Drahsid
~Deku Drahsid~ | The Hero
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2012
- Location
- Deku Palace
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a wonderful new experience in the Zelda franchise. The game is extraordinary to play; however it is not perfect. There are many issues with the game which had hindered my gameplay experience.
Visuals
Visually, the Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild is stunning: it uses the art style of a Studio Ghibli film and will not fail to please your eyes, especially when it comes to foliage. However that's as far as it goes. The game suffers from constant framerate dips without avail. As a person who mainly games on PC, this was very difficult to get used too, and is an issue that is minimal after you learn to deal with it.
The game also includes many low resolution textures. You can easily notice this on the textures for mountains and etcetera, all of which are a blurry blob at close distance. There are many other issues such as very close pop-in for NPCs and every cutscene always being loaded, which I realised when a I spotted a memory spot from a very long distance due to everything which was in the cutscene being loaded in full detail, and furthermore initiating said cutscene; no loading screen. This might seem like a minor problem, but it really poorly affected gameplay (by making it easier).
The HUD is neat and organized. The only quarrel I have with it has to due with input.
Audio
The audio in the game is very ambient. It fits the atmosphere perfectly at all times, however it lacks in variety. While playing the game, you will hear the same piano queues constantly. I wish there was more. This is especially the case for combat. My friend constantly complained about the "scissors" when fighting enemies, because he could recognize the tone which plagued him constantly as one that sounds like scissors, and I couldn't disagree with him. There ought to be more types of audio queues.
Gameplay
The game is way too easy. There is no challenge whatsoever. The most difficult time you will have is at the very beginning of the game when you have no weapons or weapon slots, which is an issue you will solve yourself quickly; since weapons are plenty and Korok seeds are easy to locate. The combat is super fun but pointless for the most part. Especially when you have good weapons, there is no reason to waste durability.
In reference to durability, weapons are way too fragile. I personally believe that there should be a much greater variety of weapons (there are very few weapons), which have much more durability.
Enemies are fun at first. They are intelligent and plentiful. As aforementioned, when you get decent weapons there is no reason to fight them, I would also like to note how few types of enemies there are: throughout your journey, discluding bosses, I combatted varients of Moblins, Bokoblins, Keese, Wizrobes, Hinox, Guardians, Lynels, and Octorocks. That's literally it, if not I didn't miss much. There are not enough enemies. The bosses are also much too easy. Their patterns are predictable, they do hardly any damage (Which is especially pointless due to the ability to eat when downed) and there is no buildup, such as the smaller Ghomas' in OoT before Ghoma. You simply battle them. The bosses scale well, making the battle feel huge, but that's it. However the combat is very well executed. You and your enemies stand the same ground. Your goal is to use your weapon and environment to your advantage. The better enemies will do this as well, it makes for great fights when you anticipate the combat. I especially enjoyed fighting the Lynels.
Climbing is poorly executed. I love the feature, however it doesn't work. Link will slide down a five-degree slope senselessly. The majority of my time in the game is probably doing trigonometry and being baffled by this. It is very inconsistent.
The puzzles are pointless. At first, how they make you use your abilities is cool; then you realise that they require the competence of a first-grader to solve, or don't even have time to solve them before you accidentally solve them. There are no puzzles in the game. It's best to call them "Observe your surroundings for a second before acting on those observations." I want puzzles that are as cool but more elaborate. The Divine Beasts fall under this as well. Every one of them have a fun concept, but is way easy to resolve.
Story
The story is very poorly done. You are constantly introduced to characters which you don't care about, because all you know of said characters is a two minute cutscene and perhaps even a diary. The game then tries to pull a cheeky sad moment and it doesn't work because you don't care. You can easily shrug the story off. The cutscenes themselves are very enjoyable and well made, however.
Replayability
No, I can honestly say after beating the game twice that it has absolutely no replayability, especially once you completely discover the world, which even discourages you from playing at all. Exploring the world for the first time is the most fun you will have in a video game, however, as I said, it becomes very depressing once you cannot any longer, due to having already explored everything. After finding so many shrines and all of the towers, I felt bored with the world, especially with so many pointless areas such as Faron and Lanayru. I ended up not wanting to explore, which is the driving gameplay mechanic. Pair that with having decent weapons that you don't want to break and you end up witch hunting the main story quests until there is nothing left to do but explore. I will compare this to the No Man's Sky effect: most players (one being myself) that played the games were stunned and loved the game for a couple hours, then slowly began to become bored. I will perhaps blame the lack of lore. There is very little lore, yet the map has a name for everything, there is no reward for finding cool stuff, except for finding it, yet stuff like such is everywhere.
Final Rating
8/10
This game is a must play, however I recommend playing it in smaller doses in spread-out amounts of time for maximum enjoyment, due to a lack of proper plot development. The main quest is so underdeveloped and the core gameplay is so easy, that you might find yourself beating the game in four hours, and playing the game again afterwards is way boring, especially knowing where everything is.
Bonus Thoughts
-The game is unfinished. Everything related to the story feels unfinished.
-The game's development was probably complete in 2014 before we got the demo which displays the Guardian. After rewatching all of the lost memories in chronological order and reading about what we know of the game's development, I will make a safe bet that we almost got a completely different game which was probably set 100 years prior to this one, if you catch my drift.
Visuals
Visually, the Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild is stunning: it uses the art style of a Studio Ghibli film and will not fail to please your eyes, especially when it comes to foliage. However that's as far as it goes. The game suffers from constant framerate dips without avail. As a person who mainly games on PC, this was very difficult to get used too, and is an issue that is minimal after you learn to deal with it.
The game also includes many low resolution textures. You can easily notice this on the textures for mountains and etcetera, all of which are a blurry blob at close distance. There are many other issues such as very close pop-in for NPCs and every cutscene always being loaded, which I realised when a I spotted a memory spot from a very long distance due to everything which was in the cutscene being loaded in full detail, and furthermore initiating said cutscene; no loading screen. This might seem like a minor problem, but it really poorly affected gameplay (by making it easier).
The HUD is neat and organized. The only quarrel I have with it has to due with input.
Audio
The audio in the game is very ambient. It fits the atmosphere perfectly at all times, however it lacks in variety. While playing the game, you will hear the same piano queues constantly. I wish there was more. This is especially the case for combat. My friend constantly complained about the "scissors" when fighting enemies, because he could recognize the tone which plagued him constantly as one that sounds like scissors, and I couldn't disagree with him. There ought to be more types of audio queues.
Gameplay
The game is way too easy. There is no challenge whatsoever. The most difficult time you will have is at the very beginning of the game when you have no weapons or weapon slots, which is an issue you will solve yourself quickly; since weapons are plenty and Korok seeds are easy to locate. The combat is super fun but pointless for the most part. Especially when you have good weapons, there is no reason to waste durability.
In reference to durability, weapons are way too fragile. I personally believe that there should be a much greater variety of weapons (there are very few weapons), which have much more durability.
Enemies are fun at first. They are intelligent and plentiful. As aforementioned, when you get decent weapons there is no reason to fight them, I would also like to note how few types of enemies there are: throughout your journey, discluding bosses, I combatted varients of Moblins, Bokoblins, Keese, Wizrobes, Hinox, Guardians, Lynels, and Octorocks. That's literally it, if not I didn't miss much. There are not enough enemies. The bosses are also much too easy. Their patterns are predictable, they do hardly any damage (Which is especially pointless due to the ability to eat when downed) and there is no buildup, such as the smaller Ghomas' in OoT before Ghoma. You simply battle them. The bosses scale well, making the battle feel huge, but that's it. However the combat is very well executed. You and your enemies stand the same ground. Your goal is to use your weapon and environment to your advantage. The better enemies will do this as well, it makes for great fights when you anticipate the combat. I especially enjoyed fighting the Lynels.
Climbing is poorly executed. I love the feature, however it doesn't work. Link will slide down a five-degree slope senselessly. The majority of my time in the game is probably doing trigonometry and being baffled by this. It is very inconsistent.
The puzzles are pointless. At first, how they make you use your abilities is cool; then you realise that they require the competence of a first-grader to solve, or don't even have time to solve them before you accidentally solve them. There are no puzzles in the game. It's best to call them "Observe your surroundings for a second before acting on those observations." I want puzzles that are as cool but more elaborate. The Divine Beasts fall under this as well. Every one of them have a fun concept, but is way easy to resolve.
Story
The story is very poorly done. You are constantly introduced to characters which you don't care about, because all you know of said characters is a two minute cutscene and perhaps even a diary. The game then tries to pull a cheeky sad moment and it doesn't work because you don't care. You can easily shrug the story off. The cutscenes themselves are very enjoyable and well made, however.
Replayability
No, I can honestly say after beating the game twice that it has absolutely no replayability, especially once you completely discover the world, which even discourages you from playing at all. Exploring the world for the first time is the most fun you will have in a video game, however, as I said, it becomes very depressing once you cannot any longer, due to having already explored everything. After finding so many shrines and all of the towers, I felt bored with the world, especially with so many pointless areas such as Faron and Lanayru. I ended up not wanting to explore, which is the driving gameplay mechanic. Pair that with having decent weapons that you don't want to break and you end up witch hunting the main story quests until there is nothing left to do but explore. I will compare this to the No Man's Sky effect: most players (one being myself) that played the games were stunned and loved the game for a couple hours, then slowly began to become bored. I will perhaps blame the lack of lore. There is very little lore, yet the map has a name for everything, there is no reward for finding cool stuff, except for finding it, yet stuff like such is everywhere.
Final Rating
8/10
This game is a must play, however I recommend playing it in smaller doses in spread-out amounts of time for maximum enjoyment, due to a lack of proper plot development. The main quest is so underdeveloped and the core gameplay is so easy, that you might find yourself beating the game in four hours, and playing the game again afterwards is way boring, especially knowing where everything is.
Bonus Thoughts
-The game is unfinished. Everything related to the story feels unfinished.
-The game's development was probably complete in 2014 before we got the demo which displays the Guardian. After rewatching all of the lost memories in chronological order and reading about what we know of the game's development, I will make a safe bet that we almost got a completely different game which was probably set 100 years prior to this one, if you catch my drift.
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