Breath of the wild is a recreation of the Zelda franchise in every way, including its story. Despite the most cinematic Zelda experience ever, it’s plot does tends to disappoint, but it’s world certainly doesn’t.
Plot
Breath of the wild’s plot starts very strong. It should come as no surprise that you play as swordsman Link, tasked with rescuing the Princess Zelda from the clutches of the evil Gannon. This time around though, Link has been sleeping for 100 years after a battle where Gannon destroyed Hyrule. He’s lost his memory after waking from a shrine – The only thing to guide him being a strange voice and a strange tablet called a Shekia Slate. Using the slate, he finds he can interact with ancient technology. Soon, he’s told that he has been asleep for 100 years after the battle with Gannon. In that battle, Gannon took control of ancient machines Link and Zelda were using to combat him, which wreaked havoc across Hyrule. Among the machines we’re 4 powerful creations – the Divine Beasts. To this day the machines and the Divine Beasts continue destruction across Hyrule.
Unfortunately, after this, the Breath of the wild hamstrings it’s plot by allowing you to complete the rest of the games event’s in any order you choose – including just directly going to face Gannon. That means Breath of the Wild’s story never has a chance to build on top of itself. The Divine Beasts, which serve as the temples in breath of the wild, feel like isolated conflicts with no real influence over the main story – because technically they’re optional. Even events like gaining the master sword just didn’t feel as epic as it should because there’s no build up – it’s something that you just sort of stumble upon. I also thought that maybe Link’s memory loss was going to be used to set up a twist at the end of the game, but again I was disappointed. From a story perspective, I’m not sure why they had Link lose his memory…apart from having a convenient reason to explain things to the player. I like to judge plot based on how much I could not wait to find out what would happen next, but unfortunately with breath of the wild I didn’t get that feeling, It’s all straight forward. Now that’s not to say that the concessions breath of the wild makes in its plot do not have positive impacts on other areas, but more on that later.
Writing
Breath of the wild does a very smart thing with its writing. It plays with the size of its text more than most other games, and it works very well to get the emotion across. The fact that the writing is smaller and a little fainter when an inn keeper is talking to themselves gives the writing the playfulness that it needs. And the writing really is at it’s best when it’s silly like that. There are more serious parts to the writing, but I never felt as they landed quite as well as the silly parts.
Now if we’re talking about characters, I’m really conflicted. The non-main characters, like people that just live in the villages, are great. So many of them have interesting and unique quirks like this girl who’s so shy that she hides in corners. Even the smallest characters have strong personalities. It’s also impressive to see just how much the characters dialog based on what you’re doing, like if you talk to them from behind a counter or not, or if you’re wearing clothes…or not.
But if we shift our focus to the main characters, it’s a little bare. I’m not saying that the main characters don’t have entertaining personalities, but they sure don’t stick around for long. For the first time in a long time Link isn’t accompanied by anyone on his journey. There’s no fairy, no Fi, no nothing. Link is exploring the world completely on his own this time. And again, since most of the game is optional, cutscenes can feel a little…empty. Very rarely are there more than two characters ever in a cutscene – usually Link and someone else, and since Link famously doesn’t talk it starts to feel unbalanced. This problem culminated for me in the ending which just felt emotionless. The conflict is over and that’s that. It didn’t make me feel anything emotionally which stems from the fact Link doesn’t have any characters that you’ve spent a significant amount of time with - so you don’t really end up caring as much as you should.
How much did I care about saving Zelda though? well that does depend on how many ‘memories’ you recover. Memories are special scenes you can view by finding specific places across Hyrule. Each memory gives more of a backstory to the events that led up to Gannon’s victory 100 years ago. Hands down these are the best written and executed parts of breath of the wild’s story. Their biggest triumph is giving a huge amount of depth to Zelda, a character that’s never been explored that closely in a game before. Specifically, the scenes tackle the pressure that’s been put on Link and Zelda to be the ‘Heroes of Hyrule’ While Zelda is unsure of her destiny. It’s a fresh and unique area to explore about the Zelda universe – so much so that I kind of feel the memories’ story would have worked better as the main story. I do wish Nintendo didn’t make you go out of your way to see these scenes, because a lot of players won’t want to put in that time commitment. Though, if you haven’t noticed yet, I totally recommend that you do.
Voice Acting
Voice Acting in a Legend of Zelda Game? That’s something that I’d never thought I’d say. And the voice acting is moderately successful. For a Zelda Games’ inaugural voice acting outing there isn’t a ton of voice acting, it’s still mostly text box speech, but it is nice to get that more cinematic feel in the scenes that do have it. I wasn’t super impressed by the quality of voice acting overall though. It’s not bad per se, just not very memorable but that could be because they don’t get very much screen time to make an impression. Far and away Zelda is the most voiced character in the game, and at least she is one of the stronger voice talents. The Star of the show for me was Sean Chiplock as the Rito Champion Revali. I thought he portrayed the arrogance of the character very well. I should also mention that breath of the wild does offer voice acting in a variety of languages, if something like original Japanese voice acting is more your style.
Immersion
Alright So I’ve had my problems with breath of the wilds story up to this point. Every compromise Breath of the Wild has made in other areas is to strengthen the immersion of the world. Because there’s no set path to follow in Breath of the Wild, the story is yours to make your own. Now normally in this section I would spend time talking about how great the world looks, or how Nintendo has reimaged nearly every classic Zelda enemy to make them fit in Breath of the Wild’s world, or how Nintendo really wasn’t lying when they said you can go anywhere you can see in the world. But, instead, I’m going to tell you guys a story. In one part of the game you must light torches along a path with fire. Well, as my luck would have it, it started to rain as I was trying to do this. Obviously lighting torches in the rain doesn’t go so well, so I decided to wait out the rain by exploring the nearby town. Pretty soon I met the shopkeeper, Seldon, who, despite me telling him it was raining, insisted that he give me a tour of the town. After that I had to take a step back and actually think about what just happened. I naturally created my own mini story without any direct instructions at all. To me, that’s the embodiment of what I want from an immersive world, for it to feel so real that I create my own stories. This was far from the last time that I created my own story either, as myself and millions of other players can attest to.
Conclusion
Can I recommend breath of the wild if you’re looking for a final fantasy esque story with lots of twists and turns? No, not really. If you’re simply looking for a world to get lost in though, there really has never been a better game than breath of the wild.