Zelda is a series that’s been near and dear to my heart since I first played Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64. The year was 1998, the start of my journey into video games. I was still trying to figure out what I liked. I’d already written off a lot of popular games because I was used to not liking the ‘popular’ things that other kids my age were into (I was a massive nerd as a kid). In my head a ‘proper’ RPG was something like Baldur’s Gate, something with complex mechanics and a rich plot. I knew Ocarina of Time was more like an action-rpg. It seemed shallow and dumb by comparison, something made for mass appeal that couldn’t possibly satisfy my far more refined tastes. Thankfully my younger brother was less pretentious than I, and watching him play the game quickly made me realise just how wrong I had been. Ocarina of Time was ground-breaking, but it also forced me to reevaluate my opinions and become more open-minded about trying new things.

When Breath of the Wild was announced it seemed like another massive departure from what I knew and loved. You get pretty much all your gear at the start, it’s a huge open-world, and it’s set in a world where you already lost the battle with Gannon 100 years before. The world is destroyed. Doubt started to creep in again. Was this a dumbed-down Zelda? Is the open world just an attempt to compete with modern RPGs? Will the gameplay be spread thin over this enormous, empty map? Without dungeons, will Zelda’s classic puzzle elements even be in the game?

I am was happy to be wrong. Just like Ocarina of Time did in 1998, Breath of the Wild has shown me once again that I should embrace the new and the different. Breath of the Wild breaks the Zelda formula but retains the spirit of the franchise, refining it into something bold, unique, yet also somehow familiar. The result is a game so well made that I cannot stop thinking about the experience months after I completed the game. It succeeds in almost all ways, each design risk enriching the overall experience in ways that genuinely surprised me.

The game begins with you emerging, naked, from a pod in the back of a cave. Gingerly you explore this tiny starting area, finding some clothing and a tool called the Sheikah Slate. Pushing on to the end of the tunnel you emerge from a hillside, revealing the land of Hyrule stretching off into the distance. It looks huge, imposing, inviting… but also, too quiet. There’s something unsettling in the atmosphere. With a random stick serving as your first weapon, you set off for adventure.

At first you’re limited to a small starting area, but you don’t realise how small it is until the full world opens up. The starting area is very dense, containing a thick forest, open plains, ruins and a frozen mountain range. It does what all good starting areas are meant to do: give the player a place to learn the controls and mechanics of the game. There’s a huge departure here from all other Zelda games, as this starting area gives you all of the game’s special abilities almost immediately.

These take the form of upgrades for the Shiekah Slate. These are abilities like being able to levitate magnetic rocks, freeze things in place and create bombs. Rather than tools to manipulate yourself or items in the environment, BoTW gives you the power to manipulate the base rules of the world itself: temperature, physics, and even time are yours to command. For example, the Magnesis ability lets you manipulate metal objects. It can be used to open gates, hold down switches, build bridges, and most importantly: beat enemies to death with metal rocks. More challenging puzzles expect you to combine your abilities. For example one puzzle is solved by freezing some water to create a pillar of ice, which allows you to place a bomb next to a weak wall. Gone are items that serve only to solve a single puzzle (Hover Boots anyone?).

These abilities are found in shrines, which are the game’s replacement for the classic sprawling dungeon. Shrines are short, refined challenges that focus on a single mechanic. Some of them are combat tests against tough enemies, others expect you to figure out the “trick” using your abilities to reach the end. There’s over 100 shrines in the world providing ample opportunity for a more classical form of Zelda dungeon-diving. That these are broken up into cohesive independent² parts only adds to the experience, eliminating the fatigue you could sometimes feel on the larger dungeons found in previous Zelda games. If a shrine is proving too much for whatever reason, it can just be skipped. They’re not required to finish the game.

Another massive improvement from earlier Zelda games is combat. While the 2D Zelda games had to work within the limitations of two dimensions, a new solution was required for the move to 3D. Ocarina of Time introduced the world to “Z-targeting”. This allowed Link to “lock on” to an enemy so that he would always be facing them. The controls would change so you would strafe around them in a circle, while the camera would make a best-effort attempt to keep you both in the frame. You could raise your shield to deflect blows and strike when the opportunity presented itself. Although not without its critics, it worked for the most part and has been a staple of the 3D Zelda games ever since.

Breath of the Wild enhances this system in a number of ways by making it more fluid and natural. While OoT focussed mainly on shield blocks, BotW places more emphasis on dodging attacks by jumping and rolling around. You also don’t need to lock on to be effective in combat, so you can run and roll around to get the upper hand before striking. There’s also some moves that require a good bit of practice to really perfect, such as the ability to reflect the beam weapon of a guardian back at them. It’s a far more nuanced system that presents the skilled player with the opportunity to pull off some incredible feats.

Another key enhancement from previous Zelda games is the way Link interacts with the world. OoT removed what was seen as an unnecessary platforming element by making Link jump automatically when he reached an edge. It was considered quite a brave design choice at the time, as it was taking away some agency from the player. BotW goes in another direction by letting you climb just about everything. Trees, mountains, towers, houses: not even waterfalls are safe from Link’s new-found thirst for free climbing. It might seem like a small thing, but the fact that you can climb anything, and not just designated ‘climbing’ walls with the right texture, connects Link with the environment in such a significant way that other games suddenly feel clunky and detached.

The world of BotW is large and open, but it’s certainly not empty. Filled with shrines, creatures and secrets, it seems like there is always something a few steps away. It’s easy to go off the path in the game because you can see something curious, then spot something from that point, and so on until you are very far from where you started and hours have passed.

It’s dangerous to explore of course. BotW doesn’t stop you from wandering into more challenging areas, so you might come across enemies that are way too tough for you. The environments themselves are sometimes dangerous enough on their own, with the Desert and Death Mountain areas being too hot to hang around in without special outfits. Your wooden weapons can catch fire near Death Mountain. But if there’s a thunderstorm, your metal weapons might attract lightning, so you’ll need to put those away. If you’re climbing and it starts to rain, you’ll need to find another path or wait until it clears up.

The environments don’t just constantly try to kill you of course. You can scavenge up various ingredients and turn them into food and potions, used to replenish your hearts. Or you can sell them in the towns scattering the landscape. Sometimes you’ll need to craft a specific food to get something out of a character.

It’s easy to lavish praise on this game. The world-building here is top-notch. The storytelling methods are simplistic and limited, but somehow it manages to convey interesting and complex characters. This is a game that has been polished from start to end.

There’s only one exception: the game clearly pushes the Switch to its limit, and as a result there are frequent frame-rate drops. Unfortunately the most egregious area is where it has the most impact: the place where you find the famous Master Sword. What should be a key moment in the hero’s journey is marred by frame rate drops as low as ~5fps.¹

Other than that, Breath of the Wild is a sublime experience. It is a demonstration of the correct way to evolve a tried-and-tested formula for a modern audience. It is a masterclass in franchise expansion. It is proof that risks can still be taken in a gaming market stuffed with annual releases and by-the-numbers action-adventure games. To me, it is a lesson to embrace the new and the different. Breath of the Wild deserves every commendation it gets.