There seems to be a lot of Steve Harvey mistakes going around. First, there was Miss Universe but now The Game of the Year for 2017 is also wrong. And it’s not just Game of the Year Awards, websites like IGN, Gamespot, and many others have declared the winner to be "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild." However, the critics were wrong, and it turns out that "Super Mario Odyssey" has won the award.
The Zelda game has come leaps and bounds since its original incarnation as the dungeon crawler, to the adventure game, to now an open-world Role Playing Game (RPG). There was a lot of time and effort put into this game, I do not doubt this. The game is gigantic and there are small missions everywhere. It feels very similar to almost every good open-world RPG out there like the "Elder Scrolls" Series and "Fallout." However, the characters Link and Zelda somehow change the game entirely. There is a lot of beauty and art in all aspects of the game and I will not deny that it is a good game. But just because it changes the formula of Zelda doesn’t mean that it changes the way I look at games.
"Super Mario Odyssey" was released several months after BOTW ("Breath of the Wild") and it is by far one of the most creative, inspirational, and fun games that has ever existed. There is so much love and inspiration. You can literally be anything. How can you get more wholesome than that?
The story is still the same, but I say if something isn’t broke, don’t fix it. You play as Mario who gets his princess captured from him by Bowser and he must go rescue her. Pretty basic stuff, right? However, his hat gets destroyed in the process. He makes a friend who turns out to be a hat and he goes to help him rescue his princess. Except, this is not a normal 2-D side-scrolling Mario that you remember, let alone a regular level-by-level game. Like "Super Mario Galaxy" and "Mario 64," it is in a 3-D environment and you have to collect tokens and achievements hidden in the world, respectively. The tokens in most Mario games are stars, but this time they are moons. That’s not a huge change, I just thought that was interesting.
I haven’t even mentioned the biggest part of this game. As I’ve stated before, you can be anything you want. That’s not just an uplifting statement. You literally throw your new hat at things in the game, and Mario becomes them: A frog, a Goomba, many Goombas, a bullet, a fish, and that’s only the start just because I don’t want to spoil anything. You can even use your hat to do some neat acrobatic tricks that help you advance the level and get to new places quickly.
What’s even more creative is the fact that there are only about 12 kingdoms but over 800 moons in the whole game. Each kingdom contains more than 25 moons, but some have more than others based on size. And when you first enter each kingdom, you wonder how there can be more than 5 moons in each. The game makes you look in every place and even places you never thought to look. For perfectionists, this game caters to them. Looking for new places and being creative only rewards you, which is not a common thread in games. Either, there is a linear story where you must follow the main path everyone else follows or it is too big of a game where using creativity doesn’t reward and only leads you to a dead end (ahem, "BOTW").
I can talk about this game forever, but you just must play the game just to see what I mean because words will never be able to give Mario justice. The only reason "Breath of the Wild" won Game of the Year is because "The Legend of Zelda" was slapped on the front. Besides beautiful graphics and tight gameplay, nothing new or innovative is added to the open world RPG genre. There is a lot of empty space and tedious walking that takes away from story and adventure. There are times where things get exciting but most of the time, it feels empty. Mario never feels empty. There is never something that shouldn’t be there, and everything exists for a reason. All the kingdoms are so precise and creative, and the movements to get around each map are so fun. Nothing feels empty and everything feels productive because new alleyways and directions lead to new ideas and moons, specifically.
Open world RPG games are sometimes interchangeable just because not much has changed about each. Nothing new is added to the genre from BOTW but just because it’s Zelda, there seems to be more prestige and creativity tacked onto it. "Super Mario Odyssey" is simply more fun. And that’s what makes a game good, right?
