Others expand that, up to a full multi-room series of Zelda puzzles, taking an idea (“transport the fire”, for instance) and iterating on it. Some are simple one-room puzzles, offering everything from a test of timing with your bow and arrow to a motion-controlled game of pachinko. Nintendo says there’s 120 of them, dotted all around the map, and each of them is a complete mini-dungeon in its own right. If you’re thinking, for instance, that four dungeons seems slim – even Ocarina of Time had nine – then let’s talk about those shrines. Gamecube-era classic The Wind Waker comes closest, with its seafaring world, but where the open ocean that game offered was largely a wide blue expanse with the occasional semirandom encounter, Breath of the Wild’s world is, and I can’t repeat this enough, bursting at the seams. And that’s only the beginning of the fight, which draws a clear inspiration from titles like PS2 classic Shadow of the Colossus and manga hit Attack on Titan.Įach of the beasts have their own radically different storyline leading up to the confrontation, and even in a more conventionally-structured Zelda, they’d be noteworthy for their impeccable mixture of puzzles, combat and flair.īut Breath of the Wild is not conventionally structured - at least, not for this series. Once there, Link is enlisted to collect lightning-infused Shock Arrows (the Zora, being a watery folk, can’t even touch them), before he teams up with the prince of the Zora to attack the divine beast, using the arrows to take out weak points on its outer shell and calm it enough to land on it. The first of the beasts I fought – and you can approach them in any order you see fit, but the game gently nudges you to tackle them in a roughly anti-clockwise order – started with a trip to Zora’s Domain, battling through a long path to reach the land of the fish people. They occupy roughly the same role in as the classical dungeons and temples of previous Zelda games, with a series of puzzles culminating in a boss fight, and form absolutely spectacular set pieces.Įach of the beasts have their own radically different storyline leading up to the confrontation. Those four divine beasts are located at roughly the four corners of the map, encouraging full exploration even before the completionism and sidequests kick in. As Zelda plots go, it’s fairly standard, considerably enlivened by the cast of characters involved, and the fully voice-acted cutscenes interspersed throughout (Link himself, however, remains a mute protagonist). Once Link leaves the Great Plateau, in short order he finds the heart of his quest: to find and free the four “divine beasts”, techno-magical creations that are key to defeating regular series villain Ganon and saving Princess Zelda and the land of Hyrule from destruction. Let’s pull back for a second, though, and look at the overall structure of the game. In fact, I can’t think of a previous Zelda game which gets the core gameplay loop so right. ![]() Thankfully, that’s not a problem Breath of the Wild has. Yes, there’s a lot to do, but that’s meaningless if doing it isn’t fun in its own right. There’s a danger, when describing a game of this scale, to get lost in the checklists. And then there’s the other stuff dotted around the place that defies categorisation: the Great Fairies, the rare non-boss monsters, the small hints at the past of the world of Hyrule, and the strange characters you’ll sometimes meet, half way up a mountain playing an accordion or in the middle of a ruined castle being attacked by Bokoblins. He can also find, hidden or in plain sight, shrines which expand his life pool for each four completed he can attack, or be attacked by, boss-level monsters wandering around the world, and solve environmental puzzles to collect Korok seeds that will expand his inventory. He can break in wild horses and ride them, collect foodstuffs and cook them, collect new weapons and kill new things with them. He can find and climb towers to mark new areas on the map and travel at speed between them. After completing the small starting area (and these things are, of course, relative: that area feels about as large as the entire Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time), Link is thrown into a world scattered with quests to complete, people to meet and monsters to defeat. ![]() At its heart, Breath of the Wild is an open-world exploration game, in the vein of titles such as Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and FarCry 4.
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