I'll dive in. My thoughts/feeling on...
Wow. Alright. I’ve been awol from my main hobby for months, playing a video game. It actually pulled me out of the gaming coma I’ve been in for years, but does that mean it’s the best game, or Zelda EVAR? Not exactly….
SPOILERS!There’s a long story that actually led me up to getting a Switch, and Zelda, but TLDR they were essentially free. Which without that, I don’t think I’d have gone on this gaming journey. I had intentions of giving the Switch to my niece (avid gamer and Zelda lover as well) and the pair of us started playing BOTW as a team even going so far as to plan to only play the game when we’re both hanging out. Initially, I was extremely put off by BOTW, and was so-so about the Switch itself. Quickly, the plan disintegrated to dust as I became hopelessly addicted in spite of my (major) gripes. And in order to not renege on my deal with my niece, I straight up bought her her own Switch and Zelda so I could keep it and play guilt free
Why do I hate the game?
I don’t now, but I sure did in the beginning…..
-The weapons break. Easily. And all the time.
-Link is as fragile as a quail’s egg. You WILL die. A lot. At least in the beginning.
-Due to his fragile state, you’ll need to heal a lot. Can you cut some grass to find a heart? Nope. Almost all restoration comes from eating food, and crafting food.
-Rupees are hard to come by, and almost never found in the wild. Yet another thing you can’t find by cutting down some grass.
-Actually, pretty much everything you’d expect to find cutting down grass, you don’t.
-No items/tools. If you’re expecting to find something like the Hookshot in this game, you’re out of luck. In place of these items, Link is essentially given powers. Kinda like Magneto, also you can form ice blocks from water, make bombs out of thin air, stop time, ect.
-The “dungeons”. They are few (4!!!), short, and devoid of enemies. Because of all that they don’t even really feel like proper dungeons.
-The dungeon bosses, are all some weird form of Ganon. Not incredibly exciting.
-The story was pretty tame, in spite of leaving out notable tropes like the Triforce, the Master Sword, and essentially Ganon himself. I’ll explain the Ganon thing later…
-The monster/enemy lineup is pretty small, making most battles very repetitive.
-The difficulty. If you pay like me, it goes from hard, to easy, then really hard to possibly unwinnable on Master Mode.
Why do I love the game?
The map is huge, and unbelievably immersive. You become focused on completing said map, which leads to you gearing up to do so, which leads you to finding/doing shrines, which leads you to farming, and so on and so on and so on. Everything you do leads to something else, and everything you try to do gets side tracked by “oooo shiny let’s go over there”. Link's "powers" while initially listed as a negative, really grew on me. They're a lot of fun.
One thing I was particularly focused on was making Link
NOT SUCK. Remember when I said you die a lot in the beginning? It’s because you start with 3 hearts, no armor, and almost everything in the environment can (and tries to!) kill you. And even when you get armor, it’s worthless until you upgrade them up a couple levels. Which, material farming for said upgrades, is a friggin chore in itself. I collected every piece of armor in the game, upgraded them to the max, got all 120 shrines, then decided it was time to “finish” the game. Still lots to do, but I thought it was time to end the story mode. And I’ll tell ya, that ending was underwhelming and WAY too easy.
There’s plenty to do afterword’s with the DLC (namely Trial of the Sword), which if done left me thinking that my (now) already overpowered Link will be even more OP…. what’s the point? On normal difficulty, not much. In Master Mode…. It would undoubtedly be worthwhile. But MM might be so hard that I can’t even complete it. But I started… so we’ll see where that goes. And that’s currently where I am. I’m sure I can beat the game to the point where I am in the normal difficulty, but Trial of the Sword in Master Mode is giving me the sweats. And if I get all the way to that point and can’t do it (because TOTS is end game material) I will be extremely upset. The difficulty didn’t need to be ramped up to “unrelenting”. So far the experience leaves me feeling there’s no happy medium. It’s either so easy that it’s unrewarding, or it’s so hard that it’s no longer fun. But it is still early in my Master Mode run through… perhaps my views on it will change…
I gotta talk about the story. Pretty much everything that’s cool and worth talking about, happens before you start the game. 100 years before in fact. So it sort of ruins the “urgency” of the situation. And in my opinion, there’s only one real character in the game this time around: Zelda. It was refreshing to see her actually given some character this time around, but she was literally it. Link once again is a mute $#@!, which fine I get it, but I think it’s time to give him a voice. And Ganon is literally just a THING in this game. A plot device. He has 6 incarnations in this game, all (uninspiring) mindless monsters with no dialogue. He’s just a “force”, and you gotta stop it. Honestly, when it was all over I felt kinda robbed, as the final boss fight might as well have been against a tornado or tsunami (with some eyeballs to hit obviously). After all the build up, I wanted to HEAR him talk. And while I liked Zelda a lot, the boring ending did her no favors. Even with the additional “good ending” cut scenes.
I feel like I’m harping a lot, but I really do love this game. I just can’t help but feel it could be SO much better. Like..
-The weapons breaking. I understand why they did it now (adds variety) and the break/recharge cycle of the Master Sword makes it so your other weapons aren’t redundant. I hated both those points before, but I’m alright with it now. With tweaking, I think I’d actually love this direction. Simply give the other weapons a durability count YOU CAN SEE, and have the option/ability to repair items like in WoW or Diablo. It actually really sucks to see an amazing weapon (like a 100+ Lynel sword) break and disappear to nothing.
-Make Rupees more plentiful to find in the wild. Essentially the only way I found to make money is to go snow bowling. And I %$#@!ing hate that game.
-Give us back the traditional dungeon type.
-More different types of enemies!
-Make the difficulties not so… night and day.
One last thing, the Koroks. Yes there’s 900 of them, and you get nothing for completing it, but it’s optional so it doesn’t bother me. It’ll give me something relaxing to do once I’ve done literally everything else on the crazy hard mode
