A Big Fat Review of Breath of the Wild

[Music] hello my beautiful friends I'm here today to talk a little bit about the Legend of Zelda breath of the wild from the moment I first started it up and emerged from the shrine of Resurrection I knew that this was going to be a very special game so perhaps unsurprisingly when I finally got around to reviewing it I really wanted to give it my all I wanted to talk about nearly every aspect of the game from its triumphs to its failures and everything in between as you can probably tell by the length of this video I did just that there may be a few tiny stones I left unturned in the end but it's really not many for the most part if I had an opinion on it it came out now I've been calling this a review and you'll hear me continue to refer to it as such throughout though I'm not completely sure that's accurate anymore I mean technically yes here I'm doing largely what one does in a review but when I hear the word review it makes me think of game critics telling people their thoughts on a game so that those people can make more informed purchasing decisions but that's just not what's happening here or at least I'm willing to bet that's not happening a whole lot by now most people have either played breath of the wild or decided that one day they will play a breath of the wild and I'd also bet that most people who are willing to watch a video this long on the game are probably not in the teeny tiny camp of people who are still trying to figure out if it's right for them this is more of a breakdown of the game's design a critique of all its pieces sort of review sort of analysis so I've recently decided to rebrand this kind of long-form analytical deep dive look at a game to separate it from my regular reviews thus the title this review of breath of the wild has become a big fat review of breath of the wild a seemingly subtle change but I think it makes a big difference originally this review / big fat review what-have-you was released in seven separate parts but here I've compiled them all into one long watching experience each part is mostly the same as it was when originally published though here and there you'll see a few notes and addendums popping up on screen not a ton so don't worry about missing them or anything just a few bits of info I felt should be added and naturally seeing as this is a nearly three and a half hour video dissecting every element to breath of the wild I'll warn you now that yes there are spoilers ahead all of the spoilers in fact as I said when writing this nothing in the game was off-limits and that included all the mechanics all the enemies the story beats and even the final Boston ending also know that while there will always be visual elements to accompany the voice-over including the affer mention notes and maybe a handful of gags that you have to see to get for the most part you can probably just listen to this whole thing without having to watch you know if you're into listening to me talk about Zelda while you clean the house or drive across the state or something with all that said I think it's time to get started ladies and gentlemen it is my pleasure to present to you my big fat review of The Legend of Zelda breath of the wild when breath of the wild was first revealed back at e3 back when we still referred to it as L d'you I watched the reveal teaser later that year I watched the precious few moments of gameplay gifted unto us at the game Awards - holy threes later that gave us the full reveal trailer with the game's name and basic mechanics in some monsters and locales and that was the stop of the breath of the wild preview tour where I got off I did not want to see anymore unfortunately stuff inevitably slipped through the cracks whenever a juicy new trailer popped up in a Nintendo Direct or something I always peaked between my fingers here and there and sure enough every time I did something was spoiled and I regretted it horribly I've talked about this before but if you're not aware I am hypersensitive to spoiler a material to me a spoiler isn't just this character dies at the end or it turns out it was all a dream to me a spoiler is anything that I would have delighted in discovering for myself if I know everything there is to know about a game going in every kind of guy I'm gonna fight every item I'm gonna get every place I'm gonna see a lot of the magic is gone the simple act of playing out a videogame isn't the only important thing to me I want a game especially a game as huge and important as breath of the wild to be like in experience an event in my life something special so I went in as blind as I reasonably could as a guy who talks about games on YouTube and I'll tell you right now I'm so so glad I did breath of the wild is obviously a great game all its own spoiler alert' by the way yeah it's a great game but I'm not exaggerating when I say that an immeasurably huge amount of my enjoyment came from not knowing much going in while I basically never like to know too much about any game avoiding spoilers had never before meant as much as it did here and that's because no other game I've played has contained such a wealth of delightful things to discover you see I'd always dreamed of this massive game where you could just go wherever you wanted in the world that was beautiful and magical and you'd actually find interesting stuff I would run through the world of Shadow of the Colossus thinking this is so close it was visually spectacular it was enormous it got my imagination running wild but beyond 16 colossi which you had to hunt down in order and I guess like fruit and lizards and stuff to eat to increase your gauges there was simply nothing to find it was just a set a really big beautiful amazing set but a set there was nothing really to do except to enjoy the scenery and of course some other open-world games have gotten close to delivering what I wanted take a game like Skyrim for instance which is huge beautiful filled with quests and completely open for you to explore at your own pace it's hard to pin down exactly why Skyrim didn't quite do it for me I loved loved loved it but it didn't contain that certain kind of magic I was looking for it could be because most of the game boiled down to killing guys in luton him find a cave or a dungeon or a sewer or anything run through it and kill the guys and grab all the loot plenty of surprising stuff to come upon and that's why it was certainly close but something was still missing breath of the wild though is the game I was waiting for all those years and really it's surprising that it turned out that way when IO Numa claimed that the great plateau the huge sprawling area available to play around in and hands-on events was only about one percent of the total map I think more than a few of us grew a little concerned I mean how much stuff can you possibly develop for a world that big how can there be enough to actually do because it doesn't matter if a game world is a thousand miles across if you're just running forever and not finding anything but the zelda team pulled it off they made the world beautiful and teeming with interesting geography and ruined buildings and just a wide assortment of unique sites to happen upon and they also packed it to the gills with dudes to kill and stuff to loot but the two things that make breath of the wild the game I always wanted to play our shrines and core ox and I think it's because for one they're just all over the place a hundred and twenty shrines and nine hundred core ox mean the world is just packed with them there's no place in Hyrule where you'll just not come upon shrines and core ox meaning that no matter where you find yourself you're always on the hunt but more importantly though they so perfectly satisfy my exploration craving because they strike a balance between useful and fun to find see if useful stuff is scattered everywhere and all you got to do is pick it up it's not as fun the game becomes a collectathon at that point the idea is just to kind of waste your time but then if there's stuff that actually takes thought to find but that stuff isn't really that useful then well what's the point looking for it all so much less fun shrines and Couric's though they're perfect shrines because they give you spirit orbs four of which can be exchanged for either another heart container or an extra bit on your stamina meter hearts mean more here than they have in any other 3d Zelda by far and stamina aids and your ability to move through the world climbing higher surfaces and gliding further primarily and of course each shrine is just a fun challenge to beat which will touch more on later but that's what makes them even more satisfying to find then quarks are great because they increase the number of weapons and shields you can hold and in this world of breakable stuff this just makes you stronger it takes more and more core ox seeds for each pouch upgrade and you'll be maxed out after getting roughly half of them but as long as it's making any difference at all I am pleased as punch to obtain each one and let's talk some more about why the finding of these things is so much fun starting with shrines out of everything the game offers shrines keep things the most interesting they provide the most unique scenarios they require so many different things of you to be uncovered it can be rolling snowball on the right path down a hill so it crashes open a door lighting some inconspicuous torches tracking down and taking pictures of statue fragments defeating a family of hand axes getting a group of Rito kids together to sing a song the list goes on and on and I can't even properly describe how awesome it felt to set foot on Eventide isle or in that one place where it's super dark or in any of the great labyrinths it was such a huge rush it was the sense that I discovered something really awesome and was now faced with some sort of fun challenge some of these shrines offer nice loot but for the most part the prize is always the same a spirit orb again though I never care spirit orbs are incredibly useful and earning them by doing all this crazy stuff just makes the whole thing that much more fun it's this feeling of constant reward no matter where I'm going or what I'm doing and you know me I feel that variety is the spice of video games if all the shrines are fun and interesting to find the fact that they come in so many different packages just multiplies that fun plenty of them of course are simply sitting in plain sight and this is great it's something of a palate cleanser between trickier shrines you don't want to get completely tired of solving riddles and doing obscure stuff and it's great that you can mark them from a distance so you can just come back to them later when you want to accomplish something a little more straightforward plus seeing them from towers is just exciting whenever you stand up on a tower you've just unlocked and you spot all those red blobs all around you you're invigorated by the task at hand by the idea of pressing into a gigantic new territory but of course even better there's this unmatched sense of wonder when you're just running around in the mountains doing nothing and you see something weird and you go what on earth is that and you investigate for a while then wonder turns to joy and triumph when you realize that yes it's a shrine my first time through I especially loved casas riddles most of them were pretty easy to solve but there were a few that made me feel awesome when I got to the bottom of things if I had to pick a favorite it would probably be the one where you have to find a spot where you can shoot an arrow through to those stones with holes in them I love to sit around and ponder in any game I love to stare at a problem from all different angles and think about it for a while and of course that was a challenge that was so unlike the rest of them there were so many that were so unlike the rest of them next of course we got the core ox and it's funny because there's so much less flashy and substantial than shrines I mean with one you've got a jillion year-old structure rising up out of the earth and taking you down into a trial meant to test the legendary hero with all sorts of weird magical technology and with the other you pick up a rock and it's a cofee family here's a seed buy but the effect these little creatures had on me especially in the early hours of the game was immense if shrines instilled within me a sense of wonder Couric's instilled a childish delight that was just as strong and just as magical just like with shrines this is largely because there are just so many of them hidden throughout the world outside of the divine beast there is no place in the entire game world where you can't find some core ox if you look hard enough it means that running through nearly my entire experience with the game there was this constant knowledge that I might find something at any moment a constant need to pay attention to my surroundings they also act as a system of constant micro rewards for simply running and climbing and looking wherever you can like a kid playing out in the forest climb a mountain have a look inside a hollow log have a make your way to the tippy tippy top of Hyrule Castle well look at that on top of your own sense of accomplishment how about a core app for your troubles no good deed goes unrewarded also as it is with shrines it's very important that on top of their immense numbers there are also an immense number of ways to find them there are so many that even now after over 200 hours of breath of the wild I'm still not certain I've seen every kind of hiding place every time I think I've seen them all I find something weird and poof another one didn't see that coming did you I called it childish delight because like a child is exactly how I feel when I track one of the little guys down I feel like shouting fangio they turn this huge world into a great big toy or a game on top of a game try to remember what it felt like when you were little and you opened a mysterious Christmas gift to find something cool inside or you pressed a button on a toy and we're delighted by what it did for me that's the same kind of feeling I get when I see something a little off and I go now I'm sure it's nothing but then I check it out anyway and I fiddle with it still going no I really don't think this is anything I think I'm making this up and then I put a rock where I feel like it should be and poof it was totally a and the kid inside of me squeals with glee like a toddler when their dad pops up from behind the couch with a silly face and Nintendo knew this was how I'd feel - it was completely deliberate why else would they include a victory chime in that little poof it's straight up like one of those party poppers it's meant to instantly hit with that happy feeling of winning a prize shrines and Couric's may be the main attractions when it comes to exploration but even beyond those the game still has more surprises in store and again if I'd known about any of this ahead of time none of it would have had a big impact on me I had to immerse myself in the world and stumble upon it all naturally in order to really feel that sense of wonder here were some of my favorite surprises the first time I came upon a gig a foot soldier disguised as a traveler I'm talking to some friendly girl and suddenly she cheerily says something about killing legendary hero and I'm like what now and then she tells me she's gonna bring her master my head and turns into a stinking ninja and attacks me I would have never seen that coming in a million years it was so out of the blue and really pretty scary for a Zelda game it's just like this is not a monster this human person wants to murder me than the Dragons oh man this was a big one I'm walking along one day and I spot some long little squirmy wormy thing up in the sky way out in the distance I can't even see what it is and it disappears okay weird later I'm walking and I see the thing closer and I see how oh yeah it's a big big big dragon just flying around on its own I have no idea if it's good or bad or wants to eat me or just wants to chill up there but really seeing it for the first time gave me goose bumps it was incredible it was one of those really intense this game moments you know when you're really blown away by a game and it just keeps surprising you and you can only go this game and this game then later I'm doing stuff up on the northern edge of Death Mountain and suddenly there's a strange breeze huh I wonder whether the divine beasts were similar to the Dragons I had no idea at all that they existed not a clue and I'm so glad because finding these things and coming to terms with the fact that there were utterly gigantic robotic beasts just chilling around Hyrule was mind-blowing it was the kind of pure just coolness that I adore vomit oh hang that up in the sky and it was always this weird little speck that I had no idea what it was I even remembered seeing it in trailers and stuff just this weird little thing hanging up in the distance and at some point I finally got close enough to get a good look at it and holy cow it's a bird it's a giant robot bird I am NOT getting near that thing then you've got Varadhan here which circles around Death Mountain and this one was fun it was a happy coincidence that for a very large amount of the game it just happened to be on the other side of the mountain whenever I looked because then one random time I'm just surveying the landscape and I look at Death Mountain from super far away mind you just looking at this gigantic mountain rising up out of the earth the tallest point on the map and suddenly something starts moving a creature easily visible from where I am is crawling around the mountain and the feeling in my gut is equal parts wonder and horror another good horrific one was the first time I saw a Lionel the Zora just kept telling me about some beasts way up on the mountain and how I would need to go get shock and arrows from it this in itself was scary and weird because they were talking about it like a a beast an animal and animals don't have the capacity to shoot you with the bow and arrow only sapient creatures can do that so what in the heck was this thing anyway the anticipation climbing up that mountain was intense turning the corner I had just absolutely positively no idea what I expected to see then finally seeing it and most importantly seeing how easily it could murder me from a mile away was purely terrifying and I know I mentioned the labyrinths already but I can't stress enough how awesome they are I found the one on the top right corner of the map first and it was this huge weird square of something out in the distance I didn't even think I could reach it but after I flew there I felt like I'd busted into some weird ancient prison and was about to be blasted by a guardian at any second it was one of the most thrilling experiences I've had in a Zelda game look I could go on and on but you get the idea here I just can't believe they managed to make a game this big with so many things to discover so many things that are delightful or scary or breathtaking again and again and again you're thrown into scenarios and you just have no idea what's about to happen if there was one phrase I uttered most during my time with breath of the wild it was what on earth so many times so many times I would spot something weird and that's I would say why on earth what is that and running ahead to find out was always a magical feeling there's still a lot to talk about with this game combat art style story all that video gaming stuff but I don't think any of its as important as that magic it's what makes the game more than just a great game it's what makes it a special game an experience that I'll probably carry with me for the rest of my life because even if Nintendo or another developer makes another game that's just as magical or even more so breath of the wild will always be a first exploration has always been one of my favorite things about video games as a whole and breath of the wild will always be the first time exploration in a game was everything I wanted it to be the first time I played a game that I previously only dreamed of [Music] for some reason sound and presentation are often hard for me to fit into a review no no I think I just focused so much on the gameplay and the mechanics and whatnot that it takes a lot of effort to transition naturally into that stuff how fortunate then that we've got an entire chunk of this review to talk about it without interruptions because oh man I got to tell you guys breath of the wild is a pretty game for both your eyes and your ears let's start with eyes Nintendo is used to using below-par hardware in order to provide a more affordable consult they've been doing it for over a decade now they're also used to getting the absolute most out of their hardware in both technical and artistic terms breath of the wild is a classic example of art style winning out over sheer graphical power because honestly on paper the game ain't much in the graphics department character models are a little simplistic and they use that Wind Waker esque style of cel shading so they don't have as much texturing or detail there are no dazzling particle effects or anything like that very little of the game's visuals could be considered complex maybe outside of the humungous divine beasts or something performance is really where it suffers most the framerate sometimes has a hard time keeping up with the action on screen it's not usually so bad that it becomes a distraction but it's certainly not the kind of performance I've come to expect with a first party Nintendo game it slows considerably in Kakariko village and slows even more in Corrick forest to the point where I'm honestly surprised they allowed the game to ship this way it's really bizarre playing a Zelda title where the game stutters this much the game's resolution ain't the best but it ain't terrible either like many switch games it seems to scale depending on what's going on employing all different kinds of rendering techniques and layers of anti-aliasing and whatnot two different things in order to keep the balance between visuals and framerate as much as possible I have no doubt that this often does make things look and run better than they could but other times it makes things look disturbingly inconsistent we see patches of textures jumping around and objects with polygon counts that scale up and down very visibly now I can see that this was the sacrifice they needed to make in order to create a world that was constant truly open there are no loading screens on this map you can run from one end to the other climb the highest mountain go into a town a house even then out again and all that to Hyrule Castle and up through the entire thing and up to Ganon's weird goopy pod thing and you'll never have to stop to load once it really is impressive and with a world this big you want to be able to see as much as possible from a distance without poppin which means just about everything is always rendered in some fashion if it's visible to you and that's why you have this active resolution scaling system that makes one thing smooth and one thing jagged and another thing smooth and then jagged it also makes the landscape in a way a little less pretty than it probably could have been it's certainly pretty for reasons we'll talk about in a bit but if you saw my first impressions video you'll remember that I found it a little more muddy than I expected distant mountains just look a little bit yucky when you look at them long enough like when you really focus on them and let me tell you now all this bad stuff is leading up to a lot of good stuff and again this was all done in order to achieve that complete openness that ability to look at everything from any angle they didn't have the benefit of pre rendering a bunch of perfect picturesque landscapes and that's of course a very fine trade-off it means the game performs the way they wanted it to with little to no pop in for the most part people and monsters are the only things that pop in though you can usually see them from far enough away that it's not a big problem the only monster that proves troublesome in this regard is the Hynix you can be pretty darn close to the thing before boink it's suddenly there and this is of course more of a problem because the Hynix is the biggest baddie in the game you always want to be able to plan where you're going and know for the most part what you'll find when you get there but hen axes can sometimes surprise you at least they're always sleeping so you know that won't see you unless you run up real close but seeing one of their big circular sleeping spots ahead of you for ages before the game decides to populate it can be jarring enough that though despite the game's visual shortcomings it's still positively gorgeous even if no single piece of it is technically impressive or particularly sharp all the elements combined together to paint one very beautiful picture it really is much like a painting in that regard up close the brushstrokes can look pretty rough and nothing is very finely detailed but when you step back it all comes together because the artist knew exactly how to achieve the overall image they wanted using all those individual pieces if there's one single most important that makes the game look so good it's probably the lighting I mean breath of the wild single-handedly taught me how huge good lighting can be in a game you spend so much time out in the wilderness running around under the sky so that day/night cycle is ever moving and no matter what time of day it is you're treated to a visual feast cloud cover is basically constant so you never get plain old bright sun shining on a blue sky you get beautiful shades of color that paint the world differently depending on where the Sun is or where the clouds shift rainy weather has never felt more real in a Zelda game it's never done so much to affect the atmosphere rolling through moonlight is simply stunning and if you happen to find yourself in view of the ocean when the Sun comes up it's a particularly splendid sight it doesn't matter how many times I see it happen or how long I play the game when that Sun starts to come up I stop and I take a moment I watch the light grow on the horizon delighting in the vibrant colors as they fill up the sky and speaking of colors part of the reason the lighting is so effective is the game's use of a very soft color palette gentle greens and browns and yellows make up the bulk of what you'll see in the world above there are some times when I do miss more vibrant colors whenever I use breath of the wild footage in a video I've got to crank up the contrast a good few notches to make it pop a little more on-screen last gen the game industry fell into this weird thing where everything was really Brown and I've really appreciated recent efforts to use the full color spectrum I mean look at something like horizon zero done it's gorgeous however breadth of the wilds minimalistic use of color helps achieve two things and in fact these are two things that the game does on a broad scale and that run through every aspect of its presentation and sound design as you will soon see sticking to the subject of color for the time being though the first thing is that the game has this theme of age of history I can't exactly think of one word to describe it but it elicits feelings of time gone by the soft color makes it look like old film or an old photograph for a painting it feels like it comes from a time when people just didn't have access to bright high contrast colors in visual mediums this is a reflection of the state the world is in Hyrule was ravaged by Ganon's forces so long ago and much of the game is about tapping into the past recovering memories accomplishing tasks that others couldn't a hundred years ago time has passed but in terms of civilization the world hasn't been able to move on and completely heal it's basically just as it was back then much as though it were a photograph the other thing the game is going for and that is very much supported by the color palette is establishing atmosphere now the interesting thing here is that up until now atmosphere and his elder game pretty much meant one of two things happy or scary the atmosphere being established was either the bright happy cartoonish nassif Wind Waker and a few others or the dark eerie foreboding we saw in games like Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess but breath of the wild is different the atmosphere it creates is one of serenity it's relaxing it's peaceful it's beautiful which is funny because never before has a Zelda game been this dangerous and demanding but of course we'll really talk about that later now this isn't to say that no Zelda ever has gone for a kind of atmosphere that is neither happy and silly nor scary it's obviously more complicated than that but off the top of my head every instance of a calm atmosphere in a Zelda game aided by atmospheric music places that really make you stop and just take it in they almost always carried something of an eeriness to them staring up at the architecture in Ocarina of times temple of time while the song of time plays like a Gregorian chant it was effective but also very somber almost demanding of a respectful reverence the snowy area in Twilight Princess it's serene but danger lurks just beneath the surface strange wolves are stalking you you're chasing a monster you don't know what you'll find up on the mountain the list goes on to my knowledge the Zelda team has never zeroed in on the sheer beauty of the world and of nature itself as they have in breath of the wild at the very least they've never featured it as a theme that runs through an entire game Ganon tried to conquer the world there was a huge war tons of people died entire villages were destroyed there was fire everywhere it was a gigantic mess and yet the deer don't know that the grass doesn't care the Sun and the moon keep on going up and coming down sure maybe of Ganon were to finally win and dominate everything before him Nature would have a problem with it but here nature is just nature and nature is beautiful it's indifferent to your adventuring or all the monsters that are everywhere or the war that went down a hundred years ago it's the same as it is in the real world and it's a fascinating thing to see in a Zelda game and of course it makes traversing the landscape that much more enjoyable that at fear grants the player with a near-constant feeling of calm but now that we're past color let's start talking about art direction character designs are interesting because we've got a really big range of complexity here hylians in the sheikah which for all intents and purposes are zeldas human characters are quite plain like surprisingly so they just look like people without a lot of really striking standout features and the funny thing is I kind of like it that way the rest of the world is so astoundingly beautiful that the people themselves become something like the background they just don't need to look more detailed than they do and in fact this is an interesting thing to look at and passes all the games in Wind Waker for instance I was fine with weird looking characters because the whole world was like a colorful cartoon it all meshed but as much as I loved Twilight Princess I remember being a little distracted by some of the characters the world was dark and largely realistic but you still had these weirdly cartoony dudes with bizarre faces and they didn't seem to fit very well the hylians and chica and breath of the wild are simple but that perfectly matches the simple beauty of the world but then of course to keep things interesting you've got your less human-like races your Zoras gorons Gerudo and Rito imaginary races or what really stick out in a fantasy world and as such these are designed appropriately they really pop they catch your attention the Zora and the Rito fish people and bird people respectively have very unique designs here they're much more like animals and less like humans than they were in previous games I mean the Rito used to just look like people with feathers glued to their arms and beak salute over their noses here the Rito really look like bird people the Zora really look like fish people and there are different designs for different characters using different species as reference points this door is like a hammerhead shark this one's like some kind of Ray that read oh there's kind of like an eagle this one is obviously a parrot then the gorons look fantastic as gowron's tend to do I will say they lack the same creativity seen in Twilight Princess with the Goron elders in particular but there's definitely a great range of character models on display and if there's one thing these gowron's do better than any others its convey emotion facial animations are superb and they're great big faces show them off better than any other race in the game plus more of them have got hair now I mean that sends the personality potential through the roof lastly you've got Gerudo and the developers obviously had a lot of tweaking the original design here just like Gerudo of old they've got darker skin and angular faces with large noses but much greater emphasis has now been put on their height specifically how much taller they are than most of the other races they've also got well let's just say very interesting body shapes while we're talking about the people of breadth of the wild let's talk about the architecture each race has its own building style and every town looks wildly different adding a nice layer to the world sense of realism the hylians have potato and idyllic little village nestled in the hills and lure Lin and Oceanside trading settlement the sheikah have their mountain village that utilizes ancient Japanese style architecture in fact much like the ego clan who broke off from the sheikah their entire culture is very Japanese once again though these pale in comparison to high rules more fantastical races you've got Gerudo town which is reminiscent of ancient desert dwelling cultures there's probably one specific one it's based on but obviously I didn't pay attention in history class is it Egypt yeah it's probably Egypt that might be the least impressive one though and probably because the Gerudo are closest to humans out of the four unique races so that naturally made the designers want to model their culture after real ones Zoras domain though is easily the most impressive let me tell you folks these aura have come a long way since living in caves in ocarina of time here they're natural architects and they've built a city above the water in a big mountain top basin that glistens with luminous stone and other natural deposits the design is complex and beautiful it reminds you of the ocean but it's also sort of futuristic easily the most visually spectacular individual area of the game and it's cool because it reflects these aura culture they've got a long and storied history of fighting wars and of heroic champions they've got a throne room with a monarch who sits on a throne and their ceremonial scepters and all that it's all very fitting compare this to the gorons who just kind of live in caves like usual the style here is much more down-to-earth the gorons don't do fancy the practical they're hard workers and that's about it the structures are roughly hewn and you've got metal bits and equipment lying around everywhere the lava and the overall on fire atmosphere certainly make it interesting but I think going into the game I was hoping for a little szura's just set my expectations so high you know but even though this is called goron city that's really a stupid name because it's not a city at all it's it's barely a village it's very tiny and kind of grouped together I was hoping for some staggering Mountain City with all sorts of levels and stuff to check out like in ocarina of time but I will certainly say this way still works perfectly and in fact it's much more in line with what I would expect of the gorons it's not even a real gripe just a little detail D kid in me was hoping for and lastly we've got the Rito who just like the rest of the races live in a place that perfectly represents who they are the Rito are bird people first of all and they're also very quiet and dignified their village spirals up a huge rocky pillar and consists of nothing more than stairs landing platforms and small wooden huts the whole thing is very modest in terms of architecture even the Rito elder lives in one of these little huts the singular difference being that his is at the top you can observe the people here living peacefully most often indulging in quiet reflection obviously enjoying the view of the surrounding landscape that their towering Town affords Zoras domain blew me away with its architecture but on a more personal level Rito village might be my favorite I won't try to claim that it's as spectacular but looking at it from a distance and being in it just makes me feel happy it establishes such a great mood and it's the only town in the game that has its own sort of shape that you can see from the distance you know especially when vame dough perches on the top it becomes a very unique landmark so that's all the architecture that they currently alive people of Hyrule built and are currently enjoying but perhaps even more interesting is the stuff that's been left behind Ganon was stopped from completely destroying the world a hundred years ago but it was a closed thing the vast majority of the world's structures have been reduced to rubble and you can find these relics of the past everywhere and this of course ties in both with the theme of age and with the atmosphere the developers were trying to establish and the atmosphere thing is a huge one I said earlier that the general mood of the game is peaceful without being too ominous or eerie or whatever and that's certainly true but Hyrule's ruins elicit another unique kind of feel seeing ruins buried under earth and covered in vines and such is a very peaceful thing in real life and it's no different in the game it's all just very still and even if you don't consciously acknowledge it you know that it's all been there for a very long time is quiet and still as always but beyond that there's a sadness that runs through the game you can see the remains of what this place used to be and if you think on it deeply enough you imagine all the people that must have died I mean there are entire villages that are just gone you'll constantly find the broken remains of people's houses even with some rotted furniture within the crumbled walls you have to wonder if these people got out in time I was bummed that I didn't discover this on my own and had to hear about it online and if you haven't figured it out yet it's doubtful that you will so I'm mentioning it here there's a spot out in Hyrule Field called the ranch ruins and if you look closely you'll notice that the layout directly matches that of Lon Lon ranch in ocarina of time obviously because of what we know of the time line these aren't actually the ruins of that exact version of Lon Lon ranch but the call back still made me really stop and think when I went and check them out it was legitimately heartbreaking to look at the rubble and remember how it once looked these weren't quite as emotional for me but hyrule castle and hyrule castle town are also very sad this was once the heart of Hyrule and this heart has never been depicted so grandly as it is here in its destroyed State the castle is gargantuan and beautifully constructed even ruined and crumbling and covered in black gunk and crawling with baddies as it is it's a sight to behold and the sheer size of it once more reminds you of just how many people once lived within the walls in addition to ruined structures there are also remnants of the war scattered throughout the land I can't stress enough how important this edition is to the feel of the game war hasn't come up much in Zelda games a few are referenced we know people once fought over the Triforce we know high rules Royal Guard have been wiped out a few times but for the most part when there's fighting to be done the hero does it no one else really takes part but places like fort Hatano make the war a hundred years ago real this time around there's a tremendous amount of tangible evidence that the people of Hyrule once had to really fight for their lives and if you ask me that makes the lore so much more effective on an emotional level than that of any other zelda lastly I want to talk about the temple of time because I feel that it's really important in establishing the tone of the game we're used to the temple of time being important you find the master sword there in a number of games it houses the entrance to the spirit realm for pete's sake in breadth of the wild it's one of the very first things you're drawn to from the very start of the game you get to see this Zelda mark in ruins it's still technically standing but it's clear that it's broken beyond repair the roof is falling in there baka blends squatting inside it's where the old man eventually reveals his true identity and it's got one of the game's many statues of heylia but that's it you don't come back later and restore it you don't travel through time to when it was still intact like in Twilight Princess you don't do anything with it because it's ruined it was destroyed in the war and just like most of Hyrule now it's nothing and this realisation was heavy for me it communicated perhaps better than anything the extent of the damage caused by Ganon and the senselessness of war but wait Arlo you might be saying you said earlier that the other games established bad vibe atmospheres whereas breadth of the wild focuses on serenity what about all this sad stuff you're talking about isn't that a pretty bad vibe explain yourself well you see the difference here and this is completely genius is that the sadness on display in this version of Hyrule is purely implicit this game doesn't establish a mood by messing with the lighting or making you all doubt with ominous music it doesn't try to scare you or force you into feeling any negative feelings because it's all visual it's all implied when you see the remains of a town or Lon Lon ranch or whatever it is your own imagination and empathy are what make you feel something especially considering all this is set against that very peaceful backdrop with its relaxing music it should be very easy to feel nothing but pleasure while you move through the world but I at least have never felt emotions this strong while running through a sunlit field of flowers while I'm serenaded by a delightful piano score we've got a few more things to cover before we move on to that score though even apart from the land structures intact or otherwise the land itself is beautifully constructed again it's not so much a graphical horsepower thing nothing in the game looks better than something from gen 7 and in fact I've played plenty of Xbox 360 games that look loads better though to the game's credit the rocks look great I don't know why they put so much detail into the rocks but man look at that rock point is though the world is gorgeous because of style and Composition there are certainly some recycled assets here and there you'll spot a few rocks or whatever and be like yeah I've definitely seen those around a few times but for the most part the entire world looks as though it figuratively handcrafted every hill and valley and mountain the different ways the plants grow in the trees grouped together the different rock formations it all feels so real it feels so much like you are walking through a real fantasy landscape rather than a collection of areas compiled by a team of programmers nature and landscape and all that in previous games has always been more of an artistic affair it seemed as though it was all designed by designers who draw out images and help create assets it always looked great in its own artistic way don't get me wrong but it's clear that this time they spent ages studying how nature really works how a landscape is actually formed geologically we've had snow places in lava places and desert places and all that and Zelda games before but never has it felt like I was truly scaling a volcano or a snowy mountain or running across a sandy wasteland much of this is because of reasons we won't touch on quite yet but so much of it is plain old incredible design much like in our own world when you're in the middle of nature you can look in just about any direction and you've got yourself one heck of a painting there's beauty to be found in every corner of the map forget the shrines and the monsters and saving the world and all that junk I've never been so absorbed by a games world alone before never have I so thoroughly enjoyed just being in it Skyrim and Shadow of the Colossus came close those games were really gorgeous but something about breadth of the wilds particular style edges them out when I was a kid I used to boot up ocarina of time just to start a Kakariko village and climb all the way to the very top of Death Mountain and sit there for a while admiring the landscape watching the Sun rise and set it was the first time I ever wanted to be in a game and breath of the wild is probably the only case where that feeling has ever come back just as strongly not much more to cover in the visual Department monster designs and animations are stellar as always the designers gave each of the lesser batty races that hang around camps and whatnot their own body language and it gives them a great sense of liveliness they're all very expressive the liz'll folks in particular are fun to watch with their chameleon-like eyes darting around and they're hunched composure and the way they curiously tilt their heads all around like birds the bigger enemies like head oxes and Lionel's aren't as pleasantly expressive but they're still well-designed especially the Lionel's talk about intimidating not as much enemy varieties I would like sometimes I do get a little tired at the same handful of guys throughout the whole game but at least what we've got is awesome each and everybody feels really unique and fun guardians shrines and all the futuristic technology contained within shrines are awesome because they help solidify the game's themes by interestingly enough acting as strong contrasts to them guardians and shrines are the polar opposite of nearly everything we've been talking about most of the game uses soft warm colors everything is made of wood and stone it all feels very natural so seeing one of those metal monstrosity skittering around like a spider with its glowing blue eye and its laser beam attack helps heighten tension on top of the tension that naturally comes from confronting a dangerous foe these things are clearly unnatural they clearly don't belong here and it's great because we know that these are very old and yet their futuristic because of the cyclical nature of Hyrule's tech things become very advanced then for whatever reason it all gets left behind for later generations to rediscover we've seen it in a good number of Zelda titles now shrines are fun because they're kind of eyesores these nasty little glowing protrusions dotting the landscape they were put in place here by much more advanced people and the rest of the world has since gone on around them when you step onto that elevator you leave your world of open sky and green grass and frolicking deer and instantly find yourself in a world of metal and machines and sharp blues and blue is of course the least common color in nature even breath of the wild sky isn't as blue as it could be with its constant cloud cover so blue is all the more effective here at representing things that come from a very different time and with such a large game featuring so many things to do above-ground shrines with all their blues and machines work to break the game up visually they sort of refresh your palate with a new set of flavors every once in a while so you don't get tired of the more natural grass and sand and snow and all that the game would have been perfectly fine without all the future e-text stuff but it adds such a delightful variety to the visuals that it makes the whole experience all the more rich also let's not forget that it's just plain cool Skyward Sword featured a lot of cool tech stuff but breath of the wild takes it to a whole new level when you're down in a shrine fighting robots and navigating through lasers and powering machines using big electrical balls you're basically playing a sci-fi game and though I doubt it will ever happen it makes me even more hopeful that maybe someday we'll get a Zelda game that takes place during one of these eras of advanced technology cyberpunk Zelda I want it so bad finally we come to music and overall sound design I don't have too much to say about the sound effects because this is a Zelda game even all the way back in Link's first 3d outings with sound is limited as it was on the n64 the game sounded great these guys no Foley work and they know how to perfectly blend it all into their games and make it sound very natural breath of the wild is of course no exception there are thousands of different sounds subtly layered into the game and it's also natural that it's easy to forget that this is a game you're playing that when link performs a certain action that action only makes a noise because someone recorded a noise and stuck it into the code and told the game exactly when to play it it feels like it just happens on its own like yeah of course it makes that sound when like puts away a weapon or throws a rock or whatever the music though does deserve a bit of a closer look like most things in the game it matches the two main themes age and serenity for the first time ever the piano takes center stage versus other Zelda games which have most prominently featured more traditional orchestral instruments such as horns and violins and music maybe another department that Zelda has always excelled in but never has it been so subtle and natural just like the open world with its lack of barriers and loading screens the music never really ends it just changes it moves with you reflecting your surroundings and since so much of the surrounding world is filled with serenity and beauty these soft piano tunes reflect that most often there are indeed higher tempo songs and ones with stronger melodies and all that but for the most part the music and breath of the wild takes something of a backseat whereas past Zelda's featured a lot of music that had you humming along this game wants as much as possible to add to the mood without you really thinking about it familiar melodies are present but they're often folded into the music in less noticeable ways and sometimes it took me a little while to catch them and while sometimes I do miss having the more prominent Tunes around I can't deny the effect the style has on the game's atmosphere and feel the developers already achieved so much in the visual Department and the music just ties it all together beautifully it's the sort of thing that I imagined took a long long time to experiment with and put together as there are any number of elements that could have broken the mood if done just a little wrong and like I said the music also ties in to the age theme this is pretty interesting and I'll admit maybe this wasn't intentional at all and I'm the only one that feels this way but a lot of that has to do with the use of the piano from our perspective the piano and other orchestral instruments were all invented hundreds of years ago they are old basically all of them in theory should be able to convey a sense of age they're almost exclusively used to score movies and shows and games that take place in the past at least in the Western world but breath of the wild uses its piano in a different way instead of emulating the long ago days of grand classical music it sometimes emulates a more recent time more frequently being used as a solo instrument versus violins and horns and all that it suggests a greater level of intimacy that calls to my mind at least the idea of smaller scale storytelling as seen in the eighteen and 1900s picture plays in silent movies where the pianist sits off to the side and single-handedly scores entire productions this is where the age theme comes in which is funny because breath of the wild sometimes alludes to events that took place untold thousands of years in the past yet like I said it's color palette often brings to mind old photos so there's a really big emphasis on what happened a hundred years ago and here's a detail I didn't mention before but whenever Lincoln recovers the memory there's this effect that makes it look like an old silent movie for a second silent movies were being made about a hundred years ago now which makes this even more appropriate seeing as links memories were a century old back to the music though the piano strengthens this concept it conveys a sense of age by subconsciously stirring up images of plays and silent movies in my mind the single greatest example of this is the theme that plays when you encounter a guardian stalker and any other Zelda game spotting a foe like this might have just started up more of those horns and cellos but here we get exactly the sort of jaunty piano tune you would hear in an old film about cowboys and bandits imagine an old-timey melodrama where a moustache twiddling bad-guy ties a helpless gal to the railroad tracks or imagine a kid up on a stage running around in a guardian costume while their teacher pounds on the piano off to the side that's what I think of when I hear the Guardian music now the whole theme does include more than just the piano it has a handful of future retouches and there's a violin in there helping carry things along but that piano is at the forefront especially right at the start when one of the things first spots you that five note motif just pounds away repeatedly and they could have easily ditched the piano entirely and used nothing but futuristic music here like the kind they put down in the shrines these guardians are way way older than just a century or two after all yet they tie into that story of a Hyrule at war from a hundred years ago and because of my subconscious associations with that kind of piano tune they feel like they fit more with the theme of age than if the style had been purely futuristic or even something actually older like a regular orchestration perhaps it's because I'm so used to futuristic themes being tied to big robots or maybe I'm desensitized to traditional orchestral music I don't know but this unusual style is really effective it makes me imagine how a hundred years after the events of breath of the wild people will be telling each other stories about how linked fought the guardians finally one more notable thing breath of the wild does in the music department is using very ambient sounds and instruments plenty piano as we've established and plenty of instances of more traditional instrumentation as well but listening through the soundtrack I'm amazed by how much of it truly falls into the ambient category like the kind of stuff you hear in various genres of ambient music sounds that you can only get using a computer to generate waves and shift and stretch stuff in all sorts of weird ways this naturally adds hugely to the serenity and the fact that it's a pretty new thing for Zelda games increases the impact it has it's otherworldly nature lets you know that you're playing a very different kind of zelda game and the funny thing is despite how awesome I think it is it took me a long time to notice it's extremely subtle and sometimes when music complements gameplay and a game world perfectly and helps establish just the right mood I don't even notice that it's there it affects me even though I'm not really thinking about it and I tell you that is the mark of an awesome soundtrack right there when taken as a whole breath of the wilds presentation is really something else it's easily the most ambitious Zelda and terms of how much love and care and time went into it and how it all ties together it's the most stylistically cohesive by a wide margin the atmosphere it establishes is something truly special and never have I played a game that made me stop and marvel as often as this one does even on other more powerful systems the dev team made so much out of relatively little and more than ever they've shown that yes these games are art and yes the people working on them are artists [Music] when we first learned that breath of the wild was going to feature a sprawling open world and that very little would ever stop you from going exactly where you wanted I worried about the story story is very important to me in my zelda games the plot and all the twists and turns dramatically increased my enjoyment of Twilight Princess and the weak plot despite a few good lore revelations throughout decreased my enjoyment of Skyward Sword thing is good story is much easier to pull off in a game with a linear structure which is what each 3d zelda leading up to breath of the wild had the plot points happened in a certain order and certain areas were blocked off so that the story unfolded as you gathered items and opened them up open-world games though much more difficult to pull off story beats have to happen without affecting the world too much so that the gameplay stays consistent if you can go anywhere at any time how do you effectively utilize your environments in your scripted events how do you lead the player to each plot point without making it feel really unnatural so when I learned about breadth of the wilds open nature I thought well surely this can't have much of a story then when I learned that you can cruise on upped again and at any time and that the only barrier is your own strength I was like well that's it there's clearly not going to be a plot at all if it has literally no bearing on beating the game then when I finally played it and saw how the story was handled I was equal parts relieved and disappointed let's go over the good first though I will say that the formula the team came up with to tell their story was perfect so much of the magic of the game comes from stepping out of that shrine with little more than a pair of pants and having no idea what's going on from the very beginning breadth of the wild excels at passive storytelling and while I don't mind being told a story actively there's a certain charm and a sense of mystery that comes with being led to uncover things yourself and in fact this style helps complement the overall mood the game is going for tech metroid prime for example when they're at their best the Metroid games instill a sense of isolation in the player and prime is no exception Samus is on this planet its original inhabitants long gone apart from the native animals and her enemy she's alone the plot is one of simply finding a way to thwart the plans of the space pirates the story though is told passively through scanning runes and log entries and through simply observing the world around you slowly uncovering what happened on the planet in this manner is somehow more rewarding because it's optional figuring stuff out on your own rather than being explicitly told everything through mandatory cutscenes comes with a sense of accomplishment you feel like you're the one driving the story breath of the wild is very much the same way right at the beginning of the game you're given a little info about what happened a hundred years ago and gently pushed in the direction of the next plot point in Kakariko village from there you're sent to the four corners of Hyrule to free the divine beasts so that they can help you blast Ganon beyond the execution of these four tasks which you could call the plot of the game the series of events that lead you to the end credits the story is told in three main ways the first one is the traditional one cutscenes mainly the ones that you get when you talk to old man emic King ghost and Impa these fill you in on the basics a hundred years ago Ganon was gonna kill everyone so the people dug up all these cooled robots to fight him with but then he turned all the robots against them and Zelda had to trap the old Manian Hyrule Castle link was heard at some point and put in a weirdo chamber with only his undies and that's how stuff got started these scripted bits are very few mostly just at the start of the game when you talk to these characters but they contain some flashes of very great awesomeness some of the shots of the Guardians destroying villages are just terrifying very exciting stuff but like I said there aren't a lot of these and as such they leave a lot to be desired but I'll come back to them later the second way the game tells its story is the most passive it's through the accounts told by the game's characters and through observation of the world through talking to all the various NPCs and completing quests and even looking at all the ruins and such scattered across the landscape you start to further piece together what happened to Hyrule one excellent example of this passive storytelling is finding the diaries of the princess and the king in Hyrule Castle as these also offer character development the third way is the most important and it's something of a mix between the two other ways tracking down Link's memories first off can I just say that I adored doing this with a world so huge trying to find specific spots based on the pictures someone gave me was loads of fun some of them required closely looking at the landscape to try and ascertain where they might have been taken the real point is though this is a perfect way to tell a story in a huge open world this is a terrific way for the player to take it in at their own pace and it also gives them that sense of accomplishment I was talking about you're not just told story here you earn it these memories fill us in on what went down a hundred years ago and also act as something of a puzzle and a collectible they're very naturally married to gameplay into pure exploration in broad terms this all sets up what might just be the best story in Zelda history for starters this Ganon isn't your run-of-the-mill Ganon he's given up on resurrection and reincarnation and has assumed a mindless enraged spirit form this might be the biggest Ganon development since he first turned into a giant pig it's a unique and very fitting take on the villain and I think it's incredibly cool then the idea that the people of Hyrule dug up all these crazy robot things from a fight with Ganon thousands and thousands of years before that's just great the game gives a sense of history that we've never seen in any other zelda game and really drives home the idea of a cyclical Zelda universe as established in Skyward Sword in fact it offers a pretty mind-blowing revelation up until now every Zelda game has fit on one of the branches of the timeline but this game references events from multiple timelines that should be impossible until you realize that this game could take place so far in the future that some of these events have repeated themselves that in a land doomed to repeat a cycle of war for eternity over a long enough time any number of events can by complete coincidence happen the exact same way maybe breath of the wild isn't set thousands of years in the future but Millions what if we can't even fathom how long this cycle has been repeating so of course this branch of the timeline had its own Wind Waker and its own Twilight Princess at some point and this was crazy to realize then the whole idea that the world was all but destroyed by Ganon and now it's people are basically living in the rubble that what we're seeing is a ruined Hyrule that was once supremely glorious that's incredible stuff breath of the wild story set up is refreshing it's bold it's exciting it's thought-provoking it's beautiful it's more than I could ever ask for in a zelda game but here's where things start to fall apart despite having a perfect format for telling its story and despite having a terrific foundation for a story the overall story the breath of the wild ends up telling in the form of a plot is sorely lacking the problem appears to be a lack of effort on the part of the dev team whether because of a lack of ideas or simply a lack of time these memory cutscenes which are the lifeblood of the game's story just don't tell us much of anything they don't reveal any important details or show us any of the exciting events the game refers to constantly basically they all just boiled down to lightly touching on again and again the basic concept of Zelda and the four champions they were hired to pilot the divine beasts in Zelda's supposed to do something with her magic God powers or the Triforce or whatever to stop Ganon but she can't figure out how to do it like that's it that's all these cutscenes ever say one will be like gee you know that's been praying up on the mountain a long time I hope she could figure out how to use her powers and another will be like I don't know what to do I don't know how to use my powers and the next one would be like yes we have our divine beasts but Zelda still needs to figure out how to use your powers they all just involve the characters sitting around and talking to each other there's no development like ever breath of the wild story is all about living in the aftermath of a bunch of crazy stuff that went down but it's a little too lazy to actually show you any of it any part of the greater story that can't be told through a group of people talking to each other has a slim chance of actually being shown to the player I mean look at one of the last memories you unlock the whole game we're told that link suffered a mortal blow which was why he had to be put in the regeneration chamber for a hundred years and I'm thinking man can you imagine the battle that could actually kill link like canonically kill link the blow must have come from Ganon himself it must have been the most epic showdown in all of Zelda history the whole time I'm just so intrigued by the idea my imagination is running wild with it then it finally happens i unlock a memory that shows me what really happened all those years ago and the memory shows a link already wounded falling on the ground Zelda saves them from some Guardians with their powers and this is actually some of the best we get from these memories this is a little bit of action but then that's it nothing of the fight that actually wounded him and I guess it was just some guardian or other monster that did it maybe a baka Blin nothing about Zelda's eventual confrontation with Ganon which is another thing I've been wondering about all this time we don't even get to see the champions getting killed I mean not that I'm super into watching Zelda characters get killed obviously but that would have been some great cutscene äj-- actually getting to see them all in action fighting doing what they've been talking about doing for the whole game instead of just sitting around and having a chat I'll swing back around to the story when it's time to go over the ending but right now this is a perfect time to talk more about those characters this is another huge miss opportunity I've always felt that Zelda games didn't do enough to utilize its various races I've always been fascinated by the Zora and the gorons especially and I've wanted them to have bigger roles to play on the surface breadth of the wild is everything I've ever wanted the races all have a real place in the world and that's great these champions were all chosen to represent their races because they're the baddest dudes around they're awesome warriors and their designs are really cool and they're gonna pilot giant magical robots so they can fight Ganon like holy cow that's the coolest thing ever we've got to go on in a Zora and a rito and a Gerudo and they're the super tight team and they're actual characters but sadly none of this is fully realized uneventful in borderline lazy cutscenes would have been easier to swallow if the writers had at least taken the opportunity to develop the game's characters but they just didn't too often we're told about how awesome these champion guys are but we're never shown and that's that's storytelling 101 we never get to see them fight or work as a team or do anything with their divine beasts beyond hitting the big red button to line up the shot again and at the end by the end of the game there's still nothing more than these broad anime archetypes that you understand fully within the first two seconds of each one talking and yes the champions ballad DLC does help a little tiny little bit in this regard but still not nearly enough and plus rounding out your characters is something that needs to be done in the main game I'm not normally so critical when it comes to Zelda characters the thing about Nintendo is that at least from how it looks where I'm sitting they don't seem to hire writers the same way that other companies do they don't track down novelists and screenplay writers to help them develop their stories and characters and write dialogue they seem to do all that stuff internally the designers just seem to kind of work out the stories on their own and I could be totally wrong on this front but that's the way it feels that's why the stories in the characters while often pretty good are rarely more than just that they have a bigger impact on me because I love the series and the universe so much that I think I'm a little more forgiving but if I'm honest it's never great without the great gameplay to back it all up Zelda stories are relatively black gameplay comes first story comes second that's just so Zelda is the thing about breadth of the wild is that it had so much potential in this regard that I found it harder to forgive the mediocre story and characters the champions in their whole thing it's just so so cool so when none of it really panned out by the end of the game I found myself pretty irked it's a major weakness in an otherwise phenomenal game and it just feels like they could have done at least a little more quite easily like I said the way it tells its story doesn't just feel minimal it feels lazy I know it's fairly time-consuming to animate a cutscene and all that but this is zelda we're talking about these are probably Nintendo's biggest games in terms of production values plus I know a lot of the development time went into building the world in the physics so the story probably came pretty late in the cycle but the game was also delayed quite a bit so that it could land on switch at lunch it's hard for me to believe that they couldn't have fit in a little more interesting story stuff in that time I can't shake the feeling that they didn't do more because they didn't have to do more they knew they had the biggest best Zelda game ever on their hands so why I wanted this story matter again I could be wrong but that's how it feels sometimes to the game's credit not all is completely lost in the character Department while we don't see enough of her for her character to really develop per se I do like this games take on Princess Zelda we've seen her bounce back and forth between younger and more lively and older and more serious but this one's fairly unique she's an older teen / young adult and she's very science minded her father keeps pressuring her to wake up her powers since many feel this is the only way they can possibly be Ganon but since she can't seem to get the hang of it she wants to spend most of her time studying the Guardians in the sheikah slate in fact this rare presence of the king of Hyrule is much of what gives her her character so far we've only ever seen the king in Wind Waker and this time around he's actually like you know Zelda's dead the king and the princess he sort of had the same role in Skyward Sword but he was hardly a king at that point really more of a mayor or something like less of a king and more just Zelda's dad but this feels like a new dynamic and the conflict that causes drives her character because of all this she's definitely a highlight in a game that otherwise doesn't do much work to establish or develop its characters I also really liked how the handled lengths this time around as a character he's still a big hunk of nothing as I'm sure he'll always be and hey I'm fine with that but I like that his origins are different here we aren't with link as he wakes up in a small village somewhere and we don't lead him to his destiny to be the great hero of Hyrule he already is the hero this link has a history with the other care he was actually a trained Knight working for the royal family this not only gives us an actual reason for him being so good at fighting already but it also enables a lot of unique character interactions the main characters know him already so there's less of that oh you're wearing green clothes you must be the hero that's been done to death by now and really just the fact that he has a background makes him feel like more of a real person I don't mind link being the voiceless avatar but it's just nice that they did something different with him in this game they made him a little more real before we move on I do want to mention the voice acting I technically should have put this in the part of my review on sound design but I think I'd like to talk about it here while I'm going over the game's characterization as you know this was the first Zelda game with voice acting beyond a few words shouted by fairies stuff like that and now that we've experienced it I think I can officially say Zelda does not need voice acting it did absolutely nothing for the game I will be fair though part of the problem is that this was a half-hearted effort only the major cutscenes are voice acted and the entire rest of the game is done with the usual text it's not a crime or anything for a game to feature voice acting and supplement it with text but in this case there's little enough of it that I fail to see the point and in fact the transition from one to the other often feels a little jarring almost like it was added as an afterthought it also doesn't help that the mouths weren't reanimated to fit the English dialogue and then none of the voice work is particularly good I mean none of it's terrible but it's it's dripping with cheese for the most part very silly and not very well fitting it's one of those things where it's like if you're gonna do it do it right try to get actors for most if not all of the dialogue yeah I know that idea is pretty daunting but it's another one of those things that other big studios do all the time and work really hard to get some top-notch actors while you're at it another thing that's tricky but can be done people do it otherwise just don't bother and again for the record I'm still fine with them not bothering I've never felt that Selden needed voice acting and bad voice acting messes up the feel of games often enough that I think I'd just rather not even take the risk with my Zelda's they're too important to me so now that we've done it we've seen how it works if Nintendo wants to put this little experiment behind them in the future I'll be perfectly fine with that their call though I guess so now we come to the low point of a section of this review that's already been pretty darn critical that ending it's bad folks real bad I had heard from multiple sources that it was bad and even with low expectations it still managed to disappoint me but let's go at it from the beginning you climb Hyrule Castle and find this big Ganon monster and a weird cocoon which I actually thought was really weird and surprising and cool he comes out and it's an actual boss battle which is great because the rest of the game doesn't really have a lot of good boss battles which is something we'll touch on later after this is the obligatory final forum section that's pretty much series standard at this point it's a trope but you know what it's a trope I like a lot of people didn't like this section because it's kind of shoehorned in there and there's no real challenge to it you just ride around popping off arrows and there's like no chance he can ever hit you with his big zappy attack it's purely for show just to give you one last exciting little cinematic thing right at the end of the game and it's totally silly but I like that I was gonna be pretty disappointed if the first forum was the only one so I enjoyed the whole light arrow thing especially with the extra cool slash silly move right at the end where you fly up on the gust from the fire and hit him right in the head it's just fun but it's what comes next that I have a serious problem with because what comes next is the worst possible thing they could have put at the end of the biggest cooler Zelda game ever nothing okay okay before we really get into this first let me tell you a little story it's called the ending of Ocarina of Time the first 3d Zelda game ever on hardware that's super old now way back when developers were used to spending a lot less time and money on their games link beats Ganon and the sages seal him in the dark realm the job done Zelda then returns linked to his own time so that he can live his full life after that were treated to one of those end credits sequences where the camera just sort of pans around the game's locations a relatively cheap method I'll admit but an effective one as it reminds us of all the different stages of our journey also we can see that these places are completely empty of people then we see a bonfire and soon learn that all the different races of Hyrule have come together to have a great big party celebrating the end of ganondorf's reign of terror we got to see all these characters from the game chillin together and having a good time then we see the sages watching over them and they fly away and shortly after we come to the pedestal of time where link has just replaced the Master Sword of creating an entire new timeline in the process note then his fairy companion flies away which will directly lead into the events of the game sequel after a false ending finally we come to Zelda's little garden where link walks up to her does she remember everything that just happened is a ganondorf from this earlier timeline perhaps on the other side of that window what will they say to each other it's a mystery for that is where this story concludes that isn't ending now let's take a look at breath of the wilds ending link beats Ganon and Zelda pops out and finishes him off then she asks Linc if he really remembers her and they look at Hyrule Castle as the king and the champions looked down on them roll credits black background with a handful of static snapshots from the game's cutscenes that's that's the ending thanks for playing I guess well okay that's not the whole ending I'll admit you got me if you unlocked all the memories and freed all the divine beasts and really who didn't do that before fighting Ganon you get the real secret ending after the credits here Zelda talks to Linc about how they can rebuild Hyrule she makes a little reference to hearing fly in the Master Sword and that's a nice little nod to Skyward Sword [Music] you've got to be kidding me I can't even necessarily call breath of the wilds ending bad bad suggests a certain lack of quality in something but how can something be bad if it doesn't exist this is an ending only in the sense that it's where the game stops but it certainly doesn't conclude anything more than the most obvious link must be bad man conflict the bland laziness present in Link's memories is at its most ludicrous in the ending I mean this is the ending you couldn't spare just a little bit more effort to leave us feeling satisfied we want to know what really happened after Ganon was defeated how did the people of Hyrule Field what did impo and the sheikah have to say about all this how does Eldon go about restoring Hyrule Castle and and reassembling the Royal Family's forces what did they end up doing with the divine beasts give us something anything and I really wasn't looking for a ton here a very small amount of effort would have got a very long way even if it was just a few little animated bits that showed us what the characters got up to after link beginning like we saw in Twilight Princess just something anything other than nothing unfortunately I can't say the ending doesn't fit with the rest of the game it's a fitting end to a plot that doesn't really do much it's a fitting cutscene in a series of cutscenes where nothing happens again the obvious potential of the game and the strength of its concept are what make all this so hard to forgive it feels like this could have been the best Zelda story ten times over a true evolution of Zelda and storytelling a series shift just as large and important as the overhauled gameplay also I usually try not to let trailers get my expectations up too high and I try not to necessarily judge games based on how I thought they would be because of the trailers and I instead judge them you know by their own merits but I will say this game tricked me the trailers for breath of the wild pulled snippets from every little exciting bit in the game and gave a very wrong impression of how it would ultimately be and I know that's what all trailers do to some extent but this took it too far in the main trailer we saw legions of Guardians laying waste to Hyrule we saw a giant horrific spirit Ganon swirling around Hyrule Castle we saw a link embracing Zelda as she collapsed weeping in the rain we heard parts from all these exciting monologues and saw this crazy stuff happening and I personally thought holy cow some curry easy stuff happens in the Zelda this is like a big action movie but then I got the game and saw that no that stuff in the trailer was basically it the trailer just took bits from the very small pool of exciting stuff the game actually has to offer and like I said that probably shouldn't affect how I view the game now but I have to admit there's a tiny little part of me that's still pretty miffed about it at this point though what's done is unfortunately done the game secrets have been thoroughly plumbed and the dlc ended up doing little to improve the game's story and characters but at the very least we can all hope that maybe it really was just a lack of time and the breath of the wild will eventually get its very own majora's mask equivalent hopefully the next time the zelda team has a great new idea for a story they're given the proper time to develop it into something that lives up to Zelda's pedigree [Music] breath of the wild is without a doubt the most difficult 3d Zelda and probably the most difficult Zelda period since the first two games on NES and when I say difficult I don't necessarily mean it's hard to figure out or has hard puzzles I mean it kills you a lot difficult in the sense that stuff makes you die more than in other Zelda's in combat and out I mean 3d Zelda games in particular haven't traditionally provided much challenge in the past Majora's Mask required a lot of careful planning and time management and Skyward Sword could be hard as heck when the motion controls weren't working properly but really combat has for the most part been really easy with hearts aplenty the addition of hero mode has certainly helped in this regard but in most games unless you're facing a ton of foes all at once it's a simple matter of protecting yourself and striking when you get the chance or using an item to open the baddie up taking damage comes less from a difficult fight and more from a lack of patience and a desire to just swing your sword like crazy breath of the wild takes the series in a whole new direction firstly it's interesting to note that it's the only zelda game where it starts hard and only gets easier the longer you play like when you boot it up and you don't have anything and you don't know what you're doing it is hard as heck but the more you play and the stronger you get the easier it is to navigate until you reach a point where you can blast through everybody you come across there's a slight element of easier as you go in other Zelda games only because when you start a file you've usually only got three hearts meaning you can only take a few hits even from little guys once you get a few extras it becomes easier in a sense though of course the challenges and the baddies do ramp up as you go as is traditional in breadth of the wild though if you take your time like I did it really does just get easier the whole way through even with baddies ramping up I'm getting a little ahead of myself though I'll talk more about progression in a bit right now I want to focus on that more difficult early stage of the experience I'm talking about the great plateau where the game starts when you wake up you're given some clothes that offer very little protection and you're spat out into the world and considering some Zelda games are infamous for having hours long opening sections where you've got to do loads and loads of busy work before you can even get a sword Twilight Princess anyone the great plateau slaps you right in the face with the realization that this ain't the Zelda you're used to son there's no hand-holding here we had given you nothing if you want to do something you've got to figure out how to do it and you've got to be good enough to do it no master sword and not even so much as a wooden practice sword nope you just start out picking up sticks and hitting monsters with them if you want better weapons then you have to win them or steal them from those monsters or if you're lucky find them hidden in chests then of course you find that all weapons break after a while here at the beginning of the game sometimes after only a few hits so this keeps you moving fighting to earn enough weapons to protect yourself with again weapon breakage is something I'll talk more about in a bit so much to all this that it's really hard not to get ahead of myself but anyway one really big thing that makes the game harder at this early stage is the complete and utter lack of recovery hearts you don't get them from downed enemies you don't get them from grass or pots you can't find them anywhere they don't exist in this game this is the case in the hero modes from previous games but this time it's like that right in the base experience if you want to heal you've got to gather food and eat it nothing responds either at least not this early for me blood moons came much later when you pick up an apple and eat it it's gone and it's not like there isn't enough food on the great plateau but it's certainly not something you can farm infinitely or find instantly no matter where you are this gives you a real actual need to be careful and when you make a mistake and get hurt you've got to work to make yourself well again and that happens a lot because like I said this game likes to kill yeah there was a really big moment for me within maybe the first half hour of the game I was wandering around and came to a cliff I wanted to know what was at the bottom of the cliff so I did what I would do in any Zelda game I jumped off and I died and I was like oh that's what kind of game this is all at once I understood I realized that it wasn't gonna baby me like the other Zelda I wasn't some indestructible superhero I actually had to try like a real person would and that was just incredible to me it was such a huge revelation it was invigorating it's pretty funny splatting off a high cliff and having such a big whoa moment it should be obvious that when you jump off a cliff you go splat but this was such a new thing for Zelda and it said something I knew from that moment on that this game would require a lot more of me and I would go on to discover that yeah I right to think that another big moment was when I figured out how to cook which you might have heard me talk about in my first impressions video way back when the game does tell you how to perform all your basic actions but some of the deeper stuff is harder to figure out the mysterious old man can be found in a few different places and he gives you some pointers but probably like many people it was a good while before I found his cabin which is where the game gives you a little rundown on cooking here's how it went with me I wanted to go up the snowy mountain to reach one of the shrines but I couldn't because it was so cold that I constantly took damage this was another really big revelation of how harsh the world could be so I fell back aways to this very conveniently placed enemy camp after clearing out the enemies I found these peppers that claim to help fend off the cold thing was just eating them raw didn't seem to work and there didn't seem to be an option in the menu to combine them into dishes there was a cooking pot in the camp so I figured okay maybe I need to cook them in this pot but again there was no command for it popping up so I thought well maybe it needs fire it felt like a long shot that any of this would work but I'd an ear by campfire with a spear and sure enough it caught and then I jabbed the pot and sure enough it lit that fire I still couldn't get it to work though and I kept thinking I must have needed the ghost guy to tell me how to cook before I could do it or give me a special spoon or something that let me do it but then I was playing around in the menus again when I saw that I could hold items I didn't know exactly what they haven't accomplished but I soon found that I could hold multiple items at once then there was my command I had to hold the ingredients and chuck them into the pot myself so I mixed my peppers with some other stuff and made a potion that let me push into the cold area and that whole experience was immeasurably rewarding especially after playing a game where on one of the last dungeons in the whole thing your companion has to stop everything to remind you that you can shoot arrows to hit switches this was just incredible the game didn't hold my hand it didn't explicitly tell me what to do and why I should do it it didn't halt my progress until I jumped through the right hoop despite the fact that I missed the place where it would have taught me in a more direct manner it gently and naturally led me to learn all this myself it presented me with a need then gave me the tools to figure out how to meet that need and golly gee you know what they call that game design and really the whole plateau is like this it's intricately crafted to teach you nearly everything you need to know about the game it technically is a starting area that you can't escape unless you complete certain tasks but it never feels that way it's only a tiny chunk of the map but it still feels massive especially the first time it's so big that I didn't mind exploring it one bit I spent hours and hours on it before moving on that's a tutorial right there that's a tutorial done right it shows you rather than just telling you it teaches you how cruel the world can be but also how you can get by you want to learn because learning is necessary to survive and never has Elda offered us such a compelling world to explore and survive in back to difficulty though one thing that makes this game the most challenging 3d Zelda yet is naturally the combat like I said combat up until now has been fairly straightforward and as long as you were patient you wouldn't take much or any damage Skyward Sword was definitely different they required properly executed motion controlled strikes in specific directions and just swinging your sword around wildly wouldn't get you anywhere I can sort of applaud this aspect of it but I think the overall execution was lacking I want my fighting to actually take effort though not the kind of effort that makes my arms tired and makes the game significantly less comfortable to play also no matter what game you're talking about motion controls will never be 100% reliable and the game doing one thing while you're trying to tell it to do another is never fun or fair but as it does with many many things that previous elders attempted breath of the wild takes the idea of more challenging and engaging combat and really nails it and it's hard to pin down exactly what is so much better about it it just feels so much less mechanical and exploitable than it used to there's a very natural feel to it instead of finding ways to open baddies up to attack as though they're puzzles it's about just killing him finding a way to do enough damage that they die from it when you counter an enemy it's not because the a button went but a tip and told you it was time to counter when you counter an enemy it's because you avoided their attack and followed up with your own like a counter work there's so many ways to go about fighting in so many moves you can do especially when you consider the runes and all the environmental stuff if you take out your bow while you're in the air you can slow down time and take better aim this alone opens up an annoyed this amount of options and most importantly is just really cool it's just really fun and empowering to pull off it makes you feel really awesome doing all these rad matrix shots all over the place successful parries are your reward for learning your enemy well and honing your reaction time then there are flurry rushes to try and pull off and these can be pretty tricky too there are times when you'll set one off without much effort but other times it just won't seem to work right there's just a lot to combat this time around it's so much more complex than it's ever been in fact I've put over 200 hours into the game and I still don't feel like I've mastered the combat I still find myself struggling sometimes when I'm fighting a big baddie without using any tricks like runes or bomb arrows getting walloped while I try and fail again and again to dodge an attack and get my rush one of the biggest changes though is that unless you're strong enough to take them out in a couple hits even the smallest guys won't let you just sit there and wail on them like pass baddies they'll block your attacks which will damage your weapon and unless you're able to knock their shield out of the way they'll inevitably hit you back and if they're whaling on you naturally you can't just sit there and block everything either your shield is just as likely to break as your sword it's just so much harder this time around to completely incapacitate monsters so if there happened to be a lot of them around fighting becomes something you've really got to think about the name of the game is strategy you can't always just launch yourself into any situation or you're likely to get your clock cleaned you've got to practice fighting know your enemy make sure you've got enough firepower to last you through the battle and in many cases try your best to deal as much damage as you can before your foes have even spotted you and speaking of breakable weapons and shields this is something that I was initially a little worried about but I soon saw how much it improved the game once more this will all sound familiar to you if you've watched my video in defense of breadth of the wilds brutal weapons but seeing as this is a comprehensive review I'd like to go over it again and I know that this is a very hot button topic there are people very firmly on both sides of the fence but here's the way I see it at least breakable weapons and shields limit the player like I said there one thing that makes the game so challenging especially at first the ability to attack and breath of the wild is no longer something you can take for granted it's a resource it's something that can be depleted and needs to be actively maintained and early on in the game this basically forced me to learn how to fight and learn all the different ways that I could kill baddies I had to learn how to sneak and execute stealth kills or utilize rolling boulders and exploding barrels ahead to use whatever weapons I found which led me to learn how to use the different weapon types which I then discovered were useful in different situations I learned the importance of a well-aimed arrow and when to use a spear versus a sword and how to effectively throw nearly broken weapons for critical damage critics of this breakage system usually cite two primary issues that they have with it and I'll address them here first they don't like that the game forces them to do anything they feel that in an open world game that offers a great sense of freedom as a selling point no single mechanics should be thrust upon them and if they want to use a single one-hander the whole game they should be able to do just that and I kind of see where they're coming from here but I just can't agree being limited and disadvantaged is one of the things that makes breadth of the wild so refreshing and unique do you really want to just play the same old Zelda where you go around trouncing every single guy you come across because that's what it would be like if you had even one decent unbreakable sword at the very beginning it would completely destroy the very delicate balance of difficulty that the Zelda team crafted here encouraging you to adapt and try new things is a very deliberate design choice that helps distinguish the game from past entries and all that would go out the window if your weapons didn't break plus it only forces you to explore other avenues of fighting at the very beginning once you really get rolling the game throws enough weapons at you that you've got a lot of freedom and can kill baddies however you want at the absolute worst you'll be annoyed that you've got to use a spear because you ran out of one handers but you certainly don't have to keep sneaking and shooting and magnificent if you don't want to secondly they don't like how the weapons breaks so darn quickly because the threat of losing a good weapon makes them not want to ever use it and in the beginning I will admit that the weapons do break absurdly fast this is the game teaching you how to play and offering you an incentive to keep adventuring for better and better stuff but again as you move through the game they start lasting longer and longer and you gain access to more and more of them it is not long at all before you've got more weapons than you know what to do with so people who don't want to use their weapons I don't normally like they get over it attitude when it comes to gaming I truly believe that most if not all opinions are valid opinions if you feel something about a certain aspect of a game then that's just how you feel we all have wildly differing tastes but in this particular case you gotta get over it man this is completely a hang-up that I understand and in fact I even feel it myself in this game sometimes but it's one that you just have to get around you just have to ignore because it doesn't make any sense using your low-level weapons because you don't want to waste your best ones will slow down your progress toward getting more great weapons like you will overall have more higher level stuff if you just use your stuff and get through those baddies faster later in the game Hyrule throws more awesome swords at you than you know what to do with this little hang-up is too silly a thing to spoil the whole experience because it's not even a thing it's not even a real problem it's an imaginary one when in doubt just use it you will always get another one later suffice it to say I love the breakage system I love how it led me to really learn how to play the game and on a more kind of dumb video game II level I love the constant satisfaction of finding cool stuff I'm constantly like oh cool another Lionel Sword ooh look at the bonus on this Guardian spear oh yes shiny new shields as long as I keep moving forward and smashing everything I pick up over the heads of my foes in that intensely satisfying way I'll always be stupidly pleased to find even more stuff to smash over the heads of my foes it's a very effective feedback loop swinging back around to difficulty one final time because sometimes I'm terrible at structuring my reviews I want to talk about one more element of breadth of the wild that really blew me away that really hit home that this was a very different Zelda game see I never stumbled upon the stone talus on the great plateau but the Zelda team did very cleverly place one right along the path to Kakariko village just in case I ran into this one and this was obviously my greatest challenge yet the thing was just massive and since I had so few hearts and such lame armor it could squish me in one hit yeah Zelda game with an enemy that could one-shot me this was really happening I fought the thing for ages reloading my save again and again learning its moves and stunning it and using up all my weapons trying to bring it down and I'm sure plenty of other people have figured out ways to beat these things with nothing more than a mop and Acorah cleef or something but not me I reached a point where I just looked at it and went I'm not strong enough to beat this thing I'm playing a Zelda game and fighting a boss and I'm not good enough at fighting nor do I have enough equipment to bring this thing down I don't have enough hearts and my swords aren't strong enough to do the job so I just left I ran away to Kakariko and this was huge this was just so different it was exhilarating and exciting because moving forward that stone talus was always in the back of my mind and I dreamed of the day I would be strong enough to bring it down and sure enough I did I came back later and it was a great challenge but after a long struggle I did it and it felt awesome that sense of victory was not only new Frisell de but also for Nintendo I'd never felt so accomplished playing any Nintendo title I'd never felt like I rose to a challenge like that before this wasn't just getting the hookshot then going into the boss room and using the hookshot on its big hook shoddy but or whatever this was a creature that was just plain hard to fight it was just strong and they put it in front of me right at the start of the game so that I knew I had something to work toward it was up to me to get better at fighting and get stronger gear and whenever I was ready I could try again and when I finally beat the thing that was me beating it not my hook shot or my bombs or my boomerang not its big hook shoddy but or its glowy eye or whatever yeah I had tools at my disposal yeah it had a weak spot but the victory wasn't handed to me I earned it through my hard work I think it also has something to do with the fact that this guy was optional it's one thing to reach a hard enemy in a game and have to try a bunch of times before you can beat it and move forward but breadth of the wilds open world with all of its enemies that you can walk up to at any time it's somehow much more thrilling each challenge feels more personal each one is your challenge it's always there waiting for you to give it another shot and overcoming a challenge like that is so much more rewarding than overcoming one that you had to overcome in order to beat the game or whatever it makes a game feel less like just a game and more like your own private adventure and that stone talus may have been the first big vote to trounce me many times before I could in turn trounce it but it wasn't the most notable climbing up to shatter back point to collect twenty shock arrows was an unreal experience it was the run-in with the stone talus times ten as I talked about in the section on exploration the sight of the Lionel terrified me and of course it wasn't long at all before I discovered that it could kill me dead with one arrow I thought that thing for probably an hour before I decided I just couldn't do it I wasn't even coming close to beating the thing I was barely leaving a scratch on it so I gave up problem was I still needed those shock arrows so I was forced to sneak around and collect them and as I did so I was scared out of my mind this was not me sneaking because this was a stealth section and the game demanded that I sneak or else I would get thrown in jail or have to start over or something this was me sneaking because if the bad guy saw me it would murder me and not in a little insta fail try again kind of wait no it would just chase me and hit me until I was dead and this was terrifically exciting I know I've been saying it a lot but again it didn't feel like something from a Zelda game it was so different and so much more eventually I gathered up enough arrows but I vowed to return someday and defeat that beast that Lionel was my white whale my new objective even above freeing the divine beasts and beating ganon and saving Hyrule I absolutely had to kill that thing so I came back every once in a while and still it managed to overpower me many many times but each time I brought its health down a little lower I lasted a little longer and one day finally finally after many long hours in the game and many many attempts I did it I climbed that mountain and the fight that ensued was legendary I probably learned more about combat from that one fight than I did from the entire rest of the game I learned its moves and how to counter each one I perfected the timing of my shield parry and wailed on it with a two-hander whenever it was stunned I felt like an animal I had fire in my eyes not even the hardest zelda bosses had ever tested my medal like that or demanded such timing and precision but everything the game asked I delivered I drained that thing's health and when it finally fell with a roar I too roared I raised my fist to the sky and triumphant made my victory known to all who could hear my mighty cry it was and still is the strongest sense of accomplishment I felt in any Zelda it was absolutely glorious later I would find different-colored Lionel's that would strike me with terror and dread all over again wait there's a there's a white one too but as time went on I got even stronger and learned how to fight them even better and now I can make short work of the toughest line out there sometimes after a Blood Moon when they all respond I'll go line huntin just to do it just to show them who owns Hyrule and this aspect of the game's difficulty leads us to the next topic progression breath of the wild does not work like any other zelda when it comes to progression because every other zelda up to this point has largely based its progression on items items grant you new abilities which allow you to reach new areas and beat bosses that's really Zelda in a nutshell for breath of the wild gives you all of your runes which are essentially your items right at the beginning once you leave the great plateau you've technically got everything you need to go and complete all the game's major objectives the entire map is open to you from the start there is still some sense of progression though there are a handful of different obstacles that will try to keep you from certain areas but I'd say the two things the game uses most to get you off are your combat strength and your stamina meter ie hard monsters and things like tall cliffs or large bodies of water since we've been going over difficulty let's cover the former first the world is filled with baddies with difficulty levels denoted by a series of colors finding and completing shrines will cause all the baddies in the world to slowly scale up and from what I can tell they'll usually scale relative to each other if you find a place with two mob lines and a bloom hablen later they might become two blue mob lens and a black mob 'ln then later two black mob lands and a silver mumbling most lionel's will eventually become silver though some of the ones that were meant to be easier will stay at lower levels the outliers here are the Guardians because they don't seem to scale at all they're extremely deadly for a lot if not most of the game but eventually you get strong enough to take them out with relative ease this whole scaling system provides a pretty good balance if every enemy was a static difficulty then progression would be much more limited you would basically be forced to only tackle the lower level areas until you've gotten strong enough to hit the harder areas heading anywhere new it would just come down to luck if you were strong enough to move forward and of course you would eventually reach some new area and realize that you were supposed to hit it earlier and look at that now every single enemy is so laughably weak that it's no fun but here the option to go somewhere is pretty much always on the table and just often enough you'll be blocked by tougher foes to keep things interesting and provide some of that very nice challenge I was talking about the game provides freedom and challenge and good measures as I said Guardians are the only enemies that don't scale each one regardless of its type lives where it lives and never gets stronger and I think this is a really important element of the game if scalable enemies help keep things balanced these unscalable ones balance it further by selectively turning just some areas of the game into particularly difficult challenges to overcome there aren't so many Guardians around that you never feel like you can go where you want to but there are just enough to instill a very thrilling sense of danger and build what are essentially progression gates but of course gates that you can hop if you're good enough early on when Guardians could vaporize me with one blast and seem to have way more HP than I could ever possibly hope to dish out I was all the more intrigued by the places they guarded all of Hyrule Castle seemed so mysterious and terrifying and I never wanted to get close because there were always so many stalkers around it if a place was patrolled by sky watchers I had to hold my breath and sneak around and pray they didn't see me and blow me to smithereens and whenever I did manage to get past them it felt like I was going somewhere I wasn't supposed to if a place is guarded by enemies that are way too strong for me to fight I must be breaking the system by sneaking in oh man if Ganon catches me here he's gonna be so mad the whole idea of every area being open to me for the most part but some being so much more dangerous than others was really fantastic talk about a sense of place breath of the wilds Hyrule feels so much more real because it doesn't feel like the whole thing is fed to you in bits with a little choice on your part you're not totally blocked off from any major areas but some of them do take a lot of extra work to get to and of course as you can guess it feels awful good when you do get strong enough to just waltz in these tougher areas and cut stalkers to pieces left and right whether you're hitting these places early or late it feels great it feels like you really earned it enemies may scale as you complete shrines but of course you get stronger as well the goddess orbs you find in shrines can be exchanged for hearts or extra stamina both hearts and stamina feed into your combat ability naturally either increasing the number of hits you can take or how big of a spin attack you can do and how much you can sprint let's talk about stamina next though because that's the other thing that largely determines where you can and can't go in breath of the wild you can climb just about any surface which opens up immense exploration possibilities but if you run out of stamina at any point you fall similarly it takes stamina to glide with your paraglider or swim across water this is extra clever because it means despite the fact that you've technically got all the tools you need to beat the game your ability to explore is increased directly by exploring the ability to reach new areas more effectively or even at all in some cases comes from reaching new areas finding and completing as many shrines as you can it's a very rewarding system and it feels very natural it gives the world a certain amount of consistency and logic sure you can go anywhere you want but are you strong enough to climb that cliff can you hold on long enough to glide out to that island and this of course goes hand-in-hand with the core exceed weapon slot system that I talked about in the section on exploration that's another way in which you're rewarded with more strength the more you explore the more core ox you find the more weapons you can hold the more damage you can do the more places you can go over all these elements make running around and doing stuff worth doing a game this big and open Nintendo could have easily messed up in this department creating a huge world to explore but offering little reason to do so or making it so open that it was easy and boring they pulled it off though even without being based on items breath of the wilds progression system is fun and satisfying it does have a few problems though the biggest one is that while they did a pretty good job of replacing item based progression I don't know if they can ever truly do it like while I obviously enjoy the way breath of the wild does progression there's always always that little part of me that misses the old way I mean it was at the core of Zelda's identity just as it is with Metroid for example and I can definitely see where people are coming from when they dislike breath of the wild for straying too far from the Zelda formula to feel like a Zelda game anymore I was a little bummed when I first found out that the great plateau contained all the quote-unquote items in the end the immense freedom and other forms of progression were enough for me to be okay with this new system but who's to say that moving forward in the series I won't start to miss the old way even more than I do now maybe a mix of the two systems would be the best of both worlds I know it's a delicate process but I'm pretty sure they could fit at least a little more in there to block the player's path in the future just a little backtracking for the sake of backtracking isn't exactly fun especially in a game this big but at the same time it's hard to replace the satisfaction of carving your way into new areas because of a new item or ability you've found of having the world open up as you play but I don't know I could probably do a whole video just on this topic so let's move on before we get in over our heads another problem I have is how weapons scale when you beat shrines and get orbs you get hearts and stamina and that's great because it's tangible it means something you accomplish more you get more you get stronger but on top of that beating shrines makes the loot you find scale up whether it's being held by foes or hidden in chests this is actually the primary way that you get stronger as in the way you raise your attack you don't gain actual levels your base attack doesn't go up you just find better weapons as you go your armor rating goes up and you gain other bonuses by acquiring and upgrading armor but let's save that for another section this weapon scaling system is obviously to help you keep up with these scaling enemies like I said I like the scaling enemies because they keep the game interesting otherwise too many areas would be worthlessly easy and boring but when combined with this weapon scaling the whole thing starts to feel a little arbitrary technically it is all happening because you're beating shrines so it's a little like you're levelling up or whatever but I often stop and think I wish I was getting stronger I wish my strength was more about building up my character and less about what weapons the game decides to spawn for me it's like if it's gonna scale both the enemies and the weapons kind of equally it might as well give me a rainbow Lionel with a billion health and a sword with 10 million attack it doesn't really matter it's kind of a false sense of progression in a way it's not like the whole thing is worthless or anything it does feel nice to move forward and get stronger and eventually you get to the point where you dominate everything which means the baddies and the weapons aren't moving at exactly the same speeds but I just think they could have come up with a better way for the game to pull you along than just slowly spawning better and better weapons even a traditional leveling system with a growing Attack stat would have worked really well especially because that would mean getting XP from enemies and that would be a dream come true for me or hey maybe you don't need XP maybe these spirit orbs could be exchanged for hearts or stamina or attack power that would make things even more interesting this system is especially lame when you consider how loot that you find in treasure chests with in shrines doesn't scale for whatever reason and if it doesn't scale well of course they don't want to risk you finding weapons way above your level so for most of the game you're opening chests and just throwing away what you find inside the special weapons you get from each of the divine beasts same thing they're just worthless chances are they're not going to be as strong as the other stuff you're getting at least if you're taking your time with the game so it kind of feels like what's the point of even having them I never used any of the legendary weapons not even once my last problem with the progression system is that it's kind of ruined by one of the abilities you get in the game two words Rivoli's Gale this allows you to fly way up in the air on a big gust of wind and yeah you've got a limited amount of gales before you have to recharge but the weight is really not a big deal the only reason this move didn't ruin too much of my fun was that I did a substantial amount of the game before heading to see the Rito some of the most fun I had in my initial run was trying to scale tall cliffs or figuring out how to traverse extra tricky areas a collet Tower oh man why couldn't more of the game have been like this surrounded by Ganon gunk and rubble how are you supposed to get up there a total head-scratcher then there's hyrule castle I had a ton of fun sneaking in early and trying to figure out how to get to the top it's that puzzle thing Eiji Aonuma was talking about before the game came out how in breath of the wild you'd be able to go anywhere but figuring out how to get to some places would be the puzzle oh that's how puzzle over puzzle solved once you get Rivoli's Gayle's so much of the challenge of traversal is gone in an instant it's just overpowered it throws off the wonderful balance of stamina and how it effects your progression entirely it's the kind of thing that I'm glad exists because after a while I do want to just get everywhere I want easily it's fun to eventually overcome your limitations and work your way up to being godlike in any game but it's just too easy to get here now that I know the move exists when I start a new playthrough I'm either gonna hit that divine beast first and get it first thing or I'm gonna be exploring and constantly wishing I had it because it's much harder to live without when it's within your grasp and you know how easy it makes everything the other Champion powers are pretty op2 to be honest and also manage to negate a lot of great design choices seriously Memphis grace basically a fairy that recharges and maxes out my health so I don't really have to be careful anymore Ravalli scale is the one that comes closest to undermining what the game is trying to achieve though one thing that would have solved all Opie problems with the champion powers would be to make each power pretty weak from the start and require level up maybe sometimes when you clear a shrine in addition to an orb you get something that makes one of your powers stronger more height for Ravalli scale more hearts from EFA's grace more charges for Dukes protection more power and range for our BOCES fury and how about lower recharge times across the board I feel this would have helped balance the game and on top of that it would have given us even more to work for and feel good about achieving we would still feel awesome gaining these abilities holy cow I can just shot guys now awesome but they wouldn't throw things out of whack like they do now all in all it ain't perfect nor is it varies lde but the progression system and breadth of the wild still works pretty darn well I would definitely like to see some tweaks and additions in the hypothetical sequel but I still had a lot of fun with it between the stamina system the scaling the new levels of challenge and the weapon breakage it makes for an incredibly fresh experience I can easily say that breath of the wild is much more engaging and takes much more thought than Zelda's of old and even if some of that classic Zelda feel was lost along the way I'm very thankful for what it accomplishes [Music] we've talked a lot about breadth of the wilds world so far and some of the stuff you get to do in it but now let's talk about how you interact with that world as well as how it in turn affects you starting with a pretty darn important element of a game this large traversal now the way I see it apart from you know running around there are two primary methods of traversal that are unique to this game the first and most impactful is climbing when I first heard that you could climb stuff in breadth of the wild I made all the assumptions you would expect it's gonna require an item you're only gonna be able to climb on certain surfaces that kind of thing I was extremely surprised when I booted it up and found that nope you can climb on basically everything every surface as long as it's not raining which we'll talk about later I originally thought that such an ability would allow too much freedom especially with the world this big I mean aren't there at least some areas the developers don't want us getting into I mean isn't that like how video games usually are but no they did it anyway they gave us that freedom and frankly it's incredible it really makes you feel like Hyrule is yours it instills this incredible sense of possibility and gives you constant incentive to go off the beaten path and challenge yourself to reach new places traversal itself is now a bigger challenge than it's ever been and of course that means it's also more fun and rewarding early in the game you look up at a high place and you go there's no way I can get up there I'm sure I'll have to come back later but then you try it and maybe you have to go at it from a few different angles or maybe you have to run off and brew up a stamina potion first but then you just barely make it to the top with the very last sliver of your stamina and you're like yes I am the best Zelda man ever and really that reflects the very new and unique magic of breadth of the wild in its world it used to be all about solving puzzles or beating bad guys but now even just the simple act of getting up onto one of the game's countless clips can be an immensely rewarding experience that all kind of goes out the window once you get Ravalli scale but I already complained about that in the section on progression the second major mode of travel is gliding with the paraglider this little thing is absolutely genius the world is so big but the distance never feels like a barrier it's never oppressive because you can always just climb up somewhere or warp to a tower and fly really fast in any direction covering a great distance it offers yet another huge sense of freedom because you never have to worry about getting down off a cliff or any high place once you put in the work to get somewhere high your payoff is just gliding away taking a smooth ride to wherever you like it makes traversal infinitely more fun and it complements the climbing incredibly well these two modes combine to make verticality more important than it's ever been in any Zelda game which makes Hyrule feel even bigger than it already is if the map is a skillion square miles or whatever it's that much more when you consider all the surfaces to climb these abilities would be too useful early in the game if they had no limits however so here we have a very clever stamina system again I talked about stamina in the section on progression but I've got one more point to make about it here while we're talking about traversal specifically one of the best things about breadth of the wild is that it takes elements and concepts that were only touched on in other Zelda's and flushes them out builds each one into a big part of the whole experience rather than just a little something to make an entry stand out a bit more we'll talk about the others in a while but perhaps the most important one is stamina Skyward Sword introduced the concept of stamina and if you ask me it didn't mean much in that game it offered some more options in combat where you could perform extra big attacks of course with the risk of running out of stamina and leaving yourself open for a moment that was pretty cool but beyond that it was kind of worthless if you were climbing up a wall or running up a steep slope or something that were always stamina fruits along the way so that you didn't run out if there were then it would be impossible you would simply not have enough stamina but there were so there was no real challenge it was an interesting idea and I certainly appreciated that they were trying new things with Skyward Sword but it was an idea that fell a little flat like they thought it was a good idea and implemented it without making sure they could come up with clever ways to use it first breadth of the wild takes the concept of stamina and turns it into an integral part of the experience it's not just a novelty something new just for the sake of being new it's a very natural and logical mechanic gliding is also a mechanic that we've seen in past Zelda's in Wind Waker you could glide with your Deku leaf but it took magic to do so and it was like why magic how does that make sense he's just holding on to a leaf but here oh right it takes stamina to hold on to your paraglider as long as you can makes perfect sense plus stamina auto regenerating makes things like gliding and climbing much less restrictive than if they still used magic for instance instead of limiting you it feels like it empowers you even if it empowers you by making you feel limited at first since traversal has never been more important and is Elda game this system keeps you from dominating the terrain right from the get-go then thanks to spirit orbs we have this very rewarding progression system where the more you explore the more you can't explore yada-yada-yada so there's technically one more significant way to get around in breadth of the wild but unfortunately I just don't feel like it makes much sense I'm not really sure why they made horses so useless in this game I mean the first image we ever saw of it was of link on a horse riding a horse through this big open world with all its beautiful grasslands it seemed so perfect it seemed like horses we're going to be more useful than they've ever been but if you ask me that just ain't the case here they can get you somewhere in good time sure certainly faster than walking but pretty much never in my journey did I want to just plow through uncharted territory superfast especially your first time through it's impossible to take three steps in this game without getting distracted by something and wandering off the beaten path usually somewhere your horse can't go and that wouldn't be a problem if you could call your horse like in you know every other Zelda with a horse ever but you can't you can whistle for them which i think is pretty cool I love how there's a button just for doing it but this is one of those instances in a game when something is very realistic at the expense of being fun imagine how close you would actually have to be for a horse to hear you whistle in real life that's pretty much how close you have to be for these horses to hear you therefore if you want to use your horse more than likely you've already wandered too far from it and your best bet is going to be to skip the whistle and instead head to a stable and have them bring your horse to you but of course that wastes a lot of time and you're just gonna end up leaving it behind again anyway pretty much no matter where you're at there's a faster way to get where you're going then to warp to a stable and talk to them and have them call your horse and then set off for your destination yes you do have the ability to magically call your horse from anywhere if you have the magic armor found in the DLC but one I'm trying not to talk about the DLC in this review and two if you have the DLC you also have a sick motorcycle so that's something of a moot point it's totally fine for other forms of travel to be better than riding horses but this is frustrating for two reasons one it would be very easy to make them less worthless how about letting them hear your whistle as long as you're in the same section of the map or within a certain radius at the very least or maybe they could follow you to a degree any of that would make a massive difference to the fact that you can catch your own horses makes the idea of horses so much cooler some horses are rarer and better than others so when you see one you're like oh my gosh look at the solid color on that horse I wonder what its stats are then there's the absolute thrill of trying to sneak up and catch one and this is another thing that depends on your stamina which is another stroke of genius you want a really nice horse you got to be strong enough to tame one then you can name them and buy different get-ups for them and have them as your cool animal companions on your adventure it has the potential to be a supremely awesome part of the game but with all of these horsey limitations the entire mechanic kind of goes out the window for me at least I mean it's not like I never ever use horses they're fine when it's early in the game and you've explored very little of the map and you want to get to a very specific place and focus SuperDuper hard on not getting too sidetracked but in my experience that has not been a very common occurrence if I'm heading somewhere new I'm taking my time to explore and if I'm going somewhere far away that I've already been to well that leads us to warping in a sense warping to towers and shrines is an important mode of travel and breadth of the wild but it's not exactly a mode of traversal you can only warp to places you've already been so it's more about convenience than anything beyond the fact that you can hit a tower from one side and use its height to glide into the other unexplored side but you can say that about any high place however despite not technically feeling like a mode of traversal it's still definitely worth mentioning just as it was with climbing I was so happy to start the game and see that I immediately had access to this power if you find a tower or a shrine you can warp to it at any time period you don't have to wait until partway through the game to unlock the ability and you're not limited to five or six warp points in fact it's almost too useful if you're ever in a bind and about to be smushed by some big monster you can always just bring up your menu and bye-bye that's sort of removes some of the sense of danger in taking risks and picking fights with higher level stuff however I really appreciate the convenience of it limitations in games are fine but not being able to warp around easily would definitely hinder my enjoyment getting places would be too much of a chore this way it's never a problem to return to a place you've already been unless you're bothered by the loading screens which yeah there they could be a little long I'll admit finally it feels kind of funny to call shield surfing a mode of Traverse because it's more for fun than anything but we got to talk about it somewhere right it's not as useful or intuitive as gliding but shield surfing is similar to gliding in that it's very freeing it's a way to get down from a high place in a very quick and very fun manner really it's a testament to just how aware the designers were of the need for breath of the wilds traversal to be constantly enjoyable and offer a lot of variety I don't think I would have even come up with the idea myself but its inclusion is just delightful the world already feels like a big toy sometimes and shield surfing adds another layer to the fun brings in another element to keep you playing and experimenting and really it does serve one practical purpose you can't bring a horse into the desert and there's a lot of sand across grabbing onto a sand sea land scooting along at high speed is really useful and I would love to see this idea explored even more in future games maybe dragging behind roving enemies and horses shield surfing is also interesting because it's another example of something that's been done in a past Zelda game namely surfing down these snowy mountain in Twilight Princess that is fully realized and turned into something practical and breath of the wild it's no longer just a minigame to be played in one specific place so that's how you interact with breath of the wilds terrain but what about the stuff well let me tell you that there's a whole lot of stuff interacting in this game also somewhat new to breadth of the wild is physics now I say somewhat because obviously previous games have indeed employed physics it's kind of how it's gonna have games work but never have they been such an integral part of the game nearly every single thing in the world is a free moving object that can be affected by gravity and wind even ingredients and raw materials can be carried around and dumped wherever you please bonds can now roll down hills yet another thing that Skyward Sword sort of touched on but not to the same extent rupees curiously enough are really the only things that you don't purposefully pick up by hitting a button and you come across freestanding ones lying on the ground very rarely pretty much just when you're harassing blue piece most objects are also destructible your weapons and materials and trees and boxes etc all can be burned and broken but all this wasn't put in place just so they could be like look at these fancy physics oh look at all this destructible stuff isn't this game cutting-edge breath of the wilds physics fit the theme that's strengthened by your new traversal abilities the idea that the world is yours you have limitless options you can play however you want to play that's why when coming up with the runes they didn't just give us the use Zelda stuff no boomerang no lens of truth no spinner know stuff that's mostly good in specific situations used as progression tools the runes in this game which act as your quote items are all about using this physic system to interact with the world in much broader ways and this is what truly turns Hyrule into your playground I'll talk a little more about each specific rune in another section but the possibilities the Zelda team gave us here are staggering stasis alone which not only freezes objects but allows you to hit them to build up their momentum so you can watch them blast off is a huge game-changer unfortunately I'm not nearly as clever as a lot of other people on YouTube but the stuff you can do with stasis is absurd then Magnus is another big one there are a lot of metal objects out there and they pretty much just gave us Magnus's and said here metal objects are now your plaything have fun magneto you can use this ability for fun or fighting or of course for puzzling which again is something we'll talk about later sorry gotta stay on track bombs are certainly a Zelda staple but an explosion is always going to be a very practical and desirable thing then there's cry onus which might be the least enormous ly useful out of all the runes if you have to rank them but it's still a big deal it's perfect for traversing water and it's applications in puzzle solving are limitless even beyond just physics and runes you've got weather and elemental effects and this adds another layer of complexity there was a big wall moment when I realized just how many different ways the pieces of this game could interact with each other it was the first time I saw that burning grass created an updraft that could give me a boost with my paraglider I was just like what on earth that's so awesome the game is filled with random little interactions like that that you've just got to discover take out an arrow in a hot place look at that you've got a flaming arrow just make sure to shoot it or put it away before it burns up outside in a thunderstorm watch out for metal objects getting struck by lightning or hey use Magni psious to weaponize the lightning got some ice troubles any kind of fire will melt it camp fire flaming sword fire arrow whatever no spring water or special blue flame needed here it's raining or your enemies standing in water then your shock arrows will do tons of damage and stun them nothing is arbitrary nothing works just because you've got an item that says it works and you use it on something that was made to be affected by that item everything follows logic wood burns ice melts water conducts electricity heat rises if you're still experimenting with how the game works and you think doing a certain thing will work a certain way there's a pretty good chance that you're right speaking of weather and how it affects you though real quick that stinking rain now I am very conflicted here I like the idea of something limiting your ability to climb in fact the zora wing of the divine beast quest just might be the best because of that long and very challenging sequence where you've got to travel up a mountain without climbing at all because of the constant rain temporary limitations are good they make you think differently they prevent you from being too overpowered all the time the problem with rain making it next to impossible to climb though is that it's one of those things that probably sounded great on paper but I say a whole different story when you actually apply it to the game as a whole fun versus realism isn't a constant issue in game design and as we discovered with calling horses just because something is realistic that doesn't mean it's fun and in this case rain messing up your climbing means spending a lot of time just standing around sometimes waiting minutes and minutes for the rain to stop that is not fun no one is going to think that that is fun if you can find some covering you can build a campfire and wait it out or you can go do something else but come on you're here you want to do the thing you want to do and wouldn't you know it every single time you're about to climb this specific thing that rain starts in again it's not the sort of thing that ruins the game and of course it's not always a problem but what it is it can be a humongous pain it would be much better if there was some way to eventually thwart it maybe you get an item that prevents slipping partway through the game maybe the suit bonus for the climbing outfit prevents slipping maybe the more stamina you have the less you slip just something some way to feel like you eventually overcame the rain Ravalli scale does help a lot but man it's still just annoying to swing back around and conclude my point though between all the elemental effects and runes and everything you've got yourself a Zelda game that's big on destiny and Ganon Thornton and princess Savin and all that like usual but even removed from all that also acts as a giant toy box the physics system and the tools you're given to utilize it change everything whether it's working through dungeons or damaging enemies or just goofing off and having a good time it's another thing that keeps the huge world being bland and boring like too many open worlds and games it's what gives Hyrule life no matter where you go or what you do there's always a new way to go about solving a problem or some new interaction to see now let's dip back into what I was talking about earlier though stuff that other Zelda's toyed with the butt breath of the wild fully realizes and fits into its cohesive world one thing is temperature ocarina of time introduced the idea of being damaged by high temperature areas with Death Mountain crater and the Fire Temple if you wanted to hang out in a volcano without your heart slowly draining you had to go get yourself a red tunic in breath of the wild though the whole concept is implemented so naturally you've got a temperature gauge right there on your screen that tells you how close you are to taking damage and there's no single the extreme temperature place that hurts you every area of Hyrule has a temperature which changes depending on different things and as you move around that temperature naturally goes up and down get higher in altitude it tends to go down get close to the death mountain it goes up Gerudo desert and I feel this is a stroke of pretty genius design becomes too hot in the day and too cold at night like a real desert again it all follows logic rather than being a simple barrier that's overcome by getting the right item and how you go about protecting yourself against the elements is up to you you can wear the proper attire and even then you'll need multiple pieces of the right gear to protect yourself against the most extreme temperatures finally getting heat and cold resistant armor felt like a very big moment for me very empowering then you can brew up some elixirs and meals to protect yourself as well and another satisfying moment for me was learning the difference between very hot and actually on fire and figuring out how to make the right elixir to get myself up Death Mountain no I didn't have to beat the right temple to get the right item to make the game let me up there I just had to figure out how to do it then Hey look at that if it's cold you can just hold a burning stick or sword or huddle up next to a bonfire if you want there's that logic again fire is warm put fire near body body warm - what do you know next up we've got breakage we already talked about this a lot in a previous section so I won't get into it here but suffice it to say it is another thing that a previous Zelda only touched on Skyward Sword gave you shields that wore down and broke over time and you only got an unbreakable shield for beating a boss challenge that was totally dumb and stupid because that game had some dumb and stupid boss battles but that's way beside the point breath of the wild your shields and weapons wear down and break after long enough now let's talk about stealth stealth is one of those things that you take part in very rarely in zelda games and only in the cases when those games give you no other choice you're trying to get somewhere and there are guys that for whatever dumb reason instantly make you lose if they see you wind waker is a great example of this you lose your sword so you've got to avoid mob lens or else they'll set you on fire and put you in a cell after you get your sword back however stealth goes out the window there's positively no reason to use it ever again and in fact you can't after that specific sequence you don't even have the option to hide in barrels anymore Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks did use stealth to a greater degree I'll certainly give them credit there but these were still very specific enemies in very specific circumstances in breadth of the wild however any enemy is an enemy you can sneak up on as we discussed before this game can be challenging and you can find yourself in the presence of an enemy you have little chance of beating but you've always got the option to crouch down and hide in the grass and either slink away or close in for a stealth attack it's extremely awesome that they incorporated stealth kills into a Zelda game later on when you're super strong it doesn't matter as much but when you're still pretty weak sneaking into an enemy camp and taking out each sleeping foe one by one well that's something I'm used to doing in an obsession screed game or something certainly not a Zelda game and of course stealth is the perfect way to get a lay of the land and look for chances to take out your enemies without even getting close usually thanks to exploding barrels that are very strangely yet very conveniently kept around everywhere and just so there's no frustration in trying to figure out how quiet you're being or what you're accidentally doing that's waking up your enemies right there on the screen a little doodad that lets you know at all times I'm sure I'm starting to sound like a broken record but once more stealth here makes sense it follows logic like everything else the idea is fully realized and it fits in perfectly with the rest of the world finally we come to two older concepts monster spoils and potions Wind Waker introduced the idea of getting specific loot from specific monsters though most of these spoils went towards specific side quests and meant little after those quests were completed there were a few however that could be used to make certain potions if given to the right characters I never really bothered seeing as that game is for duper easy and eventually you get some awesome grandma soup that makes all that worthless but it's good that they tried out the mechanic then Skyward Sword as usual was at the forefront of pre breath of the wild innovations you could buy potions but you could also augment them with all sorts of bugs you found out in the world making them way more potent this was really really awesome at the time but surprise surprise breadth of the wild takes the idea and makes it really work first off now instead of taking your bugs and stuff to a guy in spending rupees to get them all blended together you brew your own potions which funny enough in this game are called elixirs there are critters all over Hyrule grasshoppers butterflies that kind of stuff and to make elixirs you mix those critters with monster parts then in addition to elixirs you can cook meals with all sorts of edible stuff you find everywhere whether it's mushrooms or meat or fruit or whatever and I gotta say this whole system is quite in-depth there are so so many ingredients to find in the world and there's no inventory limit so you can hoard everything you come across each ingredient does something and mixing them all together can create meals and potions that heal you or make you stronger or make you faster or protect you from the elements like we talked about earlier elixirs in particular use a fairly complicated system of buffs where each individual element either ads or strengthens in effect it took me a while to pick up on the fact that food cannot be mixed with monster parts or critters and also to learn which animals or critters and which are food so I do wish they were all better separated or classified or something but after I learned how it worked it was fun to experiment fun to just start throwing stuff into a cook pot and see what comes out there's always a chance for your recipe or a lick sir to gain a random additional effect so there's that little thrill when the music rises up and you know you got something extra good in addition to elixirs monster parts and critters can be used to upgrade your armor Skyward Sword sort of almost used this idea you collected materials and use them to upgrade your items and shields sure but that was pretty different and honestly in this case I can't even necessarily say that that was an inferior version of what we've got in breadth of the wild it was pretty different and actually kind of great upgrading your major progression items was quite novel this time around it's all about armor or gear you can find this gear out in the world or buy it from shops and the whole system adds a lot to zelda we've just seen Lincoln his green tunic so many times that it's refreshing to have all these other options style is a big element here for sure but much more important are the effects that gear can bestow upon you naturally different pieces raise your defense stat different amounts and can I say real quick I love how we've got clear attack and defense stats for the first time in this game also just about anything that a meal or an elixir can do for you gear can do for you wait a minute wait did you just say you can use the stuff you collect to upgrade your gear well how did duty hot dog gathering stuff to upgrade stuff is one of our Lowe's favorite things you take your gear to a great ferry to get it buffed and I love how they did this it's a big open world so naturally people are gonna find these great fairies in different orders so whichever fair you find first lets you upgrade your gear once after that each fairy lets you upgrade once more and they all get the same ability so you don't have to go track down specific ones to hit certain levels it's a great example of how to achieve linear progression in a game with a nonlinear structure and oh man my first time through stumbling upon a new fairy felt like I'd struck gold I was just so ecstatic that I could make my gear even stronger I loved the upgrading process too I mean these cutscenes are amazing with each new fairy you're like oh geez what's she gonna do to him this time do I need to look away most importantly though I love using up my stuff it's nice to feel like I earned my upgrades by killing lots of bad guys and it can be fun to go off and try to track down that one frog I need to make my pants stronger or whatever then there's the added satisfaction of getting a bonus when you nab a full set and upgrade it high enough it's fun to hold your breath waiting to see if you get something good sometimes you'll probably be disappointed but other times you'll be jumping for joy climbing gear stamina discount anyone all these mechanics meals elixirs armor upgrading comprise what Nintendo collectively refers to as the crafting aspect of the game and while it is enjoyable and certainly a great new direction for Zelda to take get ready first junk ripen because I feel that this is easily the single weakest aspect of the game the area with the most flaws and the most room for improvement these mechanics are definitely examples of older concepts being fully realized kind of in a sense but also kind of not fully realized first problem see elixirs are the most complex to create like I said the whole ingredient system is really interesting and fun to experiment with but meals are so much easier to make and they're still really good at buffing you so I just go with them most of the time very rarely do I see a point in brewing up an elixir versus cooking a meal and it's not just that meals are easier to make than elixirs they're also just too easy to make in general don't get me wrong I like that each ingredient gives a specific effect and thus there's a logic to making meals it wouldn't be as fun if every recipe was always a really specific list of ingredients that you had to learn somewhere or a stumble upon by sheer luck it would be kind of aggravating but the ease of creation and mostly the abundance of ingredients in the world make buffs and heart recovery things you can absolutely take for granted why try using all the right critters and monster parts to make yourself an exactly perfect strength buff when you can just throw a bunch of mighty bananas into a pot and get a meal that recovers a ton of hearts and maxes out your strength even if you're not interested in buffs meat is everywhere and after a while you'll basically never run out of the stuff you need to make meals that heal all your hearts which removes way too much of the challenge another annoyance earlier in the game you can make meals that not only heal all your hearts but also give you some extra temporary ones thing is the temporary ones can never exceed the maximum number of hearts you can potentially earn on your own so later in the game when you have very few extra heart spaces if any depending on how you spend your spirit orbs everything you make just maxes out and it's like great it doesn't even matter what I throw in the pot it won't make a difference anyway it'll just heal me with no real added heart bonus what you throw in means very little at that point like if you're already gonna kind of break the system by making meals that easy to create at least let me go all the way with it now I am a bit torn here it probably only feels like ingredients are too abundant because I spend so much time just messing around and during my long long travels I naturally gather many many ingredients one could argue that this is why I've got meat skewers coming out the ears with no chance of ever being in a situation where I need hearts and can't get them this could be my reward for being thorough easier play and that's probably true if I rushed through the game and didn't spend a lot of time exploring things would be more difficult I just think they could have had a happy medium here they could have made the cooking some intuitive without making it quite so easy to just lump everything together and get the best meal ever or like with any of the elements in this game that I feel removed too much challenge they could have placed more limitations on the system I do like that bottles are an element of past Zelda's that the developers decided to overhaul in breadth of the wild having a huge inventory for meals and elixirs without having to collect or manage bottles is very freeing and opens up the system a lot wider but having fewer inventory slots earlier in the game or something would have made a huge difference here maybe you could upgrade your meal and elixir slots in the same way you upgrade your sword shield and bow slots just one example in addition to meals being way too easy to throw together on Moss another problem is that effects granted from gear and effects granted from meals and elixirs don't stack you can boost a stat three times and that's it this means that once you get some good armor sets there's little point in eating stuff to buff yourself I like to go for attack more than anything in any game really and once I got my full barbarian set I had no more use for attack boosting meals I could still go for meals that grant defense but why do that I've got a thousand meat skewers to heal with and my barbarian armor protects me just fine what's the point in worrying about defense this isn't to say that the lack of stacking renders buffs completely useless it's a little nice to be able to buff different stats without changing your gear again and again so mixing buffs together is certainly a benefit but it just feels like it limits you for no good reason breath of the wild is all about doing it your own way and figuring out how to make the game work for you so finding out that three boosts to a stat is all you get is really disappointing just like with the temporary hearts thing it's like if the system is already kind of broken you might as well let us go all the way if I want to wear my fully loaded barbarian armor and swig some sort juice and get crazy powerful why can't I also real quick while we're on the subject of buffs it's super annoying that the game doesn't tell you how much a stat boost is actually boosting you I hate this in any game defense up okay up like five percent twenty fifty a hundred I have no idea here gonna get an actual number when it comes to its crafting elements though breadth of the wilds greatest sin is that this isn't really crafting at all it wants you to think it is they even put craft your own adventure right on the back of box but seriously not crafting is taking materials that you've gathered and making stuff out of them you might be able to take all this to a non gamer and convince them that cooking counts is crafting it does sort of fit the definition but look at other games cooking is not crafting in other games cooking is cooking or alchemy or something like that and most games with cooking also have actual crafting and upgrading your armor that's not crafting by any definition at least not the way I see it going into breath of the wild as you know I didn't know much about it I read that box and I was intrigued by the idea of a crafting system in a Zelda game so I played it and I played it and I played it and I wondered when I would finally find the person or the forage or the workbench or whatever that would let me craft stuff I talked to every goron on Death Mountain five times just to make sure I didn't miss anyone and I kept getting these precious gems oh man I've got tons of rubies and look at that right in the description they contain the power of fire I can't wait to forge my own fire sword finally I looked it up nope no actual crafting in this game and it's a shame because monster parts and materials are so much fun to collect I'll admit there's a part of me that likes to collect them even after they become useless I like to find really valuable ones just because I could sell them for a lot of rupees if I wanted to even though I don't really have much of a use for rupees which we'll talk about in a bit it doesn't make any sense but in a very shallow dumb sort of way I like hoarding all of it I do like that aspect of this game but I'm also constantly disappointed that there isn't more to do with my materials upgrading armor awesome like I said but that eventually ends and beyond that the stuff mostly just sits there in your inventory I mean you've got quests and whatnot that use them there are some little uses here and there but nothing substantial nothing constant and really useful the closest thing to crafting in this game is having specific people in the world make a handful of specific things for you each race has a legendary weapon that can be remade whenever it breaks but these weapons are generally pretty useless as we've talked about before and it's not even almost worth the trouble to get them remade you can use your gems to create jewelry in a shop in Gerudo town you know if you want to wear a headpiece and mess up your armor bonus or actually you can use ancient parts to make guardian armored and ancient arrows at the Acala ancient tech lab this is actually pretty good Armour only needs to be made once but the option to make ancient arrows is decently useful even so this system leaves a heck of a lot to be desired the weirdest thing about all this is that the game feels like it was built with an actual crafting system in mind but that they just didn't include it I honestly think it might have been a crunch thing like they decided at the last minute they didn't have time or something I mean think about it in order for crafting to be a consistent part of the gameplay you have to be able to craft something expendable something that gets used up so what kind of item does breadth of the wild have that used to be permanent in your inventory but has now been turned into a consumable resource that's right weapons and also shields even arrows they were definitely a consumable in the past but they were so easily refilled they were more like a meter than anything now they're a real item that you have to find or buy all on your own and special arrows are more powerful and useful than ever how on earth could they create a game where weapons and shields and bows work this way and where you collect tons and tons of materials and not give you the ability to craft stuff of your own it's baffling never has there been a bigger missed opportunity in any Zelda game or possibly any Nintendo game period breath of the wild is like some sort of beautiful animal that's inexplicably missing one of its legs like it was built to be a certain way but one of its key elements is just kind of not there for some reason but instead of just complaining about it let's talk about exactly what they could have done to fix this and give breath of the wild a true crafting system first off imagine there are forges and work benches or something where you work the fun of cooking in this game is walking up to a cook fire and manually dumping in a bunch of ingredients instead of taking them to some guy who works in a shop so when you craft items it's all in your hands you don't have to physically hold the items like you do when you're cooking that would be too cumbersome but you do go to the forge and do the crafting yourself a fairly small detail but a piece of flavor that I feel is very important these whatever's are located all over Hyrule and every town and stable enough of them that you never have to spend too much time hunting one down but not so many that you can just craft your way out of any dangerous situation at these things you can craft melee weapons shields bows and Aeros of all kinds naturally early on your options are limited and your created weapons and shields are weaker special arrows are very costly however all over the world you find blacksmiths and much light great fairies each one passes on their knowledge and allows you to make stronger stuff that uses more materials I could picture this so easily - it's such a Nintendo gag hi I'm Jim a--they from the ancient order of blacksmiths we're all over the place want me to pass on some knowledge but I'm deputy dad maybe some of them even required that you complete quests before they give you their knowledge so that you can't just run to each one at the start of the game what you're left with here is a way to constantly use your materials if you so desire and constant incentive to gather those materials in the first place it's yet another feedback loop to make the game all the more addictive and empowering imagine yourself at the start of the game using wood from a tree that you chop down and some stone that you pulled from an ore deposit to craft D very arrows that you use to rate an enemy camp or imagine stumbling upon the last bit of Flint that you need to craft a bundle of bomb arrows so you can use them to take down the stone talus that would be so much fun plus you're growing weapon options would help bring logic and meaning to the game's progression system which as I said in an earlier section is a little lame when it comes to weapons better and better items spawning just because you're completing shrines doesn't make a lot of sense this though it's perfect it's driven by you it's your reward for being meticulous and slang lots of monsters and exploring everywhere it's worth noting someone could argue that the ability to create weapons might unbalance the game much like I've claimed having an unbreakable weapon would but I don't think this is true weapons are already free they're lying around everywhere they just take a little work to get most of the time this hypothetical system doesn't mean unlimited free weapons you're limited by the amount of materials you've got and of course as always the number of inventory slots in your bag it would just be another option and if you didn't feel like getting into any of this stuff you could just ignore it and take all the weapons and arrows the game already throws at you though I will say if you had the ability to craft special arrows I would hope that the game gave you fewer for free as it is they're way too easy to come by after you've been playing a while by the end of the game even if I was still drowning in special arrows it would be nice if it was because I made them with my own two hands not because Lionel's dropped like 30 shock arrows at a time and another note about spending resources on weapons a lot of people have suggested that even if you can't craft weapons you should at least be able to repair them for a time I felt that this made sense it would be something to spend materials and/or rupees on after all and come on in the real world what do you do with a weapon that's breaking you don't hit stuff with it until it breaks you take it to a blacksmith so they can repair it but the more I think about it the more I think this is a bad idea as I've said hoarding weapons and worrying about losing each one is the best way to not enjoy this game things work out best when you just go for it use everything up without reservations knowing that you'll always find more being able to repair a damaged weapon sounds good on paper but in reality it would mean having a full inventory and leaving behind great stuff all the time it would mean lugging around low health weapons instead of just chucking them guys heads for extra damage and on that note who would ever throw their weapons if they knew that could potentially be saved with the game the way it is now I say a repair option wouldn't be terrible but it's not the best idea if the game used the crafting system that I've proposed that I would say yes it would be terrible the idea of holding on to your weapons so you can fix them later would undermine the system of just making new ones constantly either way though the game was built around weapons that are expendable so making them expendable but also not expendable would kind of throw things off back to it another thing that would be great to do with materials how about different upgrade paths for armor like you could choose what kind of buffs to give it as it is right now you can sell armor and buy multiples of a single set but it's like what's the point if you have the armor why would you need more than just one version well there's your answer you could have one barbarian set that reduces stamina drain from power attacks one that makes your sword swing faster and one that only boosts your attack power twice but comes with a higher armor rating there are so many options the potential for mixing and matching is huge lastly how about making offensive elixirs like ones that you can chuck at your enemies one kind could explode one kind could put enemies to sleep or make them go berserk and attack each other and one could attract bees and other aggressive animals this would give us even more incentive to go out picking mushrooms and just like with weapon crafting it wouldn't be hard to implement it use mechanics that are already programmed into the game baddies can already sleep and attack and get chased by bees it would be a really simple matter of giving us bottles to throw and look at that you've already got a dedicated throw button what do you know one final thing to say while we're talking about the games resource economy rupees are probably more useful in breath of the wild than they've ever been especially earlier in the game they can be used to buy fancy armor sets and powerful special arrows and lots of stuff yet I still wish there was more to do with them if we had more uses for our materials this wouldn't be as much of a problem because we would have less to sell and money would be more scarce but as it is selling unneeded materials netsu absurd amounts of rupees even if they really wanted to leave out a more advanced crafting element it would have been nice to have something else to dump money into beyond special arrows because like I said eventually you just get tons of those buying a house is about the best money sink you get and sometimes I get the feeling that it's satisfying not because it gets you a house but because it gives you a place to dump your rupees and feel like you did something with them now paying to help rebuild other parts of Hyrule would be awesome though that whole idea is something I could talk about for way too long if I let myself so I'll do you a favor and just not so those my friends are the ways in which you interact with the world of Hyrule in breath of the wild the fact that there was so much to cover on this subject says a lot it speaks to the immense depth of mechanics on display though unfortunately it also speaks to just how immensely some of them could be improved say what you will about the game even if you weren't really impressed by it though if that's you I find it unlikely that you've stuck around long enough to hear this you can't deny that the scope and complexity exceed any previous Zelda by a country mile and a half even if there is room to grow in some departments a lot of room to grow what we've got here is one heck of a starting point if the Zelda team builds and improves upon at all in a sequel then we're in for quite the experience when that day finally comes [Music] so far we've talked about the stuff you can do in breath of the wild how you can go about doing it and even how pretty it is when you do it but now it's time to talk about the more tangible stuff the action will check them off a list kind of goals the game puts in front of you and basically all previous Zelda's the main attraction has been that Zelda staple the dungeon this game does have a handful of what you could describe as more traditional dungeons but the main attraction they are not this time it's all about shrines which are basically many dungeons the micro dungeons even I was a little skeptical of this whole idea until I saw just how many they put in the game there are a hundred and twenty of the things spread throughout Hyrule and I believe this is a stroke of very genius game design if in the past you were either working your way through a dungeon or navigating a forest or a mountain or something with very little overlap now those separate kind of dungeon and overworld experiences switch back and forth very regularly this keeps the experience fresh and considering the rewards you get for completing shrines they keep you constantly moving forward and pushing into new territory always scanning the horizon for those little glowing blobs and looking for secrets wherever you go and I won't go back into how they feed into the game's exploration and progression system I've covered that plenty in other sections but suffice it to say with such a huge world it's great to have so many shrines because it's just always something to do these shrines were put in place by the sheikah a super long time ago and they were built to test the hero or a hero or death who even knows at this point they were made for you and this is really excellent from a flavor and world building standpoint see most dungeons and past games were real places within their respective worlds spiritual temples mines prisons anything the fact that they were cleverly designed and filled with puzzles rarely made sense in terms of realism these dungeons were really just dungeons so that the player would have something to do that's that's video games there's no real reason why there would be a series of block and switch puzzles and a sacred burial temple other than it's fun but shrines are way different first off from a field perspective it's just awesome how they're inside of these massive massive underground spaces that are just way bigger than they need to be they're so far down that you feel like you've been transported to another world and it's cool to think about how all these shrines have existed for who even knows how many years and the people of Hyrule have just been walking around up on the surface with no idea of the craziness going on under their feet also the fact that these shrines were created to test the hero means that they make more sense within the world than previous dungeons have these contraptions and puzzles don't need a reason to exist they can be whatever they want to be and still make perfect sense I know this is a pretty small detail that your average person probably won't care about but you know me I'm all about feel and I think this is great I will absolutely admit though that most important is how this impacts the game from a design perspective the man-made hero tailored nature of these shrines had a massive effect on how puzzles were crafted here the existence of these shrines is more logical than previous dungeons yet their artificial nature frees them from being shackled to the logic of any individual location even if block and switch puzzles don't technically make a ton of sense being in a sacred burial temple they still have to fit within the confines of the temple and mesh with the theme of the temple all of this temples puzzles have to kind of fit together they have to make sense within the location and they very often have to be built around whatever important item you get their shrines on the other hand can be whatever they want they can be as big as they want they can be super tall or super long that can build into any direction at any time and seem and logic be darned they can feature whatever giant ridiculous contraptions the dev team could possibly dream up again this is excellent on a flavor level because it makes for these bizarre setups that can feel really dangerous and intimidating but as always more important is the freedom of design if you can think it up it could fit into one of these shrines it can shop it can stomp it can shock you can burn it can swing it can launch it can attack it is absolutely wonderful not knowing exactly what to expect when you head down into a shrine you may run into a mechanic that you've never seen before you may have to use your runes in a way that you never considered you may have to fight a guy or lots of little guys or fight no guys at all and just do puzzles some shrines contain a tiny handful of puzzles in one or two rooms and some seem to go on for ages really living up to that mini dungeon descriptor these latter ones are particularly delightful there are so many small shrines that it's always really refreshing to stay engaged with one for a good long while naturally the freedom of design we see in these shrines is thanks in very large part to breath of the physics system and the runes we've been given to utilize it a lot of the puzzles in this game are very unlike the puzzles in previous games previously there were a lot more tightly designed head-scratcher kind of puzzles sliding blocks torches pattern memorization that kind of thing breath of the wild does have a fair amount of that but it way more often employs a somewhat relaxed design you've got a goal and you've got all your runes to try and figure out how to achieve that goal there are often multiple ways to go about completing a puzzle and it's always interesting to watch other people play and see how their thought process is often differ greatly from my own let's take a moment to talk about each rune and how they affect the puzzling Magnus is easily the most versatile as is the case with many of the games mechanics it's slightly surprising to me that the dev team was willing to give us an ability that offered so much freedom Magnus doesn't just let you pick up metal objects or push them and pull them or something it lets you manipulate them fully moving them around within a giant 3d space no matter how big they are this opens up limitless interactions and allows for very complex puzzling especially considering just how many objects in this world are made of metal its impact on the puzzle design and the overall experience seriously cannot be overstated stasis gets the award for biggest game breaker just about anything that moves can be frozen smacked around then launched at crazy speeds again no matter how big it is this mechanic brings a freedom to the table that is much more creative in nature if you're gonna dream up some really wacky way to solve a problem chances are it's gonna feature stasis heavily it's especially fun because you can control the speed and direction of the object your stasis and it's a really tricky thing but launching some giant object and having it land right where you need it to like you're chucking a baseball or a golf ball or something is extremely satisfying Cronus is very much a utility room it's not showy in game breaking like Magnus's and stasis but it can still be extremely useful the blocks it creates can be used to lift platforms guide rolling balls boost you up to high places or even push things out of place I especially enjoy cryo nice heavy puzzles because they tend to be a little more traditional having many places to put blocks but trying to figure out exactly which three places should get one is a ton of fun lastly you've got bombs st. the most nuanced tarun in your tool belt but when is an explosion ever not useful bombs have always been useful in Zelda but here they're made even more so by one offering both rolling and non-rolling varieties and to providing remote detonation both of these features are positively genius because they increase puzzle application tenfold bombs also combine beautifully with stasis as they can be used to give a frozen object a ton of momentum before it gets blasted off in fact all of the runes interact with each other in fun and crazy ways each one opens up so many puzzling possibilities that what we end up with in breadth of the wild is a seemingly endless supply of super interesting physics based puzzles that can be particularly satisfying to solve when there appear to be multiple ways to solve a problem coming up with your own solution can feel incredibly rewarding like instead of just figuring out exactly what you were supposed to figure out jumping through just the right hoop and getting the answer you invented a way to do what you wanted to do it uses a very different part of the brain I think much like with the difficult combat it can make you feel like you really did something cool on your own it feels much more like you earn your victories breath of the wild shrine puzzles are really really fun but naturally I have a couple complaints sometimes I do find myself wishing we were given more traditional puzzles rolling giant stone balls and flinging around metal boxes and manipulating all these crazy ramps and things is tons of fun but every once in a while I'm just like you know I could really go for a sliding block puzzle right about now as we've seen with some other parts of the game I love this new style but I do sometimes miss the old style a little and I hope that future games offer more of a balance between the two a bigger issue is difficulty there are indeed some tricky puzzles in this game don't get me wrong but I think just a few too many are a smidge too easy like the solution is painfully obvious sometimes you'll even have these big crazy setups and you can tell that there are probably a hundred different ways you can solve a puzzle but then it's like or I could just put one ice block right here and it's done then you solve it in like 10 seconds I suppose that's the price that comes with open-ended puzzles you'll often find the weakest end and exploit it without much effort I understand that accessibility is a big thing for Nintendo but maybe just a few more extra tricky ones sprinkled in would have helped a lot fortunately though I will say that the unique nature of these puzzles means that even the easy ones can still be pretty darn fun freezing just the right thing with just the right timing and launching something where it's post ago or whatever you're supposed to do just feels good even if it only takes you one try to pull off well that's all there is to talk about when it comes to shrine puzzles I guess we can move on dog no no I just blocked gyro puzzles from my memory don't remind me that they exist you want to know what I think about breadth of the wilds gyro puzzles yeah you want my my detailed analytical critique on them they're awful they're miserable and awful and I hate them you ever heard the phrase Nintendo got a Nintendo it's the idea that no matter how awesome a Nintendo game or product is they've got this weird knack for including at least one little completely baffling thing that brings down the experience for no good reason gyro puzzles are this games Nintendo just being Nintendo thing the basic idea of tilting your controller or your switch to roll some balls around or whatever is fine I guess that could be a little fun but most often to do what you want to do you've got to keep tilting and tilting and tilting and it's not long before you reach a point where there's no possible human way to tell what movements will translate into what actions on screen and you got to just start the whole thing over or twists around randomly until you win by sheer stupid luck the puzzles are tedious the tracking is inaccurate and trying to do any of it in handheld mode is a complete nightmare I could probably complain about gyro puzzles for 10 minutes if you let me so instead I'm just gonna stop here and say what on earth were they thinking with this whoever approved these puzzles needs up need to start talking to shrines may make up the bulk of breadth of the wilds of Dungeon eNOS definitely a real word but it does very fortunately feature a handful of actual dungeons you've got for divine beasts to liberate and each one acts as its own self-contained dungeon they leave a good amount to be desired but they also do a lot of stuff very very right so let's start with the good stuff from a flavor standpoint these are probably the coolest dungeons in any Zelda game ever I mean come on they're for gigantic roving robotic beasts that are so big you can see them from across the map and yet their dungeons after an endless stream of sacred temples and lava caves and twisty tree places these are an amazing breath of fresh air they're just impossibly cool and not the sort of thing I would have ever expected to see hanging around Hyrule then I love how each one requires a fun little chase kind of sequence in order to actually board them these sequences are so unique within the game that it's a shame they're over so fast that these little bursts of excitement in my memory and I'm always bummed that I would have to start up a whole new file if I wanted to experience them again makes me feel like the game could really use more of these fast-paced sequences you know perhaps if they use the idea of latching onto roving enemies I presented in the previous section or just sequences that require a horse or take place way up in the sky with your paraglider chasing monsters and hitting their weak points and stuff while you're zipping around everywhere just a thought moving on once you're actually on board a divine beast the dungeon eNOS truly begins as is the case with shrines the puzzles on display are generally quite terrific in fact since each divine beast has something of a theme I would say that the puzzles here are some of the best as I've said I love how free and wacky shrine puzzles can be that makes for very fresh experiences but there is still something to be said about having a little more focus and having puzzles that link together to form a longer experience the absolute best part about the divine beast though is that each one gives you a special command to manipulate it in some unique way generally this involves moving huge parts of the beasts around and not only is this kind of dungeon wide manipulation just plain cool but it opens up really unique new design opportunities the different ways you can move things around and how that affects the dungeons puzzles and how do you move through the dungeons it's all exceedingly clever the divine beasts offer up some of the most cohesive interesting design we've seen in any Zelda dungeons ever on the negative side though they're just too short they're kind of like the fast paced sequences that precede each one they're great but they're over so fast that they take up a really tiny chunk of your total time with the game which can make them feel a little insignificant adding to this problem is the fact that each one contains very little fighting dungeons of old were a mix of puzzles and monster killing but the divine beasts tend to only contain little handfuls of Guardian Scouts and blobby bubble skull guys that come out of the gross Ganon goop it's really mostly about the puzzles so there's always that little part of me that feels like something's missing from the experience I guess I've just been conditioned to expect certain things from my Zelda dungeons then to top it all off you've got something of a lack of individual identity each beast does have its own shape and manipulation mechanic and even its own puzzle themes but none of these themes are as strong as those in past dungeons at least not artistically a fire cave might just be another fire cave kind of boring but when you're in a fire cave you no you're in a fire cave that's a very strong visual and thematic identity same with a crumbling ruin or a twisty spider-infested tree or the snowy remains of a castle upon a mountain these divine beasts are really unique and cool but when you hold them all up to one another they feel awfully similar when I look back on them they have less of a presence in my memory if that makes sense they can almost all just be one big dungeon the funny thing about these negatives though is that I can't count them all as completely negative when it comes to something that's been done so so many times over the years I can really appreciate big changes like these even the less than perfect elements can be forgiven because of just how different this experience is I do wish these dungeons were longer but it's also kind of nice to not have to dedicate myself to finishing a massive complicated dungeon before I can feel comfortable shutting the game off I miss having more monsters to fight with many bosses and all that but the greater focus on puzzles is also kind of relaxing the divine beasts don't have a ton of visual identity when compared to each other but the identity that they share is already so unique that I don't mind as much despite their shortcomings I can very much say that I enjoyed they hack out of the divine beasts and I hope a lot of the ideas they brought to the table are carried forward into future Zelda titles we ain't quite done with divine beast though Zelda dungeons wouldn't be Zelda dungeons without bosses and as such there's a big main boss waiting at the end of each beast and just like the beasts themselves these bosses are great in ways but also have some shortcomings in fact it's funny I'm pretty torn on almost every aspect first each blight is a nasty little mini incarnation of Ganon you got thunder blight gain and water black Ganon etc as with the dungeons these lack a very strong visual identity when they're all held up to each other versus a giant spider or a dragon or a ghost or some other thing we tend to see in Zelda games but I can really appreciate how different the core idea of them is I mean they're really cool-looking even if they all look kind of similar to each other they're super gross and scary and they embody Ganon in a very new monster like way that is not necessarily pig like mechanically they're designed much like the games other enemies they do have some specific weaknesses that you can exploit but you can also just plain all do damage to them by hitting them with swords and arrows and stuff and actually that's probably the biggest problem right there I can appreciate how open-ended the fights are it's not the same use the right item and Oh their weak spot thing that we've seen a thousand times and if you really purposefully hit these bosses early I'm sure you'd be in for a good challenge but the way I play this game it makes for disappointingly easy boss fights as far as I can tell these blights just don't scale by the time I got to each one I was powerful enough to make short work of it the Gerudo one was the trickiest for sure though not so much with all of my champion abilities and infinite healing items and I was still fairly weak when I fought the Zora one since it was so early in the game but for the most part no the game was like you can fly around on the gusts and deflect his beam and shoot back two ice blocks and I'm like or I could just shoot him in the eye and wail on him until he's dead in my eyes bosses are some of the best and most memorable things in any Zelda game so this is more than a little disappointing you could easily argue that many past bosses have been laughably easy as well and in fact significantly more so and you would be 100% correct but I just think if any game in the whole series was equipped to offer particularly good and challenging boss battles it should have been breath of the wild it's the wasted potential that's the problem one more specific gripe about the divine beast before we move on is that the game naturally pushes you to the zora one first I'm willing to bet that the majority of players do it before anything else and this whole section of the game sets the bar really high in terms of what you need to do to access a divine beast Barbuto is spraying loads of water into the air creating perpetual rain in the mountain range that comprises Zoras domain since you can't climb in the rain you've got to get all the way up the mountains on foot and it's really really challenging because the place is just lousy with shock arrow shooting liz'll foes when you finally get up you're rewarded with armor that lets you swim up waterfalls but you just get to keep forever and you have to use this to climb up ployment in' and either fight the line up there or steal shock arrows from him so that you can use them to board Virata it's this long and very fun sequence and it makes the short length of the divine beast much easier to swallow I don't know about you but I was really excited to see what kinds of cool quests I had to go on to get on the other divine beasts and what neato traversal abilities they might grant me as rewards and of course I was progressively more disappointed with each one I found none of them can hold a candle to varta I mean with vomit oh you go to retail village and they're like go find Ravalli I think he's out getting lunch or something so you walk over and find him and do like the easiest target test in the university is like alright let's go and you fly up and do your thing and you're done Firebird dhaniya is a little better there are a couple things you got to do and you got to figure out how to get up on Death Mountain without catching on fire so yeah Vonda Boras does indeed have a longer more in-depth quest that you've got to do but I wasn't too thrilled by it and I'll actually talk about that more in a bit basically the rest of the divine beast lead ups are just bummers I can deal with some being more cool and in-depth than others but the fact that the very best one is basically thrown at you right at the start of the game raises expectations and ultimately leads to something of a letdown so overall there's a lot to like about the way breath of the wild does Dungeons through both shrines and divine beasts but there's a lot of room for improvement as well the funny thing is that the biggest complaint you usually hear is that it feels like there's just not a lot of dungeon to go around versus the more traditional dungeon format of past games but when you really think about it is that true there are a hundred and twenty shrines in the game twenty-nine of them are blessings which means the challenge comes from opening them up and once you get inside there's nothing to do but grab your prize and go so okay let's say 91 shrines what's like the shortest time it takes to do an easy shrine five minutes maybe so even at that low end you're looking at seven and a half hours of shrine äj-- and we all know that some of them take way longer than five minutes to beat some are extra tricky and take a lot of puzzling out and some are just long I think twenty plus hours of working through shrines in total is a reasonable estimate and sure you don't have to do them all to beat the game but if you're lamenting that there's not enough dungeon in this game you're probably one of those people who is hunting down all of the shrines then on top of all the shrines you've got the four main dungeons sure they're not the longest dungeons but they're not the shortest either I mean Majora's Mask only had four main dungeons and Wind Waker had like I don't know to two or something I don't remember these ones are a little short but they're not in significantly so so altogether I'd say there's a decent amount of dungeon eNOS in this game so the interesting thing to think about is why does it not feel that way because I kind of feel like it's lacking in dungeons too if I'm honest and I don't get why my theory is that breaking the dungeon experience up into many smaller experiences makes it all feel a little less substantial in the end no individual thing holds a giant play in your memory so it kind of feels like you didn't get to do as much none of the dungeon the experiences have a very strong visual and thematic identity as we talked about so they all kind of run together and none of them are particularly memorable even if they are still really fun I'm not one of those people who was like super disappointed by breadth of the wilds lack of more traditional dungeons but as with many many things I do hope they can strike a better balance in the future this was kind of nice for a change but let's have some more striking and in depth dungeons next time even if it is still just a handful of them plus a whole bunch of shrines because for the record I never want another Zelda game without a whole bunch of shrines before we move on from dungeons though let's touch on two notable places in Hyrule that are sort of like dungeons even though they're kind of not but they're not like anything else in the game so I kind of lump them into the dungeon category the first is the hideout of the ego clan here you've got to venture deep into a canyon in Gerudo desert and retrieve a Thunder helm so you can board vonda Boris I liked the thrill of visiting the hideout of the guys who had been trying to kill me the whole game I like that this is a fairly large and unique area that's only used for this one quest as we don't have a ton of those in breadth of the wild I like the silly little thing the ego blade masters do when they see bananas beyond those things there is not much to like about this quest this is the kind of Auto fail stealth section that I was happy to escape when I found that breath of the wild implemented stealth in a more natural way when I got to the hideout and I saw that one hit from these billion HP blade masters would give me a game over and that I couldn't save in the middle somewhere I absolutely had to start all over whenever I died I was just appalled it doesn't really matter how strong you are you cannot take a hit from these guys and that flies in the face of the whole rest of the game and what it stands for now I'm annoyed that I can't 100% fault it because apparently it is indeed possible to kill all the blade masters and avoid having to sneak your reward for having the skill to take them out legitimately or the resources to blast them all with ancient arrows is a shorter simpler ordeal and hey I'm always talking about how some challenges in this game are too easy right shouldn't I be happy about this but somehow I'm not really I'm just annoyed that they would put a no save Auto fail section in a game that seemed to have broken free from things like that it just seems wrong it is cool how the place has a boss though even though he's you know too easy the second slightly dungeon II place is Hyrule Castle it doesn't really have an end goal beyond climbing to the top and fighting Ganon and maybe finding its shrine so at the end of the day it's mostly just a place to explore I'm a little torn on this which I suppose is not surprising based on my opinions on all the other dungeons in the game I was definitely disappointed that there wasn't more of a point to Hyrule Castle I kept turning corners and expecting to run into something big but when I look past that disappointment I can really appreciate the idea of this gigantic sprawling place that was made mostly for exploring it's jam-packed with powerful enemies and I spent so much of the game being too scared to even get close that finally creeping around inside and trying to find my way up to take an early peek again and was a huge thrill there is good loot to find and that's obviously great but most of the fun comes from just seeing the castle and how grand and beautifully constructed it is and imagining what went down when it was destroyed a hundred years ago it's incredible that the dev team puts so so much effort into something that you barely have to experience if you don't want to if you know where you're going and you just keep on climbing you can get to the top fairly quickly but if you're so inclined you can spend hours exploring every nook and cranny and you will find some decently interesting stuff if you do I already mentioned the journals of Zelda and the king in an earlier section but I would say another highlight is the stile knocks down in the dungeon that's guarding a Hylian Shield that's definitely one of those whoa I actually found something really cool moments also surprise Lionel deck Hyrule Castle may not be a full dungeon exactly but hey it does have a boss at the end the final battle again and is here and we might as well talk about it I had positively no idea what to expect when I climb that castle for the first time I was thinking so its Garrincha sitting there somewhere we're like fine Zelda hanging out with him am I gonna fight a giant swirly pig head honey how do you fight a giant swirly pig head how's this gonna go down so I was surprised and thoroughly OOP doubt when I found a nasty Ganon cocoon pod chilling up in the tower and I also did not expect the Ganon that came out of it to look quite like it did we're used to the idea of Ganondorf having a regular old humanoid body then turning into some weird pig beast when you fight him the Ganon swirling around the castle the whole game is pig-like because he's given up his regular body and is in a crazy enraged so it's extra creepy to me that here he embodies his humanoid self but in a very uncanny monster-like way I expected pure piggy but we got no piggy at all he's got a human-like face with a classically Ganondorf red beard and all these gangly human-like arms this reflection of his original Gerudo self can also be found in the blights as I touched on earlier and it's a terrifically fresh take on the villain even better though calamity Ganondorf II features are made all the more creepy thanks to the rest of his design again no piggy here even though I was sure there would be he's more like a guardian he's got a grotesque spider-like body some of his legs look like they came right from a guardian stalker he's got ancient blades for claws and he's even got his own laser beam arm he's basically the ultimate guardian and I know I've said this kind of thing about a hundred times throughout this review but seeing him for the first time I thought am I playing a zelda game here like his is this really a Zelda game because this is very unlike any Zelda boss I've fought mechanically I'm a little torn on this boss fight when you just look at him and his attacks he's the best boss in the game several times over he's just got such a wide assortment of attacks I've already expressed how I like the baddies in this game because you actually fight them you for the most part don't just use an item to open them up like a puzzle and Calamity Ganon is no exception you're constantly moving constantly dealing with some new attack or other and deciding what specific way you want to deal damage to him but then just like with the blights if you actually played the game before you came to fight him he's way way too easy you don't necessarily have to learn all of his attacks and figure out how to dodge them and deal damage if you just feel like spamming him with bomb arrows on top of that if you freed all the divine beasts and again who would not do that the champions blast him down to half health before the battle even begins when you get him down to about a quarter is when things should start to get difficult because he puts up the shield around himself and as far as I can tell the only good old fashioned way to get past it is to perfectly shield parry his laser attack and I don't know about you but parrying lasers is hard as heck got your champion powers though don't worry about a thing Duke's protection parries it for you and our BOCES fury just breaks the shield all by itself mixed in a heaping tablespoon of Master Sword and you got yourself a defeated calamity Ganon cake I can definitely appreciate this in its own way they want him to be easy if you played the game a bunch that's your reward for conquering Hyrule you get to just cruise on in there and kick his gross spidery but that's basically how it was in majora's mask but it's just so clear that calamity Ganon is an amazingly designed amazingly fun boss that it's disappointing when the battles over so quickly you definitely can make it harder by not freeing all the divine beasts which is something I might try in later playthroughs but the first time was the most special time and the memory of my first special time will always be just a little anticlimactic absolutely still fun though don't get me wrong and if anything the weird visual design kind of made up for the low difficulty it was still in amazingly cool fight after you beat calamity gain and you fight darkbeast Ganon but there isn't really much to talk about here especially seeing as I already touched on him in the section on story he's the standard Zelda final battle Zelda gives you light arrows and you ride around and shoot all his weak spots though actually it is kind of unusual in how ridiculously easy it is most Ganon fights can still be at least a little challenging this is very simple and by the numbers and I don't even know if it's possible for his big laser attack to hit you but can it if any of you guys actually been hit by that thing but like I said before though I still think it's fun I'm enough of a field guide that all takes something like this just to cap off the game some epic cinematic final sequence that exists just to be the epic cinematic final sequence I mean come on look how big the guy is breath of the wild wins the award for biggest Ganon ever while we're talking about bosses again let's take this time to touch on mini bosses there are five types of mini boss that can be found all over the place the exception being will do go which can only be found in Gerudo desert as with other baddies it is a little disappointing that there isn't more variety here I mean there are some Zelda games with 8 or 9 dungeons and each one has at least one mini boss and sometimes there are even a few outside of dungeons but fortunately these 5 guys all feel very grand and substantial epic enough to feel like they could be actual dungeon bosses Plus for the most part they're really fun and I'm actually happy to fight them again and again Zelda bosses have always been so much fun but sometimes they're over so quickly that they're like this tiny little sliver of the greater experience in breadth of the wild though you've basically got all the many bosses you can possibly take on and whether it's a Harley challenge or you're destroying them left and right it's just something fun to do Lionel's are easily the toughest mini boss of the bunch and they're literally one of my favorite things about the entire game I've talked about them quite a bit in previous sections but I just love how challenging they can be there are no tricks here no items to open them up no way to stun them beyond a very brief headshots done that basically everybody has these guys are about good honest video game playing learning attacks reacting quickly protecting yourself while also dishing out damage any way you can and that's just so refreshing stone Tallis's are really fun I love how they've only got one weak spot and it can be tough to reach when it's on the back instead of up on the head as Tallis's love to track you and try to collapse on you when they're stunned I love how incredibly intimidating they are early in the game they're just gigantic they're made of boulders and their main rock throw attack can smush you flat in a second even better you've got Fire and Ice versions and without the right arrows and gear they can be extra tough to bring down hynix is stand out because they're the most interactable they're always sleeping when you find them so sneaking up on them is pretty exciting early on I was amazed when I learned that you can hang out on a hit oxes hand and after a few moments he'll scratch his belly and lift you up where you can rob him of all his loot without him even noticing if you do want to fight a hynix the old-fashioned way and I must say I've never come across a hit ox I didn't want to fight you're in for a good time you can shoot there big ol eyes to stun them but after taking so much damage they'll start to cover their eyes with their hands and trying to stun them anyway is fun if you can't stun them you've got to get in close to hit them but then you run the risk of being squashed and squished and smacked sometimes they've got these guards on their legs and I'm seriously clueless because it also took me a long time to realize that you could burn off the wooden ones and shock the metal ones overall there's just a lot to Hynix battles and however you go about them they're just fun to fight Mull Duga are easily the most disappointing mini bosses in the game visually they're awesome they're these gross giant lizard fish monsters that swim through the sand like graboids if you're out on the open sand that can be really deadly problem is once you find out how to kill them they're a joke stand on a rock the mole Duga can never hurt you ever again throw a bomb heats it you detonate it smack and wildly stunned and run back to your rock repeat until dead it's probably the most traditional the boss fight in the game because it's got one major weakness that you exploit with one of your quote unquote items but at least past exploitable bosses have had attack phases after getting hit and that's exactly what the mole Dugan needs after you stun it and get in some hits it needs to do something that forces you off your rock and actually makes the battle a little challenging as it is though they're fairly Blom they are epic and you can try fighting them using a sand seal for some extra excitement but I don't really see the need to and that's pretty lame finally we come to guardians and I kind of lied I said there were five kinds of mini boss even though guardians come in a few different varieties stalkers are the nastiest and really they're the biggest bullies of Hyrule lionel's are tough but at least they keep to themselves and there are weaker types to fight near the start of the game stalkers come in one very high strength variety and just run around looking for little links to blasts I've already talked about how exciting to make the game and for this reason they're also one of my favorite parts about it they're horrifying magical robots that shoot you with an exploding laser beam that's just crazy finally getting strong enough to take one out is a very triumphant feeling and getting strong enough to take them out easily is its own kind of satisfaction the great thing though even if you can usually chop off all their legs before they even get a chance to move or jump down from somewhere take them out with balm arrows right to the eye before you hit the ground get caught in a situation where they're running so fast you can't hit their eyes or reach any of their legs you can still get blasted to smithereens they should never be underestimated decayed Guardians can be found lying around some places and I think these are really smart they're weaker versions of stalkers and they're stuck in the ground so they're easier to avoid but they still give you a taste of that Guardian experience early in the game it's always tempting to see if you can take one out but if you mess up you're gonna get blown to high heaven plus you never know when one is gonna turn out to be not quite as decayed as you thought and get up and start chasing you and that so is the kind of anxiety that I just love in games sky watchers are like stalkers but they fly around and have a more limited range of sight you can damage their propellers to make them fall but even then you've still got to deal with their lasers and just like stalkers they can be stunned by shooting them in the eye but panic and start missing and you're gonna have a bad time they might not be as exciting as stalkers but they still add a hefty dose of fear to many of Hyrule's locales and I love the for that turrets are only found guarding Hyrule Castle and there isn't much to say about them they stay put like decayed Guardians but they're tougher to beat and hey they got a blasty boom laser like all the other Guardians so thumbs up finally we've got the big Guardian scouts that you fight in test of strength shrines and these are actually pretty different from the other Guardians probably because they were created exclusively to test the legendary hero they were particularly fun to figure out because they've got a lot of attacks and because of this I would say there's some of the best baddies in the game their behavior changes the lower you get their HP and each move they make requires a different reaction and man when they're charging their big laser and none of your attacks stun them and all you can do is wail on them and pray that you can finish them off before they open fire that's good stuff right there the last major thing to talk about in this whole entire review is quests previous games have all had quests characters telling you to go fetch this go do that Majora's Mask introduced the idea of having them all in writing so that you could see what you had and hadn't done and breath of the wild goes nuts with the idea anytime anyone wants you to do anything it becomes a quest in your quest menu this is excellent obviously because you can easily remember what you still need to do but it's also great because it keeps track of important information about your quest so you don't need to keep re asking people for your clues I've mentioned before that shrine quests are the best but let's touch on them again here if you absolutely had to get a shrine quest from the right person before you can complete it it would be pretty lame the game allows you to stumble upon secret shrines on your own which of course adds immensely to the game's sense of exploration and discovery again I'd say these secret shrines with their own quests provide the most interesting and unique scenarios in the game they're the coolest funnest things to find when you're exploring the great big land of Hyrule but then if you haven't happened upon a shrine yet but you talked to the right person about it they can give you a nudge in the right direction if you should want one for me this resulted in a really great mix of finding cool shrines on my own and trying to puzzle out my active shrine quest whenever I was bored and wanted something to work on some of my very favorite shrine quests were castles because I just love riddles some of them were pretty easy but a few had me scratching my head every time I was running around and I heard that accordion music flowed in from somewhere I'd be like oh yes it's real time baby the only disappointing thing about shrine quests basically any shrine where it's a challenge simply to find or access it is that they usually end with a blessing like I mentioned earlier the game grows good job you already put in the work so here's some treasure and your spirit orb no puzzles needed just sit back and relax man I understand why they did it this way but what puzzles I love puzzles twenty-nine blessings out of 120 shrines is a whole lot of puzzle and I wish I was doing it's easier to forgive the blessings that come after crazy challenges like Eventide or the labyrinths or whatever but at least a handful of the blessings are pretty silly sometimes it only takes you like a minute to open a shrine and it's like come on that was too easy a warrant a blessing give me some puzzles already beyond shrine quests you've got regular old do this thing for me quests and these are another mixed bag I do really really enjoy having all these quests because if I'm in love with the mechanics and the overall experience of just playing a game I don't care much what I'm doing in it and will jump at the chance to perform even the most menial tasks finding quests everywhere and having a great big list of them to tackle I just love it a problem though is that the rewards do not seem to scale with you here and they are usually very very underwhelming it's not a huge problem because like I said it's fun to just do quests but it would be nice if these people gave you stuff that was a little more helpful I mean you spend 10 20 minutes completing a quest and you get a hundred rupees or a ruby or something pretty lame basically most regular quests are just there for the fun of doing something and the satisfaction of checking things off a list that's not gonna appeal to everyone but I can say it appeals to me enough to still be enjoyable though another thing I'll say it's also pretty lame to get a quest that's like can you go up the mountain and find me three rubies and you're like well I have 300 of those so there you go several quests are literally worthless if you hit them too late in the game there are a good few quests that I found really enjoyable but the best of the bunch just might be the Tarrytown quest for a number of reasons it's this long series of smaller quests where you have to find people with the right kind of name so when I first played through the game I was always excited to reach a new town and talk to all the town's folk then the quest takes a lot of wood and rupees and it's always nice to just use up some of your ample supply of materials the best part about it though is that it has you actually building a town watching new structures go up as you find new people having new shops to buy from is okay tangible reward but much better is the feeling that you're actually doing some small thing to restore this devastated Hyrule not only could the game use more of these long-term multistage quests in general but I think just about everyone agrees that building and restoring structures is something that would just work so well in this game sure it's nice that we get to began it in the end and we know the Delta will work to put things back in order but Tarrytown gave me such a delicious little taste of this whole restoration idea that I was left wanting so much more similarly to how the game's material gathering and weapon breakage mechanics set the foundation for a crafting system that just isn't there material gathering and the Tarrytown quest along with the ability to build your own house set the foundation for a building system that feels like it should be obvious but is also sadly nowhere to be found there seems to be a pretty common trend running through most of breadth of the wilds quests and what you could consider dungeon e-content a lot of it is really really terrific the vast number of shrines with all of their physics puzzles the visually epic and mechanically unique divine beasts many of the other quests and challenges that really imbue the world with a sense of magic or just plain fun to do sprinkled throughout there are elements that bring the experience down and there are some disappointing missed opportunities but when I turn my intense scrutinizing machine down a couple notches and just focus on how much fun I had I had a ton of fun I absolutely loved my time working through the game's various challenges and it's much easier to look past flaws when I'm just so happy to be doing something very fresh and new for Zelda maybe there will come a day when the novelty of newness wears off and I find myself bored of physics puzzles and wishing for more substantial dungeons more than anything but after hundreds of hours in the game I can still say that this was a good direction for Zelda's dungeons to move in it could all use some tweaking sure but this new format is one that I would be more than happy to see again I believe that breath of the wild is a good game you probably could have guessed that by now but a big question is is it a good sell déjame one thing has been consistent throughout all of my time talking about zelda with people on and off the internet believe me that has taken up a significant amount of my life and its that zelda means something different for everyone everyone has a different idea of what elements make a Zelda game a Zelda game want to do a fun experiment ask five people to rank all the 3d Zelda's from best to worst and you will get five very different answers and that's actually one of the things I love about Zelda one person may play it for the story another may think it's all about the fighting another may think nothing is more important than dungeons and another person may think nothing's more important than dungeons yet still disagree with the previous person on which dungeons are best but the whole what makes us Helda a good zelda discussion has never been as heated as it is now breath of the wild changed zelda every Zelda game has added ideas and tweaked them Skyward Sword in particular as I've mentioned many times probably changed the most at the time but with breath of the wild onuma and the zelda team broke the system open completely for the first time in decades they took a great big step back and examined every single individual element that made up the series and considered does this need to be here how can we make this better what if we did this instead even staple mechanics that had been there since the very beginning were not exempt from this great purge a good few examples bottles they're just gone you've got a massive inventory and you can just collect materials with the push of a button so there was simply no need to include a bottle system collecting heart containers I never imagined we would get a game that threw out such a long-standing tradition as heart containers but there you go spirit orbs are like heart containers in that you can trade four of them for one extra heart but they're used for stamina as well and they are exclusively given to you in shrines you don't find them out in the wild hidden in chests and holes the overall dungeon format no boss keys no progression items defines no mini boss at the halfway point instead we've got loads and loads of many dungeons along with for bigger dungeons that are very unlike anything we've ever played the ability to like to just jump whatever you want you don't have to get rocks feather you don't run at a ledge to make it happen automatically we just do it with a button because why not it makes sense to be able to jump in this world it's really useful so there it is special arrows they have always always been an ability that you get and you use them to get past certain obstacles that were designed for them here you just get them you don't get the fire arrow ability you get a fire arrow you can use it on a guy that doesn't like fire if you want or a shock arrow or whatever their resource they run out here's a huge one you know Zelda games right you're this guy wearing these green clothes and you have that one sword not here where's Link's tunic well he doesn't have it put on whatever armor you find in the world where's the Master Sword well you get it later in the game and even when you do you can only use it for a little while at a time so how about instead you pick up whatever weapons you come across and use those I've played the game for so long that I'm used to it now but sometimes I'm reminded just how weird this is how weird it is to be playing a Zelda game where I'm wearing wacky outfits and using Spears and hammers that I scavenged from enemies sometimes it doesn't even look like I'm playing a Zelda at all there's smaller stuff too like how you can move the camera around when you're talking to someone it's not a huge deal but it's still something where they were like why not why the heck not it makes it a little more interesting to talk to someone and still be interacting with the game and looking around and you know that annoying sound Zelda games make when you're low on hearts that is awful gonzo breath of the wild makes a noise to let you know that you're low and then it shuts up and you know what it's not just the big changes that tell us how much they rethought the whole Zelda formula here this little stuff says just as much it means they really examined every single little thing and asked themselves if each one was something they needed this game being so different instead of people saying I like the Zelda game more than the last one or I like it less than the last one or I rank it like this compared to the others you've got people either seeing this as the best Zelda ever created or something so different that it isn't even zelda anymore obviously there are plenty of people in between but to me it seems more binary than ever and funny thing is either camp is wrong because what is a Zelda game how much can you change a game in a series before it doesn't resemble the other entries in the series enough to be part of the series anymore how much can get thrown out how much do you need to keep when is it healthy innovation and when is it compromising a series identity breath of the wild is very different from the other 3d Zelda's but it actually has a lot in common with the first Zelda on the NES there we were just plunked down in a huge open world and told to go it's also a lot like link between worlds with its dungeons that could be completed in any order and it's items that you could access at any time if 3ds Zelda's and 2d Zelda czar different in a lot of ways does that mean they need to maintain their own identities without spilling over if breadth of the wild is wildly different from every other 3d Zelda but very similar to the original Zelda does that make it the least Zelda like Zelda game ever or the most dissol - like Zelda game ever if no other Zelda game had ever been created just the first one in this one how differently would we look at it as a continuation of the series how much should a game be judged against the games that came before it and how much should it be judged on its own merits these are questions that we could spend hours going over but at the end of the day like I said there are no correct answers all I can do is answer these questions for myself I can only tell you what I see when I look at this game and I suppose I'm one of the lucky ones because these changes amaze me there have been some sacrifices sure like I've talked about there are some traditional Zelda elements that have been left behind or diminished and sometimes I find myself missing the purity the old formula but so much of the new stuff here is just incredible its engaging and exciting and challenging and instead of feeling like the game has strayed too far from the Zelda formula I feel like it elevates Zelda to new places forges a path for bigger and better Zelda games than ever and this new direction for Zelda didn't just happen because the team rethought every element and brainstormed new concepts it's obvious that they drew heavy inspiration from other games this is huge because Nintendo's team's most often seem at least to do their own thing when it comes to game design and hey that's part of what makes them so unique but if you ask me Zelda was in need of a shake-up and looking outward was one of the best things they could have done to make that shake-up happen the new elements that seem to have been inspired by other games are what make the game feel so fresh and exciting a new mechanic is one thing but a whole new system or style that we've enjoyed in other games coming over to Zelda it's incredible there's no way to know exactly what was directly inspired by other sources or what those sources might be but the way I see it there are three elements that have been largely lifted from other games one source of inspiration seems to be Dark Souls and/or Monster Hunter or at least that style of game primarily this is seen in the combat and boss difficulty you can see it most clearly when you're swinging around a giant sword and fighting some huge guy I mean it really does look like Monster Hunter sometimes it uses the idea of large fierce enemies that you really have to learn in order to kill as I've gone over many times by now it's less about figuring out how to open up an enemy like a puzzle by using the right item and more about just learning them and beating them with pure skill this is a very new concept for Zelda and I don't think it's any coincidence that these kinds of games were on the rise when breadth of the wild was early in development another inspired element of breadth of the wild is the survival element and similarly I do not believe this happened by simple chance survival games were also on the rise during development I mean the genre basically exploded around that time so now we have the lack of recovery hearts and the need to gather food and cook meals and elixirs this and the new fighting style obviously come from the team's desire to make Zelda more challenging and this new level of challenge is part of what makes the game feel so much more rewarding than previous titles then of course there's the obvious one the open world leading up to breadth of the wilds released Nintendo's games were only getting more and more linear but again what other kinds of games were on the rise when breadth of the wild was being made just about every publisher out there was putting out open-world games they were creating gigantic worlds that you could explore in your own way at your own pace and that were packed with stuff to do whether or not that stuff was fun to do is up for debate but they were still doing it so the Zelda team looked at those games then they looked over at Skyward Sword in the direction they had previously been taking Zelda then they shot a quick glance over at Wind Waker before returning to breath of the wild and they went alright let's do this let's give them what they've been asking for let's do an open world Zelda and because they did that because they decided to look outside of Zelda for inspiration and adapt all these new elements to the series I believe we have a deeper and more engaging Zelda ever and before anyone says it no I don't think this means they should always just copy exactly what the rest of the industry is doing they shouldn't just follow trends but they should always keep an eye out for ideas that could legitimately enhance the zelda experience and carefully select which ones to use as I believe they've done here and you know what I will completely admit that the game probably doesn't deserve quite as much credit as it gets for these changes the rest of the game industry grows and develops together games constantly borrow concepts from each other and try to improve on old formulas should we really praise the zelda team for finally looking at what the rest of the industry was doing like they probably should have been doing to at least some extent this whole time should we praise this game for in a sense merely catching up to other games when it comes to a lot of its mechanics if countless other games have perfected the survival concept why should we give Zelda so much credit for only dabbling in it if other games have been offering deeper more challenging combat for years why is it special when Zelda does it Nintendo fans often treat the company's games like they're in their own special little bubble and I will completely admit I probably do that sometimes as well I'll admit that it's special when Zelda does it because to me Zelda is just special Nintendo franchises have this way of burrowing into my heart and when I boot up a game if it's got the name Zelda on the cover it's already at an advantage in my eyes is this a rational mindset to have I'd say yes and no sure maybe I am being a little biased here maybe I hold these games to a different standards sometimes I don't really know and I don't know if I can know but there's nothing wrong with being captivated by that certain kind of Nintendo magic I don't think there's anything wrong with being so enamored with the style and feel of the Zelda universe that if Zelda uses a mechanic I'm more likely to enjoy it then if another game does it even better it's like come on man that is a bias but it's also like I know that other game uses this mechanic too but Zelda uses it here I couldn't tell you exactly what Zelda magic even is or what elements come together to create it but whatever it is it's real and it's got me Zelda games almost always meet a certain quality standard in my mind there let me go on adventures the likes of which I just can't get anywhere else and even if another games got perfect survival or crafting or combat elements or anything it still doesn't have the benefit of coming together to form a complete Elda experience even with its flaws and underbaked elements breath of the wild is still a Zelda game when you look at it as a whole it still got that quality and magical feel it's still the kind of adventure game that for whatever reason no one else is really making right now no one ever seems to make adventure games that feel quite as good as Zelda does and speaking of flaws as we've seen in this review this games got plenty of them it is so different and new that there are some crazy growing pains even its inspired elements need a lot of tweaking and refining the survival stuff is great but the games got some issues with difficulty balance eventually it becomes too easy to pig out on all the health regenerating items you want and the ability to eat them in the pause menu without interrupting a battle compromises the new level of challenge then there's the whole system of material gathering without a proper crafting system to go with it there just isn't enough stuff to spend your money and monster teeth on the progression system could also use some work getting stronger simply by picking up stronger weapons as the game scales up doesn't feel incredibly empowering a proper XP system or something like it would work much better then of course there's the story in the ending I went to town on the game there I mean geez I probably spent half my review complaining this game has a lot of problems lots of niggling annoyances and missed opportunities but it's a perfect example of how I can think a game is incredibly flawed but still consider it one of the best games I've ever played because I do think that about breath of the wild I still need more time to decide if it's my absolute favorite game ever but it just might be this is really a larger discussion for another day but I don't see a review score as this objective measure of the game's quality when I'm scoring a game the most important factor is how much I enjoyed it I'm not gonna do the whole bug in breath of the wild a 7 out of 7 thing at the end of the review it seems silly to do that at this point but yeah for the record if I'm gonna score it I am gonna give it a 7 and yes that's despite the fact that there's so much wrong with it it's because the stuff that it does right it does so so right even if I felt like it could have been better considering what it brought to the table it still provided what was possibly the most magical experience of my video game playing life I honestly can't remember a time that I had more fun with a game felt more unbridled joy while playing it certainly not since I was a kid back when that magical feeling was much easier to find games just don't to affect me as much as they did when I was a kid my ability to lose myself completely to a game has gotten a little weaker over the years but breath of the wild breath of the wild tapped back into that kid in me it brought me back to Christmas mornings when I could boot up a game and just stare at it and wonder when I could just lose myself in a game for days and days and truly feel like I was experiencing something special I was going on a grand adventure I don't know it's kind of a weird thing to say but all a breath of the wilds flaws are kind of exciting think about it if I was able to enjoy the game this much despite its laundry list of issues and missed opportunities and seemingly missing mechanics that means that as long as the Zelda team wants to continue with this formula and statements from our numa himself plus sales figures make that all but a sure thing the only way to go is up future games can only get better way better impossibly better sure it would have been cool the breath of the wild was just the perfect video game right out of the gate but where could it have gone from there after setting the bar so high I'm kind of glad I got to be blown away by its crazy open-world in some of its new elements because now I can potentially be blown away all over again by a more fully realized version of this new formula I mean I guess I don't necessarily know if the team will work on improving what they have here or if they'll just scrap half of it and go and yet another new direction but they've got the potential to do something amazing with Zelda something truly unprecedented in the ever crowded landscape of open-world adventure games the Zelda magic used to live inside its own little box and it was a wonderful box but it was still a box in one of its own creation but this game has broken free it moves the series so far in such a new direction so quickly that now it feels like the sky's the limit and for that reason I would say it's the most important game since ocarina of time for both the series and Nintendo as a whole it shows a willingness to take inspiration and break traditions and try exciting new things that the company has sorely needed for years it shows that they're willing to make a game that doesn't hold your hand and that they finally understand how gamers want challenge they want depth they want to forge their own adventures Nintendo will never be perfect and at the risk of sounding overly pessimistic I know they'll never fully live up to the potential I see in them they just don't have the same priorities I do but breath of the wild paints bright a picture as I could ever hope for it says something very profound about Nintendo's shifting mindset their potential and the kinds of games we might see from them in the future it seems we have come to the end of my little review of The Legend of Zelda breath of the wild perhaps it doesn't come as a surprise that I was able to talk about the game for hours considering how obsessed I am with it what does surprise me though is how even after all that time I still can't say I've touched on everything there are countless things I just couldn't fit anywhere or I decided to skip for the sake of something that in some universe resembles brevity like blood moons didn't even talk about blood moons I can sum them up right here though what happened then I mentioned Eventide once or twice but I could probably talk for quite a while about that one quest alone it's incredible and you've got kilt inand how we can make disguises that let you blend in with monsters and the ability to take pictures of things and hunt them down with what is essentially a radar that's a whole thing in itself it's like a fully realized version of the dowsing idea in Skyward Sword but you know what I got to draw the line somewhere this review does have to eventually end I was originally gonna end the whole thing with another heartfelt bit about how special and amazing breadth of the wild is but I think I've made my point by now so instead I just want to say thank you if you stuck with me through this entire review then I seriously thank you from the bottom of my heart the idea that even one person on this great big planet would want to hear me talk about one game for three hours is absurd but all you guys it just feels amazing and all the comments and tweets from people who have enjoyed it throughout its production have warmed my Zelda love and heart and while I'm thanking people give it up once again for came from far-fetched reviews for editing this entire thing he is the link to my zelda I've been doing a lot of brooding trying to figure things out locked in what's felt like a century long battle with scripts and mechanics and analyses and he's been doing all the dirty work wielding his sword of editing against the calamity that is this review and with that my friends I will take my bow and bid you all adieu she talked about it for so long that you know what I think I might just do I think my switch and I are gonna spend a little time playing something else whoof I am sick of breath of the wild when's the next Delta game come out already know what I'm gonna do I'm play some Mario yeah good old running jump Mario yep Hey look a moon yeah got that moon

Channel: Arlo

Views: 762,020

Rating: 4.8330398 out of 5

Keywords: puppet, blue, monster, nintendo, switch, nintendo switch, zelda, breath of the wild, the legend of zelda breath of the wild, review, critique, analysis, retrospective, deep dive, arlo breath of the wild review, long, three hour, three and a half hour, zelda review

Id: DgIdymgu0yo

Length: 200min 42sec (12042 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/K-LAWN]

This dude just made a game review that’s the length of two movies.