Blog: Thoughts on Earthbound

Earthbound is a pretty cool game. I guess that goes without saying, now. It’s a different spin on a JRPG that really show how games don’t just have to be about getting your numbers bigger to win against the next boss. Games are art, and Earthbound is a good example why.

A place long ago and far away.

I never played Earthbound as a kid partly because it came a big box and for SNES games I figured that meant it had / needed a multi-tap and I’d need friends to play it. It also had the “it stinks” marketing campaign which I reacted to quite badly at the time. Fortunately, in recent years, YouTube has come along in the form of Chuggaconroy and Stephen Goerg (and friends) to show me just how great this game is.

I started playing Earthbound (on the WiiU Virtual Console) in early 2017 and played until mid-late 2018. So it’s been a while since I finished, and a really long time since I started. Still this game is so full of fun and interesting things that I wanted to talk about, that I thought I’d write a post.

As always, beware of spoilers for Earthbound. I totally recommend playing it yourself or watching a good Let’s Play.

Kay-o. You Thank.

Things I Liked

There’s practically nothing I didn’t like about Earthbound. It is, at its core an incredibly charming game in story and style, that has a really interesting combat system. As with a lot of SNES RPGs of the era, the store is somewhat simple, but filled with interesting and well-rounded characters. As you journey around the world every place you go is unique, memorable and interesting, and every character you meet is also unique, memorable and interesting.

Bones bones bones

Playing Earthbound I left, feeling as though I had been to another world and met ,learned about and loved people along the way. This particularly included the characters in the main party, I can’t think of a lot of other games from this era (or honestly ever) where the party was this deeply characterized with understandable motivation and struggles in the world.

I also liked the art style in. It’s simple, but very visually appealing, and everything was clear and easy to see. The battle system in particularly is fascinating with large and interesting art along with Earthbound’s notorious psychedelic backgrounds. I think there’s almost no chance that anyone who’s seen Earthbound would ever confuse a screenshot with any other game (except maybe its sequel).

Very rewarding.

The music is also quite iconic, helping to illuminate the style and feeling of the world. It’s a mix of cheerful and creepy. It’s style is very varied from, SNES meets rock-and-roll in the early urban areas or synthetic weirdness when you’re fighting the UFOs and Robots in the creepy underground bases.

More specifically I love the scrolling health mechanism. The combat is turn based, but when you take damage, rather than the damage being taken from your HP right away, your HP ticks down over a (relatively) short period of time. In the case of big or fatal damage, this gives you enough time to use a healing item or cast a healing spell, which will start healing you from wherever your HP has ticked down to, cause your health to tick up (much faster than it ticks down).

 Combat via GameFAQs user Eevee-Trainer

I think this is a fantastic mechanism for a number of reasons. First off, it keeps you interesting in and focused on the combat, because you always need to be ready to abandon your planned command in the menu and get to healing as quickly as possible. This felt to me like a really good method as opposed to some of the Active Time Battle present in other games like the Mario RPG family.

I also like it aesthetically. The HP counter is styled as an [odometer] rolling number, and so the ticking is styled as the number rolling down. Something about that really just appeals to me (although I’d love to see it styled as a train-station flip clock). Finally, it has provoked a thought about how you could structure HP and damage differently in a game, which I will talk about more later.

The final thing I wanted to talk about in the things I love is the way they handle mismatches between your level and the enemy level. Lots of SNES RPGS which came before (and after actually) forced you to keep fighting low level enemies in low level areas long after you were levelled up. In Earthbound, thanks to their visible enemy system, where enemy sprites are visible on the real world and you touch them to initiate combat, enemies will actually run from you if they think they can’t defeat you. This means that if you want the XP you can go after them, but if you don’t want to they’ll stay out of your way.

The enemies flee! via GameFAQs user Eevee-Trainer 

This is also combined with the other nice effect of the visible enemy system. If you surprise the enemy you get an extra round of attack (and if they surprise you they do). When they’re running you automatically get that extra round, and if the game calculates that you’d win in that round it doesn’t make you even enter the fight. It just gives you the XP and your other rewards for the fight. This is a wonderful touch in the game and honestly a thing that a lot of games still don’t implement that nicely.

Things I Didn’t Like

There’s not much I don’t like about Earthbound and a lot of them are easily forgiven seeing as this game had a very difficult development cycle and has some incredible things built into it.


The one thing that constantly frustrated me playing Earthbound was the inventory. It’s small and there are a lot of things that need to go into it and it’s often not very clear what a lot of items do and when you need them. Now that being said compared to a lot of other games it’s a much more effective system and it has things like a callable storage company that will take things to storage for you and bring it back, all you have to do is find a phone, call and wait in a place they feel safe to get to.

At least they're speedy via Earthbound Wiki

Still, “cleaning the fridge” is a regular activity, probably every hour or so. The mechanics for doing so are clunky and the whole thing just grinds the game to a halt. So a little more flexibility in design and a little more explanation would have been nice.

Another  element they introduced which seemed like a good idea at the time is condiments. These alter the effects of your healing items. Ketchup on your hamburger improves the amount of HP you get back and sugar improves a cup of coffee (which I think gives you magic points). On the other hand ketchup in your coffee is supposed to make it worse, as is sugar on your hamburger.

Unfortunately, if you want to use it you have to keep it in your inventory and the game decides automatically which condiment to apply (and not always the best one). This means that you lose a inventory spot, for a chance to improve one healing item, not quite as much as having two of the same healing item. So the whole system becomes useless and cumbersome. Not that the developers could be expected to make one, but a rudimentary crafting system would have made this work really well. It might also have tied in nicely with the PC who builds and fixes things.

The game is also a bit slow. That’s probably somewhat intentional, but the maps are large and intricate and sometimes it takes a very long time to go anywhere, even if the enemies are running from you. There is a fast travel system (and a very nicely diegetic one at that), but it has a limited number of places you can be dropped off, so you still get to walk.

The final thing I didn’t like about Earthbound was it’s ad campaign. I’m not sure that, being the kid I was in the 90s I’d have liked Earthbound. I had strong opinions that if you didn’t have swords and magic, it wasn’t an RPG. I *might* have come around on Earthbound, but the whole It Stinks ad campaign they ran with back when the game was new turned me right off. I hated scratch-and-sniff and the whole it’s gross so boys will love it thing in the 90s just turned me off.

It's not the game’s fault, but I think a different campaign might have brought me in (also a smaller box, since I assumed that all of the big snes boxes were for multi-taps and I didn’t really have much in the way of video-game playing friends as a kid.

Serious nostalgia vibes now. Fear then. via Some Google Archive

Things I Noticed

It would have been nice to have a little more gender parity in the party, the world and the story in general. Paula, the only female playable character is portrayed as very strong, but is also quite stereotypically girly. On its own I think that’s great, but having a different type of female character would have been a nice balance to the game. She is also kidnapped significantly more often than her male counterparts. Given that this is a game developed in Japan in the 1990s, it's not outrageous for its time, but it does feel limited in light of a lot of modern games and media.

These are pretty cool. via starmen.net

As I mentioned I did not play this game as a kid for a variety of reasons. That being said I’m not sure that this is ever a game I’d have liked as a kid. It feels as though it is intended for a much more mature audience, with more uncomfortable ideas, more disturbing situations and more complex problems to be solved. Given some of the discussion I’ve seen about this games development that’s intentional and I think it’s good to have a game that does a good job of maturity and complexity of story.

Things I’d Include In a Game

The first thing I’d include in a game is the active health system for a menu based RPG. I think there’s a lot of neat ways to play with it including to alter the spin speed as status based attack or to somehow mess with the numbers. I’ve also been considering a version which is some kind of liquid system where you pour health in and the enemies try to pour health out and you’re trying to manage keeping more going in than they’re getting out.

I also think I’d like to look at more audiences for games. I recognize this is not a unique thing at this point, but I like the idea that two games with similar mechanics could be aimed at very different audiences depending on how their story is constructed.

The final thing I think everyone should include in their games is the attention to detail. I love the attention to paid to the detail in both the story and the programming and while I know there’s a ton of people who worked on this game, I feel like Shigesato Itoi and Satoru Iwata really poured a lot of themselves in to the game.

Final Things

I’m really glad I played Earthbound. I’m also really glad I played it as an adult, because that gave me a lot of perspective on the story and the characters.

I’m also really glad I got to play Earthbound. A few years before it was released for the WiiU I remember walking around the local comic convention and seeing Earthbound boxes for $1000 a pop. It’s not that easy to find physically and it’s really nice that it got a digital release for the WiiU. I’m hoping that Nintendo remembers how important that kind of access is and makes sure that everyone will always be able to have access to important games like this one.

Somehow still a question 24 years later.

Blog: Thoughts on Paper Mario: Color Splash

It's colour and it's splashy. (Yeah, still haven't fixed the internet problem on my Wii U)

I picked up Paper Mario: Color Splash because I wanted something new, different, and not that hard to play. I’m trying not to buy too much while finish my PhD, and I thought Color Splash might be the right thing to tide me over until I can get caught up again. There will be some spoilers for Color Splash - I hate to tell you but Bowser might kidnap Princess Peach again, but wait til you see why he did it!

Toad is very firm in his beliefs.

While I've watched most of the Paper Mario games being Let's Played. I’ve never actually played one before. I’ve generally thought that they had a lot of heart and the localization team has had a lot of fun producing them. I really enjoyed Thousand Year Door and I’ve thought most of the others were pretty good. Color Splash fits in that model, and while I didn't love it, I certainly like it a lot.

Things I Liked

Paper Mario: Color Splash is very charming. From the visual style, to the characters, to the writing it was a delight to play. It definitely has some issues, as I’ll discuss in the Things I Didn’t Like, but overall it’s fun.

The first thing I really liked is the colour. I am a fan of bright colour and rainbow things and this game certainly provides. Beyond that, the Woolly World / physical paper style is fantastic. Mario is a piece of paper. The enemies are pieces of paper. If you hit the enemies with your hammer they crumple.

Don't worry that's just a country side cafe, with extra large decorative knives, getting rolled up above you.

At the same time the paper craft is used to build a really “realistic” and fun world. As you go through the world you see a shiney rock and suddenly realize it’s aluminum foil. Or you a log and realize that it’s rolled corrugated cardboard. Or you walk along a nice ridge and then some jerks roll it up and trap you in it.

I also liked the world of Prisma Island. You travel around on a Super Mario Bros. 3 / Mario World style map. At first I was a little worried that it would be too highly “levelized,” with no reason to go back to a level once you finished it. But there were interesting characters in different locations and just about every level had at least two reasons to go back, and was a little different every time you went through. Each level felt unique, and there were "biomes" across the game that felt like you were travelling between different areas, where there were common stylistic elements shared between the levels.  The world felt dynamic, alive, and interesting at every point of the game.

I'd visit.

Part of the world feeling alive is that, despite the fact that it might be really hard to tell the Toads apart, every single character is has well written, unique dialog. Everyone in every town has a personality and it’s easy to remember them. Like the bridge repair expert, and the bridge repair expert expert who helps you find the bridge repair expert (they’re especially memorable because they both get really happy whenever you use the bridge they repaired in town).

So happy!

The Rescue Squad Toads were also phenomenal, there were at least a hundred of them, in various colour squads. Each squad helps Mario do a thing usually by becoming a patch in the world (and they don’t mind if you step on them, or drive a train over them). Each Toad in a rescue squad has a personality, and has a different thing to say. At one point you and the 50 Red Rescue Squad Toads need to get in a circus. While you’re waiting all 50 toads have something different to say and they’re all witty, or interesting, or both. The attention to detail that the localizers put into this game is phenomenal.

They may be construction material, but they are glorious.

The writing overall is really good. The game is very self aware, and comedic, and it’s really enjoyable to read the plot, the side plots, and the NPCs just standing around. The story is not a heartbreaking work of literary genius, but for a Mario game, it’s unique, fun and a little different.

Things I didn’t Like

I played about 50 hours of Color Splash, and I probably enjoyed 40 of those. Unfortunately, this game is kinda cavalier with your time, and that can make it very frustrating. The first example of this is simply the game over mechanic. This game is old school, if you lose a fight, you go back to your last save. Also, did I mention that there are hazards in the world that can kill you? There are, so if you’re not careful - and sometimes if you are careful but the game designers are feeling like it would be fun for you to do that last bit over again - you’ll suddenly get blown back to your last save.

The game, and the colour, is over.

I will say that the game is generally good about saving every time you leave a level and there are save blocks positioned in fairly useful places. However even then on several occasions I found myself dead by surprise and suddenly way back with a lot to repeat again.

The game is also aware of its game over mechanic. Several times, early in the game I’d die to a boss only to have Huey pop up and tell me that I hadn’t done the fight correctly. Later in the game this didn’t happen as much but I still felt a that the game over penalty wasn’t required and there must have been a different way to handle the fact that the game is *fairly* easy.

I actually found regular fights pretty fun, instead of picking your commands from a menu you pick cards out of a hand, and then it’s back to the old fashioned action commands to thump enemies. As with all Paper Mario games, you need to take care that you choose the right type of attack for the right enemies (don’t jump on the spikey things).

Stomp, hammer, fire your way to victory.

Where I found things broke down in combat was in the boss fights. I mentioned Huey telling me I was fighting wrong, well the bosses in Color Splash all have a CORRECT WAY (™) to fight them. In general you have to find a card out in the world (a “thing”) and use that think to break whatever is keeping you from actually fighting them. On the one hand this makes the boss fights interesting and different than your regular encounters. On the other this means that almost inevitably you’ll go into a fight having not found, not gone back for, or having used the thing you need to actually win the fight. And then you die.

Better yet are the times when you have the thing but you don’t use it the right way. Did you use the balloons? Well, too bad, because right now Ludwig isn’t vulnerable to that. He’ll be vulnerable to that later. So you die.The game isn’t bad about explaining when you get to the right point that you should use the thing, but it’s still kinda easy to jump ahead and get yourself in trouble.

Morton might be be the brightest candle in the box, but he sure tried hard.

All of the main bosses work this way, but the worst example was probably the steak. Yes, there’s a boss about 2/3s of the way through the game where you have to cook a steak. So you have to tenderize it appropriately (which, i mean Paper mario does love clobbering things with hammers so - great), apply salt and pepper, apply lemon juice and grill it to medium rare. That requires three “things” you find out in the world. That are all found in different levels (although there is at least a shop in town where you can retrieve any “thing” you’ve found once in the world). Then you have to apply them in the correct amounts in the correct order. I think I fought the steak 5 times before I got it right. You don’t die if you don’t cook the steak right but you do have to buy the steak to fight again each time.

Overall, I do think the boss fights add a lot to the game, they are at least different and interesting. I’m not sure they’re fun, but I wouldn’t say they're bad. What I would say is that they feel a lot like the developers included the mechanics to slow the game down for you. I get needing patience to play, I suck at dark souls, but I recognize that I need to put the time in to “git good”. In Paper Mario: Color Splash I feel like I am good and the game’s just hitting on my ignorance. While I loved it, I was definitely frustrated at times.

This carries over to some of the puzzles in the game, they’re very long and you have to start over when you do something wrong (or sometimes when you do everything right). There’s one level late in the game where you fight your way through the forest, have to avoid the surprisingly accurate hammer brothers circus act and then you discover three “paint stars” next to each other, which means that not only was it a slow and relatively difficult level, you have to play it three times in a row for no reason.

I think my frustration also comes back to the use of save points. The game only saves when you leave a level or hit a save blocks, so when you’re infiltrating the Yellow Sniffit’s base to get the a Cafe Owner back (cafe owners are very plot important), you have to play the whole level in one sitting or start again and do the 30 minute trip to the base and then the hour long base.

I sniffed the need for a quick save feature.

(I’m wondering now if there were save points that I missed / forgot about, but still it would have been nice to just suspend and come back later. Additionally the mechanic of saving in a level and coming back is a little confusing.)

I think I was most frustrated by the part where you have to guide a ship through a spooky violet passage. That level had an “on the ground” portion, and then you had to sail the ship through a number of fairly challenging challenges, navigating rocks and shooting stuff. It probably wasn’t that bad but I was tired, I wanted to stop, but I didn’t want to give up all the work I’d done to get that far.

The game has banners in the main town square where it celebrates how many coins you’ve picked up, how many times you’ve whacked things with your hammer really well, how many times you’ve used your scissors to cut up the back ground, how much paint you’ve smashed onto things, and - how many times you’ve won a game of rock paper scissors. While 100%ing the game is not really rewarded, it is nice to see those banners unfurled, so I tackled those parts of the completion quest. Over all they’re fun enough, especially with a friend shouting everytime they see something you missed. The Roshambo however is a bit of a different beast.

Achievement Unlocked - wait, that feels wrong here...

For - reasons - Roshambo is the religion(?) on Prisma Isle. There are Roshambo Temples at least where you compete against your enemies in - the ultimate rock-paper-scissors showdown. I actually like about half of how this was put together, Toads outside the temple give you hints about what your opponents are likely to play and you can use that to help figure out a pretty good strategy to play.

The part I don’t like however is that if the Toads don’t know then you’re just playing random rock-paper-scissors. The final “boss” of each temple works that way, and the whole of the final temple. For the first 7 temples this means you need to take a couple of runs at them, for the 8th temple this means you have to win 3 rock-paper-scissors matches in a row, which works out (if I did the math right) to a 4% chance of winning on any run. While I know I didn’t have to do it, it did take me an hour to get done. I’m happy I got all the banners displayed in town, but I think there’s a better way to implement that.

You are truly the king of randomly picking things over and over and over.

The last thing I didn’t like about this game is a design decision. If you’re going to write a funny game, maybe put the jokes on the screen the player is looking at rather than the one they can’t look at? I was lucky to play with my partner because she would read me the enemy dialog that they should while I picked cards on the WiiU Tablet. Given how well the game is written I was pretty disappointed in that decision.

Generally, the use of the WiiU tablet was unusually weak in this game. When you’re moving around the over world, the tablet screen only displays a button to press to get into the menu. And you have to touch the touch screen to get into the pause menu rather than using any of the controller buttons (like, +, which would make sense). It wouldn’t have cost them anything to put the status screen you can get in the menu up all the time while you play, let alone just make the tablet screen usable like it is in other games (Wind Waker HD, for example). It’s also really slow, which suggests to me that there was some sort of information or optimization problem going on in the background.

This is neither interesting, nor useful.

The structure of the card mechanic is also weird. Your job in the game is to take cards out of your (eventually) 99 card sized hand, put them into your “palette”, “paint” them and then throw them at the enemy where they turn into your moves for a standard Paper Mario battle. First, picking through your hand is hard, especially as it gets large, secondly as you move between the different phases of organizing your cards you have to press buttons on the interface and the number of times I tried to go on to the next phase or looked back at the screen is high. I think some careful UI / UX work on the tablet would have gone a huge way to making this a more satisfying game to play.

Things I Noticed

This game has too many mechanics. It starts off well with the standard Paper Mario, go around the world and hit things with your hammer (or maybe jump on them). In the paper would this is really engaging as there are a ton of interesting paper-craft things in the world for you to hit with your hammer. This is especially when you get the temporary unfolding power which lets you make really cool things, by hitting them with your hammer. That brings us to one and a half mechanics before really starting.

Peach calls it like she sees it, when necessary.

Next we have the paint. Paint is effectively your mana in Color Splash. You and your paint can buddy Huey, are trying to recover the paint stars and in order to do that you have to recover all of the paint that’s spread around the world. Some paint is just sitting out whereas other paint has to smashed out of things with your hammer. Your primary enemies are shy guys with straws and they suck the paint out of things and steal it, so you get an extra ability to hit things with your hammer to smash colour back into them. (This is very funny - to me - when you’re resuscitating toads by smashing them with the hammer. I’ve been calling it first aid by cranial trauma, but it’s okay since they’re made out of paper and can just iron themselves out.) Again this seems like a mechanic and a half so let’s call it three mechanics, so far.

Paint, available everywhere you hit things with hammers.

Next, you have cut outs. These depend on you positioning the camera in such a way that something in your view of the game world makes a shape and then pressing a button so that you can get out your “MAGIC SCISSORS” and cut your view of the world and then sometimes put things into the cut outs, sometimes get things out of the cut outs and sometimes jump into the cut outs so you can get somewhere in the world that you can’t do normally. Firstly, these are asinine, and my least favourite thing to do in the game. I regularly forgot I could, and they didn’t make sense with the rest of the world. Either way the game expects you to do this frequently to progress and that brings us to four mechanics just for getting around the world.

I did not feel very challenged by this part.

Next they introduce the “things”. Things are - things - which are rendered in a “realistic” fashion as opposed to the paper-craft style of the world, so they stand out. These include lemons, desk fans, statues of cats, washing machines, teapots, plungers and many, many more. As I already said they play a critical role in boss fights, but are also used generally for combat and they also manipulate the world in a lot of situations. I liked the things and I thought they added to the light hearted fun of the game, but again they were a different mechanic that had to be monitored. You could go out in the world and find the things or (if you’d already found them once) you could go to “the squeezer” in the main town and just buy one (and squeeze it to get a card). There was also a toad that would give you hints about which “thing” you were going to need next. Given their uses we could probably call them three different mechanics, but let’s give them game and keep them as one whole mechanic, which brings us to five different mechanics.

Oh no, it's a giant fan! We're made from paper!

Within combat there are two main twin mechanics, one is standard Paper Mario combat, with hammer hits and jumps, which you have to act on with “timed hits” pressing buttons at just the right moment to block an attack or to hit your attack properly. In the “good” Paper Mario games you decide which attack your going to do out of a menu. In more recent games they’ve made battle commands expendable items. In Color Splash, to jump on an enemy you have to have jump card.

To use a card you have to pick it out of your hand and throw it at the enemy. As the game goes on you can throw more cards, but every card you throw is gone, so you don’t want to throw to many cards if you don’t have to. The cards are also basically useless unless you paint them, so you have to use some of your paint to colour in the shapes on the cards so they’re powerful. Thankfully the game only requires you to tap and hold on them while does the actual painting.

On the surface that’s two and a half more mechanics, bringing us to seven, but then you have to deal with the number of different cards and the different ways they work. So you have the standard cards, hit with a hammer, jump, which then have a half different dozen flavours each (which change up the effectiveness and timing of the timed hits). You also have fire flowers to throw fireballs, and ice flowers, and mushrooms to refill your paint and mushrooms to refill your health - plus some other cards too. Then you have enemy cards where in you can call in a temporary ally, which might or might not actually help you fight, but yay, now you have a goomba buddy for the next 30 seconds. Then you have the thing cards which mostly will wipe out all the enemies, except when they don’t. All of these you might find pre-painted or have to paint yourself, and you have to make sure you have enough cards, but not too many cards or you can’t pick up the new cards (which might be the thing cards you need to fight the boss). And then you have the emergency card system where you can pay money to the game to give you an emergency card (that’s helpful but not too helpful) to help you in case you run out of cards. And that’s still excluding the boss fights where you might or might not need to use a thing to do something other than what it usually does to do something to the boss so you can fight them. Oh and then there are the times where Kamek decides to flip all your cards around, or just steal all your cards, or whatever.

It's enough to make a guy droop.

So, yeah. That’s a lot of mechanics. That’s also only the regular mechanics, there’s many, many more one-off examples, such as the 2D/3D Super Mario Bros. 3 game you jump into, or the Dragadon which you can jump on and have it carry you around a volcano, but only if you have an item that you have to get in the level that is literally the farthest away you can be from the volcano.

Over all, I feel like the game could have used a little bit of editing. None of the mechanics are awful - although I really didn’t care for the cut-outs, but there’s just a lot and figuring out how what mechanic you’re supposed to use for this particular situation. As far as I can tell the game is also not very generous with allowing you to find different solutions to a problem using different mechanics.

Interestingly after all that. There’s one, one-time mechanic I wish I’d seen more in the game. In the final fight with Bowers, you have to get black paint off of him and jam it back into your paint can friend Huey. This was hard, especially because it required really skilled blocking, but I thought it really fit well into the theme of the game and was honestly a lot more interesting than the thing mechanics they used for all the other bosses - Bowser does still have a thing mechanic, but the paint capture is more prominent. I think they could have use a mechanic like that to much more effect throughout the game.

Bowser's covered in ink. Your only option is to smack him with a hammer until he's clean.

Things I’d Include in a Game

First and foremost I would love to make a game which is as charming, funny, fun and entertaining as this. While I definitely have my gripes, I loved playing this game and I think it’s a thing people should look at frequently to ensure that we have a real diversity of genre, theme and style in video games.

Friendship, a sidequest.

The other thing I think I’d like to include in a game is the combat system, at least somewhat revised. The card system they use works, and it does promote using several different play styles as you run low on one type of card or another. I think the weapon breaking mechanism from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild does this better, but it does get at keeping players on their toes and preventing people from having one solution to everything.

I think I’d rather see the game structured as more of a deck builder - similar to Legendary or Star Realms. In this way rather than collecting disposable cards, you collect a card you can put in your deck and then use that same deck regularly to take out enemies. That would allow a lot of diversity in different decks for different worlds and then different decks for different bosses. I’m not sure how well it would work but I think it would make the combat a little bit more consistent and enjoyable - at least for me.

Final Things

This is a good game. It’s fun, it’s bright, it’s rainbow coloured, it’s funny. It’s worth you time. I also got really frustrated playing it. Thinking back I think that’s more of a comment on me than it is on the game. Obviously there’s things that could have had a more streamlined design or a more thoughtful implementation, but over all the game is a lot of fun. I think I needed to slow myself down and just relax and enjoy it. I think I got a level of difficulty and a style of play in my head and when the game didn’t do that I was annoyed.

I wanted a game that would distract and entertain me. This game does that. I should have let it do that more and I hope if you’re looking for a game to entertain it will do that for you as well.

Paper Mario, best credit sequences, no question!

Blog: Thoughts on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

As I write this, I’ve played 162 hours of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I think that may be all I need to tell you about the game. It has enough depth that one 110 hour play through didn’t exhaust all of the fun in the game and now, 52 hours into a Master Mode run, I’m seeing things I’ve never seen before and I’m still having a ton of fun.

Out of the cave and off to explore.

Beyond being the game I turn on pretty much every time I get some time to play, I think that Breath of the Wild is a great demonstration of how video games can be made. In making Breath of the Wild, the creators looked deeply at all of the decisions made in all of the previous games in the Zelda franchise, and evaluated whether every aspect of game play was important to the game, or not. The result is a game, that, for me at least, has at least 162 hours worth of play in it.

I think Breath of the Wild should be required reading for everyone making games. It stands head and shoulders above games in the Zelda series. I’ve never been a huge fan of open world games, but compared to the ones I’ve played, BotW stands head and shoulders above those as well.

As always, this post contains spoilers for the whole of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I will say that I’m not sure how much spoilers will really influence your enjoyment of this game. As I discuss below, it’s not a game about the journey, not the destination. Still, I think now is probably a good time to start your first hundred hours.

Things I Liked

I’m not sure how apocryphal the story is, but apparently the seeds of Zelda were formed when Shigeru Miyamoto was young, and exploring the wilderness near his home. As he climbed over a hill he saw the entrance to a cave, and got a thrill of adventure, "Let's go see what's there!" Years later, when designing the original The Legend of Zelda, he took that thrill as a guide: Let’s go on adventure and see all of the amazing things in the world.

Through the tunnel and then...

Breath of the Wild returns to that point: Let’s go on adventure, and see all of the amazing things in the world. You get a stick to hit bad guys with, (which I missed for the first couple hours in my first play through) and you can eat apples to refill your health, and you can go anywhere you want.

The game does put you through a small tutorial. Although as Zelda tutorials go it is incredibly short and sweet. You have to visit four shrines (mini dungeons) on the opening “Great Plateau”  to get the four powers (Freezing objects in time, Lifting metal objects, Placing square or round bombs, and creating frozen platforms in water). This gives you all of the powers you’ll need in the game. You have every tool right up front, it’s up to you to learn how to use them.

Additionally, visiting the four shrines gives you four orbs, which you can trade to The Goddess to get an extra heart of health or an extra chunk of stamina (or not, that’s cool too). With that, and a rough pointer to where someone will give you more ideas of things to do in the world you’re on your own.

From there, you can go and beat the game. You can walk down the hill, climb the Castle and kick Ganon in the teeth (if you’re good enough). For completeness, there is one quest that the game wants you to finish before, which gives you “the best ending,” but there’s absolutely nothing else holding you back.

Hyrule Castle is always there

Except, it’s really not a game for beating. It’s a game for exploring. Even as you work on the first four shrines, you see things off in the distance that catch your interest. Is that a shrine down there? Is that a flying city? Why is that mountain split in two? What’s up on that ridge? Is that a dragon? Then as you start to investigate things you get new inklings of things out there that you should check out.

You’ll meet people in the world, they might give you quest to do something for them, or they might give you a quest to go find a particular shrine, or they might just mention something that’s neat in the next valley over. Over and over you’ll find there’s a new next thing to do, just over there, and then over there, and then over there and then over there.

Adventure is right over there.

The game gives you so many “over there”s. The world is huge, and tightly packed, and there is always somewhere to explore. While there may not be “story” at each point, everywhere you go is interesting: This outcropping looks cool, Hey that’s neat the way the waterfall flows through there, Huh, what an interesting place for a grave. Sometimes you are rewarded with the experience itself, but often the creators leave a Korok there to say, yeah, we thought this was cool too!

Where there is story, it’s often told through the environment. Guardians piled up against a wall where the Hylians made their last stand a hundred years ago, Old rusted weapons left leaning against the remnant of houses in a destroyed town, The makeshift barricade thrown up halfway across the bridge. As I played I felt like every view I saw was carefully crafted, so even though the world is giant, it isn’t sparse and it all feels like part of a cohesive whole.

What happened here over the last hundred years?

One thing I loved about Breath of the Wild, is the way it gives you a thrill as you reach somewhere new. I’m reminded of playing Illusion of Gaia, or Secret of Mana when I was a kid. You’d finish up somewhere and then you’d get whisked off to a new part of the world, where there were new cool things to do, see, and fight. Except, in Breath of the Wild, you don’t have to wait for the story to take you. If you want to go see a new cool thing, climb a mountain and see which way the cool takes you.

Another beautiful thing about Breath of the Wild is it’s ability to surprise you. The world is so big, and in 110 hours, I felt like I’d seen most of it. Starting a second play through, I saw things I’d missed before. Often things I’d missed by being just on the wrong side of a hedge or a valley, or even I’d flown directly over without looking down, or back at the right angle. There were also parts of the world I’d just somehow never wandered too.

One quest I got fairly early in my first play through was to find a woman who was washed down a river. I never found her. Not in 110 hours of searching (I mean, I didn’t spend all 110 hours looking, but my eyes were always open). On the one hand this is can be frustrating, but on the other hand what an amazing game that there can be a mission in “plain sight” that I can’t do, just because I’m not thinking the right way or looking in the right place.

The first DLC pack is generally great. The best part of the DLC, though, might be the “Hero’s Path”. The Hero’s Path allows you to see exactly where you’ve been over the last 200 hours of game play. Having finished my first play through, I now have the chance to go back, and find the place’s I haven’t found before. I think it might have robbed some of the exploration from the first play through, but I’m really enjoying it in the second. It’s also a fantastic storytelling tool and often when I’m done playing for the day I’ll just rewind the Hero’s Path and watch my own progress from the last little while.

My adventure this far.

The other great addition in the first DLC is Master mode. In it the game bumps up the level of the bad guys by a bit, and adds in a few new things to make you more wary traveling through the world. But it’s not just a simple change in difficulty, master mode has reformed the game for me, and made it just as engaging as it was the first time around, if not more so. Now, you have to be careful and think a lot more about where you want to go, how you want to get there and what you’re going to do when you get there. It forces you back out into the space of the game, and then gets to surprise you all over again.

I think the creators spent a lot of time thinking about how to push players out into the world. One of my favourite aspects of the game is the rain. If you look around online, you see a lot of people complaining about the rain. It makes it hard to do what you want to do. In Breath of the Wild, you can basically climb anything you want, so long as you have the stamina, and if you spend a little time with the cooking pot you can usually have the stamina. When it rains though, everything gets slippery, and it gets very hard to climb anything.

A dark and stormy night.

This makes people upset, because it “takes away their choice,” but I think it actually makes the game stronger. It makes you stop and think about how you’re trying to solve a problem. Why would I go look at the path at the back of the hill, when I can just straight climb up the steep side? Rain.

Rain makes you rethink your plans, and it pushes you to see new things in the game. Similarly, weapons and shields break, which again force you to adjust and adapt how you want to solve the problems in front of you. They both feel a little overused, so I think it would have been nice to see them spiced up with some other ways of making your readjust your plans.

I like the way the decide to break up the challenge of the game. In most Zelda games (especially the 3D ones) the overworld is there for your to explore, but is mostly just the place where you travel between dungeons and story bits. There might be some combat, there might be a some puzzles and there will be a few cool things to see and explore. Then in dungeons there will be puzzles linked together in some order (checkout Mark Brown’s series Boss Keys to see how those links have evolved over time), with combat thrown in between.

How many shrines can you see right here?

Breath of The Wild is about seeing the world, so it wouldn’t make sense for the game to shove you into a dungeon for hours and hours at a time. Instead you get a little bit of overworld exploration (possibly while following a quest or a clue) and then a little bit of dungeon challenge. It’s another mark of how this game holds to its theme of Adventure over everything else.

I especially like the times when the game pulls the puzzles out of the shrines and into the world. A few times you will find an ancient labyrinth, or other challenge, in the world and have to traverse it. At the end of these overworld challenges you get shrines where you don’t get a challenge, you only get a reward, which again is a nice, “You found (or did) something cool” moment.

Then there was the time I got stuck in a labyrinth.

I think one of the things to like best about Breath of the Wild is just how tightly the creators stuck to the theme of Adventure. Every aspect of the game calls back to it, and, while some of the other aspects of the game such as combat or story may be a little weakened by that, it creates a special experience that is really rewarding.

Things I didn’t Like

There’s not too many things that I don’t like about Breath of the Wild. The biggest is probably unfair given my tendencies as an AI researcher and a fan of simulation games, but they cheated with the NPCs. You don’t notice it too much, other than possibly that guy carrying all the stuff somehow made it from that other stable quicker than you did, … on your horse …, but the NPCs aren’t doing much in the world if you’re not right there. There are times where you’ll catch an NPC “leaving” then follow them as they walk just out of sight of somewhere, then turn around and “be arriving” again.

The cutest, and probably most story aware NPCs.

I know that you only really need “enough” AI to make the game work, but deep in my heart I’d have loved to see the people of the world implemented a little more realistically. It would be fun to see someone travel across the world trying to accomplish their own goals and it would make the world more immersive. At the end of the day it’s not game breaking, or even actually that annoying, but it is a thing I always hope for and the rest of the game has such attention to detail.

Another (small) problem I had with the game is that the the combat does get a little repetitive. Effectively there are three main types of enemies (bokoblins, lizalfos and moblins) you’ll meet and fight as you go through the game, with a few more “mid boss” style ones for special occasions. These three types of enemies can all wield a bunch of different kinds of weapons, and so can you, but eventually it feels a bit like you’ve done it all.

A fight, which was cool (but that I did not win) 

I’d have liked it if the game had a little more combat diversity, and a few more enemies that popped up at different times or different places. Beyond that if there were a few different ways to fight it would have made the combat a little more engaging. Between the combat sameness and the increased difficulty I’ve found in my Master Mode playthrough, I’ve skipped combat fairly often. (Which may have been a part of their plan to force me out to explore more again).

The other aspect of the game that feels like it could use more diversity is the architectural design. You wake up in a world 100 years after the near destruction of the world by Ganon, and before the world was almost destroyed the kingdom was trying to retrieve relics from a hyrule 10,000 years past. This seems like a lot of history, but it feels boiled down to “recently built stuff,” “stuff Ganon smashed,” “ruins” and “stuff from 10,000 years ago”. There are some differences, especially in the modern buildings, but it’s a little disappointing to travel through a vast unique landscape and arrive at a ruin that’s 100% identical to the one you found last hour.

I don’t mind as much with the “tech” stuff, such as the shrines and the towers, they’re part of the game play and within the game it makes sense that the look like they do. But I found the ruins a little disappointing, especially given how dynamic and exciting all the natural landscape is. Again, it’s nothing game breaking, and I can’t imagine how much longer “more exciting man made artifacts” would have taken, so I’ll content myself with the natural wonders instead.

One moment in the world.

Oh. Motion control dungeons. Those suck. Doubly since I didn’t use the gamepad for 99% of my playthrough. Stop it Nintendo.

Things I Noticed

It’s not a good, or bad, thing, but reducing the role of dungeons really changes the face of a Zelda Game. Thinking about what I remember of different games from the past, I find that I can remember the dungeons of a game (especially a zelda game) far better than I can anything about the world, the story or the mechanics. I’m worried then that as it ages Breath of the Wild may just dissolve into a pleasant feeling.

Divine Beast Van Medoh watching over the Rito Village

The lack of dungeons is interesting, because I think I’d say to you that it makes the game a little less engaging, but on the other hand I spent an hour hour last night running along a mountain range and didn’t feel disengaged once. I’d also be tempted to say that the game feels a little sparse, but there again I think you’re finding something new every few minutes and as I already said, the game is always ready with the next “go over there”.

I guess that means that this is a low-density game. And I guess since it works, a low-density game works. One aspect of the open world design is that there’s much less of a difficulty spike across the game, most shrines are about as hard as any other and the great beast dungeons are not that much harder either.

The World 

I think this risks making the game tepid. I think the creators kept the game interesting through good design and relying on the Zelda mythos. I suspect that if a new IP, like Horizon Zero Dawn, was this sparse in its design it would not be treated as well as Breath of the Wild has been. I think the fact that Breath of the Wild has more than a quarter century of history of Zelda games to draw on, saves it with a lot of gamers. It is able to use that history to shorthand a lot of things that another game might need to explain more fully.

I also feel a little conflicted about the way gender is handled in this game. This comes in two parts, one the gender roles implicit in the world and the other in the handling of gender identity and the Gerudo. At the end of the day I can’t say that the game handles either of these badly, so much as I think the creators didn’t take the opportunity to better consider these cases. I also suppose it’s worth noting that this is a Japanese game, and so it really doesn’t reflect my cultural biases.

The original Champions who support Zelda (the Princess) and Link (her Hero) are Daruk, Mipha, Revali and Urbosa. This gives you a gender balanced team, but it also gives you a team which died before the beginning of the game. In the game three  of the four champions’ descendants who help you enter the divine beasts are male. Now this is complicated by having two “species” who are monogendered one all males and one all females, but this means that the majority of the hero type people meet in the game are males unless they have to be women.

The Six Champions (from Zeldapedia)

This continues in the general NPC population. Of the people you meet out in the wild, the gender parity seems fairly even, but amongst the ones who interact with the monsters far more female characters need to be rescued vs the male characters who fight (though there are some of both). More generally in towns and at stables it feels a bit like there is “men’s work” and “women’s work”, which I don’t know is necessary in a fantasy game. The game is not terribly out of tune, but I still feel like there could have been better representation all around, especially among the action characters.

I was also bothered by the handling of the Gerudo. Gerudo are an all female race of humaniods (I think), into whom a male is born very rarely. In Breath of the Wild, the Gerudo are all women and they live in the desert, and only allow women from the other races to enter their walled city. Link can enter, but only when he’s received a Gerudo outfit from a man, who was using it to sneak into the city to … uh … well it is actually the nicest city.

At the Gate of Gerudo Town (and sorry I didn't have a screen shot of Link in his Gerudo outfit)

So that’s one part of the problem, the game enforces a fairly strict gender binary, and deviations tend to be treated more as jokes than as serious moments. Even if Link does look somewhat androgynous (a decision the creators made on purpose), the game is serious about letting you know that he’s MALE.

The other part of the problem is that, while the Gerudo are a proud warrior race, they spend a lot of time researching how to find husbands. Because what else would a bunch of women do when they’re gathered together, I guess. It’s disappointing because a lot of the rest of the text in that part of the game is very explicit about how there’s really nothing holding women back from doing whatever they’d like.

I think that’s what bothers me about the way the game treats gender, it has the chance to do a lot of very interesting things and it doesn’t. It falls back to being tropy and so even where they do get something approaching a nuanced look at gender the rest of the game holds it back. For a game that questioned so much else about gaming and it’s own series history, it’s a little frustrating that this area didn’t receive nearly so much examination.

Treasure hunters (almost) defending themselves.

Things I’d Include in a Game

The biggest thing I think that I'd take out of Breath of the Wild is their fearlessness with the tutorials. Or, rather their lack of tutorials. Or, their fearlessness trusting their players. Especially considering that this is the series that insisted on teaching you how the money worked every time you started the game again.

There's quite a bit going on here really.

I did really enjoy how I was able to meet each new problem in the game with my own wits. I do feel like they reduced the overall difficulty of the game a little bit to compensate for this lack this, but they managed to produce a game that left me feeling fairly smart for the most part (and really dumb the two times I had to look things up).

The thing I wonder about reducing tutorials, is how much Breath of the Wild is able to rely on people having played a Zelda game before. By my calculation there have been more than 65 million copies purchased over all of the previous games (source). So, I wonder if it’s easier for Nintendo to rely on 30 plus years of history than it might be for a new company, or a new game. I certainly can’t tell having played almost all of the history of Zelda as the games came out.

Still I think the design of the game is a good one, regardless of how much history a player has with it. They limited the amount of mechanics in the game. Looking at the different items in various previous Zelda games, there’s usually somewhere between 6 and 12 different items/mechanics in the game (Taken quickly from Gamepedia). Breath of the wild has 6, if we count generously: bombs, Magnesis, Stasis, arrows, melee combat and Thrown Weapons. They aren’t even combined that often.

I spent an embarrassingly long time working this one out.

As I said, this does reduce the overall difficulty of the game, but in counter argument I’ve now played 162 of the game and I’m still happy. They’ve managed to introduce interest without complexity and I think that’s part of how I’ve managed to play so much. It’s not Darksouls and that’s fine, I don’t have to git good every time I play.

Breath of the Wild is also a great reminder that you can tell a compelling story without talking it to death. As a story Breath of the Wild is like a short story, whereas Skyward Sword is like a novel. Gameplay offsets this though and by keeping the story short and focused, it stays with me even when I’m not advancing it. Environmental storytelling in the world then helps reinforce that. I don’t know that this says you shouldn’t try to tell a big story in a game, but it certainly works well this way.

Final Things

I love The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I’m 162 hours in, and can easily see myself playing double that over the rest of the year, even before you count what the DLC adds to the game. I think if you’re looking for entertainment and fun in a game, this is where you should be looking. Play it, and I guarantee you an adventure.

Additionally, I think the game does a great job in revisioning how games are designed. As I said at the beginning, I think this should become required reading for all game makers in the future. The mix of story and gameplay and environment is fantastic and the trust the game shows its players is great. I don’t think, by any means, that all games should play like Breath of the Wild. I don’t even want the next Zelda to play exactly like this, but I do think that it says a lot about how deeply examined, bold choices will pay off. More than anything else, this game leaves me feeling inspired to play and create.