 Hi. Welcome back. I've never reviewed Zelda Breath of the Wild. It's my favorite Nintendo Switch game. It's my favorite Zelda. And it's probably even my favorite game of all time, which is what makes the concept of reviewing it such a daunting task, because there's no way I can do it justice. Breath of the Wild released on March 3rd, 2017, and it radically changed the Zelda series forever. Introducing a new open world explorative adventure with all new physics based gameplay, fast paced combat, and even voice acting for the first time in the franchise. For many Zelda fans, Breath of the Wild felt like the logical next step for the series. As looking back at the previous titles, you can see that almost all of them wanted to reach out and explore these concepts, but they were just always limited by the hardware of the time. That said, this was still a huge leap for the Zelda series, but it was also a huge success. As it's the best selling title in the franchise, by almost triple and a whopping 24 million copies sold. So moving forward over the next half a decade, yes. It's been that long already. We're all getting very old. Today, I wanna look at all of the games that Breath of the Wild has very clearly inspired. And now, don't take that the wrong way, because the internet has a habit of getting kind of, um, internet-y. But most of these games were just inspired by Breath of the Wild, and in most cases, the developers themselves even referenced Zelda as the inspiration for their game, which is a completely normal thing to happen. Any work of art can be an inspiration for another. For example, Papa Roach lists Wutang Clan as an inspiration for their band. But no matter how many times you listen to Kareem, it doesn't sound anything like Last Resort. Something can be inspired by Breath of the Wild's art style or its music or its story, and then create something of their own with that in mind. And those are the games we're talking about today. And I'm proud of what Nintendo accomplished with Breath of the Wild. I mean, I can't think of a more established series of games other than Zelda, which had its first title in 1986, four years before I was even born. And from there, it stayed fairly consistent in its format for over two dozen games. And many series of games struggle to keep new players invested when you start hitting the fourth fifth installment in the franchise. But Nintendo managed to breathe new life into its 19th installment. One of the only other comparisons I can think of of a franchise so big doing something as radical as this and being successful is 2018's God of War. It completely revamped itself while still staying true to the core series. And that was also a massive success. And also one of my favorite games, actually. I love that game. But let's take a look at these clone games and the games that aren't clones but were inspired by Zelda. This video is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use ExpressVPN all the time. And let me tell you why. For one, you can unblock loads of content that's typically not available in your country. While I'm editing here, all I gotta do is one easy click connect to UK or Canada. And just like that, I'm watching Reckon Morty, Dragon Ball Super, heck, I can watch The Office again. Yeah, The Office never left Netflix for this guy. And hey, while you're connected to those other countries, why not check out their Steam Store or other platforms for cheaper game prices, country exclusives, or of course, games releasing an entire day earlier. The best part is while you're connected to ExpressVPN and having all this fun with it, you're also being protected. Whenever you're connected to an unencrypted connection, ExpressVPN protects you from hackers trying to steal your private information like passwords, financial details, emails. ExpressVPN encrypts your data and encases it in a secure tunnel that nobody can see. Not even your internet service provider. Yeah. Did you know your ISP can see everything you do online? Every website you go to? Mm-hmm. Click the link below or go to expressvpn.com forward slash beat em ups and find out how you can get three months of ExpressVPN free unless you like people looking at what you're looking at online. The first game is Decay of Logos. And I am starting with this one because this is the only one in the video I've never played. It doesn't look great. To catch myself up, I watched IGN's review and I think the first 20 seconds say it all. So while the combat and difficulty is clearly lifted from the Souls series, the art style, protagonist, mounts, and the exploration are clearly taken from Breath of the Wild. The issues with the game run wild, punlet intended, from the very start with graphical glitches, terrible frame rates, repetitive gameplay beats, and lack of variety throughout the world. It was the dev team's first stab at a game and they clearly looked at a game like Breath of the Wild and thought, no, let's try and make something like that but with some Souls elements. I mean, why not, right? But by judging of the lack of the game's presence on the dev team's Twitter page, I think it's safe to say they've moved on. Hopefully they regroup and come back at it with another game somewhere down the line because Decay of Logos has some solid bones here. Quickly, if we wanna talk about just art style, Ashen is a game which the devs actually cited Zelda as inspiration for their game. The game itself is completely different to a Zelda but I really enjoyed this game. Not that a game has to be like Zelda for me to enjoy it. I do like other stuff. It's a skill-based action RPG where you guide a faceless wanderer around the world. The visuals, massive environments, and epic boss fights are all wonderful but there really isn't anything to do in the world. It's more a linear open world progression through the story with lots of things trying to kill you but that's what I meant earlier by saying Breath of the Wild can inspire a game that ends up being its own thing entirely which is not the case for the next game which is Oceanhorn 2. So Oceanhorn 1 and Oceanhorn 2 are both straight unapologetic clones of Zelda games. The first title is a clone of Wind Waker. Even down to sailing between the islands, everything was very watered down, pun not intended such as these sailing parts being very linear. It was a little cute game though. It got some love so they made a sequel and for this one they said Breath of the Wild now but honestly though it's not bad either. Visually the art style is similar. It'll feel familiar with its swordplay shielding guns. Okay, wait, hold on that last one's new but the dungeons, puzzles, very similar soundtrack, boss fights all draw very obvious parallels. I think ultimately this is a decent little adventure. I do appreciate the differences they tried to make but if we wanna move to a game where the devs did very early on say they were inspired by Breath of the Wild specifically everyone's favorite Genshin Impact. Initially it was marketed as a Breath of the Wild clone. Now, hold on. When I talked about the internet in the intro I was pretty much referring to Genshin Impact fan. I made a video about Genshin Impact at the time because they said it was coming to Switch too. That was something they used heavily in their marketing especially once they've already said they're inspired by Zelda. Of course they wanna get it on Nintendo's handheld console. So their initial trailer followed so many similar beats of the Breath of the Wild trailer down to seeing the glider and exploring the world and something we're gonna get very familiar with in this video, those soft piano keys. Breath of the Wild really trademarked for its game was this sporadic sounds and noises but piano keys were a big ongoing theme throughout all of it. And it's hard not to hear those keys without thinking of exploring in Breath of the Wild. And not only did Genshin Impact use those similar piano keys in its initial trailers but so much of its entire soundtrack uses these soft piano keys. In fact, one of the songs on the soundtrack is literally called Legend of the Wind. But yeah, I made a video saying Genshin Impact is a clone of Breath of the Wild coming to Switch. That didn't age well because when the game finally released it became very clear the game had more to offer. You have the whole system of multiple characters that you can unlock using a Gacha system. The game actually ended up being a ton of fun and a completely different experience on its own right but that doesn't change the fact that it was not only inspired by Breath of the Wild but they intentionally marketed it to be like Breath of the Wild, which is fine. They did their own thing with it and I love how it turned out. The only thing I don't get is why it's not on Switch yet. It really should be, I've been waiting. Next we have Windbound. Every time you hear about people talking about Zelda clones or games inspired by Zelda, Windbound always comes up and while I couldn't find any direct references to developers saying that this game was inspired by Breath of the Wild, the inspirations are clearly there with this cell shaded art style, a focus on exploration and of course the game's soundtrack which has a similar minimalistic style with, you guessed it, a ton of ambient sounds and those trademark Breath of the Wild-like piano flourishes. You start on a small island with literally nothing and you start to try and craft things together. You build a little boat and then as you progress through more and more islands and you find, discover new secrets and unlock puzzles you progress and if you ever do die, you lose everything. It's one of those games, very different. You know what's not very different? A mortal's phoenix rising. I don't know if I still have to be careful with what I say about a mortal's. I thoroughly love the game because honestly out of all the other games on this list, this one is the clone and the reason why I said I don't know if I still have to watch my words is because Ubisoft worked with me on that game and I enjoyed making each one of those videos. I love working with Ubisoft and they let me get away with comparing it to Breath of the Wild quite a lot in my videos so I think I'm still safe to do it here. It has everything from the exploration to the climbing all over everything to the shrines, the upgrading system where you have your stamina and then you have your health. My favorite thing though is just how many puzzles there are around the world. I will say that they changed quite a bit and it feels like a different game. There's just no hiding what inspired it. Easily the biggest difference just like Genshin would be the combat. It's much more action-y with way more special abilities and upgrades and by the end of the game, you'll feel like a literal God and I really liked that about the game. So all of those were games that were very clearly inspired by Breath of the Wild itself and the notes that the game hit on with its exploration or its art style or its gameplay but I think there's two main things that inspires from Breath of the Wild. The first is those things but the other is just the notion of taking your franchise and saying, let's change it up. Let's completely rework this thing from the ground up and make it something better or at the very least something different. The most recent one, Sonic Frontier. Now again, internet, hear me out here. As soon as that trailer hit during the game awards, the writing was on the wall for me. Granted, the game isn't out yet and maybe they're doing a similar thing Genshin did by drawing those parallels, getting that hype for the Sonic Breath of the Wild moment and then flipping it and introducing everything that's going to be different about the game but as far as the one trailer we have right now, everything is the same as Breath of the Wild. So the trailer begins and you see Sonic running through the forest and then you hear Sonic over here with that like reverb. It's just to me, that's so comparable to the initial trailer with Breath of the Wild where you hear Zelda saying. Open your eyes. And then immediately you see landscapes and Sonic standing on a cliff looking over the land and that's a shot for shot of the very first Breath of the Wild trailer and one of the earliest moments in the game itself. It then shows us all these different biomes and then right as we start to get that feeling of exploration what does the music do? But it starts to play the little tippy tap of some piano keys and then at the end, we see Climony Ganon. Okay, obviously it's not Ganon but big dark purple toned massive threat. Obviously things are going to be different in this game and it's going to be Sonic themed but this trailer tries to hit the Breath of the Wild notes and it is essentially Sonic's Breath of the Wild moment. It's no secret that Sonic hasn't been doing the best with its games. I mean, love them or hate them, they just haven't been bangers and I hope this works because honestly racing around a world like that as Sonic could be fun. And if you're thinking that any of that is actually a stretch I've saved this until the end. Multiple writers for the game have compared the open world design to Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild. So you can delete those comments you were already leaving down below. I think another one that, hmm. You got to be careful with fandoms. Pokemon Arceus or Arceus. I'm already in hot water. Following the release of the reveal trailer, many news outlets drew comparisons of the game's open world setting to Breath of the Wild. I mean, visually it's very similar. I feel like if you took the two side by side and asked a group of people that didn't really know much about video games are these the same game? They'd probably say yes. It's getting funny now but once again in the trailer for Arceus you hear the same piano key. I get that it has that really nice feeling of just a world come to life. That exploration makes you wanna go and explore but it's so transparent what you're doing now. And it's fine. I mean, I don't have an issue with it. I think they saw that that big change in a core franchise can work. So the Pokemon company and Game Freak maybe felt even more comfortable in the idea of trying something radically different because Pokemon fans typically don't want things to change. I could be wrong. And it's still a safe risk because they're clearly splitting Pokemon in two different directions with your traditional games that I'm sure will keep happening and then these more open world games. And I think that is the inspiration they took from Zelda but I almost get a feeling that it's inspired by Monster Hunter and maybe that format. The more I see of this game the more I think it's clearly not a giant open world where you head out from one town to find the next town and so on but more you have this one central location like in Monster Hunter and you upgrade everything there. You do everything there, right? And then you head out into this open world area to complete tasks and missions and hunt for Pokemon. And then once you're done with a mission you come back to home base. Very similar structure to Monster Hunter but I think it's definitely inspired by Breath of the Wild in many ways but it's not going to play like Breath of the Wild. You know I want to throw out something random take it how you want but I see a lot of Breath of the Wild inspiration in the new Halo. There's a couple of things here but let's look at the very obvious from the start. Halo is a series that's been around for a long time and traditionally it's been a linear experience. Infinite features an all new gameplay style and essentially a soft reboot. It's set in an open world. It's very easy for players to jump in now for the first time. I'm actually loving the game as someone who's played all the Halos. I think this is a great fresh take on the series but you can't deny that it tried something very different which could have been inspired by Breath of the Wild. One little thing I have noticed is when I'm playing through the campaign and I saw the puzzle and there's puzzles like I get like a little seed core and shove it into a station so I can open door. There's actually a little fanfare sound effect that plays when you complete a task like that just like in Zelda. Listen to this. That sound is so similar not only to just the fanfare sound from Zelda in general but just the same kind of sound is like being in a shrine and fighting those little guardians. And I wouldn't be surprised if this was a subtle little nod to one of I'm sure many of the inspirations that this game took. The open world, it feels similar too. A big reason for that is you have the grappling hook in Halo but also there's a ton of physics based stuff. Using that grapple hook you can use the motion that you get from that to really propel yourself. There's ways to interact with the world and have fun with what surrounds you in a similar fashion to Breath of the Wild. Again, that one's more just something I've noticed. Going down that avenue of games that are shifting and trying something new, another franchise that's been around for a long time, Kirby. Okay, granted, this game might actually draw more inspiration from Mario Odyssey but it's that feel of a revamp. And I think this moment in the release trailer is paying a very small tribute to Link. I mean, look at the little cute green hat, blue hilted sword, even unleashing Link's trademark spinning attack. I mean, maybe not, but I think it is. And I for one think Kirby needed that big change. I haven't had fun with Kirby in a long time, to be honest. And the concept of playing this Kirby Odyssey type game has me really excited. And for the first time in years I'm looking forward to picking up a new Kirby game. I think ultimately what Breath of the Wild has shown is that it's okay to try something new. A lot of developers can take inspiration from that and should. I think Far Cry needs to go back to the drawing board and revamp the franchise and try something new. I like that Assassin's Creed tried it and I actually really like what they did with it and I preferred it. Just because you have something that works doesn't mean you can't change it still. And in fact, sometimes maybe that's exactly what your game needs. And then beyond the revamp, I'm not surprised that a lot of indie games take inspiration from games like Breath of the Wild. But more than anything, it really goes to show just how good of a game Zelda, Breath of the Wild, truly is. Whether it's developers wanting to pay tribute to one of the best games ever created or developers wanting to try and copy the success that that game had, it just goes to show that even in 2017 or now in 2021, Nintendo can be that innovative company that leads the industry in so many ways. While it might feel like there are steps behind the competition, there are actually a couple steps ahead in other ways. If you enjoy videos like this, kind of just like a wood thesis, let me know down below. Like the video, which would also let me know. Subscribe if you're new, share the video. Maybe, I don't know. Follow me on Twitter, on Twitch. And if you haven't played Breath of the Wild yet, do it.