The Space Between Spaces: Breath of the Wild and Shadow of the Colossus
To breath new life, you have to cast a shadow
A few weeks ago, I went out and bought the Shadow of the Colossus remake for the PS4. It’s still a great game, with nothing out there quite like it in tone or scale. That’s not to say that it did not inspire other stuff: namely, I’ve been thinking a lot about Shadow of the Colossus’ relation to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — a game, interestingly enough, that is also unmatched, even amongst the tired inundation of games with open world spaces in recent years. Setting aside Breath of the Wild’s implementation of Shadow of the Colossus’ climbing mechanics and grip meter (which was also seen in Fujibayashi’s previous Skyward Sword), as well as Link’s clambering atop larger enemies — Breath of the Wild takes Shadow of the Colossus’ particular brand of open world and completely re-purposes it to a different end, revitalising the Zelda franchise in the process.
It’s ironic that borrowing from Ueda’s work was what ended up saving Zelda, considering the core design principles of the former — Shadow of the Colossus is an exercise in taking a pre-established work and flipping it on its head. Shadow of the Colossus is a Zelda game. You are a boy, the boy has a horse, and there is a princess the boy must save, and to save her the boy must conquer dungeons — albeit this time the dungeons are living and breathing. It is a Zelda game, inverted: you are given an expansive open world, but this time it is utterly empty and pointless to explore; you are in a fantasy world, not unlike Hyrule, but here it is dull, and broken, and lifeless; you fight epic battles against intimidating foes, but, unlike Link, you’re not quite sure if you’re doing the right thing — Link’s victories against bosses are punctuated with a triumphant jingle, while the Colossi fall to a dirge most tragic. There is nothing noble about your journey. Unfortunately for Wander, he lives in a world of consequences — if Wander broke a pot, by Ueda’s ideology, his actions would be punished by a contemptuous God.
Before the release of Breath of the Wild, it would be preposterous to suggest that Hyrule would be dominated by empty space. Zelda is a series governed by a strict flow and adherence to action-based design. You are always doing something in Zelda, or going somewhere in order to do something — both in a micro and macro sense. In the big picture, you’re making your way through a dungeon, or you’re running through a field heading to the next dungeon, or you’re passing through a town completing a side-quest. Then, on a smaller scale, as you navigate from A to B, you’re doing things in the interim — whether it’s a puzzle hindering your path or enemies to defeat, there is always something to do while you’re on your way to doing the thing to do. Put more elegantly, Zelda traditionally dominates negative space with action, and a direction — usually achieved with narrative nudging by NPC’s or through the level design funnelling the player towards the goal. While this allows for an engaging and addicting pacing, it can feel inorganic and overtly structured.
Zelda: Breath of the Wild could not be more different in this regard. Similarly to Shadow of the Colossus, many of the core tenants of Zelda are there, and it is unequivocally a Zelda game, but one that has been deconstructed and rebuilt to dance to a different rhythm: outside of dungeons, puzzles are compartmentalised in discrete shrines, many of which are largely optional and avoidable; there are many more approaches to combat, one of which is avoiding it entirely — heck, after the tutorial section you can walk straight to the end of the game and attempt to beat it if you want!
While the game can lead you along a little bit, not only is the collar loose and easy to escape from — the game actively encourages its removal. In every direction of it’s open world, beyond each mountain and over every rolling hill, there is something to discover. And between the things to discover, between the doing? Nothing, largely! While there are secrets to find and enemies to fight, there are many more spaces that are okay with just being spaces. Here, the action design of prior Zelda entries takes a backseat as the “breath” in Breath of the Wild takes the reigns — while the wind stirs the trees, a squirrel escapes into the brush: above, the clouds converge into a dark mass — looks like it’ll rain soon.
Of course, this is distinct from Shadow of the Colossus’ approach to negative space — in Ueda’s work, there is no such action between making your way towards each colossi. There is fruit and lizards to collect, but their benefits are minuscule and serve only for the player to more closely observe the crumbling, ancient surroundings, to question what could have happened and what this world was, to see how thoroughly forgotten this Forbidden Land stays. True to the protagonists namesake, you Wander, and you wonder, and that is all you do.
After Shadow of the Colossus inverted Zelda’s core design principles, using negative space to evoke an empty, lonely world — Zelda, paradoxically enough, picked up the building blocks Shadow of the Colossus left behind, re-purposing that negative space to create a world full of life and colour, one that dictates its direction with a lack thereof; a careless flow at the whims of player sight and sound alone. Nintendo, in order to breath new life into a series growing stale, need only to examine the shadow they had cast.
