Last year, I wrote a response to Nintendo’s E3 presentation of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, celebrating what seemed to be Breath of the Wild‘s radical, unabashed love for the Zelda series’ exploratory roots. I tearfully ushered in what I thought could be the new age of Zelda – which really only was, at its core, the spirit of adventure that got us all into the whole thing in the first place.
I would like to hope (heh) that people hold my opinions of Zelda in some sort of regard. Having flooded Hyrule with my own tears and having water-bended a beast of an analytic series (which I desperately want to modernize, by the way), I feel like my experiences with Zelda exemplify how we can use emotion and subject position to understand virtual worlds and their characters. I want to do that again. I want to chart a course towards understanding and critical thinking with personal experience as my sail and analysis as my anchor. I want to remind us that we all embody Link during that moment of play. And I want to do this with every Zelda game, including this one.
With that being said, I want to blow you away just once more, before we sail into any stilted, sugar-coated depths:
Breath of the Wild is the best Zelda game of all fucking time.
Just… God. This game takes your breath away. The moment I got my paraglider I climbed the tallest mountain I could find, jumped off, and let it take me to nowhere. So my story truly began, crawling through highland grass to jump on a deer (I was unsuccessful), talking to organ-playing birds (I’m still humming that tune, to be honest), and splashing through Lizalfos-infested waters to find a cute fish-boy who wants me to meet his parents (I would say that’s moving too fast, but my swimming speed is inexcusable). The amount of thrills I’ve received in four days of play are simply unparalleled, and I can’t praise this thing high enough for that. But I can at least be more articulate.
The amount of open-world titles in the last decade have been staggering. Fallout, Watch_Dogs, Grand Theft Auto, Mass Effect, The Witcher, The Elder Scrolls… Games that prioritize and reward exploration and large-scale interaction are par for the course nowadays, lest they feel hollow and soulless. “Sandbox” genre games, exemplars of a bygone era where kids actually waxed (sanded?) creative in sandboxes, used to be rarities; now they stand as epitomes of the video game as an art form, prime examples of what they should be, and comparison points for all entries into the medium. Should players have to wish they could open that unlocked door or climb the peak of that distant mountain, or should they be teased by the perimeters of that open plain, that’s indictment. That’s failure. That’s lame.
But, generally speaking, these worlds only feel alive because we’re in them. If you’ve ever heard someone describe Skyrim as a theme park, you may already understand this design philosophy. Shoot man here. Fast-travel there. Never explore, only hop from one attraction to the next. Open-world games give you the sandbox, but not the shapes to make castles, nor the friends to shove down into the grains. In other words, giving you a sandbox means little compared to the ways you can make meaningful play within it; play that empowers you, play that inspires you, play that makes memories. As not just the protagonists, but the agents of change within these spaces, we cannot always sustain ourselves solely through the performative act of driving a car through a one-lane highway. The living, breathing world that you inhabit stops being so when you realize you, the player, are the only one doing that. As soon as you recognize that the environment is a conduit for your actions upon the world, but not your actions within the world – and, in addition, that the world does not organically foster meaningful actions – the entire thing falls apart.
I consider this a certain kind of imperialism: that which is laid out for us in a virtual world is by default ours to take, and this setup rejects interaction that allows for a world to breathe on its own. Over-saturated by quest lines and objectives, interactive materials that do nothing when not hacked (or hacked apart), these games emphasize becoming an overlord rather than finding oneself in an overworld. And, much like all abuses of power, we grow tired of one region and expand into others. So the cycle goes.
And it’s no lie to say I was scared of Breath of the Wild‘s prospects. “It’s like Skyrim meets Dark Souls” are not words I want to hear about a series that has, with all due respect to the previous titles, refused what makes those games tick. I was worried that the moment I opened my eyes and stumbled out of the Shrine of Resurrection, I would be hit over the head with an entire world lying limp before me.
I’m so glad to have been proven wrong.
The time it took me to reach Zora’s Domain meant nothing on its own. It was a good journey. I scraped my knees and lost a few hearts, but the Lizalfos were a fun challenge for someone as out-of-practice as I was.
It was the loneliness that truly knocked the wind out of me. The path up to the place was too long for me not to contemplate how I was walking by myself. No matter what route I took, whether I was riding the cliffs on my shield or crashing steel against Boko sticks, the weight of the looming mountain sat heavy on my sunken shoulders. The environment seemed to be eating at me; the isolation of my own journey was made evident with every step. No longer was I scared of what could lay around the next corner. I was more afraid that I would come around the wrong one. Indeed, a few wrong turns landed me in front of intimidating Zora-made guidestones, hard blue granite threatening to crush me underhead. They only reminded me of two things: the people miles away that I was desperate to meet, and how far off the beaten path I had become.
Impa had given me a task: set out to find some people and help them. She had marked the spots on my map – Zora’s Domain, Death Mountain, some others that made past lives rejoice when the names hit their ears – and had thrown me out to find them like the hero I was supposed to be. But why did I go to Zora’s Domain? It certainly wasn’t to help. To be true to myself, I was chasing a feeling of wanderlust, gazing upon Ruto Mountain from a distant tower with a pounding heart and a pointing finger. I wanna go there! was all my mind could process as my feet shot off that platform and flew past the Bank of Wishes to land on its rocky alcoves. And it was only by the time I had reached that second guidestone that I realized I had made a big mistake. I didn’t feel accomplished. I wasn’t achieving anything. The road was too long. It was too high of a climb. I was losing oxygen. And I was lonely.
A splash shook me out of my soaking shoes and back to soggy reality. The river cutting through the unconquerable valley rippled to reveal a red hammerhead shark with a human face. It was Prince Sidon, the same Zora that had begged me to partake in this journey at the foot of this mountain, back where the Lizalfos stood at their strongest and the rain had hit the hardest. He waved.
Sorry for calling from so far away! he yelled to me. The domain is still a ways off, but you’re making good progress! I shall be along soon myself.
I won’t be much longer! In the meantime, I’ll be cheering from here in the river, so hang in there!
You can do it! Stay strong!
And with a stylish back-flip, he vanished as quickly as he had appeared.
I held his words close to my heart as I cracked open the skull of another lizard, broke another Bokoblin club, and fried fish over an open fire. Parting the rainy haze of the mountain range was a newfound courage, a willingness to keep moving and see what lay beyond the risk-filled road. And so I moved those sloshing feet, against hell and its high waters, towards new friends and the prospect of something greater.
Is this just a case study in reassurance and personal validation? No, the ramifications of that event run much deeper – and highlight precisely why Breath of the Wild does exploration right. First, it is clear, painfully so, that the world is not meant for my taking. If it was, why would it try to kill me, suppress me with its twists and turns, terrorize me with its creations? Why would it so openly fight back against my desires to conquer it, the lizards armed to their sharpened teeth and quick-flitting tongues, the octoroks breaking my will to live faster than my wooden shields?
The most important element of this world, however, is not how it resists my ministrations. Rather, the tension built by my time within it, a tension between wanderer and wild, keeps me, paradoxically enough, moving through it. Think back to my initial feeling of wanderlust and the joy it inspired within me. That wanderlust launched my feet off the tower, yet also, literally, grounded me in the grim reality of the rocky road. That wanderlust created the initial moment of joy and desire to explore – and the moment I acted upon it, I had to face those consequences. I needed to prove to the world that I was ready and worthy of treading upon it. In this way, I am constantly coming into my heroic own because of and in spite of the land itself. My desire to go there, to feel it there, comes from the freedom I have to go there – and I cannot have that freedom without the challenge of self-reflection.
And what of Prince Sidon? That dashingly handsome hammerhead, cheering me from the sidelines? He may have been cheering for me, but he does not exist for me. The real discovery is not of the wild, but of myself; how I, of my own volition, can press forward in a way that is organic and real. Yet that feeling does not define him. I could have returned to my bed at any time, turned my Sheikah Slate in to Impa and called it quits, cobbled my way back to a campfire and slept in defiance under the stars. Instead, the kindness Sidon showed me is a reflection of what the world can be, what I have to look forward to at the end of this struggle, and how an environment can reward the challenge of retaining my humanity by offering some of its own. He does not simply remind me of what I can become, but of the continuum that I exist in, and why I bothered to leap off that platform in the first place.
When I speak of imperialism, of lifeless worlds, and of Zelda’s disavowing of both, I’m not implying that other games don’t try. I’m glad that we’ve realized the medium’s potential for expansive landscapes and performative discoveries. But the games we play have the potential to do something much greater: they can help us discover ourselves.
Breath of the Wild succeeds by giving us permission to do just that. We find ourselves and our inner explorers the moment our hands touch the paraglider, and we take to the skies not a second later. The joy that we feel upon landing is not out of our drive to accomplish or conquer, but out of the love of the journey, and of the landing itself. Yet dragging our feet across miles of prairie, mountain, and plain is rewarding because the land decrees it: as a world that cannot be exploited or imperialized, it asks us instead to grapple with what it stands for rather than what it can offer us. In that liminal space, on the island out at sea or within the crack in the cliffside, we find how to foster such a loving relationship, and we give it our regards once we take off again.
It would only be fitting, then, for an organically breathing world to foster all the emotions of the wanderer, including their sorrow. To find oneself out in the wilderness means facing all facets of the former, and the world closes in on us to make that known. But its affect makes both us and it human – and it only takes the gleaming sharp-toothed smile of a shark to remind us of that.
Abstractions aside, I firmly believe that Breath of the Wild is one of, if not the, definitive game of the last two decades. It has reaffirmed everything I have ever loved about Zelda and the rest of them, and the experience above is just one affecting moment out of hundreds that I’ve had in this title. If you have ever wondered if video games could reach near-perfect emotional fidelity, this game is it. If you have ever wondered if video games could reach near-perfection, this is it. If you have ever wondered, this game is it.
And if you’ve ever dreamed like I have, Breath of the Wild is those dreams come true. You can open your eyes now.
outsetalec 