The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a 2017 action-adventure game developed by Nintendo and released on the Wii U and Nintendo Switch on March 3, 2017.⁶⁸¹⁶ Set in a ruined, post-apocalyptic Hyrule, it follows the hero Link, who awakens from a hundred-year hibernation to defeat Calamity Ganon and rescue Princess Zelda.⁹²¹²⁰ The game replaced the series’ long-standing linear structure with a single seamless open world that the player is free to explore in almost any order from the outset.¹⁵¹³ On release it was met with near-universal acclaim, earning a Metacritic score of 97 from 109 critic reviews on the Switch and being widely described as a masterpiece.¹⁶⁹

Setting and story

The game takes place near the end of the established Zelda timeline, in a Hyrule devastated a century earlier by Calamity Ganon.²⁰²¹ Link begins asleep in a cave-like chamber, having spent the previous hundred years in hibernation, and emerges with no memory of the past.⁹¹⁵ Producer Eiji Aonuma? described the hundred-year sleep as “a particularly important part of this story” and a deliberate storytelling technique meant to disrupt the formula and surprise players who expected the familiar pattern.³ Ganon has for over a century controlled the powerful Divine Beasts and summons a blood moon to repopulate the land with monsters, while haunting Hyrule Castle at the world’s center.²⁰ The story can be tackled in any order, and a player may proceed directly to confront Ganon with minimal preparation.¹⁵²⁰

Gameplay

After waking, the player is confined to the Great Plateau, a raised starting area that functions as a miniature version of the entire map, teaching combat, climate-based survival, and shrine puzzles before the paraglider item unlocks access to the rest of Hyrule.⁸ Rather than a conventional tutorial, the Plateau encapsulates the whole experience in a roughly two-hour mini-adventure, with only a few interventions from a mysterious old man and a pointer toward the end goal of Hyrule Castle.⁸

Once free of the starting area, the player can climb almost any surface and travel in any direction, governed by a stamina meter that limits running and climbing.¹³¹⁹ Critics singled out this freedom — the principle that anything visible in the distance can eventually be reached — as the heart of what set the game apart from its open-world contemporaries.¹³¹⁰ Kotaku’s Jason Schreier characterized the design philosophy as a game that “always says yes,” contrasting it with the long tradition since A Link to the Past of gating progress behind specific items such as the Power Gloves or the Hookshot.¹⁵

Hyrule operates as a physics-driven sandbox in which each object is made of a material that responds to forces such as fire and magnetism: grass fields can be set ablaze, metal weapons attract lightning, and fruit can be roasted on a torch into a healing snack.¹³²⁰ The game incorporates light survival elements — Link needs warm clothing to survive cold mountains and flame-resistant gear near the volcanic Death Mountain, while weather such as rain and lightning storms can kill the unprepared.⁹¹⁹ Weapons have finite durability and break with use, forcing the player to continually source new gear from defeated enemies and the environment.⁹¹⁹ Cooking ingredients foraged from the world produces meals and elixirs that heal and grant temporary buffs.¹⁹²⁰

The world is organized around landmarks that gently guide the player without explicit waypoint markers: four main Divine Beast dungeons, towers that fill in the map, and over a hundred shrines containing puzzles and combat trials.⁸¹⁹ Completing every four shrines lets the player upgrade either a heart container or the stamina bar.¹⁹ Small environmental Korok puzzles, scattered across the landscape, reward the player with seeds used to expand inventory space.⁸¹⁹

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Official Game Trailer - Nintendo E3 2016Nintendo of America

Development

The open-world concept originated after Skyward Sword was completed; Aonuma recalled that players wished they could explore the gaps between that game’s disconnected areas, and the idea of a large, seamlessly connected world took hold once the Wii U hardware made it feasible.³ Nintendo described the project as “rethinking the conventions of Zelda,” setting aside ideas such as dungeons being completed in a fixed order, with the goal of “returning to basics” to create a reborn Zelda.⁵ Developing the system and tools to build the seamless world took about a year.³ Aonuma noted that the team briefly considered making Link female during development.³

The game was first developed for the Wii U and, in spring 2016, Nintendo firmly decided to also release it on the forthcoming Nintendo Switch, which Aonuma said placed a “large extra burden” on the team but suited the series because of the console’s ability to move between television and handheld play.³ The art director, Satoru Takizawa, cited Japanese archaeological heritage — specifically the Jōmon period — as an inspiration for many of the game’s ancient ruins and artifacts.²²²³ The game was directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi.²¹

Lineage and reception

Critics placed Breath of the Wild within a lineage of “engaged world” open-world games — those in which the explorable setting is itself the adventure rather than a web connecting scripted missions — alongside the Dark Souls series and The Witcher 3, and contrasted it with the “controlled world” model of franchises such as Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed.²¹² The Verge’s Chris Plante argued that its simultaneous release with Horizon Zero Dawn in the first week of March 2017 marked a “baton handoff” between the two design philosophies, and that Breath of the Wild represented the future of blockbuster games.²¹² The Guardian noted its map is roughly one-and-a-half times the size of Skyrim and twelve times that of Twilight Princess.⁸⁶

The game drew comparison to earlier installments going back to the original 1986 The Legend of Zelda, whose single-screen world had created the illusion of boundless exploration that the 2017 game finally realized in full.¹⁵ Reviewers praised the scope, freedom, and physics systems while noting technical shortcomings, including occasional framerate dips and object pop-in, most noticeable on the Switch in docked mode at 900p.¹³¹⁹ It received the Wii U a critic score of 96 and the Switch version 97 on Metacritic, and IGN, GameSpot, and numerous outlets awarded it perfect or near-perfect scores.¹⁶⁹¹³