As the brilliant launch game for the Switch, BOTW can lay claim to being Nintendo’s greatest triumph. But it was originally set to be released on the company’s biggest failure
As Shigeru Miyamoto never actually said, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a bad game is forever bad.” This sliding-doors concept gains an additional, poignant dimension when considering The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, because that game’s delay affected more than its quality. Originally planned for release in 2015 as a Wii U exclusive, Breath of the Wild’s shift to early 2017 moved it onto the launch lineup for the Nintendo Switch. It went from propping up a failed console to becoming the game that defined the Switch, and redefined Nintendo, for a whole new era.
That halo has made it easy to forget that the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild was actually released. Not for the first time, Nintendo chose a Zelda game to play the dual role of swan song for one generation and curtain-raiser for another (appropriately for the Zelda series, with its preoccupation with the closed loop of history). In 2006, Twilight Princess was released on both the outgoing GameCube and the brand-new Wii. On that occasion, you could see the cracks. The Wii’s novel motion controller was an awkward fit for Twilight Princess, and the game’s deliberate classicism clashed with the bright, casual, carefully neutral aesthetic Nintendo was advancing with other launch titles like Wii Sports. It was clearly a GameCube holdover in ill-fitting clothing.
Nintendo was not about to let the same thing happen to Breath of the Wild — this time, it optimized the game for the new console and retrofitted it into the old. Firing the Wii U version up recently, I found exactly the same game that had seared itself into our collective consciousness.
