Well, these positive elements are maintained and/or enhanced during the rest of the journey, with new resources and tricks at your disposal, ensuring that it never gets stale. ![]() In recent previews (that by no means could anticipate the massive adventure that came thereafter) we had been praising things like the level of freedom given to the player, and the different approaches you can use to solve every situation (again, be it exploratory, combative or puzzling). This new entry is so well designed and put together that it somehow manages to find an almost perfect balance between activities (exploration, combat, puzzles), narrative pacing, and distractions found on the map, that it actually feels like a fresh start, a reboot of the franchise from the ground up. But if you thought Breath of the Wild was going to be an expansion of Wind Waker and a correction of Twilight Princess, we're happy to confirm that you were wrong. Then there were fears over what Nintendo might consider a fun open-world, fears brought on by the emptiness of Hyrule Field in Twilight Princess (with its tiresome treks) and the clear constraints both it and its predecessor (Wind Waker) had to deal with. The precedents in terms of RPG elements came from things such as the weapons and shields system in Skyward Sword, where you could upgrade them with the resources you had collected. After more than five years of development, they've finally delivered Breath of the Wild, and given the radical change it entails, along with the many risks that have been taken, we're all the more impressed at how well-rounded it turned out. Let's go back to its open-world roots, let's remove or upgrade many of the series' conventions, and let's boost the RPG elements with a fitting survival element, all the while maintaining Zelda's identity and personality. However, when some of those conventions started to grow old (the progression and designs based on magical items, the combat systems from the past 20 years, the all too familiar secrets, the by-the-book settings), while others (the excellent design of dungeons, puzzles and bosses) had been mastered to such a degree that it was getting really tricky to come up with something really surprising, thankfully someone had the courage, the wisdom and the power to step up and call for a complete reinvention of Zelda. It stuck to its core conventions throughout nothing wrong with that, as this was the series that established them. But the franchise kept growing, getting more complex, focused and, as the technology allowed, receiving new game mechanics and improved visuals, which led to more elaborate storytelling and a more cinematic approach. ![]() If you look closely enough you can see that Breath of the Wild is something that they've been building up to over the course of 30 years, since that very first NES entry (a game that encouraged you to freely explore and where inventory items, the way you traverse the map, and the natural elements it contained, were all in place before you took those first steps). Nintendo, in particular with the Zelda series, has already flirted with open-world design and adding little RPG touches here and there, and with varying degrees of success.
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