| 2 | Zelda: Breath of the Wild DLC 1: The Master Trials | Trial of the sword is too unforgiving, have to start from scratch if dying after 11 floors down. The other parts are not very useful or fun, travel medallion, master mode, hero's path on the map, and some more armour, including the korok mask. |
| 4.9 | Zelda: Breath of the Wild | Nintendo's first attempt at an open-world Zelda game. The low-perf hardware shows again, some scenes look like My First Heightfield demo, whereas other scenes can be really cozy and atmospheric. The cartoon visual style was most likely chosen to go easier on the hardware, but it just looks bad; it's also an alibi for fanboys to claim that shit graphics were intentional, instead of actually trying to make it better. Still, the game struggles to maintain even 20fps in many areas, but it's not been a deal-breaker for enjoyment. As usual with the WiiU, every boot starts with turning off the tablet screen. The world is incredibly large, but quite empty, although the things there once found are varied and don't feel too copied out. The durability and breaking of weapons make you not want to use that new great weapon you just found... surely that's bad design; at the same time, it's mostly a loss to fight enemies, better to run past them instead, or you'll just break weapons and lose health. Putting the focus of the game on the shrine-puzzles and the big overworld makes sure you don't get stuck at a 1-solution part of a dungeon or main game progression. The little animations for cooking, finding a kokoro seed, finishing a shrine and similar are cute the first time, but just get annoying after that. And once you've cooked a thing, and would like 10 of that, you shouldn't have to do it 10 times, now I just make enough to survive, because I don't want to waste time. Remember switching between the different tunics and boots in zelda64 for different puzzles? Now you will do that for 3 pieces of clothing everywhere in the world, depending on if you climb, sneak, swim, fight etc, same with weapons, I don't want to live in the menus, micro-managing constantly just to perform a bit better. The game contained a very low amount of waggle-crap puzzles requiring the tablet in optional shrines, but Nintendo should've just skipped that; it's not fun and feels like they just try to annoy the player. More annoyances, if it starts raining when you're halfway climbing up a mountain, just remove metals, leave the gamepad, go make a tea and come back later when it has finished raining. If blood moon happens when you're halfway thru fighting a crowd of enemies, you'll have to fight the completed half again. An option to disable loading-screen tips/spoilers would be nice, also for muting anyone that might spoil on the internet. A typical reason why I don't progress the main story sometimes, is that I missed talking (again) to 1 of the 15 guys at a place, to trigger progression, so I leave and assume there's something else I need to do first, but no. The loading times when teleporting could be shorter; especially when you directly want to ent a shrine. Edit: 2nd playthru, this time on Switch. Just low resolution graphics and loading times keeping this from being the best a Zelda-game can be now. |