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. Producer Eiji Aonuma, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, and their team had taken care to stamp out anything that might have tied it to the idiosyncrasies of the Wii U hardware.
If anything, it is the Wii U version that feels out of place, mostly due to its performance issues. Nintendo took advantage of the small amount of extra headroom afforded by the Switch’s specs to output a higher-resolution image when docked, and to push the physics engine and environmental detail past the point the Wii U was comfortable with. Mostly, Breath of the Wild plays great on Wii U, but it suffers from a very choppy frame rate when subjecting Bokoblins to physics-based carnage, panning past deep vistas of the Hyrule landscape, or visiting densely detailed locations like Kakariko Village.
It’s not unplayable, but not what you expect of Nintendo; that the company was happy to live with this level of performance says a lot about the extent to which it had already moved on from the Wii U. The game also looks a little hazy and washed-out by comparison to the Switch version, whether played in 720p on a big TV or on the Wii U Gamepad’s inferior screen.
Otherwise, though, Breath of the Wild is entirely uncompromised on Wii U. Or is it? Playing the game on a TV, with the chunky slab of the Gamepad in your hands, you get a faint, vestigial sense of a more bespoke Wii U experience that might have been. When Link collects his Sheikah Slate and downloads a map onto it, it seems like a deliberate echo of the console’s unique dual-screen functionality. Surely we were meant to have the map open in our laps as we played, or to be navigating Link’s inventory on the touchscreen. In fact, Nintendo had demonstrated touchscreen features for Breath of the Wild back in 2014, but stripped them out to ensure total parity with the Switch version — and because, Fujibayashi said, looking between the two screens could be distracting.
Playing Breath of the Wild on Wii U is very fun because Breath of the Wild is very fun. (Have you heard? It’s a good game.) It’s also a little sad, because as misbegotten as the Wii U was, Breath of the Wild should have been its crowning glory. Instead, this version is a slightly hobbled afterthought living in the shadow of the definitive masterwork it became on another console. It sold 1.7 million copies on Wii U, and 32.6 million on Switch.
Playing such a familiar game in this unfamiliar form brought home to me how prophetic the design of the Wii U was. At the time, it was poorly understood, but without it, the Switch could never have happened. The Wii U was almost the right idea at slightly the wrong time. The Gamepad’s form factor, which once felt so ungainly, feels totally natural in the era of the Steam Deck. And the magic of instantly switching your gameplay from the TV to the tablet in your hands hasn’t dimmed. This is the entire concept of the Switch, just with the roles reversed.
The other day, I fancied playing Breath of the Wild in the evening, but didn’t want to hide from my family in my office, where the Wii U was plugged in. With a sudden jolt of delight, I realized — remembered — that I could just bring the Gamepad to the sofa and continue playing there. With the Wii U, Nintendo imagined a better world where your gaming could fit around and into your life. With the Switch, it made that world a reality.
