The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and First Generation Promise
It's no secret that I think very highly of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it's one of my favourite ever games.
As I said in the post above, I think it so perfectly re-imagines and crucially recaptures the essence of Zelda, which is adventure. Nintendo decided that even despite Zelda being popularly defined by many characteristics, that only one was truly indispensable. Few franchises have been so rigidly defined by such kinds of characteristics (e.g. dungeons, key items, weapons and enemies types) as Zelda has been. So to leave them aside or fundamentally change them much is risky.
It was risky and it paid off. But for as much as I adored this game for what it was, I'm just as excited for what it could mean for the future of the franchise. Because no matter how brilliant the experience was, you can break Breath of the Wild down into it's individual parts and find plenty of areas for improvement.
Those areas of improvement can be directly plucked straight from previous Zelda games or may need an entirely new approach. The key thing to why I'm so excited is because the roadmap of improvements appear to be so clearly defined and understandable. Creating a follow up to Breath of the Wild which provides meaningful improvement should largely be a problem solved by time.
As is usual with first generation creations, starting from scratch takes a lot of time, they often lack the characteristics of maturity: depth, polish and refinement. So when Breath of the Wild, arguably the first generation of this new era for Zelda is this good, then the follow ups should be so much better.
Yeah, it may not evoke the same feelings, but iterations or refinements on brand new things often don't feel as special. The enjoyment often comes from a slightly different place in these newer iterations and that's what I'm looking forward to. I'm looking for a game that takes all the great things from Breath of the Wild and improves on the combat, enemy variety, dungeon variety and complexity, provides more to do in the open world, etc.
This is a game where you can take it a part and judge the individual components and find a reasonable amount of them come up a bit short of expectations, but when you combine them all together, with the components that are exceptionally good too, you get something incredibly special. It has made me incredibly optimistic about the future of the series.