Finally back from a crazy E3 week and was fortunate to have gotten my hands on the Zelda demo! I went straight for the Nintendo booth first thing Tuesday morning, which was a great decision since otherwise I probably wouldn't have gotten a chance to do it again for the rest of the show, the lines filled up so much faster on days 2 and 3. After I think 3 and a half hours of waiting in line, our group finally got into the (insanely impressive) inner booth and assigned to a kiosk. Beforehand I had only seen the trailer on my phone, some snippets on twitter, and a bit from walking by Treehouse Live during Aonuma's section. Going in semi-fresh was clearly the best way to first experience it, I was able to independently discover a lot of the little tricks and interplay shown and it felt FANTASTIC, and seeing that I only scratched the surface with the things found in 35 minutes I had is incredible. And only a tiny tiny part of the whole game has been shown... A fella from Treehouse picked me out to interview after my session, he said there might be an impressions reel put together with interviews. Doubt he used mine though cause I was really babbly and incoherent for the whole thing lol.
I'll keep my hands-on impressions brief and limited to things that aren't clear just by watching the hours of footage. The controls are pretty good, they feel close to the last few 3D Zeldas with the exception of the lockon, which had trouble registering sometimes. I do like that locking on doesn't put you square behind Link and lets the camera float around a bit, something Skyward Sword couldn't do out of necessity but leads to more dynamic camera angles here. Gyro aiming is in but didn't feel great in most instances I used it, that kind of aiming really needs at least a steady 30FPS which the demo certainly never had, especially when enemies were active. It's good in the 3DS remakes so fixing the framerate should help with that. Melee combat also feels like an extention of what Twilight Princess had going on, lots of little moves and flourishes you can do. The trademark hitpause is weird in BotW, it's more of a hitslowdown, and just has the effect of making the animations look a bit off. Death/knockdown animations could also use some work, they're clearly hybrids of canned animation and ragdolling but they could stand to lean a bit towards the former, at least at the start. I ended up finding the Magnesis shrine during the first demo where it was already "cleared" (no monk at the end) and it was completely reset. Unsurprising, but good to know in case you want to go back and replay shrines using different techniques.
It's hard to not write some crazy sounding hyperbole about how good this game is going to be when what they've shown makes every suggestion that BotW is going to be The Best Game, the missing Link between finely tuned Japanese action adventure game design and the breadth of interplay and player creativity of western immersive sims we saw a little bit of in MGSV. Chances are it'll be the greatest meeting of eastern and western ideals and techniques since Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, a marriage that many would scoff at but for me, it's the most logical direction for big action sandbox games to go. Ocarina of Time came out at just the right time for me (played when I was 10) and I naively assumed that Breath of the Wild is where the series would naturally go from there. Obviously the Zelda team thought different from me and the series was actually about solving bespoke puzzles and not going on a grand adventure of discovery through huge forests, fields, perilous temples. I like the post-N64 Zeldas but they never went in a direction I was satisfied with, that itch was scratched partially by games like Morrowind and later on the Souls series. It feels like that circle is finally closing, like Aonuma and co interviewed me specifically before starting production on this asking what it would take to get this series back on top and they listened to like 95% of what I said and knocked it out of the park. If Splatoon (best Nintendo game in like 15 years) and BotW are any indication of where this new Nintendo is going then the NX is going to have the best library of any console they've done so far.
I do have some small notes, gripes, and wishlist things, based on how much my expectations were shattered by this reveal most if it will probably make it in:
- Having to consume food from the pause menu sucks. Just about everything else in the game occurs as a real-time simulation, including crafting, and equippables can be changed from a quick-menu and have animations associated with them. Food should be on a quick-menu too and have an animation associated with it. I can see this getting really annoying and flow breaking during difficult fights where you might want to heal up but have go to into a full screen pause menu to do it.
- One thing I unconditionally love in the series Link's Awakening and on is the great cast of weirdo NPCs and their interactions. I would definitely miss their presence here, despite liking the feeling of being alone in a ruined and desolate Hyrule. Having small pockets of quirky NPCs dotted around would probably enhance that feeling, actually.
- They probably exist, but I really want to see some big underground areas! And I don't mean shrines and dungeons, but underground areas as an extention of the overworld like Goron City or just some no-load cavern systems around Death Mountain or something. Having areas with the same level of crazy interactivity but in tighter spaces sounds great. Also, Link can carry torches so make that shit dark too.
- Lots of the viral gifs and stuff are of Link doing psycho stuff like burning grass or punting dudes heads off of cliffs. It's good to see that the actions available to Link support the idea that some of his main personality traits are being an arsonist who has no regard for property (nicely written into Skyward Sword a bit), but removing the part of his personality where he's a complete idiot that needs to be led around by the nose all the time. He's basically a bishie Doomguy now, waking up from a long slumber in a coffin and all.
Thanks Chaos17 and MiamiWesker for the great OP and posts and thanks to everyone who made gifs so I can easily send them to someone if they wrongly say that this isn't going to be mankind's greatest achievement in the interactive mediums.