In this article, I will share my thoughts after spending around 100 hours playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW, 2017) for the first time.

My playthrough was on a Steam Deck OLED using the open-source emulator Ryujinx, as opposed to the original Switch, for reasons I’ll explain shortly.

Preliminaries

To start off, let me provide some context on my background with the Zelda series, my choice to play on a Steam Deck OLED, and why I opted for emulation over the original hardware.

My background

At the time of writing, I’ve spent roughly 100 hours with BotW over the past two months. I have completed all the main story content that can be reasonably expected of a non-completionist run before facing the final boss, so I feel I have a solid grasp of what the game has to offer.

Before BotW, my Zelda experience included the following titles:

• The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1993, Game Boy Color)
• The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages (2001, Game Boy Color)
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (2002, Game Boy Advance)
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (2004, Game Boy Advance)
• The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (2007, Nintendo DS)
• The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (2009, Nintendo DS)
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (2011, Nintendo 3DS)

Of these, The Minish Cap was my introduction to the series, and the only other titles I’ve fully completed are Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages. I nearly finished Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, and Ocarina of Time, but I put Link’s Awakening and A Link to the Past down quite early. I still hope to revisit these games someday and perhaps try Majora’s Mask (2000) and Wind Waker (2002) if time permits.

Besides Zelda, my experience with open-world games is limited. Aside from Baldur’s Gate (1998), Diablo II (2000), Gothic (2001), World of Warcraft (2004), and Minecraft (2011), I haven’t really delved into the genre. I haven’t played the Elder Scrolls, Witcher, or FromSoftware titles, so my perspective may differ from that of more seasoned open-world gamers.

Why emulate on Steam Deck?

I own the original Switch version of BotW, but I chose to play it on Ryujinx for several reasons.

First, the game runs beautifully on my Steam Deck OLED, including full gyroscope support via SteamDeckGyroDSU, with next to no tinkering—a technical feat I find genuinely impressive and worth highlighting.

Second, while I could have opted for the remastered version on the new Switch 2, I have a strong aversion to Nintendo’s business practices, including selling remasters at nearly double the original price, patent-bullying smaller studios, and enforcing hardware exclusivity by shutting down fan projects like Ryujinx, despite relying on emulation themselves. Given all this, I am in no rush to buy a Switch 2, even if it might offer some appealing exclusives.

With these preliminaries out of the way, let’s dive into the review.

Review

In the following sections, I’ll start by discussing the game’s core design, then highlight its strongest elements, and finally touch on a few of its weaknesses.

Core design

Most classic Zelda games were thinly veiled linear adventures, where progress was gated by items found in dungeons. BotW, however, takes a fundamentally different approach, presenting a truly open world where players can theoretically rush straight to the final boss after the initial tutorial area. This shift in design philosophy is a radical departure and deserves special attention.

In BotW, players start on the Great Plateau, a small but varied region where they acquire all the core abilities needed to explore the entire game world. Unlike previous titles, which might have required a specific item to progress (e.g., a hookshot to cross a chasm), BotW encourages creative problem-solving. For instance, to survive a cold area early in the game, you can:

• Cook a meal that grants cold resistance
• Carry a torch or light a campfire for warmth
• Simply sprint through and heal as needed

This flexibility is central to the game’s design, allowing for a wide range of player strategies and approaches.

Once players leave the Great Plateau, they receive the game’s signature item, the paraglider, and are free to explore the massive world of Hyrule at their own pace.

Strong points

BotW’s strength lies in its deceptively simple core loop: climb towers to reveal parts of the world map, spot interesting landmarks from those high vantage points, and glide down to explore them, discovering even more points of interest along the way. This creates a nearly endless feedback loop of exploration and discovery, driven by curiosity rather than explicit markers or objectives.

What’s remarkable is just how much this simplicity accomplishes. The game reveals nearly all of its major systems in the first hour and then relies on them for the rest of its 100+ hour playtime. There are no intricate skill trees, endless collectible lists, or sprawling quest lines—just an expectation that players will find satisfaction in the sheer act of discovery. For a big-budget title, this is a strikingly bold choice.

The climbing system, while seemingly a small addition, fundamentally changes how players move through the world. It allows for truly free-form exploration, making every mountain peak a potential vantage point and every cliff a potential shortcut. Few other games have captured this sense of freedom, and it’s hard to overstate its impact on the overall experience.

This freedom is further enhanced by the paraglider, which, while not entirely new to the series—having appeared in earlier forms in The Wind Waker (2002) and Skyward Sword (2011)—synergizes perfectly with the climbing mechanic. The ability to climb to a high vantage point and then glide across vast distances gives players an unparalleled sense of agency, making every climb a meaningful choice and every peak a potential launchpad for further exploration.

This approach has clearly resonated with other developers as well. Games like Genshin Impact (2020) have adopted similar traversal mechanics, further validating BotW’s influence on the genre. Here’s hoping these games won’t also find themselves on the wrong side of a Nintendo cease and desist.

Weak points

That said, BotW is not without its flaws. The weapon durability system, for instance, can be frustrating. While the idea of forcing players to constantly switch up their gear is interesting in theory, it often feels punishing, especially early on, where every encounter risks breaking your best weapons. This can discourage combat altogether, as players may feel the cost is too high.

The game’s few more linear sections, like the Lost Woods trials, also feel at odds with the otherwise open-ended design. These moments can feel like playing a completely different, lesser game, which is a stark contrast to the freedom offered elsewhere and highlights the difficulty of integrating tightly scripted sequences into an otherwise open-ended game world. It’s as if the designers had to briefly put the brakes on player agency to tell a particular story beat or guide the player through a specific experience, which can feel jarring given the game’s otherwise freeform approach.

This tension extends to the story as a whole. While BotW makes the best of its open-world structure by presenting an insomniac protagonist piecing together their fragmented past through beautifully shot cinematics and some of the best writing the series has ever had, the open-world nature of the game inherently undermines a strong, cohesive narrative. Without the ability to control the pacing and order in which the player experiences key plot points, the game struggles to build a sense of urgency or momentum, leaving the player free to ignore the main quest entirely. This can make the stakes feel less pressing, reducing the incentive to confront the final boss rather than simply wandering the world indefinitely. In this sense, a fragmented, less focused story might be an unavoidable trade-off for the kind of freedom that defines BotW.

Conclusion

BotW marks a bold and largely successful shift from linear adventure to open-world exploration, stripping back the formula to its most essential elements while still providing hundreds of hours of compelling gameplay. Despite a few rough edges, it’s a landmark title that deserves its praise, and I look forward to seeing how its successor, Tears of the Kingdom, builds on this foundation and if this direction will become the new standard for the series.