THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD
A breath of fresh air
You stand on a precipice overlooking a valley and pick out a distant Shrine. Between you and it lie miles of open terrain. An epic adventure awaits, and anything could happen: you might creep past a dozing giant, encounter a bard who points you towards treasure, or find a killer recipe for apple pie. Here, Hyrule has so much life that it makes previous Zeldas feel positively inert.
Legendary Hylian hero Link’s mission involves travelling to the villages of former allies and cleansing corruption from four mechanised Divine Beasts to recruit them. The interior of each forms a dungeon. Once inside a beast you can take control of it to solve puzzles.
Navigation is a puzzle in itself. Ascending a sheer cliff face, we seek flatter patches of rock to catch our breath, refill our stamina meter by consuming meals, and pray rain doesn’t send us slipping off. Grunting up a mountain grip by grip then looking down where you were 20 minutes ago gives your adventure a real spirit of endeavour.
Only by trekking to towers far and wide can you unlock fast travel. Reaching their summits adds detail to your map: spiral peninsulas, peculiarly-named regions. The more map you uncover, the more you want to discover. Each of the game’s 15 towers also offers a unique problem to surmount.
This new Hyrule is tough. That comes with the freedom. We also have the freedom to walk our butts straight out of boss fights, or loot a wizard’s Meteor Rod and return to throw fireballs at it. Combat’s marvellous, a clash of sound and colour whose looseness feels like an extension of the game’s freeform principles. There are technical issues, such as slowdown in busy scenes, but you can forgive these in a game that lets you levitate bombs with a creature’s inflatable guts, or launch your paraglider on the whoosh of wind from burning grass.
This is everything Zelda’s always promised but never delivered, closest in feeling and philosophy to the original. It’s like going off-road after 20 years of driving on a motorway. Nintendo’s masterful touch has been given room to breathe. Ben Griffin
Producer Eiji Aonuma says they talked about having a female protagonist, but “in the end, it just didn’t happen”.
Close in feeling and philosophy to the original