Currently Playing: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild Is Zen As Heck
I have never, up until now played a Zelda game. I have just about enough nerdcred to know that Zelda is the female elfy one who always needs rescuing, and Link is the green Knighty one, but that was pretty much the sum total of my knowledge. So I came to Breath of The Wild without any preconceived notions as to what I might be getting myself into.
And I can honestly say I loved every single second of it. There is so much that is great about Breath of the Wild, so much that is interesting and exciting and that can, and should, be learned from. In every definition of the term "design," including (visual) artistically and musically, it is a tour de force. Even the way it utilises the Switch hardware, turning an overwhelmingly huge open-world game into something that can be both pick-up-and-play whilst the kettle boils and an afternoon's worth of puzzling timesink, is deeply impressive. Today, however, I'm going to try to focus down into just one aspect of the game overall. And I'm almost certainly not going to do it justice, but I'm going to try.
Breath of the Wild is deeply fascinating, because it is a systems based game. The story, and the characters in that story, are all extremely shallow archetypes, serving symbolically rather than narratively. Misrule (Gannon) is to be overcome by Virtue (Zelda) with help from Steadfastness (Link.) It's not really a story, it's a fable about the forces of the universe, the actual nuances of characterisation, of making believable people in a virtual world, are paid no more than a token guesture. So as somebody who loves story based games, I was a bit wary, and weary(!) of BotW's constant reinforcing of the plot at every possible turn. It's not like I was going to forget what was going on. However, there is a bit more going on here than a simple tale of "Man Fights Dragon."
The true story is of the game world, the "narrative," comes from the player's actions within that world. The boundaries, and possibilities, within the game world, are governed by the natural elements. The player writes their story of play with lightening and ice, with air, fire and metal and earth. By constantly interacting with the game world, experimenting and exploring with minimal hand-holding, the player goes on quite a genuine journey of discovery, figuring out what they can and cannot do, and how to combine abilities to perform actions otherwise impossible. It is relatively rare these days for a game to have so much confidence in the player that it does not show, or even teach, the rules of the game world. Players must engage in playful experimentation in order to figure out how to get things done, and will quickly discover that nothing exists in the game that cannot be adapted or manipulated by the elemental game systems. And furthermore, if the player gets stuck, they might get a clue from just observing the world around them, and meditating on how it got to be that way.
The whole game is suffused with the idea of the Japanese Five Elements, expressed through systems based gameplay. The player can unfreeze ice-water by applying fire. They can use gravity to add momentum to rocks tumbling across the earth. They can fan the flames of fire to create updraughts and soar like a bird. And only when the elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth are mastered, by completing each of the major Divine Beast quests, can Link and Zelda gain control over the final element, which is Spirit. By combining the Ying (female/Zelda) and Yang (male/Link) energies into a unified force, which Zelda is then able to channel into a pure energy to send Gannon back into the Void, bringing peace to Heaven and Hyrule. Thus, mastery over the elemental gameplay systems by the player is the narrative of Link becoming a hero - his demonstration of elemental mastery imbibes his spirit to the point where he is ready to take on the mantle of the hero of legend. There isn't just a "design philosophy" at work here, there is an actual philosophy. By creating a world of moving, interacting forces, rather than simply static instances, the designers have created a truly layered gameplay arena, where there actually is always something to do and something to learn. For a game in which you essentially play as a homicidal mad-man that seems hell-bent on murdering all creatures great and small, there is a bit of Buddhist Zen woven into the fabric of the Legend of Zelda world.
Further Reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_elements_(Japanese_philosophy)
http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/games/zelda/48199/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-the-design-philosophy-that-makes-it-a-classic
