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Breath of The Wild is Still Hilariously Good

Alex Rowe
5 min readOct 4, 2022

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Nintendo Switch screenshot taken by the author.

I first got my hands a Nintendo Switch many months after it launched, towards the end of 2017. I eagerly dove in to Fire Emblem Warriors (which is still great) and Mario Odyssey (which I think should be discussed more). The third game I tackled was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but by then I was in the full throes of the larger holiday game release season. I was trying frantically to keep up with everything and write online content about it — and failing miserably as I so often do.

So I stepped back from the iconic open world Zelda opus after many hours even though I thought it was great.

Over the last month or so, my brain has been totally consumed by Elden Ring. A friend and I are playing through it simultaneously, and it really is a game that just keeps on giving. Its world design is impeccable, with vast and carefully constructed level geometry that’s beautiful to look at from a distance and wonderful to explore up close. It throws exciting new thing after exciting new thing at the player, and has enough satisfying optional content that it always feels like you can go and find something new and original just by spending a few minutes riding your horse in a different direction.

It’ll probably win many game of the year awards, deservedly so, even in the face of the God of War behemoth coming down the pipeline.

Elden Ring has only one real problem: there isn’t a janky cut down version of it on the Nintendo Switch that I can play on the go. Sure, it’s on the Steam deck, but that thing is huge, and as of this writing still not available with the sort of “get it now!” speed that I always demand of my irresponsible tech purchases.

This cold resistant shirt is super helpful, and entirely easy to miss. Nintendo Switch Screenshot taken by the author.

As the stupid world sometimes requires me to be away from home, I’m not always near my beloved Elden Ring. If I’m out working coffee shop/laptop style because I’m waiting for my interminably slow maintenance department to fix something in my creaky apartment, I have to fall back on the Switch for my gaming fix. A few days ago, I loaded the Breath of the Wild cart into…

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Alex Rowe
Alex Rowe

Written by Alex Rowe

I post commentary about gaming, tech, and sometimes music. I’ve written professionally about games since 2005. Look mom, I’m using my English degree!

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