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.

Project 15: 12 Books in 21 Weeks: Update 5

Suddenly back in, I finished The Annihilation Score and The Nightmare Stacks, one of which took me a week or so to get into and the other of which I listened to straight through (basically). I think these are the two strongest in the Laundry Files so far and both were great (if slightly stressful) listens

Project 15: 12 Books in 21 Weeks: Update 4

More Stross, more Laundry. More Vampires? Don't be silly, vampires don't exist!

Project 1: The Blog - Season Seven

It’s August again. Which means it’s about that time that I decide what I’m going to do with the Blog again. So let me say “Happy (Belated) Blog Start and End Day”

As a quick reminder this blog comes in two parts, the Blog as Me Talking About Stuff, and the Blog as Project Report. Every year, on August 1, I wrap up a year’s blogging and decide if it’s worth doing it again next year. This way, there’s some concrete point where an ending can come if it needs to.

Last year, from August to the end of September, I blogged in what I’m thinking of as my “standard mode,” which means that I mostly posted Favourite Youtube posts, and kept track of my video game playing. In January I felt like I wanted to get further ahead on my PhD (yeah, I’m still working on it) as well as increase my focus on other projects, so I tried to reduce the amount of standard mode blogging I’m doing.

Each month since January, I’ve tried to keep up to date on my game tracking and then post a favourite youtube video if there’s some extra time. I’m roughly planning to continue the same way for the next year. Ideally two “non project posts” each month.

I have found the game tracking interesting. By the end of last year I felt overwhelmed, and tired, and didn’t want to do it any more. In particular, I had planned to do a few more posts than I did wrapping up the year. Then in January, I found it hard to stop tracking my play and then found that  if I got off my butt and posted the update post quickly each month, they were not too much extra effort.

For the next, I’m trying to get some more other things up and going. By this time next year my PhD needs to be finished. At the same time, I’m trying to take my other project time to get a few other things done. I’m working on same light game dev stuff, mostly teaching myself stuff I’d like to know how to do. I’m also working on some SciComm practice, I think the way my PhD has gone, I’d benefit from spending more time thinking about how we talk about computer science. Both of those should float up to posts in the next few weeks.

I should also mention that I turned ads on for the first time. I did this mostly as an experiment. I was curious how it would work. Additionally I’m hoping to spend more time communicating in a professional context in the future and it feels like if there’s any chance to offset the time I spend on this then I’d like to take it.

But there we go. Season seven, more of the same. Probably an episode where I put on some masks and pretend to be a bunch of different dead gods… wait, wrong season seven. I’ll check in again on August 1, 2018.

Project 15: 12 Books in 21 Weeks: Update 3

Back on the Stross wagon, with the next in the laundry files.

Blog: Video Games of of July 2017

July was a really busy month and so I didn't play too much, making it quite boring. My PC was also in pieces for most of the month so I was mostly down to console games. DLC 1 for Breath of the Wild also came out, so, you know, I mostly played that.

My top six games (by play time) for July were:

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Master Mode has breathed (pun sorta intended) a whole new games worth of play into Breath of the Wild. Another 30 hours played this month and I'm still loving it.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Mario Kart 8 - Really in a different category at only 3 and a bit hours played, but still a lot of fun.




3. Pokemon Go - Between the update and it being summer, it's been fun to haul this out again.





4. Cities: Skylines - I've been hoping to start making cooler cities. Everything I make tends to come out a little bit boxy. So I've been trying to think a little more creatively and make some neater places.


5. Marvel Puzzle Quest and Mario Golf: World Tour - A bit of an odd tie at just over an hour, both of the games I tend to play on breaks in the office. Either way, more fun playing two games which seem to show up here quite a bit.

Here's my total play time chart for July: 

And here's a graph of how much I've played over the month:

Project 15: 12 Books in 21 Weeks: Update 2

Back on the Stross wagon, with the next in the laundry files.

Project 15: 12 Books in 21 Weeks: Update

Really enjoyed reading through The Atrocity Archives again. Sadly The Jennifer Morgue is by a wide margin my least favourite of the Laundry Files, so I basically just skimmed it in audio book form.

Blog: Video Games of June 2017

I was busy in June and not in the headspace to sink too deeply into anything. So, my list for the month is a little shorter than usual. I guess, I also have to confess, that I stopped tracking Pocket Planes (which I did track last year), because I play it in weird bursts (30 seconds ever 2 minutes, or continuously for 3 hours), and because I play it when stressed, and I don't want to keep track of stress.

My top five games (by play time) for June were:

1. Mario Kart 8 - I decided back in May that it was time to GIT GOOD at Mario Kart 8. Since then, I've really been enjoying it. I can do about 4 150CC circuits in an hour and I can see substantial improvement. That's been fun and the online scene has been really vibrant and fun too.
   

   

   The look of this game makes me have all kinds of thoughts about Mario Odyssey.



2. Marvel Puzzle Quest - As always, this is my goto on my phone. Plus the game is showering us with stuff right now, and as long as you don't really care what you get, then you can just be happy to have something new to open. (Something, something, skinner box, pavlov, still having fun, something, something.)
   

   

   Time for Zap-Pow!



3. Pharaoh - You want a game that's not actually fun? Here's one. I technically love Pharaoh, and the walker-city genre in general, but seriously, this game can leave you spending hours working on a (unbeknownst to you) failed city without any real tools to fix things. It's a fun game, with great style and a great idea, but it seriously needs a modern take to make it properly enjoyable.
   

   

   I've been kicked out of my home and through no fault of my own. - from GameFAQs user yutjrft76



4. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - DLC 1 time, baby! Time to put another 110 hours in. Seriously, Master Mode is great. It puts the whole game back together in a new way, and it's making it exciting to play again, after the two pretty solid months I already put in. Both the game, and the DLC have been worth every penny.
   

   

   The Hero's Master Path



5. Sid Meyer's Covert Action - Yup, playing a game from 1990. Fortunately, the version on Steam works quite well, so I get to fulfill my urge to be a super spy. Plus, I've been thinking about trying to model a game on the concepts and style of Covert Action, so we can call this "research" even.
   

   

   Look at that box. How could you even have questions? - from GameFAQS user odino.

Here's my total play time chart for June:

And here's a graph of how much I've played over the month:

Project 15: 12 Books in 21 Weeks

Once upon a time, a few updates ago, I set myself a project of reading more. I've felt lately like I haven't been reading enough, so I'm back in with Project 15, 12 Books in 26 Weeks.

The plan is to read books (for non-research purposes) and enjoy it. I figure at roughly 2 books a month, that should wrap this whole thing up December 31, 2017.

Blog: Thoughts on Rakuen

I was pretty much always going to like Rakuen. I’ve admired Laura Shigihara’s work in video game music for a long time and I was excited when she started work on a game of her own, even though it meant we’d hear less from here for a while. Four years later, Rakuen is out and it’s a beautiful game. It’s an illustration of the space available in games to tell different stories and to tell stories differently. The stories it tells is heart warming and terribly sad and I think as a work it has important things to say about life, love, loss, forgiveness, perseverance, hope and sadness. I think the game is beautiful, and, like in life, you have to take the what you can from the beautiful and happy moments to help you through the hard ones.

Rakuen, a leather bound story and a cursor with a tail 

It is worth your time to play Rakuen. It’s $11 CAD and it will take about 10 hours. As I said, the story told in this game is important. I also think that the story is told in a game this way is also important. Video games are art. They are their own artform alongside books and movies and they let you experience story in a different way than any other medium. Rakuen exposes you to the feelings of its characters and it drives its story

This post will have spoilers for Rakuen and especially for the late game which I think it is important to discuss. As I said, I think you should play this game first. That being said, this game involves a lot of tough topics, including the death of children, both from accident and illness. It’s treated very respectfully, but it's not shied away from, so this may not be the game for you right now.

Things I Liked

Rakuen is a story game. It has puzzles and exploration, but no combat. You play the Boy and His Mom (neither of them get names) as they go around a hospital meeting other people in the ward and then travelling to Morizora's Forest to help them solve their problems.

I’m very lucky to have spent almost no time in hospital, but Rakuen’s hospital segments feel very genuine. It’s scary and strange and the noises are weird and people say a lot of words that don’t make very much sense. When you start out as the Boy everything feels overwhelming, you’re faced with a mysterious and scary visitor in the middle of the night when you can’t really move. Later you get to wander your hospital ward and start meeting people. You start to get a feeling that something’s not right with the hospital, but the people are nice, so it feels like things are on the edge of being ok.

The light in the hospital

Then your mother arrives and suddenly things feel a lot better. Rakuen does such a good job of conveying that sense of fear and unease you get as a child when you’re in a situation that you can’t control, and then the relief when suddenly your family is there and you know you’re safe. The inclusion of the Boy’s Mother really make Rakuen stand out, especially when so many games want to play the orphan card.

Having a hero that’s an orphan helps create a power fantasy because it cuts your hero’s ties to the world and leaves them as a free agent to do what they want/need to do. However I think the inclusion of family makes the story of Rakuen better, more grounded and more interesting. The game does an excellent job of giving you two characters who love each other and who each have a different view of the world, along with different worries and joys.

The hospital scenes of Rakuen could stand on their own as a game. They might need a little support in terms of mechanics, but they are strong. The heart of Rakuen really comes out when the Boy and his Mother travel to Morizora's Forest. In the game Rakuen is a story that Mom and the Boy read together. One of your first quests is to get the book back, and once you do it starts to open up magical doors.

The light in the forest 

The story is about a young warrior who discovers one day that his clan has disappeared while he was out hunting, he eventually learns that they’ve traveled beyond the sea. He then asks Morizora, the forest guardian to grant him a wish to travel after his clan. The guardian grants him the wish once he finishes several quests and then gives him a boat to sail to the land of Rakuen where his clan is. Once they recover the book, the Boy and his Mom decide to go to Morizora and make a wish of their own.

The Boy and his Mom arrive in Morizora’s Forest and the colour hits the game. The music becomes a lot more light and adventury and you feel like you’ve been dropped into an action RPG from the Super Nintendo. As I mentioned there’s no combat, but you don’t miss it. You journey around the world, solving puzzles and helping people out so they can open up the path for you.

Each character you meet in the real world gets a duplicate in the Forest. Your quest becomes to help the other residents of your ward to resolve the problems they’re facing. You help each person first by helping them in the game side of the Forest and then by delving into the darkness of their own minds. Between these two sections for each person, you experience blind hatred and racism in the face of natural disasters, families falling apart under the stress of the death of a family member, domestic violence, abandonment, and dementia.

Rakuen shows a child's view of a lot of problems

If that sounds hard to play, that’s because it is. Fortunately, you also have to skip across rocks, water plants, find sticks, serve tea, make friends, sing songs and go to a festival. In this way the game feels true to life, letting you experience both the hard things the Boy has to learn and the joy he gets to have in his fantastic adventure with his Mom.

But some problems are just to make the locals happy

The antagonists of Rakuen are apathy and despair. Each adventure the Boy and his Mom go on help teach them how to retain their spirits during the hard times. By extension you get to learn this as well. This helps the game hold together in the later stages, as you realize that the Boy’s condition is terminal and that this journey has a lot to do with helping him and his mom learn how to say good bye.

They are manifestations of apathy, but Mom can protect you.

In the final story of the game, you learn about the Boy and his Mom. You learn that his Father worked at at nuclear power plant, and during a disaster, lost his life saving others. In the end the Boy has to fight despair, but you take on the role of his Mom. You get to help him see how much he is loved and how good life is even if his has been short. In the end, you succeed and the end of the game has satisfaction, if not happiness.

The story of Rakuen is really powerful, and provides a lot for people to think about. I also think they way the story is told is also powerful and it demonstrates how games are their own genre of art and their own way of telling a story.

The art in the game is also really well crafted. The sprites themselves are big and vibrant, but the mood they convey is also really well constructed. In particular the difference between the working parts of the hospital, the abandoned parts of the hospital, the more natural parts of Morizora’s Forest and the magical parts of the Forest all have a distinct feeling, but still feel like a part of a whole world. I know that a lot of the time developing the game went to working on the art assets and it really shows.

Finally, it almost goes without saying, but the music in Rakuen is both beautiful and appropriate. Shigihara is an excellent composer, there’s a reason we see videos from her so often in my favourites. She really understands how to weave music into a game experience. As I said, the music is beautiful but also has a discordant aspect that helps to reinforce that not all is right in the world.

Also the game is pretty charming

Things I didn’t Like

This is one of those cases where the things I didn't like are not huge, but as with all games there are some things that could be a little different.

I found the ending was a little confused. Now I may have misunderstood, in which case you can ignore this, but as the boy dies his main concern is who is going to be there for his mom. After the credits however we see Mom meeting her other son with his grandma, and I think they use one of the sprites for the Boy for the other son which was confusing.

One of my favourite lines, but also a confusing point.

I initially thought that the Mom was adopting an orphan, but, after some reading, I was reminded that Mom mentioned leaving the Boy's brother with his grandparents. If the brother had been shown as an infant or a toddler I think the game might have made sense as presented, although some reminders in game might have helped.

I liked the idea of her adopting because it ties in well with the themes of the last part of the game. Either way it would be nice to have a little more clarity in how the end of the game ties into the concerns of the Boy and his Mom and the general themes of the game.

I also feel like the last half of the game was a little light on gameplay. There were several scenes where the action played out in cut scenes when it could have been part of the play. Towards the very end I think this may have made sense, but there were a few times where it felt like the team just didn't have time to add another mechanic. As an indie, and 4 years into development, I can't say I blame them.

Things I Noticed

Rakuen’s style is very reminiscent of the Super Nintendo and that really appealed to me. That style is always very nostalgic for me, so that’s another automatic plus for the game in my book. Beyond that however, I think the game pulls some interesting things from the SNES era of games. When you solve a puzzle, the game gives you an audio cue, but in a couple of places where it’s not evident on screen what you just solved, the game pops up a very Final Fantasy “A door opened somewhere nearby” text note. I think it’s worth noting that this is a perfectly valid approach to some game puzzles. Obviously you want the player to understand what the goal of the puzzle is from the puzzle itself, but sometimes that doesn’t fit in with the flow of the game.

I also though the times where the game didn’t do that were really interesting. Especially in the sections of the game dealing with mental health there are times where the game silently changes the space around you. I thought this was interesting because the game is dealing with matters of dementia and brain damage and it puts that forward in your thinking. It’s also illustrative of the way the game uses the environment for storytelling. You learn a lot about the people you’re helping through changes in the world around you.

One of the hardest parts of the game, emotionally. Told significantly through the environment.

I think Rakuen is particularly interesting because it allows us to look at health and illness in a game. We get to see how people handle illness, especially mental illness and how it affects both the people suffering, but also the people around them. It also allows death to be addressed much more directly because there are no combat aspects of the game.

In Final Fantasy VII, when Aerith dies you’re left wondering too much about the world because you get to regularly bring your party members back from death in combat, why is this death different than that death. By eliminating combat, as such, we can explore death and illness in Rakuen because those issues become a lot more like they are in the real world. That the game does this without sacrificing the game play elements, the “fun”, shows that there’s not a binary in game versus story in game design.

Things I’d Include in a Game

Rakuen feels like a handcrafted game. It feels like a game that someone has checked every aspect of and that it all falls into tight artistic vision and it feels like you’re being told a story by a single storyteller. I know that’s not a thing that can be included in every game but I think it’s a thing that can make some games really stand out.

For that mater, every game should have Teables, because ... tea and Leebles 

The other thing I’d like to to include in a game is a real world story. A game where you try to save people but can’t is an interesting thing. I think it’s similar to my reading of Illusion of Gaia where Will and Kara are not really saving the world but cast in a much more realistic light. . This isn't for every game, of course, sometimes you just need to shoot demons in the face, but Rakuen is a great example of how to keep your story in your game if that`s what you're looking for.

Final Things

I’m not going to lie to you. I’d have loved it, if Rakuen had been the adventure of a boy and his mom solving all the problems of the people in the hospital and bringing beautiful magic to the world and ending up with everyone cured and happy. Sometimes the game reminds me so powerfully of Secret of Mana that it’s somewhat unreal. But if that’s all it was, it would be a disservice to the story Shigihara and her team told here and a disservice to the medium of games.

There is sadness, but there is joy. You are alone, but there are friends on your journey.

Rakuen is worth your time and worth your money. It’s worth it for the story and it’s worth it for the experience. Finally I think it’s worth it just to support the team creating it. I’ve followed the game’s development over the last four years and while “the artists are good people” isn’t the best reason to support art, when the art is this good, I think they deserve it.

Rakuen is an excellent example of how a game can allow you to experience the lives of others.Games are art, they allow you to experience empathy and story in a way other media don’t and Rakuen is a shining example of a game.

The End

Blog: Video Games of May 2017

I finished Breath of the Wild, and then I had to figure out what people do with their time when they aren't running across Hyrule. Apparently there are ... other games. In the end I played a bunch of stuff and was pretty happy even if there wasn't anything that took up all of the time.

My top five games (by play time) for May were:

1. Hearthstone - I managed to play quite a bit of Hearthstone in half hour chunks in May. As always I'm enjoying it and possibly even getting very, very slightly better. I think the current state of the game is doing well in the "interesting choice" world of gameplay.
   


2. Cities: Skylines - This is a great game and Colossal Order keep making it better. The new Transportation oriented DLC and patch have fixed some of the stuff that bugged me and I've really been enjoying playing again the last little while.
   


3. Mario Kart 8 - Between needing something not too heavy to play on the Wii U and the talk of Mario Kart 8 on the switch, I jumped back into Mario Kart. It's been fun and I've actually been improving a bit.
   


4. Rakuen - I'm working on a post about Rakuen, but I was really happy that Laura Shigihara's game has finally come out and so I wanted to play it right away. I didn't manage to 100% it so I'll have to play it again at some point, but this is a game that's really worth taking some time to play.
   


5. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - I finished Breath of the Wild at the very beginning of the month. And then having played for two solid months I needed a break. I managed to play another few minutes later in the month, but I'm definitely going to need some time before I put in another 100 hours. I think I'll wait for the first DLC and see how that goes.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for May:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month: