I want Breath of the Wild 2 to make me feel weak
E3 has passed, and waiting at the end like a carrot on a stick was a long-awaited glimpse at Breath of the Wild 2, one of the most anticipated sequels in history.
Of course, any discourse about Breath of the Wild means there’s also discourse about its most controversial mechanic: weapon durability. I love Breath of the Wild, but I’ve always felt like there was something off about the game, so I’m going to squeeze that sweet, sequel SEO juice for all its worth and finally talk about what I think the first game and its followup should do differently.
I will never forget the first few hours of Breath of the Wild after leaving the Great Plateau. After gliding down into the Gatepost Town Ruins, I turned around to see the Plateau towering over me. It was huge, and I was small. It had felt wild and enormous when I first explored it, but now the sprawl rolling out before me was endless. Anything could be out there.
At this point, starting a blog about Breath of the Wild with an in-game anecdote is as tired a cliche as saying a game makes you feel like Batman. But it’s become such an obvious opener for a reason. Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule is huge and beautiful and alive, and those stories speak to how well the game connects you with its world.
Those early struggles are what captivated so many people — the first time it rains while you’re climbing a sheer cliff, the first time a glowing dragon circles you overhead, the first time you light a fire under an overhang during a midnight thunderstorm. In those early hours of Breath of the Wild you feel vulnerable and one with the world around you in a way few games had. Strong enemies gatekeep you out of parts of the map. Your best weapons suddenly become threats in a thunderstorm. Extreme temperatures will have you rationing cold resistance potions as you explore what little of a mountaintop you can before freezing to death.
That’s the magic of Breath of the Wild. You’ll start thinking about navigating the world the way Link would, making the proper preparations and planning out the best routes to get to your destination while dealing with unexpected challenges along the way. Almost like an adventurer would.
But soon enough, Breath of the Wild throws enough tools at you to trivialize any terrain and plant your flag across Hyrule. Revali’s Gale lets you easily scale incredibly heights without having to climb. Zora Armor will let you swimp up any waterfall (which can be used to bypass most of the final dungeon early on in the game.) An unlockable set of rubber gear will make lightning a non-issue. Shrines doubling as fast travel points means that eventually you wont even have to make long treks across the map. There is no limited inventory space for armor, which means you can easily deal with temperature changes by just dipping into the menu.
At a certain point, Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule stops feeling “wild” and becomes domesticated. It’s telling that the most personal moments people have with the game are during those earliest hours, and not later on when they can navigate Hyrule with so much ease that it defeats the purpose. My final hours with the game were spent starting at one corner of the map and walking all the way to the other extreme, only allowing myself to use Revali’s Gale once along the way or forcing myself to stick with just one set of armor. Breath of the Wild is one of my favorite games, but after a certain point I had to impose rules on myself to rediscover the spark that made the game so special.
I’m not arguing that there shouldn’t be mechanics or items that make navigating the world less complicated. Breath of the Wild isn’t and shouldn’t become a survival game, and the appeal of an adventure is overcoming odds and mastering your environment. Breath of the Wild has things that do this well: Revali’s Gale’s long cooldown timer makes using it a difficult decision. Getting more hearts and stamina as the game progresses makes you feel like you’ve become more capable. And yes, weapon degradation forces you to think creatively, experiment with all your tools, and even risk entering dangerous areas where you know you can find strong weapons.
I’m a hardcore defender of weapon durability in Breath of the Wild. I think Nintendo should punish you all for complaining so much by making your weapons break even faster in the next game. But I’ll give its haters this much — weapon durability objectively sucks for the kind of game Breath of the Wild eventually becomes. In the end, Breath of the Wild chooses to be a game about mastering the world and seeing the obstacles that seemed impassable early on become trivial. It wants you to feel powerful, and your 17th Greatblade of Thunderwhacking shattering into a million pieces against a goblin’s wooden club does not facilitate such things.
Breath of the Wild’s weapon degradation is a sign of a game stuck between two ideas: is this a game about exploring the world, or is it a game about conquering it? People say they want the latter, but I think the fact that everyone’s fondest memories are with the game’s opening hours is proof that what they really want is a little less control and a little more struggle. Knowing I’ll beat Ganon at the end of the game because I have 11 flaming greatswords and superpowers doesn’t hit as hard as knowing I’ll beat him because I’ve fought my way through blizzards and volcanoes and jungles and survived. Does the first option really sound like it’s better?
That doesn’t mean Breath of the Wild should be a hard game — the series has always been accesible to all ages, and it should stay that way. But it could have been something really unique. Instead, it became like everything else. Now with Breath of the Wild 2, Nintendo has access to one of the largest captive audiences in the history of video games. I think they can afford to try something a little different.
Make me worry about the weather. Take the hit markers out of shooters. There are enough games out there that make me feel strong. I want something that makes me feel small.
