Wanted Adventure

[Jacquelyne Betance]

Insteadas I pulled my horse over a ridge westward, my eye caught something on the top of a low mountain across a valley. There was movement I hadn't seen before. I checked my map, and found an oddly shaped pond marked on the flat top of the summit, and something about the shape resonated with me. Maybe a short detour?

From that peak, though, another glint in the distance caught my eye. And then from there, another. A banner blowing in the dust-filled wind, or a single sword driven into a hillside; a glow emanating from the grassy plateau; a ring of massive, deteriorated statues looking inwards at each other. A rock in the wrong place. Two rocks in the right place.

There is always something new beyond the next hill in Breath of the Wild: At one point, fifty or sixty hours into my time with the game, a man told me that he had some bananas for sale, fresh from a village I'd never heard of. (I stumbled headfirst into the place soon after, and was glad I did.)

So when Nintendo made this exact same promise when it first debuted the latest Zelda game, I was skeptical, too. But what I've come to learn was that Breath of the WIld isn't about "sheer scale," it's about scope. Not just a general sort of largeness, but a largeness that is really leveraged to produce a variety of feelings and experiences. I want to go to every mountain in this game because each one feels like it holds something fresh. While a large part of this feeling of scope comes from brilliant art and environmental design, it's what you do when you get there that lifts Breath of the Wild even higher.

Over the last 31 years, the Zelda series has been incredibly innovative but also frustratingly stubborn in its devotion to its own conventions. Barring some great experiments in structure in "side" games like Majora's Mask and A Link Between Worlds, the major Zelda games always offer the same basic shape. You spend some time in an overworld, but the bulk of your most serious play is spent in dungeons, where a newly unlocked special item allows you to traverse a handful of obstacles before finally beating the boss and getting a McGuffin. Rinse, repeat. It's reliable, but it's also predictable.

Because it front-loads all of this (and because it trusts players to be able to follow along without a mind numbing tutorial), Breath of the Wild can immediately begin challenging you to do incredible things.

There are a hundred "shrines" spread across Hyrule that offer puzzles and other challenges and reward you with rare equipment and the divine currency needed to give you more health and stamina. Those Shrines also work as free-form, nearly wordless tutorials of their own: An early Shrine I found taught me that if you hit objects after you use Stasis on them, they retain (and build up) the kinetic force you put into them, blasting off into the distance the second your stasis ends. Twenty hours later, I'd use this trick to send a boulder into the face of giant ogre.

There's the time I saw an enemy put his back to the wall so that my boomerang would be unable to return to me; the time that, lacking any fire arrows and desperately needing some, I made a fire with a piece of flint and some wood, and dipped my regular arrows in the resulting flame before letting loose; the time I realized that it can, now and then, be good to be thrown from your horse.

For all of these reasons, Breath of the Wild feels like a descendant of games like Far Cry 2 and Dragon's Dogma, games that emphasize making player expressivity joyful even (especially?) when things are going poorly. It lets me "break" the game with my nonsense in a way that reminds me of Morrowind's spell creation, and it rewards me for internalizing how the enemies and environment work the way Shiren the Wanderer once did. I do not make any of these comparisons lightly. It does not just aspire to be like these games that are in my personal canon of favorites, it does not only remind me of them, it belongs with them.

Breath of the Wild spent sixty or so hours letting me execute on (frankly) terrible plans, and it never got old. It generates the sort of spiraling, self-driven stories that pulled me into games to begin with. And even all that many hours in, I still believe that it keeps its greatest strength: Breath of the Wild will constantly surprise you and let you surprise yourself.

Here is my best effort: A few hours into playing, I'd headed east, away from central Hyrule and towards the "Dueling Peaks," a massive pair of mountains that seemed as if they were cleaved in two. Through the soft patter of the rain and the calming streamsounds of the river, I heard a song in the distance, and through the fog saw lights. I climbed a hill to get a better view, and there I saw a massive, wooden horse head lifting up from the top of a small structure. Gliding down, the music got louder, and I could hear the murmurs of speech. A dog barked, and at that moment the sun broke through the clouds, lighting up not only the stable, but also the field of horses and ruins and strange machines that lay beyond it. I ended my first night of playing by just lingering there at this stable. I fed the dog and cooked up some new recipes for myself. I spoke to the the characters there and laughed at their jokes (and sometimes, at their egos). I watched as a thunderstorm slowly rolled in across the field. It's the first time that I've ever felt like an adventurer at rest.

In marketing material, Nintendo has been calling this game an "open air adventure," the sort of unique genre description that is invented alongside so many big budget Japanese games. When I first heard that term, I rolled my eyes a little. The power of the term "adventure" has been diminished through use in the games industry. A term that once conjured a feeling of momentum and danger, intrigue and bravery has become generic. But Breath of the Wild managed to revive the term for me. For the first time in years, I don't just feel like I'm fighting enemies or searching for loot, like I'm "questing" or "exploring." I feel like I'm adventuring.

And there is more distance yet to travel. In Breath of the Wild, you can never fast travel directly to a village or ruin or other specific location, but only to a nearby shrine. That means that whenever you arrive, you always see your destination ahead of you, framed carefully: A buzzing town on a hill, a desert oasis obscured by blowing sands, a labyrinth out in the sea, a little fishing village where bananas grow on tropical trees, a strange movement on a low mountain. There is always distance to be traveled.

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Miles later, the storm worsened, and a rider named Peter Olah rode into view. The rain was horizontal, and yes there was lightning, although not striking from what I could tell. I was ready to force him into the car, which I was sure he would want to retreat to. He was externally soaked, a wet dog, but was wearing full rain slicks. I could see his tired face under his hood. I could feel compassion and concern for him.

I went into shock. Wait, what? Why? Yeah, I mean, it was raining cats and dogs, and I was pretty stressed out about being drenched for at least 30 hours while out racing, but I had prepared for four months for this race and had spent thousands of dollars registering and flying my crew out to do the thing. How could they just cancel the thing like that?

We returned to our base camp apartment, finished packing a few more things on our bikes, and went to bed early. We would wake up at 3 a.m. and shoot to be riding by 4 a.m. None of us really slept more than an hour. Outside, a tempest raged. Rain inundated roofs and alleys around us. Thunder rumbled overhead. Lightning lit up even the closed and shuttered windows. As I lay in bed awake, not knowing that everyone else was also in bed awake, I felt the return of that feeling I knew and hated so much: That post-traumatic stress of my adventures of yore. There is no way around it; nights just get dark for me.

We rode into the storm right at 4 a.m. It was wet and dark and cold, and I was scared. But I was on some sort of autopilot. I just had to turn that crank over once, and then again, and then again, and keep doing it. That tiny halo of headlight beams from our four-person group was all that fought back all of the outside forces that attempted to paralyze me, so I focused on that.

The dark sensations subsided with each passing minute. For the next 100 or so miles, every minute of our ride became more and more sublime. Familiarity took over, and its embrace was warm. I had done things like this before, and I could do things like this again. Up and over hills and mountains we rode. Through stunning valleys carpeted in heavy fog and tiny towns shuttered and bundled against the night. The glow of the sun soon came, and with it that incredible hope of a day about to be maximally lived. Moods soared. We flew. If what we were doing was dangerous, it was dangerously beautiful.

Everything went swimmingly until lunchtime the next day. Just as the forecast predicted, heavy dark afternoon clouds once again built up overhead, and our Traka route plunged us directly into them. Rain began lightly and then turned heavy. The roads and puddles, already still wet from previous storms, filled quickly. Conditions truly went off a cliff in the span of 15 minutes. Soon, we were riding through a tempest.

I began spotting rain that bounced, which could mean only one thing: hail. With the hail came the sound of thunder, and with the thunder lightning. The delays between the thunder and the lightning were approximately zero, which meant the thunderstorm cell was directly overhead. Cade wisely made the call: we needed to seek any shelter we could find. We found a sparingly small tin roof that protected a series of mailboxes-turned-birds nests from nothing at all, and we all huddled together underneath it. Overhead, the sky was violent.

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