Breath of the Wild & Discussing Discovery
Reviewers love The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but I can’t imagine too many of them loved reviewing it. For so many years we’ve cried that the Zelda franchise isn’t what it used to be, that it’s abandoned the ideas of exploration, adventure, and true discovery in favor of finely-tuned, linear, and curated experiences. Now, nearly two decades after Ocarina of Time began this trend, Breath of the Wild boldly thins itself of its predecessors’ narrative fat by eliminating a forced order of events and mandatory story missions in order to embrace the exploration found in the original Zelda games of the 1980s. For many critics, the question Breath raises is “what do I do when I’ve gotten everything I’ve ever wanted?” Live happily ever after? Not in this line of work.
There’s a huge problem with reviewing a game that does discovery well. Good discovery is usually heralded by an absence of things getting in the way of exploration. It’s very difficult to critically discuss the absence of something. For example, one could criticize Twilight Princess for having a massive world that forced a linear progression because the player is rendered unable to explore the area freely thanks to invisible walls and story points that must be encountered in order. Once those things are gone, it wouldn’t make sense to talk about them anymore. I wanted to learn how other critics dealt with this issue, so I decided to scour the myriad of already available Breath reviews.
After reading many other publications’ reviews of the title, “I could see a point in the distance and just go to it” began to emerge as a pretty popular shared thought. The rest of the review would typically be composed of a personal anecdote about a non-scripted gameplay event (i.e. a unique way to clear out a camp of Bokoblins, the game’s standard enemy); a grievance with the game’s inconsistent framerate and somewhat lackluster soundtrack; and some sort of examination of the weapon system. In Breath, weapons break after a certain number of hits and if a review sets itself apart, it’s because it has something different to say about Link’s new frail weapons. Many critics think it is frustrating that the weapons break too easily while others believe this to bolster the feeling that each combat opportunity has real stakes and increases the viability of going through the game with stealth in mind. All of the reviews, however, praise the game’s sense of exploration and then move on.
I don’t blame them. I don’t even really have a solution. If I was writing for an outlet that needed reviews by a deadline and was forced to only talk about things that would impact the final score, I would probably do the same thing. Like, “Exploration’s good. This game has it! Recent Zelda’s didn’t so much, but this one does! You know adventures? There’s one in this game! Shit’s tight.” This is obviously unsatisfactory.
I’d like to workshop a fix for this. As I said above, I don’t currently have a solution. I do, however, have some thoughts about the game’s non-linearity that I haven’t seen too many other reviews touch on and maybe looking at those might lead us in the right direction.
Disappointment upon Discovery
One of the beautiful things about Breath’s focus on adventure is that the path to a thing is always prioritized over that thing itself. This is usually fantastic. Actually playing a game takes so much more of the player’s time than the finding of a certain item or location, so emphasizing the journey rather than the destination means that the best parts of the game are the parts that take the most time. This is much better than the alternative where the parts of the game between highlights like finding a cool weapon or fighting a difficult boss are painfully mundane slogs.
There is a catch, though. Amazing ramp-ups to disappointing ends feel awful. Let me use a specific instance from the game to illustrate this point. Be warned, this is a spoiler.
Link can collect memories from his time as a knight from one-hundred years before the start of the story by visiting the specific locations in the game world where those memories occurred. The majority of these memories are interactions between Link and Zelda as they journey together trying to awaken a dormant “sealing power” inside Zelda. Zelda tries (fruitlessly) to awaken this power by praying at the Spring of Courage, the Spring of Power, and the Spring of Wisdom.
If you are a long-time Zelda fan, those names should grab your attention. Courage, power, and wisdom are the three virtues which represent the three parts of the Triforce (basically an all-powerful wishing stone). The memories between Link and Zelda don’t point attention at any other geographical areas, so it should seem that these places are really special.
Once you go to one of them, you are told that you need to deposit a scale from a nearby dragon into the spring. This is crazy. Those dragons are huge and demand attention in their flight around their sections of Hyrule. One dragon in particular, the one tied to the Spring of Wisdom, is infected with a manifested form of evil called “Malice.” If you want the dragon’s scale, you’ll need to first free it from the Malice covering its body. This act takes the form of a secret boss battle and by now, if you weren’t excited about the three springs already, you should be absolutely psyched to find out what happens when you put the dragon’s scales in the water.
Once you finally collect the scales and deposit them at their corresponding spring, your prize is revealed to be… a shrine. Specifically, a shrine with no puzzle to solve and no rare loot. This felt like Nintendo had pulled a mean trick on me. There are 120 shrines to find in Breath of the Wild. They are all optional, finding them is not the main loop of the game (that is the four Divine Beasts), and many of them aren’t particularly difficult to find. Having some of the game’s very few cutscenes and the awe-inspiring dragons direct me toward this insignificant reward felt like the game had cheated me out of something much more exciting.
When the final reward for this task was revealed to be a shrine, I couldn’t help but think of what could have been. The springs are named after parts of the Triforce, maybe I could have found that. Or maybe praying at each of the shrines would extend the number of swings the Master Sword could dish out before it had to recharge. OR maybe visiting all three of these springs could unlock a secret dungeon!
When you make a task seem as cool as this, you need to be able to live up to the expectations you’ve set. Otherwise, the emotion the player will have upon completing your interesting puzzle will not be excitement or satisfaction. It will be defeat. Your cool dragon designs thoroughly convinced me that I wanted to have some sort of interaction with them, Nintendo, but now the memory I’ll associate with them is negative.
Thankfully, this is usually not such an issue throughout the rest of the game. On the whole, Breath does a great job at actually encouraging exploration. The gigantic world map is surprisingly dense and because of the relaxed nature of the main story missions you almost always feel like you’ve used your time wisely when you find a shrine, a korok seed, or even just some interesting vista that exists for no reason other than to look at. In these rare occasions where the discovery does feel disappointing, however, you find yourself wishing that there was something other than that small selection of prizes to find.
Varied Victories
Everything not related to the main plot that the player can do in Breath of the Wild eventually feeds into building up Link as warrior. Finding some of the 900 korok seeds scattered throughout Hyrule increases the amount of melee weapons, bows, or shields Link can carry; completing each of the 120 shrines is rewarded with Spirit Orbs which can be exchanged for increases in either health or stamina; and npc-driven side-quests usually supply Link with either materials or rupees.
Besides these things, Link can also weaken Calamity Ganon (the final boss) by activating any or all of the four Divine Beasts. These take the form of gigantic mechanical animals who function much like mobile versions of traditional Zelda dungeons. Finally, the only other major activity for Link to accomplish is to collect the Master Sword from the Korok Forest which is simply a matter of finding it and having enough health to survive pulling it from its stone pedestal. All these things seem like quite a bit of gameplay to go through, but in practice the variety is a bit underwhelming.
You’ll never be at a loss for what to do in Breath because of the sheer number of collectables, but the small number of different kinds of collectibles means that things will eventually stop feeling like secrets even if they are well hidden. I gave Nintendo grief for the lackluster payoff from the Springs of Courage, Power, and Wisdom, but what could they really have put there that doesn’t break the balance of these collectibles? All they have to sprinkle throughout the world are shrines, koroks, and side-quests and shrines are the biggest deal out of those three things.
120 is a number that should be familiar to fans of Nintendo adventures. In Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, there are 120 Power Stars (or Shine Sprites in Sunshine) to collect. In those games, it would make sense if the most secreted away elements of the game were stars because collecting them is the main drive of the game. Getting more stars unlocks more worlds which unlocks more stars which unlocks more worlds… until the final world of the game is unlocked. Beating this final world is the ultimate goal of the game so every star collected is tantamount to another step toward the end of the game.
Despite there being an equal amount of shrines and their difficulty to collect being comparable, shrines don’t feel nearly as important as stars did in Mario. The end of the Breath is reachable any time after the start of the game. There are no artificial barricades separating the player from Calamity Ganon. There are no locked doors. There are only extremely difficult enemies guarding the castle Ganon inhabits and Link can either fight his way through them or stealth around them. This freedom to finish the game at any time is refreshing and is a bold choice on the part of Nintendo, but it slightly devalues the 120 shrines in the game.
I’d never argue that it should take a certain number of shrines to enter the castle in an attempt to make the shrines feel more important. That importance would be artificial and the open nature of the game would suffer from it. Rather, some of the more hidden shrines should be replaced with something else in order to not have the journey toward those shrines end in disappointment.
The puzzle of the three springs suffers because everything has to be a shrine. If this wasn’t the case, if there could just be some unique collectable in a random place on the map, this point could be completely remedied. By increasing the variety of the kinds of things Link can encounter, Breath may have been able to negate these negative feelings entirely.
Critiquing Criticism
Discussing disappointment in play and the variety of feats possible to accomplish are two ways I think criticism of open-world games can be strengthened. Breath of the Wild might have gotten more interesting reviews if its critics viewed the game through this lens. These options aren’t without issues, though.
A game having a disappointing mission or two can actually be argued to be a great thing. By refraining from bombarding the player with special events every few minutes, the truly important elements of the game feel that much more special. If the four Divine Beasts were overshadowed by a bunch of hidden stuff, I’m not sure the Beasts or the hidden stuff would be as memorable. Likewise, variety in objectives isn’t always a good thing. By simplifying what the player is able to do, the game keeps itself from ballooning into a mass of complications which may prevent the player from focusing solely on the adventure.
So, we aren’t closer to having concise metrics for discussing the merits of open-world games, but maybe that’s the point of the genre. A style of gaming so centered upon player expression, fortifying immersion, and individual experiences might have always been doomed to unsatisfactory criticism. Maybe this is enough, though. “I can see a point in the distance and just go there,” is repetitive and largely uninformative, but it’s what Breath is about, and it does it quite well.