One reader argues that Zelda: Twilight Princess deviates too far from the original vision of the series and is much inferior to Breath Of The Wild.
I can bite my tongue when people say they don’t like The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, but when someone compares it unfavorably to my least favorite 3D game in the series, Twilight Princess (as reader Bronson did in his Reader’s Feature last week), then I can’t help defending it.
Breath Of The Wild isn’t my favorite Zelda game, but that’s really just out of nostalgia for other titles. It’s dynamite. The shrines are certainly a change of pace to dungeons, but they are fantastically inventive. Gliding around is a joy, the physics engine is rock solid, it implements more modern conveniences and tendencies into the series, and there’s so much to see and do. What Breath Of The Wild really excels at is not just letting you explore the vast world, but also letting you discover what you can do in it.
When you first roll a boulder down a hill to take out some enemies, set some grass on fire to create an updraft, or attach a balloon to something to make it float away, you feel like you’re the first person to ever find out you can do this. The way the game chooses not to describe that you can do all these things, rather than bury them under a mountain of tutorials, is so stunningly confident.
The big Dolly Parton once said, ‘It costs a lot of money to look this cheap’ and that’s basically the design ethos that works with all these little mechanics. They feel so organic, off-the-cuff and understated, but that’s because Nintendo put a lot of effort into implementing them so seamlessly.
The breakable weapons made people angry, but you can see what the developers were trying to achieve there. No one will encounter a higher level gear at the beginning and equip it for the next 20 hours, so you never lose the motivation to keep looking for new things, or the resulting sense of reward you get when you find something. It also balances the difficulty and encourages you to play the battles more creatively. The story is a lot of a lot, and the boss fights are crap, of course, but when these things take up so little of the game, I can’t get too worked up about it.
Twilight Princess is another proposal.
Firstly, the dungeons are mostly fantastic, there are some real highlights of the series and while they don’t necessarily show Breath Of The Wild in terms of the ingenuity of the puzzles, they certainly show it in terms of spectacle. But they are not the whole game.
The dark tone, the story, the soundtrack and those character models that came straight from the deepest depths of the uncanny valley are aspects that are cited for criticism, but ultimately they all have to do with personal preference and if some people liked them, then that is valid. I feel like there are deeper issues with the game than that.
The upper world sometimes looks nice, but if you scratch beneath the surface, you quickly realize how little there is actually to do or find in it. It’s just a sterile, non-living funnel to the next town or dungeon and symptomatic of how linear the game is in general.
The wolf sections feel unfinished, Wolf Link doesn’t have enough moves making them repetitive. You just feel trapped playing as him, he can do so much less than human Link. Maybe the developers wanted to, but why is that fun? Why does the game want to limit you so much? The opening also takes so long that the game won’t open and you want to play it – the developers of Final Fantasy 13 were clearly taking notes at the time, though.
The lack of a lot of side content was also unfortunate. This will always be less important than the main quest by definition, but some of the most joyous moments in the series happen when you do something completely optional, and a lack of this in Twilight Princess added to the feeling that it might have been a little rushed.
The bottom line is that neither game is perfect, but both do a lot of good. Where they differ fundamentally is that while Twilight Princess insists you play some sections that don’t work brilliantly to get to the good stuff, for 99% of Breath Of The Wild the game lets you play the good parts, go where you want, and do what you want.
Breath Of The Wild isn’t just another Zelda game, it’s Zelda. It’s that original dream Miyamoto had for the series in 1984; a completely non-linear counterpart to Mario with discovery, exploration and experimentation at the core of the experience.
So, for someone to say they can’t accept Breath Of The Wild as part of the series is a really sad thing. Breath Of The Wild is Miyamoto’s original vision brought to life by his successors in the most fully realized way Nintendo has ever realized to date. Twilight Princess, good game or otherwise, is probably the furthest the series has ever strayed from it.
By reader Charlie
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