Breath of the Wild, Part 1: Link’s Awakening

I've been waiting to play this game for a year and a half.

Usually, I buy Zelda games right when they come out. But this one happened to be released in the one month where I was between jobs, so I wanted to conserve my money. And then I got busy doing other things and never had time to play it, so I kept putting it off. Even when I did buy it, I still had to wait a couple of weeks before I finally got the chance to play it. But man, it was worth the wait.

It begins, like most Zelda games do, with Link waking up. Instead of a bed, however, he’s in this strange water tank that drains and leaves him lying there, almost naked. He’s in an equally strange chamber, and as we make our way outside, we’re given what’s called a Shiekah Slate, which is basically a tablet (to match the Wii U/Switch tablet, no doubt). I’ll talk more about what it can do as we go, but it can do a lot. We also find some clothes and put them on. They’re ragged, but they work.

Upon exiting the cavern, I learn that I’m in the Great Plateau, whatever that is. I’ll tell you what it is: huge. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a starter area so big. And you’re really not given any direction. You are told to go to a dot on your map (one of the Slate functions), but not why, so you’re really just left to do what you want. So I climbed.

If this game has a gimmick, it’s climbing. And what a simple but effective gimmick it is. As big as the map is, it feels even bigger because there’s a whole third dimension to work with. And you can climb just about anything: walls, rock faces, even monsters! (I’ll get to that.) So instead of going to the dot, I decided to find out what was above me, and I was surprised to learn it was a whole mountain that was extremely cold. It’s also here I learned that if you’re in extreme cold without the proper protections, your hearts reduce over time. So I avoided that area for now. 

As I explored, I saw that there are items to pick up all over the place. Flowers and tree branches and fruit and nuts and, as I would soon learn, even more than that. Each of these items is useful in some way, but you can also combine them in different recipes to make even more useful potions and meals and other stuff. (To provide a very basic example, an apple restores half a heart, but a baked apple restores 3/4 of a heart.)

The Great Plateau may be a starter area, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t trouble. Bokoblins were lurking everywhere, and I didn’t have a weapon (or know how to use one of I did), so I just avoided them for now. They mostly keep to their own devices if you don’t get too close, but I was fine. 

As I made my way to the dot, I came across an odd building of sorts that was called a shrine. I’ve heard of shrines in real life so I knew I should be able to get in, but I couldn’t find any way to do that. Luckily, I found my point of destination, which turned out to be something called the Great Plateau Tower. An old man flew to the top of the tower on a parasail and told me he would give it to me if I could go through the shrine that I had passed earlier. So I go back to the shrine, where I have to complete a Magnesis trial.

Before we move on, let’s talk about the Shiekah Slate for a bit. It basically does just about everything in the game. You use it to explore your map and manage your inventory, mark locations, fast travel, save, and so forth. But it can also learn special abilities that - from what I know, at least - seem to replace the items you’d normally get from dungeons. 

The first room in the shrine has a dock you can put your Slate into, and when you do, it downloads the Magnesis ability to it. Magnesis allows you to scan the area for metal objects and then manipulate those objects. It took a bit to understand how to use it, but it’s rad. As the first shrine, it was pretty basic and mostly just involved moving metal boxes to break through things and using a fallen metal door as a bridge to cross gaps. At the end was an ancient Shiekah (I presume) who gave me a Spirit Orb, told me there were three more shrines on the Plateau, and then disappeared.

Outside, the old man congratulated me and then told me I’d have to complete the other three shrines to get the parasail (jerk). It was also at this time I learned that Hyrule Castle has been containing an evil beast named Calamity Ganon for 100 years, and it’s currently trying to get out. Link, as I later - but not much later - found out, has been asleep for 100 years. Hmm...

The next shrine I went to was in the Eastern Abbey (named, I’m sure, for the Eastern Temple in A Link to the Past), and hoo boy, I was not ready for this. The Abbey is in ruins, so it’s just a bunch of random wall pieces with run-down machines scattered about. The machines are a common sight across the Plateau, and I don’t know what the deal with them is, but for the most part they’re just set dressing...except these. These sprung to life! I don’t know if they’re officially Beamos, but I’m going to call them that because they behave the same way. Except they’re the scariest Beamos I’ve ever encountered because their attack isn’t immediate: a laser locks onto you for a while before the actual hit happens, so the whole time you know it’s coming but you don’t know when and you’re trying to get away but you don’t know where to go and you’re moving slower than normal because you automatically crouch when the laser sights you and it’s a nightmare. It’s also the first place I died. And the second. And probably the third. It is at this time I learned the map will put a red X on the most recent place you died. Helpful?

This shrine had a Bomb challenge, so my Slate was updated to create two kinds of remote bombs: round and cube. As you can imagine, the shrine was just blowing up a lot of stuff. I got another Spirit Orb for my trouble. 

When I returned outside, it was night. So in addition to the Beamos, I now had Stalfos to deal with. These I know for sure are not actually Stalfos but instead skeleton versions of Bokoblins (Stalkoblins?), but they work the same. They’re funny because if you hit them, their head separates from the rest of them and you can pick it up, but it and its body are still moving independently. You can also take a Bokoblin Arm as a weapon, and its fingers will still move.

Anyway, I hadn’t quite figured out how to use bombs at this point, so I died a couple more times, including a particularly embarrassing one where I set off a bomb near a Stalfos, it didn’t kill the Stalfos but DID set its club on fire, and then he hit me with the club and I caught on fire and died. Rough. Shortly after that, however, I found an Adventurer’s Sword and went to town on them...after I figured out how to use it. Y? Why is it the Y button? 

Regardless, it wasn’t until this point that I realized I’d just have to find weapons lying around, and this holds true for bows and other things too. I also learned you can throw your weapon and that pretty much anything can be used as a weapon...but also that weapons can and will break, which is a pain. But after my sword broke, I found a very sturdy axe that was supposed to be used for chopping wood, but I used it to chop bokoblins far and wide as I made my way to the third shrine atop Mount Hylia.

Getting there was a bear because I had to keep eating to replenish my hearts. Luckily I had enough food to make it. Later I learned I could cook something that made me survive the cold better, but one of the downfalls of an open world is that you don’t always do things in the best order. But the third shrine was cool, pun not originally intended but definitely leaned into.

In this shrine, your Slate learns Cryonis, which allows you to make ice blocks in water. You can make them where you stand or you can aim for them to be made elsewhere. This was used in some pretty clever ways, my favorite of which was lifting up a gate. As the ice block grew, the gate raised, lifting it high enough for me to walk under. 

After this point, I had no idea where the final shrine was, so I decided to just explore the Plateau for a bit. During this time, I discovered certain bokoblin camps were guarding a treasure chest, and killing all the bokoblins would open the chest. Unlike the other cheats I’ve found, which had weapons or food in them, these chests all had treasures like amber and opal.

You never know what you’ll find when you explore. I certainly didn’t expect a boss monster to rose out of the ground behind me! This monster is the Stone Talus, and I was not able to come close to defeating it. But I was able to find out how (a black stone on its back is the weak point) and I learned that I could climb up its body to get closer to the weak point. Pretty cool stuff. But tough.

At this point, I had to stop to leave for an event, but I resumed playing later in the evening.

When play resumed, the first thing I did was go back to get a bokoblin chest I had missed earlier. The first one I came across didn’t open, and the reason - which I only learned later - was because one of the bokoblins fell off the cliffside but didn’t die. 

With that out of the way, I did some in-depth exploring, basically going over every inch of the Plateau land to make sure I didn’t miss anything (of course, I’ve probably still missed stuff). Along the way, I found some Koroks and they gave me Korok Seeds. There are approximately one billion of these in the game, so I’ll be collecting them for a while.

The Koroks are the first hint of when this game takes place in the timeline: after Wind Waker. That’s pretty vague, but it’s a start.

In the forest, I tried to fight the Stone Talus again and failed (but got much closer this time), so I spent the rest of my exploration focused on gathering strong melee weapons. I also got the rest of the bokoblin chests. And I came across a boar. That’s my favorite part of my game so far: you can just...come across things. I’m sure I can hunt that boar and use it for food, but I’m not ready for that yet.

Through pure happenstance, I found the final shrine and its power, Stasis, is super amazing. You use it to stop time for a particular object. This can freeze it in place, which is good for obstacles, but the REALLY cool part about it is the use of potential energy. If you hit an item that’s time-stopped, it stores that energy and releases it when it unfreezes. So if you have, say, a giant boulder in your way, you can freeze it, whack it a lot, and then it’ll go flying when it unfreezes. 

After this, the old man showed up again to tell me to meet him where the four shrines intersect (the Temple of Time, which I haven’t talked about yet). So I go there, but instead of meeting him, I explore it some more because it’s a lot bigger than I realized, and I found some Hylian trousers, which are more durable than my current pants. I’m sure there’s a Hylian shirt somewhere too, but I haven’t found it. 

What I DID find, though, was that the enemies can fall asleep! If you are quiet enough, you can sneak up on sleeping bokoblins and steal their weapons or even attack them if you want. I’m not quiet enough yet, but there are things to help with that. 

Initial Verdict: THIS GAME IS SO GOOD! If I’m having this much fun in a starter area that I was mostly familiar with and doing stuff I mostly knew about, I can’t wait to see what the rest of the game is like.