Why Breath of the Wild Wants You To Fail
Channel: Video Game Story Time
Date: 2021-06-24

This video is sponsored by the adorable family friendly puzzle game Labyrinth City: Pierre the Maze Detective, available now on Steam and coming soon to Switch and mobile. To help out the channel, please be sure to click this link to check out the game's Steam page and learn more about the game: https://wehy.pe/y/2/VideoGameStoryTime 

The first look at Breath of the Wild 2 that we all got last week at E3 is absolutely fascinating. We can definitely see why Skyward Sword got a re-release at this particular moment in time. It seems that a lot of the unique ideas from Skyward Sword, such as flying above the clouds and visiting floating islands, are making a return in Breath of the Wild 2.

We've been thinking a lot about Breath of the Wild lately, not least because our daughter is obsessed with all things Zelda, and spends much of her free time (when she isn't playing Zelda either in game form or with toys) watching Zelda theory videos on YouTube. Her favourite is Zeltik, and as his content is generally family-friendly, we're happy for her to watch, while supervised of course, because this is YouTube! She can read now, and we'd rather keep her away from the comments section for a little longer.

Anyway, with our family's constant discussions about Zelda and Breath of the Wild in particular, we've been thinking a lot about the first game, and its upcoming sequel.

Games in the Zelda series are a great example of ludonarrative consonance, or the technique of making gameplay reflect story. The internet is obsessed with ludonarrative dissonance, which is when gameplay and story doesn't line up, but nobody ever really talks about the opposite. Some call it ludonarrative harmony, but we're calling it consonance because it sounds fancy and makes us look smart.

Or, maybe it just makes us look pretentious?

Anyway, the genuis thing about Breath of the Wild's most hated mechanic - breakable weapons - is that this gameplay element actually reinforces the game's story.

In flashbacks, we see Princess Zelda doing all she can to prepare for a bit fight, and then when the fight actually comes, everything goes wrong. But, Zelda is able to save the day by thinking on her feet and relying on other aspects of her preparation, such as her research into ancient Shiekah technology.

This is reinforced by the game's actual gameplay, in which the player may do everything they can to prepare for a fight with some Moblins or a Guardian or even a fight with a Blight Ganon atop a Divine Beast...but it all comes crashing down due to weather, weapon degradation, or simple bad timing.

It's then up to the player to, like Zelda, think on their feet to try and fix the situation. Breath of the Wild is deliberately designed so that the player's experience and Princess Zelda's experience complement each other.

We'd love to do more narrative analysis in games, so please, if you enjoyed this video, let us know so that we can decide whether it's worth doing more experiments like this.

Otherwise, have a great day, and thanks again to our sponsor, Labyrinth City: Pierre the Maze Detective, for giving us the opportunity to do something a little different this time!

Lots of love,
BretonStripes (http://twitter.com/bretonstriped) and Kotor {http://twitter.com/kotorcomics)

Sources:
https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2017/02/15/miyamoto-and-aonuma-on-zeldas-storytelling-and-breath-of-the-wilds-trick.aspx
https://time.com/4668908/nintendo-switch-miyamoto-interview/