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Breath of the Wild BOTW Review

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.
 
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Zachie

Moo
Joined
Aug 25, 2016
3/10 review do not recommend. You lost me at your climbing comment, it's almost like you don't understand how rain works. If you're talking about a time that it isn't raining, then I have never had that happen.

Combat is not "too easy", there's certainly a level of challenge. See: early game black-skinned enemies, guardians in general & white-skinned enemies.

There's definitely replayability, case in point: you can do anything in a different order. You could do a 3 heart run, you can do a no-dungeons run, you can even do a no-bow run. There's so much choice for different play styles.

Once again, bad review, would not recommend to anyone.
 

Dio

~ It's me, Dio!~
Joined
Jul 6, 2011
Location
England
Gender
Absolute unit
3/10 review do not recommend. You lost me at your climbing comment, it's almost like you don't understand how rain works. If you're talking about a time that it isn't raining, then I have never had that happen.

Combat is not "too easy", there's certainly a level of challenge. See: early game black-skinned enemies, guardians in general & white-skinned enemies.

There's definitely replayability, case in point: you can do anything in a different order. You could do a 3 heart run, you can do a no-dungeons run, you can even do a no-bow run. There's so much choice for different play styles.

Once again, bad review, would not recommend to anyone.

2/10 for your review of a review
 

DarkestLink

Darkest of all Dark Links
Joined
Oct 28, 2012
I disagree on the enemies really. They were...kinda brutish...they dealt a crap ton of damage, but were insanely stupid. And say what you will about previous Zelda bosses, but the bosses in this game were incredibly simplifed to the point that some didn't attack, like Ganon...

That said, the game had a lot of good content, but it really was buried beneath a dull world with little lore to discover and enjoy, which made the exploration a lost oppurtunity.
 

Drahsid

~Deku Drahsid~ | The Hero
Joined
Jul 7, 2012
Location
Deku Palace
I disagree on the enemies really. They were...kinda brutish...they dealt a crap ton of damage, but were insanely stupid.
This seems to be a mixed bag for people. I never saw how they were brutish. It seems to me that some people confuse "I just got batted off of a mountain by a Moblin and instantly died." with "Woah, all of the enemies are gods."
I feel like a ton of people are not good with combat, so my opinion might be different, however I presume that they die quickly due to that, because it is true that you can take a ton of damage. But that damage is really easy to avoid if you know how to parry. When it comes to enemy intelligence, it might be important to note how much more capable the enemies are than in other games. In other games, they don't utilize their environment at all. For example, enemies with clubs, specifically Moblins will actually aim to hit you off the side of a cliff if it is nearby. Enemies also throw bombs back, use shock arrows specifically when it rains, utilize their fallen allies. Really I guess this is all an opinion though. There are games which have much better AI as well.
I also agree very much, the bosses are quite simplified.
 

Drahsid

~Deku Drahsid~ | The Hero
Joined
Jul 7, 2012
Location
Deku Palace
I feel like there is a lack of consideration and objectiveness here, but I will respond nevertheless.
3/10 review do not recommend. You lost me at your climbing comment, it's almost like you don't understand how rain works.
In real life, rain makes climbing easier. Ice however makes it difficult. I'm not sire I said anything about raining though, I'm sure that I only commented on climbing being poorly executed. However rain was an understandable yet dislikeable feature. They (Nintendo) wanted the player to explore around more rather than climbing over everything. However it starts to rain in terrible spots sometimes and you either have to use a shrine to travel out or wait a while for it to stop, because you would have gotten stuck. This is remedied when you have a ton of stamina though.

Combat is not "too easy", there's certainly a level of challenge. See: early game black-skinned enemies, guardians in general & white-skinned enemies.
I disagree. Combat is very easy early game. Especially if you go to the stronger enemies first and take a weapon. That makes the game a breeze. Guardians were never a challenge, however they are a super fun enemy to run from. As I said beforehand, I feel that a ton of people aren't good at the combat and praise it for that. Perhaps I tackled the game differently as well. I dunno.

There's definitely replayability, case in point: you can do anything in a different order. You could do a 3 heart run, you can do a no-dungeons run, you can even do a no-bow run. There's so much choice for different play styles.
This is a very bad argument. In that case every game is extremely replayable. The core enjoyment this game has is exploration. Something that doesn't exist the second time you see something. It's not finding any longer, it's " Hm, saw that before." And for that I give you the clearly bias badge.
 

Justac00lguy

BooBoo
Joined
Jul 1, 2012
Gender
Shewhale
Let him have his opinion. Even though I disagree with a lot in this review, I think it's fair and I can see how some of those aspects can detract from someone's experience.
 

Castle

Ch!ld0fV!si0n
Joined
Oct 24, 2012
Location
Crisis? What Crisis?
Gender
Pan-decepticon-transdeliberate-selfidentifying-sodiumbased-extraexistential-temporal anomaly
8/10 seems pretty high for a game you don't seem to have much outstanding praise for if this review is any indication.

Regardless, I've heard many of these sentiments echoed in other reviews. From what I've seen, I'd agree with most if not all of em.
 

Drahsid

~Deku Drahsid~ | The Hero
Joined
Jul 7, 2012
Location
Deku Palace
8/10 seems pretty high for a game you don't seem to have much outstanding praise for if this review is any indication.

Regardless, I've heard many of these sentiments echoed in other reviews. From what I've seen, I'd agree with most if not all of em.

I feel like I failed to elaborate about why I loved this game.
That is past tense.
It was 10/10 for the longest time. The game was amazing as I explored and played for the first time. However I soon realised that the best part about the game, the exploration, is a one time experience. I've been to every corner of the map and will never have that amazing experience again. That is depressing, but it is only depressing because I loved it.
Mix that with an underdeveloped story and lack of variety in enemies and items, and you get a game that slowly goes from overwhelmingly amazing and fun to simply underwhelming and empty.
 
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10/10

Ive been waiting for a Zelda game to love since WW and i finally got it.
Ive finished BotW on my own steam and im still digesting it. Im gonna stop playing for a while to play Nier Automata and then replay some WW.
After my revisit to WW i'll go back to BotW to see if it makes me as happy as WW does after small breaks.

BotW has a good chance of usurping WW as my favourite Zelda. I dont mind the weapon breaking mechanic, i like that the story is as involved as you want it to be.
I like most of the characters, the world feels believable (for a fantasy game) and i really dont have any major criticisms that wouldnt just be personal taste (Gorons weren't very good this time around).

I also love that the largest overworld ever has the least dungeons ever, because ive always dreaded dungeons in Zelda and ive never really enjoye them. So BotW, in that respect, is my perfect Zelda set up.

I dont agree with most of what the OP review states but i can understand why some elements of the game can really get under people's skin.
 
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DarkestLink

Darkest of all Dark Links
Joined
Oct 28, 2012
This seems to be a mixed bag for people. I never saw how they were brutish. It seems to me that some people confuse "I just got batted off of a mountain by a Moblin and instantly died." with "Woah, all of the enemies are gods."

I'm not going to pretend I never died, but when I did it was either because

1) I was sniped and killed in one hit by an enemy I didn't see

or

2) I was being stupid, impatient, and rushed in.

That said though, the enemies are stupid enough to sleep next to bombs, which can often destroy the entire camp if you set them off. And even if it doesn't, the archers go down easily and once they do you can keep the high ground and just shoot all the enemies until they die. At most they might half heartedly throw a rock for minor damage, but that's it. Nearly all the combat occurs in the overworld and the overworld very easily allows you to reach high ground that the enemies can't get to. Even if you're hopelessly underleveled, you can abuse this "strategy" in your favor constantly.
 

Drahsid

~Deku Drahsid~ | The Hero
Joined
Jul 7, 2012
Location
Deku Palace
I died, of course, as well. However when I did, I took that as a way to learn from the mistake I made and improve.
That's combat deaths.
The majority of my deaths is probably the rain dropping me from a massive cleft, when I almost got to the top.
 

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