Kevin's top 10 games of 2017 - 2

#2: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

It's hard to know what to say about this monolith of a title that hasn't already been covered.  For many, including myself, this was THE reason to buy a Nintendo Switch.  Judging by the discourse around the game, everybody seems to be more than satisfied with this generation-ender / launch title.  At face value, it's like delivering on all the promises that Bethesda-style open world games welch on:  You CAN actually go to that mountain in the distance and climb it.  The game DOES just manage to work.  And all the more surprisingly inside of a Zelda game, a series that has always touted an open-ish world with a deceptively linear through line.  But now we are really choosing what we want to do, weather it's head to the four corners of the world, tame horses, solve riddles, or just speed-run for the final boss.


This game is also ends up being a masterclass in open world design as well.  It is so easy to see a scenario where this game originally highlighted sidequests, shrines and enemy camps every time you activated a Sheikah tower, in a similar fashion to the Ubisoft ur-game.  Instead the world is designed in such a way that you have to pick out what direction you want to travel, and naturally find your way side-tracked by puzzles in the environment or landmarks dotted all over the landscape.  Instead of being presented with a checklist of 120 shrines and 900 Korok seeds, it's up to the player to decide how much time they want to invest in these side activities.  And those activities themselves are broken up in such a bite-sized way as to offer players something to do if they decide to take the game portable.  Just really, really, smart design decisions.

And then you get to overall art, sound, and aesthetic.  We're riding hard on Miyazaki / cel-shaded hybrid that leverages the relative lack of horsepower available on the consoles as compared to their modern counterparts and letting visual design take the steering wheel instead.  It's how games like Okami, Windwaker, or Killer 7 can still hold up today and feel relatively timeless.  Just dodge the problem of the uncanny valley altogether and go for something that really just pops.  Juxtapose this against a mostly ambient piano score and the game just exudes personality in this reclaimed post-apocalypse.  This isn't some bombed-out wasteland,  instead it's a world taken back by nature that still holds mysteries from the past.

It isn't a perfect game.  No game is.  Load times are abundant when tackling shrines.  Combat mechanics may be a tad too simple.  DLC-implementation was lackluster.  Finally, this is a hard game to replay or hop back onto if you've been absent for a while.  But your first time through, there is nary another game like it: a massive open world that is stable, cohesive and full of mystery.