The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as a postmodern piece

I only started playing the latest Zelda game recently, but it sure does align with quite a few postmodern ideas and techniques. Since I’ve only just started it, this will be a general overview, but I’m sure that the parallels carry deeper than this.

Nintendo takes the formula that they have been recycling over and over again for Zelda games and throws out at least half of it with this one. Weapons no longer last forever, they take on damage and eventually break (usually in the middle of a battle of course) causing Link to need to stock up and get ready to swap others in if necessary. Link himself is also more susceptible to the elements, if it gets too cold or hot he will start to take on damage fairly frequently. This can be combatted with clothes, as usual, or food, which is new. Link can now forage trees for apples or shoot wild game for meat, which can then be cooked or roasted over a fire. Elixirs can also be made, which give special power ups such as speed or stealth.

All of these various aspects present a hero whose main obstacle is the environment itself. Not to mention the fact that the world of this game is so freaking huge you’re going to spend half the time lost anyways. This is a video game where you need to learn the basics of survival if you want to get anywhere, and fast since you also have a kingdom to save. Postmodernism often seeks to find a new way to conceptualize the world, one that is not so human-centric. Humans are the ones destroying the world, so how can we view this world in light of our damage? How can we let nature reclaim what was rightfully theirs to begin with? Breath of the Wild answers this by turning the environment into a foe. Now the player must fight against decay, cold, and hunger as they travel through the world. Nature can still has some fight left in her.

Then there is the fact that Breath of the Wild takes place 100 years after Link failed to save Hyrule. It’s essentially a post-apocalyptic land that we are presented with, one where evil has already won. Postmodernism frequently uses the apocalypse to make a similar point, that man is not eternal and eventually the world will rebel against us. This is a fairly new concept for a Zelda game, most of them start out in a happy setting, but then it all goes wrong somehow. Here everything has already gone wrong, nowhere is safe, Link has already messed up big time. I don’t know what the ending is, but this is one hell of a way to start.

All of these various aspects make Breath of the Wild distinct, both as a new kind of Zelda game and as a postmodern work. I imagine the message it will send the player will be quite different, because the method of playing through it already feels quite different. I’m excited to see how this game progresses.