thePlinko
What’s the character limit on this? Aksnfiskwjfjsk
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2019
Your right, LA isn’t the first real Zelda game on switch. Cadence if hyrule is.
Link's Awakening (Swtich) is much better than BotW...
- Thread starter Vaati101
- Start date
Quin
Disaster Master
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2017
- Location
- Netherlands
BOTW is technically a wii U game so your right.
- Joined
- Jun 14, 2011
I find it interesting you bring up fetch quests being annoying when BotW is the biggest insult to that idea in the whole franchise. Whether it was optional or not or down-right tedious, at least in previous games they amounted to something. Like if you went out of your way to complete them, you would have got something beneficial to aid you in your quest or in some cases actually progress the story.
In BotW, there really isn't much point in doing them with the exception of the Tarry Town side-quest. Apart from that quest which was well worth doing, the rest of them were pretty pointless. The awards you get for them you're better off finding them lying around the overworld.
And do I even need to bring up the Korok seeds? There is no doubt that the biggest up-yours to a fetch quest is finding every Korok seed in the entire game. There are so many in the game that the real benefit of collecting them stops after finding roughly half of them. But if you actually went out of your way to collect all 900, the award you get for putting in all those hours looking under every nook and cranny amounts to a big slap in the face and an unpleasant item in your inventory.
I've also seen elsewhere on the internet and even off the internet a lot of people saying they straight-up hate this game, to the point they can't believe it even exists. I personally wouldn't go that far, but it's definitely not the magnum opus others claims it to be. So if BotW is supposedly a masterpiece, how come the backlash is the biggest I've ever seen for a Zelda title?
Well, a huge part of that comes down to marketing hype. Because it was released the same day as the Nintendo Switch, there was no fear BotW wasn't going to sell. No one was going to buy a Switch to play 1-2 Switch or Bomberman R, it was purely for Zelda. Nintendo knew if they had stuck to their original plan of releasing it only on the Wii-U, BotW wouldn't have made near the number of sales it has made to this day. So they cleverly delayed the game to fall in line with the Switch's release, and that's the marks of a true salesman.
But while huge sales were a guarantee at this point, whether the game would actually be good was still debatable. I for one was really hyped for this game before it came out. I was a little concerned that they would go for an Open World style game but at the same time, my hopes were still strong, especially when I saw that story trailer. Everything I saw in that trailer got me excited for all the kind of things you'll get up to. It wasn't until I got the game and popped it in that the root of my hatred for this game sprouted.
While the Story trailer technically didn't lie, the way it presented itself compared to how it turned out actually created two completely different games. I envisioned a game where you'd actually encounter Zelda in the overworld and travel with her to all these fascinating places and meet all these characters where you ask for their aid to rescue the divine beasts as well as on the side learn from the environment what happened before you went into that 100-year slumber.
Instead of all that, you're on your own like always, Zelda is imprisoned yet again and the story, which in the trailer made out you would unfold in the present, ended up being pushed to the side in the form of memory flashbacks. And, yeah while it does show us what happened in the past and, while they are done pretty well, just didn't seem as powerful if you saw an in-game present-day cutscene and it was shown through the environment and with one of the characters giving a subtle exposition of what really happened, and maybe then go into the flashbacks. I know this isn't a movie, it's a game and that comes first. but if you are going to have a narrative, at the very least make it engaging. How more invested in the story and the characters would you have been had the game not shoved that to the side in favour of exploring an oversized empty overworld with nothing to show for it?
Not only was the story aspect completely shattered, but the exploration was a bore, weapons breaking constantly during a battle, death was frustratingly common as well as cheap and the whole climax was a complete joke. I still can't believe once you've completed the Great Plateau you can head straight to Hyrule Castle and take on the final boss with nothing but a stick, and it actually works! So what's the point of having this huge depressing backstory and the Master Sword that's supposed to destroy the Calamity if it can be beaten down with a bit of shrapnel?! That to me really destroys the foundation of the plot this game created! The only times BotW felt anywhere like a Zelda game is at the beginning on the Great Plateau, doing any of the shrine puzzles or if you actually follow the main quest. The rest of the game where it focuses the most is completely, utterly, unbearable.
That's where the majority of the backlash comes from, and while fan expectations have been dashed before, it was never done to this scale. And I am so glad I am not the only one who feels the same way. Say what you want about Skyward Sword, but at least it was more obvious what we were going to end up with. BotW completely tricked us with its trailers and marketing and it didn't matter because regardless, it was guaranteed a sale because of the joint release of the Nintendo Switch.
Now if you like BotW, great! More power to you, enjoy it to your heart's content! You clearly have a keen eye for something in the game that sparked your interest and you were able to bypass the marketing facade. But it's also important to understand that a huge amount of people were not so lucky and were decieved by the marketing hype and understandably feel betrayed by the final product and thus have a deep grudge against it. That's why when you ask one of them if they are looking forward to BotW2, they don't even want to know about it.
When Link's Awakening finally arrived, I instantly said to my self while playing it "this is so much better than BotW" because we knew exactly what to expect and we weren't lied to. I needed something to get that sour taste out of my mouth, and Hyrule Warriors, as great as it is, wasn't enough. I even said before Link's Awakening even came out I would enjoy this a lot better, even though I had huge doubts about the art style.
While it is too early to judge if Link's Awakening has won over fans or not, from early impressions, it seems to be mainly positive. not only have people said it may actually be better then the original thanks to its quality of life changes, but they also say the visual upgrade is a very stylized update which holds up very well compared to today's standards. Sure it's not going to sell as well as BotW, there's no doubt about that, but unlike BotW, Link's Awakening is not banking on people buying a Switch the very same day. Even if Link's Awakening doesn't sell as much as people hope it will, at least it will be easier for it to be universally praised and is unlikely to form a huge backlash because it knows what it is and is straight-up honest about the type of Zelda game it's going to be.
You say BotW has very little in connection to its roots. I beg to disagree. Of course BotW shook up a lot of traditional Zelda staples, but a lot of those staples were introduced in Zelda II, ALttP or OoT. Comparing BotW to its true roots, the original LoZ, there's actually a lot of connections and similarities. The original LoZ was an open world game of its time. If the developers of Zelda 1 had the technology I'm sure they would have ended up making something more more similar to BotW than to, say, TP for example.
Before the release of BotW the sense of free exploration in Zelda had never been stronger than in Zelda 1 (a case could be made for WW but that's for another discussion). With Zelda II and every game after it before 2017 the sense of free exploration was diminished by having large portions of the game world blocked off for various reasons until later in the game's story. In that regard all Zelda games that came out between Zelda 1 and BotW are the games that weren't true to the original formula.
At its core Zelda 1 had three main appeals, those being the exploration, the combat and the puzzle solving. The combat and the puzzles have remained a constant staple throughout the Zelda series, and even in BotW they're there. In fact, BotW offers engaging and varied combat along with cleverly designed puzzles that often have multiple correct solutions. However, as I pointed out in the previous paragraph the sense of free exploration died after the original LoZ because story started taking more focus as the games became more and more linear. BotW didn't just uphold the combat and puzzle staples of the series in an excellent way, it also revived the sense of free exploration which had been dead for the past 30 years. Thus BotW is the only Zelda game to truly connect to its roots by honouring all three core aspects of the original LoZ.
That said though, I think it's a little bit silly to compare BotW to LA. They're two very different games and I absolutely love both of them for what they are.
thePlinko
What’s the character limit on this? Aksnfiskwjfjsk
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2019
The Wii U version came out the day the switch was released. I will be dead in the ground before I call BotW a Wii U game.
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2019
The biggest backlash for a Zelda title? I must not be picking up on whatever you are because, as well as the number I've already given you, most online activity seems to spout praise for the game.
Here's the google results for "Breath of the Wild review". I scrolled 3 pages in without finding any overall negative results
https://www.google.com/search?q=zel...ogle:instantExtendedEnabledParameter}ie=UTF-8
Here's the amazon buying page for the game. Only 5% of customers rated it 3 stars or less
https://www.amazon.com/Legend-Zelda-Breath-Wild-Nintendo-Switch/product-reviews/B01MS6MO77
Here's the youtube video for the 2017 trailer for the game. Within the comments you find overwhelming positive things to say about the game, even within the trailer that you found so offensive to your experience with the game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw47_q9wbBE
And finally the metacritic scores submitted by users gives the game an 8.5/10 based on nearly 13,000 scores.
I'm not here trying to argue that public opinion is the sole determining factor in how good a game is. Rather, I'm demonstrating that I simply do not see this backlash that you're talking about. Yes, there's been backlash from some fans. Just as there was with Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword to varying different degrees, but there is far from any sort of overwhelming majority of fans who share your opinion. That does not make your opinion any less valid just as yours does not make mine. I may claim the game to be a masterpiece, one of the metacritic users may do the same. We are not wrong to hold such opinions.
I see nothing wrong with their decision to release on both platforms. They did it with Twilight Princess too, did they do wrong there as well? Again, as in my previous post, Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild were in the same boat release wise and, despite the Wii being the vastly more successful of the two consoles sales wise, Twilight Princess was beaten out in lifetime sales by Breath of the Wild in a single year.
The trailer that I've linked above displays no such interactions with Zelda as you've described. In fact I feel it's quite open with what is and is not gameplay. Regardless, you are allowing the efforts of a marketing team to affect your opinion of a development teams work. Yes, if you believe the marketing to be shady that's certainly something to speak up about. However, using it as leverage to try and argue the game is bad is like me going to a supermarket and calling the cashier a bad person because their CEO hunts deer in his free time.
In fact, a lot of the negative I've seen about this game typically comes from a similar place yours is now, that being hype and expectations. There's nothing wrong with getting pumped up ready for a games release, but I always view it as problematic when fans create an image in their head of how the game should be and then judge it based on how closely it follows such expectations. Breath of the Wild could have been the greatest game ever created yet if I had believed it to be a first person shooter and forbade my opinion of it to be swayed by anything other than how closely it followed my mental image, I would never have seen it as anything but bad.
Yes, the company creating the game has a certain responsibility to not lie to us. Such company is in charge of hiring the team that will create promotional material and such business relationship is done under the assumption they will handle it responsibly. We, as customers, deserve to be given an honest if somewhat exaggerated representation of what to expect in the product we are buying. That's why, as I said above, it's important to speak up about instances of what we believe to be deceptive marketing. A distinction must be made, however, between speaking up about such grievances and taking your frustration out on the game itself. A game's quality is not changed by the quality of it's promotional material. It is still the same game.
Did you do this on your first play through? I certainly didn't, and I don't know of anyone who did. In fact, the game is rather specific in pointing you in the right direction if you wish to advance the story. Is it not better than a game provides a course of action but allows deviation than to keep them strictly on course at all times? I know the speedrunning community have benefited greatly from having the freedom to take on Ganon straight away if they wish. No casual player would achieve such a feat first try and so they can follow the path laid out for them. I see nothing wrong with granting extra freedom in a game, particularly if endgame content such as fighting Ganon requires an enormous level of skill to pull off.
Compare these two pages for Breath of the Wild and Skyward Sword respectively on Speedrun.com
https://www.speedrun.com/botw
https://www.speedrun.com/lozss
Breath of the Wild has a total of 6 categories whilst Skyward Sword has only 4. Notice that 2 of the BotW categories are Any% and All Main Quests. The opportunity to take Ganon down straight away is there does not lessen the options in game, it expands it. The fact that you could take on Ganon did not impact your experience of the game in the same way that being able to Wrong WWarp to Ganon's Tower in Ocarina of Time should not, because neither of them have any impact on your experience with the game unless you are a speedrunner.
I would echo my comments above in that it doesn't matter what you expect of a game, it does not change it's quality. Am I to claim that a game I expected to be bad and was is rendered a good game as a result? Whether Link's Awakening lived up to your expectations or not should not have any sway on how you rate it, because your experience with the game is a distinct event from your initial learning and awaiting of it. I'll say it again, if you had particular expectations of a game and it did not live up to them, that's a shame and certainly a negative experience for you. However, that experience, and the experience of actually playing the game are two separate things.
I do wonder though, what you really expected to find that wasn't to your expectations in the game? Being a remake of a game we're all well aquainted with now, and being given as much gameplay footage as we were, is it really a surprise that you expected exactly what you got? We didn't even get much of a trailer for the game other than a remake of the pre-game cinematics.
I'll conclude by reiterating that I am not writing these posts to argue that you are somehow wrong in your opinions of these two games. I liked Breath of the Wild, but I may like Link's Awakening more when I finally play it. That would not change my stance on this thread, though. This thread was created with the explicit intent to argue that Breath of the Wild is an objectively bad game and that your opinions on how the series should handle itself are the only way Nintendo will see true artistic success with their games. However, the numbers I've given you previously and the examples I pasted above tell a different story entirely. You are not wrong for wanting more traditional Zelda games. However, other fans are not wrong for wanting to stick with the BotW formula. We exist in a world that allows both camps and it's the subjectivity of our experiences with games that makes them truly stand up as an art form in it's own right. As it stands, we had BotW and a remake of LA to enjoy, so both camps have been satiated in their requests this time around. That should be a cause for celebration among gamers rather than further ammunition to fuel debates that are ultimately never going to be universally settled.
It's this artistic resonance that dictates we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the trap of demanding particular action from the games we enjoy. You brought up a few of the mechanics that you didn't like about the game such as weapon durabiltiy, difficulty etc, and I will never argue against your distaste towards those. However, I will always argue against people trying to insist that their experience with the game should be mine. You hated the game, I liked it, others count it as their favourite game of all time. Your views on this matter are not substantiated by claims about Breath of the Wild drifting away from series roots as that is it's own distinct argument. Neither are your views substantiated by claims such as the marketing being deceptive, as my sentiments have displayed the notion that there are those who did not find the marketing to be deceptive.
You stated in your opening post "I still don’t get how this is the best selling Zelda game when it has very little in connection to its roots". The crux of this entire thread hinges on the fact that you are assuming the game had to have a strong connection to it's supposed roots, when not everyone allows that to influence their opinion of a game. You claim to not understand why BotW enjoyed such success but it's a matter as simple as lots of people enjoyed playing it and spread the word enough to get more people to buy it. It isn't some conundrum in which we need to rectify why so many people enjoyed it but you didn't, that's the nature of games as a subjective expression of art.
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2018
Cadence of Hyrule was not a zelda game... if anything it's a spin off like Hyrule Warriors, Tri Force Heros etc. I find it a little insulting that people say Botw is not real Zelda game. Why because it doesn't stuff lore down your throat like other zelda games do?! Myself I am not really into lore or timelines I am more about the game play. I don't fault anyone that enjoys those things to each own.. But don't call it not real zelda just because you don't like the game mechanics. I don't like Phantom Hour Glass and Spirit Tracks for my own reasons.. but because I don't like those games I won't go around saying they are not really zelda games that would be ludicrous.
thePlinko
What’s the character limit on this? Aksnfiskwjfjsk
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2019
Breath of the Wild plays nothing like a Zelda game though. Zelda has never been this open, even the first one railroaded you to quite an extent. It’s not that I dislike the mechanics, on their own I quite enjoy them, but they don’t belong in a Zelda game. Calling BotW a Zelda game would be like if sakurai made the next smash bros a dating sim and said it was different so it’s automatically good. The fact of the matter is that this is the most un-zelda Zelda has ever been, even the multiplayer titles. At least those still treated themselves as a Zelda game. Cadence if Hyrule at the very least had dungeons that felt unique and memorable, even though they were randomized. It had special items as rewards for said dungeons. Outside of the rhythm mechanic CoH was the closest to a real Zelda game we’ve had since LBW, and arguably even SS.
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2015
I reiterate my FSA point. Literally some of the most high quality gameplay in the series, yet it’s level like structure is a far cry of what is common of a Zelda game. *****ing about stuff “not being Zelda” is more just people having tantrums about a game not being what you want.
thePlinko
What’s the character limit on this? Aksnfiskwjfjsk
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2019
FSA is easily one of the worst games in the series, even worse than TP, and god knows how much I hate TP. it’s fine to be different but if you’re going to make a game this different you might as well call it something else, because that’s what it was. Once again, this would be like making the next smash bros a dating sim. You can say it’s from the same series all you want, but at the end of the day it’s simply not even remotely similar.
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2019
The example you're giving isn't even of the same genre. All Zelda games are action adventure.
thePlinko
What’s the character limit on this? Aksnfiskwjfjsk
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2019
The analogy may be exaggerated but the concept still applies
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2019
Well, no, it doesn't really. Many series undergo drastic changes from one game to the next. Sometimes to positive appeal and sometimes to negative. A better analogy closer to what you are describing would be for the next Smash Game to feature a HP system rather than a percentage knock-out system. Some won't like it, some will. Just because you don't like the new formula doesn't mean changing the formula is inherently bad, only that you've got a short straw this time around while other fans got lucky in getting changes they wanted.
- Joined
- May 7, 2018
Fixed and thank **** for that.
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2015
It’s literally not though. A lot of the dungeons experiment with cool ideas that should have been brought back but never were eg the Cave of No Return and some of the ice puzzles in the Ice Temple, not to mention interesting variety such as capturing the thieves in Kakariko, finding the kids in the Dark World in the village of the Blue Maiden, or bringing items to the Deku Scrub in the Lost Woods. I’m sorry but this is just a bad take like all around.