It’s just as hard to know how to start this article as it was to choose what to do when I began playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s demo. The hours I spent with the game reinforced my conviction that this is the materialization of the world and adventure my imagination painted in between pixels while playing The Legend of Zelda and in many ways, all of its sequels.

With a surprisingly robust physics engine and an enormous attention to detail, the game is much more than a big patch of land you can freely explore, it’s a world you can interact and experiment with. The freedom to go where you want is much more appealing when you can do so as you please, the number of reactions our actions can have is astounding, no efforts were spared to make this fictional world behave logically and naturally. A true sandbox game.

An icy river blocks your path no matter how many warm clothes you put on or hot potions you take? Well, you can climb pretty much everything, maybe you can summon the mountaineer inside you and find a way around.

Not enough stamina because you didn’t catch green mushrooms to cook a nice stew for extra stamina? Knock some trees down into the river with an axe or sword and use the Korok Leaf’s gusts of wind to help the logs get in the right position to create a bridge.

Don’t even know what a Korok Leaf is? That’s OK, a few well placed arrows will help rotate the logs as they float downriver.

Wait, what? You don’t even have a blade to cut down the tree? Use bombs!

No? Well, you saw an abandoned metal door a while back, why don’t you use the magnetic abilities of the Magnesis Rune to pick it up and make a bridge with it?

I could keep this up all day, the freedom we have to tackle any problem is simply staggering.

While in most, if not all open world games the exploration is little more than following an arrow, walking and fighting, here you have to conquer the world either by adapting to the situation or by preparing properly. Logic was always an important part of Zelda and it still is, except now it’s used in more natural, complex and varied ways.

Of course, there are puzzles closer to the classics, so far we’ve seen four shrines, small dungeons spread throughout the world where we can earn abilities and learn how to use them. Considering that the game will have more than a 100 of these, we can assume the difficulty, complexity and size will vary, not to mention that there will also be bigger dungeons asides from the shrines.

The game looks gorgeous, the shading, lighting and animations are jaw dropping and I couldn’t help but shake the feeling I was inside a Ghibli movie, namely Princess Mononoke. Of course, every rose has its thorns, playing way too close to bad TVs made the lack of anti-aliasing very obvious, although switching to a good set and sitting at a proper distance from the screen hides the jaggies to the point where I didn’t even notice or think about them.
The demo usually ran at 30 FPS, but there were some dips in moments heavy with effects like explosions or fire, but what bothered me the most was the pop-up, many objects only show up as you get closer and that certainly breaks immersion. It’s certainly a beautiful game and a ridiculously impressive technical achievement on Wii U, we’ll have to wait and see what improvements the NX version will bring.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild seems to do exactly what Nintendo promised, it reinvents the series, rethinks its conventions and stays faithful to what makes Zelda… Zelda! Breath of the Wild does much, much more than just mashing together elements of other games, it structures everything around gameplay and interactivity, leaving every other game in the genre eating dust.

Now I just need to remind myself that this was just a demonstration and that we won’t be getting the game before March 2017. It’s been a long wait and it’s still going, but judging by the demo, it’ll be worth it.