Replayability is one concern for gamers, mainly because not many people like to shell out sixty dollars for the next triple-A title. Most people tend to like movies they can watch several times and still feel excited.
This is what I was thinking about as I started replaying The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild about two weeks ago. I purposefully didn’t touch it within the last year in order to go fuzzy on some of the details so that I could play the adventure game again. Of course, there were things that didn’t take my breath away like the first time when I saw Farosh flying by through the jungle. Still, I’ve found that I’m enjoying my replay even though not all the details are fresh to me.
What’s the most interesting to me is that I took up an aspect of the game I didn’t really care about in my first play through: the photo album. My first time, I found it tedious to try and take pictures of everything, but something in me wants to get that completionist run and totally fill up the index. “What have I missed?” is a question often on my mind as I’m looking between two indexed pictures and wondering what I’ve missed and what’s supposed to go between “horse” and “white horse” or what creature goes before or after the Hylian retriever.
I still remember where everything is and how to solve most of the puzzles, but I think going at it a second time without being tired out from having finished everything else has allowed me to enjoy some of the smaller details in the game.
Video Games Deconstructed 
A similar thing happened with myself and Breath of the Wild. I played it at launch on the Wii U, got most of the shrines and a few hundred Koroks, then put it away. Two years later I grabbed it for the Switch and played through it again with the DLC included. Found myself trying different things, focusing on other aspects of the game instead.
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