Legend Of Zelda 2019: How Nintendo Can Beat Breath Of The Wild

The Best Hyrule & Link Ever

Transform the Kingdom of Hyrule into the peak of its history; back to its glory days. Erect great towns and cities throughout the land, with more side characters who can pop up throughout the campaign like Kass, and give us a little bit of fan service by bringing back old characters from previous games.

Mixing Breath of the Wild with Majora’s Mask would be the best comparison.

Every single NPC in Majora’s Mask had a purpose, they were going about their day, and had a certain number of things that they would accomplish throughout the story. Breath of the Wild did have this, to an extent, but on the whole the world felt devoid of life in parts, with only small communities taking up the odd town and stable dotted around the map, surrounded by vast expanses of open, empty land.

Let us see the return of the ocarina, the hookshot, the iron boots, heck, even the spinner. Give us these items as a reward for completing big dungeons once more, and have that sense of progression throughout the game returned, but without there being one singular, linear path through the world.

Build upon the customization that we were given with armour sets. Let us change Link’s height, weight, hair style, hair colour, or even his gender. The Hero of Hyrule has taken many forms in the past, and has been reborn many times throughout the ages, but has never really changed that much (except maybe when Wind Waker rolled around) until Breath of the Wild. We loved this new design for Link, proving that our Hero does not need to wear a green tunic and long cap in order to be recognisable.

Take the formula of exploring to gather items to increase armor stats, and apply that to weapons. Degrading weapons was one of Breath of the Wild’s most anguishing features. Although it encouraged you to keep trying out new things, it was altogether frustrating when you happen upon a giant block of ice and your fire sword had literally just broken 5 mins prior.

Let Link find a weapon that he likes, and store the rest in a chest in his house (because yes, we loved building and furnishing our own house in Breath of the Wild). Similarly to Dark Souls, every single weapon would be viable, it would have its own strengths and weaknesses, and we could use ore and wood gathered on our adventures in order to strengthen the weapons, or perhaps even craft them entirely from scratch, like in Skyrim.