The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

2025-11-09
In 2017 I had been working a fully remote job for a while and decided I should try working from a different city from a bit. So I got in my car and drove from Texas to Los Angeles to work out of an Airbnb. I learned three things:

• The whole "digital nomad" thing is a myth perpetuated by social media leeches and it's not actually tenable to do real work from an Airbnb.
• Airbnb abso-lutely lets people rent dirty hotel rooms in Koreatown from their website.
• Breath of the Wild is amazing.

Given the first two points the trip should have been a bust. But soon after arriving in LA the reviews for BOTW started rolling in. I had initially been on the fence about getting a Switch and passed on trying to get a preorder because of how bad the Wii U was. I figured Nintendo was hosed and the Switch would be a dud as well. But when the reviews rolled in, full of effusive praise, hailing a landmark on the gaming landscape, I lost my chill. Given Switch preorders had been completely sold out for a while, I promptly hopped on eBay and paid some stranger $100 for their preorder and had a BOTW Switch launch edition shipped to my dumpy little hotel in Ktown. Even I thought this was rash and a waste of money. One hundred dollars just to play something without having to wait a month? In retrospect it was an incredibly good decision.

To be able to play that game holed up in that little hotel room before knowing anything about it, before there were guides, before everyone on Earth had played it to death and back again. To be able to truly step out and explore Hyrule and not know what sort of emergent chaos would unfold next or what I'd see over the next hill. To be able to see all the things we now know so well as being invented, mastered, perfected here was worth the extra $100 and more.

It's hard to detach my opinion of BOTW from the context in which I first played it. It was an escape from the bummer that was my poorly planned little west-coast excursion. It was also the first time playing a Switch, an incredible new experience in its own right which would also usher in the next battlefield for the hardware manufacturers that we see evolving even now with Microsoft trying to push into the handheld space dominated by the Switch and the Steam Deck, itself a clear descendent of that original blue and red rectangle.

In fact I've never gone back to play Breath of the Wild. I finished it, adored my time with it--despite, yes some small annoyance with the durability system--adored the shrines, adored the music, adored the charm, adored the pure exploration, the freedom even in the broad structure of the game where you can go right to the final boss from the start of the game if you want. All of that and I was happy to keep that experience sealed away as that time I opened a package shipped to my hotel room door and excitedly opened it to play one of the greatest games of all time.

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Epilogue

I think the most amazing thing about Breath of the Wild is that it still somehow spawned an even better sequel in Tears of the Kingdom. How you take a game that is so monumental and original and influential and still find new ways to expand it while keeping that core of exploration and wonder intact is inconceivable to me. Part of me wonders if maybe I should go back and replay BOTW. Maybe I'll find it's far tighter than TOTK's excess. I don't think so. I love the excess, I'm one of 3 people who enjoyed RE6. I will take a game buckling under the weight of its big brain ideas over a perfectly polished gem any day of the week. That is all to say they are both some of the best games I've played, but only one of them is a Top 5 All Time for yours truly.