Ooh where to begin….
Honestly, in order for me to thoroughly explain why I don’t like BotW, I’d have to go into this massive explanation on my views on gaming as a whole. I’ll try to keep it brief, but I can’t make any promises.
I like to define the word “game” as “a system made for the express purpose of entertainment or competition that requires a user or users to follow a strict set of rules to achieve a goal.” This isn’t limited to video games, mind you. Any sport, card game, board game, playground game, even the games that you make up in your head as a little kid in the car fall under this.
The point in all of this is to say that video games are, by nature, restrictive. They all have rules that are strictly enforced, they all have methods to allow the player to achieve their goal. Even if you use glitches to go out of bounds or wrong warp, you are still doing that by manipulating around and finding loopholes present within the rules that are the games code. This is true for every video game ever made without exception. Even the biggest open world out there has rules that exist to restrict the player. You cannot fly in BotW unless you actively manipulate the rules.
Now this doesn’t automatically mean that more restrictions=better, nor does it mean that open-world games are bad. In fact, I think that the best games are those that are open in how you can explore yet force you to figure out what the rules are and figure out how to achieve your goal in spite of them, and the best way to do that is through an open world in the same vein as Zelda 1 or OoT.
I mean let’s take a look at Zelda 1 specifically. Your goal is to get to Zelda. In order to do this, you must kill Ganon, in order to do that, you must find Ganon in level 9. In order to reach Ganon in Level 9, you must obtain the Triforce piece in Levels 1-8.
But you can do the other dungeons in any order, right? Nope. You have to get the raft out of level 3 to reach level 4. You have to get the ladder out of level 4 to complete any dungeon after 4. You have to get the recorder out of level 5 to reach level 7. You have to get the bow out of level one and the arrows from the shop to beat either level 6 or level 8. Even inside of level 9 itself, you have to get the silver arrows to actually kill Ganon. The player doesn’t automatically know any of this. The player is left to figure that out for themselves.
Does that sound arbitrary? Good. The point of a video game is to be arbitrary. BotW isn’t arbitrary enough.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no player thought. Far from it. That means that the player has to figure out themselves the bounds they have to work around and truly figure out what they want to do and why. Where’s the fun in just being told that we can do the dungeons in any order? What’s the point in doing them in any order then?
Zelda is at its absolute best when it’s restrictions are left obscured enough to allow the player to figure it out themselves, rather than either having so many that the player has a hard time working around them or ditching them entirely. Zelda 1, LttP, and OoT are the best examples of the franchise doing this as they let the player figure out the rules themselves. If anything, this is also a criticism towards classic titles from WW to SS, though given the choice I’d much rather have an overly restrictive Zelda that forces the player to use exploits as opposed to a Zelda that goes out of its way to remove restraints.
That right there is the biggest issue with BotW. There are no rules for where you can go. There is no progression towards a goal because you are told that no matter how you attempt to do something, that method is guaranteed to work. There is no thought behind seeing a place and knowing that you’re practically guaranteed to be able to go there if you want. The simple fact that you are able to beat the final boss immediately after leaving the one place that has any sort of restriction ruins any progression that the game has. Congratulations 99% of the game is completely pointless.
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations” -Orson Welles
The thing is, a lack of a traditional item system doesn’t automatically make this game bad. I generally like to divide the progression systems for open ended games into 2 categories: Stat-based and Item-based. Classic Zelda has an Item-based system, as does Metroid and a few other titles. Most RPGs and other open-world games use a stat based system.
The problem is that BotW tries to simultaneously have a Stat-based system and an Item based system on top of removing the restraints that would make a progression system necessary, and it happens to completely miss the point of either of them.
To some degree it tries to retain the item based system that Zelda has always had. Unfortunately, the player is given almost all of them at the very beginning of the game. This means that there’s never a reason to want to explore anywhere because all of the items that are worth a damn were given to you within an hour of playing. There are exactly 3 items/abilities that are worth wanting to go out of your way to get, and even then 1 of them only exists so you can stop worrying about the awful durability system.
Then there’s the other side of the coin. BotWs stat system is barely functional. Take a look at every other stat system out there. The defining purpose of what makes them fun, is that they allow character builds, whether predetermined or open for the player to make. This is yet another way for the player to use the rules of the game to his or her advantage. BotWs stat system is such an overly simplistic one that you are never going to be able to make a build beyond temporarily increasing one stat at a time. Once again, there’s no thought behind drinking one of a billion potions whenever you want to make it easier to be stealthy. Pretty much all of BotW’s stat system amounts to is “sword has bigger number, you do more damage.” Which wouldn’t even be a problem if BotW didn’t lean so heavily on making it the closest thing to actual progression it has.
BotW feels like Zelda’s identity crisis. Like Aonuma is ashamed of what the series up until this point has been so he actively shunned any aspect of it that wasn’t that of a generic open world game. I certainly have had fun with it before, but that fun is always fleeting as it never feels like theres a point to it. I could go on about the durability system, or the awful dungeons, or the music, or the story, but it doesn’t matter. Even if all of those were perfect it wouldn’t change the fact that BotWs lack of restraint and a functional system of progression causes it to barely function as a video game, let alone a Zelda.
