It's incredible how this game sabotages every one of its mechanics
Here, one of Zelda's best combat system yet. But wait, here's also weapon degradation.
Climb everywhere! But wait, when it rains ... It'll suck. And it rains a lot.
Go anywhere! Actualy, don't. Not until you have the right gear for it, or you gather a lot of ingredients to cook a lot of food that makes you capable of exploring this area.
Here, have your horse! But you can't call it from everywhere. So always stay close to it.
Explore, there are thousands of things to find! Thousands of koroks seeds or shrines, I mean. Nothing else.
I spent too much time discussing about what I think about this game here, so I'll just leave it at that
I REALLY wanted to enjoy this game. It was the first game that I got for my Switch. But it tries really hard to make the experience less enjoyable at every turn.
It has so many design flaws that calling it one of the best games ever is almost painful.
I think the horse distance and cold/hot requirements are justified. The rest I fully agree with. It’s these things that hold it back from being amazing in my eyes, and it’s a shame.
I also think the game goes a bit too far in thinking its mechanics are solid at points. I seem to be the only one that has had this problem and talked about it, but in the blue fire dungeon there’s a door where you have to light a torch on the other side of a door with a hole in. I thought it would be fine, I’ve played plenty of Zelda games and I just need to fire an arrow through the flame to the target. No luck. After trying everything under the sun with what I’ve been taught by the game, I ended up looking up a video.
The solution is to equip a bow and arrow, then walk up to the flame so that the arrow catches fire. This is something that makes absolutely no sense to me, given that there’s no animation for it (that I remember) and I had absolutely no reason to think that when I exposed a wooden bow and wooden arrow to fire that just the tip of the arrow would be set alight. None at all. No reason to ever expect, assume, or guess that. I’ve been told that there’s a trial nearby that teaches it, but to this day I’ve never seen it. What was I supposed to do, leave the dungeon half way through and hope there’s a tutorial somewhere nearby for a mechanic I didn’t know existed? Yes this is a rant, but the game pissed me off with that.
One of the best games I have personally played. Top 20 all time for sure.
Weapon degradation I got used to eventually and I didn't mind it. I liked how it forced me to switch up my weapons. The main issue for me was thr lack of enemy variety and the lack of real reward for clearing out enemy camps. By the end of the game I was just running past them.
I can relate. And when I do that in games I feel like I’m skipping the designed encounters, so I’m actively ignoring the content of the game. To me that’s bad game design if I don’t want to engage with it.
But despite everything negative I’ve said, the changes needed to fix them aren’t much at all. More permanent weapons other than just the Master Sword (one per dungeon would be fine), making climbing not completely ruined by rain, and giving more of a reward for clearing out mobs wouldn’t take too much effort yet would be a massive improvement.
Giving us some dungeons and making them better than the 4 robots takes a lot more effort, but they easily could also have cut down on the 50,000 shrines in the massive world they made and used their time to better effect. Because it might be a great game, but it’s not a great Zelda game. It arguably fails on that front in a number of ways.
I have learned to enjoy the game more on some of my revisits by playing the game on its own terms and not mine. Things like accidentally learning that horses will follow roads that take you to your destination much more quickly than trying to navigate the world by hiking. It both cuts down on the climbing and saves you time. I still struggle with not wanting to use my good weapons, though. I will always save them for when they’re most needed, even if that day never comes.
Breath of the Wild was so close to being what OP sees it as for me, and I would love for the sequel to get there because there’s so many solid elements to the game and its systems. People spend hundreds of hours playing with the mechanics, and that’s a testament to how solid they are.
