Breath of the Wild is a Masterpiece - Movies with Mikey

[Music] there's a learned tranquility to this game and it happens organically through carefully designed trained and balanced game mechanics that feed off each other like caffeinated lemurs the first minute of the game you wake up as link confused disoriented you are not given an explanation for why you woke up nearly naked in a pool no bother you were given a tool that looks suspiciously like a nintendo switch and you stumble through a forest have i been here before you come across a man baking apples by a campfire the game has already taught you things why am i waking up into another dream when do i live it's never next time sorry um you see another tree figure out how to climb it and take the apples ah ding dang it i got hit what about those apples oh okay eating apples heals me i get it you keenly recognize that damn near every living thing in this kaleidoscope of tranquility is paradoxically trying to kill you a scrumptious conundrum you witness something catching on fire you quickly pick up a flaming stick and run back over to the holy but how did the game know what i was gonna do before i do it you throw the apples in the fire a delicious and restorative dessert this game is astounding and all i've done is collect apples and get nagged by an old man this is great and all i've done is enter my name you somehow make it to where the nintendo switch told you to go a tower erupts into the sky with you on it well we're really high and i don't know how to get down the mysterious elderly fellow is now telling me to conquer a temple my fellow i woke up on a water table with what i assume is a head trauma the parachute man ain't sharing his parachute there is a hierarchy at play here and you are the napkin on the floor you a smart person remember the baked apple you learned that baked apples do give you more health than eating them raw i never went back from my pants or shirt this is a game about survival bear grylls baby so anyway you solve all of the puzzles this temple has to offer and get a cool ability in the process but the untrustworthy apple guy is like yeah actually i'm gonna need you to clear three more temples hope that's not a big deal i know you woke up in a cave but like it's all cool bruh you still at this point do not even know who you are you've never known you will never exist beyond this perpetual moment sorry there's like a ghost in my house or something oh each of these many temples comes with a new ability bombs the ability to move heavy metals with your big comical magnet the ability to stop time on a single object and impart repeated force before releasing all of that force in a single instant oh and you can pull pillars of ice out of any water surface these little temples though not exactly easy to get to can be more rewarding by doing the fun solution huh and you somehow managed to get through all of that you are not dead go you perhaps you do belong in this world to earn your promised reward he has moved the goalpost three times already captain gerard whipplesnap then makes you climb yet another tall thing for seemingly no reason before he reveals that he is actually the former king of hyrule and you are link the brave hero who died horrifically fighting a smog lizard some 100 years ago who then took all of hyrule's defensive robot magic and turned it against the kingdom itself therefore destroying the entire thing which was a real bad this is the legend of zelda fury road the end already happened but that doesn't mean you can't do some good here it taught you damn near everything you needed to know contextually in the gameplay over this five hour streak you now only have one objective go kill the smog lizard that killed you but from your perspective also uh wow i was dead for a hundred years fighting the greatest evil the world has ever known and your thought for conversation one is anyway we took your own death away from you let's hop to it go get him go do it why why is he still why is he still here this ice cold whipple snap i've only been alive in this corporeal reality for five hours and i'm the only one who can save it cool cool cool cool let's talk about zelda [Music] is [Music] in the small town of sunobe kyoto a town that no longer exists by name due to a town merger in 2006 was one where shigeru miyamoto grew up in the late 1950s and early 60s he had no television and lived in a river valley surrounded by forested mountains he loved exploring finding a problem and then running home to figure out how to solve it he would grab magnifying glasses little lantern toys shovels probably sharp things he shouldn't have been playing with shigeru loved the exhilaration he felt doing it and he will spend his entire life trying to replicate that experience for an audience fast forward to 1985 while working at nintendo on super mario brothers a game you may have heard of an arcade experience meant to munch quarters and give people bite-sized adventures in a mushroom world he had a new idea for another game he'd already started to work his way up thanks to the success of donkey kong at this point in time but this new idea was not for an arcade game but a home console add-on drive there's in fact an idea that would take all hang on [Music] 114 kilobytes of data allowed by the famicom disk system he worked on the idea with writer takashi tuzuka who wrote the story in script so to speak which was about fitting text into available memory as much as it was about writing the narrative but stay with me they came up with a game where you started alone in the desert and had to figure everything out on your own you were to find the tools you needed to accomplish your objective find a sword in a cave save hyrule save the princess defeat ganon other than that you're on your own it was a totally non-linear game the famicom disc system sold 4.4 million units it was an add-on disk drive for the famicom only available in japan the american release of the console the nintendo entertainment system a system i had did not have a disk drive add-on so there was nothing in the hardware to save a game to conundrums abound this made a us release of the legend of zelda quite difficult a game they kind of already knew was the next big thing but unless they overcame this giant technical hurdle that concern was irrelevant this problem required a genius solution and effectively not the first of its kind but definitely the first of its scale they put a battery in the cartridge a long lasting battery that essentially keeps parts of the game running in memory on the cart all of the time so the save data could be kept in memory save games in the urban times really worked like that it was name checked on the back of the boxes and to account for the memory difference in the disk system which features some pretty slow load times the cartridge had an sram chip to increase memory and an mmci integrated circuit to shift memory into banks allowing the game to load all the stuff from the disk version look if you want to melt your own brain read up on how all your favorite nes games use all of these chips in different ways to ship different games i think the thing to sort of take away from this is to remember video games are not about what you can make it's about what you can ship there's loads of games that needed the mmci chip mega man 2 metroid kid icarus and if i may teenage mutant ninja turtles yes that one for example the legend of zelda was a benchmark for video games a technical achievement twice over as they launched it on two different systems with two distinct sets of problems and the legend of zelda sold north of 15 million copies worldwide it was a breakaway success so let's fast forward a few decades and talk about breath of the wild a game more than three decades in the making breath of the wild is the latest flagship entry in the legend of zelda franchise from that old card company i don't remember their name it came out in the year of our lord 2017 on the brand new nintendo switch and the wii u i think it's generally agreed upon as one of the better video games ever made in one of the best zeldas and i'm making this video because even given all of that the endless number of great pieces about this game i still believe it deserves more credit that's why i'm making this video most of us are all stuck at home anyway let's expand our horizon that 17 years in the game industry has to come in handy somewhere so let's talk about zelda [Music] the art director on breath of the wild was satoru takezawa a man whose career goes all the way back to being an artist on star fox 64 simply bodacious satoru said something interesting about breath of the wild he said the theme of all facets of design on this game was revisiting expectations a statement that gets truer the longer you think about it on the most basic level it was an attempt to speak to all previous artistic statements made by other styles in other zelda games and for example i remember when wind waker was released and a lot of people loved that style from the beginning but a test render from a space world presentation colored expectations of what wind waker would eventually look like at the time the announcement and first look at the game was met with much derision as a result of this it would go on to be one of the most beloved classics in that franchise and i personally think it's one of the most beautiful games ever made and nintendo pulled that [ __ ] off on a gamecube and what's really interesting is that original expectation they still delivered on with twilight princess's art style years later and that's the interesting thing about zelda games as they are designed with art styles that fit the theme of the game a game uh where link is a werewolf and zelda dies half way through it uh but don't worry she comes back at the end just saying that one was pretty dark and quite grim in color palette and narrative legend of zelda has gone a lot of places that's where i think breath of the wild is fascinating somehow it manages to be a perfectly bulls-eyed cross-section of ocarina of time wind waker twilight princess and skyward sword but also a fully dynamic canvas to just experience it is often striking lonely and breathtaking often in the measure of only a few minutes segways are for closers [Music] the joman period takes place in japanese pre-history between 14 500 bc and 300 bc it's a real hunter gatherer kind of period the word german means patterned so to speak as it was describing the pottery and art at the time ornate handcrafted stylistic there's a lot of use of circles as negative space which carries with it a swift irony how many zelda games have you played where you didn't smash every pot in sight and during the last glacial period of the ice age people came to what would later be known as japan these settlers became hunters because they had to a life lived predominantly by survival whoa that's what the game is about anyway this entire game is an homage and celebration of the shoman period style which is i'm sure just a coincidence or whatever which is to say absolutely nothing about the characters familiar to the zelda franchise getting survival generation makeovers like empa for example a character that goes all the way back to zelda 2. and the last time we saw her in this franchise and skyward sword she looked like this okay technically like this look if you have an afternoon to try to make sense of the zelda timeline go for it because i'm good what do you mean there's a story section later this game is filled with vibrant interesting characters that also happen to be talking bird people sometimes and that's okay characters designed to make an impression because you honestly aren't going to run across many other people in this game all that often it's a world of contradictions simultaneously lonely and yet entirely comforting empty but fulfilling to explore safe yet totally lethal at a moment's notice there are moments in your explorations that you just stop and go damn and i feel like the artistic statement of this game is also about what was edited out of the experience sure it's a survival simulator but it doesn't make you marvel at the minutia which is maybe all missing the forest for the tree beard because nintendo accomplished an entirely open world zelda game with hardware practically a generation behind actually two generations behind in the case of the wii u which might as well be sorcery to me and it was a game originally designed for the wii u so ludicrous levels of content and code optimizations to squeeze every ounce of power out of that wildly underpowered gpu i mean the wii u ran on the same technology as this thing arden video games is as much a technical achievement as it is one about having beautiful assets this game has both in spades also hearts diamonds and clovers look it's basically lucky charms in closing i give the art in this game 4.8 out of five choo choo jellies thank you hiromaru fujibayashi was the director of breath of the wild you might know that name from being the director of skyward sword and handheld titles diminished cap four swords oracle of seasons and ages and something called magical tetris challenge yeah i don't know in 2017 he and other breath of the wild leadership positions gave a talk at gdc two days before the game was released if you have the 90 whatever minutes that talk is available on youtube and linked in the doobly it is one of the most amazing game talks i've ever seen sort of not least of which because you watch a team thoughtfully structure and design an impossible thing they use two phrases to guide development one of which you've already heard rediscovering the essence and revisiting conventions in simpler terms what is essential to the legend of zelda as that franchise contains a multitude of sacred pillars like in every zelda game you better be able to cut all the grass and find jewels in it and i'm pleased to report in breath of the wild you will indeed be able to cut all the grass in an earth's spendable capital and there's a lot of grass like you can run around mountains all day just cutting grass in this game which describes my play style there could be colorful jewels in here conversely you can spend all your time gathering supplies to mass-produce meals you can sell for 150 rupees of pop that's what we did fundamentally if you're nintendo and you know you need to arrive with a substantially new take on the franchise what has to be in a zelda game how do you make the new zelda sell twice the units that second place did worldwide when second place is the ocarina of time on nintendo 64. yeah twice i know i was surprised too so let's get back to our discussion we continued with exploring art creation based on the wind waker and came up with our final art creation slogan refreshing and full flavored i think it's slightly easier to imagine changes to the zelda formula as the artisans at nintendo did using a conduit to influence the way you make those decisions hiramato wanted to desegregate the world of zelda conceptually so to speak take what is a world of infinite separation as is tradition in zelda games generally by virtue of available technology at the time you got a water temple a cannon area an enchanted forest all neatly divided from the world next to it in the older games you couldn't even scroll the screen until you got to the edge of it zelda games have always been about the limitations that the hardware imposes on the software so again for the people in the back they did this on a wii u the idea was to make a huge game world where you could solve a problem however you wanted to which is a goal that comes with monumental challenges and this is where design philosophies come into play our first approach was to remove those impassable walls which were convention of zelda by transforming the walls and allowing the user to climb them in our experimental game field you can say you want the player to be able to do anything but you have to design a system that allows them to do that and i'm gonna do my best not to get too far into the weeds here like i said watch that video for all of the weeds but in simpler terms you need to know the breadth of interaction that can happen in a given system when doing systems design at a basic level you need to be able to define the state of a given object in that system and then define every possible state change for said object let's take a rock and a tree branch for example in basic execution all items can be in the state of either a not on fire and be very much on fire add some binary math behind the scenes like a check box for is flammable and you're off to the races rock no branch very yes in the system these are known as elements flame water electricity wind elements when in contact with a solid body actor will affect state accordingly metal and electricity don't mix so you have a game where wearing metal in a lightning storm is a super bad idea the world is your oyster that's how they wanted the game to feel just wildly multiplying object states upon each other there's a pretty inventive concept in effect behind the scenes for multiplicative gameplay was to fill the vast game world with fun multiplicative experiences using physics and chemistry gameplay when designing and engineering all of these systems think about how they can all work to multiply each other cooking meals comes with benefits to other systems [Music] speed cold resistance attack power fajita night let's kick it up a bit traditionally in a zelda game you will search the world far and wide finding tools weapons and some pretty spiffy clothes blue link for life oh [ __ ] hang on the ghost is back am i simply a necessary tool a means to an end like this sword i will use up and throw away if you push me will i not break if you cut me will i not believe well okay i'm a ghost but yeah that ghost has a point breath of the wild made some major decisions in how weapons work for example which ps you will need a small army's arsenal of here is a very key phrase to keep in mind nothing is precious in breath of the wild you're going to fight a continent of monsters in wildly varying geographical locations use a weapon too much and it will break swords hammers bows formerly possessed demon skeleton arms and throws of a death rattle you know the usual epson chat yo but in general the fear of using a precious item at the wrong time means the player might spend their entire experience waiting for the right time you're going to pick up a litany of super cool weapons a lot of which do really cool things but fight six to ten monsters and your weapon will shatter mid fight it's a lot to consider at first you end up attacking a lot of things with a rake for example nothing is precious well okay except for the master sword and the herulian shield mainstays from the zelda franchise and those still actually do break just temporarily i know this decision was not to everyone's liking but i like a game where you wander the vast hell world for glimpses of humanity and kindness and are constantly reminded that nothing lasts forever do as good as you can with what you have well that's like a it's like a motto for life in a lot of ways this is a game created for this moment we're in right now oh an apocalypse i've been practicing and i think a large detour was in how the game handles the concept of temples now they are small quick puzzle shrines the first few train you and then you were solving those whenever you find them which is good because once you solve one you can use it as a fast travel location which is great because the world's real big and in the most nintendo ass decision ever there's 120 of them me mario completing a shrine also gives you a spirit orb collect four and upgrade either your health or your stamina you basically spend the entire game getting stronger than you were a minute ago it's a super satisfying gameplay loop in addition to that there's four massive divine beasts that double as big castles punctuated by a super hard boss battle these bestial abodes are more traditional zelda encounters big hard scary and punctuated with a huge battle against some corrupted sliver of ganon's horcruxed soul to a producer designing a game like this is an invitation to madness as you are producing a game that you would have to test for years it is designing chaos i think attempting to sum up all of the legend of zelda's story plot-wise will prove a touch out of scope for this essay not impossible however there are plenty of good videos on the internet that attempt just that but i'll give you the quick notes deep breaths everybody the first two games in the series are some of the last in the chronology zelda really went full comic book with this continuity structurally zelda is sort of like tarantino crisis on infinite earths and also simultaneously somehow telling the same story over and over and over again in addition to the wacky chronology there's a bunch of links who are not technically all the same person though that is definitely something i want to talk about link is basically predestined to reincarnate over and over and over to save hyrule forever he is infinitely eternally indentured and yes i understand that's because he is a video game character but we're talking about narrative here the narrative does not give link a choice in all of this in fact people are pretty impatient with him quite often jesus christ i'll go one further tell me anything about link tell me literally anything about him favorite food what does he do in his off time what's his last name you can't because he doesn't talk okay clarification as long as you're not a phillips cdi game or a cartoon from the 1990s he doesn't talk well excuse me princess link is designed to be a vessel for you sure he says and sometimes but he doesn't construct words or share opinions ever i'm saying he's a real gordon freeman's gordon freeman if you know what i'm saying but anyway back to the high level what's interesting is once you get to the ocarina of time and the zelda timeline splits into three parallel timelines the hero defeated timeline this one's really spooky linked the past is in there the child timeline and the adult timeline breath of the wild takes place at the end of all three timelines yeah i don't know how that works either also zelda is bestowed with goddess blood look the answer is don't think about it too much breath of the wild on the smaller scale is the simple story of a fractured fallen kingdom the races which make up the kingdom are at odds with each other and sometimes with themselves within their own walls link wakes up in a cave and goes on to repair and heal an invaded fallen state on a deeper level thinking back to miyamoto's childhood link's story is the story of you the different games always seem to be trying to capture this adventurous spirit sailing flying coloring on the walls waking up from a ranger but it all goes back to miyamoto in the forest breath of the wild is just one of the best games to explore to get lost in it it always seems to know how to reward you to keep serving an autocratic spectral regime yeah i'm calling you out whipple snap zelda games quite broadly are about revisiting fallen kingdoms flooded ruined destroyed by a meteor over and over link is predestined to serve at the pleasure of the crown in reincarnated perpetuity just brought back to life over and over to clean up the largest messes imaginable here a link thanks for risking your life for me for the 50 000 time have a leaf there is no end they use you up take what they want no task is too large no thank you too small does anyone even care how many lives i've lived in service of this noted ghost is back in the nintendo catalog mario is always the legacy series that struck out to me is inherently social mario has friends they do all types of activities together they share things always throwing parties and [ __ ] and in that same space you have the metroid and zelda series two series predominantly defined by their loneliness you go on an epic quest alone the zelda series generally has a sprawling cast of various eccentric royalties dispatching of any meaningful social interaction with you while maintaining a purely transactional relationship you know like well like like royalty oh you saved my family from certain death at the hands of a magma frankenstein have a seed at least mario's out there handing out money they all expect too much from you except for the zora they give you the armor that will help you swim up waterfalls so they're all good in my book the legend of zelda on the whole is the story of accepting one's loneliness playing this game right now was absolute catharsis you venture outside and explore a massive land hyrule is a forgotten world defined by its loneliness and that is zelda that is what zelda has always been but this time it's also a world defined by this is a game about survival from the moment you wake up to the moment you are fighting the scourge of hyrule castle which quite possibly is a month later you will fight climb cook scavenge climb die swim climb explore die climb and take minutes contemplating the heretofore unbeknownst gravities of loneliness that we're all experiencing right here right now pit of loneliness table for one a franchise that has fought back from some pretty dark spots link's crossbow training wasn't exactly the narrative escapada dreamed it would be it feels at least based on sales that interest in the legend of zelda was beginning to dry up a bit on some level it's always been about survival and survive it has look at it this way imagine coming up with a franchise that has run for 30 years now imagine the last release in that franchise being the biggest release it has ever had imagine feeling like you were just starting out it all rests on my shoulders and nobody cares they just want to tell me to solve their problems do any of these people ever learn anything when do i live it's never next time whoa damn okay no hang on do you know what it's like to be a ghost sometimes alive every once in a while never consistently just always waking up in a new body new personality but not entirely a new person yeah okay the doctor oh and you're not allowed to speak ever i am nothing i am a construct by which all humans can feel powerful i never thought about it like that i think you do a really good job and i'm glad i spent time getting to know you you're a you're a good dude ghostly hey yeah sorry 2020 has been rough for me the same but like always worse you know what i mean oh oh dang uh hang on uh ghost dairy queen is uh calling me i have an interview so i i gotta i gotta go uh you know what just just pretend it's fine forget i said anything segways are for closers it is currently 3 30 in the morning just getting water um your sleep schedule is all screwed up when uh you sleep all day back in 2017 this game came out march 3rd in fact i was kind of out of commission there for a few months to put it uh recklessly lightly i didn't get to play it originally i didn't attempt to play it again until later in 2018 i just fell into it a game about survival and nothing in that game is free also oh my god you have to climb so many things there's a lot of patience involved it can be frustrating and between you and me hand spasms do not make platforming very easy and i still adored every minute of it it's a game that has been there for me during some pretty rough spots one of which we're all collectively sharing right now this is an episode i've been thinking about for a long time i got to this game when everyone had already beaten it and moved on people were already on that good good ps4 spider-man [ __ ] when i rolled up on zelda island but zelda is a franchise i've adored literally my entire life my dad got zelda 2 for his birthday when i was like 5 and we stayed up half the night playing that [ __ ] i loved the hell out of that game as a kid and me and my dad did beat that game eventually i'm just saying i really really like zelda two the zelda series is wonderful as escapism and i know all of this isn't like a new thought or anything i don't know if you've noticed but there are some pretty big zelda fans on the internet this is just me talking about a thing i like because the world went flipsy stupid and maybe some of us didn't get a chance to play it when it came out or maybe we aren't into video games at all that's all perfectly okay i personally think that the zelda series is a pretty good window into video games if you're looking to hop in breath of the wild is a game that will go at your pace you don't gotta speedrun it though that is also very very cool you can just run around and drop bombs onto pig monsters for hours and hours on end if that's all you need from a game and that's all you want to do hey no one's here to zelda judge you i mean the rest of the internet but i am not here it's all good how many things from your childhood hold up at the level that this game world does it is an outstanding experience outside of being a zelda game if miyamoto's entire career was trying to recreate the exhilaration of his childhood in kyoto breath of the wild delivered on his wishes or maybe i didn't actually need 6 000 words to say breath of the wild is a masterpiece [Music] thank you everybody david mcintyre matt has to go brat busy john trevor sharks and bacon mike laid lost that scott julian rodriguez okay i'll stop trying that kelly naylor tristan uh hey everybody that was a lot of work uh trying something different with movies of mikey you know gotta keep it fresh after how long is six years um you should follow us on twitter and go to our patreon and like this video a whole lot just like abe finkel and cinema wins and benedict the man uh ryan trite twice hodgies melanie collins i did i got it that time nailed it i am clockwork paul v moreau james mastid bn 12. are you in testing are you a medicine

Channel: FilmJoy

Views: 222,244

Keywords: zelda, breath of the wild, legend of zelda, shigeru miyamoto, nintendo, botw, movies with mikey, mwm, mikey neumann, filmjoy, film joy, movies with mickey, joyus media, film review, positive movie review, film analysis

Id: suiVi4kjvbI

Length: 37min 1sec (2221 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020