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Back in June, I flew to North America to see my partner (who lives on the other side of the world), and when I was there I had the opportunity to try out some Nintendo games on his Switch. My opinion was fairly lukewarm, and I came away with the impression that the high esteem in which many of their games are held seems to be driven primarily by legacy clout. Breath of the Wild was hands-down the Nintendo game that I enjoyed the most (I put a good few hours into exploring the world and experiencing the main story), and it's a game that has been hailed as a shining example of open-world done right and has been placed on many peoples' lists of best video games of all time. I thought it was good, but don't believe it's nearly good enough so as to warrant inclusion as one of my favourite video games.
The game is fun, and the fact that you can climb and scale basically everything in game and explore the world in a variety of different ways imparts a feeling of freedom that's quite addicting, an aspect in which the game excels - but in practice that all amounts to getting from A to B in a subtly different way. The game doesn't really justify its (extremely large) open world, and in order to progress the main story you're mostly going from one very clearly spelled-out quest marker to another. Now, these quest markers are necessary because of how sprawling the world is - the player would easily get lost without some form of guidance - but the game explicitly tells you where you are supposed to go, and doesn't really give you incentive to explore out of bounds. If you are making an open world game you need to capitalise on the open world part as a core aspect of the game.
Technically, you don't need to progress through the game using the path set out for you, and you can take it as fast or as slow as you want, you can even skip straight to Ganon after the tutorial. One of the most exhilarating parts in my playthrough was sneaking past a bevy of guardians on the way to Hyrule Castle, a place where I was certainly too underpowered and under-skilled to be at that point. From a game design standpoint, this was certainly meant to dissuade beginner players from trying to go straight for Hyrule Castle immediately and trying to skip past the main game's content, and it felt like I was exploring outside of the manicured, well-trodden path the game had laid for me. This felt great, and I did make it past all of the guardians, but eventually turned back since I was essentially forfeiting main game content by trying to cut straight to Hyrule Castle without much reason to try and do so.
Trying to explore for additional, optional content isn't particularly enticing either, since the world is kind of a content desert with large areas of dead air in between points of interest, and there are only so many shrines and Bokoblin outposts you can explore before the cost/benefit of exploration starts looking very unfavourable. As a result, I never really felt the urge to explore outside of the bounds of the game, and was pretty much always shoehorned into doing everything the game set out for me. It's effectively an open world game that doesn't actually really make use of its (all too large) open world.
To be fair to BoTW, this criticism can also be levelled against most open-world games - the idea of an open world is generally much more enticing than how it actually plays in practice. So far, the only game I've seen do it right is A Short Hike, which succeeds primarily because of the fact that it has a fairly small, condensed "open world" packed full of content relative to its size and an extremely simple objective which you can easily complete and that doesn't require a huge amount of trekking through empty terrain. Once you start trying to expand the game's scope, when you're trying to make a 10-15 hour game with a coherent throughline set in a large, sprawling open world, making your way through the world starts to feel very tiring, and content deserts are all but guaranteed unless you want development time to inflate hugely.
It should be noted that I am someone who does value plot fairly heavily in games, something that's generally not a focus of Nintendo's. BoTW appealed to me more than, say, any mainline Mario game because of its relatively consistent worldbuilding and the fact that it had a story that wasn't an extremely marginal part of the game. The seamless incorporation of compelling narratives into a game format is an important part of the medium for me. But even excluding the general weakness and inoffensiveness of Nintendo's stories and worlds, and just focusing on gameplay, their games have some issues that I find quite difficult to brush past, and I don't agree with how highly their games are generally ranked.
Change my mind.
I'm not here to change your mind, but to agree with you. BotW was a huge disappointment and I stopped playing it after 10-20h (guessing) and I did the first divine beast (the mammoth). I didn't even bother with TotK because I had no desire to get that disappointment again.
First, I'll say that I play Zelda games for the dungeons. I want to go to cool places, solve fun puzzles, and get neat items that unlock more puzzles. I'm not interested in the world, which is really just connective tissue between the actual good parts of the game (though some games have more interesting overworlds than others). So right off the bat, BotW was off on the wrong foot. Only four dungeons? Not a good sign. But the shrines do exist, so I figured that might make up for it.
Turns out that the shrines don't really do it for me at all. They are so short that right as I'm getting into the groove and having fun, it's all over. Additionally, as you get all the items at the beginning of the game they don't engage you in new ways the way other Zelda games do. On top of that, the one divine beast I did (the actual dungeon!) was super short and simple. It took me maybe 20-30 minutes. So the main draw of Zelda for me was a big fat bust.
On top of that, the game screwed up one of the other things I love about Zelda, which is the music. Most Zelda soundtracks are packed with bangers, so I figured that I'd like the music at least. But no, it's all ambient piano shit. I know opinions vary, but ambient music is fucking boring. It was awful having to listen to that everywhere I went. I know they recorded real music for the game, it was in some of the trailers. But I never heard it when I played. Huge letdown.
On top of all that, I hated traversing the world. Ostensibly the main draw of the game, I found it to be both unreasonably big, and devoid of anything interesting. So not only were the shrines and dungeons not very good, they were connected by a painful slog through the world every time I wanted to get to one. The world, by itself, would have put a serious damper on my opinion of the game. But when it wasn't firing on any other cylinders either, it was unbearable.
Overall, I rate BotW 2/5 stars at best. It's beautiful to look at, and the physics are fun, but there's nothing interesting there in the long run. It's a terrible Zelda.
Edit: oh yeah I forgot to mention the equipment durability system. It fucking sucks (as all such systems do). People hated it in Skyward Sword, so why on earth did Nintendo think it was a good idea to bring it back? And from what I've heard it's even worse because it applies to the Master Sword (albeit just disabling it temporarily rather than destroying it). At least in SS, they had the sense to make the iconic Hylian Shield exempt from the durability system. If they had to keep durability (which they shouldn't have), they at least should've made the Master Sword similarly exempt.
This is much more defensible than calling it a terrible game.
I loved it, 5/5, one of the best games ever, the "Skyrim for kids" I'd been hoping for ever since I had kids ... but it's a very different gameplay genre from most Zelda games and I can't begrudge bigger Zelda fans for resenting seeing it published under the "Legend of Zelda" name.
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