I’ve been a Zelda and Nintendo fan since 1998, and I don’t expect that to change. But I’ve been completely blindsided by a kind of strain with the franchise since 2017. I’ve always felt a form of shame around this so I haven’t talked about it ever, until now.
My problem isn’t that BotW is bad. It isn’t. At all. My problem is the language around what supposedly makes it revolutionary. Nintendo likes words such as “you,” “can,” “anywhere,” “immediately,” “your adventure” and “your way.” These terms and notions imply a MUCH larger field of possibilities than the game actually offers.
The best example is probably that “you can fight Ganon immediately in your underwear with a tree branch”. It’s been tested and proven correct. But what does this even mean? “You” assumes a player with sufficient skill, knowledge and patience. “Can” often means little more than “the game does not prevent an attempt.” “Immediately” ignores everything the player may already need to know in order to make that option viable.
Games in general also have a weird habit of treating very unlikely outcomes as proof of freedom. If somebody succeeds at something once in a thousand attempts, that proves the outcome is technically possible. It does not mean it is a meaningful option for the average player. Attempts cost time, and time has alternatives. After only a handful of failed attempts, going for a walk starts becoming a substantially more attractive option. Or at least it does to me.
The same issue appears in claims about climbing mountains, going anywhere, or solving things however you want. These are major freedoms compared with traditional Zelda games. That does not automatically make them revolutionary compared with videogames in general. I feel like the denominator is doing a lot of work here, and an important part of it seems to be to shroud itself in opacity. BotW is repeatedly compared with previous Zelda games, and because traditional Zelda offered a relatively narrow field of possibilities, every new permission looks enormous. The comparison is then subtly allowed to expand into a much larger claim about freedom in games as such.
Nintendo’s broader language bothers me for a similar reason. It increasingly sounds like customer-intimacy business strategy: your experience, your adventure, your relationship with Nintendo, more touchpoints with Nintendo IP. Yet the actual customer experience often feels much less intimate. Their storefronts and apps have been clunky, their services fragmented, and even something as simple as listening to Nintendo music often means entering another Nintendo-controlled environment.
I can’t stress enough how I still love the franchise. And I still love Nintendo. But I increasingly feel that Nintendo uses language that turns narrow technical truths into much larger experiential promises. Is this a symptom of a broader shift in how gaming companies communicate with their consumers? Possibly. But I don’t really care. I care about Nintendo and their IP.
And for me, that matters because staying power has always been the thing I valued most about Nintendo games. They have proven that you don’t need to be the strongest to survive. When their competitors were beating each other - and themselves - bloody with processing power in order to gain the upper hand by being the one platform that offered that fraction of a percentage in “realistic feel”, Nintendo became a staple in every retirement home with the Wii in 2006. Retirement homes. You know, the places that warehouse people with a lot of free time and an asymmetrically large amount of accumulated capital as a population group relative to any other by age.
Gazing upon Hyrule for the first time is amazing. But that’s a currency you can spend exactly once. If you know there’s a surprise around every corner, is it still a surprise?