Who knew the Nintendo Switch’s first game would still be its best 8 years later?
The Nintendo Switch is celebrating its eighth birthday, which means that so is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. What else is there to say? They’re two peas in a pod. Whether talking about the console or the game, both have proven to be adaptable to different play styles for millions of players, whether you’re a new or veteran gamer, and whether you’re on-the-go, or in front of your TV. But, unlike the hybrid console, Breath of the Wild has always been good at hiding its age.
A key age-defying component is that there are next to no rules in Breath of the Wild. For instance, the game won’t stop you from confronting the final boss right from the beginning. It’s an emergent gameplay machine that, at times, turns a family-friendly adventure into a a pretty deep immersive sim, letting you have total control of its mechanics and physics so that every encounter is as fresh and chaotic as you want it to be. Its music adaptively gets calmer or more frantic to better match the scenario. Nintendo figured out how to stuff so much into this game without it exploding at the seams, yet its user interface is as unobtrusive as they come in an open-world game.
Despite being outshined in terms of features and traversal methods by its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, let’s agree on what we all know is true, deep down: Breath of the Wild is the better game. Tears of the Kingdom is the result of a 6-year-long game jam on Breath of the Wild’s core features that add in many more variables to the gameplay loop. Many of those additions are excellent (fusing items with weapons, ascending through structures), and I’m grateful that it exists, and that the ancient Switch could even run it. This isn’t about comparing siblings, though. I love you both!
Speaking of siblings, or whatever the correct analogy might be, this is the Nintendo Switch’s last birthday before its successor, the Switch 2, hits shelves later in 2025. From what we know to be true about the Switch 2, as well as what we have hunches about, it’s definitely a Tears of the Kingdom-level upgrade in terms of new features, so to speak. It’s building off the Switch’s fundamental features in some profound ways, yet it wouldn’t exist if not for the incredible foundation that the Switch has laid over the past 8 years, thanks in large part to Breath of the Wild.
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