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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild |OT2| It's 98 All Over Again

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I did this the other day and my jaw dropped in a weird mixture of shock and laughter. Unless you are zapping those Yiga into the Ancient Dimension or something, this Zelda game straight up lets you murder people.

Not too surprising. You can already carry around body parts from sentient monsters and kill almost anything that moves in the game.
 
Posted this on the screenshot thread yesterday but I cant get over how amazing this moment was (I feel like I say this ever 10 minutes but this game just keeps surprising). I was galloping through a forest on an elk when the music suddenly changed.

Creature spoilers.

c0VUCYO.jpg
 
When your horse dies due to a fall...

:(

I reloaded when my horse got killed from a fall today. Also found the horse statue for the memory!

Caught a 5-spur horse after a 25-minute struggle, beat the Bird Divine Beast, tagged the Blood Moon shrine to make sure i high-tail it there the next time a red moon rises.
 
I beat the game tonight...
why doesn't ganon stay dead after you beat him, it actually bothers me so much

It's the nature of Zelda.
But for the first time you get the sense that he's done for a long while. Demise is the original source of evil that manifests itself as Ganon as learned in Skyward Sword, and at the end of this Zelda says that he ditched being able to resurrect in favor of having more power. You defeat that, but I don't think Demise/Ganon is ever truly gone. In some ways this felt like the true final battle with Ganon and it was awesome, but that line suggests that if they want to do more Ganon, they can. But they're in the clear for now. It tells me that after this game that they want to get away from Ganon and do more things
.
 
I spent some time trying to figure out a couple of the shrines near rito village, I tried to talk to people there and the stable, etc but no dice, ater I downed the divine beast everyone just changed their schedule and dialogue, then I figured out that if you want to explore fully an area with the influence of a divine beast, it's better to finish that first, explore later.
 
Finished Kass's questline.
Omg almost every kid in the village is his? That's so cute. Also the full version of his song is great.

One of the best characters from this game.
 
I finished the game this weekend. Totals:
120 shrines, 135 korok seeds, 4 divine beasts.

Let me start by saying that I think it's the best console Zelda since Majora's Mask. Certainly it's more fun on a moment-to-moment basis than any post-N64 game but ALBW, and it has ambition and originality all over that competitor. I say that at the outset because I don't want what follows to sound like I'm cold or even lukewarm on the game. I very much doubt I'll play anything I like better this year.

I was surprised and delighted by the absence of handholding and the success of Nintendo's open-world design. The basic systems--exploration, foraging, cooking, and upgrading--were simple, direct in their pleasures,* and fit neatly together in the game's most fundamental gameplay loop. I climbed mountains, searched out points of interest, marked them down, and went to work (incredibly smart decision by Nintendo to have the player place stamps rather than auto-flooding the map with icons). The shrines were far more numerous and worked far better than I expected as SMG-like bite-size challenges. And the breadth of the game's ambition overawed me. Every few minutes I stumbled upon some windy scene, some environmental interaction, some wandering villager or breathtaking sunrise that left me muttering under my breath, "oh damn."

*It's not novel for an open-world game to have handcrafted geography with beautiful vistas, resource foraging, cooking, or crafting. It is, in my experience, unusual for these things to feel immediate and accessible. For example, it's a smaller number of open-world titles where exploration is fun in itself, with climbing, gliding, and horseback riding right from the jump. Resource foraging can often feel tedious--the payoff too small or remote. But in Breath of the Wild, it feels like a natural part of "play" within the world.

I really was blown away at finding unexpected villages and the clever shrine quests and the fun of breaking puzzles or riding animals or attempting to place balloons on sleeping bokoblins (this did not work). There was an awful lot to love.

But extended playtime also revealed the game’s biggest weakness: its failure to build drama over the length of the adventure.

After a while (a good long while, in the game’s defense), I found myself out of things I was excited to see or do. I’d explored all the regions, done a fair number of sidequests, and found enough shrines (though I was happy to go on to 120) that the search had lost its savor. I could upgrade clothes, of course, but why bother? There were no enemies or environments that could really challenge me any more. I 4-starred a few sets and barely noticed the difference. I could knock around high-level enemies, but for all the virtues of BotW’s “chemistry engine,” it still gets awfully repetitive bopping the spongy lynels and white bokoblins.

This curious flatness to the game seems to be the product of several different decisions. The first and most obvious problem is the absence of traditional dungeons that function as major tests of the player’s equipment and abilities. The Divine Beasts are cool. The challenges to reach them are mostly great, the puzzles inside them are not bad, and the bosses are pretty good too. But they’re just not big or challenging enough to give shape to the adventure. Nor does Nintendo go far enough with post-dungeon world-state changes to develop the player’s connection to the various regions and their plights/recoveries. I can’t help thinking the game would have been better if Nintendo cut 30 shrines and added 1 or 2 classic dungeons (or at least another
Hyrule Castle
-style location for what would be the midgame in a casual run.

The second problem is the story. Breath of the Wild is the first where I cringed through almost every cutscene. Part of that is the voice acting, sure (and I add "bad VA" to my list of reasons for opposing Zelda voice acting in general). But the bigger problems are that damn near every line in the main story script is a clunker (the game has a HUGE telling versus showing problem), and the mini-arcs in the past fail to fuel the action in the present. I honestly don't know what connection Nintendo expected players to form with the Champions based on like 1.5 cutscenes apiece. It would have been better to drop them entirely and reorient divine beast-specific flashbacks around Zelda (and focus on getting the players invested in one relationship).

It’s a hard task Nintendo set for itself, telling a good story with minimal cutscenes and no control over the order of events. Even so, the team could have done a lot better under the self-imposed limitations.

To be fair, I don't actually care much about Zelda lore or stories. MM and WW are the only Zeldas with notably strong stories (though the rest are usually, for all their simplicity, pretty effective). I don’t think the weakness of BotW’s story would be a big deal except that BotW is already missing other elements that would help give the game dramatic structure.**

**As a fusion of these two points, the final boss fight was significant disappointment.
First, the fact that Ganon is bestial (and weirdly merged with the guardian robotics) and does not speak or acknowledge Link in any way robs the game of yet another opportunity to make a connection with the player. Second, the last phase of the fight was a less-cool version of what the player did with 3/4 Divine Beasts. And because it involved an actual, living creature more-or-less standing there while the player shot its weak points, it came across as ridiculous and further diminished the last act's drama.

I also think the weapon system deserves some blame here. I don’t mind durability systems, and I think BotW’s brittle weapons do an okay job of getting the player comfortable with improvisation. But to say the system is painless is not to say it adds much fun. But for fire and ice weapons (useful for environmental resistance), there is little reason to be excited about finding or picking up a weapon. That wouldn’t ordinarily be a problem, but in a game that needs a few more memorable moments, big-ticket weapons behind challenging fights or sidequests would have gone a long way, and it’s just not something the system supports that well. I think Nintendo might have done better to lean into the distinctions among weapon classes and put one unbreakable weapon of each type in the world, trusting that the player would still have ample reason to switch up for different situations.

I’m sure there were other choices I wanted to comment on, but it’s a gigantic, incredible, diverse game. I’ll have to remember them later.

Please god Nintendo give this the OoT-->MM treatment: take the foundations and assets and do something wild!
 
Yeah that's a good point, the path through the Lost Woods is actually super short and the way you solve it can be really dumb. For instance l didn't even get that you were supposed to
follow the embers of your torch
, l just wandered for a bit, saw that there was a glade on my map, headed straight towards it and voila, problem solved. l didn't feel rewarded at all. Say what you want about the game but Twilight Princess for ex actually made you work for it.
There's an NPC right near that tells you to
first follow the fire then follow the wind. You can actually see the little particles flowing the right direction. No need for a torch.
Edit: just found out that Beedle gives you an ancient arrow for Customer Appreciation day(March 22nd)
What a fucking game
 
There's an NPC right near that tells you to
first follow the fire then follow the wind. You can actually see the little particles flowing the right direction. No need for a torch.
Edit: just found out that Beedle gives you an ancient arrow for Customer Appreciation day(March 22nd)
What a fucking game

In the stable, right? l actually found the stable after traversing the Lost Woods haha.
 
How timely. I did a terrible thing. A terrible terrible thing.

https://gfycat.com/GaseousAmusedCapybara

I didn't own this Horse for the record. I underestimated how far it would go forward when startled...

lol
I did the same thing with a deer. Kind of weird that the horses dont explode into meat slabs like everything else.
Would be neat if they let you be ashitaka for real and take one to the stable instead of a horse, instead of just riding on packaged meat.
 
So I'm finally starting a proper playthrough after finishing Horizon and I'm enjoying the atmosphere. One question: Did Nintendo push an update? The IQ isn't nearly as bad docked as when I first played it. Not that I mind, having a clean IQ really brings life to the artstyle.

So I am still early on, but I reached Hateno Village and did a side quest. I want to buy the house, but it's 3,000 rupees and I only have 210 :( I need money.

Also, what's the "you-whoo" that I constantly hear? I feel like it's some sort of puzzle but I can't tell where it's coming from.
 
So I'm finally starting a proper playthrough after finishing Horizon and I'm enjoying the atmosphere. One question: Did Nintendo push an update? The IQ isn't nearly as bad docked as when I first played it. Not that I mind, having a clean IQ really brings life to the artstyle.

So I am still early on, but I reached Hateno Village and did a side quest. I want to buy the house, but it's 3,000 rupees and I only have 210 :( I need money.

Also, what's the "you-whoo" that I constantly hear? I feel like it's some sort of puzzle but I can't tell where it's coming from.

The Goron mining area is stupid good for lots of valuable ore.
 
Wow. I thought my 99 atk Savage Lynel Crusher is already the strongest.

I've gotten a +30 crusher, so around 108?

Crushers are great for pretty much anything, you can kill every miniboss in a stasis+ with a full stamina spin and a triggering of Urbosa. Hinox get utterly demolished before they can even get up, lol.
 
So I'm finally starting a proper playthrough after finishing Horizon and I'm enjoying the atmosphere. One question: Did Nintendo push an update? The IQ isn't nearly as bad docked as when I first played it. Not that I mind, having a clean IQ really brings life to the artstyle.

So I am still early on, but I reached Hateno Village and did a side quest. I want to buy the house, but it's 3,000 rupees and I only have 210 :( I need money.

Also, what's the "you-whoo" that I constantly hear? I feel like it's some sort of puzzle but I can't tell where it's coming from.
You-whoo? Is it a store owner calling to you?
 
I've gotten a +30 crusher, so around 108?

Crushers are great for pretty much anything, you can kill every miniboss in a stasis+ with a full stamina spin and a triggering of Urbosa. Hinox get utterly demolished before they can even get up, lol.

That's one big attack plus upgrade. Savage Lynel Crusher + Spin-to-win + Urbosa's Fury is too OP.
 
Man, the "major" test of courage shrines sure are a pushover when there's water on the floor. Getting infinite ice blocks anywhere to stun the guardians out of their spin attacks is crazy, but the weirdest part is that the superlaser they spam when low on health can be blocked indefinetly without the ice block ever breaking.

Really enjoyed the game so far, but now that I've finally visited all the towers and reclaimed three divine beasts it feels like the game's a bit too same-y when it comes to dungeon design. The divine beasts so far have always been the same kind of dull exploration inside an empty dungeon to trigger five stones before fighting the boss (the mechanical bird had a single low-level melee guardian in it, for crying out loud), and they all look the same aesthetically as well, on top of taking little to no time to clear for the most part. Shrines at least have more variety in the type of challenges you get, but I still wish they'd have had more aesthetic variation, since you always get the same music and room textures no matter whether the shrine was in a field, a beach, an icy mountain or right next to a volcano, which makes them kind of boring when they're one of the few rewards you get from exploring Hyrule's otherwise colorful map.

Then there's the story, which gets kind of boring with how dialogues are presented. I think I remember somebody telling Link something along the lines of "You must save her. Save the princess. Save princess Zelda" in a cutscene, which was pretty shoddy for a AAA game script. Then there's the fact that many relevant characters only show up for five minutes throughout your quest: you befriend them, they help you board a divine beast, and then they kind of stop mattering altogether. While the nonlinear way the dungeons are built is nice, it also takes a pretty hefty toll on the story, since characters can't be used outside of the part of the story they show up in... still, I'm hoping things will change once I reclaim the final divine beast.

It also feels like getting all your abilities so early was another miss in an attempt to allow the player to tackle dungeons in any order they desire after the relatively dull rental design they used for ALBW since, even though they're fun to use, having them from the start kind of dulls the feeling of having the same kit of abilities throughout 90% of the game. I kind of wish they did something more interesting with the divine spells, but then again I guess they had to make them generic stuff that wouldn't get used in puzzles due to the player getting to choose the dungeon order. Enemies also get introduced way too fast and aren't really region-specific for the most part (other than fire, ice and electic-themed monsters in their respective areas), so the tension of meeting new and unpredictable enemies has long ago subsided for me; now enemies are mostly texture-swapped versions with different HP counts and better/worse weapons, which is pretty lame as well. Even if they wanted to use humanoid monsters, they could've gone with darknuts, and maybe even redead and gibdo variations of the stalfos family.

Finally, I kind of think the crafting system used to upgrade and make some gear is pretty annoying in that it introduces an element of hoarding and/or grinding for monster drops in what was otherwise a really nice and clean exploration game mostly devoid of busywork. The korok seeds are another example of a weird reward that gets less and less exciting the more you get (since inventory upgrades get expensive fast) unlike spirit orbs.

Still, all these issues I've raised are mostly nitpicking, and I'd say BotW has definitely been one of the best games I've played recently. I know I've mostly mentioned things I didn't like about the game so far, so I guess I'll do another write-up on the many things I think the game did well.
 
Finally beat it! Holy SHIT man what a game. 60+ hours, not even close to 100 shrines, but I finished all Divine Beasts, got all the memories, best ending and all that. I can't get over it, that was so good.
 
l thought it was a letdown. There's this huge mysterious place in front of you that makes you want to explore it extensively and at the end the way it's structured means it's an addition of linear challenges and uninteresting micro areas. lt also has the worst gameplay scenario in the entire game with the Korok stealth mission. Finally the way you stumble across the
master sword
felt very underwhelming to me, it actually reminded me of AlttP, l thought it was a fake and that the real one was further ahead.

l'd say it's my second most disappointing area in the game after Gerudo Highlands.
I thought the Korok Forest area was beautiful and I really enjoyed the area with the Koroks, Great Deku Tree and Master Sword. However, you are spot on about all of the areas surrounding Korok Forest. I would've liked the area to be more like a puzzle/dungeon like structure that encompassed the entire forest.
 
How timely. I did a terrible thing. A terrible terrible thing.

https://gfycat.com/GaseousAmusedCapybara

I didn't own this Horse for the record. I underestimated how far it would go forward when startled...

Bahahahaha! Not sure what I was expecting but it certainly wasn't that.

Yeah, it sucks.

But have you
found the Horse god yet?

Nope. I don't even use horses much but I took mine out to increase my bond with it so I could change its mane style. But alas...

It's back to traveling by foot for me.
 
I feel like I've come up with the perfect selection of weapons

The obvious Torch and Korok Leaf
But I have 2 variations of each elemental weapons, the broadswords and the spears (so for example I have the flame sword and the flame spear, and the ice and electric variant, I don't carry the larger swords I don't really use them for their damage output) and the rest the best damage weapons I can get + the master sword. In any major battle I essentially cycle through the elemental weapons, I only use one hit, switch to a regular weapon, hit em a few times, and cycle to another elemental weapon, rinse repeat. Enemies are usually disabled in some way due to the element, and some enemies are one shotted. Also, with this method, I have yet to have any elemental weapon break on me.
 
Spoilers on Gerudo:
I felt really creative fighting the Yiga Clan leader. During his final phase with the giant spike ball, I decided to use the Giant Boomerang and aim it off to the side so that it'll hit him from behind while the boomerang returns to me. That giant spike ball took the last 1/4 of his health as it landed on him to defeat him! And yes I know you can use Magnesis on it as well to smack him with it but I wanted to see if there was another way to fight him :P
 
Well the ending was.... Too easy?

Bit anti climatic

Loved the game overall

And for story
Ganon gave up reincarnation? He's not coming again? Not sure where this is on timeline
 
I have a ton of ore, ruby and other random stones. Are these needed only for armor crafting/fairy fountain. Or am I good to just go ahead and sell these things? I need money bad, I don't know of another better and quicker way to get cash other than to sell all my stones.
 
Well, I think I've done all I really care to do in this game. Finished every shrine, claimed my
tunic
, and beat the final boss once more. There are still some ~750 Korok Seeds left to find, but I don't think I'm going to have the patience for that, lol--the game was already starting to feel like a chore in the last hours of shrine-hunting. Maybe I'll finish off some sidequests when I'm feeling bored, but for now, Zelda's officially on the shelf.

There was a point, as happens with all single-player games of this sort, at which the magic wore off--when I'd explored enough of the world map that there weren't very many surprises left, and when the combat stopped feeling engaging and challenging and started feeling rote. But while that magic lasted, it was more pure and exhilarating than any Zelda game before it.
 
Well, just totally stumbled upon the
Master Sword
my question is does this make the Ganon fight substantially easier? I know it's a missable item so I wonder if it's going to make the last boss almost too easy to beat.
 
I have a ton of ore, ruby and other random stones. Are these needed only for armor crafting/fairy fountain. Or am I good to just go ahead and sell these things? I need money bad, I don't know of another better and quicker way to get cash other than to sell all my stones.

Yeah, they're only useful for higher level crafting and selling.
 
I was fortunate enough to finally find a Switch, last one at Walmart. Of course I bought this, and it is fantastic. The freedom and the multiple ways you can go about doing things is wonderful, it's like I'm four years old playing the original again with my dad.
 
Well, just totally stumbled upon the
Master Sword
my question is does this make the Ganon fight substantially easier? I know it's a missable item so I wonder if it's going to make the last boss almost too easy to beat.

I mean, yeah. It's really nice to have in dungeon areas like Divine Beasts or Hyrule Castle since
damage doubles and the durability never wears down.
So with your inevitable fight with Ganon your weapon
won't break.
 
It's the nature of Zelda.
But for the first time you get the sense that he's done for a long while. Demise is the original source of evil that manifests itself as Ganon as learned in Skyward Sword, and at the end of this Zelda says that he ditched being able to resurrect in favor of having more power. You defeat that, but I don't think Demise/Ganon is ever truly gone. In some ways this felt like the true final battle with Ganon and it was awesome, but that line suggests that if they want to do more Ganon, they can. But they're in the clear for now. It tells me that after this game that they want to get away from Ganon and do more things
.
I mean,
I get what you are saying and it makes sense, I wasn't so much talking about a permanence to ganons death, but...its not even checked off on my main quest log
[
 
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