5.0 out of 5 stars
An Excellent Adventure (Of Link)
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 5, 2017
I’ve been a Zelda fan for 27 years, and have played and completed almost all the games in the series. That said, the series has veered into a comfort zone over the past decade or so, to the point of even becoming the butt of jokes: More and more rigid linearity, excessive hand-holding, formulaic progression and the recycling of very dated and unintuitive mechanics has seen the series eclipsed by the freedom of The Elder Scrolls, or the anytime-anywhere emergent gameplay of the GTA series.
BOTW throws out many of the worn-out tropes associated with the franchise and freshens everything up. Gone are the gimmicky weapons and items like spinning tops, gust jars and clawshots. These things have been rendered useless because the game now runs on a (mostly) realistic physics engine. As a prime example, Link doesn’t need a special item that can only attach to very specific anchor points to get up on a ledge, because he can now climb on any surface and over any obstacle, stamina permitting. Instead of the usual dungeon-specific items, Link is given a set of special powers during the first stage of the game, which he can use to manipulate the world around him and any puzzles he comes across :A hanglider, Infinite remote bombs, Magnetism, Time-stopping for objects and the ability to form ice pillars from any water surface (even vertical waterfalls). These are the only powers you will ever specifically need to solve any puzzle anywhere in the game. You can also use ad hoc solutions (lighting a torch or an fire arrow to burn or light up something, for example) and Link does learn a few new tricks along the way, but none of these bolt-ons are ever essential to progress – there are often several ways of solving puzzles, and combining your various powers together is sometimes the key.
What I didn’t expect is how rarely you have to call on any of these powers to get about. Previous games had you constantly switching between your toolset to move from place to place - not here. For the most part, Link can cheerfully make his way around under his own steam; sprinting, swimming, sneaking, climbing and fighting. The combat will be familiar to any 3D Zelda veteran, but there a few new tricks to learn and the whole thing is a lot more smooth, organic and intense than in previous titles – there are some very nasty enemies out there and if you’re not careful, you can be overwhelmed and killed easily. In keeping with the self-sufficient motif used throughout the game (you find and cook your own food to survive or buff, make and light your own campfires to rest and cook by etc.) swords, shields and bows are all treated as consumables – they will all break without fail after sustained use and you’ll have to scavenge what you need from your foes, or from the environment itself. Your Mileage May Vary on how this affects your enjoyment of the game, but I will say that it’s the aspect I was dreading the most prior to playing, and I subsequently found that in practice I didn’t mind it at all – in fact when I obtained a ‘rechargeable’ weapon later on in the game, I found myself slightly disappointed that it had upset the mechanic of finding and replacing your weaponry. I will also say that once you have discovered a type of weapon for the first time, you’re much more likely to keep finding it as the game goes on, even in regions you’ve already explored. This means that you do end up with a much stronger arsenal as the game goes on - there’s no chance of having to take on the bosses armed only with a mop or a tree branch, unless you’re deliberately that masochistic.
At the beginning of the game, the land of Hyrule doesn’t seem to be all that huge: When you first step out into the open air, Hyrule castle and Death Mountain seem to be just a short trek away. Once you leave the carefully-isolated mesa where the game starts off however, you begin to get a truer sense of the game’s scale: That peak in the distance isn’t the polite little Death Mountain from Ocarina of Time where Link only had to go up a couple of slopes from Kakariko village to get to the top of it: it’s an enormous active volcano hundreds of feet above sea level and even the foothills of it are bloody miles away. Now, don’t get me wrong – we’re not talking about some crazy, Just Cause sized deal with the game world here – but it is very broad and there’s an enormous amount of verticality. More importantly, this isn’t just big open space for the sake of it. Every inch of the game’s world has been lovingly crafted and filled with clever little secrets and interesting geography for you to discover. You go on a journey with the intention of doing one thing and then get side-tracked with an eye-catching piece of scenery and end up drawn into a totally different area following a completely new objective. Also, due to how well drawn the world is, you can travel around without ever opening your map screen, just using landmarks to orientate you. In fact, the game is so well designed that HUDs and maps are fairly redundant – I’ve played the whole thing with the Pro HUD, showing only Link’s hearts and stamina, and I avoid using the map or fast-travelling if at all possible. There are no floating arrows or annoying companions to guide you here – you have to actually pay attention to the game itself to know what you’re supposed to be doing, and there’s no-one to nag you if you don’t.
And that is perhaps the greatest retool in BOTW: Linearity is gone. Once you escape the plateau with all your powers in the first hour or two of play, you are free to go anywhere and do anything you want. There are no restrictions. You are informed of several plot coupons that Link is supposed to find and activate, in typical Zelda fashion, but you’re free to ignore these completely – and not just “ignore these until you want to progress the game” – you can actually JUST NOT DO THEM and finish the game anyway. There are also a large number of Sheikah Shrines around the land of Hyrule which Link can visit to train and better himself: The easiest way to describe these are like low-tech versions of Portal’s test chambers: self-contained puzzles and occasionally, combat drills which help strengthen Link for the battles ahead. Sometimes, even finding these shrines is a puzzle in itself, with snatches of old songs or local legends holding clues on how to reveal or reach these hidden entrances. And yet again, you’re free to completely ignore these (although you probably won’t want to, as they’re great fun and help increase Link’s life and stamina). The lack of linearity even extends to how you negotiate the land itself: There are loads of times when you can bypass a certain challenge by thinking outside the box: Need to find a secret temple deep within a jungle, down a dangerous river trail guarded by crazed, electricity-based enemies? If you can climb up a nearby mountain, you can simply hanglide down into the clearing where the temple is, bypassing the dangerous bit (although of course, climbing the mountain holds its own dangers…) It’s this freedom to approach the game any way you want, both literally and figuratively, that lifts BOTW head and shoulders above typical ‘open-world’ games crowding the market.
Now, there are a few flaws of course. Up close, everything looks very nice – graphically, the game strikes a great balance between the cartooniness of The Wind Waker, and the increasingly confused-looking style used in recent games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword – this is how Zelda games should always have looked. However, textures are sometimes a bit muddy and ugly-looking from a distance due to the dated hardware – you can smell the HD Remake coming on this one already. Also, the frame rate does flag a bit from time to time – not badly and not often, but it’s a thing.
Also – and this section might contain very mild spoilers – I think the game could have done with being even more mysterious and obtuse than it is. If you do decide to go after the big plot coupons – and let’s face it, you probably will at some point - you find yourself suddenly smack-dab in recent-Zelda-game territory, led from cutscenes to set-pieces by local guides who tell you everything and do most of the work in getting you to the dungeons required (and if you play the game you’ll understand why even getting into the dungeons should be a massive undertaking in itself), rather than you having to figure out and then execute these plans yourself. This is another case of Your Mileage May Vary, but for me it runs against the feeling of freedom the rest of the game evokes. Also, once you get to them, these dungeons are a little underwhelming; there are barely any enemies and only a few sparse but well-designed puzzles framed in quite small areas. As for the bosses within the dungeons? Well, you meet more difficult and well-designed normal monsters that spring out at you while you’re roaming around the world. It’s a shame, especially in a series known for its elaborate and grotesquely gorgeous menagerie of bosses down the years.
One other small niggle for me is that there are no real internal areas – it would have been great to venture into some caves or old ruins given the way that light-sourcing and survival are handled with this engine. I do understand why this didn’t happen – the game is designed to take place out in the open – but when you do get to explore Hyrule Castle (not a spoiler, it’s on the box art and is the second main landmark you see) and experience how this is handled – the innards of the castle are part of the same world as everywhere else and the whole thing is perpetual – you realise that it would have been great to have a few more places like this dotted around, for some Skyrim-style dungeon crawling or MGS themed infiltration. I do think that, with the sheer amount of space in the game world, it would be very easy to bolt on some areas like this in DLC, but whether that’ll happen or not is anyone’s guess.
One final aspect of Mileage-Variance is the audio. There’s voice acting in certain key cutscenes which you may or may not like, and you might find some of the voices a little ‘off’. The best approach might have been to have the voice acting done in a made up dialect, a la Twilight Princess or the Team Ico games, although a recent patch lets you download the voice tracks in loads of languages and use whichever one you want, which might improve your experience slightly. The music leans heavily towards the ambient side: Don’t expect to step out onto Hyrule field and have a rousing theme start playing as you run around – you’ll be lucky to get a few tinkly piano keys every couple of minutes. Even the music that there is could be described as, well, ‘inoffensive’. Unlike previous games, I’d struggle to hum any of the tunes from the soundtrack, even after 100+ hours of play. Given some of the glorious and memorable themes we’ve had from the franchise down the years, it’s a little strange.
However, these are minor flaws in an otherwise superlative package. Yes, there have been some rather, er, suspicious reviews among the pro community for this game, but believe me when I say the game doesn’t need any of the hype or controversy to carry it. Everything else aside, this is an excellent title, one of the best videogames ever made and something everyone needs to check out if at all possible.
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