fall and bust your ass. Again, exactly like regular outside. Which is free. And shitty. Look at these comparison photos:

The top image is Hyrule, and the bottom 2 are regular ass outside, just normal Appalachia, where I live, and which is nearly universally agreed to be one of the shittiest places to be in the country. Xenophobia is strong, and people will look at this and hear dueling banjos in their head. This is what assholes call the setting for an entire genre they call, "Hillbilly Horror,". But, for our purposes, the point to take away is that sitting on the porch is free. This isn't some beautiful fantasy landscape, it's not an escape from reality, it's literally just normal reality. And they've made Link as shitty as a normal person, so it's reality where you get winded walking up a mountain. It's a Tuesday simulator. With recycled textures.

And they simply did not have enough content to justify the size of that map. I don't actually mind climbing a mountain, now and then, in a Zelda game. If I have to. I would absolutely rather hookshot up it, and I don't know why that isn't an option, but I'll do it if I have to, to get to a game objective. A real objective, that I, as a player, am led to by good environmental game design. This simply isn't that. This is wandering alone through the mountains with no objective for no reason ignoring the wishes of a dying parent to save his child.

Alright, let's talk about game design and gameplay. This is where it becomes especially obvious that this is not a video game. The map is simply too big to learn via kinesthetic intelligence, because it's so samey. It's the reason people get lost in the Appalachias all the time. When environments look similar and have no notable landmarks, and no real marked trails, it's very easy to just get lost. Which is shitty. Being lost is shitty. It is not pleasurable. I really want to emphasize this, because the game does not seem to know that. I spent a lot of my playthrough literally lost in the hills. You spend a lot of this game in frustration, feeling like you're being 411ed. I have no idea why this map is so big and empty. The emptiness is really the crux of it. When you design a video game, the environment is supposed to lead the player to the next objective. That is game design 101. That just doesn't happen in this game.

The developers spoke about designing the world to respond to the player, to be dynamic and changing. Like, you cut a tree down and it stays cut down. Ok, so 1: Why? To what end? Why would I want that? And 2: It's complete bullshit. Because the map is so huge the game can't track all those changes and has to completely wipe and reset every so often. They elected to do this in the shittiest way possible, an event called, "the Blood Moon," which temporarily makes the game harder for no reason and makes no sense with the established lore. I have been to the moon in Majora's Mask. It doesn't do this. We've all literally been to the moon. You do not respect your source material.

Which is another thing. This is straight up not a Zelda game, at all, even a little bit. There's nothing Zelda about this game. I don't know why it's a Zelda title. It really feels like Starfox Dinosaur Planet where a team built a physics engine and a little demo around it, and knew it wouldn't sell on that alone, so they slapped a franchise on it. Don't expect to see any Zelda elements, no familiar items (except the master sword, which we'll get to in a minute), no creation goddesses, no dungeons, no driving plot about the 3 triforce bearers, and no familiar NPCs that would have made the game remotely playable, like maybe, I don't know, A FUCKING CARTOGRAPHER.

The maps on this game are such a joke, and the omission of Tingle so abhorrent, that the fans banded together and created a real map to tell players where the shrines are. It is ridiculously obvious that Tingle should have been in this game to mark the locations of the shrines on your map that fans had to step in and do his job for him. To make the game playable. Not to make it better, to make it playable at all. This game assumes you're going to be using outside sources. It assumes you have access to a second expensive electronic device and constant internet access.

Between obtaining this game in 2017 and beating it in 2026, y'all might remember seeing on the news that my region was hit with a flood and the mountains fell apart, crushing many people to death in landslide. I didn't have those things for a good 6 months. And, many rural people don't have them at all. If you spend $60 on a game, you expect it to be complete, not reliant on fan services, or the Nintendo phone app. This is another major ethics violation that is completely inexcusable. I'm not saying that Nintendo should have predicted a flood, I'm saying that they should know goddamn well that there is a huge swath of the population that doesn't have access to these luxury goods and they should not be required to play the game. A product should ship complete.

So let's talk about how badly this game fucked up the lore. This game made me evil for no damn reason. So, as you all know, the Master Sword, the Blade of Evil's Bane, can only be wielded by non-evil people. This does not have to be Link, it can be random non-evil people, as seem in Zelda BS and other titles, but they can't be evil. The Master Sword kills evil people. In every Zelda game, the player walks up and pulls out the sword. Because they're not evil. But in BOTW, you walk up and try to pull the sword, and it kills you deader than hell. And there is no way to keep it from doing that. Link is marked as evil, and the sword will try to kill you. Therefore, the only way to get it is to get so hearty that you can tank the curse. And, this game allows us to see how strong that curse is. And it is crazy strong. There will be no 3 heart completionist run here, my friend. Because the Master Sword will kill a regular person (3 hearts), FOUR TIMES OVER. You have to have at least 13 hearts to pull it. And it never accepts you. It will just turn off, stop working, and disallow you to wield it, for long intervals.

Oh, and even getting it is a goddamn ordeal; everything in this game is a goddamn ordeal. The Lost Woods eschews the established musical cues and instead relies on a mechanic of "follow the wind,". OK, that's fine, I'm an expert at that, I sailed the Great Sea. However, this is a pain in the ass. Your clothes don't sway in the wind or anything. To determine the direction of the wind, you have to have a torch out. Which burns out, because all items are shitty in this game, because having your shit break is the best part of real life so they put it in the game.

Clothing options in this game are also a lore breaking goddamn ordeal. You can get different outfits, but obviously you're just going to wear the ones with the best stats, which are not any of the tunics that I don't even remember how I got. Probably via amiibo, because the game itself doesn't give 2 shits about the hero's tunic and the iconic look of the hero, something that used to be folklore within Hyrule itself, as seen in Wind Waker. Hyrule flat out doesn't have a culture anymore. It's just gone, replaced with way too many bland NPCs, most of whom are completely forgettable. Again, they didn't have time to write good NPCs, so they populated the empty world with empty background characters. Nothing you do matters.

The gameplay itself is tedious and annoying, and, once again, from a gameplay standpoint, it doesn't matter and feels pointless and stupid. Like I legitimately forgot, while fighting Calamity Ganon, that I could summon lightning, which you're supposed to do in that battle. Flat forgot about it, because I never had to use it. And in that moment, I thought to myself, "If only I had had a dungeon that taught me how to use this ability, I would have remembered it existed,". And I was constantly doing that. "Which button jumps?" "How do you pull out your sailcloth?" "How do you shield surf?" "I can't call a horse, right, where the fuck is my ocarina?" "Oh, right, I have a magnet," "oh, right, I can freeze time,". Nothing you do is explained and nothing matters at all, so you just forget about it, because the game isn't designed to teach you how to do it or why you ever would. It's mostly dicking around in a field while a parent's child dies. Doing fuck all. Because there's no clear path to the next objective.

Also, if it rains even a little bit you can't go up a mountain, and since so much of this game is going up mountains in the desperate hope that you find a shrine, the game grinds to a dead halt every single time it sprinkles. As if people in mountainous regions don't go outside when it rains. As if I can call into work for a light shower. This is ridiculous. 6 notes on an ocarina makes this kid completely useless. Video games are supposed to be a power fantasy. Oh, and you'll get struck by lightning if you have anything metal on you. Which is, once again, insane. Lightning strikes are so rare, if you're going for realism, which I assume you are, because it's just fucking mountains and trees and whitetail, then almost nobody gets struck by lightning. I cannot count the amount of times I've driven through mountains in a rainstorm in a vehicle made of metal, a big metal box, and NOT gotten struck by lightning. Fucking stupid.

Zelda is a shame under her ancestors. This bitch is descended from Ninja Pirate Wizards and spends the entire game crying in a pond because praying to herself doesn't unlock her magical powers. Literally. That's her whole thing. Praying TO HERSELF. So, in this game, the creation goddesses have been replaced by Hylia, who you might remember as a lesser deity, the patron deity of the Hylians. And, as you might also remember, she gave up her godhood to be reincarnated as a mortal so that she could use the triforce to genocide the demon tribe and colonize the surface. And that soul is passed down through her family line from eldest daughter to eldest daughter. So when Zelda is praying to a statue of Hylia, she is literally praying to herself. She is literally Hylia. Which explains why she's not the avatar of Nayru, goddess of wisdom, because she is a dumbfuck.

Also, you are literally the hired help, in this game, a bodyguard, and there's this scene that anybody in the service industry recognizes where two members of the family you're working for get into a giant fight and you have to just stand there and ignore it. That is the only relatable thing I remember from this game. Just staring at the floor waiting for the rich people drama to stop.

So if the Princess can't do fuck shit and the hero's not chosen by the master sword, the goddesses have spoken and we just let Ganon have it this go round. He was chosen for this one. We'll get him next cycle.

The Ganon fight is also extremely stupid and counterintuitive. If you want Dead Man's Volley, you, my good friend, can go fuck yourself because that's not happening. If you want to hit the killing blow with the master sword, you will kill yourself and have to be resurrected by your dead girlfriend, because that is not how you beat Ganon, for reasons that are never explained. I died trying to do that. Don't do that. You have to just shoot him in the head, anticlimactically.

Also, the first half of that fight, the actual Ganon fight, not the weird spider thing, is just the Gerudo horseback archery thing from Ocarina, so I kept thinking, "You know who would be really good at killing Ganon? Ganon." And it's gyroscope controls so it's a goddamn ordeal. There's no fun in this game. Everything is a goddamn ordeal. Then, they remembered that they had to market this as a Zelda game and slapped the triforce in there at literally the last second.

So let's talk about accessibility. Nintendo has a long history about not giving a single shit about disabled people, the Wii literally has a real world physical injury named after it, like in actual medical journals. So I didn't go in expecting accessibility. However, I fucked my shoulder up and lost mobility in it for a week because of this game. Multiple shrines use gyroscopic controls, and these require extreme joint rotation. If you don't have extreme joint rotation, because you have a bad shoulder or a bad wrist, you are simply fucked. I've talked about the lack of accessibility options in some other video game reviews, such as my Paper Mario review, however this is inexcusable, because they learned that this injures people during the Wii era. They knew going in that it was dangerous and did it anyway. This is a major safety concern and we're not going to sit here and ignore it. People can get maimed for life playing this game. It is a recognized health and safety issue. This is the kind of thing that should have a product recalled, causing injuries, exacerbating existing conditions, and causing someone to lose mobility in an appendage for multiple days is completely unacceptable. This is the kind of thing that should cause a recall. There's no warning screen or anything.

I'm sure that I can think of more to say on the subject of this terrible tech demo pretending to be a video game, but it's going to be more of this. I just feel like these things need to be said, because many of the reviews are overwhelming praise that simply doesn't hold up after the first few hours of gameplay. My opinion of this game is that you don't feel guilty for skipping it, and if you are going to play it, come in with tempered expectations. It's not a Zelda game. If you expect a Zelda game you're going to be let down. Come in expecting a tech demo for a physics engine with a Zelda skin slapped on it, and you may have a good time dicking around in the field if you ignore everything that would make it a video game and deny a dead man his last wish that his child be safe.