I've made a little more progress on Breath of the Wild. I'm pretty consistently playing it every day not only because my girlfriend is quite insistent that I continue but also because I'm committed to actually finishing it and getting the complete experience of the game.
I think my opinions on this game may differ from the majority of folks that really loved it. I have the most fun with the game when I'm on a focused, coherent quest in which I'm seeking to achieve a specific objective. This means that my time is spent defeating enemies, solving puzzles, sneaking around, or collecting treasure. What I like a little less is when I'm walking for long periods of time from place to place just trying to find the next objective. And I guess that's interesting, because I think for a lot of people they'd enjoy Breath of the Wild if it had no story at all and was primarily about wandering the game's massive world. I think I understand that take but at the end of the day it's not what I'm looking for.
I can't help but compare the game to Horizon Zero Dawn which of course came out at around the same time. There was a lot of comparisons of the game floating around then, with the prevailing sentiment being that Zelda improved on Horizon's formula in a lot of ways. Sure, I'll admit that Zelda is better in the sense that it doesn't shoehorn you into specific paths or prevent you from exploring certain areas. In Breath of the Wild, if you see it, you can travel to it. This isn't always the case in Horizon where there are pretty specific climbing paths ala Tomb Raider or Uncharted. Still, Horizon's world was absolutely massive and every place you could go to had something new to see. I feel this isn't always the case with Breath of the Wild. I can go anywhere, sure, but what's less clear is why I would want to do that. There are so many open expanses of land in which there is absolutely nothing to do from point to point.
What I found really engrossing about Horizon (and perhaps frustrating for my spectator) that I frequently became distracted from my primary quest objective by stumbling across different side-quests, ruins, artifacts, and monsters. I might be on the way to the next rung of the main quest when suddenly I came across a bandit camp to infiltrate or an ancient artifact might catch my attention at the end of an intricate mountain path. Following through on these distractions was almost always rewarding. There weren't many times in that game where I felt like I was wandering around aimlessly, bored with what little I had to do on the way.
It's not that Breath of the Wild has nothing to do. That's certainly not true. There are countless shrines to explore with puzzles to solve, there are korok seeds to uncover (even though I'm tremendously bad at finding them), and you'll come across the occasional monster camp or guardian (hereon referred to as laser boys). I can't shake the feeling as I'm playing though, that it'd be nice if there were a few more enemies roaming around or a few more non-shrine areas to explore just for some flavor.
I'm still fairly early in the game at this point, having just completed my first Divine Beast, Vah Ruta. The quest leading up to unlocking this dungeon is really interesting and fun because you're constantly doing something engaging the whole way through. You have to navigate your way through monster camps as you climb your way up the mountain to Zora's Domain, carefully picking off lightning keese along the way. You'll have to decide whether or not you stealthily move past some archers firing lightning arrows at you or sloppily take them out head-on. And then when you enter the dungeon itself, you get to surf around on Sidon the Zora prince and hurtle wildly up waterfalls, propelling Link into the air where he can fire shock arrows into the beast's weak points. These are the parts of the game that I really like a lot and I look forward to tackling the other Divine Beast dungeons as I progress further.
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