Since the announcement of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at E3, fans of the iconic game series have been speculating endlessly on the sudden stylistic changes to the trademark Zelda gameplay we’ve all come to know and love. One of the most notable changes that’s been polarizing fan opinions over the past several days is the revelation that Breath of the Wild will take place in a Hyrule left in ruins. That’s right, there will be no towns, only a handful of wandering NPCs, and no partner character assisting Link along the way.
No, you didn’t read that wrong. Zelda creator and Breath of the Wild executive producer Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed in an E3 interview that the upcoming game will take a page from the original Legend of Zelda’s book and leave players to fend for themselves in a vast and lonely world. The full interview can be found on Nintendo’s Youtube, but we’ll be going over some of the most interesting bits here.
“In the past Zelda titles, we’ve gotten to the tendency where there’s a lot of explanation by different NPCs, to tell you who you are and what your role is,” Miyamoto elaborated via translator. Breath of the Wild will be different. “You don’t know who you are; you don’t know what you’re supposed to do. You’re thrown into this world, and as you’re traveling and interacting with nature, trying to survive this wilderness, you learn who you are and what your role is.”
Changes like giving players more customization options for their weapons and armor loadouts have received an overwhelmingly positive response, but the idea of a barren and empty Hyrule has been met with mixed emotions from players. Indeed, bustling hubs such as Clock Town from Majora‘s Mask and Windfall Island from Wind Waker have been staples of the Zelda game franchise. Helper characters the likes of Midna have risen to fan-favorite status. Even the oft-joked about Navi has become an undisputed icon of the series. The epic storylines that the player and Link are lead through have been embedded within the very core of what makes a Zelda game. Is minimalist, environmental storytelling really something the series should make a return to?
In this fan’s humble opinion, yes it is. I’m going to try to avoid sounding like a nostalgic, bleeding-heart retro gamer here, but for me Zelda has never been about the characters. There have been some especially compelling personalities to liven up the games over the years, certainly, but in the end they all ultimately serve the function of telling you something about the world itself.
For me, this is where Zelda has always shined. Sure, elaborate scripted sequences can be fun and memorable, but it’s moments where the games let you go and explore unsupervised that make them such a unique experience. To this day, stubbornly wandering about the Lost Woods in the original game until I was finally rewarded is one of my most vivid Zelda memories. The original game is far from perfect, of course. I’ll even admit that the sometimes unclear or otherwise esoteric mechanics can be frustrating or downright unfair. The Lost Woods was admittedly a rather clunky obstacle that needed to either be looked up in a guide or brute forced, but the fact that the game trusted you to figure things out for yourself is something that newer Zelda titles have lost.
Maybe that’s what Miyamoto meant when he said that, with Breath of the Wild, “what we really wanted to go back to was the original spirit of Zelda, which was actually freedom.” The freedom to imagine and explore is something that’s been increasingly absent in modern games, as focus shifts towards making things more cinematic. There’s certainly a place for epic storytelling in games, but there needs to be a place for uninhibited imagination as well. If Breath of the Wild can deliver on this promise of freedom, and recreate the experience of accomplishing or discovering something with your own stubbornness and imagination, it could find itself comfortably in the running for my own personal favorite Zelda game.
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