The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I bought a used Nintendo Switch with a bunch of games, and now I'm playing Zelda. At first I wasn't very impressed - it's not particularly graphically impressive, the game world can feel barren at times, tutorials are easy to miss, and the difficulty is all over the place. It's growing on me though, and the more I play it (and get used to its quirks), the more I like it.

It all feels very derivative though. Not unusual for a game in a franchise of course, but Breath of the Wild doesn't just borrow from earlier Zelda games, it also borrows heavily from The Elder Scrolls, Portal, and to a lesser degree from Ubisoft's sandbox games.

Most of all it reminds me of Skyrim, and much of the time it feels like I'm playing The Elder Scrolls: Hyrule. The game feels less ambitious though, with fewer things for the player to do. But that again means the developers actually had the time to properly polish the game, and it's not riddled with the kind of bugs and half-hearted features that we expect from a Bethesda game.

And it's not necessarily a bad thing that they borrow heavily from other games. What matters most of all to us players is that a game is fun, and Breath of the Wild certainly is fun. I think I'll be playing this game for at least a few more weeks.