LogFAQs > #933450545

#2





Years of release: 2017 (Wii U/Switch)
Beaten?: Surprisingly, no, but I'll get to that

Including this game at the top of my game of the decade list is probably the most cliche thing I could have done, but look. It's cliche for a reason. This game is going to win the GotD2 contest for a reason; gaming publications are naming this their game of the decade for a reason. My opinions can only go against the grain so much. I'm human.

It is important to note that, while I do consider the Zelda series perhaps my favorite series of games, it's front-loaded. For quite a while, the Zelda series has been kind of dead to me;

2003: Wind Waker. AMAZING game. No complaints. Zelda still going extremely strong at this point.
2004: Minish Cap. It was okay, but it didn't really capture the magic of the previous Game Boy games for me. Not a bad game by any means but not an unforgettable one.
2006: Twilight Princess. Don't really love it. It has its upsides (turning into a wolf being ridden by a hot furry imp is always gonna have its upsides for me let's be real about this), but the color palette is so washed out and the game so dour and depressing that I just can't really get into it. At best, it's trying to be Ocarina of Time, but worse. Disappointing.
2007: Phantom Hourglass. Hated it. It felt so barebones in every way, I found no joy at all in exploring the world or the dungeons. It was a cheap imitation of Wind Waker and I detested it.
2009: Spirit Tracks. Hated it more. It was even more empty than PH, and I eventually got sick of this game and didn't even finish it.
2011: Skyward Sword. To be honest, I just haven't been able to get into this one. I don't think it's terrible - the color palette is certainly an improvement on TP! - but I find the game just doesn't make me that enthusiastic about exploring it, for some reason. SS never caught on as much as some other Zeldas so I don't think I'm alone here. I want to go back and give this game another chance someday.
2013: A Link Between Worlds. Ten years since WW and finally another Zelda that really hit the mark for me. It's still kind of in remake-territory though, and it isn't a 3D Zelda, so we're still in a drought on those at this point.

And then another four years and all we got was Triforce Heroes, which I didn't play. Also, Four Swords Adventures happened at some point in the mid-00's and I forgot to list it, it was great but I don't really consider it a standard Zelda game.

And then Breath of the Wild comes along, and oh no, it's one of those dreaded open-world games. I said this a while ago, but I tried to get into open-world games a few times and it just didn't click for me. I don't know why - the thought of a big expansive world to explore, where your options are seemingly limitless and the game doesn't tell you what to do, it carries obvious appeal, but games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 just never managed to charm me enough to keep me wanting to be within that world. It kinda tricked me into thinking that I just wasn't into open world games. Oh, I was, but I was just waiting for the right one.

I wasn't even that excited for Breath of the Wild. My expectations were really low - the idea of an open-world Zelda did not appeal, and the Zelda series had been largely dormant as far as my tastes were concerned for 14 years aside from one really good remake. I'm not even the one who bought the game - at this point in my life, I still live with my parents, but I was temporarily displaced to my grandparents' house while they were at their winter home due to a plumbing incident that flooded my bathroom and part of my bedroom. Too long a story to get into for this writeup, but while I was away, it was actually my mom and my younger brother who got the Switch and the game, and it's kinda their console and game and not mine. My mom played this game for a solid hundred hours and told me that I needed to come over and play it, so I did, expectations still thoroughly whelmed. Well, she was right. I did need to come over and play it.

It's hard to know where to begin. I think this Awkward Zombie comic kind of sums it up:

http://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/wild-streak

As the description for the comic says, I, too, walked out of the starting cave, turned around and immediately tried to do anything but what the game told me to. And the game's response, in turn, was "ok." There were no artificial boundaries to stop me, at least not until I wanted to get off the great plateau. You can just... run everywhere. Climb on everything. Every object and every surface is something that can be interacted with. Every place is a place that is meant for you to go. The old man can wait, if you feel like just kind of fucking off for a while in some bushes hunting for bugs.

I'm immediately reminded of way back in the way when I played Super Mario 64 with one of my friends when I was a kid - we both loved Super Mario 64, but while I wanted to go into all the levels and you know, play the game, my friend got hours of entertainment just out of running around the starting area outside of the castle. This kind of baffled me a little bit, but thinking back on it now I get it - there is just a sort of inherent fun about running around and jumping on everything, even if you're not really doing anything in particular. No surprise, that same friend of mine loves Breath of the Wild, a game that I think perfectly understood this exact appeal. It just feels great to go anywhere and do anything in this world, anything at all. Running on stuff, jumping on stuff, climbing on stuff, even if it doesn't really meet any particular goal except to see what's over there, it just always feels good. All I need is to think "hey, I wonder if there's anything at the top of that mountain in the distance", and that's a good enough motivation for a hike that can take up to 20 minutes to get all the way over there in which the journey is more than the destination.

There's something so emergent about this game's sense of fun. I'm reminded of how, in Terraria, I enjoyed the idea of sort of creating my own adventure by having a general destination in mind but leaving it completely up to myself to decide what route I wanted to take. BotW has this, too; I'll often know the general place that I need to get to, but there's no specific route to get there. Sometimes the game suggests a route by providing a trail; sometimes it doesn't. There's so many places to go and so many ways to do it that no one person is likely to go in the same exact direction the first time they