#nintendo legendofzelda breathofthewild jimsterlingisanidiot

[darkarm66]

Breath of the Wild review

On the Wii U, I had The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess in their HD remastered forms....and barely touched. This is reoccurring issue with me and remasters, even with games I love. No matter how much I loved them the first time, there are some games I won't touch again and it was mainly due to the beginning stages. I dreaded going though Ordon Village again and knowing I'd have to put up with those tutorials again to get to the parts of Twilight Princess i did enjoy. So once Link wakes up Breath of the Wild, gets his clothes and Sheikah Slate and I got to run around with my meager abilities and items, I knew that this game was gonna be a classic. Yes, that's all it took. Now, there have been many many reviews that extolled the excellence of Breath of the Wild, much better written reviews when it came out, possibly on the verge of hyperbolic. So allow me to add to it. And yes, not only is this the best game of 2017, It very well could be one of the greatest of all time. While those reviews have mentioned Witcher 3, Skyrim, Arkham Asylum and other open world games as direct influences (Nintendo said as much as well), this game inspired feelings in me I haven't felt since Xenoblade Chronicles. And like Xenoblade Chronicles, Breath of the Wild succeeded due to not just the high amount of gameplay but also by eliminating a lot of wonky, reductive elements. 

There's no invisible barriers that prevents the player from going where they want to go, once you get off the Great Plateau after getting the runes in the Shrines, the player has everything the need to explore this amazing version of Hyrule. And the exploration was felt lacking in previous Zeldas. You knew that special icon or crack in the ground required the player to retrieve the item from a dungeon. Now, you just have to go there and a lot of it just jumps out at the player. This time around, Hyrule itself is a dungeon with so many puzzles that tempt to player to stop moving and just fiddle around for a bit. The world is littered with seemingly out of place shapes and it draws the player in a way that doesn't feel contrived or blatant. And even if a trail isn't apparent or there's no natural way to enter a place, the climbing mechanic breaks all of it. Climbing itself becomes its own minigame because its governed by a stamina wheel and the weather system, which does allow the player to be challenged by where they can climb but it doesn't allow the player to break the game by going everywhere. And speaking of challenge, get ready to eat humble pie with the simplest combat system but toughest enemies ever. 

This Hyrule wasn't afraid to hand the player its ass over and over. And the lack of tutorials and locked rooms that teach you to fight means you're not stuck in this one place until you get it right. If you die, you come back and try again or move onto somewhere else to do something that won't kill you. When I tried to put off the story as much as I possibly can, I ended up discovering Shrines (in a minute, not yet), Koroks, rupees, side quests, food. Until I became bored and started the Zora quest line, which delighted because I got to climb up a waterfall with ice blocks and led to the real menace of Hyrule: Lynels. This is when previous Zelda game would put you in this room and turn this into a boss battle to see if the player has gotten any good. Not this time, it didn't care that I didn't have enough hearts, or my shields were too weak, or my weapons were brittle. So I just turn around from the high point and glided to somewhere else instead. While players will have to fight to actually survive, Breath of the Wild let the experience teach the players.

And mainly, those Shrines is how you get experience points. The Shrines are dotted the map, some not even trying to hide, some taking maddening puzzle solving, others rewarding the player for figuring out all the clues. Not only is this how the game facilitates fast travel, it also scratches that dungeon crawling itch for a bit, but only by being a puzzle shrine or a combat shrine. It lacks the incredible intertwining of previous Zelda dungeons but the light content and brain stretching use of items makes up for it. Especially since the player is always rewarded with a great item. Unless its a weapon...

Okay, in the early goings, weapon durability can be a bummer. Weapons break too common and by the time you get used to one, its gone. That's not the worst part of it. The problem comes when good weapons do start becoming more readily available but not you're out of slots because you don't wanna waste your Royal Broadswords on some basic ass Bokoblins because you know a Lynel needs that work more. However, you deal with it because all the puzzle solving and wander lusting led to Korok seeds to expand the inventory, so now by the time you wanna start wrecking things, you're actually equipped to do so this time around.

I also believe that the durability allows the player to actually replay certain areas. While other games use powerful enemies as gates to keep the player away for a few hours, that doesn't feel like it this time around. The map allows players to actually keep tabs on where they may want to go but don't feel like dying to do so. Place that stamp down, go somewhere else and come back to it when the player truly feels ready. I remember Miyamoto talking about how they wanted Zelda games to be able to replay certain areas for a reason. And now they didn't have to force the player to do a bunch of fetch quests or pixel hunts to come back to an area they already beaten. This makes Hyrule feel more livelier this time around because no matter how much time you spent in one area, you can come back to it and discover something hiding under your nose this whole time but you couldn't see it just yet. Or it has a dope sword you really needed but didn't have room for.

But one thing to make room for: food! There was something so hypnotic about resource gathering and cooking, in a way that surpasses Final Fantasy XV's photo-realistic dishes. The abundance of materials, which not only kills the tedium that might have killed lesser games, allows players to actual feel free to consume and experiment with everything they've gathered. In the beginning, basic meals are cooked to give your health a chance withstand raiding an enemy camp. By the time you're in the 100 hour mark, players are hunting to create complex dishes that give them dope buffs to make a play session a more pleasant.

One pleasant thing this go around is the story. For all the flack Nintendo gets for its approach to stories, it only gets it because they're not telling it through the usual cinema envy of other games. This is a deconstruction of Link and being the chosen one. Link isn't just gonna be handed all the tools needed to succeed just because he was chosen. Same goes for Zelda, who seems heartbroken that she has to be the reincarnation of a goddess. And thanks to the Memories questline, you get to see those cutscenes but they aren't automatically triggered because you did a thing. You earn those previous moments beforehand that showed Link and Zelda not truly feeling going along with what destiny wants to do because it worked 100 years ago...which was probably Nintendo's feelings developing this game.

For years, Eiji Aonuma talked about breaking the conventions and in the gameplay and story, that feeling comes across well with Divine Beast Champions, especially who they just fall doing what they were told to do. This is truly about how Zelda's dev team felt about coming together to give the same results, only for it to fail before it even began and the task fell to new people to do what's necessary to defeat Ganon through new means. It's deeply personal and the emotion maturely understated. Link and Zelda develop as legit characters through their struggles and heartbreak and it gives the story an emotional richness not seen since Ocarina/Majora. Link (and the player) truly earns the right to be called a hero, not because he was chosen but because he endured and grew.

I haven't even mentioned how beautiful this game is. Forget your need for 6 billion polygons per sec to animate a face. The details astounding from up close and far away. Climb to the top of the mountain and you see a sprawling, diverse horizon to take your breath away or look down to see a forest or lake or camp to possibly sail down. None of it ever stops looking gorgeous. My favorite place in the game revolved around a Shrine that needed an Orb to unlock but the area you were in was completely dark. Seeing Link as a shadow, lighting torches to move around this area was utterly beautiful and proves that developers don't need to high end CGI cutscenes to make a visual impression that last forever. Speaking of lasting impressions, this is one of the best UI I've seen in a game. It conveys information and stats without completely cluttering the screen and taking away from the game world. Even when playing in handheld mode, you can stil take in a lot of visual treats of Hyrule.

And despite the impression that I'm ready to marry this game, this game isn't flawless. Weapon switch is a legit pain. Holding down one button to switch to a particular weapon isn't as intuitive as the other controls in the game. You're better off just pausing and switching items, which sorta breaks the immersion for the player. Also, as great as the Koroks and Korok puzzles are, did their have to be 900 of them. I'm all for trolling the player and subverting expectations for attempting 100% completion, but 900?!? That quickly veers between padding and repetitive. And the dragons can suck it. Only one item drop per appearance and god help you if you don’t want a scale. Again. Which leads to the upgrade system being underwhelming, due to its limited focus on armor and not weapons.

What makes me ignore these flaws: the game never forces you to do any thing mentioned before this (except the first four shrines and runes). You never have to find a Korok seed (but why the fuck wouldn't you?!?), you never have to expand your health and stamina, you don't need to cook a meal, get the Master Sword, ride a horse, shield surf, regulate your temperature, complete a shrine. The game is indifferent to your progress. But you will do any and all those things because Breath of the Wild is excellent at triggering your curiosity and intellect  and rewarding it, not rewarding your patience. Best of all, nearly everything you do fits into a mechanic the benefits the player, the quest aren't just a collection of repetitive checklists of escalating numbers nor is its badly tuned mechanics just thrown for the sake of variety. (Take that, open world games!)

This is not to say the previous Zeldas were awful. They didn't get tens and awards for nothing. You may even miss the linearity. They were great for what they are. Breath of the Wild is just better. Instead of telescoping design and handing you the fun stuff when you did the one thing it told you to do, it trusted the players this time around to make their own fun and build their own legend. Players will end up completing the same things but everyone will make their own path to completion. Breath of the Wild is worthy of the praise it has received and then some. It break ground by avoiding all the pot holes and wasted soil of previous Zeldas and open world games and brought  freshnesss that hasn't been felt in years. Truly a game that lives up to the word 'Legend'

#nintendo legendofzelda breathofthewild jimsterlingisanidiot