Nintendo Switch Topic; #byebyenx

[Kriven]

To be honest, BotW really doesn't deserve all the high-praise it gets. The world they want you to explore is a vast expanse of copy-pasted environments, so there isn't any reward for the exploring but exploring itself. Sometimes that can be fun, but more often than not it's disappointing to find out you climbed all the way up this peak only to... see more peaks to climb. But okay, they wanted to make a game where the main point was simply to explore for the sake of exploring (which would have been more fun if there was any actual character to the environments [there really isn't] and if it didn't take ten fucking minutes to run across a bridge), and they mostly did achieve a game which makes the exploration fun enough that it almost qualifies as "Everywhere is the Dungeon." Unfortunately they built a good thing and then immediately ruined it with entirely unbalanced enemies. It isn't fun to hike for half an hour, get one-shotted by something you didn't even know was there, and then find that the autosave hasn't kicked in for forty minutes. The fact that the enemies scale with the player makes this worse, because it means you're never going to get that feeling of growth as you play through the game. The enemies are always going to be the same relative strength to Link that they were at the beginning of the game... which means they can one-shot you no matter how much health you've got (and the way their upgrade system works, you won't have much of it). Then they decided that adding a feature where the rain makes cliffsides too slippery to climb was a good idea for a game where the entire point is to climb up cliffsides. Oh, and lightning which can spontaneously one-shot you. Fantastic.

I think matters could have been helped if they didn't remove so much of what makes Zelda fun. Just as an example, there are no Heart Containers to collect--you have to buy them with Spirit Orbs. Which I know are essentially the same function, but "Find Spirit Orb, Find Fairy Fountain, Sell Spirit Orb" isn't as exciting as opening a treasure chest or completing a shrine to watch Link excitedly dig through his spoils and hold up that bejeweled heart container. With its immediate reward, at that. Right now it just feels like: "Oh boy, a yet another same-looking shrine, with a same-looking dungeon, with a same spirit orb." I also think it was a mistake to remove the Heart Containers randomly scattered around the map, which was always a good reason to go exploring in the older titles. Now in the one that is literally ALL ABOUT EXPLORING they put those Heart Containers in easily identified shrines. Come on.

It would have also made the current balance a lot more bearable if enemies dropped hearts like they do in the other games. The whole "eat food to heal" mechanic really isn't Zelda, and kind of makes the established food items (like Lon Lon Milk) seem less special. Although I am enjoying the cooking and seeing what I come up with... it would have been nice if Link could record the recipes you've tried, though. I mean, he has a literal tablet strapped to his hip at all times. There's no reason not to keep track of this. It would be another way to reward the player for exploring (the culinary arts). But yeah, defeated enemies should drop health, and living ones should deal less damage in general.

They tried to force players to experiment with different weapons types by adding a Fire Emblem-esque breaking mechanic to each weapon, but all this really does is serve as yet another negative consequence to exploring. Items break far too easily, and it's all too often that you'll run out of them halfway through a task... and now you're shit-out-of-luck. Go all the way back to one of the few towns and restock. Then start completely over. This problem could have been mitigated by giving the player more weapon slots right off the bat (although I hear you can earn more... I can't seem to find too many of the things I need to do so) if they didn't want to give every single weapon a durability buff. As it is now, the tactic for killing most things is "Stay away from archers, throw bombs at everyone from some cheap place."

tl;dr: The developers wanted to emphasize exploration and to make just exploring in and of itself fun, and then they ruined it by adding a whole shitload of features which are entirely negative consequences for exploring. They wanted to make a Zelda game and then removed a lot of the features that make Zelda special (features which would have still worked in the greater scope of the game).

All that said, the game must be doing something right, because I keep playing and thinking about it. Which is more than I can say for Skyward Sword.

[Jermungandr]

I'm glad to finally see someone who has criticisms about the game other than myself. Seems like you can't say a single negative thing about the game - even if it's just a tiny insignificant gripe - without people calling for your head on a pike. I agree with pretty much everything you sad.

To alleviate some of your pain though: use your amiibos. The Zelda franchise amiibos (any of them, including the Smash ones) drop tools that have higher durability than what you find roaming the game and it is super useful; I haven't had to return to town to restock on weapons even once yet. (Of course, I also generally don't fight enemies unless there's an actual reason to. A lot of them are literally nothing more than random diversions with no value to fighting them). It doesn't make the feature any less bullshit but it does make your life a lot easier; though in return it kind of makes if feel like you're being punished if you haven't bought any of their plastic toys.

The exploring the world mechanic is functionally just the Wind Waker's sea all over again, except made way more inconvenient due to now having to deal with elevation.

I am enjoying the game, but it's far from being a flawless masterpiece.


[EDIT] You know what very simple thing I feel they could have done that would have added both a lot of flavor to the world as well as making exploration feel more "worth it"? Including a Landmark Journal. Basically, just scatter a bunch of interesting old landmarks around the world (something more than their "burned out village A" and "burned out village B") and reward the player for finding them by filling a log with the history and/or lore behind the landmark, making the world feel like it has some flavor and history and chronicling the deterioration of the world. It'd make the world seem way more interesting than just "Ganon made the world suck, deal with it."

[Zero Kirby]

I'm quite enjoying BOTW as well. I like how simple everything is, while still being really satisfying when you really do pull something off, like fighting a large group of enemies or winning a really tough fight or solving a puzzle that took a while to figure out. I like all the exploration, honestly - it's fun climbing up somewhere, lookin' around, seeing things, marking them, and then gliding down and checking them all out. I like having a final goal in mind, as well - something that a lot of other open-world games kinda lack in my opinion. It's made clear there's a final boss and where they are early on, so having a reason to do all the exploration to get stronger and whatnot is pretty nice, as opposed to having to wait until halfway through the game to get said reason.

The feeling of discovery is just really really strong here. I love tossing ingredients into a pot and getting a super-awesome food item out of it. There's a bit where... well, spoilers:

Spoiler

I went to an island of the south-west coast of Hyrule, and ran into a trial where all of my items and equipment were taken away, leaving me with just the glider, my runes, and my wits to solve the puzzle on the island. It was supremely difficult, I probably died at least ten times trying to finish this trial alone, but I still had fun doing it just 'cause it was interesting. It reminded me of a similar bit in Skyward Sword, where you lose all your items in the volcano area and have to stealth around, which I also quite liked, and it also worked as an extended reference to Link's Awakening, my favourite Zelda game, and the two landmarks on the island, Toronbo Beach and Koholit Rock, are both references to, Koholint Island and, well, Toronbo Beach from that game.

I just happened to stumble on that while exploring, and was very pleasantly surprised. Finally completing it after many tries was also very satisfying.

Is it perfect, of course not. The game's performance is kind of unstable (especially in towns) and it sucks there's no touch screen elements whatsoever (you tap it to move the game to the GamePad screen - otherwise it goes completely unused). But it really makes you feel like an adventurer, which is really really cool.

[Lemonray]

They tried to force players to experiment with different weapons types by adding a Fire Emblem-esque breaking mechanic to each weapon, but all this really does is serve as yet another negative consequence to exploring. Items break far too easily, and it's all too often that you'll run out of them halfway through a task... and now you're shit-out-of-luck. Go all the way back to one of the few towns and restock. Then start completely over. This problem could have been mitigated by giving the player more weapon slots right off the bat (although I hear you can earn more... I can't seem to find too many of the things I need to do so) if they didn't want to give every single weapon a durability buff. As it is now, the tactic for killing most things is "Stay away from archers, throw bombs at everyone from some cheap place."

The weapon durability began to get on my nerves early on too. I have the Master Sword now so perhaps it will be less of an issue (it "recovers", apparently by regenerating after several minutes of being broken) but this is something they could absolutely have done better.

I would have gone with something more like the Morrowind system, where weapons have a visible amount of durability which decreases fast enough that you will be forced to repair it after a bit of time. Which, in Morrowind you could do through a smith NPC or yourself with the various repair hammer tools. The weapon/shield/helmet/etc. was preserved while broken, so if you found something nice like an ebony shortsword a few hours in, you could potentially use it forever and take it all the way to Dagoth Ur. Not so with Breath of The Wild. I have one sweet looking Sheikah sword in my inventory that is just sitting there because I don't want to break the thing in combat- I only take it out to look at it and I don't think I'll use it at all until the final boss.
Just imagine if the Great Fairy's sword in Majora's Mask broke forever after fifty uses. That would have been terrible.

_____________

So, the dungeons. They are done differently this time, instead of the usual dungeons

Spoiler

You're inside huge mechanical animals, which operate like huge puzzleboxes for you to explore and manipulate. I really like this. It feels new and genuinely enjoyable.

As usual there are the dungeon bosses. It seems they're mostly gimmick free, I've only fought one but I just had to damage it enough to kill it. Which was easy enough since there was still a weak spot, in this case one vulnerable to being shot. I used a few bomb arrows, which seem to be super effective in this game because the last third of the thing's health bar went away in seconds when I started using them.
There are also boss enemies you will encounter in the overworld- the first one I found was a golem that I couldn't kill that early in the game because I only had low tier weapons, and would have broken them all before the boss died, so I had to go back later for him. There are also centaurs and cyclops giants.

Another replacement for the standard dungeons are the shrines. They give you a single room with one or a few themed puzzles or sometimes a robot miniboss to fight, essentially they're individual dungeon rooms seperated and spread across the entire map. I like these a lot. I'm not sure how I feel about the spirit orbs- I think the traditional pieces of heart would have been better with the stamina upgrades being totally seperate, but whatever.

Regarding the combat- It has been simplified. Now Link can't be made to do vertical/horizontal/diagonal/thrust attacks, instead the attack button will execute the standard attack animation of the type of weapon you're holding. You can also do a running attack, jump attack or spin attack. That is it. There is a Dark Souls shield parry move you can do, which is one positive addition, and a rush attack which can be triggered by dodging an enemy attack at the right moment. Also, unlike Twilight Princess Link, BoTW Link cannot swing a weapon while moving. Skyward Sword also dropped this- I don't know why the developers decided to remove something so simple from the post TP games.

Avoiding enemies to preserve weapons aside, I rather like the exploration. The glider is neat, but I would have liked if there were a couple of little upgrades for it, besides just being able to glide longer by increasing Link's stamina meter. Climbing is okay but potentially annoying if something is just out of reach.

Having multiple clothing/armours is something I've wanted for a while in a Zelda game, BoTW does it okay and I hope future Zelda games expand upon it. It works more or less how you would expect, though I actually wasn't expecting the hands/body equip slot to be shared- I was hoping we would get the golden gauntlets or something like that.
There are some very nice equipment sets, though. There is a Sheikah set, a Hyrule Knight set, a Zora set and so on, as well as a climbing set to improve Link's climbing speed and other things that boost his abilities and temperature resistance, etc.

So the game is pretty good. But honestly, probably not the kind of thing one could sink hundreds upon hundreds of hours into the way some people can with, say, the Elder Scrolls games.

Edit: Also the framerate issues are certainly there. They don't break the game or anything but they're easy to notice. Supposedly both the Wii U and Switch versions suffer from drops, hopefully Nintendo will release performance patches because otherwise people will never stop experiencing this.

[miyabi95_]

aaa i just played waku waku 7 with someone on campus who brought his switch. the screen looks amazing tbh~

[Kriven]

The fact that you can ride bears makes me wish all the more that they had found some way of including Moosh in the game... just the same way they included Epona would have worked.

[Lemonray]

I beat BoTW. Some more thoughts.

Spoiler

I have mixed feelings on the final boss. The first phase was a letdown, what you get is pretty much a bigger, more edgy version of the four dungeon bosses. No dialogue, no characterization. This version of Ganon is my least favourite yet. The second phase, I thought, was better. He becomes Dark Beast Ganon and you fight him in the overworld with a unique bow and light arrows. Except for the very last shot, which requires precision, he is incredibly easy, but it was nice to fight him in a more Ganon-like form which wasn't the case for the first messy amalgamation.

All along I was hoping he would just assume a new version of his classic trident wielding pig form, but that didn't happen.

Another thing that rather disappointed me was how the Master Sword was used. When I first saw some of the artwork where the sword looks like this:

Spoiler

I was interested in what could have caused the apparently unbreakable, divine Master Sword to become rusted and damaged like that. Only, in the game it only looks like this in two flashback cutscenes, the damage having been caused by Link using it against guardians. By the time you get it, it is back to normal. So, there is no interesting explanation, no quest to restore the sword's power, nothing. The Master Sword is present, but irrelevant. Use the sword, don't use the sword, it doesn't matter. Finish Ganon with a Bokoblin club instead.

Looking back on it, the world could have done with more unique and interesting locations. Perhaps some Bottom of The Well style mini-dungeons would have been enough, but really there should have been at least a couple of traditional dungeons with keys and puzzles and enemies and such. It's not as if the developers didn't have enough time to design a dungeon or two, they have had at least five years to work on the game so I'm guessing they simply chose not to include standard dungeons for the sake of BoTW being different.

The lack of variation among the four bosses you fight in the four beasts is also an issue because they're more or less four versions of each other. Having a similar visual theme could have worked if they were shaped differently- One could have been the big guy + weapon while the others could have been more like various animals, or whatever. Imagine if every one of the adult Link temples in OoT had featured Phantom Ganon as a boss, only with an altered moveset depending on the temple. That is essentially what BoTW does. I would much rather have bosses like Jalhalla and Goht to fight instead. I don't know how they managed to mess up something as important and simple as boss variation. The number of different regular enemies is also a problem- There just aren't enough of them.

I'm still finding the game enjoyable, however. I got the Dark Link costume and have spent some time finding more shrines and exploring the interior of Hyrule Castle (you can get to Ganon by climbing the walls, you're never actually made to enter the interior to reach him) and doing some of the side quests. You can also get other costumes and items from previous games like the OoT outfit and Biggoron's Sword, if you're willing to spend more real-life shekels on the various amiibos that unlock them. The Wolf Link companion is acquired this way and summoning him to join you on your adventures is fun, although he is a bit of a psycho since he will immediately seek out and kill even passive wild creatures on sight.

There's also the DLC to think about. The one promised for the end of the year seems to be offering a new dungeon, which could be interesting.

[Dazz]

I bought a Switch and I've been playing a lot of Zelda. It's a really fun video game.
I'm glad I'm not spending hours looking into the game or reading reviews, because it's just fun to play.

[iyenal]

Well, apparently Zelda is a very good game ! I didn't think so, especially for the scenario, but now anything tell the reverse. Personally, I am looking forward to emulate it... until I can buy the Switch (if the price drop...).

[Goemar]

Anyone tried that new Blaster Master yet?

[miyabi95_]

well at least i know what i missed when i threw out my blaster master cartridge when it wouldn't work on my nes. lol

it looks fun. i love that gamedevs are giving nods to sunsoft these days.

[Dolphman]

I bought it as soon as it came out, and I'm enjoying the hell out of it. Sunsoft ought to revive some of their other games.

[Goemar]

It would be really nice to see Gimmick! on the VC... Like man, Sunsoft made some kick ass games back then...

(A new 'NES' Batman would also be awesome but well... yeah that's never going to happen).

[miyabi95_]

i'm carrying around my vita since it's more or less the same size as a switch, if not a little smaller. not exactly filling a void per say, as i'm not super intrigued to get a switch but i think since carrying around handheld consoles is becoming popular again i might as well.

anyone notice that? back in the day (game boy color, advance time) ppl in the younger age range like 4-30 something carried around game boys and whatnot everywhere. now i kinda feel that with smartphones as the device to have in a professional setting, seeing young adults with handheld consoles in public i a lot less common...

[senjen]

So Nintendo just showcased what's in store for the first Dlc pack for breath of the wild http://nintendoeverything.com/nintendo-r...er-trials/

and omg some of the new costumes look amazing.