Zelda: A Fart In The Wind

So I finally finished my first The Legend Of Zelda game. Whilst on a plane. In the middle of turbulence. I'm a terrible flyer and I was trying to do anything that would take my mind off the inevitable crash that I knew was about to transpire. But after 55 hours of playing I was happy that the adventure was finally over, and the ending was satisfying enough for me to not throw a hissy fit. Even if I was slightly unpleasantly surprised that there was no post-credits sandbox.

Looking back, I have a feeling TLOZ: Breath Of The Wild (BOTW) will not leave as lasting an impression as I thought it might. Considering I was willing to buy my first Nintendo console solely based on the trailers for BOTW, my opinion of it has definitely muddied somewhat. That isn't to say it's a bad game. It's a great game with plenty of great ideas, interesting challenges and gorgeous scenery. But there was definitely something missing from it, although what that "it" is, I'm not entirely sure of.

I knew something was up when I had to take a break from my constant playing of the game. After playing the game fairly steadily from April to June, I then took a month off as I was travelling South East Asia (snort). Once I arrived back home at the end of the month, I had zero urge to play BOTW. No urge to complete any of the side missions, or explore more of the map or finish the main quest to destroy Ganon. I think after having already completed the four boss dungeons, finding all but one of the hidden memories and finding (but not quite yet receiving) the Master Sword, I had a feeling of "yeah, this is close enough, no need to carry on." I didn't think that the game could throw any surprises at me at this point. I would get the Master Sword, face Ganon, save the princess and that would be it. And I was correct, naturally.

In a sandbox-esque game like BOTW you really do need interesting side missions/quests/activities to keep the player from turning off the console and going back to Rocket League. That is something I think BOTW sorely lacks. The NPC's don't do enough to differentiate from one another, and all of their side quests feel so token and lacking in stakes that they're not worth bothering with. If you compared it to some of the side missions in Skyrim, some of which are more interesting than the main quest itself, the side missions in BOTW just fall so, so, so short.

BOTW was a bold, new direction for the Zelda series, and naturally on a first major attempt at something new, not everything is going to be perfect. Nintendo has already confirmed that they're going to be sticking to the sandbox formula for future Zelda games (or at the very least the next one), so hopefully they will be working on fine tuning and improving the areas where BOTW  fell short.

Again, I enjoyed the game immensely, so don't look at this post as some kind of ignorant hate speech. I'm still trying to get through MGS V at the moment, and believe me, I would much rather be starting BOTW for the first time again than going through this overly-verbose nonsense.