After five hours of tooling around in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one thought keeps flitting back into my head again and again: This. Is. Great.
Breath of the Wildis unlike any Zeldagame you've ever played. It might even be more accurate to say it's unlike any Nintendo game you've ever played.
SEE ALSO:We finally unboxed Nintendo's Switch and turned it onBy now you've probably heard all about the massive open world. The easy comparisons it draws to games like Skyrim. There's crafting; there's stealth; there's a whole mess of weapons and armor.
You're a fan. You know the bullet points. But how does it feel to actually play?
Remember the first time your fired up The Legend of Zelda? I'm talking about the original NES game. You push past the title screen, write out your name, and then... off you go. There's a cave nearby where some old dude gives you a sword and that's it. The rest is yours to figure out.
Breath of the Wildopens in much the same way. A woman's voice whispers softly. She's urging Link to wake up. He does. He's in a dark cave and he's wearing nothing more than undergarments. How embarrassing.
You wander outside -- collecting some basic outerwear, thankfully -- and suddenly there's this expansive world in front of you. Enter all those Skyrimcomparisons.
My first act when I got outside was to turn around and climb up the sheer rock face right outside the cave where Link slept. That's a thing, by the way: you can climb on pretty much anything so long as there's juice in your stamina meter.
Credit: Adam Rosenberg / MashableFor my first hour or so in Breath of the WildI ran around wondering why I didn't have any way to kill monsters. They'd come at me with their clubs and stones, and all I could do was run away.
It wasn't until later that I realized my error. Just outside the starting cave there's a little campfire blazing beneath a rock outcropping -- the same one I scaled. Sitting in front of the fire is an old man. Across from him? An axe. Link's first weapon.
I completely missed it. There are other tools for doing battle, of course. In this Zeldagame, all weapons degrade with use and eventually break. It happens quickly enough that you're constantly grabbing enemy weapons at the end of most battles.
But the fact that I could miss this very basic starting point speaks to the truth of Breath of the Wild: the rules you know are gone. This isn't the same Zeldayou've come to know.
It's not entirely different, either. The opening section of the game plays out across a vast plateau situated high above the rest of the world. Your big goal in the opening hours is to get your hands on the Paraglider, which is your only way to escape the plateau and venture into the rest of the world.
Is there anything more Zeldathan questing to obtain a specific piece of gear that then allows you to explore further?
Credit: Adam Rosenberg / MashableBreath of the Wildsings the loudest in those many spaces where the Zeldayou know collides with completely fresh ideas. Nights are still dangerous and blue Moblins are still tougher than red ones, but you can sneak into a Moblin camp at night -- when they're all sleeping -- and stealth-kill them, one by one.
You don't collect heart container fragments anymore. Instead, you complete Shrines -- single-puzzle micro-dungeons -- and earn Spirit Orbs, that you can then exchange for heart containers or stamina boosts (stamina lets you climb, run, swim and paraglide).
The Zeldayou know isstill in here... it's just been completely rethought. And so far, at least, the results are impressive.
There's plenty more to talk about that I'm not telling you. The story and how it revisits major characters. And the theories forming in my head relating to how Breath of the Wildties in with the rest of the series.
It's too early to make a judgment, but five hours is enough to convince me that I'm going to spend ten times that -- and possibly more -- uncovering every inch of this magical world.
TopicsGamingNintendo
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