Zelda: Breath of the wild has created this insane Metacritic Record


Breath of the Wild is already breaking records and it hasn’t even been a week yet. On Metacritic, Breath of the Wild has already made a huge achievement, besdies having a score of 98/100.

That 98 makes it the 4th highest rated game of all time, but moreover it’s also the game with the MOST “Perfect” scores ever.

image: metacritic

Other games that come close, with 42 perfect scores each, are The Last of Us and Super Mario Galaxy 2. The user scores aren’t as kind, it’s sitting around 7.7 on user-scores (Out of 10), which is a far stretch from perfect.

But if you take a closer look, you’ll see a notable amount of those negative reviews are just people who are just getting their hate on. They heard someone say “Don’t hate the player, hate the game” and they really took it to heart. Not to say there are zero criticisms of the game, but the average is definitely being weighed down.

image: technobuffalo.com

Something you’ll notice often on IMDB for movie scores is that they tend to favor new releases. If a great, hit movie comes out, it’ll usually spend some time closer to the top of the all-time charts because people are psyched on it, before slowly settling into a more realistic position. However, that’s not really an issue with Metacritic’s critical scores so much.

Another thing to consider is that there are a lot more outlets reviewing games these days than when Goldeneye or Majora’s Mask or other critically praised games were released, so Breath of the Wild has more opportunities to get those perfect scores. On the flip side, those other games have had years and years to collect their reviews, and plenty of sites will do retro reviews of older games, so it can really go both ways.

image: comingsoon.net

In any case, Breath of the Wild is  turning out to be the system-seller that Nintendo really needed upon launch. But if Nintendo wants to avoid a similar fate to the Wii U, they’re going to need more than just a few rock-solid first party titles. They couldn’t have hoped for a better start than Zelda, but let’s see if they can run with this momentum.