Since about mid December I've been slowly working my way through Breath of the Wild on my Switch. I've been playing it for a good while now, got a handful of things but I'm sort of teetering on the point where the adventure is really going to get into full swing so before I grab my Master Sword and get in some big ancient robots, I'll post some of my thoughts about this game so far.
First lets get some good things out of the way. The game is HUGE, and I don't just mean in terms of actual game world but there's also a ton of stuff to do. I've not even seen close to all of it but I'm constantly finding quests, big enemies, shrines, interesting looking landmarks, towns etc. There is definitely a ton of fun to be had just running around and looking for things which, in fairness, is what I've spent the vast majority of my time doing with the game up to this point. With a lot of these open world type games its easy for the world to be big but sort of barren of anything interesting (New Fallout for example) but Zelda just constantly has stuff popping up every which way. You'll set a goal for some quest or to get to some shrine and then on the way there about 7 different things will distract you, but in a good way.
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But after you get over the vast and varied world, things tend to go downhill a little bit. Zelda doesn't have your usual set of dungeons to explore and conquer. In this game you have 4 divine beasts that you must go inside and defeat the boss of and then go hit up Hyrule Castle to go slap Ganons shit in. Conventional dungeons have been replaced with Shrines which are sort of short puzzle or combat sequences which will net you a spirit orb. 4 spirit orbs give you either an extra heart or extra stamina, that choice is up to you. Since exploring the world is so fun, the act of hunting around and finding these shrines are cool but the only thing that awaits you on the inside is pure disappointment. Every single shrine is some kind of brain dead puzzle to solve or some shit, non threatening, easy as hell enemy to defeat. This wouldn't be a problem if the shrines were not such a big part of the game but doing a number of shrines is VITAL to success. For example getting the master sword requires you to have a certain number of hearts in order to pull it from its stone and so you have to do a button of shrines to get enough orbs to get those hearts. Health in general is a problem in this game because of my next big gripe which is the combat.
The combat in Breath of the Wild is shit. There's no if, ands or buts about it, it's just shit. Partly it's shit because of the breakable weapons thing that the games decided to use and it seems that there isn't a weapon in the game that doesn't just shatter after about 7 or 8 hits. This problem however is more of an annoyance than a real deal breaker but the deal is indeed broken when you consider the difficulty of combat. A combat encounter will only really go one of two ways. The first is that you fight the enemy for a bit and then it lands a hit on you and you die instantly, this is basically the only way to game over. The second is that you will fight the enemy for a bit and he lands a hit on you and doesn't kill you instantly. In this situation the enemy has literally no chance of winning the encounter because if your health becomes critically low, you can just chow down on one of the hundreds of steak skewers in your pockets or just spam apples until you are full HP again. All this challenge (or lack thereof) means is that there exist little pockets of Hyrule that you can't go to yet until you find either enough shrines to get enough hearts or until you get armor strong enough to make sure you don't die in a single blow, after that, every single combat encounter in this game is free.
The tedium of the shrines and the atrocious combat are my two BIG gripes with this game but I'm fully aware I'm only scratching the surface. I've not done any of the divine beasts yet and there seems to be plenty of stuff dotted around the world that might make up for these two glaring problems by the time I get to the end. I don't hate this game, but I think that all the hype I encountered before getting my Switch made me think I was in for something really special when all I seem to be getting right now is a mediocre open world action adventure.
I'll do another post after I finish it to see if my opinion changes at all
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