The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I have to be honest about this: I regularly felt very aware while playing this that I am really not the target audience for this game. Breath of the Wild is sprawling and leisurely where I generally prefer my games to be focused and tightly paced; I am always drawn toward strong characters in stories, but Link is an empty shell, Ganon is a cardboard cut-out of a bad guy with a post-it note saying 'evil' stuck to his forehead, and Zelda is profoundly irritating, with an absolutely terrible fake English accent I would rank somewhere alongside Tom Hardy's Bane for unintentional comedy value; forcing the player to do things like change clothes, hunt, cook, craft, use the console's gyroscopic features, put up with destructible equipment, and wait for specific times to day to solve certain puzzles all screams 'pointless feature bloat' at me; it frequently seems to rely on nostalgia for previous Zelda games for impact, and I simply don't have any, Nintendo's home consoles always being very much the second favourite behind Sega and Sony in this country; the story is minimal and unengaging. All things being equal, I should not have liked this game.

And yet I absolutely did, and I can think of no greater testament to Breath of the Wild's quality than to say that even I, somebody who is in theory completely predisposed to having a bad time with it, loved it.

What this game reminds me of more than anything is a time about nine years ago when The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Minecraft were the biggest talking points in gaming - a time when it felt a threshold had been crossed for me. Those felt like huge escalations in what the phrase 'open world' meant, and as somebody who thought every Grand Theft Auto game that came after Vice City was too big to be enjoyable, it seemed like mainstream gaming just wasn't going to be anything that interested me in future. I played, understood, and respected both games - certainly moreso than Call of Duty and Halo, which had already started to make me feel alienated in the couple of years before this - but it felt like there was simply no way I could fit those games around a full time job, a relationship, and any other hobbies. Had they came out when I was in school, I've got no doubt I would have loved them, but it felt like they demanded a level of commitment I simply didn't have the time or the inclination for.

I'm not sure exactly why Breath of the Wild doesn't feel like all that. Perhaps the simple fact that it's on a handheld console gives it a pick-up-and-play lightness that home console and PC games don't have. Perhaps it's the general sense of friendliness and approachability to it. Perhaps the heavily stylized art direction, closer in spirit to Persona 5 than any other open world game I can think of, makes a massive difference; both Skyrim and Minecraft became pretty boring to look at after an hour or so, and this never does. Perhaps it's because the open world itself seems both much bigger and much smaller than it really is; smaller because it's absolutely packed with activities and teeming with life everywhere you go, bigger because the terrain is so wildly varied. Or it could be the intuitive difficulty curve, the smooth gameplay, the deceptive blend of complexity and simplicity in the mechanics and controls....

The obvious answer is that it's all of those things, of course, and ultimately Breath of the Wild really does feel like a victory for quality. If it's true that it doesn't really matter what you do just as long as you do it well, and that any genre or format can be transcended, then this feels as good a bit of evidence of that as anything. This is just a game that does so much right and almost nothing wrong, almost everything that seems like a limitation or a failing at first later revealing itself to be largely irrelevant to the bigger picture. (The shrines with the gyroscopic controls are inexcusable, though.) If the story and the characters are unremarkable, it's because story and characters are not the point - all that would just be too stern and too much like hard work for this cozy, contented, unhurried, blissful sigh of a game, where freedom genuinely feels free, and where time never feels wasted.