Why Breath of the Wild Needs to Be One of the Best Games Ever Made

Just being great isn't enough – it needs to be one of the greatest.
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In just two days, Nintendo will launch the Switch, a console that is ostensibly the final form of several decades’ worth of efforts to merge console and portable play by the mercurial console holder. Breath of the Wild launches with it – and, oh yeah, it’s also releasing for the comatose Wii U. Neat.

The burdens borne by Breath of the Wild are heavy indeed. Here is a game that is almost single-handedly responsible for ensuring the initial success of the Switch – a curio of a home/portable hybrid console that will come out of the gate light on both launch software and ancillary features like web browsing and Netflix – and restoring the greatness of a venerated franchise. If this were virtually any other game, it would very obviously have been set up for failure.

But this isn’t any other game. This is Breath of the Wild, for which the hype train has soared so high off the ground that if you looked back you wouldn’t even be able to make out the tracks it flew off so long ago. It was all the way back in 2011 when Nintendo first showed a proof of concept for its first high-definition Zelda game. You may not remember it now, but that footage looked absolutely nothing like Breath of the Wild. It wasn’t until 2013 when franchise producer Eiji Aonuma revealed in a Nintendo Direct that with this game Nintendo would be “rethinking the conventions of Zelda.” Aonuma said at the time that this “new style” of game wouldn’t be afraid to cut out some longtime Zelda staples such as completing dungeons in order.

Zelda fans threw themselves into a whirlwind of fear and excitement about what this brave new world of Zelda would be like and what fan favorites would get the axe. Then, in 2014, Aonuma filled them in just the tiniest bit: this new Zelda game would be gargantuan in size. The small, confined areas of recent Zeldas were out in favor of a world with “such a vast field to explore” that players could explore anything they could see “from virtually any direction.” Nintendo would also ditch the prolonged intro sections of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword in favor of putting players immediately into the action and puzzle solving.

This was music to fans’ ears, and the accompanying video clip served to hype up even the most ardent skeptics. Best of all, this game was coming in 2015 to save Nintendo from foundering Wii U sales and deliver its fans one of the games so many had bought the system to play. Of course, that never happened.

Many delays later, Nintendo made a move that would be extremely unusual if it weren’t for the fact that the consistently inconsistent Nintendo was the one making it: the as-yet-unnamed Zelda sequel would be the only game Nintendo brought to E3. Nintendo’s E3 booth was a massive shrine to the franchise, transporting any attendee who was able to brave the hours-long lines to play into a real-world interpretation of Hyrule. The verdict was near unanimous: the demo was fantastic and appeared atop most outlets’ Game of the Show lists. The only problem was that fans still had to wait for the Switch to launch in 2017 – marking a nearly six-year gap between Zelda console game releases, the longest in franchise history – before they could play the full game.

Nintendo didn’t stop the hype train from rolling, though. In a recent interview with Game Informer, Aonuma and series creator Shigeru Miyamoto promised that Breath of the Wild was different than anything that came before, saying fan feedback was largely to thank for this divergence.

“I’ve felt like there are ways that the game should be and I’ve stuck to it for a very long time,” said Aonuma. “But then, right before I started developing Breath of the Wild, I realized there is a gap between fan feedback and what my strategy was.”


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Author
Nick Santangelo
Nick has been a gamer since the 8-bit days and has been reporting on the games industry since 2011. Don't interrupt him while he's questing through an RPG or desperately clinging to hope against all reason that his Philly sports teams will win something.