1. Pokémon Moon - 3DS2. Tony Hawk's Underground - GCN3. Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising - PC4. Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II: Retribution - PC5. Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness - PSP6. X-Wing: Imperial Pursuit - PC7. Star Wars Republic Commando - PC8. X-Wing: B-Wing - PC9. Blazing Lazers - TG-1610. Tales of Xillia 2 - PS311. Shining Force CD: Shining Force Gaiden - Sega CD12. MUSHA - Genesis13. Sonic CD - Sega CD14. Final Fantasy Legend III - GB15. Tales of Zestiria - PS316. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - SwitchTonight I finished the new Zelda with the Master Sword, all four Divine Beasts Conquered, and all 120 Shrines completed. All of those needed to be stated, as they are all optional. If you really want you can go fight Ganon right from the get go; you'll probably get pasted but it is an option. And to put things in perspective the current world record for any% is 54 minutes while doing all four of the Divine Beasts is sitting at 3 hours.
Breath of the Wild is an open world Zelda game. There is very minimal direction given, and even sidequests rarely give you useful quest markers. It really emphasizes discovery in a way that I haven't experienced since I first played the original Legend of Zelda as a kid. The most notable thing that BotW does is the climbing mechanic. Unlike most third person games where you can only climb slopes of a certain steepness (Bethesda) or need to find special handholds (Tomb Raider), in this game you can climb anything. The only surfaces you can't climb are inside the Shrines and Divine Beast dungeons (as they are heavily puzzle based and climbing would trash half the puzzles), and the only thing that blocks a climb is a 90 degree overhang; the latter is used shockingly rarely. The main limitation is your stamina gauge (from Skyward Sword) and the fact that when it rains you slip really badly (and some areas are in constant rain due to story events). You can and will go anywhere at a rate that makes the most sense to you.
And the reason you really want to go anywhere is the Shrines. You'll notice I mentioned there are only four main dungeons. The slack of traditional Zelda puzzle solving is taken up by the Shrines; 120 mini dungeons scattered throughout the land. Some require you to solve a world puzzle or quest to access them while others are either sitting out in the open or hidden behind a bombable wall. Each of these has a theme, and tend to involve an escalating progression for the theme. For example, one is designed around the electricity effects, so the first puzzle is to activate a switch with electricity while the next one is taking advantage of forming connections with conductive blocks. The reward for each Shrine is an orb; four orbs can be traded for a heart or stamina container. There are also treasures in the Shrines; some may be unique pieces of gear while others might just be rupees or more generic weapons. There are also combat Shrines where you have to fight a mini boss; these help you practice the combat mechanics in a known environment and drop some nice weapons.
Speaking of, one of the other well known features is a weapon degradation system. Your weaponry breaks often in this game, and you are constantly churning through gear. On the flip side, the game also gives out weapons like candy. The weapons are divided into four categories: one handed swords, two handed swords and axes, spears, and bows. Spears are the fastest but deal the least damage; the reverse is true for the two handers. Within these three categories there is a lot of variety. Some have elemental effects, while others might spawn with affixes like doing critical damage on the last hit of an attack chain. When a weapon breaks you get an automatic critical hit, and you can also throw weapons you no longer need at enemies (which is treated as an attack, so a weapon can survive this if it has enough health). Weapons have different levels of health that are fairly intuitive; rusted and wooden stuff breaks easier than high quality steel. You'll also notice that you tend to get better weapons as the game goes on; this can include things like a lower tier weapon spawning with a high +damage affix to keep it competitive. I'm not sure what controls this precisely, whether it's your number of hearts or number of main dungeons.
Going back to main gameplay, the four story dungeons are deeper puzzle fests capped off with a boss fight. Doing these dungeons helps you out in the fight against Ganon at the end, as well as giving you some unique powers that are quite useful. Well, three of them are quite useful; the last one is a let down. These dungeons tend to be more involved than the Shrines, and have lots of interleaved pieces. One feature is that you can control some aspect of the dungeon explicitly, such as rotating a portion on demand. The puzzles obviously make heavy use of this. They dungeons are still shorter than the adult dungeons of OoT, but I think for what they're doing they clocked in at the right length. The boss fights are less interesting, though. They are all variations of a core theme and frankly I found them over with too fast. But that might have been because I waited until I had the Master Sword and an armor set that boosts my damage; in two combos I could get each boss to the second phase that comes at half health.
The Master Sword, like in the original LoZ, is gated entirely behind your base heart count. This, combined with the general open world, means you are pretty free to tackle the game in any way you see fit. All of your mobility enhancing options are unlocked in the starting area; these consist of infinite remote bombs, the ability to manipulate magnetic objects (including weapons), the ability to create ice blocks on the surface of water, and the ability to stop time for an object temporarily (though if you smack it while its frozen it stores up that momentum; this is used to build a giant golf course at one point). There are some other things that make your life easier, like armor that lets you swim up waterfalls for no stamina cost, or a leaf that can generate bursts of wind, but everything they let you do you can do another way if you want. The game really wants you to take things at your own pace.
In terms of complaints, I have a couple very minor ones. The first is that some of the Shrines that require a quest to unlock are hidden too well with no indication there's anything there. What I mean by that is that while you can usually do a good job of exploring areas that are empty and might have something, sometimes there will be a hidden shrine tucked in a corner with the quest trigger right next to it; if you don't notice that little thing you will miss it and futilely try to figure out where it was. Most shrines can be found with a short range radar; these ones cannot. I ended up having to use a map for the last 10 or so Shrine locations (but I made a point of solving how to activate them myself once I knew a shrine had to be there) because of this. The other complaint is they really reduced the value of horses in this game. Now, in terms of how they handle it's very similar to Twilight Princess, including being able to fight from horseback. The problem is that the horses are fully persistent in the world; if you leave a horse in one corner of the kingdom the horse will stay there (with an icon on the map), and your ability to whistle only carries so far. Unlike basically every other game with a mount this game does not feature magical horse teleportation. And you realize WHY every game has magical teleportation when you start playing this game. Now, you can teleport the horse by going to one of the many stables around the map and having them summon you the horse, but the first time you jump off because your Shrine radar went off you'll probably have navigated somewhere the horse can't follow, and then you say fuck it and just do everything by foot. It's quite unfortunate, because there were times I wished I could use the horse to get somewhere quicker, usually when I wasn't close enough to one of the Shrines or Map Towers (all of which are fast travel points once activated).
All in all I had a massive blast with this game. As I mentioned in Slack I sort of neglected to do any adulating for the past nine days, which includes things like eating proper meals. Whenever I've evaluated spending an extra 20 minutes on a making a nice meal and playing Zelda the meal lost. This game has an excellently balanced reward cycle that keeps you going, not to mention finding new stuff around every corner. There's a lot of stuff that feels like it was placed for the hell of it, rather than to serve a gameplay purpose. There's a lot of interactions programmed in to lead to emergent gameplay, all of it being real-world intuitive and ironically not video game intuitive. Whenever you think something should work it probably will. I actually had to do some unlearning of my normal video game knowledge.
I expect to be able to knock out Horizon Zero Dawn and Tales of Berseria over the week, so I should have a clean dance card in time for Mass Effect Andromeda. What a year so far.