I LOVED Mario's foray into open world game design on the Switch, and when I saw that Breath of the Wild was 25% off on Amazon last week, I thought why not pick it up and Link's open world adventure a try: I was certainly not disappointed! It's a game not without its faults, but what it does well is SO good that the bad is worth pushing through to get to the far more frequent good stuff :D . I got all 120 shrines, 203 Korok seeds, and did all the memories and story quests (but none of the DLC) and it took me about 60 hours.
LOTS of design changes this go around for LoZ. Even though it's a series that's fairly used to pretty significant design decisions, none have been so ambitious before. You have no dedicated sword, shield, or bow, because EVERYTHING has durability and will eventually break. As a result, any weapons you find lying around, even ones dropped from vanquished enemies, can be picked up and used as your own (with one-handed swords, one-handed wands, two-handed swords and axes, and two-handed spears/polearms as your 4 weapon choices). You have a whole slew of armor to pick up (that doesn't break, thank god) that can give you all sorts of bonuses ranging from swimming faster to dealing more damage. No more Epona (unless you have her amiibo): You gotta go out and find and tame your own horses to stable and ride! You can collect all sorts of crafting materials like plants, ores, and monster parts to cook meals and potions to heal yourself (no more finding hearts to heal!) as well as eventually use them to improve your armors to provide set bonuses for wearing a whole set of armor at once. This is all on top of a giant, almost entirely contiguous open world you have to explore. If there's a mountain, you can scale it. If there's an ocean, you can swim it. If there's a house, you can go in it. Even the 4 dungeons are all located in actual space within the world and are very unlike any way dungeons have been done before. All this with nearly no loading screens outside of fast traveling or doing shrines. Your exploration and fighting are only limited by your hearts and, another new addition, your stamina bar! You can find shrines spread all throughout the kingdom that contain challenge rooms inside, the contents ranging from physics mini-games to combat trials to puzzles to solve. For every one you get you get a spirit orb, and for every 4 spirit orbs you get you can either get a new fifth of a stamina bar or another heart container (up to 30 hearts and/or 3 full stamina bars). Only 120 shrines means that you'll technically be short 12 orbs from having all of both, but those 12 shrines are found in the DLC, from what I've heard (and being maxed out like that is hardly essential if you have good armor, weapons, etc.). As a result of all this open-world stuff, the game is extremely non-linear, even by the standards of most non-linear games. The closest DNA in the Zelda family design-wise would be something like Majora's Mask, where collecting all the masks gets you a mask that lets you WRECK the final boss, as well as letting you learn a lot more about the world and solve so many more of its problems. Breath of the Wild cranks that up to 11, as even almost all of the story and all 4 main dungeons are technically entirely optional (although you're certainly highly encouraged to do them), as nothing (short of your ability) is stopping you from immediately running to Ganon to kill him in just around 40 minutes. I thought the story was quite good for a Zelda game. Due to the non-linear nature, it wasn't really at the quality of Skyward Sword's story for me, but the way they approach Zelda's character was really interesting and was genuinely touching. The world building is hit and miss, with the Gerudo being the obvious standout race among the 4 present, but it's all very engaging nonetheless (the Gorons were my favorite (THEY LOVE EACH OTHER SO MUCH AND IT'S SO PRECIOUS <3 )). The game isn't without its flaws, though. Cooking takes AGES, only being able to cook one thing at a time, needing to pick each ingredient from your inventory and put them into your hand, then drop them into the cook pot and watch (or skip) the little cutscene to then get your single food item takes FOREVER when you start cooking a lot of stuff at once. This isn't something huge, but it's something that just came back to irritate me, especially given you need to FIND a cookpot in the world to cook in. You can carry around and light your own fires to wait at (you can't do the Skyrim "wait" just anywhere, it needs to be at a fire, and even then you can only wait until 6am, 12pm, or like 7pm), but you can't carry your own cookpot for whatever reason. Most of my complaints amount to something similarly small, and this is honestly one of the biggest ones (which shows you just how small these problems are). My only other really major complaint other than those would be that I wish you could set hotkeys to swap outfits more quickly and rebind the buttons (because using X to jump and holding B to run, even though you can swap those, is really awkward compared to most other open world games' control schemes, and if I'd been using the joycons more instead of the pro controller I would've gone absolutely nuts). My last design complaint is somewhat spoilery but something I just HAVE to complain about to someone XP. I think it's absolutely ridiculous that the Hero's Clothes that you get are SO bad when you get them and that you need SO many dragon parts to upgrade them to something awesome. It's not like they're easy to get. You've gotta do every shrine! Why make you grind like crazy with the immensely boring dragon pieces? to make the coolest armor actually worth using at all? If the dragons were tough enemies you have to fight, that'd be one thing, but they're no fun to grind at all, especially with the waiting system as weird as it is. When it's way easier to have a near fully/fully upgraded ancient armor set by that point, I have no idea why the Hero's Clothes are such a bitch to upgrade. /rantover :P Edit: I can't believe I totally forgot to talk about presentation! This game's presentation is faaantastic~. The graphics are beautiful, with the enemies and friendly NPC's all having wonderful designs that make them look vibrant and unique. The music is also amazing. This has to be one of the best Zelda soundtracks in recent memory for sure. The only flaw I'd mention about presentation is that the game has some pretty regular framerate dips in areas with lots of particle/grass effects. So in the middle of a grassy forest on flying around a volcano spitting up ash, the framerate is gonna stutter pretty bad. It's nothing that ever made the game unplayable, but it's absolutely something that's impossible to miss and is always annoying when it happens. Verdict: Highly Recommended. The good in Breath of the Wild far, FAR outweighs the bad. This has certainly topped Majora's Mask as my favorite 3D Zelda to play (not by that much, but it has still topped it). Nintendo didn't make a perfect game, but they made a world that, given its expansive size, feels alive in a way I've never felt any other open world game feel, and it's a truly impressive feat just in that regard on top of being loads of fun to play :D
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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