The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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About

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a 2017 action-adventure video game and the 19th title in the The Legend of Zelda series. The game took a departure from many of the conventions found in previous titles, featuring an open-world environment and the ability to play through the game's dungeons in any order. Upon release, Breath of the Wild received widespread critical acclaim as the launch title for the Nintendo Switch and the final Nintendo-produced game for the Wii U.

History

Eiji Aonuma, the manager for The Legend of Zelda, first announced that a new game in the franchise was being developed during a Nintendo Direct livestream on January 23rd, 2013.^[1] During the livestream, Aonuma explained that the new title would challenge some of the series' conventions, but couldn't show any video material yet. During Nintendo's Digital Event at E3 2014, Aonuma showed the first gameplay material of the game with the game having a release date somewhere in 2015.^[2] The 2

An official game trailer was released for the game on June 14th, 2016, which announced its sub-title to become "Breath of the Wild"^[3] but no longer featured a release date. Another trailer was released on January 12th, 2017, which announced the game's title to be on March 3rd alongside the release of the Nintendo Switch.^[4]

Online Presence

On April 5th, 2013, a page for Breath of the Wild was created on the Zelda Wiki.^[6] On June 14th, 2016, a page for the game was created on TV Tropes.^[7] That day, the /r/Breath_of_the_Wild^[8] subreddit was created for discussions about the game. On June 15th, a Facebook^[10] page for the game was launched, garnering more than 100,000 likes over the next eight months. On March 2nd, 2017, Clickhole released a video on YouTube arguing that the game revealed that "Japan could pull off another Pearl Harbor" (shown below).

Reception

Immediately after release, the game received positive reception from critics, gathering a Metacritic^[5] score of 98/100; the user score stayed lower by swaying around 75/100, but upon closer inspection was shown to be caused by new accounts with questionable access to the game giving it 0/100. Many gaming review sites gave the game perfect or near perfect ratings (shown below). On March 2nd, 2017, Twitter^[9] created a Moments page titled "Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a 'masterpiece' say the reviews," collecting positive tweets about the game.