ANIMATION AND VIDEO GAMES

The Revolutionary Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

or the future of art

By Andrew Chang

Beautiful, isn't it?

It has been a recognizable fact that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has become one of the most important milestones in video game history since its release in 2017. This game is the first of its kind to bring high art into a popular video game franchise. To understand this outstanding project from Eiji Aonuma and his team at Nintendo, we need to look back at other video game releases during that time. Major companies were releasing large-scale open-world games that people were getting tired of, and the indie game studio had artistic games that only appealed to a small audience. BOTW slipped into the gap between indie art and popular games, and in doing so, it broke out from each category into what might be the future of art.

The video game world was flooded with big titles in 2016 and 2017. We got Mass Effect: Andromeda, Mafia 3, Watch Dogs 2, Far Cry Primal, etc. These large open-world games had been under development for years by the largest game companies, and they were highly anticipated franchises. However, in reality, none of these games were impressive. Their average rating was no more than 7.5/10. The biggest complaint from players was that these big titles had nothing new to offer. After a couple of hours into the game, though, players soon realized that despite the large-scale open world and storyline, these games couldn’t provide an immersive experience, because game developers keep reusing the same resources over and over again. This tedious gaming experience made players feel like they were interacting with lines after lines of codes.

BOTW seems to be the corrective to these failed experiments as if it saw all their deficiencies and worked to fix every single one. The most revolutionary aspect of BOTW is the open-world design: it is the most immersive game ever put together. One word we can use to describe it is “common sense”: If you pick up an axe, you can chop down every tree you see and even use the trunk as a bridge. You can also throw flames into the grass, and it will burn down the whole field, but it will also allow the hot air produced by the flames to let you fly if you happen to have the paraglider.

You can cook any food you pick up, and by combining food you can create any recipe you want. If you think it will work in real life, it probably works in the game as well. The game really works using common sense logic.

Not just the world, but every character in the game is just as interactive. The main enemies in the game are goblins called Bokoblin. Bokoblin have their own life and habits when they’re not attacking the player. When you sneak around their camp, you can see Bokoblin dancing around the fire, eating meat on bones, and sleeping. When Bokoblin finds you, they honk the alarm for the camp to attack you.

Surprisingly real for an unreal creature

The Bokoblin will use the bone that they’re eating as a weapon, which is hilarious and surprising. These details are what make them feel alive, and this creates an emotional bond between the players and the game.

What tied all these experiences together is the story. In BOTW, the player doesn’t find the story, the story finds the player. Unlike most other video games, which will have text and limitations that guide players to explore the game and the storyline in a certain way, BOTW doesn’t do any of that. Instead, it presents players with a massive world full of details. You can wander around the forest and find a traveler getting attacked by the Bokoblin. After you save the traveler, he will tell you a story about an old town nearby, and the history of that place.

Each encounter feels real

In this game, you encounter dozens of these characters, and even more mystery sites, all these scrap pieces of information build up the whole storyline of this game.

The immersive experience is beyond the game on the screen. The gaming console of BOTW, Nintendo Switch, is also a remarkable product in terms of physical feedback to the players. When pulling the bow, you can feel the tension through Nintendo’s HD rumble, which is precise vibration feedback, and when aiming with the bow, you can tilt the entire console like you are actually aiming with your arm. These hardware feedbacks allow players to not only see but feel the world in BOTW.

Just tilt it a bit

Last but definitely not least is the artistic style that made this game an Avant-garde artwork that stands out from the crowd. When you are used to playing mainstream video games during that period, BOTW will feel like a portal to a whole new world. Instead of pushing the limit of the processor and producing visual graphics as close as our real world, BOTW used a clean animation-ish style that brings the fantasy world to the player. It’ll feel like watching a Studio Ghibli animation compared to a live action movie.

The Revolution is on the run

The main reason BOTW has become a revolutionary project in video games is that it marks the beginning of new high art and also a new art that we can barely comprehend and have no idea where it might take us in the future. In one way BOTW seems to be the end of the video games, it’s polished to a level where it’s hard to exceed, in another way, this game is presenting what might be the future of art. Until BOTW, video games still felt like codes and programs, but it changed all that: you could feel the real craft of artistry, a vision, daring, and, most importantly, the way it immersed its users in a total world. And that’s important to realize that in the world of art and culture that has always meant the end of one era dn the beginning of another.

©Andrew Chang and the CCA Art Review