1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017)
- Final score: 98 points
- Total placements: 5 lists
- Highest placement: #1, (tie) Joe, Schnei & Casey
Bill writes:
I bought BotW fairly shortly after its release in March 2017, while I was still on the faculty at Georgia Tech. I felt at least a little delusional buying any video game at that point, almost exactly three years after I'd taken my tour on the faculty interview circuit, and at least five years since I'd given myself a full night off. But given what was by then already apparent about the game, owning a BotW-free Switch felt like an absurdity that I just couldn't abide by.
It wasn't until September of that year that a grim farce played out in the department that was both cruel and unusual enough for me to admit that too many lines had been crossed for me to keep at the same job: I hadn't formally announced anything then, and I didn't even know what would be next, but in my heart, an interregnum had begun. Naturally, I couldn't think of a better thing to do with my first free 8:00 PM in years than to see what the last six months of fuss had been about. It didn't make my or anyone else's problems go away, but it was nice to start being in some place new.
Schnei writes:
I recall, shortly after the release date, lamenting that I didn’t have a Switch yet, when Q mentioned “btw if you don’t want to wait, it’s also available for Wii U,” and suddenly the next 72 hours were a blur (not just because of the underpowered frame rate). I’ll be honest that to some extent, I’m rating not just the games but my favorite gaming experiences, and it’s been decades since the last game that I literally couldn’t stop thinking about all day until I could get home and play it. Chrono Trigger comes to mind. And so, for several weeks in a row, I didn’t. BotW gave me the self-discipline to enforce a sustainable work-life balance when I needed it most. What other game can say that?
Everything there is to say in praise has already been said better by others, but my favorite BotW truism is that it’s the first Zelda to capture the original Zelda spirit since the original Zelda. It’s by no means perfect: the limited palette of (enemy type x weapon/attack ability x terrain/scenario) runs thin well before you run out of world to explore; the too-parallel puzzle box dungeons are underwhelming by comparison; the plot likewise doesn’t do nearly enough to fill the expanse. But those flaws are dwarfed by the ethereal atmospherics (that light-handed piano soundtrack is a triumph of understated form), the surprising density of fascinating details to uncover, and the sheer joy of the finely tuned exploration -> growth -> exploration feedback cycle. It’s my favorite game of all time, and that’s good enough for me to say it’s the best game on the Switch.
Casey writes:
One weird thing that I think about sometimes when playing this and Tears of the Kingdom is how I can still enjoy Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time but knowing that a video game can do everything that Breath of the Wild does, they do feel like more limited experiences within the framework of what “a Zelda game” provides. What will the Zelda games of 2037 feel like? How will they supersede the feeling of leaving the Great Plateau for the first time, barely equipped to be out in the wild, and figuring out how to engage with the dangers of the massive world that stands in front of you? What will be the equivalent of the first time you accidentally catch some tall grass on fire and throw your carefully measured Moblin encounter into total chaos?
It was really cool to see the franchise rediscover itself this past decade after a somewhat messy period after Wind Waker. Before this game came out, I had noticed in myself that I wasn’t really engaging with “big” games any more, and I worried about signing myself up to start a game that might take me 50 hours to complete. 120 hours later and still only completing maybe 75% of what it had to offer, I realized that the problem isn’t the amount of time the game asks of you, it’s that most of those games are simultaneously asking you to settle for less.