It’s weird we’d suddenly get a quiz. I spent hours playing BotW tonight. It’s kind of funny, at first, because the two games look and act so similarly, it’s like, ‘It’s not a Musou? I can go anywhere and do anything?’. Lol.
I love the headspace it puts me in. Just this super relaxed, chill, but adventurous and fun mood, that’s like nothing else. But there’s always something somber, something sad, and not quite right, which I think is a brilliant example of communicating story through gameplay.
That’s kind of BotW in general. We’ve gotten so used to interactivity, being part of a story, and player choice in games being an illusion. Even if it’s supposed to be an ‘open world’. There are partial exceptions but most games play out like movie scripts, even the best ones. Everything about BotW, on the contrary, is so real, so raw. Nothing ever happens because of a tight script. It happens because there are countless elements in the world, all packed together, and allowed to interact naturally.
I think I totally get why I like it so much now. BotW isn’t revolutionary because it lets you climb anything, or one of the thousand great ideas it has. It’s revolutionary because it combines them into a whole that fulfills the original promise of videogames, before we settled — that it’s you in there, making choices, interacting with everything, and being a true part of that world, affecting it as much as it affects you.
I couldn’t pick when the Gaf GotG pitted Odyssey against BotW, but now I can. Odyssey is brilliant, but BotW shows us how games can be more.