You're being way too pedantic, blatantly misconstruing what I'm saying, and flat out arguing against false assumptions you’re projecting onto me. So I'm gonna save myself the headache and just say what I have to rather than respond to every individual paragraph of intentional miscommunication and lies that I shouldn't have to keep clearing up.
Super Mario Bros. is not about exploration. You can keep repeating it or make whatever philosophical argument you want for it, it doesn't make it true. Mario was not conceived as a game with non-linear design just like Zelda wasn't created to be a linear game. They're two completely different genres that follow different tropes. I will no longer engage with meaningless semantics over this long established fact.
Whether you like Breath of the Wild or not, it cannot be denied that the game, like previous entries, has you solving puzzles, engaging in combat, and exploring. These concepts are at the very heart of the series and to say these elements are not present in Breath of the Wild just because you don't like the way they've been applied to a more open experience is objectively incorrect.
Your entire argument against Breath of the Wild can literally be applied to Super Mario 64, which "ditched" its series identity and got not even a single peep from fans about it. Instead, people call it a masterpiece and have the nerve to talk down on games like Super Mario 3D World that better captures its 2D roots.
Except a game like Super Mario 3D World wasn't possible on an N64 and wouldn't have been the greatest use of the technology either. A game like Super Mario 3D World was only possible because Super Mario 64 got to exist and the series got to grow and be refined, that by the time 3D World came around, it felt like a step backwards for the series.
While Crash Bandicoot was doing basic linear platforming in 3D by simply moving the camera behind the player and still frequently making use of 2D gameplay, Nintendo was evolving the genre because it had a whole new set of tools to play around with that they never had to think about when they first created Mario and that is the exact approach they had with Breath of the Wild. A re-evaluation of conventions and tropes that were the result of its time's limitations.
Breath of the Wild isn't any less a Zelda game for giving the player more choices in progression than Skyward Sword is for its forced motion controls. You purposely choose to make structured design elements with strict puzzle solutions the most important aspect of the series because it supports your hatred for Breath of the Wild, which you claim doesn't retain any of these elements, therefore cannot be a Zelda game.
It's such a disingenuous stance to take, even if Breath of the Wild wasn't your cup of tea. I understand the open world isn't for everyone, but neither were motion controls, stylus controls, cartoony visuals, time limits, or side-scrolling gameplay. I've acknowledged that Breath of the Wild did a lot of things differently than past games that a lot of us would prefer to see done more traditionally. But I've also acknowledged what Breath of the Wild brings to the table and can recognize that a lot of what it does is simply a reapplication of pre-existing conventions to suit an open world.
So no, it didn't remove anything and it's not less a video game or Zelda game because of it. You just don't like its execution, but you refuse to accept that Breath of the Wild is more like Zelda than you're willing to give it any credit for because it would hurt your ego, so you'll try to twist and pick apart vocabulary and fabricate a "gotcha" just to justify your hatred of a video game and that's your own problem.
I can't make my point any clearer than that and I have no issue with anyone disagreeing with me, but I don't really care for this whole charade of arguing for arguing's sake.
No I’m not, no I’m not, and no I’m not. You can’t just pretend that I’m making illogical arguments just because you can’t be bothered to actually argue against them.
You don’t seem to understand what the word “exploration” means. Exploration has literally nothing to do with whether a game is “linear” or not. Super Mario Brothers had secrets. That was a pretty big selling point, actually. It had secrets that you had to explore the levels to find. Are you really going to try to sit there and tell me that actively checking every pipe to see if it led to a secret area is somehow
not exploration?
Yes, BotW does have all of those elements. You know what else does? Most adventure games ever. The simple fact that it has those is not enough to call it Zelda because the method in which it handles all 3 of those things is wildly different from any game in the series. You’re trying to compare tables to giraffes by saying “they’re both made of concrete matter, and therefore have more in common with each other than they do the abstract concept of the number 4,” not understanding that the comparison that you’re trying to make is completely meaningless in any practical way.
Except 1.Super Mario was never inherently about the structure of the game like Zelda was. The series always had an emphasis on developing how Mario controlled as a platformer character as opposed to how the structure worked. Super Mario 64 is more along the lines of something like Metroid Prime, where most of the things that the series pioneered are still there in the exact same way as before, only now the less important surrounding elements from the classic games are gone. If anything, Skyward Sword is a better comparison to Mario 64 than BotW just because of how much it managed to change while also keeping most of what the series development pioneered in. 2.My argument still applies regardless of if I liked BotW or not, just like how the inherent differences between course clear and collectithon Mario are still there regardless of peoples opinion on 3D Land/World. Hell if you want another example, I prefer the Symphony of the Night styled Castlevanias to the classic Castlevanias, that doesn’t stop me from understanding that there is a clear difference between the two to the point that the former completely removes what made the latter stand out to begin with.
It didn’t feel like a step down, actually. When it first came out nobody was complaining that it was. They were complaining that it wasn’t a traditional 3D Mario because we didn’t have a traditional 3D Mario that generation, while we already had
two course clear type 2D Mario’s that generation. This is clearly obvious just by looking at the high amount of praise it’s Switch port got when it released on a console with an original collectathon 3D Mario.
Except literally not a single one of Zelda’s tropes were due to limitations. Of all of the things that you’ve said so far, this has got to be the most asinine. The simple fact that it would have been easier to
not program in required items in the original Zelda makes this blatantly obvious. For that matter, Daggerfall released 2 whole years before OoT and Morrowind released the same year as WW. The technology was there to make an actual open world game in the same style as BotW, but they didn’t because that’s not what they wanted to make. Even if you want to pretend that it’s because they didn’t bother trying, I’d point out that they clearly did try to make a more open Zelda in WW, but they still tied it to the series tropes because those tropes were what made Zelda good.
I’m not “making” the structure of Zelda anything more than it already is. The simple fact that it was what the game used to separate it from other “open” games at the time like Ultima or Hydlide is more than enough to prove me right. The fact that Metroid literally exists because someone at Nintendo said “let’s take Zelda’s structure and make a sidescroller out of it” is more than enough to prove me right. The fact that this structure is what they decided to expand upon in literally every game prior to BotW is more than enough to prove me right. Literally all evidence on the matter whatsoever points to what I’m saying as objectively, inarguably true regardless of my opinion on BotW. My dislike of BotW has nothing to do with this, in fact the actual scenario is that your blind love for BotW is causing you to ignore and argue against the objective evidence of the matter.
Except I have no problems with open world games. I’ve played plenty of open world games, some of which I’ve absolutely adored. I have problems with games that claim to somehow apply series conventions to a new format when in reality they neither contain a single series convention nor a format that hadn’t already been done significantly better by plenty of other games.
It removed everything that united the series mechanically, and this is provable by acknowledging literally any of the evidence I have presented, or even just
playing the games. Talk about ego, you have yet to present a single argument that even attempts to disprove just one of the things that I’ve clearly explained to you, instead just resorting to ad hominem and simply saying “nuh-uh” in an attempt to defend the easily disproven. BotW does not share the mechanical design philosophy of the series leading up to it, and therefore it’s fundamentally different from the basic identity of any of the games prior to it.
You can call it arguing for arguments sake all you want. If that’s how you cope with someone proving everything you’ve said wrong, so be it, but the fact that you are so unwilling to acknowledge the simple facts surrounding the argument shows that you really can’t handle someone arguing against you.
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