I may have mentioned in passing that I am playing through Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW). This was originally going to be supervised watching of Little Man playing, but the mechanics proved too punishing for him, and so he wants to watch me play. So I have been, for the last several weeks. I believe we are roughly halfway through the game, but it is hard to tell.

Broadly speaking, I don’t find BotW very fun at all. In fact, it feels like it’s designed to be un-fun.

I’m certainly not treading any new ground here, but for posterity, the biggest offender for un-fun is weapon durability. In BotW, every single weapon you pick up in the game (sans one) will eventually shatter. In some cases, it makes sense, like your tree branch or skeleton arm breaking or whatever. Other times, you have Royal weaponry that has presumably survived countless battles over dozens of years… and it’s gone after fighting three goblins. “Realism!” I guess? No blacksmiths anywhere, but we have ancient robot technology and teleportation and food that makes you immune to lightning.

I can see the design goal. It’s exciting starting out practically naked and eventually becoming a force of nature by scrappy adventuring. Defeating a powerful foe and claiming it’s deadly weapon for yourself feels good! There’s also no reasonable way to introduce more than a dozen different weapons into a Zelda title without having a mechanism to enforce you not just using the strongest one all the time.

That said, it just feels awful at every stage in the game and warps player behavior. I think this is the first game I have played where the stronger you get, the more you are actively punished for engaging in combat. In the early game, you use whatever you can get to just survive. Later on, defeating some strong enemies give you powerful weapons… which you then have to stow away while you flee from every low-level enemy encounter, lest you waste precious durability on trash. At some point, no combat is worth engaging in. And when you do engage in extended combat sequences, you get the fun experience of pausing combat multiple times as you toggle through menus, debating which weak-ass weapon you are OK with breaking just to be rewarded with vendor trash, at best.

And oh god, the menus. Defeated enemies don’t drop hearts; you must consume food to regain life, or otherwise get back to civilization. There are dozens of different ingredients, all of which you have to – painfully slowly – experiment with to determine if the resulting meal is worth your time. 99% of the time, it was not. In fact, the vast majority of the food is functionally useless considering it might restore 8 hearts, despite you only have like 5 at the time. The only ingredients worth a goddamn are ones marked “Hearty X,” which when cooked (at a lit cookpot), result in a full refresh of all hearts plus some extra temporary hearts. So, you cook them, 1 at a time, because while you can technically combine up to five ingredients to stack the temp HP, it is much more functional to refresh all hearts plus get 4 temp ones X times than one refresh with 20 temp hearts once.

Meanwhile, your adventuring is entirely spent scouring the countryside looking for hidden shrines. Completing one shrine gets you one Spirit Orb. Turning four Spirit Orbs in lets you get one extra heart container, or one-quarter of an extra stamina meter. Where I’m at right now, I believe I have eight total hearts (started with 3) and a full second stamina meter, so… 28 shrines completed? I’m supposed to get to 13 hearts for reasons, so that’s another 12-20ish shrines depending on a few factors. Sigh.

It’s dumb, guys. When there’s actual quests going on, things are decent, but I was once awarded an heirloom weapon of a dead friend and even Little Man said “No, we can’t use it, because it’ll break!” Was that the vision? The developer intention? “Nothing lasts forever, kid. Get used to it.”

You know, maybe there was a zeitgeist I missed when Breath of the Wild first came out. Being able to climb literally everything was undoubtedly novel at the time. My first experience with that came from Craftopia, which unabashedly stole it and several other things from BotW, and so did every single open-world gacha game that came out since then, so experiencing it here in 2026 was no big deal. I’ve also heard all the stories about peoples’ minds being blown when they realized the first plateau was just the tutorial and how big the world was. Yeah, okay. I got that back in 2008 with Fallout 3, but I guess some players weren’t even born yet. Something has to be someone’s first.

But, seriously, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills or something. BotW is a big, beautiful… empty, sterile world that drains you of resources for interacting with it. In Fallout, I relish every opportunity to scour empty buildings of Aluminum cans or rolls of duct tape. Ghouls or Raiders appear? Fantastic! More loot, more XP, more character progression. Even if a particular ruin is a bust for any of those things, there are often environmental vignettes that can be poignant.

That doesn’t exist in BotW. There is zero reason to ever clear a goblin camp. The only reason to explore is to find either another Shrine (puzzle) or a Korak Seed (puzzle), to incrementally gain more HP/Stamina or more items slots, respectively. Every heart of damage you take or damage you deal is paid with busywork later. Sloooooooowly cooking up food, collecting up arsenals of garbage weapons, or enduring loading screens teleporting around to “farming spots” where you can more easily gather the best versions of either. That’s not exactly the power fantasy I’m expecting from a Zelda game.

That said, my opinion is clearly wrong: Breath of the Wild enjoys a ~97 Metacritic rating, and has sold 35 million copies. The game indeed embraces nonlinearity, encourages exploration (for the first few hours), has minimal onscreen UI for an open-world game, and has challenges that can be overcome in a number of (occasionally physics-based) ways. What more could the average gamer ask for?

Not being punished for interacting with said world, for starters, I would say. Apparently, that’s just me.