-Picture credit, IGN
If you know me at all, you may know that I for one love video games, I absolutely adore them. As they develop and become better in terms of how much you can do, what they can do, and what they can let you do, video games are becoming a cleaner form of art with every passing year, some people, including me, would argue that video games are becoming the future of storytelling as they become more accessible to more and more people, and this form of storytelling will always speak to me more as whatever story is achieved will always be a direct outcome of the actions of the player, making it feel more relatable in the most fantastical of situations and they add gravity and impact to the story by having multiple endings which are affected by the player's choices. And I think, that’s the most crucial part of making a video game fun, players' choices. (Insert clean segue here)
My favourite game of all time is the legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild, due to my scarily passionate mood and the fact that I’m writing this in a moving car, I will refer to breath of the wild as BOTW. Now, BOTW is a game that singlehandedly spoiled me to the open world game genre in one fell swoop, the player playing as Link can climb, explore, and glide across the map of Hyrlue and do whatever the hell they please, I mean it, as soon as the first tutorial section is done (around 20-40 minutes) the player can simply walk up to the final boss and kill him, it’s difficult, it’s very difficult, but not impossible, in fact, this game has gotten a huge degree of clout in the speedrunning community because of how much freedom you have as more and more players come up with creative new ways to break the fastest times the whole world of Hyrlue is spread across a large sprawling map that has so much character and is so fresh in every corner, the world never gets boring, add to this and endless list of activities and side missions and a compelling story so powerful it’s made people who’ve never played any of the other instalments before this, still feel connected to the whole franchise In a way that the stories and legends of all the hero’s resonate with you, making an emotional attachment with the characters who are so well written and so well developed. And you may say, “alright Rushi, we get it the game is fun, beautiful, has a more than compelling story, and has a lot to do, but there are many games that offer that, why is this your favourite?” To this, I’d reply, “firstly, thanks for this segue, and it’s my favourite because of its freedom”. To explain myself better I’d like to divert your attention to one of the biggest games of 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2). The beauty of RDR2 is apparent, it is one of the best stories I’ve ever seen in a video game, and I can’t pick between the stories BOTW and RDR2 so I’m giving them both first place (a slight edge to RDR2 because of reasons I explain later). To sum up the beauty of RDR2 in a paragraph, RDR2 has a large sprawling map that has so much character and is so fresh in every corner, the world never gets boring, add to this an endless list of activities and side missions and a compelling story so powerful it’s made people who’ve never played any of the other installment before this, still feel connected to the whole franchise... The keen-eyed readers may have seen what I just did there (I swear it’s a literary trick and not me being lazy) The point I’m trying to get across is that both the games have very similar appeals and I love them both for very similar reasons. But the ultimate factor upon which I base my decision is freedom. THERE IS NO PLAYER FREEDOM IN RDR2!!!!. Sure, you can choose what side missions you can do and there’s a beautiful open world, but the illusion of freedom only lasts as long as you aren’t in a mission, you want to kill a few animals? Go ahead, want to go fishing? Be my guest, want to track down and kill KKK? Have at it. But the main missions? They get repetitive, every single main mission on the game can be boiled down to “follow the yellow line and shoot simulator”. This became increasingly apparent to me in one of the early missions where the protagonist Arthur goes hunting with one of his gang members, Hosea, in that mission I figured if I’m hunting a large legendary bear, I should perhaps be using my rifle from the higher ground so the bear doesn’t maul me to death, and so I tried to do that, I started riding my horse up a nearby hill and I got the infamous mission failed screen for doing something the game didn’t explicitly tell me to do. Is this a big deal? Yes, does this make the game bad? NO!!!!!, The game is still beautiful and stunning and I’m captivated by the story, and the price of being told a fabulous story is that there is already creative vision behind it, the good people at Rockstar entertainment have made the most compelling and beautiful interactive movie I’ve ever seen, the game doesn’t give you freedom in main missions because it can’t, because it has a very very delicate story it wants to tell you for example that mission with Hosea, it went bad, we got mauled by the bear, but that was supposed to happen, it’s moments like those that add the emotional link between the characters, that make you want to cry at the end of the game, and these bits of storytelling are only unlocked in BOTW by means of unlocking faded memories by completing a few main missions, does this mean that BOTW’s story is dry? NO!!!! Because collecting the memories are a huge part of the game and there are many of them and they all tug on the heartstrings very effectively, and this less involved form of storytelling is the price we pay for a game that lets me do whatever the hell I want. I
fell in love with BOTW when it gave me the option to kill a group of enemies by dropping a metal box on them for absolutely no reason, I could’ve gone and hit them with my sword, I could’ve used a stealthier approach with a bow and arrow, I could’ve gone full-on war criminal mode and rained bombs on them, I could’ve pushed a boulder on them, I could’ve ridden my horse into their camp and run them over, I could’ve pushed them into a fire... You get the point, the countless amount of ways to do the exact same thing making every step I take in the game a unique experience to me is what I absolutely love about this game, every step, every kill, every breath (wink wink) I take feels unique to who I am, now this may not be a big deal to most people, I’ve seen men swear by RDR2 as their favourite game of all time, and I can’t say that they’re wrong, not because it’s subjective and stuff like that, but because it’s stunning, I feel like the core approach that Rockstar took with RDR2 is to create cinema and the main approach that Nintendo took with BOTW is to create an experience, for me the latter edges out all competition just because if the sheer idiosyncratic style of game play, and if all of you reading this ever get the opportunity to play either of these games, please do and let me know if you do, cause god I want to fanboy with you guys, cheers. Wear your masks.
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