A Big Fat Review of Breath of the Wild

Hello my beautiful friends, I am here today to talk a little about Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. From the moment I booted it up and walked out of the sanctuary of the Resurrection, I knew this was going to be a very special game. So, unsurprisingly, when I finally got around to

review

ing it I really wanted to give it my all. I wanted to talk about almost every aspect of the game, from its triumphs to its failures and everything in between, as you can probably tell from the length of this article. video I did just that there may have been a few small stones that I left unturned at the end, but it's really not many for the most part, if I had an opinion on it, it's out now.

I've been calling this a

review

and you hear me keep referring to it as such throughout, even though I'm not entirely sure that's accurate anymore. I mean, technically yes, I'm largely doing what you do in a review here, but when I hear the word review, it makes me think of game critics. telling people your opinion on a game so they can make more informed purchasing decisions, but that's not what's happening here or at least I'm willing to bet that's not happening much now, most people have played Breath of the Wild. or decided that one day they will play a

breath

of the

wild

and I also bet that most of the people who are willing to watch such a long video about the game are probably not in the small group of people who are still trying to figure out to determine If it's right for them, this is more of a breakdown of the game's design, a critique of all its pieces, a review of sorts, a type of analysis, so I've recently decided to rename this type of deep analysis and extensive of a game to separate it from my usual reviews, therefore the title of this Breath of the Wild review has become a big Breath of the Wild review, a seemingly subtle change, but I think it makes a big difference originally in this review/big review.

You was released in seven separate parts, but here I've compiled them all into one long viewing experience. Each part is pretty much the same as when it was originally published, although here and there you'll see a few notes and appendices popping up on the screen - not a ton, so don't worry about missing them or anything, just a few tidbits of information that I felt like they should be added, and naturally, since this is a nearly three and a half hour video breaking down every element of

breath

ing in the

wild

, I'll warn you. Now yes, there are spoilers ahead, all spoilers, in fact, as I said when writing this, nothing in the game was prohibited and that included all the mechanics, all the enemies that the story defeats and even the final ending of Boston, I also know that while there will always be visuals to accompany the voiceover, including after-mention notes and maybe a handful of jokes that you'll have to watch to understand most of it.

You can probably hear all of this without having to look. You know if they like to listen to me talk about Zelda while they're cleaning the house or driving around the state or something like that with all that said. I think it's time to get started, ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to present to you my great review of The Legend. from Zelda Breath of the Wild when Breath of the Wild was first revealed at e3, back when we still referred to it as L d'you. I saw the reveal trailer later that year. I saw the precious few moments of gameplay they gave us at the Game Awards: Three Saints Later, which gave us the full reveal trailer with the name of the game and the basic mechanics on some monsters and locations, and that was the stop of the game. breath of the wild preview tour where I went down, unfortunately I didn't want to see more. things inevitably slipped through the cracks every time a juicy new trailer appeared at a Nintendo Direct or something.

I would always peak between my fingers here and there and sure enough, every time I did something it would mess up and I would regret it terribly. I've talked about this before. But if you don't know, I'm hypersensitive to spoilers in a material. For me, a spoiler is not just that this character dies at the end or it turns out that everything was a dream for me. A spoiler is anything that I would have loved to discover. For me, I do know everything. What there is to know about a game in every type of person, I will fight every object, I will get every place, I will see that much of the magic disappears with the simple act of playing. releasing a video game is not the only important thing to me.

I want a game, especially a game as big and important as Breath of the Wild, to be like experiencing an event in my life, something special, so I went into it as blind as I reasonably could. As a guy who talks about gaming on YouTube and I'll tell you right now, I'm really glad I did it. Breath of the Wild is obviously a great game with its own spoiler alert, by the way, yes it is a great game, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that an immensely large amount of my enjoyment came from not knowing much while basically never liking it. knowing too much about any game, avoiding spoilers has never before meant as much as it does here and that's because no Another game I've played contains a lot of lovely things to discover.

You see, I had always dreamed of this massive game where you could go wherever you wanted in the world, that was beautiful and magical and that you would actually find interesting. things that I would run around the world of Shadow of the Colossus thinking this is so close it was visually spectacular, it was huge, it made my imagination fly, but beyond 16 colossi that you had to hunt in order and I guess I eat fruits and lizards and things to eat to increase your gauges, there was just nothing to find, it was just a set, a really big, beautiful, amazing set, but in a set there was nothing to do except enjoy the scenery and of course some other games of open world have come closer. to deliver what I wanted, take a game like Skyrim, for example, which is huge, beautiful, full of quests, and completely open so you can explore at your own pace.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly why Skyrim didn't do it for me. I loved him, I loved him, I loved him. but it didn't contain that kind of magic I was looking for, it could be because most of the game boiled down to killing guys in Luton, finding a cave, dungeon, sewer or whatever, running through it and killing the people. guys. and grab all the loot, lots of amazing things to find and that's why it certainly came close, but something was still missing. However, it's the game I've been waiting for all those years and it's really surprising that it turned out that way when IO Numa claimed that the Great Plateau, the huge sprawling area available for play and hands-on events, was only about one percent. of the total map.

I think more than a few of us worry a little bit, I mean, how many things can you do? develop for such a big world, how can there be enough to do? It doesn't matter if a game world is a thousand miles wide if you're just running around forever and finding nothing, but the Zelda team did it, they made the world beautiful and packed with interesting geography and ruined buildings and a wide variety of unique places to find and they also filled it to the brim with guys to kill and things to loot, but the two things that make the game a wild breath.

I've always wanted to play with our shrines and core ox and I think it's because on the one hand they're everywhere, one hundred and twenty shrines and nine hundred core ox means the world is full of them, there's no place in Hyrule where you can't. I won't find shrines or central ox, which means that no matter where you are, you will always be hunting, but the most important thing is that they perfectly satisfy my desire for exploration because they strike a balance between useful and fun to find, see if there are useful things . It's scattered everywhere and all you have to do is collect it, it's not that fun, the game becomes a collecting marathon at that point, the idea is just to waste time, but then if there are things you really require effort to find, but those things aren't really that useful, so what's the point of searching for everything?

Much less fun shrines and Couric, although they are perfect shrines because they give you spirit orbs, four of which can be exchanged for another heart container or a little extra in your stamina meter hearts mean more here than in any other Zelda 3D , and stamina helps and your ability to move around the world by climbing higher surfaces and sliding further mainly and of course each shrine is just a fun challenge to overcome that will touch more. More on that later, but that's what makes them even more satisfying to find, so quarks are great because they increase the amount of weapons and shields you can hold and in this world of fragile things this only makes you stronger, it takes more and more ox seeds for each one. upgrade the bag and you'll be maxed out after you get about half of them, but as long as it makes some difference, I'm very happy to get each one and let's talk a little more about why finding these things is so fun. starting with shrines of everything the game offers, shrines keep things most interesting, provide the most unique settings, require so many different things on your part to be discovered, it can be a snowball rolling down the right path down the hill, so a door opens.

Lighting some discreet torches, tracking down and taking pictures of statue fragments, defeating a family of hand axes, gathering a group of Rito children to sing a song, the list goes on and on and I can't even adequately describe how amazing it was. felt when you set foot. on Eventide Island or that place where it's super dark or any of the big labyrinths was such a rush that I felt like I discovered something really amazing and now I was facing some kind of fun challenge that some of these shrines offer. Good loot, but for the most part the prize is always the same, a spirit orb again, although I don't care.

Spirit orbs are incredibly useful and earning them by doing all this crazy stuff makes everything so much more fun, it's this feeling of constant reward. No matter where I go or what I'm doing, and you know me, I feel like variety is the spice of video games, if all the shrines are fun and interesting, the fact that they come in so many different packages just multiplies that. fun, many of them of course are just in plain sight and this is great, it's a bit of a palate cleanser between more complicated shrines, you don't want to get completely tired of solving puzzles and doing dark things and it's great that you can mark them from a distance so you can come back to them later when you want to accomplish something a little easier, plus seeing them from the towers is just exciting every time you stand on a tower you just unlocked and see all those red spots around you.

You feel invigorated by the task at hand by the thought of advancing into gigantic new territory, but of course, even better, there is that incomparable sense of wonder when you are simply running through the mountains doing nothing and you see something strange and see. , What the hell is that? You investigate for a while and then amazement turns to joy and triumph when you realize that yes, it is a sanctuary. The first time I visited I especially loved the house puzzles, most of them were pretty easy to solve but there were a few that made me feel amazing when I got to the bottom of things.

If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the one where you have to find a spot where you can shoot an arrow at those stones with holes in them. I love to sit. I love looking at a problem from different angles and thinking about it for a while and of course that was such a different challenge than the rest that there were so many that were so different from the rest. Next, of course, we have the main ox and it's funny because there are a lot less flashy and substantial ones than the shrines.

I mean, with one you have a million-year-old structure that rises out of the ground and takes you to a test. to test the legendary hero with all kinds of strange magical technology and with the other you pick up a stone and it's a coffee family, here's a seed purchase, but the effect these little creatures had on me, especially in the first hours of the game, it was immense if The Shrines instilled within me a sense of wonder. Couric instilled a childlike delight that was as strong and magical as with the shrines. This is largely because there are so many of them hidden throughout the world outside of the divine beast that there is no place.

The entire world of the game, where you can't find an ox core if you look hard enough, means that for almost my entire experience with the game there was a constant knowledge that I could find something at any moment and a constant need to pay attention. To my environment, they also act as a constant micro-reward system for simply running, climbing and looking wherever you can, like a child playing in the forest, climbing a mountain, looking into a hollow log,head towards the tippy tippy. On top of Hyrule Castle, look at that, in addition to your own sense of accomplishment, how about a primary app for your problems?

No good deed goes unrewarded. As with the shrines, it is very important that in addition to their immense number there is also an immense number of them. There are so many ways to find them that even now, after more than 200 hours of breathing in nature, I am still not sure I have seen all of them. types of hiding places, every time I think I've seen them all I find something. strange and poof another one didn't see it coming right? I called it childish delight because as a child that is exactly what I feel when I spot one of the little ones I want to scream fangio, they turn this huge world into a big world. toy or a game on top of a game try to remember how you felt when you were little and you opened a mysterious Christmas present to find something cool inside or you pressed a button on a toy and we're delighted by what it did for me, that's the same kind of feeling I get when I see something a little strange and I go now, I'm sure it's nothing, but then I check it anyway and continue to tinker with it.

No, I really don't think this is anything. I think I'm making it up and then I put a rock where I feel like it should be and poof, it was totally a and the kid inside me screams with joy like a little kid when his dad appears from behind the couch with a goofy face and Nintendo knew that That was how I would feel; It was completely deliberate, why else would they include a victory buzzer on that little beanbag? It's like one of those party poppers that is meant to instantly hit you with that happy feeling of winning a prize.

The shrines and Couric may be the main attractions when it comes to exploration, but even beyond that, the game still has more surprises in store and again if I knew all of this beforehand, none of it would have had much of an impact on me. I had to immerse myself in the world and stumble upon everything naturally to really feel that sense of wonder. Here were some of my favorite surprises the first time I saw an infantryman dressed as a traveler at a concert. I'm talking to a friendly girl and suddenly she cheerfully says something about killing a legendary hero and I think what she occasionally tells me she's going to bring. she dominates my head and turns into a stinky ninja and attacks me.

She would have never seen it coming in a million years. It was so unexpected and really scary for a Zelda game. It's like this isn't a monster, this human person. he wants to murder me than the Dragons, oh man this was a big one. I'm walking one day and I see a long twisted little thing with worms in the sky, in the distance, I can't even see what it is and it disappears well, weird then I'm walking and I see the thing closer and I see how oh yeah, it's a great very big dragon flying alone.

I have no idea if it's good or bad or it wants to eat me or it just wants to chill there, but seeing it for the first time gave me goosebumps. It was incredible. It was one of those really intense moments in this game. You know, when you're really impressed by a game and it keeps surprising you and you just can. Go to this game and this game and then I'm doing stuff on the north end of Death Mountain and suddenly there's this weird breeze, huh. I wonder if divine beasts were similar to dragons. I had no idea they existed. track and I'm so glad because finding this stuff and coming to terms with the fact that there were absolutely gigantic robotic beasts just chilling around Hyrule was mind-blowing, it was the kind of pure coldness that I love to throw up, oh hang that up. the sky and there was always a strange little speck that I had no idea what it was.

I even remembered seeing it in trailers and stuff, just this weird little thing hanging in the distance and at some point I finally got close enough to get a good look at it and holy cow, it's a bird, it's a giant robot bird. I'm NOT going near that thing, so you have Varadhan here who circles around Death Mountain and this one was fun, it was a happy coincidence that for a lot of the game he was just on the other side of the mountain every time I looked because then, at a random moment, I was simply looking at the landscape and looked at Death Mountain from very far away.

Remember that you are just looking at this gigantic mountain rising up. of the earth, the highest point on the map and suddenly something begins to move, a creature easily visible from where I am crawls around the mountain and the feeling in my gut is equal parts amazement and horror, another good and horrible It was the first time I saw a Lionel the Zora kept telling me about some beasts at the top of the mountain and how I would have to receive electric shocks and arrows. This in itself was terrifying and strange because they talked about it as if it were a beast, an animal, and animals were not.

I don't have the ability to shoot you with the bow and arrow, only intelligent creatures can do that, so what the hell was this thing? The anticipation of climbing that mountain was intense as we turned the corner. I just had no idea what I was expecting to see. then finally seeing it and most importantly seeing how easily it could murder me from a mile away was purely terrifying and I know I already mentioned the mazes but I can't stress enough how amazing they are. I found the one in the top right corner of First I looked at the map and it was a huge, strange square of something in the distance.

I didn't even think I could reach it, but after flying there it felt like I had entered a strange ancient prison and was about to be destroyed by a guardian at any moment. It was one of the most exciting experiences I have ever had in a Zelda game. . Look, I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I can't believe they managed to make such a big game with so much to discover, so many things that are delicious, scary or impressive, over and over again, you find yourself thrown into scenarios and you simply have no idea what's about.

If it happened if there was one phrase that I had uttered the most during my time with Breath of the Savage, it was the thing that so many times, so many times, I detected something strange and that's why I would say why the hell, what is that and run forward to find out It was always a magical feeling. There's still a lot to talk about with this combat game. art style story all that video game stuff, but I don't think any of that is as important as that magic, it's what makes the game more than just a great game, it's what makes it a special game, an experience which I will probably take with me. for the rest of my life because even if Nintendo or another developer makes another game that is just as magical or even more, Breath of the Wild will always be a first exploration, it has always been one of my favorite things about video games in general and I encourage . of the wild will always be the first time the exploration in a game was everything I wanted it to be the first time I played a game I only dreamed about before for some reason the sound and presentation are often hard for me to fit into a review no no, I think I focused so much on the gameplay and mechanics and all that that it takes a lot of effort to make a natural transition to those things.

It's a good thing we have a whole portion of this review to talk about it without interruption because Oh man, I have to tell you that Breath of the Wild is a pretty game for both your eyes and your ears. Let's start with the eyes. Nintendo is used to using low-quality hardware to provide a more affordable consultation. They have been doing it. For more than a decade, they have also been accustomed to getting the most out of their hardware, both in technical and artistic terms. Breath of the Wild is a classic example of how art style trumps sheer graphical power because, honestly, on paper the game isn't much in the graphics department, the character models are a bit simplistic and use the style of Wind Waker style cell shading, so they don't have as much texture or detail, no dazzling particle effects or anything, very little of the game's visuals. could be considered complex, maybe outside of the huge divine beasts or something, the performance really suffers the most, the frame rate sometimes struggles to keep up with the action on the screen, it's usually not as bad enough to become a distraction, but he's certainly not the type.

The performance I expected from a first-party Nintendo game slows down considerably in Kakariko Village and slows down even more in Corrick Forest to the point where I'm honestly surprised they allowed the game to ship this way. It's really strange playing Zelda. title where the game stutters so much the resolution of the game is not the best but it is not terrible either like many switch games it seems to scale depending on what is happening using all kinds of rendering techniques and layers of anti-aliasing and all that two different things to keep the balance between images and framerate as much as possible.

I have no doubt that this often makes things look and work better than they could, but other times it makes things look disturbingly inconsistent - we see patches of textures jumping back and forth. and objects with a number of polygons that increase and decrease very visibly. I can see now that this was the sacrifice they had to make to create a consistent and truly open world. There are no loading screens on this map. You can run from one end. on the other climb the highest mountain go to a town a house even then go out again and all that to Hyrule Castle and climb through everything and up to Ganon's strange sticky capsule and you will never have to stop to load once you actually It's impressive and with a world this big you want to be able to see as much as possible from a distance without appearing, which means almost everything is always rendered in some way if it's visible to you and that's why you have this resolution scaling system active . that makes one thing smooth and one thing bumpy and one thing smooth and then bumpy also makes the landscape a little less pretty than it probably could have been, it's certainly pretty for reasons we'll talk about later, but if you saw the video of my first impressions, you will remember that I found it a little muddier than I expected.

Distant mountains look a little gross when you look at them long enough, like when you really focus on them, and let me tell you all about this now. bad things lead to a lot of good things and again, all of this was done to achieve that total openness, that ability to look at everything from any angle, they didn't have the benefit of pre-rendering a bunch of perfect picturesque landscapes and that of course is a very good trade off, it means the game works the way they wanted, with little to no appearances, for the most part people and monsters are the only things that appear, although you can usually see them from a sufficient distance. which is not a big problem, the only monster that is problematic in this regard is the Hynix.

You can get pretty close to the thing before it suddenly appears and this, of course, is a bigger problem because the Hynix is ​​the world's biggest baddie. In the game you always want to be able to plan where you're going and know for the most part what you'll find when you get there, but the chicken axes can sometimes surprise you, at least they're always sleeping so you know that won't be the case. Seeing you unless you run very close, but seeing one of its large circular sleeping spots in front of you for a long time before the game decides to populate it can be jarring enough that, despite the game's visual shortcomings, it's still positively beautiful, even if there isn't a single piece of it that's technically impressive or particularly sharp.

All the elements combine to paint a very beautiful picture. It really is very much like a painting in that sense. Up close the brush strokes can look quite crude and nothing is very detailed, but when you take a step back it all comes back. together because the artist knew exactly how to achieve the overall image he wanted using all those individual pieces. If there's something more important that makes the game look so good, it's probably the lighting, I mean the breath of the wild, alone taught me how good it is. lighting can be in a game, you spend a lot of time in nature running under the sky, so the day/night cycle is always moving and no matter what time of day you enjoy a visual feast, cloud cover is basically constant, so you will never have just a bright sun shining in a blue sky.

You'll get beautiful color tones that paint the world differently depending on where the sun is or where the clouds change. Rainy weather has never felt more real in a Zelda game, never has. How much it affects the atmosphere moving through the moonlight is simply breathtaking and if you find yourself facing the ocean when the Sun rises, it is a particularly splendid sight, no matter how many times you see it or how much time passes. I play when the sun starts to rise, I stop and take a moment, watch the light grow in thehorizon, I delight in the vibrant colors that fill the sky and, speaking of colors, part of the reason the lighting is so effective is the game's use of a very soft color palette, greens, browns and yellows Soft objects make up most of what you'll see in the world above.

There are times when I miss more vibrant colors whenever I use wildlife imagery in a video. I have to increase the contrast a few notches to make it pop a little more on the screen in the last generation, the gaming industry fell into this strange thing where everything was really brown and I really appreciate the recent efforts to use the full color spectrum, I mean look at something like horizon zero done, it's gorgeous, however the breadth of nature, the minimalist use of color helps to achieve two things, and in fact, these are two things that the game does on a large scale and that cover all aspects of its presentation and sound design, as you will soon see, for the moment we are sticking to the color theme, although it will First is that the game has this era theme of history.

I can't exactly think of a word to describe it, but it provokes feelings. from time gone by the soft color makes it look like an old film or an old photograph of a painting it feels like it came from a time when people simply didn't have access to bright, high contrast colors in visual media this is a reflection The state of the world Hyrule was devastated by Ganon's forces a long time ago and much of the game is about accessing the past, recovering memories and performing tasks that others could not do a hundred years ago. Time has passed, but in terms of civilization, the world I haven't been able to move on and heal completely, is basically the same as it was.

Back then, as if it were a photograph, the other thing that the game is looking for and that is heavily supported by the color palette is to establish the atmosphere. Now the interesting thing here is that until now the atmosphere and your previous game meant more or less one of two things, happy or scary, the atmosphere that was established was the cheerful and bright cartoon of Wind Waker and a few others or the dark and creepy foreboding that we saw in games like Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess, but Breath of the Wild is different, the atmosphere it creates is one. of serenity it is relaxing it is peaceful it is beautiful which is funny because never before has a Zelda game been so dangerous and demanding but of course, we will talk about that later, this is not to say that no Zelda has opted for a type of a atmosphere that is neither happy nor silly nor scary, it's obviously more complicated than that, but what comes to mind is that every instance of a calm atmosphere in a Zelda game aided by atmospheric music, places that really make you stop and take it in, they almost always found it a little unsettling looking at the architecture in Ocarina of times temple of time while the song of time plays like a Gregorian chant, it was effective but also very somber, almost demanding a respectful bow, the snowy area in Twilight Princess It's serene but danger lurks just beneath the surface strange wolves are stalking you you're chasing a monster you don't know what you'll find on the mountain the list goes on, as far as I know the Zelda team has never focused on pure beauty of the world and of nature itself, since they have a breath of the wild, at least they have never presented it as a theme that runs through the entire game.

Ganon tried to conquer the world. There was a great war. Tons of people died. Entire towns were destroyed, there was fire everywhere, it was a gigantic disaster, and yet the deer don't know that the grass doesn't care, the sun and moon keep rising and falling, sure that maybe Ganon would finally win. and would dominate. everything before it, nature would have a problem with that, but here nature is just nature and nature is beautiful, it is indifferent to your adventures or all the monsters that are everywhere or the war that happened a hundred years ago, it's the same as in the real world and it's a fascinating thing to see in a Zelda game and of course it makes traversing the landscape much more fun as the fear gives the player an almost constant sense of calm, but Now that we've gotten over the color, let's start talking. about the art direction, the character designs are interesting because we have a really big range of complexity here, hylians in the sheikah, who for all intents and purposes are zeldas, the human characters are pretty simple, surprisingly, so they just look like people without much appeal. outstanding features and the funny thing is that I like it like this, the rest of the world is so amazingly beautiful that the people themselves become something like the background, they just don't need to look more detailed than them and in fact this is is something interesting From watching and passing all the Wind Waker games, for example, I was fine with weird looking characters because the whole world was like a colorful cartoon, everything fit together, but as much as I loved Twilight Princess, I remember being a little distracted by Para some of the characters, the world was dark and largely realistic, but there were still these weirdly cartoony guys with strange faces and they didn't seem to fit together very well.

The hylians, the girl, and the breath of the wild are simple but go perfectly with simple beauty. of the world, but then of course to keep things interesting you have your less human races, your Zoras gorons, Gerudo and Rito, imaginary races or what really stands out in a fantasy world and as such are designed appropriately, They really stand out, they catch you. Your attention, the Zora and Rito fish and the birds, respectively, have unique designs here, looking much more animal-like and less human-like than in previous games. I mean, Rito used to look like people with feathers attached to their arms and beaks waving on their noses here the Rito really look like birds the Zora really look like fish and there are different designs for different characters using different species as reference points this door is like a hammerhead shark this is like some kind of ray that says oh there's some kind of eagle this one is obviously a parrot so the gorons look fantastic as gowrons usually do.

I will say that they lack the same creativity seen in Twilight Princess with the Goron elders in particular, but there is definitely a wide variety of character models on display and if there is one thing these Gowron do better than any other it is convey emotions, the animations Their facial features are excellent and their large faces show them off better than any other race in the game, plus there are now more of them with hair. means that sends the personality potential through the roof, lastly you have Gerudo and the developers obviously had a lot of tweaks to the original design here, just like the Gerudo of old, they have darker skin and angular faces with big noses , but much greater emphasis has been placed.

Now it's been put on their height, specifically, how much taller they are than most other races, they also have well, let's say very interesting body shapes, while we talk about the breadth of nature people, let's talk about the architecture of each a. The race has its own building style and each city looks wildly different, adding a nice layer to the world's sense of realism. The Hylians have potatoes and an idyllic small town nestled in the hills and attract the trading settlement of Lin and Oceanside. The Sheikah have their mountain village that uses ancient In fact, Japanese style architecture is very similar to the ego clan that split off from the Sheikah, their entire culture is very Japanese once again, although they pale in comparison to the high rules.

The most fantastic races are the city of Gerudo, reminiscent of ancient cultures that inhabit the desert. It's probably based on a specific one, but I obviously didn't pay attention in history class, is it Egypt? Yes, it's probably Egypt that might be the least impressive and probably because the Gerudo are the closest to humans of the four unique races, so naturally, it made the designers want to model their culture after Zora's royal domain. , although it is easily the most impressive, let me tell you, friends, these auras have come a long way since they lived in caves in ocarina of time here, they are natural architects and have built a city over water in a large basin on top of a mountain that shines with luminous stones and other natural deposits.

The design is intricate and beautiful, reminding you of the ocean but also being somewhat futuristic, easily the most visually spectacular single area in the game. It's great because it reflects this aura culture. They have a long history of fighting wars and heroic champions. They have a throne room with a monarch sitting on a throne and his ceremonial scepters and everything, it's all very appropriate. compare this to the gorons who just live in caves as usual, the style here is much more realistic, the gorons don't like practicality, they are very hardworking and that's it, the structures are roughly carved and you have metal parts and equipment everywhere, the lava and the general atmosphere of fire certainly make it interesting, but I think going into the game I was expecting a bit of szura, that made my expectations so high you know, but even though This is called Goron City, that's really a stupid name because it's not a city at all, it's just a town, it's very small and somewhat clustered.

I was expecting an amazing Mountain City with all kinds of levels and things to check out like in Ocarina of Time. but I will certainly say that this way still works perfectly and is actually much more in line with what I would expect from gorons, it's not even a real complaint, just a small detail that the kid in me expected and finally we have the Rite, who like the rest of the races, live in a place that perfectly represents who they are. The Rito are, first and foremost, bird people, and they are also very calm and dignified.

Their village rises in a spiral on a huge rock pillar and consists of nothing more than stairs, landing platforms and small wooden cabins, everything is very modest in terms of architecture, even the old man Rito lives in one of these small cabins, the Unique difference is that yours is at the top, you can observe the people here living peacefully and often enjoying quiet reflection, obviously enjoying the view of the surrounding landscape that their imposing city offers. Zora's Domain blew me away with its architecture, but on a more personal level, Rito Village might be my favorite. I won't try to claim it's that spectacular, but looking at it. from a distance and being in it makes me feel happy, it creates a great mood and it is the only city in the game that has its own shape that can be seen from a distance, especially when the vame mass lands on top . becomes a unique landmark, so that's all the architecture that the currently living people of Hyrule built and are currently enjoying, but perhaps even more interesting is what was left behind.

Ganon was stopped from completely destroying the world a hundred years ago, but it was a closed thing, the vast majority of the world's structures have been reduced to rubble and you can find these relics of the past everywhere and this of course relates both with the age theme as well as the atmosphere that the developers were trying to establish and the atmosphere. The thing is huge. I said before that the overall atmosphere of the game is peaceful without being too sinister or creepy or whatever and that's certainly true, but the ruins of Hyrule give off another kind of unique feeling when you see ruins buried underground and covered in vines and things.

So. It's a very peaceful thing in real life and it's no different in the game, everything is very calm and even if you don't consciously recognize it, you know that everything has been there for a long time, it's calm and still as always, but beyond that . there's a sadness that runs through the game, you can see the remains of what this place used to be and if you think about it deeply enough, you imagine all the people that must have died, I mean there are whole towns that just disappeared. I constantly find broken remains of people's houses, even with some rotting furniture inside the collapsed walls.

One has to wonder if these people got out on time. I was bummed that I didn't discover this on my own and had to find out about it online, and if you haven't figured it out yet, it's doubtful you will, so I'm mentioning it here. There is a place in Hyrule Field called the ranch ruins and if you look closely you will notice that the layout directly matches that of the Lon Lon ranch. in ocarina of time, obviously from what we know of the timeline these aren't actually the ruins of that exact version of the Lon Lon ranch, but the callback still made me stop and think that when I went and the I checked, it was legitimately.

It is heartbreaking to look at the rubble and remember what it once looked like. These weren't as emotional for me, but Hyrule Castle and Hyrule Castle Town are also very sad. This was once the heart of Hyrule and this heart has never been depicted as grandly as it is here in its destroyed state, thecastle is gigantic and beautifully built, even in ruins, crumbling and covered in black grime and infested with bad guys, as it stands it is a sight to behold and its sheer size once again reminds you how many people once lived within the walls, in addition to the ruined structures, there are also remnants of war scattered throughout the land.

I can't emphasize enough how important this edition is to the feel of the game. War hasn't come up much in Zelda games, some have. mentioned, we know that people once fought for the Triforce, we know that high rules, the Royal Guard has been eliminated several times, but for the most part, when there is a fight to be had, the hero does it, no one else participates, but places As Fort Hatano waged war a hundred years ago, this time there is a huge amount of tangible evidence that the people of Hyrule once had to actually fight for their lives and, if you ask me, that makes the story that much more effective. on an emotional level than that of any other.

Another Zelda Lastly, I want to talk about the temple of time because I think it's really important in setting the tone of the game. We are used to the temple of time being important. You find the master sword there in several of the games it houses. The entrance to the spirit realm, for God's sake, in the middle of nature, is one of the first things that attracts you from the beginning of the game, you can see this Zelda brand in ruins, technically it is still standing, but it is Sure it's broken beyond repair, the roof is falling in, there are baka mixes squatting inside, it's where the old man finally reveals his true identity and has one of the game's many heylia statues, but that's it, no.

You come back later and restore it. You don't travel back in time to when it was still intact like in Twilight Princess, you don't do anything with it because it's ruined, it was destroyed in the war and, like most of Hyrule, it's nothing now and that realization was heavy for me. my. perhaps better than anything the magnitude of the damage caused by Ganon and the senselessness of the war, but wait, Arlo, you could be saying that you said earlier that the other games established atmospheres of bad vibes, while the breadth of the wildness focuses on the Serenity, what's up with all these sad things? what you're talking about is not a very bad vibe explain yourself well you see the difference here and this is completely cool is that the sadness shown in this version of Hyrule is purely implicit, this game does not establish a mood by playing with the lighting or making you all doubt with sinister music, it doesn't try to scare you or force you to feel negative feelings because everything is visual, everything is implicit when you see the remains of a city or a Lon Lon ranch or whatever, your own imagination and empathy are the ones that make you feel something, especially considering all of this is in contrast to that. peaceful backdrop with its relaxing music, it should be very easy to feel nothing but pleasure as you move through the world, but at least I have never felt such strong emotions while running through a sunlit field of flowers while being accompanied by a lovely piano sheet music.

We have a few more things to cover before we get to that score, although even aside from the terrain structures being intact or not, the terrain itself is beautifully constructed again, it's not so much a matter of graphical power, nothing in the game looks better that something. since generation 7 and in fact I have played many Xbox 360 games that look much better, although you have to give the game credit, the rocks look great. I don't know why they put so much detail on the rocks, but man, look at that rock tip. Although the world is beautiful because of the style and composition, there are certainly some recycled elements here and there, you'll see some rocks or whatever and you'll be like, yeah, I've definitely seen those a few times, but mostly all over the world.

It seems as if he figuratively handcrafted each hill, valley and mountain the different ways the plants grow on the trees grouped together the different rock formations everything feels so real it feels like you are walking through a landscape of real fantasy instead of a collection of areas compiled by a team of programmers nature and landscape and everything that in previous games has always been more of an artistic affair, it seemed as if everything was designed by designers who draw images and help create assets, he always looked great in his own artistic aspect. Don't get me wrong, but it's clear that this time they spent years studying how nature really works, how a landscape is formed geologically, we've had snowy places and lava places and desert places and all that, and Zelda games before, but never before. .

I felt like I was really climbing a volcano or a snowy mountain or running across a sandy wasteland. A lot of this is for reasons we won't mention yet, but a lot of it is old, awesome design, much like our own world. when you are in the middle of nature you can look in almost any direction and you have a great painting, there is beauty in every corner of the map, forget the shrines and the monsters and save the world and all that garbage, I have never been so absorbed in a gaming world alone, I have never enjoyed just being in it so much before.

Skyrim and Shadow of the Colossus came close, those games were truly wonderful, but something about the particular style of wildcard breadth sets them apart. When I was a kid, I used to start ocarina of time just to start a Kakariko village and climb to the top of Death Mountain and sit there for a while admiring the scenery watching the sun rise and set. The first time he wanted to be in a game and Breath of the Wild is probably the only case where that feeling has returned with the same force. There's not much else to cover in the visual department.

The designs and animations of the monsters are stellar, as the designers always provided. Each of the less crazy races that hang around the camps and whatnot have their own body language and it gives them a great sense of liveliness. They are all very expressive. The Liz'lls in particular are fun to watch with their chameleon eyes darting around. and their hunched composure and the way they curiously tilt their heads like birds. The larger enemies like the oxen and Lionel aren't as pleasingly expressive, but they're still well designed, especially Lionel's speech about not intimidating the enemy so much. varieties that I would like, sometimes I get a little tired with the same handful of guys throughout the game, but at least what we have is amazing, each and every one feels really unique and fun.

The guardian shrines and all the futuristic technology contained in the shrines are Awesome because they help solidify the game's themes by acting, interestingly, as strong contrasts to them. Guardians and sanctuaries are the polar opposite of almost everything we've been talking about. Most of the game uses soft, warm colors. Everything is made of wood and stone. It feels very natural, so seeing one of those metal monstrosities slithering around like a spider with its glowing blue eye and laser beam attack helps build up the tension on top of the tension that naturally comes with facing a dangerous enemy.

These things are clearly unnatural, they clearly don't. It doesn't belong here and it's cool because we know they're very old and yet they're futuristic due to the cyclical nature of Hyrule's technology. Things become very advanced and then for some reason everything is left behind for later generations to rediscover. We've seen it in quite a few Zelda titles now shrines are fun because they are sort of monstrosities, these nasty little glowing protuberances that dot the landscape, they were placed here by much more advanced people and since then the rest of the world has been around them when you step into that elevator, you leave your world of open sky, green grass and frolicking deer and instantly find yourself in a world of metal and machines and deep blues, and blue is, of course, the least color. common in nature, even the wild sky breath is.

It's as blue as it could be with its constant cloud cover, so blue is even more effective here to represent things that come from a very different time and with such a big game featuring so many things to do, shrines on the surface with all its blues. and the machines work to break up the game visually, kind of refreshing your palate with a new set of flavors every now and then so you don't get tired of the more natural grass, sand, snow and everything that the game would have been about. perfectly fine without all the future e-text, but it adds such delightful variety to the images that it makes the whole experience even richer.

Plus, let's not forget that it's just plain cool. Skyward Sword featured a lot of cool tech stuff, but breath. of the wild takes it to a whole new level when you're in a sanctuary fighting robots and navigating through lasers and powering machines using big electric balls, you're basically playing a sci-fi game and while I doubt it will ever happen, I gives even more hope that maybe one day we'll get a Zelda game that takes place during one of these technologically advanced Cyberpunk Zelda eras. I love him so much. Finally we come to the music and sound design in general.

I do not have much to do. say about the sound effects because this is a Zelda game, even in Link's first 3D outings the sound is limited like it was on the n64, the game sounded great, these guys don't work with Foley and they know how to mix it up everything perfectly. He plays it and makes it sound very natural. The breath of nature, of course, is no exception. There are thousands of different sounds subtly layered throughout the game and it's also natural that it's easy to forget that this is a game you're playing and when Link works. a certain action that action just makes a noise because someone recorded a noise and put it in the code and told the game exactly when to play it, it feels like it just happens on its own, yes of course it makes that sound when it saves . a gun or throw a rock or whatever, the music deserves a closer look, as most of the things in the game match the two main themes, age and serenity, for the first time, the piano takes center stage compared to other Zelda games that have The most prominent are the more traditional orchestral instruments, such as horns, violins, and music, perhaps another department that Zelda has always excelled in, but it has never been as subtle and natural, as the world open, with its lack of barriers and loading screens, the music never ends.

It just changes, it moves with you reflecting your surroundings and since much of the surrounding world is full of serenity and beauty, these soft piano melodies reflect that most of the time there are songs with higher tempos and others with stronger melodies and everything. That is, except for the majority. Partly the music and the breath of the wild take a backseat, while in the past Zelda featured a lot of music that made you hum, this game wants to boost the mood as much as possible without you actually thinking about it. The familiar melodies are present, but they are often included in the music in less noticeable ways and sometimes it took me a little while to pick them up and although I sometimes miss having the melodies more prominent, I can't deny the effect that the style has on the atmosphere and feel of the game.

The developers have already achieved a lot in the visual department and the music just ties it all together beautifully, it's the kind of thing that I imagined took a long time to experiment with and put together as there are a lot of elements that could have broken the mood if It's done a little poorly and like I said the music also relates to the age theme, this is quite interesting and I admit that maybe this wasn't intentional at all and I'm the only one who feels this way but a lot of that It has to do with the use of the piano from our perspective, the piano and other orchestral instruments were invented hundreds of years ago, they are old, basically, they all, in theory, should be able to convey a sense of age, they are almost exclusively used for composing movies, shows and games that take place in the past, at least in the Western world, but Breath of the Wild uses its piano in a different way instead of emulating the old days of great classical music, it sometimes emulates a more recent one . time as a solo instrument versus violins and horns and all of that suggests a greater level of intimacy that reminds me at least of the idea of ​​a smaller scale narrative as seen in films from the 1818s and 1900s in silent films where the The Pianist He sits to the side and he alone composes entire productions.

This is where the age theme comes into play, which is funny because Breath of the Wild sometimes alludes to events that took place thousands of years ago, but like I said, it's the color palette. It often reminds me of old photos, so there's a big emphasis on what happened a hundred years ago, and here's a detail I didn't mention before, but every time Lincoln regains his memory there's this effect that makes itLook like an old silent movie for a second. About a hundred years ago silent films were made, which makes it even more appropriate, since the links between memories and music were a century old.

Although the piano strengthens this concept, it conveys a sense of antiquity by unconsciously stirring images from plays and silent films. In my opinion, the best example of this is the theme that plays when you encounter a stalker guardian, and any other Zelda game that detects an enemy like this could have activated more of those horns and cellos, but here we have exactly the type of cheerful piano melody that you would hear in an old movie about cowboys and bandits, imagine an old melodrama in which a bad guy with a mustache ties a helpless girl to the train tracks or imagine a boy on a stage running around dressed as a guard while his teacher bangs the piano aside, that's what I think when I listen to The Guardian's music.

Now the whole thing includes more than just the piano, it's got a handful of future tweaks and there's a violin in there that helps carry things along, but that piano is at the forefront, especially right at the beginning when one of the things looks up at you. first time, that five note motif just hits repeatedly and they could have easily abandoned the piano entirely and used nothing but futuristic music here like they put in After all, the shrines of these guardians are much older than just one or two centuries, but they relate to that story of Hyrule at war from a hundred years ago and because of my subconscious associations with that kind of piano melody, they feel like they fit more. with the age theme that if the style had been purely futuristic or even something really older like a normal orchestration, maybe it's because I'm so used to futuristic themes being linked to big robots or maybe I'm desensitized to the music traditional orchestral that doesn't I don't know, but this unusual style is really effective, it makes me imagine how a hundred years after the events of Breath of the Wild, people will tell each other stories about how Linked fought the Guardians, finally one more notable thing that Breath of the Wild does in The music department uses very ambient sounds and instruments, a lot of piano as we've established and also a lot of instances of more traditional instrumentation, but listening to the soundtrack I'm surprised how much of it actually falls into the ambient category like the kind of thing you hear in various genres of ambient music, sounds that you can only get by using a computer to generate waves and change and stretch things into all sorts of strange shapes, this naturally adds greatly to the serenity and the fact that it is something fairly new to Zelda games they increase the impact that their otherworldly nature lets you know that you are playing a very different type of Zelda game and the funny thing is that as amazing as I think it is, it took me a long time realizing that it is extremely subtle and sometimes when the music perfectly complements the gameplay and the game world and helps set the right mood, I don't even realize it's there, it affects me even though I'm not really thinking about it and I tell you that that is the mark of an incredible experience.

The soundtrack right there, when taken as a breath of the wild, the presentation is really something else, it is easily the most ambitious Zelda and in terms of how much love, care and time was put into it and how it all comes together, it's the most cohesive stylistically by a wide margin, the atmosphere it sets is something truly special and I've never played a game that made me stop and marvel as often as this one. Even on other, more powerful systems, the development team did so much with relatively little and more than ever before. I've proven that yes, these games are art and yes, the people who work on them are artists when we first learned that Breath of the Wild was going to feature a sprawling open world and that very little would stop you from going exactly where you wanted.

I got worried. about the story the story is very important to me in my zelda games, the plot and all the twists and turns dramatically increased my enjoyment of twilight princess and the weak plot despite some good story reveals decreased my enjoyment of skyward Sword. The good thing is that the story is much easier to achieve in a game with a linear structure, which is what every Zelda 3D leading up to Breath of the Wild had the plot points in a certain order and certain areas were blocked off to It made the story unfold as you collected items and opened it up to open world games, although it's much harder to achieve story beats that need to happen without affecting the world too much for the gameplay to remain consistent.

Yes you can go anywhere at any time. How do you effectively use your environments in your scripted events? How do you take the player to each plot point without it feeling really unnatural? So when I learned about the breadth of open, wild nature, I thought, "Surely this can't have much history," then when I learned that you can surf at a higher level. again and at any time and that the only barrier is your own strength. I thought, "Well, that's it, clearly there won't be any plot if it literally has no bearing on beating the game," when I finally played it and saw how the story was handled.

I was equal parts relieved and disappointed. Let's go over the good first, although I will say that the formula the team came up with to tell their story was perfect, so a lot of the magic of the game comes from leaving that sanctuary with little more than a pair of pants and without having idea of ​​what's going on from the beginning, the breadth of the wild stands out in the passive storytelling, and while I don't mind being actively told a story, there's a certain charm and sense of mystery that comes with being taken to discover things yourself and, in fact, this style helps complement the overall mood of the game for Metroid Prime technology, for example, when they are at their best, Metroid games instill a sense of isolation in the player and Prime is no exception, Samus. is on this planet its original inhabitants were long ago separated from the native animals and her enemy she is alone the plot is simply to find a way to thwart the space pirates' plans, although the story is told passively through scanning runes and log entries and through simply observing the world around you and slowly discovering what happened on the planet this way is somehow more rewarding because it is optional to discover things on your own rather than having everything explicitly told to you. through obligatory cutscenes, which brings with it a sense of accomplishment that you feel like you're the one driving the story of Breath of the Wild is much like the beginning of the game, they give you a little information about what happened a hundred years ago and push you gently heading towards the next plot point in Kakariko village. from there you are sent to the four corners of Hyrule to free the divine beasts so that they can help you destroy Ganon beyond the execution of these four tasks that you could call the plot of the game, the series of events that lead you to the Credits endings, the story is told in three main ways, the first is the traditional one, the cutscenes mainly the ones you get when you talk to old Emic, King Ghost and Impa, they tell you about the basics a hundred years ago, Ganon was going to kill. everyone, so people dug up all these cooled robots to fight him, but then he turned all the robots against him and Zelda had to catch the ancient link from Manian Hyrule Castle.

It was heard at some point and they put him in a weird chamber with just his underwear on and that's how things started, these scripted bits are very few, mostly right at the beginning of the game when you talk to these characters, but they contain some flashes of great genius, some of the shots of the Guardians destroying villages are terrifying stuff, very exciting, but As I said, there aren't many of these and as such they leave a lot to be desired, but I'll come back to them later. The second way in which the game tells its story is the most passive, it is through the stories told by those responsible for the game. characters and through observing the world, talking to all the NPCs and completing quests and even looking at all the ruins and such scattered around the landscape, you begin to piece together what happened to Hyrule.

An excellent example of this passive storytelling is finding the princess and king's journals in Hyrule Castle, as these also offer character development, the third way is the most important and is a sort of mix between the other two ways. to trace Link's memories. First of all, can I say that I loved doing this with In a world this big, trying to find specific places based on photographs someone gave me was a lot of fun, some of them required looking closely at the landscape to try to determine where they could have been taken. The real point is that this is a perfect way to tell a story in a huge open world.

This is a great way for the player to take it in at their own pace and also gives them that feeling of accomplishment I was talking about. Here they not only tell you the story, you earn it with these memories. It tells us what happened a hundred years ago and also acts as a kind of puzzle and collector's item. They are very naturally married to gameplay and pure exploration broadly speaking. All of this sets up what could be the best story in Zelda history. For starters, this Ganon is not your average Ganon. He has renounced resurrection and reincarnation and assumed a mindless, enraged spirit form.

This might be Ganon's biggest development since he first turned into a giant pig. It's unique and a very fitting interpretation of the villain and I think it's incredibly cool, so the idea that the people of Hyrule dug up all these crazy robots from a fight with Ganon thousands and thousands of years before, that's just cool, the game gives a sense of story that I've never seen in any other Zelda game and really makes me understand the idea of ​​a cyclical Zelda universe as established in Skyward Sword. In fact, it offers a pretty mind-blowing revelation. Every Zelda game so far has fit into one of the branches of the timeline, but this game references events from multiple timelines that should be impossible until you realize this game could take place in the future. so far away that some of these events have been repeated on a land doomed to repeat a cycle of war for eternity for a long enough time, any number of events can happen, by complete coincidence, in exactly the same way.

Maybe the Breath of the Wild is set not thousands of years in the future, but millions, what if we can't even fathom how long this cycle has been repeating? Of course, this branch of the timeline had its own Wind Waker and its own Twilight Princess at some point and it was crazy to then realize the idea that the world was almost destroyed by Ganon and now people basically live among each other. the rubble. What we are seeing is a once extremely glorious Hyrule in ruins. It's something amazing. The setup of the story is refreshing. It's bold.

It is exciting. Invites to reflexion. It's lovely. It's more than you could ask for in a Zelda game, but here's where. things start to fall apart despite having a perfect format to tell its story and despite having an excellent foundation for a story, the overall story that Breath of the Wild ends up telling in plot form is very poor, the problem seems to be a lack. of effort on the part of the development team, whether due to lack of ideas or simply lack of time, these memory scenes that are the soul of the game's story simply do not tell us much of anything, they do not reveal any important details. or show us any of the exciting events that the game constantly refers to, basically they all came down to lightly touching over and over on the basic concept of Zelda and the four champions who were hired to pilot the divine beasts in Zelda with the ones that were supposed to do something. his magical God powers or the Triforce or whatever to stop Ganon, but he doesn't know how to do it, that's how all these scenes say that you're going to be like, gee, you know, that's been praying on the mountain for a long time.

I hope she can figure out how to use her powers and the next one will be like I don't know what to do I don't know how to use my powers and the next one would be like Yeah we have our divine beasts but Zelda still needs to figure out how to use your powers they all just involve the characters sitting and talking to each other, there is no development as usual. A Breath of the Wild Story is about living after a lot of crazy things happened, but it's a little too lazy to show you any of that.

Any part of the larger story that can't be told through a group of people talking to each other has little chance of being shown to the player. I mean, lookone of the last. memories, you unlock the entire game, we're told that Link suffered a mortal blow so he had to be put in the regeneration chamber for a hundred years and I'm thinking, man, can you imagine the battle that could actually kill Link like canonically ? Kill Link, the blow must have come from Ganon himself, must have been the most epic showdown in all of Zelda history all along.

I am so intrigued by the idea that my imagination runs wild and finally it happens, I unlock a memory. That shows me what really happened all those years ago and the memory shows an already wounded link falling to the ground. Zelda saves them from some Guardians with her powers and this is actually some of the best we get from these flashbacks. This is a bit of action, but that's it, nothing about the fight that actually hurt him and I'm assuming it was just some guardian or other monster that did it, maybe a baka Blin, nothing about Zelda's eventual confrontation with Ganon , which is another thing I've been wondering about all of this.

This time we don't even get to see the champions get killed. I'm not saying I really like watching Zelda characters get killed, obviously, but that would have been a great scene, actually being able to see them all in action fighting doing what they've been talking about the entire game instead of just sitting around and chat. I'll come back to the story when it's time to review the ending, but right now is a perfect time to talk more about it. characters, this is another huge missed opportunity. I always felt that the Zelda games didn't do enough to utilize the various races in her.

I've always been fascinated by Zora and Gorons, especially, and wanted them to have bigger roles to play. On the surface, the breadth of the wild is everything I ever wanted. All races have a real place in the world and that's great. All of these champions were chosen to represent their races because they are the baddest guys ever, they are amazing warriors and their designs are really cool and they are going to pilot giant magical robots so they can fight Ganon like a sacred cow. That's the coolest thing we've ever had to do on a Zora, a Rito, and a Gerudo, and they're super tight. team and are real characters, but sadly none of this is done completely without incident in borderline lazy scenes.

It would have been easier to swallow if the writers had at least taken the opportunity to develop the game's characters, but they just didn't do it too often. We're told how amazing these champions are, but we're never shown and that's storytelling 101, we never get to see them fight or work as a team or do anything with their divine beasts beyond pressing the big red button to line up the shot. again and at the end of the game there's still nothing more than these broad anime archetypes that you completely understand within the first two seconds of each one speaking and yes, the Champions Ballad DLC helps a little bit in this regard, but it's still not enough and also, completing your characters is something that has to be done in the main game.

I'm usually not that critical when it comes to Zelda characters. The thing about Nintendo is that, at least from how it looks where I am. sitting around, they don't seem to hire writers the same way other companies do, they don't look for novelists and screenwriters to help them develop their stories and characters and write dialogue, they seem to do all that in-house, the designers just seem to do it. In a way, they resolve the stories on their own and I could be totally wrong on this front, but that's how it feels, which is why the character stories, while often quite good, are rarely more than just having a biggest impact on me because I love the series and the universe so much that I think I'm a little more forgiving, but if I'm honest, it's never great without great gameplay to back it all up.

Zelda stories are relatively dark. Gameplay comes first. The story is second. That's simply it. The thing about Zelda about the breadth of the wild is that it had so much potential in this sense that I found it harder to forgive the mediocre story and the characters, the champions as a whole, it's just so cool that when none of it worked in the end of the game, I was quite annoyed, it's a major weakness in an otherwise phenomenal game and I feel like they could have done it at least a little easier, like I said. the way it tells its story not only feels minimal, it feels lazy.

I know it takes a long time to animate a scene and all, but this is zelda we're talking about. These are probably Nintendo's biggest games in terms of production values. I know a lot of the development time was spent building the world in physics, so the story probably came pretty late in the cycle, but the game was also delayed quite a bit to be able to land on the Switch over lunch. It's hard for me to believe it. which couldn't have included a slightly more interesting story at the time. I can't shake the feeling that they didn't do more because they didn't have to do more.

They knew they had the best Zelda game of all time. in his hands, so why did he want this story to matter again. I could be wrong, but that's how it feels sometimes, to the game's credit, all is not completely lost in the character department, while we don't see enough of her for her character to really develop. Yes, I like that this game takes on Princess Zelda, we've seen her jump back and forth between younger and livelier, older and more serious, but this one is pretty unique, she's an older teen/young adult and He is very scientifically minded, his father keeps pushing.

She must awaken her powers, as many feel this is the only way they can be Ganon, but since she can't seem to figure it out, she wants to spend most of her time studying the Guardians on the sheikah slate, in fact, This rare presence of the King of Hyrule is a large part of what gives him his character. So far we've only seen the king in Wind Waker and this time it's like if you know Zelda is dead, the king and the princess had the same thing. role in Skyward Sword, but at the time he wasn't a king, he was actually more of a mayor or something, less of a king and more just Zelda's father, but this feels like a new dynamic and the conflict it causes drives his character because of all this.

It's definitely a highlight in a game that otherwise doesn't do much work establishing or developing its characters. I also really liked how the lengths were handled this time as a character, he's still a big piece of nothing, as I'm sure he always will be. be and hey, I'm fine with that, but I like that his origins are different here we are not with Link since he wakes up in a small town somewhere and we do not take him to his destiny of being the great hero of Hyrule . he is already the hero, this link has a history with the other cares, he was actually a trained Knight that worked for the royal family, this not only gives us a real reason why he is already so good at fighting, but also gives him allows it to have a unique character. interactions, the main characters already know it, so there's less of that.

Oh, you're wearing green clothes, you must be the hero who's already been killed and really just the fact that he has a background makes him feel more like a real person. I don't mind Link being the voiceless avatar, but it's nice that they did something different with him in this game, made him a little more real before moving on. I want to mention the voice acting. Technically I should have put this. The sound design part of my review, but I think I'd like to talk about it here while I go over the characterization of the game, since you know this was the first Zelda game with voice acting beyond a few words shouted by fairies. , things like that and now that we've experienced it I think I can officially say that Zelda doesn't need voice acting, it did absolutely nothing for the game.

I'll be fair, though part of the problem is that this was a half-hearted effort, just the main scenes. They are voice interpreted and the rest of the game is done with the usual text. It's not a crime or anything for a game to include voice acting and supplement it with text, but in this case there's so little of it that I don't see the point. and in fact, the transition from one to the other often feels a bit jarring, almost as if it's been added as an afterthought, it doesn't help that the mouths haven't been reanimated to suit the English dialogue and, furthermore, none of the Voice work is particularly good, I mean, none of this is terrible, but it's dripping with cheese for the most part, it's very silly and doesn't fit together very well, it's one of those things where it's like you're going to do it, do it right, try to get actors for most of them, if not. all the dialogue, yes, I know the idea is pretty daunting, but it's another one of those things that other big studios do all the time and work very hard to get top-notch actors while you're doing it, another thing that's complicated but can In fact, people do it, otherwise just don't bother and, again, for the record, I'm still fine with not bothering.

I never felt like Selden needed voice acting and bad voice acting ruins the feel of games quite often I think. I'd rather not even take the risk with my Zeldas, they're too important to me, so now that we've done it, we've seen how it works if Nintendo wants to move on from this little experiment in the future. I'll be perfectly fine with his decision, though I guess we've now reached the nadir of a section of this review that's already been pretty critical of the ending being bad, really bad people. I had heard from multiple sources that it was bad and even with low expectations, it still managed to disappoint me, but let's do it from the beginning.

You go up to Hyrule Castle and you find this big Ganon monster and this weird asshole that I actually thought was really weird and amazing and cool. He comes out and is a real boss. battle, which is great because the rest of the game doesn't really have many good boss battles, something we'll touch on later after this is the obligatory final forum section that's pretty much standard for the series at this point, is a trope, but you know, it's a trope I like. A lot of people didn't like this section because it's paved and doesn't pose any real challenge.

You just go around shooting arrows and there's no chance he can hit you. His big attack is purely for show, just to give you one last exciting cinematic right at the end of the game and it's totally silly, but I like it. I'd be pretty disappointed if the first forum was the only one, so I enjoyed it. The whole light arrow thing, especially with the silly cool move right at the end where you fly with the fire blast and hit him right in the head, is just fun, but it's what comes next that I have a serious problem with. problem because What comes next is the worst thing they could have put at the end of the best Zelda game.

Nothing is okay, okay, before we get into this first, let me tell you a little story. It's called the ending of Ocarina of Time, the first 3D. Zelda game once on hardware that is super old now, when developers were used to spending much less time and money on their games, the link defeats Ganon and the sages seal him in the dark realm, job done. Zelda then returns bound to her own time so she can live her full life after that, they were treated to one of those end credits sequences where the camera just pans around the game's locations, a relatively cheap method I admit, but effective since it reminds us of all the different stages.

During our journey we can also see that these places are completely empty of people, then we see a bonfire and soon learn that all the different races of Hyrule have come together to have a big party celebrating the end of Ganondorf's reign of terror. we see all these game characters relaxing together and having a good time, then we see the sages taking care of them and they fly away and soon after we arrive at the time pedestal where Link has just replaced the Master Sword to create a whole new timeline. In the process note, his fairy companion flies away, which will lead directly to the events of the game's sequel after a false ending.

We finally reach Zelda's small garden, where Link approaches her. Remember how everything that just happened is a Ganondorf of this? previous timeline maybe on the other side of that window what they will say to each other is a mystery because that is where this story that does not end concludes now let's take a look at the final link breath of the wild defeats Ganon and Zelda appears and finishes it off, then asks Linc if he really remembers her and they look at Hyrule Castle while the king and the champions look at them with contempt. Roll credits.

Black background with a handful of static snapshots of the game's scenes. That's the end. Thanks for playing. I guess well, that's not the end of it. I admit you got me if you unlocked all the memories and released all the divine beasts and really who didn't do that before fighting Ganon you get the true endingsecret after the credits here Zelda. talks to Linc about how they can rebuild Hyrule, she makes a little reference to hearing flying in Master Sword and that's a nice little nod to Skyward Sword, you've got to be kidding me. I can't even necessarily call it the end of Breath of the Wild. bad bad suggests a certain lack of quality in something, but how can something be bad if it doesn't exist?

This is an ending only in the sense that it's where the game stops, but it certainly doesn't conclude anything other than the most obvious link. He must be a bad man, a conflict, the gentle laziness present in Link's memories is more ridiculous in the end. I mean, this is the end. You couldn't spare a little more effort to leave us satisfied. We want to know what really happened next. Ganon was defeated, how did the people of Hyrule Field do? What do impo and the sheikah have to say about all this? How does Eldon restore Hyrule Castle and reunite the forces of the Royal Family?

What did they end up doing with the divine beasts? anything and I wasn't really looking for much here, a very small amount of effort would have gone a long way, even if it was just a few animated snippets showing us what the characters were doing after the start of the link like we saw. in Twilight Princess just more than anything, unfortunately I can't say that the ending doesn't fit with the rest of the game. It's a fitting ending to a plot that doesn't really do much. It's a fitting scene in a series of scenes. where nothing ever happens again, the game's obvious potential and the strength of its concept are what make this all so hard to forgive, it feels like this could have been the best Zelda story ten times over a true Zelda evolution and a narrative of a series change simply.

As big and important as the reviewed gameplay is, I also try not to let the trailers raise my expectations too much and I try not to necessarily judge games based on how I thought they would be because of the trailers and instead I judge them, you know? ? its own merits, but I will say that this game fooled me, the trailers for Breath of the Wild took bits out of every exciting little part of the game and gave me a very wrong impression of what it would ultimately be like, and I know that's what everyone the progress they make with some.

To some extent, but this went too far in the main trailer, we saw legions of Guardians rampaging through Hyrule, we saw a giant, horrible spirit, Ganon, circling Hyrule Castle, we saw Link hugging Zelda as she collapsed crying in the rain. , we heard parts of all of these. exciting monologues and I saw crazy things happening and I personally thought, oh my god, some easy curry things happen in Zelda, this is like a big action movie, but then I got the game and I saw that no, those things in the trailer were basically progress. I took snippets from the small set of exciting things the game actually has to offer, and like I said, that probably shouldn't affect how I view the game now, but I have to admit there's a small part of me that's still pretty upset about it. that.

At this point, while unfortunately what's done is done, the game's secrets have been thoroughly plumbed and the DLC ended up doing little to improve the game's story and characters, but at least we can all hope that maybe it really was just lack of time and Breath of the Wild will eventually get its own equivalent to Majora's Mask. Hopefully, the next time the Zelda team has a great new story idea, they'll be given adequate time to develop it into something that lives up to Zelda's pedigree. Wild is easily the hardest 3D Zelda and probably the hardest Zelda period since the first two NES games and when I say hard I don't necessarily mean that it's hard to solve or that it has hard puzzles, I mean that it kills you.

It's very difficult in the sense that things make you die more than in other Zeldas in and out of combat. I mean, 3D Zelda games in particular haven't traditionally provided many challenges in the past. Majora's Mask required a lot of careful planning and time management and Skyward Sword. It could be very difficult when the motion controls weren't working properly but in reality the combat has for the most part been very easy with hearts galore, the addition of hero mode has certainly helped in this regard but in most games , unless you're up against a ton. of enemies at once, it's a simple matter of protecting yourself and attacking when you get the chance or using an item to open up the enemy.

Taking damage comes less from a difficult fight and more from a lack of patience and a desire to simply swing your Sword Like Crazy Breath of the Wild takes the series in a whole new direction. First of all, it's interesting to note that it's the only Zelda game where it starts off hard and just progresses. It gets easier the more you play, like when you start it up and you have nothing and you don't know what you're doing, it's very difficult, but the more you play and the stronger you get, the easier it is to navigate.

Until you get to a point where you can cut through everyone you encounter, there is a slight element of greater ease as you progress in other Zelda games, just because when you start a file you usually only have three hearts, which means that you can only take a few hits. Even for the little ones, once you get a few extras, it gets easier in some ways, although of course the challenges and baddies increase as you go, as is traditional in the wild, although if you take your time as I did it, it really does. it just gets easier throughout, even with the bad guys increasing.

I'm getting a little ahead of myself, though I'll talk more about progression in a moment. I want to focus on that initial, more difficult stage of the experience. speaking of the large plateau where the game begins, when you wake up they give you clothing that offers very little protection and spit you out into the world and considering that some Zelda games are famous for having hours long opening sections where you have to do a lot of work before you can get a sword. Twilight Princess. Whatever the great plateau slaps you in the face when you realize this isn't the Zelda you're used to, son, there's no one who can hold your hand.

We hadn't given you anything. If you want to do something, you have to figure out how to do it and you have to be good enough to do it. Without a master sword and not even a wooden practice sword. No, just start by collecting sticks and hitting monsters with them, if you want better weapons then you have to earn them or steal them from those monsters or if you are lucky find them hidden in chests then of course you will find that all weapons break after of a time. here at the start of the game, sometimes after just a few hits, so this keeps you going fighting to gain enough weapons to protect yourself with weapon breaking again, something I'll talk more about in a moment, both of everything This is really difficult.

I don't want to get ahead of myself, but anyway, one really big thing that makes the game harder at this early stage is the complete and utter lack of recovery hearts. You don't get them from fallen enemies. You don't get them from grass or flower pots. I can't find them anywhere, they don't exist in this game, this is the case in the hero modes of previous games, but this time it is like this in the base experience, if you want to heal, you must collect food and eat. It doesn't respond at all either, at least not that early for me, the blood moons came much later, when you pick up an apple and eat it, it's gone and it's not that there isn't enough food on the great plateau, but it's certainly not something you can cultivate infinitely. or find instantly, no matter where you are, this gives you a real need to be careful and when you make a mistake and get hurt, you have to work to recover and that happens a lot because like I said, this game likes to Kill, yeah, There was a big moment for me in maybe the first half hour of the game.

I was wandering and came to a cliff. I wanted to know what was at the bottom of the cliff, so I did what I would do at any time. Zelda game I jumped and died and thought, oh, that's the kind of game this is. Suddenly I understood, I realized that he wasn't going to take care of me like the other Zelda. He was not an indestructible superhero. I actually had to do it. Try it like a real person would and that was just amazing to me. It was such a revelation that it was exhilarating. It's so fun to fall from a high cliff and have such a big moment.

It should be obvious that when you jump off a cliff, you go. splat, but this was something so new to Zelda and it said something that I knew from that moment on, that this game would require a lot more of me and I would continue to discover that yes, I was right in thinking that another great moment was when I discovered how to cook, of which you may have heard me talk about in my first impressions video a long time ago, where the game tells you how to do all your basic actions, but some of the deeper stuff is harder to understand.

The mysterious old man may be. I found him in a few different places and he gives you some advice, but probably like a lot of people, it was a while before I found his cabin, which is where the game gives you a little rundown on cooking. This is how it went for me. I wanted to go up. the snowy mountain to reach one of the shrines, but I couldn't because it was so cold that I was constantly taking damage. This was another great revelation of how harsh the world can be, so I retreated to this very conveniently located enemy camp afterwards. clearing out enemies I found these peppers that claim to help defend against the cold, simply eating them raw didn't seem to work and there didn't seem to be an option on the menu to combine them into dishes, there was a pot stove at the camp so I thought maybe I needed cook them in this pot, but again there was no command for it to appear, so I thought, well, maybe it needs a fire.

It seemed like a long shot that any of this would work, but I stuck an ear next to a campfire with a spear and sure enough, it lit and then I hit the pot and sure enough, it lit the fire. However, I still couldn't get it to work and kept thinking I must have needed the ghost guy to tell me. how to cook before I could do it or they gave me a special spoon or something that would allow me to do it, but then I was playing with the menus again when I saw that it might contain items that I didn't know exactly what they didn't have.

I managed it, but soon discovered that I could hold several items at once, so there was my order. I had to hold the ingredients and throw them into the pot myself, so I mixed my peppers with some other things and made a potion that allowed me to push inside. cold area and that whole experience was immensely rewarding, especially after playing a game where in one of the last dungeons around, your partner has to stop everything to remind you that you can shoot arrows to press switches. It was just amazing that the game didn't do it. He didn't hold my hand, he didn't explicitly tell me what to do and why I should do it.

He didn't stop my progress until I jumped through the right hoop even though I missed the place where he would have taught me in the future. More directly, he gently and naturally led me to learn all of this for myself, presented me with a need, then gave me the tools to figure out how to fill that need and, geez, do you know what they call that game design and really everything? stagnation is? Like this one, it is intricately designed to teach you almost everything you need to know about the game. It's technically an early area that you can't escape from unless you complete certain tasks, but it never feels like that.

It's only a small part of the map, but it still feels huge, especially the first time, it's so big that I didn't mind exploring it even a little. I spent hours and hours on it before moving on. There's a tutorial right there. It's a well done tutorial. It shows you instead of just telling you that it teaches. You don't know how cruel the world can be, but also how you can cope. You want to learn because learning is necessary to survive and Elda has never offered us such an attractive world to explore and survive in difficulties, although one thing that makes this game the best.

The most challenging Zelda 3D yet is naturally the combat, as I said the combat so far has been pretty easy and as long as you're patient you won't take much if any damage. Skyward Sword was definitely different, requiring properly executed motion-controlled strikes on specific ones. directions and simply swinging your sword violently would get you nowhere. I can applaud this aspect, but I think the overall execution was poor. I want my fight to really require effort, just not the kind of effort that tires my arms. and makes the game significantly less comfortable to play, plus no matter what game you're talking about, motion controls will never be 100% reliable and having the game do one thing while you try to tell it to do another is neverfun nor fair, but As with many things the previous ancients attempted, Breath of the Wild takes the idea of ​​more challenging and engaging combat and actually pulls it off and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what it's so much better, it just feels so much less mechanical and exploitable than it used to be, it has a very natural feel instead of finding ways to open up bad guys to attack like puzzles it's just about killing them and finding a way to do enough damage so they die when you counter to an enemy.

It's not because the a button was but a tip that told you it was time to counter when you counter an enemy, it's because you avoided their attack and followed up with your own as a counterattack. There are so many ways to fight in so many ways. moves you can make, especially when you consider the runes and all the environmental stuff. If you draw your bow while in the air, you can slow down time and aim better. This alone opens up an annoying amount of options and, most importantly. It's really cool, it's very fun and empowering to accomplish, it makes you feel really amazing doing all these radical array shots all over the place, successful parries are your reward for knowing your enemy well and perfecting your reaction time, then there's avalanche gusts to achieve this. try to achieve this and this can also be quite complicated.

There are times when you will activate one without much effort, but other times it just won't seem to work. There's just a lot to fight this time, it's much more complex. In fact, I've put over 200 hours into the game and I still don't feel like I've mastered the combat. Sometimes I still find myself struggling when I fight a big villain without using any tricks like runes. or bomb arrows being hit as I try and fail over and over to dodge an attack and speed up, but one of the biggest changes is that unless you're strong enough to take them out with a couple of hits, not even the types smaller ones will do it. they'll let you sit there and cry at them like they're bad, they'll block your attacks which will damage your weapon and unless you can get their shield out of the way they'll inevitably hit you back and if they're whaling.

On you, naturally, you can't just sit there and block everything, whether your shield has the same chance of breaking as your sword, this time it is much more difficult to completely incapacitate the monsters, so if there were a lot of them around , fighting becomes something you really have to think about is strategy, you can't always just jump into any situation or you're likely to get your clock wiped, you have to practice fighting, know your enemy, make sure you do it. You have enough firepower to last through battle, and in many cases, you do your best to deal as much damage as possible before your enemies detect you, and speaking of breakable weapons and shields, this is something that initially worried me a little. bit. but I soon saw how much the game improved once again, this will all sound familiar if you've seen my video in defense of brutal weapons from the breadth of the wild, but since this is a full review I'd like to go.

I'll say it again and I know this is a very hot topic, there are very strong people on both sides of the fence, but that's how I see it, at least the breakable weapons and shields limit the player, like I said, there is one thing What makes the game so challenging, especially at the beginning, the ability to attack and the breath of the wild is no longer something you can take for granted, it is a resource, it is something that can be depleted and must be actively maintained and at the beginning of the game this basically forced me to do it.

I learned how to fight and I learned all the different ways I could kill bad guys. I had to learn how to sneak around and execute stealth kills or use rolling rocks and explosive barrels ahead to use whatever weapons I found, which led me to learning how to use the different ways. types of weapons that I later discovered were useful in different situations. I learned the importance of a well-aimed arrow and when to use a spear instead of a sword and how to effectively throw near-broken weapons to deal critical damage. Critics of this breaking system generally cite two main ones. problems they have with it and I will address them here first.

They don't like the game to force them to do anything. They believe that in an open world game that offers a great sense of freedom as a selling point, no mechanics should. imposed on them and if they want to use one hand for the entire game they should be able to do just that and I understand where they are coming from here but I don't agree that being limited and at a disadvantage is One of the things that makes nature be so refreshing and unique. Do you really want to play the same old Zelda, where you defeat every guy you meet?

Because that's what it would be like if you had at least one decent unbreakable. sword from the beginning would completely destroy the delicate balance of difficulty that the Zelda team created here. Encouraging you to adapt and try new things is a very deliberate design choice that helps distinguish the game from previous installments and everything that would come out of the game. window if your weapons didn't break and also just forces you to explore other avenues of fighting from the start, once you really get rolling the game throws enough weapons at you so you have a lot of freedom to kill the bad guys however you want.

If you want, at worst you'll resent having to use a spear because you're out of hands, but you certainly don't have to keep sneaking around and shooting and being magnificent if you don't want to, secondly, they don't. I don't like how weapons break very quickly because the threat of losing a good weapon makes them never want to use it and at first I admit that weapons break absurdly fast. This is the game that teaches you how to play and gives you an incentive to keep going. You venture out for better and better things, but again, as you progress through the game they start to last longer and longer and you gain access to more and more of them, it's not long before you have more weapons than you can handle.

You know what to do. So, people who don't want to use their guns. I usually don't like to be outdone. Attitude when it comes to games. I truly believe that most, if not all, opinions are valid if you feel something about a certain aspect of a game. so that's how you feel we all have very different tastes but in this particular case you have to get over it man this is completely a problem that I understand and in fact even I feel it myself sometimes in this game but it's something that you you just have to move, you just have to ignore it because there is no point in using your low level weapons because you don't want to waste the best ones, it will slow down your progress to get more cool weapons like you will have in general. more higher level stuff if you just use your stuff and beat those bad guys faster later in the game Hyrule throws more awesome swords at you than you know what to do with this little problem is too dumb a thing to ruin the whole experience because Ni It's not even a thing, it's not even a real problem, it's imaginary, when in doubt, just use it.

You'll always get another one later. Suffice to say, I love the break system. I love how it led me to really learn how to play. game and in a sillier video game level II. I love the constant satisfaction of finding interesting things. I constantly think, oh cool, another sword from Lionel, ooh, look at the bonus on this guardian spear, oh yeah, shiny new shields, as long as I keep them. advancing and smashing everything I collect over the heads of my enemies in that intensely satisfying way. I'll always be stupidly pleased to find even more things to smash over the heads of my enemies.

It's a very effective feedback loop back to the level of difficulty. one last time because sometimes I'm terrible at structuring my reviews. I want to talk about one more element of the breadth of the wild that really blew me away and really drove home that this was a very different Zelda game. I never ran into the stone. talus on the great plateau, but the Zelda team very cleverly placed one right along the path to Kakariko village in case I ran into it and this was obviously my biggest challenge, however, the thing was just huge and since I had so few hearts and such lame armor that it could crush me in one hit, yes, a Zelda game with an enemy that could one-shot me, this was actually happening.

I fought that thing for years, reloading my save over and over again, learning its moves, stunning it, and using all my weapons. I'm trying to knock it down and I'm sure plenty of other people have figured out ways to beat these things with nothing more than a mop and an Acorah wrench or something, but not me. I got to a point where I just looked at him and said. I'm not strong enough to beat this. I'm playing a Zelda game and fighting a boss and I'm not good enough at fighting nor do I have enough equipment to take this down.

I don't have enough hearts and my swords don't. I wasn't strong enough to do the job so I just left it, I ran away to Kakariko and this was huge, it was so different, it was exhilarating and exciting because to keep going, that stone slope always It was in the back of my mind and I dreamed that one day I would be strong enough to take him down and sure enough, I did. I came back later and it was a big challenge, but after a long struggle I did it and I felt incredible, that feeling of victory was not only new for Frisell's but also for Nintendo.

I have never felt so accomplished playing any Nintendo title. I had never before felt like I was up to a challenge like that. This wasn't just getting the hook, then going to the boss room and using the hook on your big shoddy hook, but or whatever, it was a creature that was just hard to fight, it was just strong and they put it in front of me right at the beginning of the game so I knew I had something to work on, it was up to me to improve. to fight and get stronger equipment and when I was ready I could try again and when I finally beat the thing that was me, I wouldn't hit it with my hook, or my bombs, or my boomerang, or its big mean hook. quality, but with his bright eye or whatever, yes.

I had tools at my disposal, yes, I had a weak point, but victory was not handed to me. I got it with my hard work. I think it also has something to do with the fact that this guy was optional, it's one thing to get to a difficult enemy in a game and you have to try a few times before you can beat him and move on, but the breadth of the wild open world With all of its enemies that you can approach at any time it is somehow much more exciting each challenge feels. more personal, each one is your challenge, it's always there waiting for you to give it another chance and overcoming a challenge like that is much more rewarding than overcoming one that you had to overcome to win the game or whatever it makes the game feel like. less like a simple game and more like your own private adventure and that stone slope may have been the first great vote to defeat me many times before I in turn could defeat it, but it was not the most notable point that rose to destroy me.

Collecting twenty shock arrows was an unreal experience, it was the encounter with the stone talus times ten, as I mentioned in the exploration section, the sight of Lionel terrified me and of course it wasn't long before I discovered that . He could kill me with an arrow. I thought about that thing for probably an hour before deciding I just couldn't do it. He wasn't even close to beating the thing. I was barely leaving a scratch on him, so I left the problem behind. I still needed those shock arrows, so I was forced to sneak around and pick them up, and as I did so, I got really scared.

It wasn't me sneaking because it was a stealth section and the game required me to sneak or else I'd go to jail or have to start over or something, it was me sneaking because if the bad guy saw me , he would murder me and not in a small instant, he would try again, like wait, no, he would just chase me and beat me until I was dead and this was tremendously exciting. I know I've been saying it a lot, but again it didn't feel like something from a Zelda game, it was very different and so much more.

In the end I gathered enough arrows, but I promised to return one day. and defeat that beast, Lionel was my white whale, my new goal, even above freeing the divine beasts, defeating Ganon and saving Hyrule, I absolutely had to kill that thing, so I came back from time to time and still That's how he managed to dominate me many, many. times but each time I lowered his health a little more I lasted a little longer and one day finally after many hours in the game and many attempts I did it, I climbed that mountain and the fight that followed was legendary, I probably learned More about combat from that fight than the rest of the game.

I learned their moves and how to counter each one. I perfected the timing of my shield parry and whined with a two-handed weapon whenever I was stunned. II felt. Like an animal, I had fire in my eyes, not even the toughest bosses in Zelda had tested my medal like that or demanded such timing and precision, but everything the game asked of me I delivered, I drained that thing's health and When he finally fell with a roar, so did I. I roared I raised my fist to the sky and triumphantly made my victory known to all who could hear my mighty scream it was and still is the strongest feeling of achievement I felt in any Zelda it was absolutely glorious I would later find Lionel of different colors that would invade me terror and dread again, wait, there is a white one too, but as time went on I became even stronger and learned to fight them even better and now I can quickly overcome the harder line that there is sometimes afterwards. a blood moon when everyone answers, I'm going to go find lines just to do it just to show you who owns Hyrule and this aspect of the game's difficulty brings us to the next topic.

Breath of the wild progression doesn't work like every other zelda when it comes to progression because every other zelda up to this point has largely based their progression on items that give you new abilities that allow you to reach new areas and defeat bosses. That's really Zelda in a nutshell, Breath of the Wild gives you all your runes which are essentially your items from the start, once you leave the big plateau you technically have everything you need to go and complete all the main objectives of the game , the entire map is open to you from the beginning, there is still some sense of progression.

Although there are a handful of different obstacles that will try to keep you away from certain areas, but I would say the two things the game uses the most to get you out are your combat strength and your stamina meter, i.e. tough monsters and things like high cliffs. or large bodies of water since we've been going over the difficulty, let's cover the first one first, the world is full of bad guys with difficulty levels indicated by a series of colors, finding and completing shrines will cause all the bad guys in the world to slowly increase and of What I can say is that they will usually scale each other if you find a spot with two mob lines and a bloom spoke, then they might turn into two blue mob lenses and a black mob.

Then later two black mobs and a silver murmur land. most Lionels will eventually become silver, although some of the ones that were meant to be easier will remain at lower levels. The outliers here are the Guardians because they don't seem to scale at all, they are extremely deadly to many, if not most. the game, but eventually you become strong enough to take them out with relative ease, this whole scaling system provides a pretty good balance if each enemy had a static difficulty then progression would be much more limited, you'd basically be forced to tackle alone lower level areas.

Until you have become strong enough to attack the more difficult areas and head anywhere new, it will only be a matter of luck if you are strong enough to continue forward and of course you will eventually reach a new area and find yourself Realize that you were supposed to attack her first. and lo and behold, now every enemy is so ridiculously weak it's no fun, but here the option of going somewhere is almost always on the table and quite often you'll be blocked by tougher enemies to keep things interesting and provide some of that. very nice challenge I was talking about, the game provides freedom, challenge and good measures, as I said, the Guardians are the only enemies that do not scale, each one, regardless of their type, lives where they live and never gets stronger and I think that this is a really important element of the game if the climbable enemies help keep the balance, these non-climbable ones balance it out even more by selectively turning only some areas of the game into particularly difficult challenges to overcome, there are not so many Guardians around that you never feel like you can go wherever you want, but there are enough of them to instill a very exciting sense of danger and build up what are essentially progression gates but of course gates that you can jump over if you're good enough from the start when the Guardians could vaporize me with a explosion and seeming to have more HP than I could hope to dish out, I was even more intrigued by the places they guarded.

The whole Hyrule Castle seemed so mysterious and scary and I never wanted to go near it because there were always so many stalkers around it. If a place was patrolled by skywatchers, I had to hold my breath and sneak away and pray they didn't see me and blow me to pieces, and every time I managed to get past them I felt like I was going somewhere I wasn't. The assumption is that if a place is guarded by enemies that are too strong for me to fight, I must be breaking the system by sneaking in. Oh man, if Ganon catches me here, he'll be so mad at the idea of ​​all areas being open to me. for the most part, but some are much more dangerous than others, it was really great to talk about a sense of place, the breath of the wild.

Hyrule feels a lot more real because it doesn't feel like everything is fed to you in pieces with a little bit of choice on your part, you're not totally locked out of any major areas, but some of them require a lot of extra work to get to and, Of course, as you can guess, it feels really good when you get strong enough to just walk in. these more difficult areas and cut stalkers to pieces left and right, whether you get to these places early or late, it feels great, it feels like you really earned it, enemies can escalate as you complete shrines, but of course you become stronger and the goddess orbs you.

Those found in shrines can be exchanged for hearts or additional stamina. Both hearts and stamina feed into your combat ability naturally, whether it's increasing the number of hits you can take or how big of a spin attack you can do and how much you can run, let's talk about stamina. Next, because that's the other thing that largely determines where you can and can't go in nature. You can climb almost any surface, which opens up immense possibilities for exploration, but if you run out of stamina at any point, you similarly fall. It takes stamina to glide with your paraglider or swim through the water.

This is very clever because it means that even though you technically have all the tools you need to win the game, your ability to explore is directly increased by exploring the ability to reach new objectives. areas more effectively or even in some cases comes from reaching new areas, finding and completing as many shrines as possible. It is a very rewarding system and feels very natural. It gives the world a certain amount of consistency and logic, sure you can go wherever you want, but are you strong enough to climb that cliff? Can you last long enough to glide to that island?

And this, of course, goes hand in hand with the weapon slot system exceeding the core. What we talked about in the exploration section, that's another way you're rewarded more strongly the more you explore the more ox core you find more weapons you can sustain more damage you can do more places you can go through all of these items make it worth the effort. It's worth running and doing things. Making a game so big and open. Nintendo could have easily messed up in this department by creating a huge world to explore but offering little reason to do so or making it so open that it was easy and boring.

However, even without being item-based, Breath of the Wilds' progression system is fun and satisfying, it does have a few issues, though the biggest one is that while they did a pretty good job of replacing item-based progression, I don't know if they did. I can really do it, while I obviously enjoy the way Breath of the Wild progresses, there's always that little part of me that misses the old way, I mean, it was the core of Zelda's identity, just like it is with Metroid, so example, and I can definitely see where people are coming from when they don't like Breath of the Wild for straying too far from the Zelda formula to feel like a Zelda game.

I was a little discouraged when I first discovered that the big plateau contained all the quotes. In the end, the immense freedom and other forms of progression were enough for me to be okay with this new system, but who's to say that as I progress through the series I won't start to miss the old way even more than I do now? perhaps a combination of the two systems would be the best of both worlds. I know it's a delicate process, but I'm pretty sure they could fit at least a little more in there to block the player's path in the future, just a little backtracking for the Backtrack isn't exactly fun, especially in a game this big, but at the same time it's hard to replace the satisfaction of making your way into new areas because of a new item or ability you've found to open up the world how you play, but I don't know, I could probably make a whole video just on this topic, so let's move on.

Move on before we forget. Another issue I have is how weapons scale when you beat shrines and get orbs, get hearts and stamina. and that's cool because it's tangible, it means that something you accomplish more, you get more, you get stronger, but on top of that, beating shrines makes the loot you find increase, whether it's in the hands of enemies or hidden in chests this is actually the main way you get stronger since the way you increase your attack you don't get real levels your base attack doesn't increase you just find better weapons as you go your armor rating increases and you get other bonuses from acquiring and upgrading armor, but Save that for another section, this weapon scaling system is obviously to help you keep up with these scaling enemies, like I said.

I like enemies that climb because they keep the game interesting; Otherwise too many areas would be uselessly easy and boring, but when combined with this weapon. Scaling everything starts to feel a bit arbitrary technically, it all happens because you're clearing shrines, so it's a bit like you're leveling up or whatever, but I often stop and think I wish I got stronger. I wish my strength was more about developing my character and less about what weapons the game decides to spawn for me, it's like I'm going to scale both enemies and weapons the same way, might as well give me a rainbow Lionel with a billion health and a sword with 10 million attack, it doesn't really matter, it's kind of a false sense of progression in a way, it's not like everything is worthless or anything, it feels good to advance and get stronger and eventually you reach the point at which you dominate. all of which means that the bad guys and the weapons don't move at exactly the same speed, but I think they could have come up with a better way to make the game draw you in than simply generating better and better weapons, even with a traditional leveling system. with an increasing attack stat it would have worked great, especially since that would mean getting XP from enemies and that would be a dream come true for me or hey, maybe you don't need XP, maybe these spirit orbs could be exchanged for hearts or stamina or attack power which would make things even more interesting, this system is especially boring when you consider how the loot you find in treasure chests and shrines doesn't scale for some reason and if it doesn't scale well of course they don't want to risk finding weapons well above your level, so for most of the game you open chests and simply throw in what you find inside the special weapons you get from each of the divine beasts.

The same thing is that they are worthless. You're not going to be as strong as the other things you'll get at least if you take your time with the game, so it seems like what's the point of having them? I never used any of the legendary weapons, not even Once, my last problem with the progression system is that it is a bit ruined by one of the skills you get in the game, two words, Rivoli's Gale, this allows you to fly very high in the air with a big gust of wind and yes, you get a limited amount of gales before you have to reload, but the weight really isn't a big deal.

The only reason this move didn't ruin my fun too much was that I did a substantial portion of the game before going to see Rito. The most fun I had in my early career was trying to climb high cliffs or figuring out how to traverse more difficult areas. A necklace tower, oh man, why couldn't it have been more part of the game like that, surrounded by Ganon's dirt and debris? How are they? You're supposed to get there with a total scratch, then there's Hyrule Castle. I had a lot of fun sneaking in early and trying to find outhow to get to the top.

It's that puzzle that Eiji Aonuma was talking about before the game came out. In the breath of nature, you could go anywhere, but figuring out how to get to some places would be the puzzle. Oh, that's how you solve puzzle after puzzle once you get Rivoli's Gayle, much of the challenge of getting through disappears in an instant. It's just overpowered, it upsets the wonderful balance of stamina and how it affects your progression entirely. It's the kind of thing I'm glad exists because after a while I want to get where I want easily. It's fun to overcome your limitations. and work towards becoming divine in any game, but it's too easy to get here now that I know the move exists, when I start a new game, I'll either hit that divine beast first and get it first thing or I'll be exploring and constantly wishing you had it because it's a lot harder to live without when it's within your reach and you know how easy it makes everything the Champion's other powers are pretty op2 to be honest and they also manage to negate a lot of cool designs. seriously options Memphis is basically a fairy that recharges and maxes out my health, so I don't have to be careful anymore.

Ravalli's scale comes the closest to undermining what the game is trying to achieve, although it is one thing that would have solved everything. Opie's problems with champion powers would be making each power pretty weak from the start and requiring leveling up, maybe sometimes when you clear a shrine in addition to an orb you get something that makes one of your powers stronger, more height for Ravalli, climb more hearts. by the grace of EFA, more charges for the protection of the Dukes, more power and range for our BOCES fury and how about lower reload times across the board.

I feel like this would have helped balance the game and also given us even more to work for and I feel good about achieving it, we would still feel amazing if we got these abilities, holy cow. Now I can shoot the boys. It's incredible, but they wouldn't throw things off balance like they do now. In general, it is not perfect nor does it vary. The progression system and breadth of wildness still works quite well. I would definitely like to see some tweaks and additions in the hypothetical sequel, but I still had a lot of fun between the stamina system, the expansion of new challenge levels, and the weapon. breakage, makes for an incredibly cool experience.

I can easily say that Breath of the Wild is a lot more engaging and requires a lot more thought than the Zelda of old and even if some of that classic Zelda feel was lost along the way, I'm very grateful for what it achieves. We've talked a lot about the breadth of the wild world so far and some of the things you can do in it, but now let's talk about how you interact with that world and how it in turn affects you, starting with a pretty important element of a game with such a huge amount of travel now, the way I see it, aside from you knowing how to run, there are two main methods of traversal that are unique to this game, the first and most impactful is climbing when I first heard that you could climb things in the vastness of nature I did them all the assumptions you would expect, it would require an element that you'll only be able to scale on certain surfaces, that sort of thing.

I was very surprised when I turned it on and discovered that it didn't. You can climb on basically any surface, as long as it's not raining, which we'll talk about later. I originally thought that such an ability would allow too much freedom, especially with such a large world. I mean, aren't there at least some areas that developers? I don't want to get into that, I mean, isn't that how video games usually are, but no, they did it anyway, they gave us that freedom and, frankly, it's amazing, it really makes you feel like Hyrule is yours, instills this incredible sense of possibility? and gives you a constant incentive to go off the beaten path and challenge yourself to reach new places.

The traversal itself is now more challenging than ever, and of course, that means it's also more fun and rewarding early in the game. place and you go, there's no way I can get there. I'm sure I'll have to come back later, but then you try it and maybe you have to do it from different angles or maybe you have to run out and first brew a stamina potion, but then you barely make it to the top with the last bit of your stamina and you say, yeah, I'm the greatest Zelda guy ever and that really reflects the new and unique magic of the breadth of Into the Wild, its world used to be about solving puzzles or beating bad guys, but now , even just jumping into one of the game's countless clips can be an immensely rewarding experience that goes out the window once you understand the Ravalli scale but I already complained that in the progression section the second main mode of traveling is paragliding this little thing is absolutely brilliant the world is so big but the distance never feels like a barrier it is never oppressive because you can always just go up somewhere or travel to a tower and fly very fast in any direction covering a great distance.

It offers another great feeling of freedom because you will never have to worry about getting off a cliff or any high place once you have placed the work to get to a high place your reward is simply gliding taking a smooth ride to wherever you want makes the journey be infinitely more fun and complements climbing incredibly well these two modes combine to make verticality more important than ever in any Zelda game which makes Hyrule feel even bigger than it already is if the map has an ability of a million square miles or whatever, much more so when you consider that all the climbing surfaces these abilities would be too useful in the early game if they had no limits, however, here I have a very clever stamina system again.

I talked about stamina in the section on progression, but I have one more point to make here while we're talking about traversal, specifically one of the best things about the breadth of the wild is that it takes elements and concepts that have only been touched on in other Zelda and the eliminates; makes each one a big part of the whole experience rather than just something small to make an entry stand out a little more. We'll talk about the others in a while, but perhaps the most important is resistance. Skyward Sword introduced the concept of resistance and if you ask me it didn't mean much in that game, it offered a few more options in combat where you could perform extra large attacks, with the risk of course. of running out of stamina and leaving yourself open for a moment, that was pretty good, but beyond that, it was worthless if you were climbing a wall or running down a steep slope or something that was always a result of stamina in the way so that You can't run out if there were then it would be impossible you just wouldn't have enough stamina but there were so there was no real challenge it was an interesting idea and I certainly appreciated that they were trying new things with Skyward Sword but that was it. an idea that backfired a bit like they thought it was a good idea and implemented it without making sure they could find clever ways to use it.

The first amplitude of nature takes the concept of resistance and makes it an integral part of the experience, it is not just a novelty, something new for the simple fact of being new, it is a very natural and logical mechanic. Sliding is also a mechanic we've seen in past Zeldas. In Wind Waker you could glide with your Deku Blade, but magic was required to do so. do it and it was like why magic, how does that make sense, it's just grabbing a blade, but here of course you need stamina to hold your glider as long as you can.

Perfect sense plus automatic stamina regeneration makes things like gliding and climbing are much less restrictive than if they were still using magic, for example, instead of limiting you, it feels like it empowers you, even if it empowers you by making you feel limited at first, since the journey has never been more important and it is the game from Elda, this system prevents you from dominating the terrain from the beginning. Thanks to spirit orbs, we have this very rewarding progression system where the more you explore, the more you can't explore yada-yada-yada, so technically there is a more important way to get around in the wild, but unfortunately I don't think it has a lot of sense.

I'm not really sure why they made horses so useless in this game. I'm referring to the first image we saw. It was a bond on a horse, riding a horse through this big open world with all the beautiful grasslands in it. It seemed so perfect. It seemed like horses are going to be more useful than ever, but if you ask me that, it's just not the case here, they can get you somewhere on time, sure, certainly faster than walking, but hardly ever on my trip did I want to just Go through uncharted territory super fast, especially the first time, it's impossible to take three steps in this game. without getting distracted by something and going off the beaten path, it's usually somewhere your horse can't go and that wouldn't be a problem if you could call your horse like you know every other Zelda with a horse, but you can't.

I can whistle at them, which I think is cool. I love how there's a button just to do it, but this is one of those cases in a game where something is very realistic at the expense of being fun. Imagine how close you would have to be. For a horse to hear you whistling in real life, that's how close you have to be for these horses to hear you, so if you want to use your horse, chances are you've already gotten too far away from it and Your best bet is to skip the whistle and instead head to a stable and ask them to bring you your horse, but of course that's a waste of time and you'll end up leaving it behind anyway, no matter where you are.

There is a faster way to get where you are going, then go to a stable and talk to them and ask them to call your horse and then leave for your destination. Yes, you have the ability to magically summon your horse from anywhere if you have the magical armor found in the DLC, but I'm trying not to talk about the DLC in this review and two, if you have the DLC, you also have a sick motorcycle , so that's a moot point, it's totally fine for other shapes. Traveling is better than horseback riding, but this is frustrating for two reasons: First, it would be very easy to make them less useless.

How about letting them hear your whistle whenever you're in the same section of the map or within a certain area? radio at the very least or maybe they could follow you to a certain extent. Any of that would make a huge difference in the fact that you can catch your own horses makes the idea of ​​horses that much cooler, some horses are rarer and better than others so when you see one you say oh my gosh , look at the solid color of that horse. I wonder what his stats are. So there's the absolute thrill of trying to sneak up and catch one and this is another thing that depends on your stamina, which is another thing. stroke of genius you want a really cute horse you have to be strong enough to tame one then you can name them and buy them different outfits and have them as your cool animal companions on your adventure it has the potential to be a supremely horse It's an amazing part of the game, but with all these limitations of horses the whole mechanic is lost on me, at least I mean it's not that I never use horses, they're fine when it's early in the game and you've already explored. very little of the map and you want to get to a very specific place and focus on SuperDuper so you don't stray too far, but in my experience that hasn't been a very common thing if I'm heading somewhere new, I'm taking my time to explore and if I'm going to some faraway place I've already been too long, that leads us to warp, in a sense, warping to towers and shrines is an important way of traveling and the breadth of nature, but it's not exactly a way of traversing.

You can only warp to places you've already been, so it's more about convenience than anything else beyond the fact that you can hit a tower from one side and use its height to glide to the other unexplored side, but you can say the same about any high place. However, even though it doesn't technically feel like a traversal mode, it's definitely worth mentioning, as with climbing. I was very happy to start the game and see that I immediately had access to this power if you find a tower or shrine that you can warp. To access it at any time, you don't have to wait until mid-game to unlock the ability and you're not limited to five or six warp points;

In fact, it's almost too useful if you're ever in a bind and about to do it. to get smashed by a big monster you can always open your menu and bye bye, that takes away some of the sense of danger from taking risks and picking fights with higher level things, however,I really appreciate the convenience of its limitations in games. They're okay, but not being able to get around easily would definitely hinder my enjoyment. Getting to places would be too arduous a task. This way it's never a problem to return to a place you've already been unless you're bothered by the loading screens which yes, they could be a little long, I admit, ultimately it feels a bit funny calling navigation with I shield a Traverse mode because it's more for fun than anything else, but we have to talk about it somewhere, it's not as useful or intuitive as gliding. but shield surfing is similar to sliding in the sense that it is very liberating, it is a way to get down from a high place in a very fast and fun way, it really is a testament to how aware the designers were of the need to traverse the breath of the wild be constantly fun and offer a lot of variety.

I don't think I would have thought of the idea myself, but its inclusion is just lovely. The world already feels like a big toy sometimes and shield surfing adds another layer to the fun. in another element to keep you playing and experimenting and it really has a practical purpose: you can't take a horse into the desert and there is a lot of sand throughout, grabbing onto a sea of ​​sand and sliding at high speed is really useful and I would love to see this idea explored further in future games, perhaps dragging wandering enemies and horses, surfing with shields is also interesting because it's another example of something that has been done in a previous Zelda game, namely surfing around these snowy mountains in Twilight Princess, which is fully realized and turned into something practical and a breath of the wild, is no longer just a minigame that is played in a specific location, this is how you interact with the breath of the wild terrain, but what about things?

Well, let me tell you, there are many things. Of the things that interact in this game also something new in the breadth of the wild is physics. Now I say something because obviously previous games have employed physics, that's how games will work, but they've never been such an integral part of the game. Every thing in the world is a freely moving object that can be affected by gravity and wind, even ingredients and raw materials can be carried and thrown wherever you want, bonuses can now roll down hills, something else Skyward Sword mentioned, but not to the same extent, interestingly, rupees are actually the only things you don't intentionally pick up by pressing a button and you come across standalone rupees lying on the ground very rarely, almost only when you're harassing the blue piece, most objects are also destructible your weapons, materials, trees, boxes, etc., everything can be burned and broken, but all this was not implemented just so they could be like look at these fancy physics, oh look at all these Destructible things, isn't this game? -Breath of the Wild's physics fit the theme which is enhanced by your new traversal abilities.

The idea that the world is yours. You have unlimited options. You can play however you want. That's why when they came up with the runes, they didn't just give you. us, we use things from Zelda, no boomerang, no lens of truth, no roulette, we know things that are mostly good in specific situations, they are used as progression tools, the runes in this game, which act as quote items , are about using this physical system to interact with the world to a large extent. wider forms and this is what really makes Hyrule your playground. I'll talk a little more about each specific rune in another section, but the possibilities the Zelda team gave us here are amazing: stasis alone, which not only freezes objects but allows you to hit them. gaining momentum so you can see them take off is a huge game changer, unfortunately I'm not as smart as a lot of other people on YouTube, but the things you can do with stasis are absurd, so Magnus is another big one.

There are a lot of metal objects out there and they practically gave us Magnus's and said: here metal objects are now your toy. Have fun, Magneto. You can use this ability for fun or fighting or of course to solve puzzles, which again is something we will do. We'll talk about that later, sorry, I have to stay the course. Bombs are certainly a Zelda staple, but an explosion will always be something very practical and desirable. Then there's Crying, which might be the least useful of all the runes if you have to sort. them, but it's still a big problem, it's perfect for traversing water and its applications in puzzle solving are limitless, even beyond physics and runes, you have weather and elemental effects and this adds another layer of complexity, there were A big moment of realization. how many different ways the pieces of this game could interact with each other.

It was the first time I saw that burnt grass created an updraft that could give me a boost with my glider. I wondered what the heck is so amazing about the game. Full of random little interactions like that that you just have to figure out, take out an arrow in a hot place, look you have a burning arrow, just make sure you shoot it or put it away before it burns up outside in a storm be careful with metal objects who are hit by lightning or use Magni psious to weaponize the lightning have some problems with ice any kind of fire will melt it campfire flaming sword fire arrow whatever no spring water or blue flame needed special here is it raining or its If you have enemies standing in the water, your shock arrows will deal tons of damage and stun them.

Nothing is arbitrary. Nothing works just because you have an object that says it works and you use it on something that was created to be affected by that object. Everything goes on. logic wood burns ice melts water conducts electricity heat increases If you're still experimenting with how the game works and you think doing a certain thing will work a certain way, there's a good chance you're right about the weather and how it works. affects You thought very quickly about that stinky rain. Now I'm very conflicted here. I like the idea of ​​something limiting your ability to climb.

In fact, the Divine Beast Zora Wing quest might be the best because of that long, challenging sequence where I have to climb a mountain without climbing anything because of the constant rain. Time limitations are good. They make you think differently. They keep you from feeling too dominated all the time. The problem with rain making it almost impossible to climb is that it's one of those things that probably sounded great on paper, but I say a completely different story when you actually apply it to the game as a whole, fun versus realism isn't an issue. constant in the game design and as we discovered, calling the horses just because something is realistic, that doesn't mean it's fun and in this case rain ruining your climb means spending a lot of time standing around, sometimes waiting minutes and minutes at a time.

Let the rain stop, that's not fun, no one is going to think that's It's fun, if you can find something to cover yourself, you can make a fire and wait it out or you can go do something else, but come on, you're here, you want to do what you want to do and wouldn't you know it every time? you're about to escalate this specific thing where it starts raining again, it's not the kind of thing that ruins the game and of course it's not always a problem, but what it is, it can be a huge pain, it would be a lot better if there was. some way to thwart it eventually maybe you'll get an item that prevents slipping mid-game maybe the suit bonus for the climbing gear prevents slipping maybe the more stamina you have the less you'll slip just a little some way to feel like you've eventually made it through the rain The Ravalli's scale helps a lot, but it's still annoying to turn around and conclude my point, although between all the elemental effects and runes and everything, you have a Zelda game that's big on fate and Ganon Thornton and Princess Savin and all.

That's business as usual but even away from all that it also acts like a giant toy box the physics system and the tools they give you to use it change everything, whether it's working in dungeons or damaging enemies or just joking around and having a good time, it's other What makes the huge world bland and boring, like so many open worlds and games, is what brings Hyrule to life, no matter where you go or what you do, there is always a new way to solve a problem or some new interaction to see now, let's see. Dive back into what I was talking about.

Before, though, things that other Zeldas played with in Breath of the Wild are fully realized and fit into its cohesive world. One thing is that the time temperature ocarina introduced the idea of ​​being damaged by high temperature areas with the Death Mountain crater and the Fire Temple, if you wanted to. To hang out on a volcano without your heart slowly draining, you had to go find yourself a red robe in the middle of nature, although the whole concept is implemented so naturally that you have a temperature gauge right there on your screen which tells you how close you are going to take damage and there is not a single place with extreme temperature that will hurt you.

Each area of ​​Hyrule has a temperature that changes depending on different things, and as you move, that temperature naturally rises and falls, increases in altitude, tends to fall. approaching death mountain goes up through the gerudo desert and i feel like this is a stroke of genius the design gets too hot during the day and too cold during the night like a real desert again everything follows logic instead of being a simple barrier that is overcome By getting the right item and how to protect yourself from the elements is up to you, you can wear the right clothing and even then you will need several pieces of the right gear to protect against the most extreme temperatures, which will ultimately make the heat and The Cold Resistant Armor seemed like a very important moment for me, very enriching, so you can prepare some elixirs and foods to protect yourself as well and another satisfying moment for me was learning the difference between being very hot and being really on fire and discovering how make the right elixir to go up Death Mountain, no I didn't have to beat the right temple to get the right item for the game to drop me there, I just had to figure out how to do it and then hey, look at that, yeah It's cold, you can hold a burning stick or sword or curl up next to a bonfire if you want, that's the logic again, fire is warm, put fire close to the body, body heat: what do you know?

Next, we have breaks, we already talked about this. A lot in a previous section, so I won't go into that here, but suffice to say it's another thing that a previous Zelda only touched on Skyward Sword and gave you shields that wore down and broke over time and you only got an unbreakable shield. for beating a boss challenge that was totally dumb and stupid because that game had some dumb and stupid boss battles, but that's beside the point. Breath of the Wild, your shields and weapons wear down and break after enough time. Now let's talk about stealth.

Stealth is one. one of those things that you participate in very rarely in zelda games and only in cases where those games give you no choice, you're trying to get somewhere and there are guys who, for whatever silly reason, instantly make you lose if they see you Wind Waker is a great example of this: you lose your sword so you have to avoid the mob's lens or else they will set you on fire and put you in a cell after you get your sword back, however the stealth is lose, there is something positive. There's no reason to use it anymore and in fact you can't after that specific sequence, you don't even have the option to hide in barrels anymore.

Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks used stealth to a greater degree. I will certainly give them credit. there, but they were still very specific enemies in very specific circumstances in the wild, however, any enemy is an enemy that you can sneak up on, as we discussed before, this game can be challenging and you may find yourself in the presence of an enemy that you have . There's little chance of beating, but you always have the option to crouch and hide in the grass and sneak around or get close for a stealth attack. It's extremely awesome that they incorporated stealth kills into a Zelda game later on when you're super. strong doesn't matter much, but when you're still pretty weak sneaking into an enemy camp and taking out each sleeping enemy one by one, well that's something I'm used to doing in an obsession screed game or something it certainly isn't. a Zelda.

Gaming and of course stealth is the perfect way to get the lay of the land and look for opportunities to eliminate your enemies without even getting close, usually thanks to explosive barrels that are very strangely but very conveniently kept everywhere for you. there is no frustration. When trying to figure out how quiet you are or what you're accidentally doing, that wakes up your enemies right there on the screen, a little flourish that lets you know at all times, I'm sure I'm starting tosound like a broken record but once again the stealth here makes sense it follows logic like everything else the idea is fully realized and fits perfectly with the rest of the world we finally get to two older concepts loot from monsters and potions Wind Waker introduced the idea of ​​being specific loot from specific monsters, although most of this loot went towards specific side quests and meant little after those quests were completed, there were some, however, that could be used to make certain potions if given to them. the right characters.

I never bothered to watch since that game is so easy and eventually you get some awesome granny soup which makes all of that useless, but it's nice that they tested the mechanics and then Skyward Sword, as usual, was up to par. At the forefront of innovations prior to Breath of the Wild, you could buy potions but you could also upgrade. them with all kinds of bugs that you discovered in the world, making them much more powerful, this was really incredible at the time, but the surprise, the breadth of the wild takes the idea and makes it really work first now instead of taking your mistakes and those things.

For one guy, by spending rupees to mix them all, you make your own potions which interestingly enough in this game are called elixirs, there are bugs all over Hyrule, grasshoppers, butterflies, that sort of thing, and to make elixirs you mix those bugs with monster parts. Besides elixirs, you can cook meals with all kinds of edible products that you find everywhere, whether it's mushrooms, meat, fruit or whatever, and I must say that this whole system is quite deep, there are so many ingredients to find in the world and there is no inventory limit so you can accumulate everything you find, each ingredient does something and mixing them all together can create foods and potions that heal you, make you stronger, make you faster or protect you from the elements , as we talked about previous elixirs in In particular, I use a rather complicated system of buffs where each individual element increases or strengthens.

It took me a while to realize the fact that food cannot be mixed with monster or bug parts and also to learn what animals or bugs they are. food, so I wish they were all better separated or sorted or something, but after I figured out how it worked, it was fun to experiment, it was fun to just start throwing things in a pot and see what comes out, there's always a possibility for your recipe or a lick, sir, for a random extra effect, so there's that little thrill when the music goes up and you know you've got something extra good besides the elixirs.

Monster and bug parts can be used to upgrade your armor. Skyward Sword almost used this idea. You collected materials and used them to upgrade your items and shields, sure, but that was quite different and honestly, in this case I can't even necessarily say that it was an inferior version of what we have in nature, it was quite different. And in fact, improving your main progression elements was quite novel this time. This is armor or equipment. You can find this equipment in the world or buy it in stores and the whole system adds a lot to the Zelda we just saw.

Lincoln wears his green tunic so many times that it's refreshing to have all these other options. Style is an important element here, but much more important are the effects that equipment can naturally grant you. Different pieces increase your defense stat by different amounts. I can say? very fast, I love how we have clear attack and defense stats for the first time in this game and also almost anything that a food or an elixir can do for you, the equipment can do for you, wait a minute, wait, are you just to say what can you? Use the things you collect to upgrade your equipment.

How was the hot dog? Collecting things to make them better is one of Lowe's favorite things to do. You take your gear to a big ferry to polish it and I love how they did it. It's a great opening. world, so naturally people will find these great fairies in different orders, so whichever fair you find first will allow you to upgrade your equipment once afterwards, each fairy will allow you to upgrade once more and they will all gain the same ability so You don't have to follow them. going down specific ones to reach certain levels is a great example of achieving linear progression in a game with a non-linear structure, and oh man, the first time I ran into a new fairy I felt like I'd struck gold.

I was so elated that I could make my team even stronger. I also loved the update process. I mean, these scenes are amazing with each new fairy. You say, oh dear, what is he going to do to her this time? Do I have to look away? Most importantly I love using my stuff, it's nice to feel like I got my upgrades by killing a lot of bad guys and it can be fun to go out and try to track down that frog I need to strengthen my pants or whatever, then there's the added satisfaction to get a bonus.

When you get a full set and upgrade it high enough, it's fun to hold your breath waiting to see if you get something good. Sometimes you'll probably be disappointed, but other times you'll jump for joy. Climbing equipment. The team's resistance counts anyone out. All these mechanics. meals, elixirs, armor upgrades comprise what Nintendo collectively calls the crafting aspect of the game, and while it's fun and certainly a great new direction for Zelda, be prepared to grow up first because I feel like this is easily the weakest aspect of the game. game. plays the area with the most flaws and the most room for improvement, these mechanics are definitely examples of older concepts being fully realized in a sense, but they are also the first issue not being fully realized.

Look, elixirs are the most complex to create, like I said. The whole ingredient system is really interesting and fun to experiment with, but the meals are much easier to prepare and are still very good at boosting you, so I follow them most of the time and rarely see the point in making an elixir versus cooking a meal and it's not just that meals are easier to prepare than elixirs, but they are also too easy to prepare in general, don't get me wrong, I like each ingredient to give a specific effect and therefore there are a logic to meal prep, it wouldn't be as much fun if every recipe was always a really specific list of ingredients that you had to learn somewhere or stumbled across by sheer luck, it would be a little irritating, but the ease of creation and most of all Everything, the abundance of ingredients in the world creates buffs and heart recovery things that you can take for granted, why try to use all the right creatures and monster parts to become an exactly perfect strength booster when you can just throw a bunch of powerful bananas in a pot and get a meal that recovers a lot of hearts and maximizes your strength, even if you are not interested in the benefits, meat is everywhere and after a while you will basically never run out the things you need to make meals that heal all your hearts, which removes too much of the challenge, another annoyance in the early game, you can make meals that not only heal all your hearts but also give you some extra temps.

Temporals can never exceed the maximum number of hearts you can potentially earn on your own, so later in the game, when you have very few, if any, extra heart slots, depending on how you spend your spirit orbs, everything what you do is maxed out and it's great, it doesn't even matter what I throw in the pot, it won't be a difference anyway, it'll just heal me without any real extra heart bonus, what you add means very little at that point, like If you were going to break the system by making meals so easy to create, at least let me go all the time.

Now I'm a bit torn, I probably just feel like the ingredients are too plentiful because I spend a lot of time gaming and during my long travels I naturally pick up a lot of ingredients, one could argue that's why I have meat skewers coming out of my ears and not I have no chance of being in a situation where I need hearts and can't get them. This could be my reward for being an easier game and that's probably true if I rushed the game and didn't. Spending a lot of time exploring things would be more difficult.

I just think they could have had a middle ground here. They could have made cooking somewhat intuitive without making it so easy to just throw everything together and have the best meal ever. Any of the elements of this game that I think removed too much challenge could have put more limitations on the system. I like that bottles are an item from Zelda's past that the developers decided to revisit in the wild, having a huge inventory for food and elixirs without having to collect or manage bottles is very freeing and opens up the system a lot more, but having less slots inventory at the beginning of the game or something would have made a big difference here, maybe you could upgrade your food and elixir slots in the same way you upgrade your sword shield and bow slots, just an example, besides that meals are too easy to prepare in Moss, another problem is that the effects granted by equipment and the effects granted by meals and elixirs do not stack, you can increase a stat. three times and that's it, this means that once you get some good armor sets, there's not much point in eating things to upgrade yourself.

I actually like to attack more than anything in any game and once I got my full barbarian set, I no longer have any use for foods that increase attack. I can still opt for foods that provide defense, but why do that? I have a thousand skewers of meat to heal with and my barbarian armor protects me very well, what's the point of worrying about defense? I can't say that the lack of stacking makes the benefits completely useless. It's kind of nice to be able to boost different stats without changing your equipment over and over again, so mixing buffs is certainly a benefit, but it seems to limit you for no good reason.

Breath of the Wild is all about doing it your way and figuring out how to make the game work for you, so finding out that all you get is three boosts to a stat is really disappointing, just like with temporary hearts, it's like If the system is already a bit broken, you might as well let us go all the way if I want to wear my fully charged barbarian armor and drink some kind of juice and become incredibly powerful, why can't I also do that very quickly while we're on the subject? ? of buffs, it's super annoying that the game doesn't tell you how much a stat boost is boosting you.

I hate this in any game, defense, okay, like five percent twenty fifty hundred. I have no idea we'll get a real number here when it comes to his crafting items, although nature's biggest sin is that this isn't really crafting. He wants you to think he is. They even put Create Your Own Adventure right on the back of the box, but seriously, not crafting is taking materials. that you've gathered and made things from them, you might be able to take all of this to a non-gamer and convince them that cooking counts as crafting, it somehow fits the definition, but look at other games, cooking doesn't. is to elaborate on other games. cooking is cooking or alchemy or something and most games with cooking also have you crafting and upgrading your armor, which isn't crafting by definition, at least not the way I see it, getting into the breath of nature, as you know, did not know.

I read a lot about it and was intrigued by the idea of ​​a crafting system in a Zelda game, so I played it and played it and played it and wondered when I would finally find the person or the fodder or the workbench. or whatever allowed me to create things. I talked to every goron on Death Mountain five times just to make sure I didn't miss anyone and I kept getting these precious gems. Oh man, I have tons of rubies and look that in the description contains the power of fire. I can't wait to forge my own fire sword.

Finally I looked for her. No, there is no real crafting in this game and it's a shame because monster parts and materials are a lot of fun to collect, I admit. There is a part of me that likes to collect them even after they become useless. I like to find some really valuable ones just because I could sell them for many rupees if I wanted, although I don't really have much use for them. rupees which we'll talk about in a moment, it doesn't make any sense, but in a very superficial and silly way, I like to accumulate them all.

I like that aspect of this game, but I'm also constantly disappointed that there's nothing more to do with my materials, upgrading armor. It's awesome, like I said, but that eventually ends and beyond that, most things just sit there in your inventory. WannaI mean, you have quests and everything that uses them, there are some little uses here and there. but nothing substantial, nothing constant and really useful. The closest thing to crafting in this game is having specific people in the world do a handful of specific things for you. Each race has a legendary weapon that can be remade every time it breaks, but these weapons are usually pretty. useless as we have talked about before and not even worth redoing.

You can use your gems to create jewelry at a shop in Gerudo City. You know, if you want to wear a helmet and mess up your armor bonus or actually, you can use ancient parts to make armored guardians and ancient arrows in Acala's ancient technology laboratory. This is actually pretty good. The armor only needs to be made once, but the option to make ancient arrows is decently useful, even so, this system leaves one big problem. There is much to be desired. The strangest thing about all of this is that the game feels like it was built with an actual crafting system in mind, but they just didn't include it.

Honestly, I think it could have been something crucial, as they decided at the time. At the last minute they didn't have time or something, think about it. For crafting to be a consistent part of the game, you need to be able to create something expendable, something that runs out, so what kind of item covers the breadth of the game? Wildlings used to be permanent in your inventory, but now they have become a consumable resource, that's right, weapons and also shields, even arrows. They were definitely a consumable in the past, but they were refilled so easily that they now looked more like a meter than anything else.

They are a real item that you have to find or buy on your own and the special arrows are more powerful and useful than ever. How could they create a game where weapons, shields and bows work this way and where you collect tons and tons of materials and not give you the chance to create your own stuff is baffling, a bigger opportunity has never been missed in no Zelda game or possibly any Nintendo game. The breath of nature is like a kind of beautiful animal that is inexplicably missing one. of its paws as if it were built to be a certain way, but one of its key elements just isn't there for some reason, but instead of just complaining, let's talk about exactly what they could have done to fix this and give encouragement. the wild, a true brewing system.

First of all, imagine that there are forges and workbenches or something that you work on. The fun of cooking in this game is walking up to a kitchen fire and manually throwing in a bunch of ingredients instead of taking them to a guy who works in a store, so when you craft items it's all in your hands, you don't have to You have to physically hold the items like you do when you cook, that would be too cumbersome, but you go to the forge and do the crafting yourself. A fairly small detail, but a bit of flavor that I think is very important.

These whatevers are located all over Hyrule and in every city and are stable enough that you never have to spend too much time hunting one, but not so many that you can just craft them. To get out of any dangerous situation in these things, you can create melee weapons, shields, bows and Eros of all kinds, naturally, from the beginning, your options are limited and your created weapons and shields are weaker. Special arrows are very expensive, however, you can find blacksmiths all over the world. and a lot of light, big fairies, each one transmits the knowledge of it and allows you to make stronger things that use more materials.

I could imagine this so easily, it's a Nintendo joke. Hello, I'm Jim, they from the ancient order of blacksmiths. They are all over the place and they want me to pass on some knowledge to them but I'm the deputy father, maybe some of them even require you to complete quests before giving you their knowledge so you can't just run to each one at the beginning of the game which will leave you What's left here is a way to constantly use your materials if you want and a constant incentive to gather those materials in the first place.

It's yet another feedback loop to make the game even more addictive and empowering. Imagine yourself at the beginning of the game using wood from a tree that you cut down and a stone that you take from an ore deposit to create D arrows that you use to qualify an enemy camp or imagine stumbling upon the last flint that you need creates a pack of bomb arrows so you can use them to knock down the stone slope, which would be a lot of fun, plus the increase in weapon options would help give logic and meaning to the game's progression system which, as I said in a previous section, is a bit silly when it comes to weapons, better and better items that appear just because you're completing shrines doesn't make much sense, although it's perfect, it's driven by you, it's your reward for being meticulous and using slang, lots of monsters and exploring everywhere parts.

It's worth noting that someone could argue that the ability to create weapons could unbalance the game in the same way that having an unbreakable weapon would, but I don't think this is true. Weapons are already free, they are everywhere, they just take a little work to get most of the time, this hypothetical system doesn't mean unlimited free weapons, you are limited by the amount of materials you have and of course as always, Because of the amount of inventory slots in your bag, it would just be another option. and if you didn't feel like getting into any of this, you could just ignore it and take all the weapons and arrows the game already throws at you, although I will say that if you had the ability to create special arrows, I hope the game gave you less for free. , since they are too easy to get after you've played a while in the late game, even if I was still drowning in special arrows, it would be nice if it was because I made them with my own hands, not because Lionel released like 30 arrows from crash at a time and another note about spending resources on weapons, many people have suggested that even if you can't craft weapons, you should at least be able to repair them.

For a while I felt like this made sense, after all it would be something to spend materials and/or rupees on and come on, in the real world, what do you do with a weapon that's breaking? You don't hit things with it until it breaks. you take it to a blacksmith to get it repaired but the more I think about it the more I think it's a bad idea, like I said hoarding weapons and worrying about losing them is the best way to not enjoy this game. It works best when you just try, use everything without reservation, knowing that you will always find more, being able to repair a damaged weapon sounds good on paper, but in reality it would mean having a full inventory and leaving behind cool things, all the things.

At that point, it would mean charging in with low health weapons instead of just throwing guys' heads for extra damage, and on that note, who would throw away their weapons if they knew they could be saved with the game as it is now, I say a repair option? It wouldn't be terrible, but it's not the best idea if the game used the crafting system I proposed. I would say yes, it would be terrible. The idea of ​​keeping your weapons so you can fix them later would undermine the system. of just constantly creating new ones anyway, although the game was built around weapons that are expendable, so making them expendable but also non-expendable would throw things back, another thing that would be cool to do with materials, how about different upgrade paths? for armor like you can choose what kind of upgrades to give it as it is right now, you can sell armor and buy multiple of a single set, but it's like, what's the point if you have the armor, why would you need more than one? version?

There's your answer: you could have a barbarian set that reduces the stamina loss of power attacks, one that makes your sword move faster, and another that only increases your attack power twice but comes with a rating of higher armor. There are so many options that you can mix and match. It's huge, lastly, how about making offensive elixirs like the ones you can throw at your enemies? One type could explode, one type could put enemies to sleep or make them go crazy and attack each other and one could attract bees and other aggressive animals, this would give us even more incentive to go out and collect mushrooms and just like with weapon making, It wouldn't be difficult to implement.

Use mechanics that are already programmed into the game. Bad guys can now sleep, attack and be chased by bees. It would be a really simple question. from giving us bottles to throw and seeing that you already have a dedicated launch button, what do you know? One last thing to say while we're talking about the resource economy of the game, Rupees are probably most useful in Breath of the Wild which I've been especially early in the game, they can be used to purchase fancy armor sets and powerful special arrows and many things, but I still wish there was more to do with them if we had more uses for our materials, this wouldn't be the case.

A big problem because we would have less to sell and money would be tighter, but since unnecessary materials are sold, netsu absurd amounts of rupees, even if they really wanted to skip a more advanced crafting item, it would have been nice to have. something else to invest money in beyond the special arrows because like I said you eventually get tons of those people, buying a house is the best source of money you get and sometimes I feel like it's satisfying not because get you a house but because it gives you a place to throw your rupees and feel like you did something with them, now paying to help rebuild other parts of Hyrule would be amazing, although that whole idea is something I could talk about for too long if would allow me, so I will do it.

I'm doing you a favor and not like this, those friends of mine are the ways you interact with the world of Hyrule in a breath of the wild. The fact that there is so much to cover on this topic speaks volumes, it speaks to the immense depth of mechanics on display, although unfortunately it also speaks to how immensely some of them could be improved, say what you want about the game, even if you don't like it. Very impressed, although if that's you I think you're unlikely to stay here for long. Suffice it to hear this, there's no denying that the scope and complexity surpasses any previous Zelda by a mile, even if there's room to grow in some departments, plenty of room to grow, what we have here is a ton.

As a starting point, if the Zelda team builds and improves something in a sequel, then we are in for a great experience when that day. Finally, up to this point we have talked about the things you can do in a breath of nature, how you can do it and even how nice it is when you do it, but now it's time to talk about the more tangible things that the action will have. Check them off a list of objectives that the game presents you with, and basically every previous Zelda, the main attraction has been that Zelda is the staple of the dungeon.

This game has a handful of what you could describe as more traditional dungeons, but the main attraction is. This time it's not about shrines, which are basically a lot of dungeons, micro dungeons, even I was a little skeptical of this whole idea until I saw how many they put in the game, there are a hundred and twenty of those things spread all over Hyrule and I think this is it. a very cool game design stroke if in the past you would fight your way through a dungeon or navigate a forest or a mountain or something with very little overlap, now those separate types of dungeon and overworld experiences switch on one side to another.

Very regularly, this keeps the experience fresh and considering the rewards you get for completing shrines, they keep you constantly moving forward and moving into new territory, always scanning the horizon for those little glowing specks and searching for secrets wherever you go and you won't go back. About how they influence the exploration and progression system of the game. I've covered that a lot in other sections, but suffice it to say that with a world this big it's great to have so many shrines because it's always something to do. These shrines were placed in place. by the sheikah a long time ago and they were created to test the hero or a hero or death that even knows at this moment that they were made for you and this is really excellent from a flavor and world building point of view.

See most of the previous dungeons and games. they were real places within their respective worlds spiritual temples mines prisons anything the fact that they were cleverly designed and full of puzzles rarely made sense in terms of realism these dungeons were actually just dungeons so the player would have something to do that's what are video games There's no real reason why there would be a series of block and shift puzzles and a sacred mortuary temple other than it's fun, but the shrines are so different from a field perspective, it's just amazing how they are inside these enormous underground spaces thatthey're just they're so much bigger than they need to be, they're so far down that you feel like you've been transported to another world and it's cool to think about how all of these shrines have been around for who knows how many years and the people of Hyrule.

They have simply been walking on the surface with no idea of ​​the madness happening beneath their feet. Additionally, the fact that these shrines were created to test the hero means that they make more sense within the world than the previous dungeons. They don't need a reason to exist, they can be whatever they want to be and still make perfect sense. I know this is a pretty small detail that the average person probably won't care about, but you know me, what matters most to me is feeling and I think this is great, I absolutely admit that, but the most important thing is how this impacts the game from a design perspective.

The nature of these shrines tailored by man-made heroes had a massive effect on how the puzzles were created here. The existence of these sanctuaries is more logical. than previous dungeons, but their artificial nature frees them from being chained to the logic of any individual location, even if the lock and switch puzzles technically don't make much sense being in a sacred mortuary temple, they still have to fit within the temple boundaries and mesh with the temple theme, all the puzzles in these temples have to fit, they have to make sense within the location and very often they have to be built around whatever important item you get, their shrines on the other hand , they can be whatever they want, they can be as big as they want, they can be super tall or super long, they can be built in any direction at any time, and they can seemingly feature any giant, ridiculous contraption the development team can come up with again. .

It's great on a flavor level because it creates strange configurations that can look really dangerous and intimidating, but as always more important is the freedom of design, if you can think about it, you could fit in one of these shrines, you can buy, you can stomp. can hit, can burn, can swing, can dash, can attack, it's absolutely wonderful not knowing exactly what to expect when you head into a shrine, you may stumble upon a mechanic you've never seen before, you may have to use your runes of In a way you've never considered, you may have to fight one guy or many little guys or fight no guy and just solve puzzles.

Some shrines contain a small handful of puzzles in one or two rooms, and some seem to continue. for years they really live up to that mini dungeon description, the latter are particularly charming, there are so many little shrines that it's always really refreshing to stay involved with one for a good while, while naturally the design freedom we see in These shrines are due to much of the encouragement of the physics system and the runes we have been given to use it. Many of the puzzles in this game are very different from previous games. Previously, there were puzzles much more designed to scratch your head. sliding blocks torches pattern memorization that kind of thing breath of the wild has quite a bit of that, but more often employs a somewhat relaxed layout you have a goal and you have all your runes to try to figure out how to achieve that goal, there are often several ways of completing a puzzle and it's always interesting to watch other people play and see how their thought process often differs greatly from mine.

Let's take a moment to talk about each rune and how they affect. the baffling Magnus is easily the most versatile, as is the case with many of the game's mechanics. I'm a little surprised that the development team was willing to give us an ability that offered so much freedom. Magnus not only allows you to pick up metal objects. or push and pull them or something that allows you to completely manipulate them by moving them around within a giant 3D space, no matter how big they are, this opens up unlimited interactions and allows for very complex puzzles, especially considering how many objects in this world are made of. metal, its impact on the puzzle design and overall experience, seriously, cannot be overstated.

Stasis gets the award for biggest deal breaker in the game. Pretty much anything whose movements can be frozen, hit, and then launched at crazy speeds again, no matter how big it is. This mechanic provides a freedom on the table that is much more creative in nature. If you're going to come up with some really wacky way to solve a problem, it's likely to involve a lot of stasis. It's especially fun because you can control the speed and direction of the object, your stasis and It's really complicated stuff, but throwing a giant object and having it land right where you need it, like you were throwing a baseball or a golf ball or something, is extremely satisfying.

Cronos is very much a utility room, he's not flashy in games like Magnus and Stasis, but he can still be extremely useful, the blocks he creates can be used to raise platforms, guide rolling balls, propel you to high places or even push things out of place. I especially enjoy the nice, heavy cryo puzzles, because they tend to be a bit more traditional to have lots of places to put blocks, but trying to figure out exactly which three places there should be one is a lot of fun. Lastly, you have bombs. The most nuanced tarun in your tool belt, but when is a blast useful?

Bombs have always been useful in Zelda, but here they are even more so because it offers rolling and non-rolling varieties and provides remote detonation of both. The features are really great because they increase the puzzle app tenfold. Bombs also combine wonderfully with stasis, as they can be used to give a frozen object a ton of momentum before it explodes; In fact, all the runes interact with each other in fun and crazy ways. Each one opens up so many baffling possibilities that what we end up with is a seemingly endless supply of super interesting physics-based puzzles that can be particularly satisfying to solve when it seems like there are multiple ways to solve a looming problem.

Having your own solution can be incredibly rewarding, because instead of just discovering exactly what you were supposed to discover, jumping through the right hoops, and getting the answer, you invented a way to do what you wanted, using a very different part of the brain, I think it's a lot like difficult combat, it can make you feel like you've really done something cool on your own, it feels a lot more like you earned your victories. Breath of the Wild's shrine puzzles are actually a lot of fun, but naturally I have a couple of complaints. Sometimes I find myself wishing they gave us more traditional puzzles, rolling giant stone balls and throwing metal boxes and manipulating all these crazy ramps and stuff is a lot of fun, but every once in a while I think I could really do it. for a sliding block puzzle right now, as we've seen with other parts of the game.

I love this new style, but sometimes I miss the old style a little and I hope future games offer more balance between the two. The biggest problem is the difficulty, in fact there are some tricky puzzles in this game, don't get me wrong, but I think too many are too easy since the solution is painfully obvious, sometimes you'll even have these big, crazy setups and I can Saying there are probably hundreds of different ways to solve a puzzle, but then it's like I can put a block of ice right here and voila, you solve it in about 10 seconds.

I guess that's the price that comes with opening. Finished puzzles, you will often find the weakest end and exploit it without much effort. I understand that accessibility is a big thing for Nintendo, but maybe just a few more complicated additions would have helped a lot, thankfully, although I will say that the only attempt to get it right is all there is to talk about when it comes to shrine puzzles I guess we can move on dog no no I just blocked the gyro puzzles from my memory don't remind me they exist want to know what I think about the breadth of wild gyro puzzles yes you want my detailed analytical review on them they are horrible , they're miserable and horrible and I hate them, have you ever heard the phrase Nintendo got a Nintendo, it's the idea that no matter how awesome a Nintendo game or product has this strange ability to include at least one completely baffling little thing that it reduces the experience for no good reason.

Gyro puzzles are these Nintendo games, they're just a Nintendo thing, the basic idea of ​​tilting the controller or the switch. rolling some balls or whatever is fine, I guess it could be a little fun, but most of the time, to do what you want to do, you have to keep leaning, leaning, leaning and it's not long before you get there to a point where there is no possible human way of knowing which moves will result in which actions on the screen and you have to start all over again or spin randomly until you win by sheer stupid luck the puzzles are tedious the tracking is inaccurate and trying to do any of that in portable mode is a complete nightmare.

I could probably complain about gyro puzzles for 10 minutes if you let me. Instead I'll stop here and say what the hell were they thinking with this, whoever approved these riddles needs to start talking. Shrines may represent the bulk of the Dungeon eNOS wilderness, that's definitely a real word, but thankfully it features a handful of actual dungeons that you have for the divine beasts to unleash and each one acts as its own standalone dungeon. . They leave a lot to be desired, but they also do a lot of things very, very well, so let's start with the good things from a flavor standpoint.

These are probably the coolest dungeons in any Zelda game. I mean, come on, they're gigantic. Wandering robotic beasts that are so big you can see them from the other side of the map and yet their dungeons, after an endless stream of sacred temples, lava caves and places with winding trees, are an incredible breath of fresh air, They're incredibly cool and not the kind of things I'd ever expect to see hanging around Hyrule, so I love how each one requires a fun little chase sequence to get to grips with. These sequences are so unique within the game that it's a shame they ended.

Quickly burning these little bursts of excitement into my memory and always putting me off that I'd have to start a whole new file if I wanted to experience them again makes me feel like the game could really use more of these fast-paced sequences. maybe you know if they use the idea of ​​latching on to wandering enemies that I introduced in the previous section or just sequences that require a horse or take place in the sky with your paraglider chasing monsters and hitting their weak spots and stuff while you're running around all alone a thought move on once you're aboard a divine beast, the eNOS dungeon really begins as is the case with the shrines, the puzzles on display are generally quite fantastic in fact, as each divine beast has something of a topic that I say the puzzles here are some of the best, as I've already said.

I love how free and whimsical the shrine puzzles can be, creating very new experiences, but there's still something to be said for having a little more focus and having puzzles that come together to form a longer experience, though. The best part about the divine beast is that each one gives you a special command to manipulate it in some unique way, usually this involves moving. huge parts of the beasts around and this kind of manipulation throughout the dungeon is not only just cool, but it opens up some really unique new design opportunities, the different ways you can move things and how that affects the puzzles of the dungeons and how you move through the dungeons.

The dungeons are extremely clever, the divine beasts offering one of the most cohesive and interesting layouts we've seen in any Zelda dungeon. On the downside, although they are too short, they are like the fast-paced sequences that precede each one. One of them is great, but it ends so quickly that it takes up a small portion of your total in-game time, which can make them feel a little insignificant. Adding to this problem is the fact that each contains very few fighting dungeons. Of old they were a mix of puzzles and monster slaying, but the divine beasts tend to contain only small handfuls of Guardian Scouts and guys with bubble skulls emerging from Ganon's disgusting goo.

It's actually mostly about the puzzles, so there's always that little part of me. It feels like something is missing from the experience. I guess IThey've been conditioned to expect certain things from my Zelda dungeons and to top it all off you have a sort of lack of individual identity, each beast having its own form and manipulation. mechanics and even its own puzzle themes, but none of these themes are as strong as those of past dungeons, at least not artistically, a fire cave can be another somewhat boring fire cave, but when you are in a fire cave, no, you are in a fiery cave that has a very strong visual and thematic identity, the same as a crumbling ruin or a twisted tree infested with spiders or the snowy remains of a castle on a mountain, these divine beasts are truly unique and great, but when you compare them all to each other they feel awfully similar when I look back on them they have less presence in my memory if that makes sense almost all of them can just be a big dungeon, the funny thing about these negatives is that I can't counting them all is completely negative when it comes to something that has been done so many times over the years.

I can really appreciate big changes like these, even the elements that aren't perfect can be forgiven because of how different this experience is. I wish these dungeons were longer. but it's also nice to not have to dedicate myself to finishing a huge, complicated dungeon before I can feel comfortable closing the game. I miss having more monsters to fight, lots of bosses and all that, but the increased focus on puzzles is too. The relaxing divine beasts don't have much visual identity compared to each other, but the identity they share is already so unique that I don't mind that much despite their shortcomings.

I can say I enjoyed his hack. of the divine beasts and I hope that many of the ideas they brought to the table are carried forward into future Zelda titles. We're not done with the divine beasts yet, although Zelda dungeons wouldn't be Zelda dungeons without bosses and as such there is a big main boss waiting at the end of each beast and, like the beasts themselves, these bosses are Great in many ways, but they also have some shortcomings. In fact, it's funny. I'm pretty divided on almost every aspect. First, each plague is a nasty little mini incarnation of Ganon. you have thunder plague gain and black water Ganon, etc., since with the dungeons, they lack a very strong visual identity when they are all faced with a giant spider, a dragon, a ghost or something else that we tend let's see.

Zelda games, but I can really appreciate how different the core idea is from them. I mean, they're really cool looking, even if they all look like each other, they're super gross and scary and they embody Ganon in a very new way. As a monster that isn't necessarily like a pig mechanically, they are designed very similar to the games, other enemies have some specific weaknesses that you can exploit, but you can also just hurt them by hitting them with swords and arrows and stuff. and in fact, that's probably the biggest problem. I can appreciate how open the fights are, it's not the same as using the right item and oh its weak point, something we've seen thousands of times and if you really hit these bosses early on purpose.

I'm sure you're in for a good challenge, but the way I play this game makes the boss fights disappointingly easy, from what I can see these pests just don't scale when I get to each one I had. powerful enough to solve in a short time, the Gerudo's was the most complicated, although not that much with all my champion skills and infinite healing items, and it was still quite weak when I fought the Zora's, since it was very early in the game. but for the most part no, the game was like you could fly with the blasts and deflect his beam and shoot back two blocks of ice and I was like or I could just shoot him in the eye and cry on him until he dies in my bosses.

Eyepieces are some of the best and most memorable things in any Zelda game, so this is more than a little disappointing. You could easily argue that many previous bosses have also been ridiculously easy, and in fact much more so, and you'd be 100% right. but I think that if any game in the entire series was equipped to offer particularly good and challenging boss battles, it should have been a breath of the wild, wasted potential is the problem. One more specific complaint about the divine beast before we move on is that the game naturally takes you to the zora first.

I'm willing to bet that most players do this first and foremost, and this entire section of the game sets the bar high in terms of what you need to do to access a divine. The Barbuto beast is spraying a lot of water in the air creating perpetual rain in the mountain range that comprises Zora's domain, since you cannot climb in the rain, you have to climb the mountains on foot and it is really very challenging because the place is just lousy, with shock arrows that shoot at enemies. When you finally get up you are rewarded with armor that allows you to swim in waterfalls, but you can keep it forever and you have to use this to climb in place and either fight the line there or steal shock arrows so you can use them to approach Virata.

It's a long, very fun sequence that makes the divine beast's short length much easier to swallow. I don't know about you, but I was really excited to see what kind of cool quests I had to take on to take on the other divine beasts and what traversal abilities they could give me as rewards, and of course I was increasingly disappointed with each one of them. I didn't find any of them. can be compared to varta, I mean, to vomit, oh, you go to the mall and they tell you to go look for Ravalli. I think he's out for lunch or something, so you walk up and find him and act like it's the easiest target test in college.

Like, okay, let's go and you fly and do your thing and that's it. Firebird dhaniya is a little bit better, there are a couple of things you have to do and you have to figure out how to climb Death Mountain without setting yourself on fire, so Yes, Vonda Boras actually has a longer, deeper quest that you have to do, but I wasn't very excited about it and in fact I'll talk more about that in a moment, basically the rest of the divine beasts. They're just a shame, I can deal with some being cooler and deeper than others, but the fact that the best one is basically thrown at you from the beginning of the game raises expectations and ultimately leads to a sort of disappointment, so Overall There's a lot to like about the way Breath of the Wild dungeons through shrines and divine beasts, but there's also a lot of room for improvement.

The funny thing is that the biggest complaint you usually hear is that there doesn't seem to be much. of dungeon for everyone compared to the more traditional dungeon format of previous games, but when you really think about it, it is true that there are one hundred and twenty shrines in the game, twenty-nine of them are boons, which means that the challenge comes from opening them. and once you get in, there's nothing to do but take your prize and leave. Okay, let's say 91 shrines. What is the shortest time it takes to make an easy shrine? Five minutes, maybe so even at that low end you're looking at seven and one. half an hour of shrine äj, and we all know that some of them take more than five minutes to beat, some are very complicated and require many puzzles and others are just long.

I think twenty more hours of work on the shrines in total. It's a reasonable estimate and I'm sure you don't have to do them all to beat the game, but if you're lamenting that there aren't enough dungeons in this game, you're probably one of those people who is looking for all the shrines, so In addition to all the shrines , you have the four main dungeons, sure they are not the longest dungeons, but they are not the shortest either. I mean, Majora's Mask only had four main dungeons and Wind Waker had like I don't know. two or so, I don't remember, these are a little short but not significant, so all in all I'd say there's a decent amount of dungeon crawling eNOS in this game, so the interesting thing to think about is why not.

I feel this way because I feel like it's also lacking in the dungeons, if I'm honest, and I don't understand why. My theory is that breaking up the dungeon experience into many smaller experiences makes everything feel a little less substantial in the end. No single thing has a giant work in your memory, so it seems like you couldn't do as much. None of the dungeons, experiences have a very strong visual and thematic identity as we talked about, so they all go together. and none of them are particularly memorable, even if they are still very funny. I'm not one of those people who was super disappointed by the breadth of nature and the lack of more traditional dungeons, but as with many things, I hope they can achieve a better balance in the future.

This was a nice thing for a change, but the Next time let's have some flashier, deeper dungeons, even if it's still just a handful of them plus a bunch of shrines because, for the record, I never want another Zelda. game without a lot of shrines before moving on to dungeons, although we do touch on two notable places in Hyrule that are like dungeons, although they are not, but they are not like anything else in the game, so I group them in the dungeon category , the first is the ego clan's hideout. Here you have to venture deep into a canyon in the Gerudo Desert and recover a Thunder Helm in order to board vonda Boris.

I liked the thrill of visiting the hideout of the guys who had been trying to kill me the entire game. I like that this is a fairly large and unique area that is only used for this mission, since we don't have many of those in the wild. I like small and silly ones. What ego blade masters do when they see bananas beyond that stuff, there's not much to like about this mission, this is the kind of auto-fail stealth section that I was glad to escape when I discovered that the breath of the wild implemented stealth in a more Natural way, when I got to the hideout and saw that one hit from these billion HP Blade Masters would give me game over and that I couldn't save somewhere in the middle.

I had to start over every time I died. Dismayed, it doesn't really matter how strong you are, you can't take a hit from these guys and that goes against the rest of the game and what it means now. It bothers me that I can't criticize 100%. because it's apparently possible to kill all the swordmasters and avoid having to sneak your reward for having the skill to legitimately take them out or the resources to destroy them all with ancient arrows is a shorter, simpler test and hey, I'm always talking about that Some challenges in this game are too easy, right?

Shouldn't I be happy about this? But somehow I'm not. It just bothers me that they put an auto-fail unsaved section into a game that seemed to be broken. free of stuff like that, it just seems wrong, it's cool how the place has a boss, although even though it's too easy, Dungeon II's second place slightly is Hyrule Castle, it doesn't really have an end goal beyond climb to the top and fight Ganon and maybe find his sanctuary, so at the end of the day it's mostly a place to explore. I'm a little divided on this, which I guess isn't surprising based on my opinions on all the other dungeons in the game.

I was definitely disappointed that Hyrule Castle didn't make more sense, I kept turning corners and hoping to come across something big, but when I look past that disappointment, I can really appreciate the idea of ​​this gigantic sprawling place that was made primarily to explore its jam. - Full of powerful enemies and I spent much of the game being too scared to even get close, I finally crawled inside and tried to find my way to check it out early again and it was a great thrill, there's some good loot to find and obviously It's cool, but most of the fun comes from just seeing the castle and how grand and beautifully built it is and imagining what happened when it was destroyed a hundred years ago.

It's amazing that the development team puts so much effort into something that you barely have to experience if you don't want to, if you know where you're going and keep climbing you can get to the top pretty quickly, but if you want you can spend hours exploring every nook and cranny. and you'll find some pretty interesting things if you do. I already mentioned Zelda and the king's journals in a previous section, but I'd say another highlight is the takedown style in the dungeon he's guarding. a Hylian Shield that is definitely one of those, in fact, I found some really cool, surprise moments too.

Lionel's deck. Hyrule Castle may not exactly be a complete dungeon, but hey, it has a boss at the end of the final battle again and it's here and we could well, let's talk about it, I definitely had no idea what to expect when I went up to that castle for the first time . Wasthinking Garrincha is sitting there somewhere, we're like okay, Zelda hanging out with him. Am I going to fight a giant pig head, honey? How do you fight a giant, swirling pig head? How is this going to go down? Just like before, we are used to the idea of ​​Ganondorf having a normal old humanoid body and then turning into a strange pig beast when you fight him, Ganon revolves around the castle, the whole game is pig-like because he has renounced his normal body. and he's crazy with rage, so it's very creepy for me that here I embody his humanoid self, but in a very strange, monster-like way.

I was expecting pure piggy, but we don't have any piggy. He has a human face with a classic Ganondorf. red beard and all these gangly human-like arms, this reflection of his original Gerudo self can also be found in the Plagues, as I mentioned before, and is a terrifyingly new version of the villain, even better, although Calamity Ganondorf II's features they become even more. creepy thanks to the rest of his design again, there's no piggy here although I was sure there would be, he's more like a guardian, he has a grotesque spider-like body, some of his legs look like they came straight from a guardian stalker, he has ancient swords for claws and even has his own laser beam arm, he's basically the ultimate guardian and I know I've said this kind of thing hundreds of times throughout this review, but upon seeing him for the first time I thought I was playing a Zelda game here.

Like yours, this is truly a Zelda game because it's so different than any Zelda boss I've ever fought mechanically. I'm a little torn on this boss fight when you just look at him and attack him, he's the best boss in the game several times over. he just has such a wide variety of attacks. I've already expressed that I like the bad guys in this game because you actually fight them, for the most part you don't just use an object to open them like a puzzle and Calamity Ganon is without exception, you're constantly moving, facing some new attack or another and you decide in what specific way you want to deal damage to him, but just like with the plagues, if you actually played the game before coming to fight him, so is he. easy, you don't necessarily have to learn all of his attacks and figure out how to dodge them and deal damage if you just feel like spamming him with bomb arrows, on top of that if you released all the divine beasts and again, who wouldn't? champions reduce him to half his health before the battle even begins, when you reduce him to about a quarter is when things should start to get difficult because he puts the shield around him and as far as I can tell , the only good one.

The most modern way to overcome him is to perfectly protect his laser attack and I don't know about you, but stopping the lasers is difficult since you have your champion powers, although don't worry about anything, Duke's protection stops him for you and our BOCES . fury just breaks the shield on its own mixed with a heaping spoonful of Master Sword and you get a cake of Calamity Ganon defeated. I can definitely appreciate this his way, they want it to be easy if you played a lot, that's your reward. To conquer Hyrule, you can just go in there and kick his disgusting spider, but that's basically how it was in Majora's Mask, but it's so clear that Calamity Ganon is an incredibly designed and incredibly fun boss that it's disappointing when the battles end so fast.

I can definitely make it harder by not unleashing all the divine beasts, which is something I might try in later playthroughs, but the first time was the most special moment and the memory of my first special moment will always be a little anticlimactic, but absolutely fun. , but not. Don't get me wrong and if anything the strange visual design made up for the low difficulty, I was still in an incredibly cool fight after beating the calamity gain and fighting the dark beast Ganon, but there really isn't much to talk about here, especially seeing as I already mentioned in the story section, he is the standard Zelda final battle.

Zelda gives you light arrows and you ride around and shoot all of her weak points, although it's actually a bit unusual because of how ridiculously easy most of Ganon's fights are. Be at least a little defiant, this is very simple and by the numbers, and I don't even know if it's possible for his big laser attack to hit you, but can it be if any of you have actually been hit by that thing, but like I said ? before, while I still think it's fun, I'm field guide enough and it all requires something like this just to cap off the game, an epic final cinematic that exists only to be the epic final cinematic, I mean, come on, look what so big it is. dude is a breath of the wild wins the award for greatest ganon of all time while we're talking about bosses again, let's take this moment to touch on the mini bosses.

There are five types of mini bosses that can be found everywhere. The exception will suffice. go that can only be found in the Gerudo Desert like with other baddies it's a little disappointing that there isn't more variety here I mean there are some Zelda games with 8 or 9 dungeons and each one has at least one mini boss and sometimes there are There are even some outside of dungeons, but luckily these 5 guys feel very great and epic enough that I feel like they could be real dungeon bosses. Plus, for the most part, they're a lot of fun and I'm actually happy to fight them over and over again.

Again, Zelda bosses have always been a lot of fun, but sometimes they're over so quickly that they're like this little slice of the larger experience in the vastness of nature, even though you basically have all the bosses you can face. and whether it's a Harley challenge or you're destroying them left and right, it's just a fun thing to do. Lionel is easily the toughest mini-boss of the group and he is literally one of my favorite things in the entire game I've ever talked about. I've seen them quite a bit in previous sections, but I love how challenging they can be.

There are no tricks here. There are no elements to open them. There's no way to stun them beyond a few brief headshots that basically everyone has. These guys are about a good, honest video game. play, learn attacks, react quickly, protect yourself and at the same time deal damage in any way you can, and that's such a refreshing stone. The Tallis are really fun. I love how they only have one weak spot and can be hard to reach when it's on the back. from above on your head as Tallis loves to follow you and try to collapse on you when they are stunned.

I love how incredibly intimidating they are at the beginning of the game. They are simply gigantic. They are made of rocks and their main attack is throwing stones. can crush you in a second, better yet, you have Fire and Ice versions and without the right arrows and equipment, they can be very difficult to take down. Hynix stand out because they are the most interactive, they are always sleeping when you find them, so sneaking up on them is quite exciting from the start. I was surprised when I learned that you can hang by the hand of an ox and after a few moments he will scratch his belly and pick you up to steal everything. loot from him without him realizing if you want to fight a hynix the old fashioned way and I must say that I have never come across a beaten ox.

I didn't want to fight, you're in for a good time, you can shoot. There are big eyes to stun them, but after taking so much damage they will start covering their eyes with their hands and trying to stun them is fun anyway, if you can't stun them you have to get in close to hit them. but then you run the risk of being crushed, crushed and beaten. Sometimes they have leg guards and I have no idea because it also took me a long time to realize that you could burn the wooden ones and electrocute them. Metal ones in general, there are a lot of Hynix battles and no matter how you do them, Mull Duga is fun to fight.

They are easily the most disappointing mini-bosses in the game. Visually they are incredible. They are these disgusting giant lizard fish monsters. swim through the sand like graboids if you're in the open sand, that can be really deadly. The problem is that once you figure out how to kill them, they are a joke, stand on a rock, the Duga mole can never hurt you again, throw a bomb, heat it up, detonate it, stun it and run back to your rock, repeat until you die. It's probably the most traditional boss fight in the game because it has a major weakness that you exploit with one of your quote-unquote items, but at least it passes.

Exploitable bosses have had attack phases after being hit and that's exactly what the Dugan Mole needs after you stun him and take a few hits. He needs to do something that forces you off your rock and actually makes the battle a bit challenging, since even though they are. They're pretty Blom, they're epic and you can try fighting them using a sand seal for a bit more excitement, but I don't really see the need and that's pretty boring. Finally we got to the Guardians and I lied a little, I said there were five. types of mini bosses, although guardians come in different varieties, stalkers are the nastiest and are actually Hyrule's biggest bullies.

Lionel's are tough, but at least they keep to themselves and there are weaker types to fight near the start of the game. Stalkers come in a very high strength variety and simply run around looking for small links to explosions. I've already talked about how exciting it is to make the game and for this reason they are also one of my favorite parts. They are horribly magical. robots that shoot you with an explosive laser beam which is insane, finally becoming strong enough to take one out is a very triumphant feeling and becoming strong enough to take them out easily is its own kind of satisfaction, the best, even if You can usually cut off all their legs before they have a chance to move or jump from somewhere.

Take them out with balm arrows right in the eye before they hit the ground. Get caught in a situation where they run so fast you can't hit them. eyes or reach either of their legs, you can still be blown to pieces, they should never be underestimated. Broken guardians can be found lying around in some places and I think these are really intelligent, they are weaker versions of stalkers and are stuck in the ground. so they're easier to avoid, but still give you a taste of the Guardian experience early in the game. It's always tempting to see if you can take one out, but if you're wrong, they'll blow you away, and besides, you never know when one is going to turn out not to be as down as you thought and you get up and start chasing yourself and that's the kind of anxiety that gets me. love it in games.

Skywatchers are like stalkers but they fly and have a higher range of vision, you can damage their propellers to make them fall but you still have to deal with their lasers and like stalkers they can be stunned by shooting them They have a hard time, they may not be as exciting as the stalkers, but they still add a big dose of fear to many of the places in Hyrule and I love it because the Turrets are only found protecting Hyrule Castle and there isn't much to say about them. They stand still as decadent Guardians, but they're harder to beat and hey, they have an explosive laser like all the other Guardians, so, thumbs up, we finally have the big scout Guardians you fight in the Test of Strength shrines and ​These are really pretty.

Unlike the other Guardians, probably because they were created exclusively to test the legendary hero. It was particularly fun to discover them because they have a lot of attacks and because of that I would say there are some of the best bad guys in the game. Your behavior. it changes the lower you get their HP and every move they make requires a different reaction and man, when they're charging their big laser and none of your attacks stun them and all you can do is cry on them and pray that you can finish them off. before they open fire, that's a good thing, the last thing to talk about in this entire review is the missions.

Every previous game has had quests, characters telling you to go find this, and Majora's Mask introduced the idea of ​​having them all written down. so you can see what you did and what you didn't do, and the breath of nature goes crazy with the idea that every time someone wants you to do something, it becomes a quest in your quest menu, this is great , obviously, because you can easily remember what you still need to do, but it's also great because it keeps track of important information about your mission, so you don't need to keep asking people for your clues.

I've mentioned before that shrine quests are the best, but we'll address them again here if you absolutely had to get a shrine quest from the right personbefore you can complete it. It would be quite boring. The game allows you to stumble upon secret shrines on your own, which of course greatly increases the game's sense of exploration and discovery. I would say thisSecret shrines with their own quests provide the most interesting and unique settings in the game, they are the coolest and most fun things to find when exploring the great land of Hyrule, but if you haven't come across a shrine yet, but I spoke to the right person about it, they can give you a nudge in the right direction if you want one for me.

This made for a really cool combination of finding cool shrines on my own and trying to figure out my active shrine search whenever I was around. I was bored and wanted something to work with Some of my favorite shrine quests were castles because I love puzzles, some of them were pretty easy but some made me scratch my head every time I ran around and listened to the accordion music that flowed from Somewhere I would say, "Oh yeah, it's real time, honey." The only disappointing thing about shrine quests, basically any shrine where it's a challenge to simply find or access, is that they usually end with a blessing, as I mentioned before, the game grows, good job.

I already got to work, so here is a treasure and your spirit orb. No puzzles needed, just sit back and relax. I understand why they did it this way, but I love these puzzles. Twenty-nine blessings from 120 shrines are a lot of puzzles. and I wish I was doing it, it's easier to forgive the blessings that come after crazy challenges like Eventide or mazes or whatever, but at least a handful of the blessings are pretty dumb, sometimes it only takes like a minute to open a shrine and it's like come on, that was too easy, a guarantee, a blessing, give me some puzzles that are already beyond the shrine quests, you have regular and old quests, do this for me and these are another mix.

I really enjoy having all of these quests because I am in love with the mechanics and the overall experience of just playing a game. I don't care much what I'm doing in it and will jump at the chance to do even the most menial tasks, find quests everywhere and have a big list to tackle them, I just love it, although the problem is that the rewards don't seem to scale with you here and they're usually very very disappointing, it's not a big deal because like I said it's fun to just do quests but it would be nice if these people gave you stuff that was a little more useful I mean you spend 10 to 20 minutes completing a quest and you get a hundred rupees or a ruby ​​or something pretty boring, basically most regular quests are there just for the fun of doing something and the satisfaction. of checking things off a list that won't appeal to everyone, but I can say that it appeals to me enough to still be fun, although another thing I will say is that it's also pretty boring to have a quest like can you go up the mountain and find?

I have three rubies and you say, well, I have 300 of those, so there you have it, several missions are literally useless if you complete them too late in the game. There are a few quests that I found really fun, but the best of the bunch might simply be the Tarrytown quest for a few reasons: It's a long series of smaller quests where you have to find people with the right kind of name, so when I played For the first time I was always excited to arrive in a new city and talk to everyone. the people of the city, so the quest requires a lot of wood and rupees and it's always good to use some of your ample supply of materials, but the best part is that it allows you to build a city watching new structures being built as you go.

Finding new people who have new stores to shop at is a nice tangible reward, but much better is the feeling that you're actually doing something small to restore this devastated Hyrule. Not only could the game use more of these long-term, multi-stage quests overall, but I think almost everyone agrees that building and restoring structures is something that would work very well in this game. Sure, it's nice that we can finally get started and we know Delta will work to put things back in order, but Tarrytown gave us such a delicious little taste of this whole restoration idea that I was left wanting something much more similar. to how the game's material gathering and weapon breaking mechanics lay the groundwork for a crafting system that simply doesn't include material gathering or the Tarrytown quest.

With the ability to build your own house, it lays the foundation for a building system that seems obvious but is also unfortunately nowhere to be found; There seems to be a pretty common trend in most wild quests and what I might consider electronic dungeon content, much of it is really fantastic. The large number of shrines with all their physics puzzles. Visually epic and mechanically unique divine beasts. Many of the other quests and challenges really imbue the world with a sense of magic. or it's just fun to do, there are elements that detract from the experience and there are some disappointing missed opportunities, but when I take my intense scrutiny machine down a couple notches and focus on how much fun I had, I had a ton of fun.

I loved the time I spent working on the game's various challenges and it's much easier to move past the flaws when I'm so happy to be making something very fresh and new for Zelda, maybe there will come a day when the novelty of the newness wears off and I get bored of physics puzzles and want more substantial dungeons more than anything, but after hundreds of hours in the game I can still say that this was a good direction for Zelda dungeons to go in, everything could use some tweaking, sure, but this new format is one I'd be more than happy to see again.

I think Breath of the Wild is a good game. You've probably already guessed it, but the big question is: is it a good sale? Let me. One thing has been constant throughout. of my time talking about zelda with people on and off the internet, believe me, it has taken up a big part of my life and zelda means something different to everyone, everyone has a different idea of ​​what elements make a Zelda game a Zelda game. For a fun experiment, ask five people to rank all 3D Zeldas from best to worst and you'll get five very different answers.

That's actually one of the things I love about Zelda. One person may play it for the story, another may think that's it. about fighting, another person may think that nothing is more important than dungeons and another person may think that nothing is more important than dungeons and still disagree with the previous person about which dungeons are better, but the discussion about What makes Helda a good Zelda has never been so heated. like Breath of the Wild now changed Zelda, every Zelda game added ideas and changed them. Skyward Sword in particular, as I've mentioned many times, was probably the one that changed the most at the time, but with Breath of the Wild Onuma and the Zelda team broke the system completely open for the first time in decades, took a big step back and They looked at every single element that made up the series and considered whether it needs to be here, how we can improve it, what would happen if we did this instead, even the basic mechanics. that had been there from the beginning were not exempt from this great purge, some examples of bottles simply disappeared.

You have a huge inventory and can collect materials with the press of a button, so there was simply no need. to include a bottle system that collects containers of hearts. I never imagined we'd have a game that would do away with a tradition as old as heart containers, but there you have it, spirit orbs are like heart containers in that you can trade four of them for an extra heart. but they are also used for resistance and are given to you exclusively at shrines. You don't find them in the wild, hiding in chests and holes. The general format of the dungeon.

There are no boss keys. There are no defining progression elements. There are no midway mini-bosses. Instead we have tons and tons of dungeons, plus larger dungeons that are very different from anything we've ever played, the ability to jump whatever you want, you don't have to get rocks, feathers, you don't run to a ledge to For this to happen automatically, we just do it with a button because why doesn't it make sense to be able to jump in this world? It's really useful so there are special arrows that have always been a skill that you get and you use them to overcome certain obstacles that were designed for them here you only get them you don't get the fire arrow skill you get a fire arrow you can use it in a guy who doesn't like fire if you want or a shock arrow or whatever their resource is, they ran out of here's a huge one, you know, the Zelda games, right, you're this guy who wears these green clothes and you have that sword, not here, where is Link's robe?

Well, he doesn't have it on whatever armor you have. Find in the world where the Master Sword is, well you'll get it later in the game and even when you do you'll only be able to use it for a little while at a time so how about you pick up the weapons you find and use them ? I've played the game for so long that I'm used to it now, but sometimes I remember how strange it is to play a Zelda game where I wear extravagant costumes and use spears and hammers that I eliminate from enemies, sometimes it doesn't even feel like I'm playing to Zelda.

There are also smaller things, like how you can move the camera when you're talking to someone. It's not a big deal, but it's still kind of where they were. like why not, why the hell not, it makes it a little more interesting to talk to someone and still interact with the game and look around, and you know that annoying sound Zelda games make when you're low on hearts, which is a horrible and gonzo breath. the wild makes a noise to let you know you're down and then goes quiet and you know, it's not just the big changes that tell us how much they rethought the whole Zelda formula here, these little things say as much as they mean.

They really looked at every little detail and asked themselves if each one was something they needed. This game was so different instead of people saying: I like the Zelda game more than the last one, or I like it less than the last one, or I classify it as Compared to the others, there are people who see this as the best Zelda ever created or as something so different that it's not even Zelda anymore, obviously there are a lot of people in between, but to me it seems more binary than ever and fun. The thing is, either camp is wrong because what is a Zelda game?

How much can a game be changed in a series before it doesn't look enough like the other entries in the series to remain part of the series? How much can be discarded? Do you need to know when it is a healthy innovation and when it compromises the identity of a series? Breath of the Wild is very different from the other 3D Zeldas, but it actually has a lot in common with the first Zelda on NES, which they just released to us there. in a huge open world and they tell you to go, it's also very much like a link between worlds with its dungeons that can be completed in any order and are items that you can access at any time if the czar of 3ds Zelda and 2d Zelda It is different in many.

Does that mean they need to maintain their own identities without overflowing? If the breadth of the wild is wildly different from any other 3D Zelda but very similar to the original Zelda, that makes it either the least Zelda-like game of all time or the most dissolved. as a Zelda game if another Zelda game had never been made, only the first one, how differently would we view it as a continuation of the series? How much should you judge a game in comparison to previous games and by what? extent? Judged on their own merits, these are questions we could spend hours going over, but at the end of the day, like I said, there are no right answers.

All I can do is answer these questions for myself. I can only tell you what I see when I look at this game and I guess I'm one of the lucky ones because these changes surprise me, there have been some sacrifices, sure, as I've talked about, there are some traditional Zelda elements that have been left behind or diminished and, Sometimes, I find myself missing the purity of the old formula, but a lot of the new things here are just incredible, engaging, exciting and challenging, and rather than feeling like the game has strayed too far from the Zelda formula, I feel like elevates Zelda to new places. forges a path for bigger and better Zelda games than ever before, and this new direction for Zelda didn't just happen because the team rethought every element and brainstormed new concepts;

It's obvious that they took a lot of inspiration from other games. This is huge because the Nintendo teamis the most frequent. It seems like they at least do their thing when it comes to game design and well, that's part of what makes them so unique, but if you ask me, Zelda needed a shake-up and looking out was one of the best things they could have had . made for that change to occur new elements that seem to have been inspired by other games are what make the game feel so fresh and exciting a new mechanic is one thing but a completely new system or style that we have enjoyed in other games that are coming to Zelda is incredible, there's no way to know exactly what was directly inspired by other sources or what those sources might be, but the way I see it there are three elements that have been drawn heavily from other games, a source of inspiration seems to be Sea Dark Souls and/or Monster Hunter or at least that style of play, mainly this is seen in the combat and boss difficulty.

You can see it more clearly when you're swinging a giant sword and fighting a huge guy. I mean, he really does. It feels like Monster Hunter, sometimes it uses the idea of ​​big, ferocious enemies that you actually have to learn to kill, as I've gone over it many times so far, it's less about figuring out how to open an enemy like a puzzle using the right item and more about simply learning them and beating them with pure skill, this is a very new concept for Zelda and I don't think it's a coincidence that these types of games were on the rise when the wild width was early in development, another inspired element of the wild width. wildness is the element of survival and similarly I don't think this happened by mere chance.

Survival games were also on the rise during development. I mean, the genre basically exploded around that time, so now we have the lack of recovery hearts and the need to gather food and cook meals and elixirs, this and the new fighting style obviously come from the team's desire to make Zelda be more challenging and this new level of challenge is part of what makes the game feel so much more. rewarding than previous titles, then of course there's the obvious one: the open world that leads to the breadth of wildness thrown in. Nintendo games were becoming more and more linear, but then again, what other types of games were on the rise when the breadth of the wild was being created? almost every publisher was releasing open world games, they were creating giant worlds that you could explore in your own way and at your own pace and that were packed with things to do, whether they were fun or not.

They debated, but they were still doing it, so the Zelda team looked at those games, then looked at Skyward Sword in the direction they had previously been taking Zelda, then took a quick look at Wind Waker before returning to Breath of the Wild and it was okay, let's do this, let's give them what they've been asking for, let's make an open world Zelda and why they did it because they decided to look outside of Zelda for inspiration and adapt all these new elements to the series. I think we have a deeper and more engaging Zelda than ever before and before anyone says no, I don't think this means they should always copy exactly what the rest of the industry is doing, they shouldn't just follow trends, they should always They should be attentive to ideas. that could legitimately improve the zelda experience and carefully select which ones to use like I think they've done here and you know what I'll fully admit, that the game probably doesn't deserve as much credit as the rest of them get for these changes.

Members of the gaming industry grow and develop together. Games constantly borrow concepts from each other and try to improve on old formulas. Should we really praise the Zelda team for finally looking at what the rest of the industry was doing like they probably should have at the time? At least to some extent all this time, should we praise this game for, in a sense, simply catching up with other games when it comes to many of its mechanics? If so many other games have perfected the concept of survival, why should we give Zelda so much credit for just dabbling?

If other games have been offering deeper, more challenging combat for years, why is it special when Zelda does it? Nintendo fans often treat the company's games like they're in their own special little bubble, and I fully admit that I probably do that sometimes like Well, I admit it's special when Zelda does it because to me Zelda is just special. Nintendo franchises have this way of taking root in my heart and when I start a game, if it has Zelda's name on the cover, that's already a plus. In my opinion, is this a rational mindset? I would say yes and no, sure, maybe I'm being a little biased here, maybe I hold these games to different standards, sometimes I don't really know and I don't know if I can know, but there's nothing wrong with being captivated by that certain kind of Nintendo magic.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being so in love with the style and feel of the Zelda universe that if Zelda uses a mechanic, you're more likely to enjoy it. So if another game does it even better, it's like, come on man, that's bias, but it's also like I know other games use this mechanic too, but Zelda uses it here. I couldn't tell you exactly what Zelda magic is or what. The elements come together to create it, but whatever it is, it is real and it has me. Zelda games almost always meet a certain standard of quality in my mind, allowing me to have adventures that I can't get anywhere else, and even if there is somewhere else.

The games got perfect elements of survival, crafting or combat or anything that didn't already have the benefit of coming together to form a complete Elda experience, even with its flaws and undercooked elements. Breath of the Wild is still a Zelda game when you look at it as Overall, it still has that magical quality and feel, it's still the kind of adventure game that for some reason no one else is making right now, no one seems to make. adventure games that feel as good as Zelda and speaking of flaws like We've seen in this review that this game has many, it's so different and new that there are some crazy growing pains, even its inspired elements need a lot of tweaking and refinement.

The survival stuff is great, but the games had some issues with difficulty. Over time it becomes too easy to get all the health regenerating items you want and the ability to eat them in the pause menu without interrupting a battle compromises the new level of challenge, then there's the whole material gathering system without a system. of proper processing. Plus, there just aren't enough things to spend your money and monster teeth on in the progression system. It could also take some work to get stronger by simply picking up stronger weapons as the game grows, it doesn't feel incredibly empowering from a proper XP system. or something like that would work much better, then of course there's the story at the end.

I went to town on the game, I mean, hell, I probably spent half of my review complaining that this game has a lot of problems, a lot of annoyances and missed opportunities, but it's a perfect example of how I can think a game is incredibly flawed. but I still consider it one of the best games I've ever played because I think about Breath of the Wild I still need more time to decide if it's my absolute favorite. game, but this could be a larger discussion for another day, but I don't see a review score as an objective measure of game quality.

When I rate a game, the most important factor is how much I enjoyed it. I'm not going to do the whole blunder on Breath of the Wild, a 7 out of 7 thing at the end of the review, it seems silly to do that at this point, but yeah, for the record, if I'm going to pull it off, I'm going to do it. Give it a 7 and yes, that even though it has so many bad things, it's because the things it does well it does very well, even if I felt it could have been better considering what it brought to the table, it still provided. which was possibly the most magical experience of my life as a video game player.

I honestly can't remember a time when I've had more fun with a game and felt more unbridled joy playing it, certainly not since I was a kid when that magical feeling was a lot. The easiest games to find just don't affect me as much. like when I was a child. My ability to completely lose myself in a game has weakened a bit over the years, but the wild breath, the wild breath, entered again. that kid in me brought me back to Christmas mornings when I could boot up a game and just stare at it and wonder when I could get lost in a game for days on end and truly feel like I was experiencing something special. in a big adventure, I don't know, it's a strange thing to say, but all the flaws of a breath of the wild are kind of exciting, think about it if I could enjoy the game so much despite its long list of problems and bugs. opportunities and seemingly missing mechanics, that means that as long as the Zelda team wants to continue with this formula and our own numa's statements plus sales figures make it almost certain, the only way forward is up, future games will only can improve. better, impossible, better, I'm sure it would have been great, Breath of the Wild was just the perfect video game from the start, but where could it have gone from there after setting the bar so high?

I'm glad I let myself fly. I got carried away with its crazy open world in some of its new elements because now I can be impressed again with a more complete version of this new formula. I mean, I guess I don't necessarily know if the team will work on improving what they have here or just throw away half of it and go in another new direction, but they have the potential to do something amazing with Zelda, something truly unprecedented in the ever-crowded landscape. of open world adventure games. The magic of Zelda used to live inside its own little box and it was a wonderful box, but it was still a box of its own creation, but this game has broken free and takes the series so far in such a new direction, so fast that now It seems like the sky is the limit and for that reason I would say that it is the most important game since Ocarina of Time both for the series and for Nintendo as a whole.

It shows a willingness to be inspired, break traditions, and try new and exciting things the company has to offer. Much needed for years, it shows that they are willing to make a game that doesn't hold your hand and that they finally understand how players want challenge, want depth, want to forge their own adventures. Nintendo will never be perfect and will take risks. to sound too pessimistic. I know they will never live up to the potential I see in them, they just don't have the same priorities as me, but Breath of the Wild paints as bright a picture as I could hope for.

It says something very profound about Nintendo's change in mindset, their potential and the types of games we could see from them in the future, it seems like we've reached the end of my little review of The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, maybe don't be a surprise. "I could talk about the game for hours considering how obsessed I am with it, what does surprise me is that even after all that time I still can't say I've touched everything, there are countless things I just could." It doesn't fit anywhere or I decided to skip it for something that in some universe briefly resembles blood moons.

I didn't even talk about blood moons. I can summarize them right here, although what happened next I mentioned Eventide once or twice, but couldn't. We'll probably talk for quite a while about that quest, it's awesome, you have a kilt and how we can make costumes that allow you to blend in with the monsters and the ability to take pictures of things and hunt them with what is essentially radar. that's all in itself, it's like a fully realized version of the idea of ​​dowsing in Skyward Sword, but you know, I have to draw the line somewhere, this review has to end.

I was originally going to end it all with another heartfelt bit about how special and amazing the breadth of nature is, but I think I've already made my point, so I just want to say thank you. If you stuck with me through this entire review, then I seriously thank you from the bottom of my heart. The idea that even one person on this big planet would want to hear me talk about a game for three hours is absurd, but to all of you, it feels amazing and all the comments and tweets from people who have enjoyed it during its production have warmed my heart. .

Zelda love and heart and while I appreciate people giving up once again, it came from unbelievable criticism for editing all of this, he is the link to my zelda. I've been brooding a lot trying to resolve the blocked things. in what felt like a century-long battle with scripts and mechanics and analysis, and he's been doing all the dirty work wielding his editing sword against the calamity that is this revision and withThat, my friends, I will bow and say goodbye to you all. I talked about it for so long that you already know what I think I could do.

I think I'll change my game and I'll spend a little time playing something else. I'm sick of wild breath. When is the next Delta game coming out? I know that. I'm going to do it, I'm going to play Mario, yeah, well, old man, running, jumping, Mario, yeah. Hey, look at a moon, yes, I have that moon.