Breath of the Wild, the latest installment in Nintendo’s beloved Legend of Zelda series,

has received basically universal acclaim since its release back at the beginning of this
month. If the still-early reception were to crystallize today, it would go down as one of
the most widely and ecstatically praised video games of all time. It is groundbreaking. It
is a masterpiece. It is a cultural moment. It’s also ... kind of tedious and boring?

I feel a strange but real impulse—as a nostalgic lover of the Legend of Zelda series (and,
yeah, of Nintendo itself) whose heart swells at the sounds of the Hyrule Field
theme from 1998's Ocarina of Time—to apologize for this take. Truth be told,
I want Nintendo, with its love of bright colors and sweet characters and fun puzzles, to
reign supreme over a video-game landscape presently overrun by grim-and-gritty
slaughter-fests geared to the dismal tastes of the sorts of ghouls who thought Batman V.
Superman: Dawn of Justice was a good movie. And I want the Legend of Zelda series to
be its flagship. Ideologically, but much more importantly as somebody who just friggin’
likes Link to the Past a lot, I want to be able to say, sincerely, that Breath of the
Wild rules and is the best game ever made.

I’m sorry! It’s just not doing anything for me at all. I have not had a spontaneous
impulse to play it in over a week, and had not had a spontaneous impulse to play it in
nearly a week before that. Which is disturbing, because I’m only a few hours into the
thing: Down off the tutorial plateau, across the first patch of wild Hyrule, through the
canyon between the twin pointy mountains, past the horse barn and all the way to
Kakariko Village, but still essentially in the same place where I started out, relative to
the game world’s massive sprawl. This should be the most inviting time to hop on the
sticks—when, if nothing else, the sheer novelty of the setting or the gameplay mechanics
or both would draw me in. When I could set off in literally any direction and, within
mere moments, be somewhere I’ve never been before, trying out game actions I haven’t
come close to mastering yet.

Ah, nice, time to replace this bitchin’ battle axe with some shit-ass tree branches. GIF
via Dunkey
Instead, the thought process goes like this: Hmm, maybe I could play Breath of the
Wild? Or, on the other hand, maybe I could not spend an hour hopscotching between
same-y Bokoblin and Moblin encampments scattered across a rainy, uninviting world
mostly rendered in dreary, washed-out pastels, breaking and collecting innumerable
disposable tools in what at this point seems like it’s mostly a pursuit of new apps for
Link to download to his smartphone. Actually I will do the latter.

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I ... I really don’t like it! For one thing, as a Legend of Zelda game, it is depressingly un-
Zelda. Its Hyrule is a ruined post-apocalyptic place with small, sleek, uniform, and
vaguely alien “shrines” in place of the grand, mysterious, diverse dungeons and temples
familiar to the series. It is dotted here and there with laser-shooting robots. Link carries
what for all intents and purposes is a glowing iPhone. It even takes photos! Contrary to
the title, the world of Breath of the Wild does not feel like wilderness, as the Hyrule of
1986's original game and 1991's Link to the Past did, but rather like a decayed
civilization, and one that was not all that great or appealing in the first place. It could
just as easily not be a Legend of Zelda game at all; the early portions would lose nothing
if the developers spent 10 minutes changing the principals’ names and hairstyles and
called it friggin’ Fantasy Blade or some shit.

I don’t know about you, but when I think “Legend of Zelda,” I think “robots” and
“smartphones.” GIF via YouTube

Which, actually, could be fine (I’ll get into why it’s not in a second): Breath of the Wild is
its own game, and owes nothing to what anybody expects of it based on previous entries
in the Legend of Zelda series, and Nintendo’s wild experimentation is one of the things
that has made the series so great in the first place. The bigger problem—or, no, actually,
its un-Zelda-ness is a pretty big problem, so let’s just say the other problem—is that,
leaving the burdens of the series aside, taken just as a fantasy-adventure game, it’s ... not
fun? Like at all?

At least in the early going, the flimsy, constantly shattering weapons and countless
same-y Bokoblin camps provide an overwhelming disincentive to explore and try stuff
out: The sight of enemies in the distance evokes an Ah crap, not more of this
shit feeling, rather than an excited Let’s do this. In a practical sense, this seems like a
pretty bad game- and/or story-building failure: The heart of an adventure game or story,
after all, is the impulse to get out into the wild unknown and see what there is to see—to
have an adventure. Breath of the Wild’s opening hours seem perversely bent on
punishing that impulse. Oh, wandered off toward the horizon, did you? Time to throw
away all the weapons in your inventory dispatching the same three Bokoblins you
fought 90 seconds ago at an identical campsite in a different spot. Your reward for this
intrepid venture? A chest with a useless fucking opal in it and three shitty, disposable
wooden clubs, all of which you will shatter at the next Bokoblin camp, 90 seconds later.

Darn, I really liked that, uh, shitty generic club I picked up two minutes ago. GIF via Arlo

(Or maybe you will use the GPS on Link’s iPhone to find a shrine! The shrine will
contain no enemies, a single puzzle which you will solve in under three minutes, and a
wrinkled mummy who will reward you with an orb you can maybe cash in for more
stamina later. It will look pretty much exactly like every other shrine you have come
across.)

In older Zelda games (most especially Ocarina of Time, of course), when a random NPC
gave you a side-quest to do, it was a thrill: Anything to prolong your engagement with
the rich, fascinating, mysterious game-world, and to make things better for the sweet
and charming characters who lived in it. In Breath of the Wild, when the (very cute!)
villagers in Kakariko Village offer me shit to do, my reaction, in all cases, is
exasperation. “Fuck off, asshole! I’m not throwing away all these bullshit flimsy weapons
I’m lugging around just to find some ingredients for your dumb ass!” But, the thing is, I
don’t want to do the main storyline, either: It’s out there, in the sad pastel post-Ganon
Hyrule filled with half-broken robots, where I will destroy what passes for the cool shit I
found and groan my way through innumerable too-cute-by-half puzzles. What I want to
do, in Breath of the Wild, is not play Breath of the Wild. Thankfully it allows me to do
that, owing to its compatibility with my Nintendo’s off button.

My friends and colleagues who are loving Breath of the Wild respond to these
complaints (I’ve made them indulge my mewling and qualming and handwringing more
than once, bless them) by saying Yes, sure, these are problems with the early game, but
it improves as you play your way into it, and if you stick with it long enough it’s just as
magical and thrilling as any other Legend of Zelda game, if not more so. I believe
them. The mistake is thinking that this is a recommendation of the game, rather than a
criticism of it. Why would I play the game long enough to reach the good parts, if the
experience of doing so is not fun? It’s a game! Is there some good reason why its
developers couldn’t making its opening stages enjoyable too?

The irony, here, is that a supposed—and extravagantly acclaimed—difference

between Breath of the Wild and all previous Legend of Zelda games is that this one
opens the entire world of Hyrule and all its contents to the player pretty much right
away: You can go anywhere, climb anything, fight any boss, find any item, from the
moment you escape that opening plateau. Great! Now, for the first time, a Zelda game
that does not make you unlock any of its goodies ... except, uh, enjoyment. Link to the
Past made you find, and fight to earn, the boomerang. Breath of the Wild makes you
find, and fight to earn, a rewarding game-playing experience. That’s not better! Actually
it’s worse.

Pictured: Pretty much any four seconds of Breath of the Wild gameplay. GIF via YouTube

But also, at least so far, the strongest motivator to make use of the game’s radical
openness is the hope that I can escape the repetitive drudgery and bottomlessly boring
inventory management of the early going. That escape will always be easier by just
switching the game off and finding something else to do; the reason to stick with Breath
of the Wild, then, is the accumulated goodwill built up by its forebears. That lasted for
all of around four hours, and got me to Kakariko Village, where I fear my poor Link will
spend the rest of eternity.

To a certain extent, what has happened is, my life has become incompatible with the
way Breath of the Wild wants to dispense its pleasures. I’m older than hell now, and
don’t have much time to spend playing video games; in the average week, I play maybe
five or six hours, spaced across three or four nights, after the kids have gone to sleep. A
game in which an hour worth of play means grimly enduring a half-dozen same-y
Bokoblin fights and a couple of dreary, empty shrines, spread across a world I don’t like,
rendered in colors that kind of gross me out, in pursuit of what promises—if I Trust The
Process—to become a magical and rewarding experience at some unknown point in the
future, is not how I am looking to spend my limited game-playing time. But also: Why
would that ever have been an appealing prospect? Maybe I’m just less of a sucker now?
Or maybe Breath of the Wild just isn’t all that good.

In any case this definitely is the most depressing blog post I have ever written. I’m
gonna go play Ocarina of Time on my kid’s 3DS to feel better. It delivers that right away.