The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

A vast, long, meticulously crafted open-world adventure that emphasizes and rewards exploration, experimentation, and improvisation. It contains a great many fun puzzles and quite a few challenging riddles. Combat is, if taken on its own, rather mediocre, but it is greatly enhanced by a multifaceted physics system. Clever use of the environment and items makes some encounters truly emergent and wacky. Bosses are exciting, and like all classic bosses are structured like puzzles. As for the story, it won't blow you away, its tone swinging between Nintendo-cringey and genuinely adorable, but throughout it stays doggedly loyal to its internal logic and values. The result is a very immersive, very memorable, and very fun experience. It is rightfully regarded as a classic.

Progress is slow, balanced, and always feels earned. There is no "XP". Instead your power entirely depends on equipment you find by exploring, solving puzzles, picking up from dead enemies, or buying. That said, "earned" does not always mean "fun". Towards the late game enhancing your equipment requires the collection of rare items in increasingly large amounts. This involves considerable grind, backtracking, and even "farming" tricks. Grind isn't a bad thing in itself if the core game loop is good. But here it can feel tedious and too dependent on chance. For example, if an enemy doesn't randomly drop the ingredient you need when killed you might be inclined to reload and try again until it does.

Its most infamous progress mechanic is that your weapons break after very little use. While ridiculous and even annoying when considered in itself, it's actually a satisfying core aspect of the game loop. It provides you with a reason to keep exploring, taking on more powerful enemies (who would drop more powerful weapons), and it forces you to experiment with all kinds of weapon types, because often you'll have to use what is available. It keeps you on your toes.

The quest structure is also quite innovative in that it's remarkably disaggregated. Very often you are not told where to go or what to do. Your best friend is the map: just choose a direction where something cool seems to be and go there. Adventure will find you. This is not like those empty Ubisoft worlds: everywhere you go there is something to do. Actually, it's unlikely most gamers would even see much of the content without the aid of a walkthrough. You need to be exceptionally diligent to uncover all the secret locations. I thought I did pretty well, but when I looked up an online guide I was amazed by how much I had missed.

Even the introductory area offers almost no hand-holding. Unfortunately it might be a bit too loose. While it's a good introduction to the loose structure of the game, it can be confusing and even boring for unprepared players. The first time I tried to play the game I quit after a couple of hours because there didn't seem to be anything to do. It's actually remarkably simple: just follow your curiosity.

The game looks good on the original Wii U or Switch hardware, but emulation can make it look amazing. I played it on Cemu at 4K/120FPS with the "clarity filter" shader and it holds up well. This is mostly due to effective design decisions, specifically doing more with less. Simple textures, cel shading, straightforward color palettes, and dramatic shadows go a long way towards establishing mood. The animations, too, are immaculate.

Note that going above the original 30FPS introduces a few bugs. It generally subtly alters the physics system in ways that can make gameplay a bit more difficult. There are also a handful of places in which you must lower it to 30FPS in order to pass. But, boy is it worth it.

In summary, this is a must-play game for those who adore exploration and also have the patience for some grind. Few open-world games are as coherent and as consistently good.

The DLCs are a mixed bag. Let's discuss three aspects of them:

Much of the DLC content is extra equipment to find—conveniently marked by "EX"—that alters the balance of the game, and thus the narrative, a bit too much. If you play the core game fairly comprehensively then you should already be powerful enough. After all, the core game was carefully designed to be completed. So, by definition the extras are unnecessary and thus feel rather hollow as rewards, just some more grind for some shiny new toys. Admittedly, a few items provide a nice boost in quality of life. But those, too, might spoil the original feel of the game by enabling gameplay shortcuts.

And then there are two big expansion quests. The first, "Trial of the Sword", is awful, the only real blight on the game's quality. It comprises 51 (!!!) boring square arena levels in which enemies are thrown at you and you have none of your hard-earned equipment. The leap in difficulty is rather shocking: suddenly Breath of the Wild becomes Dark Souls. There are only two checkpoints, so if you die—and it is eminently easy to die—you are sent way, way back. This is a complete betrayal of the joy of the experimentation and improvisation of the core game. If your experiment fails you will be punished by having to repeat hours of gameplay. It also highlights the weakest aspects of the game's combat mechanics: while the physics sandbox can be fun, it's also finicky and wonky. In this super-tense situation the lack of precision control is infuriating. After much frustration and rage I enabled an immortality cheat and it still took me a few tedious hours to complete. The reward is ... a powerful weapon, which you don't need because you'll already have many powerful weapons when you reach the endgame. And this mockery of a "quest" adds absolutely nothing to the narrative. Skip this abomination.

The second expansion quest, "The Champions' Ballad", is wonderful in all the ways that the first is awful. It adds true story content, and I would even consider it essential as it brings some of the narrative threads full circle with nice summary touches, taking you back to places you've been to before while showing them in a new light. It adds extra gameplay content of the same kind that is in the core game, though with a very reasonable little bump in difficulty. And the reward is ... a super duper cool item. It doesn't change the balance of the game in any way, but is just ... cool. Strongly recommended even if you choose to ignore the rest of the DLC content.