I'm Still Playing Breath of the Wild

I'm currently stuck on getting rid of Seath in Dark Souls. I've been meaning to go get him, and I've been having fun with the game and all that, but I've not been playing recently. Maybe it's because I've been doing a ton of really emotionally intense TTRPGs, particularly The Undertow which, while cathartic, is still a story about a woman coming to terms with the fact that she comes from a system of exploitation, rape, and demonic possession. So maybe I'm not really wanting to run into something which is also the product of exploitation and lies and filth as well? Who knows?

Anyway, I just keep finding myself in Breath of the Wild. I'm not upgrading hearts, at all, so I'm creeping along in a world that can very easily kill me, but that's about the only similarity I'm seeing with Dark Souls. The world is bright, open, and quiet. There's all this cutesy sound effect stuff with cooking, the people you run into are pretty chatty and helpful, by and large, and it's just so friggin' relaxing. It's a similar feeling I get to actually being outside, surrounded by the woods back at my in-law's house. You can't get the exact same thing in a video game as you do out in the real woods, but there's this sense of calm that pervades the world. There's nothing immediately pressing that you need to go do.

But the thing about Breath of the Wild isn't necessarily about how relaxing it is. There's multiple mechanical systems that have interesting little bits and bobs about them. You've got climbing, which uses differing amounts of stamina based off on how you are moving. And yes, rain completely and utterly hoses you at lower stamina levels, but some of my most enjoyable times in the game happened in a rainstorm, when I found myself going into unexplored territory out of sheer necessity. The system allowed me to appreciate the environment that had been crafted. I was interacting with the world.

Combat itself isn't the most interesting thing, but it certainly has enough tidbits to make it fun. Dodging, reflecting, sneaking, all of that works, and it works well. It's simple, intuitive, and keeps things moving. That being said, it's a lot simpler (and more fun!) to find creative ways to use the environment to kill off creatures. Master Mode kind of skews with this by giving the creatures health regeneration, but we'll get into why that isn't necessarily a problem in another blog post. Regardless, my current run is on normal mode. And it's a lot of fun to fight when I have to, but more fun to find ways to not fight at all. Which is clearly the design intent.

I've always loved weapon breakage. Yup, I know, a lot of people hate it, but it goes back to the core of the game: exploring the world. You cannot just wade through the world, killing willy nilly, ignoring exploration, because your weapons break. That and the fact that there are no health regens outside of towns without grabbing food means that you are always pushed back into the environment. You have to note areas that have specific foods and scrounge when you don't have what you need.

And then there are those moments when you just run into sheer beauty.

I mean, wow. Just wow. Playing this game you get immersed in the sheer beauty of it all. And yes, Dark Souls has those moments as well, but they're purposefully rare. Every time I wind back up at Firelink Shrine I stop and bask in just the sheer beauty of that area, in the music, in the view from the top of the Shrine, in the conversations I can actually have with the people there. But the rest of that game is a trudge through darkness. And yeah, I enjoy it, and I really want to go back to it, but right now?

I'm just basking in the beauty of Breath of the Wild. Again.