I’m not exactly sure how I ended up playing Zelda Breath of the Wild. I haven’t particularly liked 3-D Zelda games. I bought a Switch in Germany, because I didn’t have a television and I wanted to play Super Mario Party with my six-year old daughter. And then I guess I was just bored, and it seemed like something that I “should” experience, but had been putting off, like The Godfather Part 2 or Stephen Hawking’s, A Brief History of Time.
Now, I’m about a dozen hours in and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of this game. Not just the geography, although that too:
There is just so much to this game. And yet it might be the first open world game since Fallout 3 that doesn’t ramp up some annoying OCD tendencies. I don’t have a checklist of things I need to remember to do, like in Dark Souls 2 or 3. I’m not trying to keep track of my morality and angle towards a particular ending, like in The Witcher 3. I’m just playing the game. No guides, no trophies, no cascading objective trees. It’s leisurely and relaxing. It’s so big, that I’ve given up trying to see it all. Which means I’m enjoying whatever weird version the game it is that I’m experiencing.
I can’t say yet if BOTW will end up being in my personal top 5 favorite games (which are Dragon Warrior 4, SNK vs. Capcom Card Fighters Clash (SNK edition), Demon’s Souls, Tactics Ogre, and The Last of Us. With Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne coming off the bench). But so far I do think you can make a meaningful argument for it being the best game of all time.
