Games Beaten:
1. 3D Power Drift 3DS
2. Maze Hunter 3-D 3DS
3. Hyrule Warriors Legends 3DS
4. Icarus Proudbottom's World of Typing Weekly PC
5. Paper Mario N64
6. Catherine PS3
7. Glover N64
8. Blast Corps N64
9. Snipperclips: Cut It Out, Together! Switch eShop
10. Pullblox 3DS eShop
11. Pokémon Picross 3DS eShop
12. Bare Knuckle III Mega Drive
13. The Legend of the Mystical Ninja SNES
14. Alisia Dragoon Mega Drive
15. Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master Mega Drive
16. Dynamite Headdy Mega Drive
17. Runbow Wii U eShop
18. The Mystical Ninja starring Goemon N64
19. 3D Puyo Puyo 2 3DS
20. Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa 3DS
21. SteamWorld Dig 3DS eShop
22. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Switch *NEW*
Replays!:
1. Bare Knuckle III Mega Drive
2. Die Hard Arcade Saturn
3. The World of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck Mega Drive
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild
Everyone and their mother has written a review of this on this thread, so I’m just gonna skip over explaining the story and gameplay and summerise my thoughts on what I liked and disliked about the game, followed by putting out my final throughts.
5 things I like
1. Lets go wherever I like
The freedom to explore in this Zelda game is unmatched, and it feels great to be able to see something off in the distance that looks interesting, and know that you can go there, now if you like, nothing’s gonna stop you. Sure, you might have some difficulty with the enemies or you might need to do some cooking or something to prepare for the climate, or the climb, but you still have the ability to make that choice. You’ll likely be rewarded too, with new weapons, korok seeds, or a shrine to find. The game does a very good job of encouraging you to explore, at least in the early stages.
2. Shrines are fun
I like the Shrines. They feel like little sidequest puzzles, the likes of which existed in previous Zelda games, but not on this scale. The puzzle variety using the games physics engine is quite broad, and although they’re not all winners, I always enjoyed finding a new shrine to attempt. I was sometimes disappointed if they just turned out to be yet another bloody Test Of Strength though – they just felt like filler.
3. Constant progression
The Zelda series has always been a series with a good sense of progression as you journey from 3 heart wonder to terror of moblins everywhere, but I wasn’t sure how well the sense of progression would carry over to an open-world game, especially with the ‘dungeon items’ taken away. I needn’t have worried, because this Zelda games has so much to find that makes you feel like you’re constantly growing. Working towards new hearts (which actually feel valuable this time), extra stamina, more weapon slots, better weapons and the likes is really nice, and the game also makes those feel valuable as they start getting bonuses, and as the enemies start to scale up in difficulty over time. I will say though, that sometimes it got tiring seeing that the enemies had ranked up to your new power, meaning your newly acquired weapons felt underpowered compared to where you had been before.
4. Genuinely challenging start
I actually got a few game overs in this one. Finding out that enemies actually stood a good chance of killing you in this game was a defining part of the experience, and a refreshing change for a series that has been altogether too easy for sometime now. The difficulty ramps off towards the end as you get to your fully powered state, and the divine beast bosses are too easy no matter when you take them on, but I’m happy the game managed to present a challenge sometimes.
5. Creative use of runes and items
No dungeon items is a bummer, but the runes at least managed to offer a lot of utility, and it was interesting to see how many ways they could be used, and how the game trusted you to use them how you please for the most part. I personally rarely used the stasis rune, but I’ve seen some people use it in incredible ways. Allowing 2 separate bombs that could be remote detonated at will offered a lot of utility for their use too. I also like how weapons like the Korok leaf, magic rods, bomb arrows, boomerangs and all offered plenty of utility, and how they put in some fun novelties like the octo balloon to just let you play around and see what you could make happen.
5 things I don’t
1. They should've used cool travel options more
Being able to go wherever I want was undoubtedly cool, but the ways to get there were incredibly disappointing. Both the horse riding and shield surfing were some of the coolest elements of the game, and they were universally underutilised to ridiculous degrees. Shield surfing shredded shields so fast that you couldn’t really make use of it til later in the game when you could carry plenty of spares with plenty of durability. It also only really worked well on grassy, snowy or sandy terrain, and there were far too many rocky mountains to get the best use out of it. Mountains were also a reason Horse riding was limited, as there wasn’t enough flat ground to make it feel satisfying, and you were constantly needing to get off the horse to check out a potential Korok puzzle, or climb a nearby mountain and see what was there, or the path would just be awkwardly narrow and you’d ride your horse off a cliff. Horses were pointless despite being fun to use. Lastly, the seal surfing in the Gerudo Desert was awesome, but every time I went into a shrine, my seal would disappear, and I’d have to go all the way back to the Gerudo town, change my clothes, and rent another. That sucks majorly, as again, it punishes you for stopping to explore. All these methods of travel are awesome, and all of them were implemented in a mediocre way that left me running everywhere slowly, or climbing and gliding whenever I could.
2. Fuck mountains
Speaking of climbing, fuck mountains. There are altogether too many of them in this game. It’s cool that you can climb everywhere, but 90% of the game was cliff faces and mountains, and it got ridiculous. The game was already enormous without spending hours hanging off of the side of a wall as you slowly crawl up it. I wore the climbers gear for 95% of the game, because there was little reason to take it off. Climbing was slow and tedious, running out of stamina whilst doing so was really shitty, and FUCK the rain. Spending 2 hours exploring a mountain whilst spending 45 minutes of that waiting for the rain to stop was not the most fun way to encourage exploration game. Even worse is that the sheer cliff faces rarely offered cover to light a fire to pass time when raining, so you would literally just have to sit there and wait it out. If they’re doing more Zelda games in this style, I hope they keep a lot more things at ground level and let me ride my horse instead of wasting time climbing EVERYTHING.
3. Exploring becomes less worth it as you progress
This game has a good sense of progression for sure, but it also suffers badly from diminishing returns. Every stamina guage boost is a godsend, and the first few hearts are truly treasured too, as they increase your survivability a ton. At a certain point though, they stop being exciting, as the difference between 20 hearts and 21 might as well be nothing. Weapons suffer too – shrine reward me with base 40 dual handed swords gets underwhelming when I’m packing 12 weapons of power 52 or more. This is especially apparent in the main story areas where the regional weapons (Zora Spears, Kite Shields, Drill shafts, etc) are universally awful if you’re more than 20 or so shrines into the game. Rarely are the treasures in shrines worth the effort after you get halfway through the game, as the random stuff you find outside them is so much better. It quickly becomes a game where you search for shrines to get orbs, and koroks to get seeds, because new weapons are rarely worth it.
4. Dungeon areas are rubbish
Dungeons are my favourite part of the Zelda series, and the dungeons in Breath of the wild are rubbish. They’re repetitive, often requiring looping around certain sections multiple times. They’re small, with wide open rooms containing not a whole lot. They’re irritating, with lots of slow waiting for parts to move when you modify them on the map. The bosses are unmemorable and easy, the rewards for beating them are nice but not exciting and frankly, they should go back to the old formula for dungeons next time, dungeon items and all.
5. Too much boss repetition
This is a short one, but damn, I got bored of fighting Lynels, Taluses and Hinoxes. Yawn. Even worse, Lynels often seemed to come in threes next to each other, so after one 10 minute Lynel fight, it was straight into another if you were being thorough. The excitement of fighting them quickly wears off by the 5th, 10th, 15th time of fighting one. More variety would be nice.
Overall, I really liked Breath of the Wild. Open world games aren’t typically my genre, and this game was an exception to the rule. I put 130 hours into it, got all the shrines and did all of the sidequests. But, unlike most of you, this isn’t my favourite Zelda title. In fact, I don’t think it breaks my top 5. The fact is, I adore the classic Zelda formula. Not many games do Zelda like Zelda did, and now it seems that not even Zelda is going to do Zelda like Zelda did, and that makes me sad. One hundred-hour long adventure is plenty for me for now, and I’d like to see them maybe alternate between the classic style and modern style games if they plan to continue this path, although I doubt they will. I really enjoyed Breath of the Wild, but what it represents for the games actually makes me sad, rather than being an exciting new evolution for the series like it is for most.
