Breath of the Wild - A Hearty Retrospective

[Music] breath of the wild is there any controversy with calling this the most impactful nintendo title in modern memory it's the bombshell that sprung from a series with a near unparalleled combination of mass-market appeal and intense devotion and unflinchingly hammered away vast chunks of the structure its predecessors had spent decades building in some cases uncovering remnants of a past long forgotten and in others something else entirely i can comfortably say that breath of the wild is the greatest single player experience i've had in many years and currently sits as my favorite single player video game competing only with the super smash brothers series for my favorite game of all time it's also a deeply flawed experience crafted by a development team which bit off more than they could chew the stretched unstable bones of its harsh growth creaking loudly beneath the surface so i know this introduction isn't exactly subtle it's a long video and the first one for me in this style and it's fair to give you clear expectations before you commit to watching it i've got strong opinions about breath of the wild both good and bad and i'm not going to make any attempts to be objective because i generally find analyses that embrace subjectivity both more interesting and more accurate as a quick example i like to be rewarded for my efforts in adventure games i'm very extrinsically motivated as opposed to the intrinsic desire for gameplay as its own reward so a steady stream of interesting items and upgrades makes a big improvement to my experience as we'll explore later i'm not a big fan of a lot of breath of the wild's reward structure and rather than trying to take a hypothetical position right in the middle of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation i'm simply going to write how i feel in this case more negatively that's what i mean when i talk about accuracy it's not some kind of fixed truth but it is a viewpoint the creator actually holds as opposed to having to try to manufacture one this means that the upbeat congratulatory watch some of you clicked on expecting isn't always going to happen and sometimes it will like i said i enjoy the game overall but please set your expectations accordingly while i like breath of the wild i won't be treating it as an object of reverence this video is divided into discreet sections which i've included time stamps for in the description but fair warning you'll get the most out of this if you watch it start to finish at your own pace to some extent the sections do build on top of each other and you'll be missing bits of context if you skip around too much apart from the obligatory spoiler warning i think that about wraps things up let's begin beginning on a surface level breath of the wild is a gorgeous game to look at the 3d legend of zelda titles have never been afraid to experiment with considerably different art directions moving from a hampered but earnest attempt to emulate at the time contemporary japanese anime stylings in ocarina of time and its direct sequel majora's mask to the whimsical characters and vibrant cell shading of the wind waker to a semi-realistic approach for twilight princess to the overt impressionist painting inspiration seen in skyward's sword breath of the wild comes across as a distillation of the strongest elements of all the previous 3d zelda stylings which could easily be taken as a step backwards compared to the developer's previous willingness to explore new artistic visions in some cases radically new but i can't feel too strongly along those lines when the end result is this pleasant to look at it also ties cleanly into the game's overall universe which likewise serves as an amalgamation of the entire zelda canon humans seem like a blend between the hero of time titles twilight princess and skyward sword the latter two of which also carried over some of their digital overtones alongside part of skyward's sword's painted aesthetic and the entire thing is rendered in the wind waker's distinctive cell shading link himself is wonderfully designed and animated coming as close to the expressiveness of the wind waker's incarnation as this more grounded model will allow for while simultaneously having much more balanced facial features than his last outing in skyward sword other highlights include the various zelda fantasy races which were previously a collection of mostly identical creatures that somewhat fit within the bounds of suspension of disbelief but certainly came across as very artificial and video gamey breath of the wild takes a huge step forward in this regard by providing varied models for members of the same species this is most striking for the zora who now pull from sea creatures ranging from hammerhead sharks to whales but we see a similar approach with the variety of bird inspirations seen on the rito which previously looked very human with a lot of heavily repeated models the gerudo and the gorons are based on humans and boulders respectively so don't have nearly the same degree of flexibility on their base models but there's still an impressive array of clothing hairstyles and other differentiating factors between them that's traditionally mostly been reserved for hylians in previous outings there may have been a bit more room to differentiate the gorons by having them based on various types of stone but there's also something to be said about the simple designs for their simple society and i wouldn't be surprised if this was an idea the art department experimented with and ultimately discarded the end result is still a very strong take on these characters i'd say the same about the enemies in the game a collection of extremely expressive and easy to read opponents particularly the core group of pokoblins moblins and lizolfos their range of behaviors has been greatly expanded from previous games which we'll go more into later making their body language exceptionally important these gangly designs with long snouts and bent backs make it very easy to tell where they're looking as well as distinguish intent and the generally large heads also facilitate the new aero weak point they now suffer from making these designs very strong mechanically as well as artistically as well implemented as these models are however an enormous factor in the game's aesthetic appeal is the decision to reintroduce cell shading to the series and we can see just how much this adds if we look at a mod that turns it off cell shading is a lighting style that simplifies what would normally be realistic color gradients down into large discrete chunks similar to how you would color with a set of felt pens it's a popular technique to emulate hand animation because the approach those animators take is similar complicated gradients and textures are usually prohibitively difficult and time consuming to carry across frames so they'll likewise be condensed into solid blocks in fact the name cell shading comes from the celluloid sheets animators drew on before computers changed the process the wind waker was meant to look like a children's cartoon brought to life so cell shading was a natural choice and because breath of the wild also drew inspiration from hand animation miyazaki films in this case the return to cell shading was a good fit in addition to obviously pulling inspiration from the series previous outing the parameters between the two games aren't exactly the same breath of the wild's algorithm seems a bit more relaxed so models tend to have more individual colors on them but the overall clarity this style provides still comes through very strongly when combined with other aspects of the art direction like heavily exaggerated particle effects and stylized but easily recognizable models breath of the wild features a world that's still somewhat grounded in reality while also allowing for some of the same whimsical atmosphere the wind waker's hyper-simplistic direction brought to the table this was very intentional with the developers specifically citing link's cooking as too cartoonish for a realistic art style but the wind waker is too cartoonish to intuitively convey breath of the wild's new physics and chemistry systems again i respect nintendo's willingness to consistently reinvent zelda's visual design but if this were to be the game that solidified something of a consistent look for the series moving forward i think i'd be okay with that not only does it work in a wide array of contexts but it also sets the breath of the wild's visuals to age very gracefully something i don't think any of the other 3d titles outside of the wind waker have fully accomplished audio design is also dripping with the trademark polish the series is known for which isn't to say that it sounds like the previous zelda titles in fact i'd say this is the one that most boldly differentiates itself from its 3d peers in stark contrast to its middle ground art style a large part of this comes down to the game's music both in terms of composition and implementation breath of the wild focuses heavily on piano a decision that would be fairly mundane if not for the fact that zelda games have never done this before well-known piano compositions certainly have appeared in previous games but there's typically been a far higher emphasis on orchestral brass wind and strings this is particularly noticeable in its overworld theme perhaps the most enduring composition in any installment in the series the legend of zelda universally features a majestic upbeat tune during overworld travel from the game you've actually been listening to ocarina of times land to wind waker c to skyward swords sky and even majora's mask and twilight princess the aesthetically darkest zelda games still follow this convention in comparison here's breath of the wild's overworld [Music] theme [Music] previously comforting landmarks lie in ruin their inhabitants long dead and most of the land is controlled by fearsome monsters and machines presided over by the embodiment of hatred itself breath of the wild is definitively presented in a post-apocalyptic setting and yet while it certainly looks the part it doesn't sound apocalyptic a full century has passed since the great calamity and the world's remaining inhabitants have had time to adjust to a new way of life many of them never having known anything else civilization while scaled back has largely returned to a delicate order with roaming monsters and robots just another danger to consider during your travels and the castle yet one more place that sensible people avoid and outside of its primary quest the game largely regards the apocalypse through the same lens as its inhabitants history the apocalypse serves as a catalyst for the actual focus of the game throughout most of a typical playthrough that of course being the wilderness that's risen to reclaim these crumbled societies and the music defers to the sounds of this wilderness at every opportunity wind gently wrestles the grass unseen birds chirp in their nests a muffled hum marks the presence of a fierce waterfall around the corner environmental sounds certainly aren't a concept unique to breath of the wild but they're in immaculate form here and even the already sparse music isn't afraid to drop away entirely leaving nothing but the tranquil atmosphere of a world unconcerned with heroism destiny or malice this tranquility for the player is interrupted every time it's interrupted for link but even in these cases it tends towards a gentler interruption than we've typically seen galloping on horseback creates playful dancing piano twinkling rather than the expected fanfare village scores blend into the background and dynamically shifts to even more subdued variants at night even the overworld danger theme takes a long time to build momentum rather than risk shattering the player's immersion if they're simply passing a group of enemies by to be sure the game does have its dramatic moments climactic story encounters feel appropriately epic the world's mini bosses brazenly announce their presence and the guardians are accompanied by bizarre distorted piano loops that invoke an almost digital feeling especially effective when juxtaposed against the stillness of a forest or field and hammering home the twisted nature of these machines and just how unwelcome and unnatural they are in this environment sound design is excellent across the board in other areas as well from the satisfying ping of a critical hit to the friendly confirmation of a collected item the voice work in the game the first time the legend of zelda has utilized full voice acting has been a sticking point for a lot of people but i'll save my thoughts there for when we dive into the story and characters and overall i think few people would have trouble praising the majority of breath of the wild's visual and audio aesthetic while any still image of the game looks great however it's unfortunately far less impressive in motion the visual style nintendo went with fits the direction of the game and is very pleasant to look at but it was also clearly chosen to reduce performance strains on the hardware cell shading is generally less demanding to render than photorealistic lighting and the cartoonish art direction allows models with reduced polygon counts and simpler textures to still look like they're being rendered as intended in fact if you look for it it's easy to spot just how low the polygon count on these models actually are for comparison link's character model the most important one in the game is made from about 12 000 triangles whereas eloy from horizon zero dawn another open world game released in the same year has hair made from a hundred thousand triangles despite nintendo's efforts however breath of the wild's performance is still very far below the curve whether the base of 30 frames per second is acceptable or not will have to be judged on an individual level i'm personally not bothered by it but in areas with a lot of meshes effects or ragdoll physics on the screen at one time it can dip well below this extremely unfortunate to see in a flagship title frame rates are a bit more steady when in handheld mode and if nintendo provided the option to output the docked version of the game in the handheld resolution i would probably take it zelda games typically have notoriously poor options menus though and while breath of the wild provides a slight upgrade compared to previous outings it's still very bare bones overall the performance issues of the hardware also had a noticeable impact on at least one aspect of the art style i just praised that being the game's shadows dynamic shadows are far more obnoxious and resource intensive to render than you might expect which means they're often one of the first sacrifices when trying to get a game to stop chugging in the early days of 3d gaming you could just plop a circle into your character and hope no one noticed but nowadays that typically means reducing your shadow's resolution which breath of the wild very noticeably does a lot of games suffer from this to some degree and switch games in particular but breath of the wild is an especially jarring example because of how much optimization was needed as well associating blocky colors exacerbating the effect in moment to moment gameplay this generally isn't too noticeable but it is very distracting in some cutscenes in particular none of this is enough to spoil the game and the same can be said for the poorly disguised asset swapping in the otherwise seamless world loading or some fairly jarring pop-in but it is certainly enough to make you wish that breath of the wild was running on more powerful hardware nintendo generally does an admirable job of making games that feel well suited for the console they're running on but that doesn't apply here the ability to play in handheld mode is very good but even here with the exception of the less reliable d-pad this game is far better suited for the pro controller of course that doesn't mean the developers shouldn't have pursued this concept and this isn't even a criticism of the switch its reduced hardware specifications were a calculated sacrifice for the sake of benefits in other areas it's more of an unfortunate set of circumstances with no one particular factor to fully point the blame at this is to say nothing of the wii u's performance either which is by all accounts even worse although i haven't played this version myself to confirm this even on the switch the framerate is poor enough to be a periodically occurring problem but the draw distance is an almost constant problem towers shrines and landscapes will always be visible regardless of distance but this does not apply to many other major gameplay elements like enemies and treasure materializing foliage is ultimately fairly harmless even if it looks bad but in a game centered around scoping out your path across vast stretches of terrain and which gives you the ability to glide high above that terrain the omission of gameplay altering elements from your view can have a significant detriment on gameplay on the topic of which we've discussed how the game looks sounds and runs so let's get into how it plays dropping the player into a large world and telling them to go explore it was the core idea behind the original legend of zelda an idea that's been continuously eroded over the years nintendo has blatantly cited this game as their primary inspiration for breath of the wild and while the inspiration certainly bleeds through that's not to say the games share identical structures or mechanics or in many instances even particularly similar ones that guiding line of player agency was always there for the developers to follow though as becomes apparent only moments into the game we begin with a very short cut scene that provides the minimal context necessary link is asleep a mysterious voice tells him to wake up he's in a futuristic bath next to a pedestal he should probably go look at it's not directly stated at this point that link is suffering from amnesia but he's clearly in an unfamiliar environment which provides more than enough justification to guide the player through the same unfamiliarity this opening lasts for about two minutes after which you're given control of link reasonably brief especially compared to the last few 3d outings from the series but still feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to provide a first impression to the player about the type of game this is going to be a freedom focused experience with inspiration from the original legend of zelda which drops you into a multi-path field immediately on the other hand the flow of this opening has obviously been meticulously considered to the degree that booting up the game launches straight into this cutscene rather than a menu and it would also be the grand opening of the nintendo switch for a lot of people it works well in its own right so i can't understand whether developers would include it and not opt to make it skippable it is skippable in subsequent playthroughs but only if you're willing to overwrite your existing save file as breath of the wild doesn't support multiple saves at once in any case it won't be long until the game's design philosophy reveals itself and after a short section that makes sure you understand the sheikah slate and basic inventory and world navigation including the new climbing mechanic you arrive on that iconic shot of link staring across hyrule and my god this is how you hook a player i avoided full gameplay demos prior to the game's release meaning the shot wasn't spoiled for me ahead of time and it was one of the most visceral emotional responses i've had not just to a video game but to any form of media even after playing through breath of the wild multiple times i always look forward to this moment as well as the following gameplay on the great plateau before you're able to explore the vast world you've just been shown you're required to complete a reasonably lengthy tutorial section that has you plundering the first four of the game's many shrines collecting the majority of chica-slate runes you'll be using over the course of your adventure and completing the first few of the game's story beats culminating in the first of many choices between another heart of health or an upgrade to the stamina meter and finally the paraglider and an exit into the world as a whole it would be reasonable to find breath of the wild's lengthy tutorial section disappointing considering its focus on player agency however the blow is softened by the tutorial a being very well designed arguably even the best part of the game and b providing a good amount of player agency within its confines as soon as you take back control of link you're presented with an obvious path to go down which provides a basic weapon a few bits of health restoring food including some that reinforce the importance of the climbing mechanic a boulder that you can push if you notice it and your first campfire and a bit of story with the old man who also has a baked apple lying next to the flame a hint of the elemental interactions you'll be exploiting while this path is very strongly directed and i'd imagine the vast majority of players choose to follow it you're never forced to do any of this and do have the option of simply scaling down the cliff and immediately running off to activate your first tower although it is mandatory to do this before heading to the fourth shrine scattered across the plateau and it's also mandatory to complete all of these and collect the paraglider from the old man before setting off into the world of hyrule proper this feels to me like a very reasonable middle ground less free form than the original zelda but a very long way from twilight princess's enforced fishing that said the excuse the game provides for keeping you here is extremely contrived the old man tells you that trying to jump off the great plateau without a paraglider would result in your death and barring the glitch that allows you to survive fall damage by swapping items close to the ground he's absolutely right the obvious catch is that link can climb in this game and it's absolutely possible to descend on the cliffside in a way that would avoid fall death so this excuse really doesn't hold up under even casual scrutiny the player is trained right from the very start of the game to look for climbable surfaces so many of them are undoubtedly going to attempt to get off the great plateau this way and they'll be rewarded for their efforts by an immersion breaking fog that inexplicably makes links slip and vanishes the moment he gets the paraglider again no explanation provided it's not a huge deal but it is a very arbitrary restriction in a game that generally tries hard to avoid this pitfall and would have been very easy to ride around say the plateau is surrounded by the purple mist of ganon's corruption put here specifically to try and contain link the old man has some last bit of power that's able to clear it but doing so will alert ganon so he's waiting until link proves he's recovered enough to begin his real quest this would even help the rest of the story which as we'll see later on feels maybe a bit convenient everything is starting to go wrong all at once right as link wakes up but we're never really given a justification why it could be interpreted that ganon did know about link and that's what set events in motion zelda seemed to know he'd returned oh yeah that mysterious voice was zelda by the way what a twist but making this more concrete would be an improvement there are a lot of ways you could justify being trapped here for a bit but the one nintendo went with is kind of lame at least its goal of forcing you to stay on the plateau is worthwhile since after activating the tower prompted by zelda regardless of whether you choose to engage with the old man the first time he will appear now and task you with completing your first four shrines in exchange for a paraglider which are also where you'll obtain the majority of your sheikah slate runes you're strongly pointed towards the magnesis shrine although again you're free to do them in any order where you'll acquire the rune learn what it does in this case lift metal objects and put it to use in a series of tasks in order to pass this shrine you need to learn how to move objects out of your way that they can collide with other objects as well as their ability to create pathways for the player with secondary lessons about using magnesius in combat and to collect treasure chests each of the other starter shrines is structured in a similar way bombs are now a permanent rune instead of a collectible item and their shrine requires you to destroy fragile stone differentiate between round and flat bombs at least that's what i think this platform is meant to test although it's absolutely not required and introduces the basics of pipes and launchers as well as primes you to watch out for hidden treasure stasis is an interesting one that allows you to temporarily freeze an object in time as well as build up momentum during the period while it's frozen both of which are tested in the rune shrine and then we have cryonus which spawns solid ice blocks out of water these blocks can be climbed and used to lift objects and you also have an opportunity to discover their shielding possibilities against long-ranged enemies i've been speaking like many of the objectives in these shrines aren't extremely easy to bypass in other ways which they are but this really only serves to reward experience or cleverness while keeping the tutorial aspect of the shrines intact for less grizzled players these runes add considerably to the number of ways link has to interact with breath of the wild's new real-time physics and chemistry systems fantastic additions that could easily have formed to the core gimmick of a new zelda title and which i hope never leave the series there's an incredible sense of sense at work behind these systems they make so much sense and feel so natural that it's easy to forget just how much work would have gone into bringing them to life throw fire at something flammable it burns balloons lift objects which can then be pushed by wind if a blade hits a tree that tree comes down these effects are obviously stylized to the point of absurdity electricity on metal doesn't literally work like this but while the input output relationships in this universe may be exaggerated they're still close enough parallels to ours to make them feel extremely logical and painless to predict even though i'm sure that implementing and polishing these interactions from a development standpoint wasn't painless at all are there small details that could be addressed absolutely ice melts too slowly for example and while more fire will speed this process up you're now being forced to choose between your in-game resources and your real world time not the only instance where the game tosses this kind of choice at you and not a choice you should ever have to make it's ultimately a fairly minor gripe though and doesn't significantly detract from the system the runes tie into this fairly cleanly their mandatory use throughout the game isn't as fleshed out as i'd like since they're not usually interwoven with more than one other mechanic at any time but their individual abilities are still well defined and more powerful than might be expected at a glance a few basic examples would include the ability to ride objects in stasis an extremely addictive bit of gameplay or bomb yourself for some extra air time these chests in the sludge are clearly intended to be collected by using magnesis to make a bridge as they're located right outside that shrine but are actually possible to collect with any of the starting runes or again just by shield jumping in previous zelda games this would probably be something you need to remember the location of for later then return after you've unlocked a specific item this theme of an intended solution with room for creativity will be a lingering one over the course of the game and it's extremely refreshing to see and greatly distinguishes breath of the wild from its predecessors although as we'll explore later it does come with its own issues the quest for these runes sends you all across the great plateau which has been designed to mimic much of the full world on a smaller scale meaning that you'll be climbing cliffs braving the cold fighting enemies collecting treasure and overall getting a fairly strong sense of what to expect after you leave mostly taught through freeform gameplay with an incredibly restrained guiding hand by zelda standards going so far as to remove the persistent companion character that's been a staple of the series since ocarina of time the old man and zelda's voice do pop in once in a while to provide some rough guidance including for optional lessons on techniques such as tree felling and zelda will continue this role in a very limited sense once the tutorial ends but for the most part you really are left free to explore the world as you see fit with the world initially referring to the great plateau and then the entirety of hyrule another standout element of the great plateau compared to previous 3d zelda tutorials is its hostility the developers have packed in more than enough free roaming enemies and harrowing terrain to give players a legitimate challenge while also providing them with a multitude of tools to overcome this challenge the ins and outs of these tools will largely need to be discovered through exploration and experimentation though breath of the wild does concede some of its immersion with pop-up tool tips but they'll only appear after the player makes a relevant discovery combat will be covered in more detail later in the video but as a basic precursor it's easily broken but not at this stage in the game particularly for a new player link's low health and defense combined with the need to scramble for resources made far more urgent by breath of the wild's new weapon breakage system means that the great plateau actually plays far more into the surviving in the wilderness concept than most of the game will oddly making the tutorial area one of the most hardcore sections the player will experience this is especially the case if they decide to engage in a lot of combat which is never truly mandatory but certainly highly encouraged and i'd have to imagine the majority of first playthroughs will involve clearing the plateau of as many book goblins as possible even if you never swing your sword or axe or a tree branch a single time though you'll still be fighting against the world itself there's a segment where you'll need to chop down a tree to create a bridge for yourself then scale a cliffside falling to your doom if you fail to manage your stamina meter correctly elsewhere you're required to head up into the cold mountains to obtain cryonis so you'll need to come up with a way to cross this frigid river and then survive the continuous damage link suffers in harsh temperatures the beauty of this implementation is that at every step of the way you're free to choose your own strategy to accomplish this goal a very clean way to complete this cold section would be to cook spicy peppers into a dish that provides cold resistance and then use magnesis to build yourself a simple bridge across the river you're also free to cross this river though by chopping down trees to build a bridge to a raft or once again take advantage of the fact that you can ride objects you've used stasis on or if you come to this section on your way back from getting cryonics instead of on your way to it not the path you're guided towards but certainly an option you can just get across with that rune instead surviving the cold meanwhile can also just be done by brute forcing your way through with food or by completing the old man's recipe and getting the warm doublet or by hiking up the mountain using a torch or other burning weapon to keep yourself warm another instance of breath of the wild's robust set of state interactions it's a puzzle that looks like a hike and everything from your navigation path to completion of other puzzles to your understanding of the temperature system can be used for a solution between these experiences and many others with the developers going so far as to hide a mini boss on the starting area an enemy that can be quite intimidating at this stage of the game the great plateau alone can provide a compelling sandbox to the player for quite some time at some point though you'll have your shrines completed speared orbs in hand and be told to head off to what's revealed as the temple of time generally a very important component of zelda games but here just as much an understated ruin as anything else you've seen yet another reinforcement of this game's abandonment of tradition with nothing more than a goddess statue contained within as you'll soon discover these statues are found all across the world there really isn't anything unique about the temple here functionally its time has passed you trade in your orbs at this goddess statue for your first heart container or stamina vessel retrieve your paraglider from the old man aka the spirit of hyrule's former king and zelda's father and at this point you're free to go where you please i'd say that the great plateau has entered the pantheon of iconic video game areas alongside the likes of super mario brothers 1 1 or green hill zone and is undoubtedly going to be a focal point of game design study for years to come its core structure is fantastic and there are so many little moments of polish that highlight the experience of nintendo as a studio this platform that simultaneously teaches you a mechanic and lets you dictate exactly how much combat engagement you're comfortable with this tree which showers you with apples like confetti as a reward for following up on the tree felling tutorial the seemingly arbitrary crumbling walls which are actually explicitly framing many prominent landmarks to increase the anticipation of being able to explore hyrule castle the dueling peaks that beckon you into kakariko village hylia island which contains a shrine that's hidden from this angle teaching you that they won't always be quite so prominent if you go here first my absolute favorite of these has to be right after you get the paraglider and are provided with two windows to jump out of for your first flight one of them neatly frames your path to kakariko village and the other your path to ganon if you don't have strong convictions either way the developers would prefer to direct you to the village so a simple wooden launch platform gently draws your eye in that direction alternatively if your new paraglider is too unfamiliar to feel comfortable with this kind of leap yet you're also presented with a simple intuitive path back the way you came if you need more time to practice it's an excellent subtle use of environment designed to impart the game's core philosophy to the player whether it's consciously picked up on or not we'll go into other aspects of the game i have far more of an issue with but my praise for the great plateau is almost universal once off it you can rush ganon immediately you can head to kakariko villages recommended by the king to have amba assign you the main story quests or anywhere in between beating the game in under one hour or well over a hundred i would recommend the latter here because hyrule's landscape is phenomenal easily the best i've played on the terrain is very well laid out and beautiful to look at again barring the performance issues the amount of polish and attention to detail on display here is extremely impressive the variety of environments is about as expected the overworld mostly sticks to relatively realistic environments and the bases are all covered you've got a wide array of grasslands and forests a very sizable and oppressive desert snow-capped mountains relaxing sandy beaches hot springs rivers valleys a volcanic region etc while the world itself does have some fantastical elements they're generally still played fairly straight the game's more outlandish creations have usually been put there by a sentient species before we head into those though we should probably talk about how you're going to get to them as soon as link leaves the great plateau he has access to the vast majority of movement techniques he's going to be using for the remainder of the game which have been greatly expanded from previous titles to better interact with this larger more complex world the stamina meter returns from skyward's sword and is incorporated into many of his movement options including the primary trifecta of running gliding and climbing a proper sprinting system likewise returns from skyward sword which at this point i'm going to assume means that the role spamming days of old are officially behind us a mercy considering just how much running around the world you're going to be doing here it chews through your stamina meter fairly rapidly and if it runs out you're stuck in a slow-moving exhausted state waiting for it to recover usually more of an annoyance but potentially dangerous if you exhaust yourself during combat this more open ground movement is augmented by a dedicated jump button breaking the long-standing tradition of automatic jumping that ocarina of time introduced this doesn't mean that link is going to be challenging mario's acrobatics anytime soon his aerial control is essentially non-existent and the range is comparable to what he's had before albeit with a bit of a boost thanks to the new shield jump but the jump's performance isn't really the standout feature here what's more interesting is that it's yet another bit of hand-holding that nintendo stripped away from breath of the wild if you want to get across that gap then pointing yourself in its general direction is no longer good enough you need to time the sprint and jump yourself i fully admit that i might be reading into this a bit too much as there is a perfectly good utility reason for this feature link is going to be leaping off of a lot of ledges and a jump button is the most logical way to avoid forcing players into a single trajectory but intended or not it still does play nicely into the game's broader design philosophy with the nice bonus of providing an intuitive way to perform the jump attack from previous games there is one aspect of it that i don't like though the transition into a dive animation whenever you're over a body of water it's infrequent enough to be easy to forget about and can mess you up if you're planning to glide over the water rather than jump into it which you're going to avoid like the plague whenever possible because swimming feels horrendous in breath of the wild you move like a snail on crutches are denied basically all of your actions can't dive which is a glaring step down for most 3d zelda games and even many 2d ones have no good way to make it feel better because even the armor set created for the sole purpose of increasing link's water mobility doesn't provide that much of a speed boost and the water dash link you can use shreds through the stamina meter while still being pathetically slow this is the worst that swimming has felt in any zelda title i've played and possibly the worst time i've had swimming in any video game and while the world is mostly land there are still more than enough oceans lakes rivers and pawns scattered around to make it an unpleasant aspect of breath of the wild's exploration it's good that cryonis allows you to circumvent this to a degree and treasures can still somewhat be hidden underwater thanks to magnesis albeit in a way that's much less satisfying to find since all you'll ever need to do is flick the rune on and look for a splash of purple but it's difficult not to be put off by the sharp downgrade to water and swimming compared to link's previous outings especially when you consider all the ways breath of the wild's other systems could have interacted with it to create some really interesting scenarios slow motion stasis launches freeform cryonis placement guiding air bubbles around to keep flames lit or avoid shocks there was a ton of potential here that was let down by the lackluster water mechanics now this wasn't done without reason the massive map already takes a long time to explore thoroughly and having underwater sections would place even more demand on the players as well as taking up additional development time to create that said making the map as a whole a bit smaller in exchange for failing more of its surface area and introducing compelling mechanics could potentially have been a good trade-off and while i enjoy breath of the wild's scope there are several reasons i'm not totally convinced the decision to make the map this overwhelmingly massive was a net positive for the game although we'll put a pin in that for the moment thankfully the air is a lot more fun to traverse than the water all because of the new paraglider this is built on the back of previous creations like the deco leaf from the wind waker and sail cloth from skyward sword but the freedom offered to the player here dramatically outstrips any previous incarnation the paraglider is always easily accessible just by tapping the jump button in midair and its slow descent and reasonable airspeed means that if you can start from a high point something this incarnation of hyrule is decidedly not lacking in you're able to take some beautiful gliding trips across the landscape paragliding is limited by link's stamina meter in addition to its natural descent but if you come prepared with stamina refilling food it's possible to glide for a very long time a sense of freedom that's unparalleled in the legend of zelda series and brushes the upper edge of adventure games in general skyward sword had freer air movement in terms of in the moment use but it was only available in fixed areas whereas there's no point in the game that takes away the paraglider after you get it there's no need to be so grandiose though even a short glide off a rooftop or down a hill invokes the same feeling to some degree the paraglider is fast and responsive enough to be constantly useful and fun even outside of the obvious lengthy flights it's hard to overstate just how much this adds to the game's adventurous spirit especially earlier on when you're constantly surrounded by distant structures vying for your attention climb somewhere high leap off into the open air and set out for a new discovery the introduction of such freeform gliding does have its pitfalls which we'll touch on soon but overall i think breath of the wild would be considerably less enjoyable with its absence and we haven't even gotten into its additional functionality in combat or puzzles of course gliding's value is limited if you can't consistently gain height in the first place and while this can be done through simple upwards hikes or utilizing updrafts including creating them yourself through the game's new chemistry system a lot of the time this will be accomplished through link's other prominent movement option climbing with a few notable exceptions link can climb almost any surface in hyrule whether that's a house in a village the side of a mountain the body of a rock monster a tall tree hyrule castle this is the mechanic that truly turns this hyrule into your playground and going back to earlier 3d zelda's after breath of the wild feels incredibly restrictive in comparison however while the realization that you can reach and climb the distant terrain you saw in that opening shot is wonderful the actual act of doing so is less wonderful link's climbing speed is not very fast and climbing also pulls from the stamina wheel very quickly while you can press the jump button to increase your climbing speed it chews through the wheel even faster so on a longer climb it's generally smartest to save your jump until the last possible moment where link gets one final desperation leap to try and reach the top at face value this system makes sense providing link with the ability to scale almost any service but not going too far with it and allowing him to improve this traversal more and more as he unlocks additional stamina in practice however the purpose of the stamina restriction is quite limited the game's non-linear nature and stamina upgrade system combined with easy to stockpile stamina restoration food means the developers have to assume that any climbable surface in the world is possible to fully climb regardless of where the player is in the rest of the game's progression this makes it very difficult to introduce any kind of interesting climbing task into the game as what's difficult for one player will be trivial for another depending on the path they've taken through the game to reach that task and for the most part the developers just don't bother sailing was told of a legendary mountaineer from the past who hid their treasure on the highest peak of the most dangerous mountain left only for an extremely accomplished climber to find this would lead the player to go through the game anticipating the moment when they finally had enough stamina to tackle that mountain and claim their prize this sounds like a very legend of zelda a bit of game design and we see these kinds of teases everywhere in the series but no such concept exists or could exist with breath of the wild's climbing mechanics now not having it would be fine in its own right breath of the wild breaks a lot of zelda conventions and while it doesn't entirely shy away from these kinds of anticipatory progress gates it does minimize them for the sake of increasing player agency there didn't need to be interesting climbing tasks for the sake of progression gaining but there should have been interesting climbing tasks which there are generally very few of by the time you leave the great plateau you've already seen the most polished climbing task the game has to offer and that's specifically because the developers could anticipate how much stamina the player was going to have when they attempted it there are certainly more serious climbing tests than just this but the vast majority of climbing in the game will have no such excitement or really any at all mountaineering seems to be the strongest argument for stamina usage and at its best it makes a good case forcing you to judge vertical distance and maneuver around the terrain accordingly for every compelling white knuckle climb though there will be many more mundane ones and the amount of skill involved in climbing isn't as high as i first expected either there are no choices to make besides climb jump let go jump off open a menu and pick up the odd plant and while there is some skill involved with maneuvering into pockets to recover stamina it's not a very deep skill and can be learned quite quickly the safest bet for climbing is essentially always to go up as slowly as possible and then perform a final jump at the end the only exception being if you're getting attacked on the way up which accounts for a tiny fraction of the total climbs you're going to make the real reason to press jump in the middle of your climb is convenience and the most significant climbing related reward for upgrading your stamina meter is more convenience the ability to press jump more often and get this over with faster that's not the only reward there are certainly other climbing related benefits to building stamina but it's by far the most common one you'll be utilizing over a play through and considering how fundamental the climbing and stamina systems are to the game having this be their most frequent intersection feels ill-considered this only gets worse when you think about how few direct methods of progressing your character there actually are in breath of the wild stamina is one of the main systems and climbing is probably the biggest argument for its existence and while the full utilization of climbing is held back by other parts of the game's design still other parts are held back by it the ability to climb almost any surface creates a lot of design challenges the developers had to come up with solutions for including disabling it entirely in some instances in shrines and divine beasts this is justified by having very smooth polished surfaces and you could say this is understandable trying to design an obstacle course where the participant can clamber over every obstacle is a tall order however spending a good chunk of the game's run time with one of its core mechanics forcibly disabled is hardly an ideal scenario it's a very blunt solution to a problem spawned from directly conflicting design elements i'm not necessarily saying this wasn't the best solution available exclusively designing rooms that climbing couldn't break would come with its own pitfalls for sure but it's still an imperfect solution climbing is one of the game's most distinctive and ubiquitous abilities and you're going to be spending an awful lot of time not being able to do it within segments specifically meant to test your abilities no less in the overworld however while there are a few logical climbing restrictions put in place including extremely steep surfaces and slick ice breath of the wild generally restricts climbing through rain this is by far one of the most maligned aspects of the game i've seen pop up in discussions and i've tried so hard to come up with a reasonable explanation for its existence throughout multiple playthroughs and i just can't breath of the wild employs a dynamic weather system which means in most parts of the world it will be raining sometimes as you'd expect during this rain though surfaces become too slick to climb meaning that if you're in the middle of climbing a mountain and it starts raining you may well need to just twiddle your thumbs and wait for the weather to clear up or abandon your climb completely both of which feel absolutely terrible i understand that the goal here was to periodically provide further navigation challenges to the player and i'm very on board with that idea but this was not the right way to do it its other major purpose is to provide a permanent obstacle to the player during certain gameplay segments such as forcing you onto the road up to zora's domain or increasing the challenge of the trial of thundershrine quest but these isolated scenarios could easily be justified by the addition of a dedicated monsoon weather state that's limited to these regions this behavior did not need to be carried over into the broader world i'm certainly not saying i don't like the inclusion of rain at all it's a mission would feel baffling and it has some other interactions that i do quite like such as suppressing the fires that you can normally use for a tactical advantage or turning lightning arrows into area of effect attacks although even then there are a few overworld quests that involve transporting fire which rain can smother and the solution likewise just being to wait out the storm doesn't feel good at the very least for these ones you have nearby indoor areas to light campfires in which link can use to pass the time even if it's fully possible to go to sleep to rain and wake up to more rain multiple times in a row realistic sure and realistically frustrating too i've been speaking as if there weren't exploits available to get around many rainy slopes which there are but in addition to the ambiguity of whether they were even programmed intentionally and some of them certainly weren't most players are never going to know about these to begin with there is something to be said for increased game knowledge providing an increase to your mobility options but this is another case where the payoff feels more like the way the game should have worked from the beginning a bit of a tangent there admittedly but we were definitely going to have to bring up rain at some point and what better time than during the climbing discussion where it contributes to an already flawed system becoming teeth-grittingly awful on a routine basis i need to emphasize that the ability to climb is still a fantastic addition that's absolutely critical to making breath of the wild's world design function as well as it does but there are a lot of areas i think could be improved from faster climbing speeds to less rain penalty to potentially ditching the stamina requirements altogether in fact looking at how the mechanic has functioned so far i question whether the introduction of a stamina system into the zelda series was necessarily a positive one and i'd like to point to a few techniques in breath of the wild including some unintentional exploits discovered by the playerbase that reinforced this question the first is whistle sprinting a technique that allows you to continue at a faster pace than link's typical walk speed while waiting for his stamina meter to recover if you know how to do this and can handle the extra bit of strain it puts on your hands it allows for a faster ground speed and prevents constantly having to switch between walking and running across large sections of the world the other two go hand in hand bomb lodging is an exploit of breath of the wild's physics system that allows link to soar through the air much faster and farther than he was originally intended to rivale's gale on the other hand is not an exploit it's intentionally granted to link after clearing a major quest and allows him to build significant height from a grounded starting position both of these come with a hefty chunk of baggage rivali's gale is something i'll go into more when talking about all the champion abilities but bomb launching hilariously breaks a large portion of the shrines in the game can be used to totally bypass many obstacles the developers intended as interesting roadblocks for the player and allows link to move at a faster pace than the game's engine can even keep up with there are a host of reasons that bomb launching couldn't and shouldn't have been introduced to the game in any official capacity however i'm bringing it up because one of the major things i use it for is bypassing boring swims or cryonis trudges rivoli's gale likewise has many uses however in general gameplay by far the most common ones at least for me are to bypass smaller swims assist with bomb launching over a larger body of water or bypass the tedium of climbing up a cliffside keep in mind in these specific use cases i'm rarely actually going anywhere i couldn't get to otherwise but i am bypassing the tedious act of getting there these techniques combined give us a look at a link who can move through the world more efficiently with less stamina encumbrance and i don't think too many people comfortable with using them would say they make breath of the wild less fun to play you are going to be spending extended periods of time running across terrain which is made less enjoyable by constantly having to feather a stamina meter i really wish there was a better system put in place here whether that was removing stamina burn from link's sprint altogether while slightly reducing that sprint speed or allowing him to for example settle into a slower sprint after the meter is used up essentially an automatic version of whistle sprinting both of which i thoroughly believe would make ground traversal more enjoyable and both of which reduce or eliminate the emphasis on stamina these would have minor implications in some scenarios notably combat but i think that would be a small concession considering exploration gets a far higher portion of total playtime and the impact would still be relatively minimal even in combat scenarios swimming and climbing likewise needed to either be made more efficient or more interesting link receives armor that allows him to literally swim up a waterfall while it's equipped showing that the essence of these absurdly fast and agile water creatures is something he absolutely can access and yet while swimming in water that isn't actively being pulled down by gravity he still moves like a clumsy amateur this is what breath of the wild considers to be the upgraded swim speed he can also cross any body of water at any time thanks to cryonus the only major exceptions being when he's already been knocked into or recklessly dove into water with no way to get out and recover his stamina a player may lose a few hearts to this over a run particularly a first run but it'll be a fairly uncommon occurrence with the permanent consequence of making the rest of the adventure more tedious than necessary to recap for running the stamina system makes ground travel your most common activity actively worse for swimming the mechanic is already unnecessarily constrained and stamina only exacerbates the issue further and for both systems the moments where it serves a valid purpose pale in comparison to the moments where it unnecessarily gets in the player's way climbing is a bit more complicated though as i said at its best it works well and it does feel like there should be some kind of obstacle involved with scaling surfaces being able to shimmy your way up the tallest mountain effortlessly at any time would trivialize it at the same time essentially any surface that you can climb turns stamina into purely an irritation if you can make it to the top like this the game essentially never provides a reason why you shouldn't also be able to make it to the top like this any act of traversal should ideally be either compelling or unobtrusive but breath of the wild frequently misses that mark with these mechanics in many instances traversal is simultaneously uncompelling and intrusive if the game supplied a steady stream of interesting obstacles that took the stamina system into account its implementation would make a lot more sense but this doesn't happen that often and even when movement challenges do appear stamina frequently doesn't play a substantial role navigating around this infested tower to find an opening is a good challenge and i enjoy it but it's a pathfinding challenge link's stamina isn't a factor in solving it even though this is an overt movement test and stamina is supposedly the mechanic that adds challenge to movement it is a factor in making the tower really slow to climb without stamina upgrades though despite the fact that there's no decision to be made on this tower besides go up we see this happen all over the place even when these obstacles are absent and there are no interesting decisions to be made between points a and b the stamina system constantly rears its head even though it's adding nothing to the experience one option might be to simply get rid of the stamina penalty for jumping i.e fully climbing versus fully jumping goes the exact same height but then there's rarely ever a reason not to just spam the jump button i think that would still be better overall but it wouldn't be my first choice for a solution in the same way that if you were complaining about how long it was taking to run through a field my suggestion wouldn't be to add a roll button it would work but it's probably not exactly how you want movement in your game to look case in point and a similar statement applies to swim dashing with all this combined i can't help but feel that the stamina system employed all over breath of the wild's most fundamental movement tools does more harm than good that's not to say it's all bad of course while the game hasn't been designed to fully take advantage of it stamina is a reasonable idea on paper and the fact that you can enhance it at the cost of heart containers masterfully ties into the game's overall goals of increasing player agency and breaking long-standing conventions in the series i hope such a trade-off becomes standard for zelda possibly even making heart containers one of several resources to choose between that said even here i'm not sure stamina is the ideal resource to include in this decision because if it was fixed creating challenges that took it into account would be much easier stamina also sometimes does achieve the goals the developers were likely aiming for and the fact that it scales over the course of your adventure plays out well in certain instances a fresh file won't have much stamina to work with so if the player does stumble across an obstacle they can't climb yet they'll be forced down a different path than they were planning which given how much there is to explore and be distracted by in breath of the wild can lead to fun spontaneity as you start filling in your map though and have firmer locations you'd like to make a beeline for extra stamina can help you get there there's also a nice sense of logic behind exploration leading to better exploration as you find more spirit orbs and stamina ingredients and stamina makes complete sense in the context of gliding although this could easily be its own discrete resource i'm not convinced stamina needs to remain in the series but if it does continue i think we'd ideally see some changes my suggestions would start with completely ditching stamina restoration items which would increase the impact of upgrading stamina as well as make it possible to create late game challenges which use stamina as a significant factor i'd also make it so that link's climbing abilities ramped up considerably faster with a higher ceiling reducing intrusiveness and introduced more climbing-related obstacles making the act of climbing more compelling if there were frequent moving obstacles that you needed to time your jump around for example whether these were enemies or otherwise that would be a good use case for the jumping mechanic there are additional movement options we haven't discussed as well including shield surfing a very inspired idea that feels fantastic in action it controls wonderfully it's fast and exciting on the right terrain it can be combined with a paraglider or the bow for some really smooth sequences it's easy to picture breath of the wild without this mechanic if it was never here people wouldn't be clamoring for it but i'm very happy it is here because it's great i do wish that it was a bit more responsive on more types of terrain though having friction severely hinder its momentum is certainly realistic but nintendo were very comfortable bending their physics for the sake of gameplay blatantly calling breath of the wild's physics system a series of clever lies told to the player this is an area where i wish they'd been willing to lie a little bit more as well as possibly let link kick like he was riding a skateboard to keep momentum for longer a much more annoying issue is that shield surfing uses up that shield's durability which means the player is granted an extremely fun tool and then constantly made to feel anxious about actually using it there are some considerations made to these issues a few shields exist which do have low friction and or high surfing durability and some terrain doesn't degrade shields at all but i still think the mechanic could be further incentivized horse riding is back switching from a pona to wild horses tamed in the fields of hyrule and for the most part they've been implemented very well finding a group of horses out in the wild choosing the one you'd like and figuring out a way onto its back can be really exciting especially the first time i got breath of the wild for my girlfriend as a birthday gift and after clearing the great plateau she immediately ran towards some horses and spent the next hour plus exclusively going after them this gave me some insight into the thrill of the chase however i never really got to experience this myself that compelling positioning and stalking kind of goes out the window if you think to try ice arrows which i did immediately and forever damaged some of that enjoyment as a result i'd been rewarded for my idea with a more efficient process but i definitely don't have as much fun feeling as stable as she did the horse captures you've been watching were fun but i only did this specifically because i was making a video and needed footage if this wasn't the case i'd really have no reason to take this kind of roundabout approach this kind of trade-off is inevitable to some degree with how freeform so many a breath of the wild systems are and i think the game generally does an admirable job of making alternate solutions enjoyable but as we'll see horses aren't the only part of the game where this kind of issue can appear the fact that i can just opt to not use ice arrows doesn't really solve the problem although there will be better times in this video to go deeper into that concept in any case it's still fun to climb aboard a horse successfully tame it and see it respond to your commands for the first time only enhanced more as you take it to a stable here you'll realize that you can name it see the different stats and later style its hair and change its gear you also have the ability to build a bond with your horse a small but inspired system mechanically it's not terribly interesting horses with higher bonds go off course less often and you need a maximum bond with them before they can be customized and building a bond likewise isn't anything special you just need to ride around for a bit and press a button when it gets upset despite the simple mechanics though it's still very effective at building a connection between the horse and the player not just link the game makes horses just individual enough to let you feel invested in them this isn't just a horse it's your horse and it helps that the act of riding them is better than ever they're responsive quick to get going link can smoothly and stylishly mount and dismount them at a moment's notice the follow major roads of their own accord so you can dedicate your full attention to the environment and horseback combat is great thanks to the longer reach link has compared to previous titles which makes it such a crushing shame the developers made horses so difficult to actually use much of the world is divided up by cliffs deserts mountains and other terrain that horses can't cross which is fair enough but using them to get between these areas could still be a great option the killer here is that as soon as you abandon your horse the only ways to get it to back are to either return to exactly where you left it or go to a stable where you're then forced to go through a series of menus wait for the retrieval and be lectured about some minor horse fact you've been told 10 times already this would be damning enough but you'll also constantly be dismounting to head up into harsher terrain seeing something new in the distance and setting out to go examine it and the end result is that horses are rarely going to last longer than the initial trek from the stable to one or two points of interest before being swiftly abandoned again when you come back to horse friendly ground it's rarely going to be the same ground that you left and stables are spaced far enough apart that heading to one to retrieve your horse is generally going to be a hindrance more than a help there's a button on your controller dedicated entirely to the act of whistling but all it does is make a horse that's already extremely close to you run a bit closer it doesn't summon it from elsewhere on the map and this decision is extremely puzzling nintendo may have been worried that players wouldn't thoroughly explore the world if they had the consistent option to move through it faster but considering the game typically emphasizes the freedom to play how you want and that breath of the wild was heavily associated with horses right from the very first teasers it really seems like they should have had a better use case than they ended up with if the intention was to force players to visit stables more often a system that for example wore your horse down over time preferably quite slowly and required you to take it to a stable to freshen it up would be a far better way to drive traffic there while simultaneously increasing the player's connection to their horse if the intention was to make finding a stable feel valuable this could be done through a reward system maybe you're given a stable card and told that if you do business with every stable in hyrule you're given some kind of unique item simply putting better supply shops and the lycan stables with more exclusive items would also achieve both of these these are just some basic suggestions but they hopefully get across that you could achieve these kinds of objectives without crippling what should be a core feature of the game a lot of the criticisms i've aimed at and will aim at this game are very subjective and solutions to them would involve trade-offs elsewhere but this is what i'm very comfortable calling a flat-out mistake on nintendo's part or potentially something more sinister but we'll save that for the dlc talk more positively the sand seals and gerudo desert to provide a sort of cross between horse riding and shield surfing and it's a fun mechanic that feels good and creates a few interesting set pieces during your time here actually acquiring a seal though whether trained or wild isn't particularly convenient so i don't find myself using them too often when exploring the broader desert rafts are likewise a somewhat niche tool that can provide a fun alternative to swimming or cryonis hopping but only if you've got a korok leaf on hand to propel them meaning that you may be forced to sacrifice a precious inventory slot for the sake of somewhat more efficient reversal with that said rafts are introduced as early as the great plateau and are also one of the few travel mechanics seen there that aren't dulled as the game goes on tree felling is replaced with the paraglider this kind of magnesis bridge becomes obsolete as soon as you gain cryonis and rivali's gale neuters the already limited climbing challenges to name a few examples rafts on the other hand are always efficient rare enough to maintain their novelty and provide a broader range of options than other methods of water traversal in this sense they actually maintain their usefulness impressively well over the course of a playthrough keeping rafts relevant may also be why the zora armor is so pathetic but if this is the reason i wouldn't consider it to be a very good one as there are far more bodies of water in hyrule than there are rafts the ideal solution in my eyes would be to improve the zora armor but also introduce another upgrade that improves rafts as well so that after everything was collected rafts were still the superior option when available barring some of the more outlandish options out there this more or less covers how link will be moving around high rule i know it was a lengthy section but considering how sprawling the map is even small nuances with these systems have an enormous impact on the experience by the end credits and despite my gripes i think it generally works pretty well and it helps that link usually controls about how you expect him to this isn't universal climbing in particular has a few hiccups and every once in a while you're undoubtedly going to get stuck on something you didn't mean to climb or lose your grip unexpectedly at one point i also got well and truly stuck on the geography but considering what a daunting task these movement options must have been from a technical perspective i'd say nintendo did an admirable job bringing them to life i think that essentially all of these mechanics could have been polished up more but the possibilities they create shine brighter than the flaws in acting on those possibilities of course none of this actually matters if what you're running and gliding and seal surfing towards isn't enjoyable to begin with so let's dive into those filling in your map involves climbing and activating hyrule's various shika towers with each tower unlocking the topography of its respective region as well as a new permanent warp point alongside being accompanied by some sweeping cinematics that show off potential places to explore next completing a tower always feels satisfying although i would have appreciated a few more unique challenges associated with them the ones that provide more of a task to complete than just go up are considerably more fun the act of navigating to and activating a tower is fun in and of itself though so i don't think this is a very big issue the map is helpful but unobtrusive not overburdened with information that the player doesn't choose to add to it themselves and you'll still need to actually travel across each region to fully fill it in it's precisely useful enough to serve as an exploration guide without spoiling exploration and the ability to assign your own waypoints and stamps is a simple addition that greatly improves the user experience a few minor sticking points would be the inability to write your own notes which previous games have done and the low amount of simultaneous waypoints you can have along with the blue one looking enough like the other markers to make it hard to find once the map starts getting filled in more for the most part though i am a fan of the design of both the map and the towers which moves us onto shrines arguably the real heart of the game in a thorough playthrough that take on more of a gameplay role than even the main quest line there are 120 of these in total and they serve as warp points link's source of spirit orbs as well as a number of other roles the most common of which being a scaled back take on previous games dungeons exactly where their scale settles on can vary a fair amount and sadly the same can really be said about their quality let's get this out of the way immediately the open world nature of breath of the wild means that these shrines can be visited in any order apart from the first four on the great plateau meaning that the classic nintendo game design philosophy that served the zelda series so well in the past is severely hammered here i brought up world one one of super mario bros earlier which i've traditionally seen used to demonstrate this concept so for a change of pace let's instead look at the first level of kirby squeak squad a very clean bit of design in its own right i know nintendo's technically just the publisher here but their dna has always been wound into the series and it's about as accessible as video games get the player is dropped into an open plane and to progress they have to move right they then come across a bump requiring them to jump and move right after this is the first enemy of the game safely contained between two more bumps giving the player as much time as needed to figure out a way across then comes a more dangerous uncontained enemy with an optional copy ability this one can still be jumped over but it's harder because of its beam weapon so inhaling or multi-jumping are more strongly encouraged at the next obstacle encouragement becomes insistence they must figure out multi-jumping finally another enemy with a more complex movement pattern guards the door and it's okay for it to be harder because the player is at least guaranteed to know that they can multi-jump over it the level keeps going but i'll stop here because by now you've hopefully already noticed the theme of gradually introducing concepts and then testing them under increasingly stringent circumstances on top of that the level after this can make use of the lessons learned here then the one after that folds in its lessons and so on this is very classic game design nintendo helped pioneer and has been employed all over traditional zelda dungeons but because these shrines can be visited in any order by any player they can't build on top of each other the same way there can't be lessons in some shrines to test in other shrines because there's no guarantee that the lesson will be found before the test this escalation design could still be self-contained within an individual shrine but the problem is nintendo decided 120 was the number required to satisfactorily fill the world even with the level editor-esque construction shared between all of them this is still a lot of content to produce for an already enormous game this means that many of them turned out very short not providing too much time to introduce a clear concept and then build on it the ones that do manage to escalate a clear concept across several stages tend to be my favorites and will likely best scratch the traditional zelda dungeon itch for a lot of players which have generally heavily leaned on this design trial of power is a reasonably lengthy shrine with a theme based around a generating momentum the side rewards don't really tie into this theme and it briefly makes use of the horrid motion controls nintendo insisted on shoehorning into the game but this may be the best use of them in any of these shrines just because of how short and relatively unobtrusive this segment is overall i'm quite happy with this one and it does feel like a miniature dungeon thanks to its length hidden treasure combat and building of a clear idea two bombs likewise introduces a basic concept then escalates it by changing the apparatus from automatic to player controlled this second segment still doesn't strictly require two bombs but it's useful to do so since you can see what's happening from there you move on to a final section which does concretely ask you to synchronize both your bomb runes it's a strong concept that ends too quickly and only fully materializes in the final segment with a task that isn't entirely connected to what you've previously been doing but is still a success in my eyes blue flame is both built on a compelling concept transporting a blue flame across the area as well as being long enough to build upon that concept in multiple clever ways transport the flame by hand then arrow then to a set of simultaneous targets then to increasingly complex sets of simultaneous targets if more of the shrines worked like this the game would be better for it that said while a lot of them aren't this involved there is still fun to be had in some of the shorter one-off entries pushing power has an obvious goal get the ball in the hole but provides a satisfying physics playground in order to achieve this windmills provides a bit of meat if you want to go after all the numerous optional chests but even the core concept of rotating fans to fully cover all the propellers in a room serves as a satisfying logic puzzle a balanced approach also does the logic room puzzle well requiring the player to take the weight and volume of various boxes into account for every good shrine though there's an equally underwhelming two or three to match it sunken scoop solution is obvious the second you step into the room and yet the act of solving it is still tedious due to the limited slow and slightly wonky controls and camera of magnesis the rune is still a great addition to the game overall but it doesn't hold up well when too much is asked of it drawing parabolas is pure busy work if you understand the concept of these blocks being able to launch link which the player was taught about back in the opening shrines stalled flight has you get on top of a block and use stasis a single time at which point the shrine ends trial of passage just requires you to remember that stasis and magnesius exist despite the shrine's flashy appearance you don't do anything interesting and are likely to get stuck waiting for the apparatus to slowly work its way back around to the right position three boxes has you grab the chests in the room and put them on a big switch and that's it if the title wasn't an immediate giveaway you might get a tiny eureka moment out of this one but even so mechanically it's still a notable step down from the shine you first got the magnesis rune in melting ice hazard was a shrine i wanted to love because of its similarity to blue flame one of my favorites in the game your task this time is to safely transport an ice block through a fiery obstacle course an extremely strong concept but significantly brought down by the lack of actual challenge the block is big enough to survive just being thrown right through most of the fire there's no ambient heat putting you on a clock and link's own navigation is pretty straight forward this was possibly the biggest letdown i felt between first entering a shrine and leaving it the most consistently iron inducing ones though are the shrines that lean heavily on motion controls which are incredibly awkward to use whether you're playing with joy cons or the pro controller these are simply nowhere near as accurate or responsive as they needed to be this right here is a bad tech demo it shouldn't be getting passed off as substantial content in a triple a video game of course i've mostly been discussing these shrines as if they follow the same relatively rigid rules as previous zelda dungeons which they famously don't part of the charm here is the ability to creatively break them thanks to breath of the wild's physics and chemistry systems it's a compelling element to shrines for sure you're probably not actually outsmarting the developers most of the time they likely knew about most of these tricks but it certainly feels like you are i remember feeling extremely clever during my first playthrough when i realized i could complete electrical circuits by using metal weapons in my arsenal in this shrine i'm supposed to be using blocks to create a wind current that will gradually push a ball into a socket which will then give me enough time to run to an elevator the socket activates instead i took those blocks fashioned a cradle and engulfed the ball in from the elevator this one made me feel good too but there are scenarios where alternate solutions can be pushed too far breaking the shrine so much that they become mechanically worthless fire-based shrines are often particularly bad examples of this they present what could potentially be interesting puzzles but are usually breezed right through just by pulling out a couple fire arrows the electrical puzzles somewhat fall into the same trappings and an argument can be made that solving your first puzzle like this has a detrimental effect on any you encounter later however the initial thought to try using your inventory does require creative thinking and the same applies to any other tricks you pick up that can be applied to multiple shrines using fire arrows on the other hand does not require this initial inspiration and almost always takes less creativity than the intended solution blue flame avoided this problem by making the fire something that couldn't be generated from your inventory and i assume the developers didn't do this for every firebase shrine because they wanted to emphasize their open-ended nature but i think they took things too far and more of these challenges should have used blue fire in some capacity the very same wind current shrine i just praised actually demonstrates the issue with too much shrine freedom as well i know now that you can actually just put the ball in the socket stasis it and run into position i didn't think of this solution myself i saw it on youtube so i suppose stupidity was actually a blessing in this case because i think this more efficient solution is actually less interesting and satisfying not everyone will feel this way some people undoubtedly came up with the same solution and felt good about it but keeping the puzzle so open always leaves the possibility of disappointment on the table just like too many ways to mount a horse can potentially harm the fun for some players i don't think these downsides outweigh the positives and there's a lot to love about the creativity shrines offer but they're not a strictly beneficial addition and making more of them a bit less vulnerable to very simple workarounds would likely have been an improvement while completing these shrines is inconsistent the same can be said for gaining access to them a decent portion are simply scattered around waiting for link to walk up to them but many will also require some additional challenge to access whether that's an obstacle to overcome or a dedicated quest to unlock them and the best of these are some of the better and more fleshed out moments in the game many of the riddle-based shrines are presided over by the rito cass and his accordion and while some of these can involve a bit too much waiting around for a specific trigger they're usually pretty enjoyable to solve asking you to perform tasks like write a deer onto a pedestal fire an arrow into the sun figure out an angle that lets you thread two stone rings with a single arrow or hunt for a giant white bird they're all presented as riddles but just how core the cryptic element of these shrine quests are will vary quite a bit the archery task is essentially spelled out for you and the incredibly conspicuous terrain hammers the objective home so this one is less about deciphering and more about execution the deer on the other hand is referred to as a beast that wears a crown of bone so there's some of each here you have to first decipher that you even need to ride a deer onto the pedestal and then actually go catch one and then the giant white bird is mostly deciphering it turns out to be a perspective trick on some nearby mountaintops i don't think that every one of these riddles is a slam dunk but the variety here is still ultimately very welcome and i'd call them a great addition to the game stranded on eventide is easily one of the best shrine quests breath of the wild has to offer removing all the items you've acquired across your journey and forcing you into a lengthy back to basic survivalist section an aspect of the game that will have faded for most players by the time they get to this point it's genuinely refreshing to have weapons you've long since stopped picking up in the overworld to become valuable again and the island's layout is excellent the terrain here is put to very good use during your quest to carry three orbs into the scattered pedestals it's a great break from the established gameplay loop and i'm always a little bit sad when it's over it makes me wish that breath of the wild emphasized this kind of resource scarcity more often as the great plateau and eventide are two of the segments i find most compelling in the entire game another successful set of shrines comes from the three found deep inside intimidating labyrinths across hyrule which stand out enticingly in the distance these can be fairly demanding with a lot of enemies to fight and loot to discover on the way there and having open ceilings with climbable walls is a neat touch that makes them appear far easier than they actually are make no mistake here if you want your spirit orbs and pieces of the barbarian armor you're gonna have to take some covered paths to get there the shrine hidden at the end of a darkened area provides another welcome change of pace especially when it culminates in a stylish fight against one of the game's mini bosses mechanically it's pretty plain following the bird statues is a very basic pathfinding test and the boss is recycled from the overworld but the impression this area leaves still absolutely justifies its existence a slightly more involved navigation challenge comes via the lost woods which you'll have trouble getting through to access the multiple shrines inside until you realize that you can always follow the sparks blowing off a torch it's an understated puzzle with some red herrings thrown in for good measure at first i thought there might be some kind of pattern in the swirling fog i was supposed to follow and i also tried following the gaze of the trees which had worked so well for me in the dark once threw the lost woods into korok forest i like the gauntlet link has to run with specific gear which he's never allowed to remove or break however i wouldn't say the developers fully delivered on the potential that forcing a specific loadout for the sake of a shrine quest has this equipment really just functions like anything already in link's arsenal and you still use your own arrows the only thing a bit unusual is that everything is made of wood which makes enemies with fire attacks more dangerous it's still fun but they could have gone further with the idea in the gerudo desert a soldier has gone missing found exhausted and on the brink of death you need a drink to revive her which requires you to carry a rapidly melting ice block through an enemy infested ruin a very clever way to restrict link's path without explicitly putting up additional barriers in the overworld for the sake of this quest i also love that rather than actually bringing her a drink you just go tell her that it's ready and she sprints off excitedly the odd progression gate the lighthearted ending to an apparently dire situation this entire quest feels very zelda the trial of thunder tasks you with moving orbs onto a raised platform in the pouring rain but leaves the method of getting them there open i think the intended solution is probably to golf them into place using stasis but during this through i had octorock balloons in my inventory and this was among the better uses i'd ever gotten out of them you can't get to this shrine if you step on the crazy ladies flowers it's very simple but it does add some much needed character to an open air shrine something they typically lack based on what i've seen she's become one of the better known tertiary characters it's a short sequence but very memorable nonetheless the nedra encounter was one of the best moments of the entire game for me nestled away at the top of a forlorn peak so it's a once mighty dragon breath ragged tongue rolling completely overtaken by ganon's corruption seeing one of these dragons roaming the sky for the first time was already a very awe inspiring moment but this was an entirely new level of discovery you shoot the first bit of corruption off nadra's body it takes off and it's up to you to stalk it across the mountainside clearing it off corruption until its former majesty is restored at this point it freely offers you one of its scales you throw it into the spring of wisdom and a shrine reveals itself what a fantastic epic sequence even causing a permanent change in the world beyond the usual fast travel point shrines offer as nadra will now be free to travel the sky alongside the others this unfortunately gets offset by the reality of the dragons these initially intriguing mysteries are mechanically just flying farm nodes but the addition of a new element to hyrule and the experience of adding it still rises above it's among the most heroic you're made to feel outside of the main quest stolen heirloom is another time for link's heroism to come through an extremely involved quest that has you tracking down the thief of a sheikah treasure before fighting a duel against a yiga blade master it's a detailed quest with a surprisingly sad story behind it but unfortunately breath of the wild's open world design harmed this one for me this quest takes place in kakariko village the first area you're directed to after leaving the great plateau so it's probably intended to be completed early in the game in which case this blade master will likely make for an intimidating presence and be the first one the player has seen essentially substituting for a boss in my case though this was one of the last shrine quests i completed and by that point in the game blademasters had become a routine enemy i'd encountered in the wild many times so any challenge or attention he was supposed to provide flew straight out the window there is an argument that this was my fault for not being thorough enough when i first arrived in the village but investing so much time into a quest's creation only to have it potentially fall apart at the finale like this nevertheless seems odd this was clearly supposed to be one of their premium quests and i don't think it's comparable to say completing a rupee quest past the point where rupees stopped being relevant if recycling an overworld enemy was the only way this quest could be completed within the game's time and resource constraints i can accept that as it is ultimately still good content and diverting resources to a problem this minor that will never appear for many players likely wasn't in the developer's best interest but it is a flaw regardless the standard shrine quest that may have gotten the most attention from the developers is recital at warbler's nest this one has you going on a scavenger hunt for various retail around their village then cooking up a specific recipe for another and then traveling to another location and using a korok leaf to repeat a melody they sing to you a mechanic that to my knowledge doesn't get repeated anywhere else in the game there's even a dedicated cutscene afterwards beyond the usual shrine summoning this one is really good but not all the shrine quests get quite such a glowing review the lost pilgrimage has you following an agonizingly slow npc through a forest until it eventually comes across the shrine you can't let it see you so this entire quest consists of standing behind something and waiting before moving up slightly to stand behind something else really lackluster design that the cute factor doesn't overcome stolen heirloom used the same idea and it was the weakest part of that quest too but the trailing sections were shorter had more interesting content at the end and weren't the only thing required shining stone has you drop a luminous stone onto a pedestal and even if you don't know what luminous stones are you can probably safely assume they're the stones sitting directly beside the quest i don't really understand what the thought process behind this one was or what it was supposed to be testing lightning shot makes you fire a lightning arrow at a target i came across this marker notice the colossal lightning bolts painted all over it and shot without even stopping to think challenge over this one was supposedly an actual shrine quest that an npc gives you but i found the shrine itself first removing any sense of anticipation whatsoever part of the double-edged sword of leaving the shrine so open the same thing happened again with a landscape of a stable i just naturally stumbled across the shrine in my travels and it really wasn't particularly hidden i had no idea this was even a quest until i spoke with the source npc much later i wish that more of the shrine quests have been designed to avoid this by making the source a requirement or near requirement to complete the quest a fragmented monument is a good example of this sending you on a scavenger hunt to photograph three shards scattered across a beach and present your findings to an npc you could stumble across any number of the shards before talking to the npc but you won't know what to do with them unless you've played the game before in which case it's still a good solution because it shortens the time you have to spend solving a puzzle you clearly already know the answer to you also have to speak to the npc to finish the quest which avoids moments where you're assigned a shrine quest only to have it immediately checked off on your ui because you already found that shrine i'd say the shrine entry requirements are good more often than not but there's still a frustrating amount of throwaway ones and these aren't helped at all by the often lacking contents found within shooting lightning at the picture of lightning wasn't just the end of the shrine in terms of getting into it it was the end of the shrine period there's nothing inside except a treasure chest and the requisite monk and these blessing shrines make up a substantial portion of the total 120 in the world at the end of an involved challenge sure fair enough you've already surpassed a different type of obstacle to earn your spirit orb but something like this or even simpler that barely qualifies as content i'm sure nintendo knows how underwhelming some of these shrines can be and given the inconsistency of their contents it may well not have been intentional this shrine has a defined entry challenge and content inside this one only the former and this one has neither you just head right in if there had been more development time would some or all of these blessing shrines have been replaced with more unique interiors i suspect so but it's only speculation and ultimately i have to judge the product nintendo actually shipped the one type that we haven't covered yet is the test of strength shrines which may be my least favorite content in the entire game there are 20 of these divided into three difficulty tiers and they don't scale with the player in any way this means that a major test of strength can be a grindy wall you'll break all your weapons against if encounter too early and more egregiously a minor test of strength will be irrelevantly easy if encountered too late the major test issue is somewhat helped by the shrines being registered as warp points when they're found rather than completed meaning that it is possible to leave and come back later but shrines are supposed to be fun discoveries and having to do this feels really bad on top of this the variation between each of these shrines is pitifully small robots in higher tiered shrines have increased health and damage and more weapons attached to them which functionally translates to essentially the exact same melee combat against all of them there are just very small timing and positioning differences to account for the higher leveled arenas can also have a slightly different obstacle you need to put in the robot's way when they charge at you but once you catch on to this pattern the rune to use is blatantly obvious two seconds after you walk in to the game's credit it never explicitly points this out to you there isn't even a tutorial for the lower level arenas that all use stone pillars you might very well not catch onto that pattern right away but you probably will at some point after which that entire phase is just going through the motions and apart from this each of these fights plays out identically an initial melee phase that sometimes closes the gap with lasers a spinning charge that requires you to place an aforementioned obstacle in their path a phase where they spin their laser in a circle which creates an updraft and a final desperation phase where they put up their shield and charge a laser once again while there is a starting robot that guides link through basic offense and defense things like catching an updraft from the laser don't get the same treatment they need to be figured out independently which is good if you were told this then the phase would be trivial just glide up and shoot it in the eye having said that the moment you do figure out this phase or any other that's exactly the fate it suffers it has the exact same solution every time now you could say this is how all video game attacks work and while not universal sure that's generally true much like the shrine riddles i just talked about though these can generally be broken down into some combination of deciphering tests figuring out what to do and execution test actually doing it some of these phases do have at least a reasonable execution test attached to them but others are essentially entirely deciphering and these are the ones that really tend to fall apart for a lot of players first playthroughs and definitely subsequent playthroughs it's a format that's going to wear out as welcome far too quickly and make you feel robbed of a more interesting experience the second you set foot in the shrine from nintendo's perspective i absolutely understand the logic behind these they can be slapped together with a modular template to fill out what would otherwise be more empty shrines on limited development time the template the developers went with is not modular enough though i certainly don't hate the idea of combat centric shrines which can be quickly thrown together but think this would have worked much better as a room filled with various different enemies similar to what we've seen in previous zelda games or even in breath of the wild's own dlc content this would potentially undercut the increased immersion these areas achieve compared to previous games i'm certainly not saying that finding ancient mines or temples filled with puzzles was a problem that needed solving but it's hard to argue that ancient puzzle rooms make more sense contextually the robots fit into this context perfectly as well but standard enemies would need some type of explanation considering these rooms have supposedly been abandoned for thousands of years would that be particularly difficult to explain though probably not and the game zone dlc feels no need to do so for its very similar concept either i can't say for sure whether this type of varied layout would cause more or less development strain overall compared to creating a new enemy type but even just adding a couple enemies and blocks to each room alongside the robots maybe toning those down slightly as compensation would likely work better the tests of strength would be much more varied the additional development impact would be very minimal and these enemies could even scale like in the overworld to fix some of the static difficulty issue referring back to the shrines as a whole i know a lot of people weren't big fans of them sharing the same visual style and soundtrack but i actually didn't mind this it gave the experience of entering them a comforting and even somewhat meditative feeling i'm obviously giving the game too much credit the reason they all look and sound the same is because it made them easier to develop and feeling disappointed by the severe drop in variety from previous games is certainly valid but it worked for my tastes overall considering how much of a thorough playthrough will be spent hunting down and solving shrines as well as what they're replacing they should have been a major highlight of the game some of them do rise to this occasion but there are far too many that didn't feel like highlights or anything close to it more like just another box to check off the list with a very heavy slow-moving pen shrines for the developer's best opportunity to construct imaginative set pieces for the player they're self-contained areas that are canonically given permission to bypass any connection to the outside environment storyline anything at all there's just so little imagination on display for so many of them though at least once you get inside again i think the shrine quests are usually at least good and the best of them are really good but there are precious few of these the most likely reason for this is the developers had to pump out 120 of these and they had to pump out 120 of these because of how big the world is so once again maybe the world shouldn't have been so big these shrines also contain a lot of treasure chests but there's rarely anything interesting in them weapons are almost never an exciting find in a chest as the range of movesets and special properties between them is so low and they all break anyways the first time you do find one of the more interesting ones like your first elemental sword is a legitimately cool discovery but this is a trick that the game can only pull once not even necessarily once as there's no guarantee that you haven't already stumbled across it somewhere else and just how cool it is will still be limited by the fact that it largely plays like something you've already used and will break shortly after you get it breath of the wild does attempt to give these weapons a bit more appeal by introducing a mild completionist element done through its photocompendium and if you're a die-hard fan of this system the appearance of a slightly different spear will probably be reasonably interesting to you which does have some merit personally though it doesn't appeal to me that much and i'd expect it to be a challenge taken up by a relatively small portion of the player base the way chess work when your inventory is full drags weapon rewards down further still you'll always be booted out of the chest without the option to swap its contents into an inventory slot meaning if it's content you actually want you're going to have to head into your inventory remove something and then open the chest a second time you're going to be doing this constantly over the course of the game and it quickly becomes extremely irritating thankfully this generally won't be an issue for other reward types for example shrines also offer the classic rupees which are no longer constrained by a wallet you can carry 999 9999 right from the start of the game rupees have traditionally been fairly underwhelming filler rewards and while they are somewhat more useful here than in previous zelda games they hardly qualify as exciting precious stones are another possibility which may appear to be exciting but they don't actually do all that much they're used for armor upgrades to buy a few new pieces of gear as well as to forge a handful of legendary weapons that are unlocked by clearing parts of the story quest if you haven't played breath of the wild that last one may have made your ears perk up but these weapons are mostly pretty mediocre and you never need all that many stones for the other purposes not to mention that they're already handed out fairly freely in the overworld this means that the majority of the time any precious stones that you do find are just going to end up getting sold for rupees anyways you can also find guardian parts which serve as an alternate type of currency and an armor upgrader and these ones are more encouraging they're hardly the most exciting reward in the series but they can be used to purchase gear from the akala ancient tech lab and the weapons and arrows here are always useful arrows are always useful period and part of the higher appeal of rupees so finding them in shrines feels at least okay but just okay which is really the most i can say about any of these the same rewards issue appears in the overworld as well but it's most on display in shrines which are both the likeliest places to find chests and also replace dungeons which were previously known for providing game driving items the older dungeons held their fair share of filler rewards as well but you were also usually promised something that provided a significant change to gameplay so the fact that this almost never happens in shrines can feel jarring to series veterans and while newcomers won't have the same contrast in mind the monotony of the shrine reward structure will still exist with so many of them expecting something significant beyond spirit orbs and everyone is unrealistic and trying to maintain the uniqueness and significance of that quantity of chess would likely require major changes to the game's core but as is the only ones that somewhat fit this criteria are the armor sets armor does provide the player with a permanently accessible change to their appearance and abilities but it's a shame that there are so few of them you can obtain this way the rubber armor protects you from electricity the barbarian armor gives you an attack boost and stamina upgrade during combat the climbing gear removes at least some of the tdm from climbing not too much and the hero set gives you an upgraded beam attack these are the only armor sets available through shrines though and every other reward falls into one of the earlier categories the overall armor system in breath of the wild is a good idea with mixed implementation many other sets are available in the overworld through various means and they add some fantastic visual variety to the game being able to run around as a glow-in-the-dark luchador woman of the desert or heavily armored centurion many but not all of which can be died in various colors greatly helps break up the monotony of staring at the same character model for potentially 100 plus hours of gameplay and many of these armor sets have additional effects beyond defense upgrading armor also provides a significant portion of breath of the wild sense of progression as while link does have a hidden level stat that ramps up enemy and weapon spawns over time it's invisible to the player and there are no stat levels or other traditional rpg progression mechanics in the game armor acts as a substitute for this and it's a reasonably effective one requiring you to thoroughly explore hyrule for materials and being initiated with some genuinely funny animations although i wouldn't consider this to be nearly as compelling as a more involved progression system you can't have traditional stat progression while fully maintaining breath of the wild structure the powerful weapon pickups near ganon are the entire reason an early boss kill is possible which when combined with the durability system would break if link also had a scaling attack stat in this context i understand such a system's absence in which case the armor upgrades do make sense but there still probably could have been more progression of some kind of link as a character rather than just his gear the balance of armor upgrades is unfortunately very poor which i'll elaborate on when we get to combat but i can say that their additional effects don't always suit the delivery method one of the most common effects attached to armor is protection from some form of environmental damage whether that's cold heat extreme heat lightning etc these are good use cases for armor because they mean that areas of extreme weather are always more oppressive than usual even though the player has a way to bypass their effects this type of armor never has stats anywhere near as powerful as dedicated combat gear so in any environment where you have to equip armor to survive you're making yourself more vulnerable in other areas a sacrifice in exchange for a gain you can get these same protective effects temporarily through consumable items but in addition to losing inventory these consumables can also provide benefits to combat or traversal and they can't be active simultaneously so the trade-off still holds there are certain systems that start to infringe on this balance to some degree for example carrying a frostblade in the desert to stay cool but these aren't generally the most powerful weapons in your arsenal maintaining a trade-off to not putting on your armor and after a certain point this alone still won't be enough to fully protect you similar statements can be made for armor with combat centric use you can wear armor that boosts your attack your defense your proficiency with specific weapon types that makes certain enemies friendly towards you but never all at once you're required to prioritize traversal armor on the other hand is less effective a design as we've gone over you're rarely facing any kind of significant challenge when swimming or climbing and even for most of the rare occasions that you are these encounters will neither be very dangerous or very long so sacrificing combat attributes in exchange for more efficient movement isn't generally actually a sacrifice the result of this is that if you have a waterfall to swim up or a wall to scale there's almost never a reason not to open your menu equip the armor complete the traversal and re-equip the armor you were wearing before it's an uninteresting non-decision which severely interrupts the flow of gameplay by sending you into the inventory menu the only real choice to be made here is whether you find the slower movement speed or being forced into your inventory more obnoxious sets like the dark armor which raise your movement speed at night are a bit more sensical because they're best worn for extended periods of time even here though there's very little stopping the player from wearing them until they're in combat opening the menu equipping combat gear winning the combat opening the menu equipping the movement gear and continuing on i save very little stopping the player rather than nothing stopping them because increased movement speed does offer some benefit in combat but i think most players would agree that it's less of a benefit than increased attack or defense these kinds of effects where using them is almost always objectively correct and also requires no significant trade-off elsewhere would have been much more effective as permanent passive abilities for link to unlock that's not to say i'd like all of these armor sets cut from the game if i found out nintendo made knight speed a permanent boost and removed the dark armor as a result i'd be disappointed but i would be happy to hear they made the first change and gave the dark armor a more interesting ability instead the armor sets aren't devoid of interesting abilities but there is a shortage of them especially because there's so much overlap between different sets in my first playthrough i unlocked the thunderhelm before any of the rubber armor and because they both provide shock resistance it made that rubber armor one of the few compelling shrine rewards considerably less exciting to discover now having multiples of the same effect isn't entirely redundant it does create more opportunities to obtain each effect depending on your playthrough path and there can be upsides or downsides strictly speaking the thunderhelm is the better option of the two since you can wear stronger chest and leg armor while still getting the same electrical protection but it's also hidden behind a lengthy set of quests that will require different resources to complete than the rubber armor will to upgrade the rubber armor also lets you run around with a giant fish on your head which for many players will be all the motivation they need i think for many others though they're bound to be at least a bit let down by whichever one they unlock second and the same applies to many other items in the game i was initially excited to unlock a shop where i could buy circlits a brand new type of headgear when i found out they just provided the same resistances i already had sitting in my inventory though my excitement vanished the targeted resistances in particular are useful and an integral thing to have in the game but it's hard to say they do anything particularly fun once the novelty of zelda with a temperature system wears off like i said there are a few interesting armor sets in the mix the ability to run around with an army of monster buddies is entertaining i like being able to see enemy health bars with the champion's tunic and certain armor sets freaking everyone out is pretty funny even if it has no mechanical effect on gameplay for the most part however these are utility items and nothing more one or two variables slightly changed in the code and there are often alternative means of obtaining that utility the zora armor's waterfall climb and dash attack are the only truly new actions link gains access to and as i alluded to earlier would have been better suited as permanent character upgrades this also sadly won't be the last time we'll have to talk about loot that's less engaging than the path up to it there are many side quests scattered across hyrule with greatly varying levels of detail the least interesting ones are basic fetch quests bring me x amount of meat and i'll give you some rupees or a bit of food that sort of thing these are unremarkable but also pretty harmless they give slightly more substance to the npcs can often lead to some fun dialogue and you can gradually fill the mode at your leisure as your adventure proceeds it makes sense to populate a game of this scale with this kind of content and while it's clearly mindless filler it's filler i don't have an issue with the rewards aren't always so weak for this type of quest though the most impactful of which is probably slated for upgrades the setup is similarly mild tasking you with delivering ancient parts to an npc which are obtained from chests or by defeating guardians in return you're able to upgrade some of your runes a permanent change which directly improves link's capabilities and in the case of stasis plus actually grants a new one highly in homeowner's only requirements are first delivering wood and then later rupees but it allows you to get your very own house that you can continuously upgrade i have to say that the mechanics behind this house are very half baked and you can hardly customize anything you just unlock a number of elements with fixed placements in terms of practical use you can store a few weapons for later and you can sleep to fully restore your health considering how abundant weapons and healing already are i've never found either of these to be particularly necessary underdeveloped as it is though it's still something unique which permanently affects the world and it comes with good characters bolson in particular is so ridiculously shamelessly over the top that i can't help but like him the quest is an overall positive addition to the game when judged in a vacuum but the ratio of development effort this would have taken compared to how much of an impact it actually has seems maybe a bit off there are also some more substantial quests although i do need to emphasize the sum from the ground up is folded into the same storyline as hylian homeowner with links traveling the world in search of inhabitants for a new town all of them needing to have sun in their name as is tradition apparently for some reason look this is a legend of zelda game they may have abandoned a lot of traditions but bizarre npc requests remain in full force these end up being members of each of the primary races involved in breath of the wild's main quest line meaning that you'll almost inevitably be working through this quest slowly and steadily as you play through the game all you're technically doing here is chopping wood and speaking to npcs but it provides another through line alongside the main story content which is a good inclusion the reward is pretty compelling as well as you gradually watch terrytown form on what was once an empty patch of earth and by the end of the quest it will include vendors selling goods you can't buy anywhere else along with more side quests to take on this is an acceptable payoff but a lot of the satisfaction in this quest comes from the simple joys of helping people and adding another small pocket of society back into the wilderness the game leans on that kind of intrinsic motivation too often over the course of a typical playthrough for my taste but i do think it works nicely here the decision not to put a shrine in the town itself is a nice touch as well the nearest one is conveniently close but also overlooks it meaning that you'll always have a good view of the developing town if you visit here in between quest segments hunt for the giant horse has you trekking into the desert to i'll let you fill the blanks in on that one which you then need to make a fairly lengthy ride back on to show the source npc it's a bit of a stretch to explicitly call the horse your quest reward you can discover entanglement without speaking to anyone but the quest tells you where to find it and for many people the result will functionally be the same it's a very slow but strong horse aka kind of useless if we're being honest but still cool enough to make me break it out every now and then the eighth heroine sends you on a long journey once again this time into the snowy mountains multiple times in search of artifacts to photograph the quest is pretty funny as well with the source npc trying pitifully to woo link in his female disguise and the reward ends up being the snow boots and sand boots armor that increases link's movement speed in these environments not a bad payoff per se but it does fall squarely into the useful but uninteresting criticism i've levy towards a lot of the other armor pieces you need to complete a variety of side quests to unlock the thunderhelm and some of this content is very roped bring her some berries bring her some flint bring her some guts bring her a jury in yada yada with that said it also does have you performing some engaging tasks like tracking a polluter across an aqueduct system or fighting what will be a new enemy for many players in order to get those guts it's definitely not all great though and again your reward is the thunderhelm which i've already talked about the priceless maracas both serves as what might be a reasonably challenging combat trial if you discover it in the early game as intended and also acts as your introduction to hesto an important npc he's conspicuously sitting beside the road into kakariko village and tells you that he's lost his maracas to a group of mid-level bokoblins that you'll need to kill to get them back complete this quest and you'll finally uncover the point of those damn koroks you've been running into everywhere the 900 koroks scattered across the map are a reasonably solid method of filling in more of hyrule each of them providing a mini challenge that grants a korok seed for hestu's maracas which he can then use to upgrade link's melee weapon bow and shield inventory slots with so many koroks to find a large amount of copy paste was inevitable but the developers have made an effort to avoid players being bombarded with constant repetition the simplest type of korok just involves walking over to them and pressing a and these are usually going to be either hidden in high places most notably the very top of hyrule castle itself or running around in a circuit you'll need to track down an extension of this would be certain rocks that you'll need to lift to reveal the korok underneath some of which are themselves hidden under or behind other objects there are some that ask you to play ball games by throwing a rock into a circle for example or knocking a boulder into a hole you might need to solve a block puzzle by using magnesis to make two structures match a decent idea that can unfortunately get a bit annoying when the block needs to be maneuvered with a lot of precision the controls and camera of magnesius once again come into play here and it doesn't feel like this was supposed to be a dexterity test there should probably have been a bit more lenience built into some of these yet another type has you matching the fruit on a set of trees and i may be dumb for admitting this to the internet but it took me literally hundreds of hours to realize this type of korok seed existed i ran right by them for my entire first playthrough and most of my second other koroks require you to move through a series of flowers offer apples to a statue complete a broken circle navigate a brief time trial or shoot targets which can be obvious or hidden one or several static or moving this is the type that provides one of the most memorable korok seeds with link plotting across a long abandoned horse riding course and this is actually one of the only individually memorable korok encounters the developers did make an honest effort to mix things up generally trying to play similar korok puzzles away from each other and making as much use of the environment as possible something that the time trial and flower chase variants do a particularly good job of having said that the fact that so few of them provide anything as distinctive as this riding path which itself is still not terribly unique does eventually become an issue as korok seeds start to deliver diminishing returns and their variety is exhausted many times over they're novel enough to sustain a solid portion of a playthrough and the variety is slightly better than i've made it sound i haven't gone over every type of seed and there are a few more individual ones that stand out however certainly for me and i'd imagine many other players that novelty does fade away before the game is done at least if played thoroughly that's not to say the 900 number isn't gross overkill it's clear nintendo wasn't intending players to hunt down every single one since less than half of them are needed for a full inventory upgrade and the remainder will only get you hestew's gift which yeah has pretty clearly been chosen to be worthless i've heard a lot of complaints about this quote-unquote reward for collecting all 900 korok seeds and i agree with them to an extent i think an emblem should probably be the maximum reward for such an arduous task because if it was literally anything more substantial even a new hat with purely cosmetic effects hell let's say negative effects that would still be something quite a few more players would want to track down putting themselves through a painful slog to do so something nintendo clearly did not want to encourage on the other hand a literal turd something that openly mocks the player for their efforts is a step too far as some players were inevitably going to take this completionist challenge on another issue with korok seeds would be that they're leaned on too heavily in order to provide at least one small discovery in each area koroks are well suited as small bonuses and this may well be what they were originally conceived for but there are also many seemingly significant areas to discover in hyrule that are only occupied by koroks there comes a point where hiking into a new region and finding yet another one of these goes from fun to discouraging even more so if you made the hike knowing there was unlikely to be anything else it was necessary to do this because there was so much world to fill and koroks were the quickest way to fill it so i'll say it again maybe the world shouldn't have been so big if you'll recall this was a tangent from breath of the wild side quests and while the ones i've highlighted so far are generally what i'd consider to be positive additions to the game i've still had to attach a fair amount of caveats and am already starting to run out of highlights appearance love has you eavesdropping on a couple in terrytown and cooking up what's likely going to be a new recipe for you the monster cake which you can get a hint towards from the recipe book in rito village compelling quest makes you feel helpful by healing a sick child the reward is rupees weapon connoisseur has you showing another child a series of increasingly rare weapons from across hyrule always giving you something to keep in the back of your mind during your adventures and the reward is rupees and a diamond at the very end so as we previously discussed with precious stones probably rupees cass gives you a riddle presented exactly like a lot of the better shrine quests in the game except it's a cop-out and your award is rupees special delivery puts you on a dangerous escort mission to ensure a letter safely travels downstream this ends up uniting a couple who link can meet back up within zora's domain and who will reward him with the double jump ability i'm kidding of course it's rupees and in this case a storyline that's more than a little creepy and plays heavily into the she's older than she looks strope it's written to be very tame but i still personally found it jarring and i'm honestly surprised it was allowed into the game looking through the list of side quests in breath of the wild almost all of them offer either rupees or some other basic consumable rupees rupees carrot rupees rupees seeds rupees this cuckoo fetching challenge is very reminiscent of the one in ocarina of time which granted link a bottle as a reward a very rare and useful item that breath of the wild doesn't include in fact in previous games it was common to reward these kinds of involved side quests with some important collectible whether that was a bottle heart piece or something more unique and the fact that breath of the wild almost never does this has a significantly detrimental impact on the satisfaction of completing them there are a few more substantial rewards we haven't covered already you complete the zora armor set by photographing a lionel for example but these are very much the exception rather than the rule and the much more committal quest in the same area that has you traveling far further away grants you fish you're given this while you're standing by a lake full of fish now not all side quests require some grand reward and in fact including too many might even go against the purely optional nature of this content causing some players stress from the perceived need to constantly go off track from their goal even so breath of the wild skews considerably too far in the other direction having covered shrines and quests we've now discussed the bulk of what you'll be spending your non-story time doing but there are still a number of other activities to discover the customary mini-game selection returns although a lot of their identities are somewhat diluted because between shrines korok seeds and general travel it's likely you'll have already done something similar by the time you reach them boom bam golf is an example of this a game of stasis golf you can find tucked away in the corner of the world because it's so far removed from the direction the game pushes you towards by the time most players encounter it they've likely already stumbled across similar concepts for korok seeds and the same can be said for shrines multiples of which employ some form of golfing game this one is a bit more stringent than the rest it's a multi-shot challenge that requires the ball to remain on the course the entire time but it's still not particularly novel which reduces the enjoyment of finding and playing it how could it be novel when it introduces no unique mechanics or assets of any kind nothing that you haven't already been doing and this is an issue that arises for essentially all of the minigames in birth of the wild you can go bowling with snowballs a basic environmental interaction that's also used to kill enemies and open a shrine you can deliver ice again you can shoot targets on the flight range again you can light the blue flame again you can hunt deer you can run fast you can glide far all of which you've probably already been doing my personal favorites are the ones that ask you to demonstrate mastery of movement mechanics significantly more than usual although even here they feel more like compensation for being underutilized in the overworld yes some shrines may demand a bit more control of the paraglider than normal and sand seals are used in the main storyline but those are tiny fractions of the total playtime which is also why i'm making a distinction between the paraglider minigame that has you tightly navigate through a branching obstacle course a rare movement test and the one that just has you glide as far as possible a standard method of getting around the same applies to horse riding mounted archery isn't anything unique to this mini game but there's nothing else that tests it with anywhere near the same degree of rigor and the other horse-based mini-game that has you jumping over hurdles is a fairly unique challenge the super gut check challenge comes close to meeting the standard as well offering the exact kind of climbing test i was lamenting the lack of earlier in the video but ultimately ends up reinforcing the issues with breath of the wild's existing stamina system if you come across this challenge with too much stamina it's trivial with the right amount it's actually pretty good and if you don't have enough it's unplayable i talked about the potential of including stamina based progress gates earlier in the video but making this insignificant minigame one of very few instances which uses such a jarring hard resource check potentially sets unrealistic expectations ooh the game doesn't usually do this so it must be guarding something really good i don't have enough stamina right now but i'll mark it for later i'm really looking forward to finding out what's behind this that's a really solid setup the payoff of rupees and a mushroom is decidedly not solid even if it is repeatable to function as a rupee farm the flying mini games fall under the same criticism they're not nearly as bad since they're not completely broken just by having stamina stockpiled but everything else applies and then there's the lottery it's i mean it's a lottery you choose one of three chests and you might get back more than you put in now compare any of these mini games to something like izza's rapid ride from twilight princess or even something smaller like sinking ships from the wind waker are these incredible pieces of content no they're mini-games they're not really supposed to be and in fact i'd say sinking ships is even pretty bad but they are novel content and introduce new ideas to their respective games i'd call breath of the wild's deer hunting challenge more fun than a slow boring battleship clone that's largely based on luck but sinking ships is still by far the more memorable mini-game similar to the rewards from quests having mini-games based on existing mechanics isn't inherently bad and some of them are decent enough fun in isolation it's the fact that there are only mini games based on existing mechanics that drags them down many games have never been an integral part of the zelda experience and with how much there is to do in breath of the wild they're not the worst omission the game could have but it's nonetheless a bit disappointing to see them so transparently downgraded compared to previous titles once again it was likely a necessary sacrifice to spare enough development time to complete this enormous world so once again maybe the world shouldn't have been so big other content includes a fifth fairy or god that allows you to revive dead horses and he's either a trickster who wants you to think he's a psychopath or a psychopath who wants you to think he's a trickster either way he's a lot of fun to discover even if across all my playthroughs i've maybe used him three times you'll also see mysterious beams shoot across the sky and land on the ground these are intriguing when you first see them but unfortunately end up suffering the same fate as the dragons they're called star fragments and they're ultimately just another ingredient for recipes and armor upgrades a relatively rare one so they are more exciting to discover than many ingredients but nothing more than that they can also be a bit on the buggy side their physics calculations are disabled until link gets close enough and while it usually just looks a little goofy every now and then it can lead to some clearly unintended results i never did find this star fragment numerous npcs can be found traveling hyrule's wilderness mostly along the main roads and these can provide conversation merchant services or little gifts some of which first require you to save them from monsters before they're stunned i like this addition because it punctuates the usually laid back wilderness travel with a touch of urgency the rewards you're given are never good but they still provide a bit of a tangible reason to hurry and these encounters are also infrequent enough to not egregiously disrupt the overworld's relaxed atmosphere it also enforces that this is in fact a post-apocalyptic environment if you never interacted with npcs who were in trouble outside of the vague future threats that are provided in the story the dangers of the environment would be somewhat undercut there's another town to discover the seaside laurel and village which has no connection to the main story whatsoever it's unsurprisingly the least substantial or useful one by a significant margin but i was still very pleased the first time i encountered it and there is a bit of content to explore even if little of it is particularly meaningful it also helps to avoid the world feeling overly contrived it makes perfect sense that little pockets of civilization would have spread across hyrule over the preceding century and of course they wouldn't all have some grand stake in the fate of the world if anything the game could use a couple more of these there are new mounts to discover we've talked about deer but not bears or skeleton horses or the lord of the mountain mounts like these can potentially be a lot of fun the footage you're watching now is from the last substantial playthrough of breath of the wild i did for this retrospective even after all this time the game still managed to surprise me with bokoblins mounted on bears which i'd somehow missed up to this point so naturally i had no choice but to find one of my own and challenge their authority this was a fantastic bit of intrinsic motivation i could easily have fought these enemies on foot and if we're being honest it might even have been easier but damn it i wanted bear combat from an extrinsic viewpoint however these kinds of mounts are virtually no purpose as there's no way to keep them around and you're inevitably going to have to get off of them at some point the lord of the mountain is an even worse example of this that enticing green glow you've noticed in the distance turns out to be a horse-like spirit presiding over a gathering in a mountaintop spring it looks like you just might be able to try riding it and sure enough if you approach it very carefully and come prepared with enough stamina to resist its intense strength you can in fact tame this awe inspiring creature and my god it's so fast it's so graceful this is amazing and then you try and register it at a stable and are unceremoniously told it's not allowed and the second you dismount it's gone once again in terms of intrinsic motivation this can potentially be a very strong moment getting a chance to discover and ride the lord of the mountain for a bit will be rewarding enough for some players then they might even feel that being allowed to keep it would cheapen the experience as i've mentioned though i'm generally more extrinsically motivated and for a player like me the inability to maintain any mount besides horses is setting up a guaranteed moment of intense disappointment when i inevitably first tried to register one horses are already underutilized as is and i have a hard time understanding why being able to travel by deer skeleton or spirit would be something a game is focused on player agency as breath of the wild would prohibit it might be because the developers were worried horses would be left by the wayside if this was an option but they're generally more useful than the other mounts besides the lord of the mountain anyways and that one could easily have its stats brought more in line with its peers if balance was a major concern i'm not sure that balancing the stats of a mystical spirit to those of a standard horse should necessarily be a major concern so maybe extreme outlier stats like only having a single hit point would allow it to maintain its satisfying strength in other areas you could also place it further from the starting region to increase the horse's chance to shine earlier in the game maybe there could even be several legendary mounts along the world's borders breath of the wild already contains unique horses and horses with maximum stat distributions that many players are likely to stick with once they're acquired so maintaining the bond you forge with your first horse or similar factors already don't have much integrity and again you're not spending most of the game on them to begin with so their ability to severely alter the player's experience is limited from the start being able to collect a variety of mounts would have been an excellent addition to breath of the wild's rewards for throw exploration and almost all of the systems needed for this had already been built as is though the vegetation growing on satori mountain ended up being more of a payoff than the source of the mysterious glow which brought you there which is a shame i've just brought up stables another structure the player can find a number of across the world which often contains side quests and other little rewards and supplies they're relatively straightforward and often contain dogs that can be interacted with a small detail that adds to the world's immersiveness and might even be distracting if it was missing if dogs are a little detailed that improves immersion though then the invincible animals often found nearby which look nearly identical to the ones players have been conditioned to think of as food are a little detail that breaks it humans tend to have a built-in negativity bias so if you experience a small praiseworthy moment followed by a small problematic one the latter is the one that tends to stick more in your head sometimes these moments are unavoidable allowing link to kill innocent people for example would place far more of a burden on the story and mechanics of the game than the increased immersion would be worth you could avoid this by simply not including npcs but hopefully the issues with that approach are self-evident and i'd likewise call the dogs a net positive to the game even though they had to get the same invincibility treatment including the animals in this form though wasn't necessary the idea was obviously to increase the game's sense of immersiveness but at least to me they have the opposite effect not having them at all though might feel a bit sterile so some reasonable alternatives might be to make them killable but have a penalty for doing so maintaining the canonical depiction of link as a character who isn't supposed to be acting this way or to enclose them in pens a reasonable concept given the dangerous nature of the world for some more substantial side content let's talk about the master sword link's signature weapon and generally a mandatory item in 3d zelda i really like the way it's been handled in breath of the wild while there are some npcs that will nudge you in the right direction there's absolutely nothing stopping you from stumbling across it at any time and doing this was probably the biggest oh damn moment i experienced during my first playthrough this obviously won't be nearly as impactful if you're not already familiar with the series but even if you don't fully understand its significance it's obviously a revered item that you may or may not have to anticipate coming back for later the master sword is one of very few things in the game that is firmly locked behind a progress gate and a fairly elegant one at that link doesn't have a visible level and the open world and philosophy of freedom discouraged the developers from creating geographical barriers as much as possible so instead pulling it simply drains a certain amount of link's hearts specifically needing 13 to unseat it from the pedestal it's a check on the number of shrines and divine beasts you've cleared rather than specifically heart containers as there's a statue in one of the villages that allows you to swap between heart containers and stamina vessels breath of the wild makes performing a lot of tasks in bulk a bit of a pain and if you've invested in stamina this one's no exception but even though measuring both hearts and stamina would be superior mechanically it wouldn't feel as thematically rich so i understand why this approach was taken the master sword is very powerful against guardian enemies and lets you fire a beam attack if your health is full similar to the classic games but its highest value comes from being the only weapon in the game that never breaks it still does fundamentally use the same durability system as every other weapon but comes back after a cool down and can never be thrown or dropped even if you're hit by electricity now this isn't necessarily a universally positive design decision but i'll save that for the upcoming combat discussion and as a player it's certainly an enticing reward the hylian shield also appears as an optional item not nearly as ceremoniously being guarded by a mini boss rather than a unique mechanic and getting no story recognition whatsoever but it's still the most durable and powerful shield in the game does it do anything special not really it's just iconic and strong although still a solid find as well as one worthy of the danger you need to place yourself in being guarded deep inside the ganon infested hyrule castle hyrule also has some more one-off instances to come across the man who talks link off the ledge if he tries to jump off a bridge a radical shield server at the top of a hill kilton and his monster stand which travels from place to place at night selling a few unique sets of armor a few joke weapons and some other knickknacks and of course there's the world itself which is full of little scenarios that aren't mechanically distinct but still serves to provide additional depth to this incarnation of hyrule from both a present and historical perspective the colosseum is a good example of this mechanically speaking it's just a room full of monsters and weapons but it still feels like a significant discovery that imparts a bit more information about hyrulean culture there are unsettling statues hidden away in the depths of the jungle fort hatner was the site of a major guardian invasion during the calamity this ancient tree stump was important or the tree was it gets its own location designation and has a village nearby so it seems like it's supposed to have been important at some point but we're never given any definitive information about this area and this is a theme that gets repeated too often for my tastes while i highlighted a few interesting landmarks the reality is that most of what you'll find in these previously civilized areas are generic ruins without much more than a name on the map to tell you what their purpose used to be now some of them do get at least a few hints and tidbits beyond this the tree stump possibly included but it's surprisingly uncommon contextually sure this makes sense they've been abandoned for a full century and realistically it's not likely that much in the way of journals artwork children's toys or other items that gave the impression that anyone ever actually lived here would survive that long without being degraded or scavenged but i still wish the developers had come up with some reasonable excuses to include even a bit more concrete information to discover particularly through journals if i find another new ruin on my travels i know there's almost no chance of anything inside other than an enemy or two a low-grade weapon or maybe at best a korok it does have a significantly detrimental impact on the excitement of that discovery even the slim possibility of finding a journal or trinket buried or hidden behind something would significantly increase the anticipation of exploring a new area as well as the reward for doing so when this did pay off a single throwaway line from an npc early in the game that talks about the [Music] i don't know waterproof paper hyruleans figured out would be all the explanation needed to make this feel sensible in the game's universe and while they still might feel slightly contrived and would also make breath of the wild feel a bit more like other post-apocalyptic games on the market i think those are reasonable trade-offs not everyone is going to agree on this i do understand the appeal of minimalist storytelling through world building and for some people the mystery would be ruined if it was overexplained for my taste though learning even a bit more about this crumbled society would enhance my appreciation for the world not diminish it by now while i certainly haven't covered all the non-story content in breath of the wild i have given it a reasonably thorough look which would make this a natural time to jump into the story content i'm not quite ready to do that yet though since i think the time has finally arrived to talk about the game's combat both because it will be necessary to fully discuss that content which contains the only truly mandatory fights in the entire game and also because it plays into some of the issues i have with breath of the wild's design as a whole and i'd like to tie these together as conclusively as possible i'll also note that i'm mostly restricting this to a more average play experience breath of the wild's mechanics can be pushed much further than this but i'm generally avoiding that side of the game in this video that type of gameplay probably deserves a separate discussion and i simply wouldn't be qualified to lead it i've learned more tricks than your average player but talking about the world of advanced breath of the wild with any degree of proficiency is outside my skill set i've generally considered combat in the legend of zelda to be one of the least fleshed out and enjoyable aspects of most of the games this is admittedly more true in 2d where outside of boss battles it largely devolves into mashing the attack button and at most using one item to open enemies up beforehand the 3d titles have suffered from similar problems but i do think that they've generally made more sweeping improvements from game to game with the hero of time titles being upstaged by the wind waker's expanded moveset and again by twilight princess which further diversified link's abilities and also took what were previously reaction commands and instead move them into actions the player could initiate at any time representing a sharp increase in player agency skyward sword's adoption of wii motion plus and one-to-one sword combat is so radically different from the other 3d titles that i don't feel it can be directly compared to them in the same way it sits in its own category but breath of the wild returned to more traditional hardware and while in some areas it does continue the forward momentum of previous 3d entries this isn't universally true melee combat is the largest stumble here which i didn't initially expect after seeing the expanded range of weapons breath of the wild has quite a few weapons nintendo's own terminology that excludes bows and shields but they're all broadly broken down into four categories one-handers can be wielded with shields while maintaining solid melee damage two-handers are considerably slower but offer more range and the highest damage output possible spears have even more range and fast attacks while sacrificing crowd control and single-hit damage and rods while usable for melee combat specialized in mid-range elemental projectiles on paper this seems like the setup for a good diverse combat system but there's still too much overlap between the different weapon types ignoring rods which are both much more rare and use a limited move set meant primarily to create an opening before being swapped out each weapon class allows link to perform exactly a standard short combo a dash attack a charged attack a jump slash a plunging attack and a throw even within these far higher emphasis will be placed on the combo charge attack and dash attack and this isn't nearly enough to remain compelling over breath of the wild's run time to be fair this doesn't tell the full story the one-handed spin attack doesn't perform the exact same role as the spear single target flurry but the repetition of your actions still absolutely starts to set in before the end of the game made far worse by a more egregious issue the almost total overlap within each weapon class essentially every weapon within each class uses an identical or near identical move set with the only differences between them being durability and damage output there are some minor exceptions to this boomerangs will arc back towards link when thrown one-handed swords have a very slightly different combo compared to one-handed clubs swords modeled on katana or wakazashi use a unique draw cut instead of the typical spin attack of most two-handers one of these the wind cleaver also fires a damaging air blast the rod's basic and upgraded versions are at least different in a way that goes beyond a stat being changed these are ultimately mostly minor tweaks though as these weapons still use the same homogeneous move sets in every other instance and a lot of the time these more unique attacks aren't necessarily designed particularly well boomerangs can't be reliably thrown in more enclosed environments and while this isn't too objectionable i do think their flight path should be at least a bit more robust with so little variation available already it doesn't make sense to constantly disincentivize one of the few truly unique attacks the wind cleaver is much worse as its projectile bizarrely can only be fired along a flat plane it can't hit enemies above or below link even if he's locked onto them which is extremely annoying the issue stems from the fact that the wind cleaver can be thrown which most projectile equipped hand weapons disallow in order to use that button for manual aiming including the master sword rods and the korok leaf korok leaves incidentally could be argued as a fifth weapon type but i'd say they're more of a utility item with some niche combat application weapons can also have some inherent trait differences the most notable of which would probably be elemental variants but even within these there are only three elemental typings and two of them frost and thunder are usually used for similar purposes temporarily stunning enemies there absolutely will be situations where they're further differentiated as each element does have a variety of interactions but these interactions aren't unique to the weapons and once again they use the exact same move sets as everything else the elemental attribute is just a passive effect that has to recharge most weapons can also be found with some form of modifier particularly later in the game although it's hard to call any of these especially inspired more damage more durability small number tweaks rather than anything genuinely new including the bafflingly weak long throw modifier which is only vaguely useful even if the weapon is about to break with all of this considered there's disappointingly little substance to the offensive aspect of breath of the wild's melee combat but fortunately this is somewhat made up for with a more interesting defense system than we've seen in previous 3d titles when holding a shield you can parry attacks with a well-timed a-press a system that returns from skyward sword but with a much tighter window which makes it reasonably challenging while also providing a reward that justifies that challenge it creates the expected opening after an attack is successfully parried and on top of this it can also completely disarm opponents and even deflect laser beams i love that an extremely important and powerful option is quite challenging to master by the standards of the zelda series newer players are still able to approach combat with alternate strategies but a player who's comfortable with parrying is in an entirely new league of combat prowess and it helps enhance that power fantasy with some very satisfying visual and sound design i do wish that i could give similar praise to the shields themselves there are an impressive amount of beautifully modeled and textured shields to discover throughout your adventure but for all their visual variety their combat functionality is nearly identical there are a few unique effects attached to them particularly for the higher leveled ones the most prominent examples would be the lynel shields which have melee damage on the parries and the ancient shield which reflects laser beams automatically akin to the mirror shield of previous games and these are solid quirks that make the shields fun to collect and use in the majority of cases though the functional combat differences between shields comes down to their durability and a single shield guard stat which improves the shield's ability to disarm an opponent after parrying them staggers stronger attacks on block and also augments his durability the lack of variety between shields isn't nearly as problematic as it is with weapons as their functionality is inherently going to be more focused and they don't work in tandem with every weapon class but there was still room to take these farther with more unique actions different passive bonuses elemental properties etc bringing a percentage-based damage reduction system into the game rather than all shields flatly blocking all damage may also have been interesting although that one might be straying too far from the expected feel of shields in the zelda series this is another element i wouldn't be too surprised to hear was experimented with and cut i don't think the current variety in shields is horrible but particularly early in your playthrough it can be a bit disappointing to find several new types only to realize that they all function the same regardless of what the flavor text implies whatever weapon link is using he also has access to evasive maneuvers done with a directional jump while in the lock-on state if one of these is used to dodge an incoming attack with the right timing and positioning link enters a unique stage called flurry rush where time slows down and allows him to get some additional damage somewhat of an alternative to the shield parry with a more restrictive follow-up it's a good addition to the combat system but even after spending a very long time with the game i still can't say i fully understand what the activation window for it is sometimes it triggers when an attack is nowhere near you and sometimes it doesn't trigger even when it really looks like it should which against certain enemies can get you unavoidably hit also while it's not a terribly common issue every now and then i ended up dodging sideways when i wanted to go backwards or vice versa because the lock on camera decided to switch to an awkward angle i wasn't prepared for i think a zed targeting system like this should favor a behind the back camera as much as possible and breath of the wild defaults away from this far too often on top of that trying to switch between multiple targets can be incredibly imprecise there's no way to do so other than dropping the lock on repositioning the camera and trying again which is a problem in its own right during group encounters and also compounds on the previous camera issue the right analog stick could be put to good use here but instead only serves to rotate the camera which is not only very uncomfortable to do without using a claw grip but would also almost never be necessary in the first place if not specifically for the off kilter lock-on system i know zed targeting worked this way in some previous zelda titles but that's not really a defense it caused issues there too its effects are just much more strongly felt here because of the new dodge mechanics we've now talked about melee combat including weapons and shields but that still leaves bose which received my favorite implementation out of any of them they've been given a higher skill ceiling with the introduction of headshot bonuses which feel great to line up thanks to the continuation of gyroscopic gaming i turn this off for my first playthrough and in retrospect it's a decision i regret it's a very natural way to make fine adjustments alongside the right stick's broader motions that makes archery feel very fluid this is a much better use of motion controls than the mass of twisting the shrine's demand of you if you're still having trouble with head shots you can make life much easier on yourself by taking advantage of breath of the wild's new bullet time done by drawing your bow in midair this system is a wonderful addition to breath of the wild's combat it makes link feel extremely dangerous gives additional value to climbing by turning every raised surface into a power position and while it's undoubtedly very strong it's also kept in line by draining stamina this means the bows are oddly the component of link's arsenal that makes the best use of stamina as weapons only use it as a restriction during charge attacks and shields aren't limited by stamina whatsoever there was obviously potential to make more of link's attack strain stamina and i'd be shocked if it wasn't explored by the developers but their final choice was generally aimed towards making link attack freely only using it to rein in small elements this fairly sparing implementation continues the questions i raised earlier about the necessity of including a stamina meter but looking at the combat system as a standalone concept i have no problem with this decision plenty of action games use some form of stamina meter to create a balancing act between attacking and recovering but while this does introduce some positive elements it always comes with trade-offs there's a reason plenty of games also don't include such a system it would potentially give breath of the wild more strategic combat but would also depart even further from the expected zelda experience probably too far for many players and would make link feel less agile and powerful than the developers clearly wanted him to these are only a few of the questions nintendo would have to ask themselves when creating the combat system and at least stamina gets a few prominent roles between the two-handed charge attack and bose bullet time bows themselves are also more varied than any individual weapon class still not nearly as much as i would have hoped for but on top of the usual damage output and durability they can also have different draw speeds arrow velocities or aiming zooms can shoot two three or even five arrows at once and can also choose from six different types of arrows standard arrows the three elemental versions bomb arrows and ancient arrows extremely powerful and expensive variants that can one hit kill most enemies in the game with a good shot the balancing on these upgraded arrow variants unfortunately hasn't been tuned very sensibly from multi-shot bows nerfing the bonus damage to a point where the diminishing returns are so severe that it essentially negates the benefit of using better arrows in many scenarios that issue aside though ranged combat is overall quite solid in this game and i still find gliding in from a high place and head shotting an entire squad of mccobbins before link's feet touch the ground immensely entertaining the ability to freely switch between arsenal slots at any time with both bows and weapons as well as to easily transition between melee and ranged combat adds some nice fluidity and makes it easier to take advantage of the variety that does exist in the game particularly for melee combat as said though this variety is all things considered just too limited which is even more of a shame because of the controversial durability system with the exception of the master sword every single item in link's arsenal will break after enough hits and the primary motivation for this was likely to force players to continuously mix up their strategy i understand and agree with this conceptually but the problem is that the limited variety between weapons means that there aren't actually all that many strategies to choose from another major reason i can think of for its inclusion is to give the various weapons scattered across hyrule more value if you can pick up the first traveler sword you see and keep it for the rest of the game every other traveler's sword in the game is now worthless to you whereas if it's going to break at some point that's no longer the case there would be other ways to alleviate this problem including making it possible to simply sell weapons to vendors although that's a fairly weak cop-out solution that devalues weapon pickups even further many games with enemy drops function this way and it's never an exciting option other alternatives might include creating a crafting system that used weapons as ingredients or allowing them to be used for elixirs these would take more work to implement though and would come with their own challenges i can think of many but just as an example the carrying capacity of link's inventory would be harder to balance as swords both needed to conform to their current convention and also needed to be carted around as ingredients maybe there could be some kind of dismantling action to let them be put into his larger materials inventory instead and that would probably need to be justified with some kind of hammer or dissolving powder this is just one system that would need to be changed and you can easily see how things could spiral out of control for an already strapped development team again in theory i understand the approach taken here and in the early game it creates a tension that i think works quite well constantly pushing the player to scavenge their environment out of fear of resource depletion there inevitably comes a point though and it doesn't take particularly long where your inventory has been upgraded a few times and is full of powerful reasonably durable gear and this is the point where the pros of the durability system rapidly start to deteriorate whereas its consequences loom for the remainder of the game fiddling with weapon selection before you chop down a tree or smash a rock constant interruptions in the middle of fights combat with mobs creating resource depletion rather than resource gain the possibility of being stuck with no reasonable way to fight a tough enemy there are a lot and i do mean a lot of rippling problems that the durability system creates but i think the most egregious of all of them is that it turns weapons into an unexciting reward whereas in previous zelda games they were some of the most compelling rewards in the entire series this one is made even worse after you acquire the master sword and weapon degradation slows to a crawl thanks to its constant availability significantly easing the demand to even use other weapons at the same time simply removing weapon degradation from the game without major changes to other systems would create a host of its own issues i'm on board with the mechanic but even some minor alterations such as generally higher durability a default melee attack link always has access to and no durability loss on activities like wood cutting and shield surfing would make its implementation less obnoxious for a lot of players at the end of the day however i don't think these kinds of band-aid fixes would be enough to fully bring out the potential in the durability system there would likely need to be some radical changes made to resource distribution weapon design and a host of other elements in the game these would in all likelihood have taken up more development time than the existing content and development time was even more precious than usual because of how demanding this enormous world was to create so i'll say it again maybe the world shouldn't have been so big of course this is only taking the direct methods of attacking and defending against enemies into account but breath of the wild's physics and chemistry systems provide a lot of room for creative alternatives you can freeze enemies and blow or push them off a cliff you can shoot lanterns and drop them into explosive barrels you can directly shoot those barrels with fire arrows or blow them up with bombs you can stasis launch boxes at enemies roll boulders onto them and i'm really only scratching the surface the amount of interesting scenarios that can spring from a set of simple logical interactions is truly impressive this is all great but these options don't scale particularly well as the game progresses higher tiered monsters begin to spawn throughout the world as link keeps cutting them down and while equivalently better weapons also become available to compensate for this the damage you can deal from environmental hazards remains fixed by the time you start encountering these high-level silver variants even explosives serve as little more than chip damage and unless there's an obvious tool very close by to kick combat off it's often way more time efficient to just use your standard arsenal the fact that you'll have access to more durable gear by now and likely more inventory slots as well further harms the incentive to take advantage of the environment as preserving your equipment becomes less of a concern this is another instance where the great plateau introduces a cool concept makes good use of it and it's never seen in nearly so elegant a form ever again part of the reason to keep using these tactics would just be for the fun of doing so and fair enough it can be fun for a while but the appeal of clearing out enemy camps does fade over time due to diminishing returns the gradual erosion of its novelty and the blood moon mechanic these are semi-random events where most overworld enemies respawn meaning that it's impossible to ever permanently clear an enemy camp they'll always be back at the next blood moon for the most part i think this is a good inclusion that stops players from accidentally wiping all challenge and certain resources from the map although i do wish that there were more areas that enemies could be permanently removed from maybe little pockets of land that people are trying to set up settlements in seeing terrytown spring up is very satisfying and the ability to transform the world more often like this on a smaller scale with a quest condition no more complicated than run in and kill some monsters could potentially add a lot to the game blood moons also trigger a cut scene every time and while it is mercifully skippable that doesn't mean it's harmless [Music] we can all agree that was right like i know i'm making a very opinionated video and people are going to disagree with different parts of it which is totally fine but i mean come on tell me that wasn't it may sound like i dislike combat in breath of the wild but that's actually not generally the case there's still a lot of fun to be had here and i haven't even gotten into some of the other elements that make it enjoyable such as the light stealth system that rewards sneakiness without ever making it mandatory or the ability to jump cancel your attacks adding to the melee system's depth and flexibility it also maintains the crunchy sound design and generous hit stop the 3d titles have continuously leaned into so while melee attacks in particular do wear out their welcome in context in isolation they still feel extremely satisfying to connect with the combat system kept me engaged enough to want to really dive into and explore link's fighting abilities and that unfortunately started to become an issue in and of itself breath of the wild's combat does not hold up well under scrutiny cooking is an obvious contributor here i haven't talked about this system in any kind of detail so let's do that now rather than forcing you into a narrow list of pre-prescribed recipes breath of the wild allows you to gather up any five ingredients that would reasonably work together toss them in a pot and get a good result the baseline result will be health restoration very important because raw ingredients heal inefficiently and pure heart pickups no longer exist but you can also get a variety of temporary bonus effects higher stealth attack and defense boosts stamina restoration weather resistance faster movement speed etc i can't say that there's an incredible amount of creativity in most of these effects but i'm willing to give this a pass because the act of cooking ties so well into breath of the wild's freedom philosophy encouraging players to experiment in an enjoyable way or at least it does for some of these bonus effects for actual health restoration still by far the most important and impactful use for cooking this entire system is gutted by the decision to include hearty ingredients these are items that can be cooked all by themselves and the result is a meal that not only fully restores all of your hearts but also provides bonus hearts on top of that this is so absurdly above the power level of every other recipe along with being extremely quick and easy to mass produce that they've become essentially my only source of healing by mid game in every playthrough i've done it's not like i'm making any special effort to look for them either they're less common than your standard herbs and mushrooms but also aren't particularly rare if i look through a list of all the recipes purely dedicated to health restoration that breath of the wild's developers accounted for it's genuinely impressive and i've maybe felt the need to create 10 of them in all my time in the game because hearty dishes completely blow any other form of health restoration out of the water breath of the wild's cooking system is honestly a really good idea but the tuning on it is just bizarre nintendo may have taken a cautious approach to ensure that nobody was ever at risk of being unable to heal but i'd still say they overdid it and this wouldn't be nearly as big an issue if healing had some degree of risk involved but it unfortunately doesn't at absolutely any time you're free to just open the menu eat as much as you'd like meaning one hearty meal a lot of the time and close it again with no consequence not only is there no contextual item that you need to use like bottles filled with potions but as mentioned bottles no longer exist at all so the inventory restriction they created for on-the-fly healing is gone as well this means that the life-saving fairies don't suffer this restriction either while also being easy to find and collect thanks to their presence around great fairy fountains so the already overly lenient healing system is easy to stack with further redundancy in case you do miscalculate and all of this still doesn't break combat nearly as much as armor upgrades do we've talked about link's invisible level which scales enemies up in the overworld with increased health and damage while also providing link with stronger weapons to compensate this would only compensate for enemies increased health by itself though they'd still be doing additional damage and the developer's solution to this was to allow link to upgrade his armor at the four great fairy fountains across the world unlocking one additional upgrade tier per fountain found and with each tier and piece of armor using different collectibles a solid concept that directly ties power scaling into exploration without filling up an exploration meter or something equally blunt but these upgrades aren't even close to properly balanced they outscale enemies damage output to such an absurd degree that link becomes essentially invulnerable if you just play the game in a way it supports and arguably even encourages thoroughly exploring the world upgrading whenever you've got some materials maybe teleporting to an area you remember to collect the last one or two of a material you need by the time you're done you'll have trivialized literally every enemy encounter in the game there is an argument to be made for a player being able to dictate their own difficulty by the gear they wear but i don't think requiring players to compensate for poor balancing is something a game should be praised for don't use that cool armor you found and definitely don't engage with one of the few progression systems in the game because if you do you're going to completely destroy combat does that seem like a reasonable thing to have to tell a player i don't think it does there are two more issues that play into this combat is too easy to break statement which although they're not nearly as glaring still deserve mention upgrading the stasis rune allows it to be used on enemies in addition to physics-based items and against more threatening one-on-one encounters this is very overpowered allowing you to effortlessly score shots to their weak points there's also no real penalty for missing your stasis attempt the cooldown is so minimal that you can just keep mashing a and it will activate as soon as the enemy enters your crosshairs now to be clear overall i like that the stasis plus rune exists being able to freeze up a coblin right off its mount is the exact kind of wacky fun i'd hope to see and it's not unreasonable in group fights as it only works on a single enemy at once i wouldn't want this functionality removed but it would have been smart to design it so that mini bosses in particular weren't torn apart so thoroughly from its use the obvious solution would just be to further reduce this duration against these types of enemies so that headshots required quicker aim but a more ambitious approach could be to have the ai recognize and respond to the fact that it's about to get hit by stasis maybe it could guard its face so you'd need to move quickly and save stasis use for when you're already at a favorable angle this could be contextualized by for example having the sheikah slate emit a harsh light whenever stasis is primed that enemies are shielding themselves against on the topic of ai the final crack in combat for me is how exploitable some of the enemy types in the game are which means now would be a good time to talk about the enemies link is going to be facing starting with the least dangerous and moving up we have wildlife most creatures in breath of the wild can be made hostile if provoked but they generally don't pose too much of a threat the only ones that will go out of their way to hunt you are wolves which don't hit very hard and can be scared off very easily and bears which are quite rare and very slow a step up from that we have the minor monsters keys choo choos pebblets and octorocks despite also appearing in elemental versions these first three are almost never a threat unless they're part of a larger battle individual keys hover politely in front of link before they attack and the flocks they sometimes form are easy to bat away by flailing at them as soon as they begin their charge choo choos are extremely slow and predictable the only significant danger being the elemental explosions they can create which are simple to avoid in isolation these explosions are the most interesting part of these enemies as they can be used against other enemies as well and the same property even applies to the jelly they drop which can also be infused with elemental properties after the fact considering their horrible mobility and that they rarely appear in enclosed spaces anymore choo choos were going to need to undergo some kind of change to make them even vaguely relevant and i think the approach taken here was very good it ties into their traditional role as a resource supplier while also embracing the chemistry system and free-form approach of their new home peblets are also very slow and on top of being instantly killed by bombs they can also be picked up and thrown to act as bombs themselves this generally isn't the most useful combat option and they're a fairly lackluster enemy type overall although i only found out while making this video that enemies were also capable of using their explosive capabilities yet another little detail that the game managed to surprise me with octorocks are a bit more dangerous than the other minor monsters they fire persistent long-ranged projectiles and can disguise themselves as treasure chests which you need to remember to check for with magnesis they'll hide in various terrain and take simplistic evasive and offensive maneuvers still relatively straightforward to take out by themselves but these are the first ones that can start to make you sweat a little sprinting through an octorock infested area with low health in the early game is legitimately stressful and they're by far the most annoying of the minor monsters of working in tandem with another category the octa rocks on death mountain may also be the first look you'll get at the vacuum mechanic you'll see the area's boss use which can be beaten the same way by chucking in a bomb this is a well-designed reward for exploring the area thoroughly giving the player an opportunity to discover a puzzle that acts as a piece to a larger puzzle all of it handled in a way that feels very natural and relies on the player to connect the dots themselves in a neat touch you can also throw in rusty weapons and a better weapon will get spat back out at you it's another of those little details that nobody would miss if it wasn't included but makes the world feel that extra little bit more rich next up we have the monster grunts or bakoblins maublins and lizolfos these are the enemies most players will be spending the bulk of the game fighting and are also the ones i'd consider to be the most impressive from an ai standpoint they fulfill the same general rules as in previous zelda titles with bakoblins being the basic foot soldiers maublin's a bigger and tougher threat and luzolfo's more agile and tricky what sets them apart in breath of the wild though is the greatly expanded number of actions each enemy is capable of taking but coblins are the most diverse of all dancing around campfires dynamically picking up weapons and seeking out mounts lighting those weapons on fire to increase their damage hunting wildlife throwing temper tantrums when they lose their weapons eating apples when offered to them hurling rocks when link is out of attack range kicking his own bombs back at him there's an ambitious array of behavior they'll exhibit in different scenarios and i wouldn't be surprised if at least one of the ones i listed was news to a fair portion of the people watching this video and it was far from a comprehensive list moblins may not be able to ride mounts but they have no issue picking up the bokoblin they were just enjoying a friendly chat with and hurling it at link which the bokoblin is very much not on board with and it's hard to overstate just how much i love this inclusion this is one of my favorite attacks in any video game bokoblins and moblins can both use bows and throw rocks but lizoflows play the most with range out of the three they'll dart around evasively before closing in with an attack and this is further enhanced with elemental variants which can incorporate different projectiles tracking their movements during a group fight can successfully add stress to the encounter although in single combat it does have a tendency to devolve into an annoying waiting game these chameleon-esque creatures can also camouflage themselves for an ambush and while i like this idea and think it makes a lot of sense the vast majority of the time this just serves to give their species a bit more flavor rather than actually add anything to the combat experience as they're still extremely easy to spot it's a neat gimmick and having enemies constantly pop out of nowhere would probably start to get annoying but i do wish they were a bit better hidden in certain instances as even at night in the middle of a snowstorm they're not fooling anyone and they could have been used to add more tension to harsh areas you do get the occasional burrowing wizolfos which somewhat fills that role instead but effective camouflage would be both more thematically appropriate and more mechanically satisfying as it would present a challenge to your observation skills unfortunately because these are the enemies where the ai starts to get sophisticated it's also where the cracks start to show more prominently the sneak strike aspect of the stealth system is very abusable here although that one's not such an issue because it falls off in group encounters and may not even be unintentional it's kind of hard to say it's also pretty fun to do and makes you feel like you're in a looney tunes cartoon but other exploits are less fun and more sloppy like the ability to farm arrows by positioning links diagonally downwards from an archer there should have been a check here that prompted a change in behavior after enough unsuccessful shots enemies are also too lenient about being attacked from a distance to feel realistic i'd have been very impressed if this kind of scenario prompted them to form into hunting parties and spread out for example although i can largely forgive this one because there's an element of gameplay balance here the developers likely limited some aggressive tendencies on purpose i'll emphasize that overall the ai here is among the better i've played against and much like with the invincible stable animals this is why the areas where the code underneath peeks through bothers me more than it usually would it's very possible that's not a fair criticism and also understandable that yet another custom behavior pattern to avoid something like arrow farming didn't make the cut considering how much work the programmers already clearly had on their plates but it is how i ultimately feel skeletal variants of these monsters also appear throughout the overworld at night sharing much of the same behavior but requiring different combat patterns to kill efficiently they're far more brittle than their living counterparts but can also reassemble themselves if their heads are left intact which can be prevented either by scoring a headshot or finishing off the head separately they've got some more fun little unnecessary details of their own as well like being able to pick up their arms and use them as weapons these are very bad weapons and there's no real reason to do this outside of the very early game but it's still a neat inclusion this also applies to the custom animation for throwing their heads generally link uses an overhead toss for these kinds of objects but here he dismissively kicks it away it makes dispatching these things by throwing their heads off a cliff or into a lake even more satisfying as an aside the fact that many of the game's most common enemies die in water is an inspired design choice breath of the wild has quite a few ways to generate knockback effects and this both expands the creativity you can approach combat with as well as saves nintendo from having to animate and program a bunch of swimming behavior wiz robes are a step down from the previous monsters with much simpler behavior that mostly amounts to ethereally scooting across the air firing elemental projectiles and eventually changing the weather around them i find their implementation a bit weird they're usually by themselves but seem designed to be dangerous in group combat alongside other enemies their environmental damage and evasive ranged assault could potentially be threatening and is in the few instances where they do team up but they're very easy to take down if the player has time to focus on them i really like how genuinely creepy they are but they feel underutilized in most parts of the game which i can't say for the guardians breath of the wild signature enemy and a major cornerstone of its story coming in a variety of forms from walkers to flyers to multiple turret variants these do present a significant threat until the player has a firm grasp of parry timing or is equipped with powerful enough gear as guardians are one of the enemy types that don't scale alongside link their ai is nothing particularly sophisticated mostly sticking to the same path until they find you then moving into optimal range or beginning to charge their laser but i mean they're robots the simplistic behavior is completely justified in context i generally consider this to be a very well executed enemy type and love the ability to either parry them to death or systematically dismantle them and if encountered in groups they remain oppressive for much longer stretches of the game than most enemies will especially since they're one of the few enemy types that link can't reliably outrun on foot it's good to have at least a few enemies that can force you into a fight or die scenario and while this would be theoretically undercut by the freely accessible teleport in practice there's not usually too much of a penalty for death and breath of the wild you're just forced back to an earlier auto save this means that escaping from a guardian by warping back to the nearest shrine or tower will often create more of a setback than if you'd been killed so you might as well stand your ground while i stand by my praise of the ancient shield it is arguably too effective against them something like increasing the parry timing window rather than just making laser deflection fully automatic may have been a better way to handle it because it's bought with giant ancient cores though which are easiest to collect by killing guardians there's a reasonable chance that the player has demonstrated some proficiency with guardian combat by the time they obtain the shield if they haven't though it does create a loop that stops them from ever having to learn to fight guardians so maybe there should have been variants in the overworld which didn't entirely rely on their laser this is pretty reasonable when you consider how much of the infrastructure for this was already in place i also wish guardians had a slightly better defined startup to their death animation since i found myself slashing at the air sometimes if there were also other enemies to focus on but not a big deal next up are the yiga which as i subtly hinted at i'm not nearly so fond of there are only two variants foot soldiers and blade masters and foot soldiers in particular are possibly my least favorite enemy type in the game they always use one-handed weapons in the same bow always attack with the same tactics always drop the same rewards and their evasive yet mostly non-threatening nature means that they're more tedious to fight than anything else you either run in and catch them immediately or have to track them as they teleport around hearing their signature laugh and seeing them poof into existence loses its novelty very quickly although i do like the ones disguised as travelers there's some fun dialogue in there before the reveal even if i caught onto their patterns fairly quickly and was rarely actually convinced i was going to be speaking to a normal npc i generally much prefer the blade masters which are harder and less evasive with a more interesting move set requiring pinpoint perry or dodge timing and a good paraglider used to get the most out of the fight the lack of variety in their drops is still disappointing but at least the wind cleaver is despite my comments about it earlier one of the more unique weapons in the game one element that i don't like about any of the eaga clan fights is that they teleport away instead of dying after being defeated it teams up with a blood moon mechanic to make you feel like your efforts in the overworld are completely futile he's just fine and is definitely going to be back later you've accomplished nothing here previous zelda games have obviously had respawning enemies as well but could usually be dismissed as different enemies moving into the same territory the uselessness of your actions has never been hammered home to the degree breath of the wild does if they had a proper death animation it could at least change the player's perception of their actions even if there was no difference mechanically and considering link can properly kill their leader later in the game and is also shown killing a foot soldier in a cut scene this doesn't seem like an age rating issue either then again it's worth noting that none of these deaths directly appear on screen and they're also not directly acted out by the player so i could be wrong on this one this moves us onto the game's mini bosses enemies which are present for a few set pieces but more often can be found freely in the overworld compared to the usual approach of railroading most mini bosses into dungeons this is a fairly radical removal of safeguards that some players are absolutely going to get hung up on at the start of the game although ultimately i think it was a good decision there's always another way around these enemies if you'd rather come back with better equipment or not come back at all but there's also nothing stopping you from hurling yourself at them over and over again if that better suits the way you approach challenges the weapon durability system is unfortunately very antithetical to this and another argument for link to have a default attack besides bombs but that's not an issue with the mini boss placement we'll start with the hinox which will always be sleeping when you first encounter them i initially really liked this enemy it's got a reasonably diverse set of attacks ranging from a stomp to a butt slam to ripping a tree out of the ground and they have some other interesting behavior as well like the way they freak out if their wooden greaves are lit on fire or how they learn to cover their eyes as they're closing in on you that said the upgraded stasis rune is far too effective at locking them down since the loop of stasis eye shot slash and run away is extremely reliable particularly since they're almost always alone and in very spacious environments even if this hasn't been unlocked yet i still wouldn't necessarily call these fights incredibly challenging provided the player knows not to stay too close to the hinox for too long they're really easy to run away from it does make for a good spectacle the first handful of times you encounter them though and the ability to steal the weapons they're carrying whether that's by sneaking onto their chests as they're sleeping or going for an eye shot into a quick swipe is a very cool touch their skeletal stellnox form works in a similar way this one doesn't sleep but you can still steal its weapons by knocking its eyeball right out of its head these ones can also attack you by pulling their own bodies apart which is a really impressive detail that turns them into one of my favorite enemy types even if mechanically it's a fairly standard attack then we have the talus monsters made of living stone which can attack link with hurled rocks or crushing blows from their limbs with breath of the wild's mobility system it makes sense to have a shadow of the colossus style enemy you need to climb up to reach its weak point and they get some other twists added to them like different locations for that weak point or elemental coatings which need to be neutralized i love and do mean love the idea behind these enemies but sadly even with their variations the talus just aren't complex enough to remain interesting over a playthrough especially because stasis plus once again obliterates them the challenging part of a talus fight is supposed to be getting onto its back in the first place because once you're up there any reasonable two-handed spin attack will knock off most or all of its health without upgrading the stasis rune there can be some excitement if you're facing a variant with a protected weak spot because then getting into position can actually pose an interesting challenge even here though the simplistic attack patterns with low execution demand eventually become pretty easy to exploit after this there's the malduga a creature entirely unique to the desert region that swims around under the sand this mini boss is terrible which is really disappointing to say because it's one of the most distinctive enemy types and is supposed to serve as a refreshing experience for players coming into this region it's intimidating to see moving around and has some extremely ominous accompanying music but will never actually hit you if you're standing on any terrain other than the sand itself and the developers have been careful to provide plenty of terrain in all malduga areas just throw a bomb wait for it to take the bait detonate hit it while it's stunned retreat when it's recovering and repeat until it's dead it's an extremely simple exploit that's easy to find quickly and by accident turning what could potentially have been a very cool encounter into a poorly designed somewhat tedious loop and then finally we have the lionel an enemy i've often heard highlighted as the standout encounter of the game to which i'd largely agree they provide a degree of difficulty that's genuinely refreshing for the series wielding several different weapons and relentlessly attacking with an array of extremely damaging moves mastering lynel encounters taking what was once a seemingly insurmountable task and gradually whittling it down is one of the more gratifying experiences in the game especially because they're one of the few enemy types that you can't totally cheese with the stasis rune they're aggressive enough and have a high enough health pool that you'll still need to learn the timing of their attacks well enough to survive in between cooldowns they even have a unique mount state that allows you to get off some hits that don't drain your ability from your weapon meaning that a player can go hey that kind of looks like a horse i wonder if i can ride it and be rewarded for their insight this is all really genuinely great stuff until you learn that you can keep them locked in an endless stun cycle and it's very easy to do glide down and stun them slash a few times wait until they stood up and finished shaking their head stun them slash a few times wait until they've yet you can literally repeat this until they're dead now to be clear games have exploits and the more complex the game is the more exploits are inevitably going to appear the stun lock in particular bothers me though because not only is it not some obscure scenario lining up another headshot as a stunned enemy recovers is an obvious strategy that many players are going to try but it's also a strategy the developers were clearly aware of that's the entire reason this lynel has invincibility until its head is finished shaking but they didn't extend this invincibility long enough or provide some other safeguard like having it cover its head during the end of the recovery phase which would likely be a better solution anyways because excessive invincibility can have detrimental impacts on a player's immersion they knew this was a problem to solve but their solution was sloppy there's a well-known quote from soren johnson a game designer for the civilization series which goes as follows given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of a game it's a problem the civilization developers are very aware of with his co-worker sid meier earlier stating that one of their responsibilities is to protect the player from themselves that is from the player being able to create an optimized experience that harms the fun of gameplay and this is something that breath of the wild doesn't handle very proficiently if you never figure out that malduga can't follow you off the sand you might be in for a legitimately tense encounter desperately darting around and using your bombs to distract it from your footsteps if you never learned that you can farm bokoblins for arrows then resource depletion will be a much more significant issue in the early game and you won't have the temptation to grind the game to a halt every time you see the scenario appear if you never learn that you can permanently lock down a lynel or that you can upgrade your armor so much that it stops being a threat or that you can effortlessly stockpile a massive supply of risk-free full heals in case it does manage to hurt you lynos can potentially be a great fight i had fun with it on a more surface level enough fun to want to really dig in deep and master its mechanics and as a result as soon as i cross the threshold where preserving weapon durability is a major concern every lionel encounter is severely damaged those who would say i have the option to not use any of these tactics are correct but i've again been put in a position where i either need to play in a way i know is suboptimal or have an unsatisfying combat encounter and clearly neither of these options are the ideal scenario i haven't been protected for myself and i have optimized the fun out of the game or at least this enemy type now you may be going i never knew or cared about any of this stuff which is a totally reasonable position to have but i think if you're going to thoroughly evaluate a game which again you the viewer are by no means required to you do have to push back against it a bit exactly how much you're supposed to push back before you're having a completely different discussion is admittedly pretty fuzzy but i do think the line is at least past the first time super casual experience it doesn't help that there are so few enemy types apart from story encounters i've just gone through all of them and this would be bare bones even by the standards of previous zelda games but in a world as big as breath of the wild it leads to an overbearing amount of repetition figuring out how to cheese any single enemy type under these circumstances means that you've now figured out how to cheese a significant percentage of individual enemy encounters in the game against a lot of the mini bosses in particular this problem is fairly rampant but thankfully not every encounter falls apart to quite the same degree while you never need to engage with standard enemy groups in melee combat for example if you do opt to the fights generally get played at least reasonably straight even if we ignore the continued combat breaking through armor and healing though there are still only so many times you can fight the same two or three enemy types before the experience starts to lose its luster even with the additional attack options breath of the wild's environmental interactions create this lack of variety is one of the linchpin problems i have with breath of the wild and while it's almost time to move on to the main quest line i need to say again that what i've been covering so far is not throwaway side content it's the meat of what the game has to offer if you make a beeline for ganon straight off the great plateau you can beat breath of the wild in its first hour and folding in the main story beat still doesn't leave you with a particularly long or satisfying game the real heart of breath of the wild is exploration but throughout that exploration there isn't enough introduction or development of ideas the great plateau introduces you to essentially all of them earlier i praised the plateau for acting as a representation of the game as a whole but this didn't end up meaning that its non-stop fountain of exciting new possibilities represented the way the entire game was going to play out it meant quite literally that no this is the game everything you're doing now is pretty much just what you're going to keep doing during a thorough playthrough while the truly beautiful environment around you may change you're still fundamentally going to be performing the same few actions facing the same few challenges and getting the same few rewards with the more unique moments still leaning on very similar mechanics and being spaced very far apart if you were to make a list of every unique piece of content i've praised throughout this video so far it would sound like a solid amount and it is but there's a vast amount of hyrule to explore breath of the wild would have benefited tremendously from another more gameplay-altering form of collectible optional moveset upgrades seem like a good candidate which the series has already seen multiple times these would be dramatically superior rewards to essentially anything the game currently offers even more so with multiple weapon classes that could each have new techniques to discover this could even extend past just combat 2 more say mobility upgrades and oh if we're going to take that approach how about doing it with runes maybe more classic zelda items could be optional upgrades to the shiga slate the hook shot in particular comes to mind here it would make climbing less painful since you could grapple to a higher starting point but also wouldn't break anything it could easily be designed to only attach to surfaces you can already climb and as i discussed earlier climbing doesn't lead to any meaningful progress gating in the first place it would have some negative implications for the few proper climbing traversal tests that exist in the game but far less so than ravali's gale does so if that upgrade is deemed okay to exist then i failed to see why the hook shot would be an issue but the game's director does there's an interview with hidemaru fujibayashi as well as series producer asianuma where they talk about the hook shot in particular and there are a few key points i took away from this many people on the team loved them and thought they felt great but they were ultimately discarded because they would have to be given out as a later game reward and they'd be a retread of a mechanic the series had already seen both of which were concepts breath of the wild's leads were generally against breath of the wild was handled with a very scorched earth mindset nothing is sacred burn it down and start again and what rises up should be so dramatically transformed from its predecessor that it's almost unrecognizable i really genuinely admire this it must have been a scary prospect but also an important one by the time skyward sword came around it was clear zelda's pendulum had swung too far in the direction of restrictive linear gameplay and breath of the wild was a strong reaction to that however while this kind of reactive design can and in this case did do wonders for making a game feel fresh on release that freshness inevitably fades and the game must stand alone free of that context maybe under a less narrow viewpoint some of those elements the team was so eager to burn would have been good inclusions after all maybe pushing the pendulum so far in the other direction becomes less appealing once the pendulum's old position is forgotten a memory that's still reasonably clear at the time of upload but is already fading to say nothing of how breath of the wild will be perceived one two ten zelda titles from now the fact that the hookshot was old took priority over whether it was fun a decision i question now and will only come more into focus as the game ages you may agree here or you may not but even if you do it's still hard to blame nintendo for this hindsight is a powerful tool that they didn't have and the scope of this project was pretty ludicrous by any standard so much so in fact that a lot of the watered-down feel i've criticized about the game's content was known about and necessary even the eureka moment behind the game's inception nintendo knew that what they referred to as additive gameplay creating new ideas and mechanics for a specific moment wouldn't be very feasible so instead they largely focused on multiplicative gameplay a series of universal mechanics that could be endlessly combined it's a clever solution to the game's scaling issues but frankly i miss some of that additive gameplay and its effects are very far reaching the lackluster mini games i talked about earlier that's a textbook example a lot of mini games in the zelda series have been additive only being implemented for that one moment did you ever wonder why you can't pet the dogs in breath of the wild settlements that would also be additive the time spent programming a petting mechanic was considered unjustified since it couldn't be broadly recycled elsewhere that's not speculation by the way nintendo directly confirmed this this was all of course necessary to fill the enormous world a task so demanding that even multiplicative elements started to become strained so i'll say it for the last time maybe the world shouldn't have been so big i keep bringing this point up but it's not because i dislike the scale of the map in fact quite the opposite i consider running around such an enormous and beautiful incarnation of hyrule to be the single biggest strength of the game a statement i think many people would agree with but breath of the wild's radical shift in format from previous zelda games placed an enormous strain on the developers which nintendo has been open about every element of the process from art to level design to animation to artificial intelligence had to be completely reworked and ran into a host of new technological challenges even with the concession to multiplicativity each feature still likely received less time to implement and polish than it normally would the game being delayed multiple times isn't surprising considering the challenges they've openly talked about and others they likely haven't making the map smaller would have taken strain away from the quantity of content that needed to be produced and allow more time to be spent on its quality i understand that phrasing is a bit confusing because part of what i'm talking about is more systems but i'm referring to systems that didn't need to be developed primarily for the sake of mass producing content i adore the large map which is about 12 times the size of twilight princess's already substantial offering but would happily trade it for a map eight or nine times the size with more developed content throughout which would still feel outrageously big if we never had this iteration to compare it with of course the problem with this kind of thinking is that i have absolutely no way of knowing how much content we'd actually get in return for sacrificing 25 of the map i think it would certainly correlate with more complex and high quality shrines and less reliance on korok seeds but anything beyond that is a reach each player would certainly have a sweet spot somewhere in that trade-off though and for my taste breath of the wild leans too far in the direction of scale hyrule itself is wonderful but so many elements suffered in order to implement it that i don't consider the result to be a full success again note that i'm coming from the position of a largely extrinsically motivated player if interesting and substantial rewards weren't so inherently powerful to my gameplay experience then i'd probably get significantly more out of this version of hyrule and the fact that i still enjoy it as much as i do speaks to just how carefully it was crafted in many areas a lot of breath of the wild's most distinctive content though comes from its main quest so let's look at that breath of the wild's main questline primarily consists of three sections the divine beasts hyrule castle and link's memories i'm gonna run through the first two with a focus on gameplay then i'll shift over to talking about the story content which is a natural time to bring in the memories as well after heading into kakariko village off the great plateau and speaking to impa link is tasked with taking down four divine beasts across the world one each in the remains of the zora gorons rito and gerudo all four of these quests follow the same course structure a lead up in and around the corresponding city a boarding sequence to get linked into the divine beast activating the five terminals within the divine beast a boss fight with one of ganon's blights and a reward bestowment and shift in the divine beast's position within the world i'll cover eight section in the order it seems the developers might have been nudging the player towards their geographical positioning which i'd estimate to be zora's domain goron city gerudo town rito village then again gerudo desert is probably the hardest area so maybe it's supposed to be last you know what just don't worry about this too much zoro's domain is pretty clearly intended to be first but other than that it's fairly arbitrary zora's domain has an extensive lead up period with the fan favorite prince said on guiding link up a lengthy rain-soaked path it's a well-designed section that provides a balance between letting the player know they're progressing done through sidon's reappearances and leaving the player to fend for themselves through some enemy-filled hiking once link arrives he's given the zora armor and told to go fetch 20 shock arrows from a nearby mountain with the small problem that they happen to be presided over by a lynel bringing these arrows back completes the lead up this is a good sequence but remember the shrine quest that was spoiled by finding it too late the same thing can happen here this lynel is clearly supposed to be a massive threat that encourages tents sneaking around to collect the required arrows and is also likely to be the player's first time seeing a lynel if they follow the encouraged path making for an interesting reveal out of sequence though not only does the reveal fall apart but so does the tension of the fight as this will always be the lowest level lineal variant unlike most others in the world it does not scale with you the reveal in a subsequent playthrough obviously wouldn't hold up under any circumstance but there was nothing preventing me from encountering the same scenario in my first playthrough i just got lucky that the first time i played things fairly straight it technically isn't even necessary to go there at all if you're already carrying shock heroes or have found a merchant who sells them all the quest giver is actually interested in is that you have the arrows making the trivial action mandatory and the compelling one entirely optional scaling this lynel and making the quest require some form of unique collectible would have gone a long way towards tightening things up although to truly ensure a good reveal it would need a unique mini boss that scales appropriately from what i understand the slano is programmed a bit differently than the others in the game it's more aggressive when it spots link but that's just not enough it's also possible to approach zora's domain from an alternate angle which can skip sidon's introduction and the dangerous path entirely to the developer's credit they did account for this possibility but a player who accidentally takes this approach is robbing themselves of an otherwise well-done sequence as well as some of sidon's characterization avoiding this would have required extensive retooling of the quest and maybe an unavoidable consequence for allowing this degree of player agency in which case strongly pushing the player along the intended path may be the most reasonable compromise available that said i also find it hard to accept that players can be punished like this for deviating from the intended path in a game that supposedly encourages just such a mindset someone can want to fully experience the game while also exploring the unusual freedom it offers and by doing the latter they can unknowingly compromise the former goron city tasks link with trekking through a lava field to rescue a missing goron which will also introduce the timed cannons that will later be used for its boarding sequence it's the classic game design principle i alluded to earlier in the video which gets more of a chance to shine here because these sections are played out fairly linearly and it works well this one is a step down in terms of a crafted experience compared to the zora equivalent but this also means it works better in any part of the game something that applies to the rest of these as well and the terrain link has to traverse feel suitably oppressive they also try a bit of a retread with the great plateau's cold section because to get to the city in the first place you need to figure out a way to survive the extreme heat environment having one of the four divine beast regions introduce a different kind of environmental challenge makes sense the mountains play with cold and the desert plays with both heat and cold but these are systems most players will be familiar with by the time they reach them so their open-ended solutions won't be as interesting this kind of shakeup is good on paper and something breath of the wild needed more of but the solution is mediocre the fireproof effect is a lot more restrictive to obtain and forces you to find a specific animal either to brew a fireproof elixir or trade it for fireproof armor and unless you want to burn through a massive stockpile of food this is all you have to work with once you're in the city this armor is easily obtainable so at least there's no more hassle but i'm still left thinking about how once again we're looking at an idea that played out better on the great plateau i appreciate the developers tried to reintroduce this type of discovery but i don't think this is a very good attempt in gerudo town the tribe continues their long-standing tradition of forbidding men from entering their city so link needs to seek out a vendor in a nearby bazaar and get an appropriate disguise which he's hilariously bashful about this lets him into the city where he's then tasked with recovering an heirloom from the yiga requiring him to head into their hideout this is functionally a small dungeon one of very few areas outside of shrines and divine beasts that earn the title and is generally quite well designed with a heavy emphasis on stealth the area is patrolled by a large number of yiga blade masters that will trap you and spawn reinforcements if spotted it's still possible to fight your way out i like that it's not an automatic loss but it's clearly been tuned towards the death sentence end of the spectrum fortunately you can sneak past the blade masters using bananas for some reason yeah i'm not really sure what the rationale is here but it's hilarious watching a usually intimidating enemy tiptoe towards a snack like scooby doo you'll find these same banana stockpiled everywhere in the hideout as well so i guess that's just what they do okay this area gets considerably easier and frankly less interesting once you realize that you can just stasis every ego you need to get past but it's still not quite a free pass and doesn't completely spoil the fun it's even finished off with a unique boss encounter pitting you against master koga leader of the yiga he's intentionally much less threatening than you might expect and the fight takes on a slapstick tone that mainly focuses on having him hit himself not really too much of a challenge but still a very welcome unique boss that reminds me of just how much the game needed more of this kind of content that escalating game design principle is missing entirely a scavenger hunt for women's clothing has nothing to do with a stealth sequence and neither have anything to do with the rest of the skills you'll be tested on throughout the remainder of this part of the storyline but i certainly don't think this is mandatory to create an enjoyable experience and they're compelling standalone tasks rito village and stark contrast is the worst of all these lead ups by an absurd margin you're pointed towards a flight range consisting of a pit cave with targets lining its walls that hems in a large updraft and need to shoot five of these targets within the time allowed that time allowed is three minutes and completing it took me a few seconds after that you're done i think we're supposed to be seeing that game design principle at work the subsequent divine beast boarding sequence also uses aerial archery but the lead up is so ridiculously forgiving that it doesn't properly train the player and as we'll soon see the boarding sequence is likewise so forgiving that training wasn't even really necessary i have to wonder if there's maybe cut content here because this is so insanely short underwhelming and poorly thought out compared to any other part of the divine beast quests the concept of a target test that makes use of updrafts is great and with better terrain and target placement this could have been a fun challenge but what we ended up with is very disappointing during all of these lead ups you'll get a good chance to see the divine beasts in detail and i love that they're seamlessly integrated into the world at all times it simultaneously makes them more awe inspiring and more believable than traditional dungeons and is a legitimately great piece of world building a nice subtlety here is that varuta the zora divine beast is the only stationary one if a player follows the encouraged path it leaves a bit of room to be surprised twice because it's still a very standout thing to discover but not nearly as standout as the subsequent ones which move around their environment the design of the cities also adds a lot to the world zoro's domain and rito village are probably the most memorable but i've got a particular fonus for gerudo town's wall heavy layout taylormade to play around on with link's climbing abilities i wish i had nearly the same degree of enthusiasm for most of the characters encountered in these quests we're told about how important they are but they don't tend to have much of an in-game purpose beyond quest source yes to be fair that does describe a lot of npcs in zelda but it's kind of an issue that i have with some of the other games as well none of them are offensively bad though and each region does at least get one atypically proactive character during the boarding sequences speaking of which the sequence in zorus domain has link writing on prince sidon's back as the divine beast turls ice chunks at them which are most effectively handled with cryonus but can also be attacked if the player doesn't think of this option he'll bring you up to the waterfalls pouring off the beast's back which you'll need to ascend with a zora armor in order to snipe a series of targets with the shock arrows you collected earlier i quite like this sequence it's not very difficult especially if you realize that crayonus breaks all the ice a consequence of being able to mash a mindlessly with no penalty similar to stasis but it's still a fun and inventive set piece that definitely weaves multiple concepts introduced in this region together granted none of these concepts were strictly mandatory but the push towards them was strong enough that i'd still call it a solid use of that escalating game design i talked about i'm not as into the goron variant which has link guiding yunobo the goron he rescued earlier up a guardian infested path using his horse whistle to start and stop his movement there are several cannons along the way which are used to fire yunobo into the divine beast as it scuttles along the side of death mountain eventually felling it the cannons here work well as an extension of the earlier concept and the idea of shooting a goron in a bubble at a giant mech is pretty funny and leads to some nice spectacle but the whistling mechanic comes out of absolutely nowhere is never seen again and i'd struggle to call it particularly fun it mostly just serves to slow the game's pace to a crawl is adding a non-sequitur mechanic into a questline for the sake of variety inherently bad of course not but it's probably going to feel jarring so it should justify this by also being compelling i'm sure plenty of people did find this mission compelling but while i liked the debris manipulation aspect i wasn't one of them overall as a result i don't like how disconnected this feels from the rest of the region and think it probably would have worked better in gerudo desert which already introduced the idea of stealth in a more interesting way and could have incorporated npc control as a natural extension of the concept fortunately what we got in the desert instead is still pretty good making use of the enjoyable sand seals and having the player multitask between staying in a protective circle and firing bomb arrows at the divine beast's feet the spectacle here is once again extremely impressive and while i think the fight could have been made even more interesting by adding hazards in the sand that's a matter of tuning broadly speaking i love this sequence and my only real complaint is how quickly it's over which sadly is about the polar opposite of how i feel about the rito boarding sequence the notion of taking to the skies for an aerial assault with a flying companion working in tandem with you is awesome but the sequence never actually throws any significant challenge at the player the lasers are absolutely effortless to avoid and you're free to take as long as you need to approach and shoot the turrets those turrets are spaced far enough apart that moving between them creates a lot of down time and the quote unquote help that your reado companion offers amounts to flying by and distracting them every now and then which does not matter at all because again they're never actually going to hit you this quest line makes two attempts to create a compelling aerial archery sequence and misses the mark on both of them setting the sporting sequence high in the air makes it visually great and gives it a lot of potential but that potential was never even close to realized with any interesting mechanics at this point we're entering the divine beasts themselves which alongside shrines serve as stand-ins for the more traditional dungeons from past zelda games they're shorter and largely non-linear the appeal of which will vary from player to player but i can't imagine the lack of visual variety will have sat well with a large chunk of the player base the divine beasts wholeheartedly abandon the colorful designs of previous dungeons stripping everything back into a standardized brown and red architecture that makes them look virtually indistinguishable from the inside they don't even keep any of the standard elemental aesthetic despite each of them leaning on a classical element from a mechanical perspective i said that i wasn't bothered by the uniformity of the shrines but nintendo had an opportunity to add some more visual interest back into this style of content and it's a shame to see a color swapped version of the same aesthetic used instead they are saved from total visual boredom though thanks to their continued integration with the outside world allowing for some really impressive views as link moves through both their interiors and exteriors before any of that link needs to receive a brief overview from the beast's corresponding champion and go collect the map which are now mandatory pickups because they're needed to control each divine beast's unique interactive element these interactive elements will be manipulated in order to help activate several terminals per divine beast the goal of this sequence for the elephant-inspired varuta of the zora domain this will be a spouting trunk that can be freely moved throughout its arc varuta has a predictable emphasis on water and essentially hands the first terminal over on a simple magnesius crank i understand this is intended to be the first divine beast but even if that was guaranteed to be the case this would still be overly simplistic for a key puzzle in a major quest line there are only five terminals per divine beast and none of them are particularly long or complicated to begin with making one of them a freebie shaves a hefty chunk off an already fairly sparse experience the puzzles which play with enormous water wheels are a little more involved manipulating different water streams through cryonis and to the trunk respectively and adding a bit of stasis interaction as well another can be accessed by traversing the moving trunk in real time and this one works very well as a spectacle moment if nothing else it's technically impressive and almost feels like something you shouldn't be doing even though it's obviously been designed to work this way the final terminal and keep in mind i'm using first and final loosely there's no set order uses the same crank as before to open the ceiling and then the trunk can be positioned to pour water on flames blocking the terminal i'm not impressed by this one a sequence this short should not be resorting to recycled mechanics and no this doesn't qualify as iterating on an earlier idea although it's likely the player will find this after the other crank that's not a guarantee and even if we assume it is the action the player performs is exactly the same the trunk movement is an independent action the player performs afterwards and they likely won't even know that they're going to be moving the trunk until the ceiling starts opening whether they reduce that from the environment or not doesn't matter anyways because it makes absolutely no difference to their actions this isn't a flowing logic puzzle it's two incredibly half-hearted tasks stacked on top of each other the first of which literally isn't a puzzle if you've encountered the earlier crank as intended and the second of which has such an incredibly obvious solution that it barely qualifies for the title either the way the trunk is used here is as basic an application as there could possibly be this feels like a puzzle anyone could come up with in a first brainstorming session that should have been used as a starting point for the real thing the goron's vairudanya starts off with an interesting twist plunging link into darkness until he gets his hands on the better guarded map gameplay wise obtaining the map is based on transporting a flame setting it in darkness wasn't necessary but it pairs well with the concept and makes the introduction to this divine beast the most memorable out of the group vairudanya features a fire theme and its map allows it to be rotated 90 degrees and back as it moves around the volcano once again some of the puzzles here are overly simplistic particularly the one where you just burn a plank of wood holding some doors shut this one is on par with or even worse than the magnesius cranks but there are a couple that make reasonable use of this beast's mechanics there's a terminal where you need to properly rotate by rhodania transfer a blue flame to its exterior use that to set an orb free and then use rotation alongside your sheikah slate to complete the orb's path another has you combine a few ideas together by burning a barrier to obtain a metal block using magnesius to position it and then rotating the beast to get through a wall of flames are any of these great no but they do at least involve spatial awareness and multiple mechanics vana boris of the gerudo desert has the most possible configurations with three internal cylinders and four orientations per cylinder which are paired with an electrical circuit theme i'd consider this one to make the most of its central gimmick as well as to be the most complicated requiring you to transport electrical orbs through multiple floors and synchronize the cylinders positions to complete extended circuits the extensive use of moving platforms can make the pacing drag and this is the divine beast that probably suffers the most from the uniform visuals that can make navigation needlessly confusing but i'd overall still consider it to be a reasonably substantial and cohesive challenge which leaves the rito's vamadoe a bird that can be tilted in three orientations with a theme of wind currents too many of these puzzles are weak movement tests that ask nothing of the player beyond using the paraglider while the beast is tilted a certain way but i do think that this specific terminal which makes use of different runes wind and shifting vomidor around multiple times is decent that said considering it's by far the most complex terminal in this divine beast there really isn't that much to chew on here and as i haven't been especially subtle about this really applies to far too much of the divine beasts overall the developers decided to keep the same non-linear approach for these sections as they did for the rest of the game and while i can't call that decision a mistake i also don't think it was implemented very well most of the individual terminal challenges are lackluster some of them incredibly so and the very compelling idea of controlling these divine beasts doesn't get explored very thoroughly this was the big opportunity to create some coherent structured content that introduced ideas and built on top of them scratching some of the itch that the previous zelda dungeons left behind and was what i was expecting when i first entered these divine beasts as soon as i saw the trunk mechanic for varuta as an example my assumption was that i'd be using it to create a stream of water from one side of the beast to the other solving a variety of puzzles to complete the path for the stream and having to keep the various components orientations in mind as i worked my way through maybe moving the trunk back a few notches activates the water wheel i needed to move the next piece of the path into place but also breaks something earlier up in the path so i need to go use a rune on it in a clever way and then activate the trunk at an opportune time nothing like this ever happens the closest thing to an interconnected through line on any of these divine beasts is the electrical leads running through the length of van aboris and even in this one you don't generally need to care what orientation they're in unless you're working on a specific terminal that makes use of them in that moment now here's the catch there's nothing wrong with structuring the divine beast differently than i expected dungeons are one of the most deeply ingrained traditions the zelda series has and nintendo made a very bold decision to shake up the formula which i respect and provided the new formula was done well i was very open to a change the divine beasts aren't disappointing because they took away linear progression and interconnected puzzles they're disappointing because they took these away without replacing them with something equally enjoyable i'd call a good half of the terminal challenges meaningless or close to it and even out of the remainder i don't think there are any that i consider more than solid i never came across a single terminal puzzle that made me go wow that's really clever a sentiment i've experienced many times in previous zelda dungeons i've heard a lot of people say that the divine beasts were the biggest letdowns in the game for them and that's not the case for me i certainly enjoy a good zelda dungeon but most of my personal highlights from the series take place in the overworld i'm not in the group most primed to be let down by these and i do enjoy some of the terminals along with the beast spectacle but i can still easily recognize how far they landed from their full potential before we can close the book on the divine beasts though we of course need to talk about the boss fight against one of ganon's blights at the end of each one water blight ganon uses a variety of long-range spear attacks in a waterlogged arena that encourages heavy use of cryonis both to shield his attacks and to create openings of your own in his second phase he'll retreat to the ceiling and summon ice blocks to fire at link reminiscent of this beast's boarding sequence which can likewise be hid away or shattered with cryonus or if you're crafty frozen with stasis and fired back the other way it's a relatively simple fight appropriate considering it's intended to be the first boss encounter of the game and i'd generally call it well-designed barring some underlying issues with these bosses that we'll talk about in a moment next up is blight ganon who's probably my least favorite of the bunch it has what i'd consider to be the weakest use of its elemental theme which mostly amounts to projectiles and damage boosts along with a shield that can be disrupted by shooting its fireballs or throwing bombs at it overall i just don't think this fight is very interesting and most of its play patterns aren't all that different from what you see outside of the divine beast the only thing players might hit a snag on is figuring out how to break the shield thunder blight ganon much like the divine beast it's found in is probably the one that i'm most impressed by its first phase makes fairly minimal use of its electrical theme just firing a bit of easily avoidable ball lightning from time to time but still distinguishes itself with agile movement and a large shield to hide behind its second phase is where it really takes off electrifying its sword and dropping metal spikes into the ground that conduct lightning which can be picked up with magnesis for a counter-attack electricity is a dangerous element for an enemy to possess due to its disarming properties and these spikes are one of the most clever integrations of the boss's theme into link's counterplay making this a generally more challenging and interesting fight than its peers although i will say that breath of the wild's camera and the way magnesis handles don't play very well with that high multi-tiered arena which leaves us with wind blight ganon an aerial focused boss that rapidly teleports around to the arena and fires projectiles at you this had the makings of a potentially interesting fight however it also takes place in an arena with permanent static updrafts and being airborne is an overpowered state for link that players will always be looking for ways to initiate in general combat the ability to access the air whenever you want seems to be what the fight is built around but much like the rest of this questline it doesn't seem like the developers really knew what to do with aerial combat here it's reasonable to think taking to the skies would be an expected movement pattern that the boss design would encourage and be prepared for but no not really doing so completely breaks the fight you get all the benefits of bullet time's massive damage output which wind blight has no safeguards against and it also allows you to easily avoid its attacks it's really not a very good shot these little satellites are supposed to fire lasers that ricochet among them but i've literally never seen that happen in this arena the fight is over too quickly at no point do you ever need to snipe projectiles out of the air you never need to deftly dart from updraft to updraft maybe those updrafts lift you continuously higher so you can come down on the blight's weak point with a plunging attack putting a weak point on the top of its head instead of the generic eye placement would be a fantastic way to emphasize aerial movement those satellites could even shoot your arrows out of the sky so that you had to use the plunging attack nothing else in the game ever demands that you use this move and it would make the fight feel so much more unique as is you can really ignore basically everything this boss is doing and just kill it with arrows and this is a thread that runs through too many of these fights the blights are built along the same principle of freedom as the rest of the game meaning that you can tackle them in ways beyond the heavily prescribed solution in most previous 3d titles and i have mixed feelings about this decision i like it with water blight ganon for example where the watery arena and ice blocks can be utilized to make the fight go much smoother but aren't strictly required arrows and brawling can get the job done if you insist thunderblight ganon works a bit differently it uses patterns that have strict melee emphasis and strict gimmick interaction which trade places throughout the encounter even within these fights though there are moments where they don't feel distinct enough from the other blights or even standard enemies and this applies even more to fire blight and especially wind blight cannon arrow headshots in particular are an extremely effective method of dealing with most phases of these bosses so of course it's a strategy players are going to gravitate towards and it's not as engaging as it should be because it's the same strategy you've already been using against everything else now making boss fights too prescriptive is a problem in its own right when majora's mask was remade for the 3ds the bosses were changed from a similar freeform approach to forced weak spot targeting and a lot of people did not like this change i'd rather see more of a middle ground with an efficient interesting encouraged strategy with room to weave in alternatives again water blight ganon does this fairly well and the wind blight changes i proposed earlier would also achieve this the homogenous feeling the blights suffer from isn't remotely helped by their appearances all bearing strong resemblance to each other as well as the architecture found all over the world considering that the champion characters in this game are mostly stuck with nothing to do have elemental affinities and exist as imprisoned spirits i have to wonder why we're not fighting possessed versions of them instead here the fact that they're spirits means they're as malleable as needed ganon's corruption could scale them up during the fight for example if size was the issue and these boss battles are already being undertaken with the premise of freeing the champions now this might be veering too far into unfair criticism in the same way that is not fair to criticize the game for failing to give link a shotgun but considering it would lead to more memorable boss encounters and increase the presence of the champions killing two quite sizable birds with one stone i think it's a reasonable thought to have the champion's most impactful moments of agency are probably when they bestow their unique abilities upon link after being freed and much like the divine beasts themselves these are a mixed bag mipha's grace and daruk's protection will be the most common first two abilities to receive and so essentially function as safety nets with mifa's grace granting a second and upgraded set of hearts upon death and daruk's protection granting a more powerful block that can be active without a shield these are extremely practical upgrades but it's hard to get too excited over them their primary purpose is to reduce the penalty for defensive errors breath of the wild is the most difficult zelda title in quite some time so these are reasonably appropriate if maybe a bit over the top but it doesn't feel like the significance of the reward matches the significance of the events around it although when bundled with story progression and an additional heart container this is admittedly somewhat improved prospects get brighter when we turn to urbosa's fury which augments link's charge attack with an enormous area of effect lightning burst and i do mean enormous to the degree that it can easily hit an entire enemy encampment it's frankly absurdly overpowered while it's active and a discussion could certainly be had about its balance but it's ultimately an exciting power-up that significantly and permanently alters link's abilities in a unique way which as we've discussed is a feature the game is in desperate need of so i'm happy with its inclusion fair or otherwise ravali's gale requires a bit more discussion as it's simultaneously one of the most poorly considered and important upgrades link will receive on his adventure it allows him to board enemy platforms without taking an interesting approach it gives him bullet time on demand it takes a lot of the clever tricks he would normally need to employ to gain height or traverse terrain and makes them largely redundant it also just flat out breaks some parts of the divine beasts which don't ban champion abilities in the same way that shrines do figuring out shortcuts to activate the terminals is one thing it can make you feel clever but just flying over a gate you're supposed to be completing a puzzle to open decidedly does not on the other hand the ability to bypass a lot of tasks particularly the swimming and climbing i criticized earlier is a blessing that makes the game dramatically more enjoyable to play to the degree that regio village is now my first destination every time i leave the great plateau and again it's one of the rare instances of link gaining a significantly new skill as the game progresses rivali's gale is also probably the champion ability that most strongly highlights the flaws in the cooldown system they've been given mifa's grace has a single use before triggering a very long cooldown but the others all have three uses leading into a shorter cooldown period mipha's grace and daruk's protection are more logical implementations since they're generally only ever going to be triggered in combat encounters unless you really go out of your way butterbosa's fury and rivali's gale are easy to use at any time meaning that after one or two uses the temptation is always there to burn the remainders during downtime in order to make sure that you have sufficient charges available when you need them theoretically if you have the patience after every encounter that uses a charge you can just drain the rest stand in place until they replenish and functionally have infinite ability usage at the cost of large chunks of your real world time a cooldown after use is a reasonable way to prevent these abilities from becoming too spammable but they should probably passively recharge outside of combat to avoid this odd incentivized behavior the champion abilities were also a prime opportunity to address some of the other issues i've mentioned throughout this video particularly ones related to mobility mifa could have provided link with a significant passive upgrade to his swimming abilities and the same goes for say daruk and climbing or urbosa and sprinting if link's other mobility options were less tiring to deal with then rivali's gale would stop being such a necessity and it could be used to for example create a horizontal wind blast rather than vertical which could still be used in the air to improve link's gliding without the more game breaking aspects the current iteration introduces and would also be the perfect way to provide the raft upgrade i alluded to earlier in the video they could still keep some of their current aspects as well and maybe even introduce more it doesn't seem unreasonable for the bestowment of a separate species essence to result in several changes to link maybe each champion could provide upgrades to both mobility and combat which would make receiving these bestowments much more interesting and reduce the repetitive nature of link's actions throughout the game's runtime at this point the only enemy left to face is ganon himself who's taken over hyrule castle one of my favorite areas in the game it's not the same form of dungeon which has solidified into a core part of the modern zelda formula and is instead more reminiscent of the combat challenges seen in earlier games and also takes the form of a sprawling labyrinth with numerous pathways both inside and out completely infested with high-level enemies and sporting plenty of hidden treasure and secret passageways to uncover its design is in a word excellent you're able to rush ganon without ever stepping foot inside particularly if you can traverse waterfalls with the zora armor although it's also one of the best showcases of and arguments for this iteration of link's climbing mechanics thanks to numerous surfaces which aren't overly tedious to climb but are made dangerous thanks to an ever-present army of guardians with that said if a player is looking for rich exploration the area strongly encourages and rewards this with a collection of the game's strongest items including the hylian shield i mentioned earlier as well as some additional bits of story content like a journal from zelda which is the exact kind of century old record i mentioned wanting to see more of throughout the game i do think it might be a little too easy to come across ganon accidentally if you opt for an outdoor path as there's no warning that you're about to enter his sanctum and it's fairly large but it's a minor issue compared to all the things hyrule castle gets right i can absolutely understand how some players would be disappointed in the total lack of traditional puzzle elements compared to how this castle has typically appeared in zelda games but i appreciate it for what it is the removal of anything resembling the terminals found in the divine beasts gives the freeform nature of this area much more room to breathe and let the designers really focus on the core concept get to gannon that's all you need to know i love the purity of that vision once you do get into the sanctum you discover what freeing all those divine beasts has netted you no blights in the sanctum and less health on ganon if you didn't kill them ahead of time they'll appear consecutively here to take down with each fight largely playing out the same as it would on the divine beast but with some differences due to the altered arena appearing back to back like this can definitely start to make this segment drag and weapon durability is a major hindrance that essentially discredits the notion that you can leave the great plateau and immediately go kill ganon in reality you do need to go collect weapons first unless you feel like going through the hell of chipping away at everything with bombs taking these factors into account removing the blights could be seen as an important reward if you consider allowing the player to break from the intended path at the expense of an unpleasant end game to be reasonable game design which i think i do you're not intended to do this the developers aren't going to coddle you if you decide to ignore most of the game but you still can albeit again with the caveat that weapon collection is essentially mandatory the reduced health on ganon is less impressive to me this is the big climactic moment you've been working towards potentially for a very long time and to have it all lead to one short cut scene and a single number being changed was something i found pretty disappointing i thought maybe there would be an outdoor battle that the divine beasts would join in on or they'd provide link with some last minute awesome abilities or essentially name any reasonable outcome of freeing gigantic titans and their ancient commander's spirits and it will probably be more interesting than what was actually put into the game thankfully the ganon fight itself does make up for this to a degree showing off perhaps the most bizarre incarnation he's ever had a cyborg spider beast bristling with ancient weaponry who plummets out of a massive cocoon despite this visual style being oversaturated throughout the game i still find myself liking the design of calamity ganon quite a bit it's an extremely bold choice that also allows plenty of room for a diverse moveset which he does thankfully have he crawls around to the wall he swings his enormous weapons he fires a variety of projectiles and area of effect attacks he retreats into an armored shell that needs to be punctured with counter-attacks or herbosa's fury it's an interesting fight but not without its problems it's hard to ignore how many of these attacks are taken almost verbatim from the blights you've already fought potentially just fought and while this does serve to make calamity ganon feel like a culmination of what came before appropriate for an end-game boss there are also plenty of other techniques that the player has been mastering throughout their adventure that calamity ganon doesn't really test at no point during these fights do you need to climb swim shield surf etc in fact the game places you in the most barren arena possible to ensure that none of these options are available and frankly these are much more interesting parts of breath of the wild than that one boss's big spear along with being more representative of the game as a whole and would have been more appropriate to create a final test for you could make the argument that hyrule castle fills that role but for the most part it's not really structured around heavy movement testing a lot of the fight's potential tension is also robbed by his strangely low damage output as well as how incredibly effective shields are against the vast majority of his attacks if you picked up the hylian shield and or a reasonable arsenal of decent shields before facing him then you can pretty much stand in place and block most things that come your way this is the fight that really sells me on the idea of percentage-based damage blocking on shields he does have a few attacks that can get around this strategy but not enough to be much of an issue as is calamity ganon is considerably easier to kill than most lionel variants which might be a necessary concession as calamity ganon is a mandatory fight and the lynels are optional but it still creates a dissonance i can't totally overlook i wouldn't consider this a brilliant fight by any means but i do enjoy it and consider it to be one of the best boss fights in the game which admittedly might speak more to the overall weak showing by breath of the wild's bosses than it does to calamity ganon and while we're talking about weak boss showings dark beast ganon my choice for the single worst moment in breath of the wild bar none after defeating calamity ganon you're taken outside and put on horseback for one final epic encounter no more experimental cyborg this is the boar that we know so well bigger and more menacing than it's ever been the music swells zelda delivers a rousing speech you charge forward to obtain the legendary bow of light and you shoot a couple targets on ganon's body while it plods around aimlessly what happened here there's no tension there's no challenge there isn't even really combat this is a shooting gallery dark beast ganon is so unbelievably clumsy and slow that not only has he never hit me he's never even gotten within the ballpark of hitting me there are no discernible phases apart from the different target positions and there are no skills tested apart from archery and horseback riding to even call the archery portion a test is a bit of a stretch because for all intents and purposes you have as much time as you possibly need to hit these gigantic slow moving targets with your infinite ammo the same can be said for horseback riding you really need no competence with the skill whatsoever which is actually good because it's fully possible to beat the game without ever riding a horse so it's actually an odd choice for one of the very last things you're asked to do at almost every step of the way the developers have embraced freedom we'll give you a suggested solution but if you can come up with a better one awesome go for it essentially the only time we saw this philosophy broken with the divine beast boarding sequences which while i didn't always succeed were clearly stripping this kind of agency away with the intention of creating a compelling focused experience that required restrictions to ensure that experience was had dark beast ganon is even more restrictive than these and there's no way you can reasonably call this a compelling experience it's the exact opposite and it's gut-wrenchingly disappointing because the concept of riding around this awe-inspiring incarnation of ganon in an open field had all the potential in the world it could easily have been setting up the most memorable boss fight in zelda history and instead it's terrible this isn't just my pick for the worst boss in breath of the wild or the worst boss in the legend of zelda this is the worst boss i've ever fought it might earn this title purely from its non-existent mechanics but when putting context as the last thing you do in the game with so much potential and build up behind it it falls so much lower still i have to believe this was due to some form of time constraint because the idea of a studio full of talented developers looking at this and saying yes we've built something great here we're going out on a high note is just unfeasible to me after this the game is over zelda pops out the credits roll and you're treated to one more cutscene if you visited the various memory points around hyrule these memories are the only real gameplay element we haven't touched on yet a dozen different points that can be found across the world with some assistance from photos provided by an npc the actual gameplay aspect of discovering these is quite limited your only concrete reward is provided after the first one when impa gives you the champion's tunic the larger incentive to find these memories is to flesh out the story with each memory unlocking a cutscene and collecting the bunch unlocking a few more the game is played entirely in the present but heavily leans on flashbacks to fill out its narrative although story still takes a heavy backseat to gameplay even more so than usual for zelda's generally simple storylines thousands of years before the game's events the advanced shika civilization repelled the continuously reincarnated ganon from hyrule by building thousands of guardian robots as well as the four divine beasts each piloted by a champion from a different race these champions worked together to beat ganon down creating an opportunity for their princess and her knight to seal the monster away fast forward to 100 years before the game takes place and the return of ganon seems inevitable so hyrule's royal family resurrects the ancient creations and assigns new champions to the divine beasts the princess of hyrule is of course zelda with link serving as her appointed knight and the wielder of the master sword the blade that seals the darkness zelda is desperately attempting to access the same ceiling magic as her predecessors but is unable to do so much to the dismay of her father who believes it to be a result of splitting her time between training and her studies of the ancient technology where her true interests lie ganon resurfaces before the magic and having learned from his previous defeat corrupts the machines that the hyruleans believed to be their saviors the battle is lost horribly and the champions are killed their spirits trapped in the divine beasts they once piloted much of hyrule is lost with them including most of the royal family and link takes zelda and flees from the castle being mortally wounded during their escape as a guardian approaches to deliver the final blow zelda is finally able to call upon her ancestor's magic to save them she has link taken to the healing shrine of resurrection where his body will be fixed over the next century leaves the damaged master sword hidden within the lost woods and heads to the fallen castle where she uses her newfound powers to pull both ganon and herself into a stasis within its walls 100 years later link's wounds are finally healed and he awakens on the great plateau with amnesia where the king of hyrule's spirit informs him that zelda and ganon are still locked away he travels to meet impa an old ally and member of the shika tribe who tasks him with freeing the still-trapped spirits of the champions so they can use the divine beasts to help defeat ganon and free zelda they accomplish this and the story ends with link and zelda setting off to rebuild high rule this is a strong setup with a number of themes that can be drawn from it i'm not going to dwell on this too long as frankly i'm not a great story analyst but as an example i interpreted a theme of corrupted purpose which ran throughout the game the shika technology created for the purpose of protecting hyrule eventually became distrusted as a potential threat which led to the shika abandoning it underground in order to appease those around them this resulted in both the regression of hyrulean society and the creation of the yiga clan former shika who resented the baseless suspicions raised against them and now fight for ganon zelda is unable to activate her ancestor's magic while simultaneously being restricted from pursuing her natural curiosity and while this is never explicitly stated it can be interpreted as a corruption of the triforce of wisdom holder's natural purpose king rome keeps telling her to stick to her training and prayer instead and it never works maybe if he had fostered her curiosity instead then the ceiling magic would have awoken earlier and the great calamity could have been stopped ganon also creates the calamity by quite literally corrupting the purpose of the guardians and divine beasts now i could pull from any number of story elements to create any number of themes the blue curtains might represent existential depression or blue might just be the author's favorite color but whatever your mindset there is enough to breath of the wild story to pull meaning from despite its relative lack of emphasis having said that there's a difference between a story and the way it's told and as we start to look deeper into breath of the wild's story issues start to appear and one that constantly bothered me was the diverging tones between the plot and the characters this isn't referring to general npcs i've seen a lot of complaints that hyrule citizens don't feel oppressed enough but i don't have an issue with this personally it makes sense that over the course of 100 years society has reached an equilibrium point that allows it to function within the perils of the world the destruction of hyrule is no longer actively expanding because zelda is still holding ganon back zelda herself on the other hand along with the champions should be far more distressed than they are each of them have been imprisoned and tormented for a full century by the time link encounters them zelda locked in some form of frozen combat and the champions straight up killed and yet they all seem pretty damn chipper about it they speak in the exact same leisurely tones after being rescued as they do beforehand making it feel less like you're freeing their souls from eternal anguish and more like you're buzzing them into the apartment after they forgot their keys i mean mifa tells you that she was sad but you never see her sad which is completely breaking the show don't tell fundamentalist storytelling her segment here makes things worse if anything since we've now confirmed the champions were indeed conscious and aware of their imprisonment this entire time it was probably pretty horrible i assume again she seems fine to me i understand not wanting to drag the tone of the game down too much but even ignoring the fact that zelda games have never shied away from dark moments including a couple in this one there's still a middle ground between depicting the full horror of their situation and ignoring it entirely with breath of the wild choosing almost exclusively to take the latter option and it takes so much of the bite out of a potentially gripping setup i lied earlier we do see mifa sad longing for a chance to see her family one last time a chance she'll never get because she's bound to her duty this actually made me feel something for her and if i'd seen her in this kind of pain beforehand i'd have been genuinely motivated to save her from it except at this point that ship has sailed i've already cleared this divine beast and will never directly interact with her again so oh well and that's the closest any of the champions get to this kind of catharsis the tertiary story characters likewise don't seem to be in too much of a hurry a lot of the time and the entire main quest rarely feels like the stakes are that high even though they actually are quite high open world games are particularly prone to a notorious problem that if you're a fan of game design analysis you've probably heard mentioned before that being ludonarrative dissonance put simply is the disparity between what the character is supposed to be doing like stopping a second apocalypse and what the player is making them do instead like choosing the snowballing minigame by zed targeting the npc and standing slightly to the right breath of the wild's premise does a fairly impressive job of minimizing this disparity by blatantly stating right from the start that link the character is not strong enough to approach ganon yet he should recruit help he should gather resources so when you the player take on these tasks it doesn't feel dissonant it's not a perfect implementation and was never going to be but it is an admirable attempt to maintain the story's weight within the game's open structure an attempt which is heavily undermined by how nonchalant most of the rest of the script is this makes it difficult to feel truly invested in saving the champions in particular and the limited definition each of them are given doesn't help mifa is a gentle cleric who loves link and wants to do the right thing daruc is a well-meaning yet overbearing goofball who wants to do the right thing urbosa is a stoic warrior with a soft spot for zelda who wants to do the right thing rivali is haughty and arrogant and thinks he should be in link's position but can ultimately put that aside to do the right thing you've seen all these characters before and while it may seem like i'm using the same kind of snarky oversimplification you can apply to anything you dislike there really is very little shown of them beyond these surface level traits zelda is thankfully more thought out and i'd say she's one of the more fully realized incarnations of the character we've seen she's kind outgoing and genuinely concerned for the future of her citizens but also flippant insecure and sort of a brat which are pretty reasonable traits to find in a teenager she's by no means flawless and seems overly attached to tradition although again it's questionable how much of this comes from her and how much of it comes from her father and i appreciate that they gave her studious and even mad scientist tendencies zelda holds the triforce of wisdom and compared to link's courage and gannon's power she tends to be depicted less in line with that assigned trait in most games likely a consequence of generally being fairly young it might be a stretch to call a 16 year old wise in the sense that we've come to expect that term to be used in a fantasy setting but she certainly has a scholarly personality which i think fits well despite being the namesake of the series zelda as a character has been handled with very inconsistent quality over the course of her appearances and while i'd hardly call this version an all-time great video game heroine i do think she's a successful incarnation she's also one of the few characters that manages to stand above two words that cast a permanent shadow over breath of the wild's narrative character development first off let's just acknowledge that developing characters who are mostly already dead and whose stories can be experienced in arbitrary orders was going to be a heavy task from the start especially for the champions let's break down what the structure of each champion's representation will actually look like they'll show up in the past they'll show up one time in the present having been completely stuck in place between those times they'll appear in the past again and they'll appear for a brief moment in the present one last time to pump their fists and say a few words of encouragement then stare at you silently as they disappear this is the optimistic case mind you where a player goes through the entire game in roughly the order the developers intended and even so it's still not inherently obvious how any of these characters could change or grow within this structure nintendo just accepted this and didn't really try but there could have been room to work with particularly when link interacts with the champion's spirits in their divine beasts rivali at least shows a shred more respect to link than he did before his rescue but even here it's pretty minor he still throws in snide remarks and in the past he was already willing to follow link and zelda into battle this angle could potentially have been played up a lot more maybe the champions were working together reluctantly in the past with some kind of strife between the different races we see that there's a bit of doubt towards zelda already maybe there could have been a lot more even genuine hostility from some of them which of course would also be passed on to link as her knight maybe they had personal demons of their own which contributed to their defeat which they've had time to contemplate and reject over the previous century coming to forgive and embrace link and zelda as heroes in the process i'm not saying this approach would need to be applied to all of them and in fact it wouldn't work to do so it would be too formulaic however i hope i'm getting across the idea that there was more to do with these characters than nintendo chose to they made all of the champions very pleasant yes including ravali and clearly really wanted players to like and be invested in them while simultaneously creating a structure and a narrative that makes being invested in them extremely difficult there's azura during the varuta quest who deeply resents link blaming him for mifa's death in time though he comes to understand that he's in the wrong and ends up respecting and forgiving link on his own terms this minor side character gets considerably more of an arc than any of the champions there's another character who wants link to introduce him to a garuda woman and after it works and they become a couple he ecstatically rewards link with a few rupees the woman chastises him for being so greedy and he reluctantly relents and increases the reward this guy also gets more of an arc than any of the champions sure they're dead you can make the case that their lives are over and so their journeys should be too but you can't throw these characters in people's faces as a selling point and say hey these are important members of the main cast like them and root for them and buy their dlc while simultaneously denying them the most fundamental storytelling structure used to make characters compelling there are also ghosts that can still walk and talk just fine and also have a large chunk of the story's run time dedicated to their actions in the past so this argument really doesn't hold much weight with me like i said zelda is fortunately handled much better beginning as an insecure girl unsure of her ability to live up to her kingdom's expectations her earnest efforts to align those expectations with her natural interests are continuously slammed down by her father and her attempts to follow the path he's laid out for her result in constant failure she resents and rejects link both as an embodiment of her father's oppression as well as a person who seemingly fits into their role perfectly the exact opposite of herself and a reminder of that failure in time their relationship evolves and she comes to respect the similar struggles link faces although her doubt and powerlessness persist until after the great calamity has already begun removed from the oppressing forces in her life her externally appointed destiny her father the walls of the castle itself and placed into a position where she must act and act of her own accord her doubts finally fade and her magic awakens from this moment onwards she becomes a proactive force saving link protecting the master sword and facing ganon herself i spent the first couple of years after breath of the wild came out thinking it would have made for a stronger narrative if we definitively saw zelda free herself from her father's oppression as opposed to having him killed by an outside source upon further reflection though i think it's an important decision on nintendo's part until she's cast into the wild zelda is a passive force and an unsure character which is fairly unsubtly paralleled by the silent princess flower we see in a few cut scenes a flower that only appears in the wild and won't bloom domestically as hard as the castle residents try freeing herself would have made for a stronger character sure but this initial lack of strength isn't an accident the harms of trying to domesticate a wildflower are somewhat undermined if the flower actually grows pretty alright domestically but would be slightly healthier outside she can still be well defined she can still be sympathetic and want to do what's best for her kingdom but giving her the strength required to free herself while still being trapped under the influences robbing her of that strength would be a fundamentally different narrative it would turn into a more well-worn and i'd argue less compelling story of empowerment rather than the cautionary tale nintendo gravitated towards while i'm not quite sure i would you could go as far as to say this is king rome's story as much as it is zelda's after all if you were to tell me the story of a man who tried unsuccessfully to grow a flower inside his walls only to have it moved outside and bloom freely would you be more inclined to say the story was about the flower or the man while it's possible that a story with these kinds of subtleties is inadvisable when combined with the non-linear and largely optional delivery methods the game uses i do respect it i've seen quite a few people criticize breath of the wild story as very poor and while i think the champions are handled atrociously i can't agree with this for zelda she had some unconventional and relatively nuanced choices made for her narrative that go beyond what i've seen in most games in the series i've played that said i also can't blame anyone who misses this entirely or comes up with a completely different interpretation than mine that's much less satisfying if you don't subscribe to king rome being the suppressing force for zelda's magic as an example it's easy to see her as a well-meaning but pathetic character who saves through deus ex machina the legend of zelda series has had some excellent stories and story moments but if we're being entirely honest it's also had plenty that are at best serviceable storytelling has never been nintendo's greatest strength as a studio and i'm fully open to the possibility that my interpretation is giving them more credit than they deserve i have a hard time believing i'm saying existential depression and they're saying blue but they might be calling those curtains more along the lines of sad even if my interpretation is less strong than what nintendo has actually written their storytelling method has still clearly buried a lot of that strength and left plenty of people cold from start to finish and that's still arguably a failure on their end the way i've talked about king rome up to this point may make you think he's a monster or at least cruel but if you've read his journal you know that's not true he deeply cared for zelda but felt the need to put on a strong front for what he thought was in her best interests he even came to realize how flawed his approach was and was going to attempt to mend their relationship the next time he saw her a meeting that tragically never got to happen it's a few lines of text that totally changes the context of his character arguably the entire story and it's hidden behind a false wall in a labyrinthian dangerous area right at the end of the game so you can hardly blame someone if they miss this i will also say that the one element of zelda's development i do strongly dislike is the incident that changes her opinion towards link he saves her life even though she was being mean to him link is the princess's personal bodyguard what else was he possibly going to do in this situation i don't understand why we're supposed to think this would be surprising or somehow reveal a different side of him to her it's a weak excuse to close the gap between them and surely something more sensible and interesting could have been conceived for the most part though their story has some substance to it and it's a shame that several of the cut scenes between them are limited to inconsequential exposition instead of leaning more into this what do we learn in this cutscene link is good at killing monsters zelda supports him something bad is going to happen soon we as the audience know this already why is this time not being used to impart new information about their relationship or the world around them there are good ones in here i love that link can fall into the role of unwilling test subject ardent protector or trusted confidant but they still could have been done better a lot of the most dramatic story events never actually get to happen on screen either we never see the champions fall we never see link get fatally injured we're just told about or shown them after the fact even within the interesting events that we are shown they're essentially all flashbacks very few cut scenes depict situations the player can directly interact with and this severely limits their impact as a quick example at some point kakariko village could suffer an invasion with one cutscene at the start to provide context another to resolve it at the end and the invasion played out in between to be clear i did not need breath of the wild to have a strong focus on story but if we were going to get this type of cutscene i'd have far rather seen pivotal events in the present that we're worthy of creating them for rather than using them as an excuse to show pivotal moments without needing to back anything up with gameplay that's not to say this never happens but it's by no means common and of course eventually we were gonna have to get to the voice acting i know this isn't a universal opinion but i'm very on board with the idea of introducing voice acting to the zelda series and when it's done well here it feels like a massive boost to the game's production values with that said it's notoriously not always done well and also isn't universally applied only appearing in important story beats i'll address the latter point quickly having voice acting in place selectively like this is probably a worst case scenario i'd have been perfectly content with zelda's traditional approach of gibberish or silence but having it appear one moment and disappear the next only draws attention to the fact that nintendo is cutting a corner whether that's due to budget time constraint storage space i don't know but none of these are factors i want to be reminded of when i'm trying to immerse myself in a world reception to the voice acting's quality was generally mixed as well and while i can't disagree with this i do think an unfair amount of the blame has been placed on the actor's shoulders we'll start with zelda because she's the one i've most often heard brought up as a sticking point i actually do like the voice her actress adopted and when it's being used properly i think it sounds good there is a bit of stiffness in there that may or may not have been entirely intentional i know the actress is american and the character speaks with a british accent so that may be a factor but i also think it works well to sell the sense of repression zelda constantly struggles with along with her royal upbringing i've prayed at the spring of courage and at the spring of power yet neither awoke anything inside me but maybe up there part of the issue with this though not the entire issue mind you is that this kind of restriction doesn't always match the situation take this scene here and compare the english and french deliveries the latter of which seems to be the overwhelming favorite among fans from what i've seen oh my friends the entire kingdom my father most of all i tried and i failed [Music] i loved them all the time [Music] [Music] now there's always going to be subjectivity in a discussion like this and i know there was some criticism of both performances among their respective language bases but i'd have to imagine that at least in this moment most people would say the french version works better this is zelda at her lowest having just lost her family her kingdom her hope in french she sounds devastated where in english she sounds upset however i have a very hard time believing that an experienced voice actress doesn't know how to sound convincingly devastated i have no experience in the voice acting industry whatsoever and each line you're hearing in this video probably needed at least five takes so please apply a heavy grain of salt here but to me this comes across as less of an issue with the actress and more with the direction she was given she should have been directed to do a more intense take before moving on and for all we know she did and it was rejected in favor of this one during the editing stage which she likely would have had no control over and looking at some of the other performances only highlights the suspicion for me urbosa has what i consider to be by far the worst performance of the main cast going for stoic and proud but often coming across like a hammy stage actress i should have expected as much from the princess's own appointed night she was out on a survey all day today still as the sands now so spill it boy have the two of you been getting along all right out of curiosity i looked up the resume of the voice actress and listened to some of her other performances and they were extremely impressive this is a talented professional behind the mic who does know how to give a good performance again i can't prove this in any way but i have to imagine this delivery is at least partially a result of the direction especially because the same actress also voices riju who i don't think has the same issue now am i here to claim that the mixed reception to breath of the wild's voice acting is unwarranted no i'm not the cast usually have their moments and there are a few standouts like again riju unfortunately i cannot appease naboris on my own i have no choice but to entrust the rest to you or revoli it's considered to be quite the masterpiece of aerial techniques even among the retail but the disparity between the overall quality of the game and the quality of its voice acting is not great i need to repeat though that this does seem like a cascading series of events i think the direction and even translation play into this to some degree let's pop back to the same scene as before and this time i'm going to show the direct french translation rather than just recycling the english subtitles oh my friends the entire now full disclosure i haven't spoken french since middle school and even then canadian french is pretty different tonally but i'm still comfortable saying the second clip sounds a lot more like an actual person and less like the script to a video game and the english version has a lot of these moments peppered through it i owe you big for this because of you my spirit is finally free can't thank you enough this translation seems heavily focused on filling out syllables to match the lip flaps which the french version basically said to hell with and it wasn't handled particularly gracefully you can really hear the actor struggling to fit all those words into an unnaturally short time frame dealing with these lines is still ultimately the responsibility of the voice cast and look there are honestly still a lot of awkward deliveries without this context but it does seem like context worth highlighting at this point i've combed through most of the content in the base game however breath of the wild did receive two dlc expansions so before i deliver my closing thoughts i'd like to take a look at these and see if they offer meaningful contributions to the game i will note that breath of the wild also supports several different amiibo however i simply don't own any and having looked at them i don't have strong enough opinions to justify the cost sorry if this video feels light on content let's start with the various armor sets introduced in the expansion pass aesthetically i like these quite a bit and there are a ton of fun throwbacks to previous zelda titles the phantom from spirit tracks minna's helmet from twilight princess tingle phantom ganon majora's mask these are all really cool things to have in the game thanks to some unfortunate design decisions though they're mostly reduced to novelties with almost all of them granting abilities that can already be found on base game sets i've already said that i find a lot of these upgrades to be less imaginative than i'd like so to see so many of them recycled again is not something that makes me particularly happy these overlapping sets are almost strictly worse than the ones they're copying too because they can't be upgraded which means their base stats are all they're ever going to have you can't even dye them which i think is kind of lame even in the base game so i'm really not happy to see it here the few that aren't essentially useless also introduce negative effects on the balance of progression particularly the phantom set each piece provides an attack up bonus the same as the barbarian armor one of the most useful and difficult to obtain sets in the game by contrast the phantom armor is found in hyrule field a short hop away from the great plateau with no progression gate of any kind just read the book that tells you where the armor pieces are head over to the three nearby locations and grab the chests they're theoretically supposed to be protected by dangerous enemies but it's really not difficult at all to get to the chests before they pose a threat especially since you can just open the chest and then immediately pause and teleport away congratulations you've now completely broken the early game with the phantom armor's outrageous damage output and relatively high defense and you might not even have meant to do it it destroys the game's balance then becomes utterly useless once you've acquired the barbarian armor it's worth noting that breath of the wild's open nature always makes this kind of balanced destruction possible if you're setting out to do it there's nothing stopping a player from rushing straight for barbarian armor pieces the moment they get off the great plateau but it's not a very natural movement pattern there's still an argument to be made that the temptation to do this on subsequent playthroughs in combination with the ability to run right past essentially all enemies isn't necessarily a great aspect of breath of the wild's design but at least the way this armor is positioned makes finding it unreasonably early in a first playthrough fairly unlikely something that can't necessarily be said for the phantom set there are a few unique abilities among the armor pieces as well some of which are better considered than others i think the korok mask is a decent addition for example which rattles every time a korok seed is near without telling you its exact location it's potentially a little too useful in fact i quickly found it becoming the only headgear i ever wanted to wear while running around hyrule the penalty-free armor-swapping strikes again here but it does offer something distinct and fairly well-balanced so overall i like this one the same somewhat applies to ravio's hood which increases link's sideways climbing speed realistically this is usually going to be less useful than the standard climbing gear but there may be some situations where it makes sense to pull the hood out instead i do think this is the bare minimum the developers could have done to simulate a link between world's wall walking system though fully recreating that system is not a reasonable expectation but some paint particle effects while wall jumping as an example would be this dlc costs a third of the base game's price with monumentally less content so i don't consider the bare minimum to be an impressive value proposition you've also got the island lobster shirt with a hidden trait that increases your speed on a raft this is a neat little nod to the wind waker but again it's just a number tweak and on top of that making this a hidden technique means that the vast majority of players are never going to know about it if a lot of the armor pieces had utility beyond what was listed in the menu including some that were quite obvious it might incentivize players to experiment but most of them don't assuming that this is a largely cosmetic piece to fool around with for a few minutes is a reasonable expectation because in most cases you'll be right the shirt's listed ability is just the same heat resistance that two other tops in the game already provide so there's no incentive given to have it on for long enough to actually experiment with and while secrets like this can be fun things to hide the result here is an armor piece that many players are going to spend their entire playtime thinking is totally useless and then the grand reveal only bumps it up to extremely niche i'm honestly baffled by this decision they've taken an already very underwhelming item and lowered its value even further in the eyes of most of their player base attaching something like the hurricane spin or a unique wind technique to this instead of heat resistance would dramatically improve its use case it would be a cool piece of armor that you wanted to wear increasing your chances of discovering its hidden trait and that hidden trait would also be more appropriate it's not impactful enough to be a good highlight but would work very well as a cool bonus to discover this would require a modicum of work from anyone who wasn't on the art team though which nintendo seemed completely unwilling to do for any of these armor pieces it's once again the bare minimum and i'm once again not impressed the salvager set is similarly underwhelming with its swim dash speed upgrade almost entirely surpassing the zora armor until link needs to climb a waterfall again suffering from the assignment of these skills to armor rather than passive upgrades i'm less critical of this one though because it's free and decently fun to track down actually all of the armor is particularly if the dlc is being used on an existing save file as would have been originally done for many players the discoverable quest journals hint at every armor piece's location and creates a fun excuse for a world tour this hasn't been thought through carefully when seeking out the armor at the start of the game though which is fully possible and somewhat even encouraged to do the moment you exit any shrine off the great plateau you're immediately bombarded by a series of fairly obnoxious quest notifications we already covered the problematic phantom armor but majora's mask has the same issue possibly even more so it provides the same disguise effect as the mask's kilten cells but unlike those it prevents aggro from multiple enemy types at the same time and is easy to obtain much earlier in the game dramatically lowering the danger of the overworld there's obviously the possibility of simply not using items like the phantom armor or majora's mask but this comes with the same issue as the broken combat aspects of the base game the developers are placing the player in a position where they need to decide between playing suboptimally or breaking the game's balance and for many players neither choice will be fully satisfying there's no aspect of the dlc armor besides the cosmetic factor that impresses me and this is coming from someone who's gotten more use out of it than 99 of the player base ever will i also won't ignore that good cosmetics are extremely appealing to some players there will be a few people out there perfectly happy to pay the full price of the dlc just to spend the entire game running around as tingle and if you include yourself in that group i'm glad you got what you wanted but i'd still hope you can see the issues with content that makes no effort to smoothly integrate into the base game rehashes the same already underwhelming mechanics that can be found in the base game and almost always winds up either useless or game breaking the entire dlc coverage isn't going to be this scathing but i need to emphasize just how much nintendo cost to buy with this content and i need to do the same for some of the other more trinket-ish dlc before moving on to the larger additions that i had better experiences with the ancient bridle grants your horse a bit more room to gallop relatively harmless although a lot of its cosmetic appeal is taken away because it hides the main you've so carefully customized it looks pretty cool standalone but this probably could have been thought out more the ancient saddle on the other hand lets you summon your horse without needing to go to a stable this should not be dlc this is how horse mechanics should have worked in the base game and nintendo is correcting this mistake by allowing you to pay for it was it a mistake though is this the reason that horses are so handicapped in the base game so that they could be sold back to you later i'd like to think not this would be my default suspicion towards many publishers but nintendo does generally seem to stick to making a game first then doing the dlc after rather than deliberately carving features out it's a reasonable question to ask though and i don't like having to ask it the game has received multiple free updates mostly to improve performance and this is a feature that could and should have been added in one of those i do not like that this exists although i'm slightly less hostile towards the other convenience features the dlc introduces there's a travel medallion that essentially works as a new warp point you can drop anywhere and a hero's path mode that lets you see where you've walked so far on the map these aren't necessarily features i would expect in the base game but there's still quality of life improvements more than substantial content and don't feel like good value for money master mode is also locked behind the dlc and while this is content that's been included with the base version of previous zelda games there's a bit more to this mode than usual enemies are all a tier higher than normal which obviously makes them hit harder but also turns them into damage sponges which is a sloppy way to inflate difficulty in most games but an especially bad idea with a durability system like breath of the wild uses that said the developers accounted for this in an interesting way by placing floating platforms across the world that hold chests and easily killable enemies giving link access to higher level weapons than the base game they don't drop armor though so the end result is combat against enemies that do extra damage but still die in a reasonable amount of time link's often scales up to match them but his defense doesn't this is a rough summary that doesn't always perfectly line up at the very start of the game you should just run away from everything you can absolutely run into damaged sponge walls and fights still take longer overall but i do like the way it was done it's a much more inventive approach than just applying a flash damage upgrade to the game's enemies there are also more enemies present in the world most strikingly a new line along the great plateau they can detect link more easily and kill him more easily as well link is protected against one hit kos from full health and normal play he'll be left with a quarter heart unless the initial attack is immediately followed up with elemental damage and impact after being sent to flying anything along these lines whereas master mode removes that protection there are some other minor changes as well such as guardian's laser timings being less predictable and the game providing less auto save slots but the one change i do not like is the addition of regenerating health all enemies that go a bit without being damaged can do this and it happens quickly does it make the game harder sure but it also severely restricts the creativity you can approach a fight with and takes away from the damage sponge fixes i praised a minute ago the mode creates a very specific meta that heavily favors tactics such as sneak striking disarming with electricity or freezing the last of which is especially useful as it allows you to separate a single enemy from the pack to focus them down which regenerating health makes almost mandatory in some ways i do like how much it shakes up the usual play patterns but making some of your sword blows feel like they don't matter is a pretty grave sin to me that requires a lot of justification and i don't feel like there's enough here it also just feels kind of lazy which really applies to a lot of this mode yes like i said they did do more than just tweak enemy stats but let's be clear this is a paywall for a mode that's typically free that was baseline expected behavior not something to be praised were shrine layouts remix to be more difficult similar to something like ocarina of time's master quest no they just dropped tougher robots into a few of them did they create new enemy types that were harder to run away from or had more complex attack patterns no they just upscaled their stats and added another handful to the world did they change the healing system to be less abusable no it's completely untouched a lot of other zelda games don't do any of this either but as soon as you attach a price tag the conversation around that content fundamentally changes and while i wouldn't call mastermo's conversation entirely negative i also wouldn't call it great dlc pack one concludes with the trial of the sword the first part of the dlc that feels like actual significant work went into it and as a result the first part of the dlc that i really like it works in a way that's reminiscent of eventide island you can eat stat boosting food beforehand but can't bring in any items everything has to be collected within the trial itself progressing from sticks all the way up to powerful swords and ancient arrows it's divided into three sections and each of those sections is further broken up by some respite rooms filled with protective resources like fairies food and armor each trial has to be completed in one go death means starting over from the beginning which might make the experience a bit tedious for some players but does add a great sense of tension to tougher rooms the variety of rooms is good even if the lack of enemy variety brings them down a bit and this content generally feels quite solid both in terms of concept and execution completing every trial permanently puts the master sword into its powered-up state and it really only serves to exacerbate the same issues i already had with it stop me if you've heard this one before but i would have rather seen it given exciting new abilities instead of a number tweak i really liked the trials themselves but was less impressed by their payoff all that's left is the champion's ballad and let's just get this out of the way the story is just as mediocre as the base game probably even worse because zelda is less prominent this was pitched as their opportunity to dive into these characters and learn more about them which ends up as follows each champion gets a diary in the overworld which reveals a few small details about them each champion gets a new cutscene that shows them accepting the role of champion and doing something kind of cool and a final cut scene shows them all getting their champion's garb and having the picture taken together these cut scenes tell us essentially nothing new about these characters this was the best opportunity the game was ever going to have to explore daruk we're in a section of the game focused around him and watching his very own dedicated cutscene and the big reveal the one thing nintendo absolutely wanted to make sure you didn't leave the game without knowing about this guy is that he's scared of dogs urbosa nuzella's mom rivale's overcompensating mifa likes her brother there's nothing here and while the final picture of them together is trying really hard to be charming and i'll admit does succeed to a degree it mostly just makes me think about how basically everything we've learned about these characters is contained in this one tiny scene you could discard everything in the game but the last 30 seconds of this cut scene and still have roughly the same idea of what these characters are like thankfully the other side of their ballot is gameplay which is better and actually hidden behind some appropriate progression gating since you can't access it until you've completed the four divine beasts it begins with a new quest that has link clearing out four enemy clusters across the great plateau with his new one hit obliterator a weapon that reduces him to a quarter of a heart but also one shots every enemy i was initially really excited for this challenge but while it is decently fun it's also largely spoiled by letting link keep his bows and arrows and considering it's a late game quest i had plenty of powerful ones in my inventory so i mostly just ended up shooting everything once again suboptimal versus game breaking every time one of these clusters is defeated it opens up a new shrine that also uses the one hit obliterator collected soul has you dodging rolling balls in order to scoop another ball off a ramp using magnesis i'm not a big fan of this one it's very short and simple and magnesis handles as clumsily as ever i much prefer stop to start an extended and very lethal obstacle course that makes use of multiple runes and test traversal in a way few other parts of the game do it's not insanely difficult or anything and i'd have liked it to be longer but this is a shrine that couldn't exist without the one-hit obliterator and uses it well despite the lack of combat that combat does rear up in another major test of strength shrine which is a weird choice considering it's rendered completely trivial by the one-hit obliterator oh or not i saw this fake out coming but i still laughed it throws you into a lower level with a lot more enemies to defeat and while i'm glad one of these is a straight up combat challenge it is again harmed quite a bit by allowing bows the final room is designed around archery so it works better but i still think this concept would have been stronger if link was purely limited to the one-hit obliterator and the shrine was redesigned accordingly the last of these shrines is dark and not much more it's an interesting concept for a one-hit kill shrine but i don't think anything terribly interesting is done with it and it's pretty easy after these shrines are completed four more hotspots appear on the map sadly at the expense of the one-hit obliterator which shatters to create them and can never be used in any form ever again i think it would be better if this could be revisited for some interesting overworld gameplay with as many restrictions in place as needed to avoid breaking the game each of these hotspots turns out to be a set of three map locations 12 in total which will each contain a unique challenge that opens another shrine shrines that reward emblems rather than the typical spirit orbs the locations of these shrines are given by map fragments on the pillars while hints about how to make them appear are given by cass mifa's song requires you to take down a group of flying guardians in a hilly region go through a very easy yet still satisfying waterfall swimming gauntlet and solve a riddle by paragliding into a light beam on the water all of which i enjoyed doing this unlocks your first three shrines and again this is just for a point of reference they can be done in any order the secret stare is one of my favorite shrines in the entire game because there's no obvious prescribed solution it's a pure test of your understanding of the game's mechanics it can be reasonably simple if you have a strong grasp of them sure but i still love its design for the playthrough i captured i decided to try actually creating something that resembled a staircase but during my first playthrough i dragged the metal box back to the entrance and used a stasis launch instead i've tried going on youtube to see what the quote-unquote proper solution is supposed to be and i just keep seeing people do different things it's a fantastic embodiment of breath of the wild's emphasis on freedom i like support and guidance as well because it does something breath of the wild is rarely comfortable with takes a concept that was introduced in an earlier shrine and builds upon it there's no guarantee that the player has come across the precursor to the shrine before but the developers can reasonably assume the player has had time to get comfortable with their runes by now and this shrine makes a strong argument for more of this kind of progression gating the game is introducing the slightest hint of linearity and immediately benefiting from it the melting point is one i don't like there are a few solutions but they all involve a lot of standing around waiting for ice to melt to different sizes daruk's song continues the format of a combat traversal and puzzle challenge for combat you need to defeat a giant talus which is disappointingly done in the exact same way as any other talus for traversal you need to hike and glide your way over the volcano this was probably the best setting to use these basic mechanics in since the environment is more dangerous here but it's still really easy all these traversal challenges are honestly pretty easy but the other ones are more fun because they provide an excuse to break out some underutilized movement techniques whereas there's been no shortage of climbing or gliding up to this point and the unique movement option associated with this area bomb-powered rail carts would have been a much better fit the puzzle at least is pretty good you need to survive standing in this ring and to do so you'll need to move a metal box into position it's just tall enough to save you of the three shrines here i'd call moving targets by far the worst it recycles the cannons from varudanya's quest in a very simple timing test then tries to increase the challenge with motion controls and i've already said what i think about the motion controls blind spots is a step up it's a long shrine that has you clambering over a variety of moving blocks to stay out of harm's way there's too much down time here and the concept isn't taken as far as it could be but it's still a good concept block the blaze is probably my favorite of these three using several techniques to get linked past fire jets but i still wouldn't call it an amazing shrine this bunch clicked with me less than mifa's oh look more motion controls urbosa probably has my favorite shrine challenges the combat portion is nothing special you fight the malduking aka do the exact same completely safe pattern as you would against any other mulduga except it takes longer but the traversal challenge has you riding the always enjoyable sand seals and the puzzle is replaced with a trip back into the yiga clan hideout to retrieve an orb which you then need to throw down the same mysterious hull master koga fell into yes it's recycled content but it's recycling a good area of the game and i actually liked the excuse to go re-explore it the shrines in this portion are good too big or small is a pretty elaborate electricity puzzle which again iterates upon previous concepts in a satisfying way it also has a horrible optional chest hidden behind the single most frustrating motion control task in the game that should never have gotten past play testing but at least it's optional dual purpose is another engaging electricity puzzle that has you balancing metal objects roles as both circuit components and pathways i'd probably call these electricity challenges the most consistently solid theme because they inherently function as strong logic puzzles and worthwhile intersections of the game's unique mechanics whereas many of the shrines perform at most one of these roles and this might be my favorite of any of them inside the box brings back the motion controls unfortunately but it's one of the less offensive uses at least if you're playing with a controller as you're only moving a box around to figure out how many of each colored orb it has inside it's honestly a pretty lame shrine that could easily have been done without motion controls but it's not enough to sour me on these shrines as a whole the other two might overlap a bit too closely but they're still very good in their own rights rivali song is the only one that doesn't contain a true combat challenge you just need to shoot dinral's horn i'm not sure why rivali doesn't get the flying guardians instead of mifa considering this is obviously supposed to be compensation for the lack of a proper aerial mini boss in the base game which the dlc didn't add i'd like to say this is weak in comparison to the other songs but mifa is the only one who had a reasonably interesting combat portion to begin with so it's actually pretty on par which is not a compliment i'm way more into the traversal challenge any excuse to do some shield surfing is a boon to the game but you wind these challenges down by going back to the same flight range and completing almost exactly the same bafflingly easy target shoot as during the divine beast lead up overall not great master the orb though is a solid shrine that once again takes advantage of progression gating requiring you to juggle a number of different runes and techniques to get an orb down a track actually all the shrines here do the same thing with the other two combining wind currents with a bunch of different techniques to get through them the four winds in particular feels like a very explicit continuation of path of hidden winds when i look at all the shrines together their average quality is noticeably better than what appears in the base game not nearly as much as i'd hoped some of them are too simple or have more significant flaws than i'd like to see considering these were the ones the designers could really sit down and focus on but my overall experience was pretty positive the bosses suck though all of them they're just rehashed fights against the blights with set inventories for link the worst part is that this is explicitly stated to be some kind of dream or mirage and if they were going to construct a scenario that didn't need to adhere to reality in a dlc pack that supposedly focused on the four champions why on earth wouldn't these sequences include the champions you could fight alongside them you could fight as them this isn't real the setup was right there any and all ideas are on the table here lazy and disappointing your reward is similarly underwhelming just a reduction in cool down time for the champion abilities you already have useful absolutely rivali's gale in particular makes the game far more efficient to play imaginative interesting you know the drill by now after all the blights are defeated you return to the shrine of resurrection and in a surprise that i really liked it turns out to be an elevator which pulls you down into a new divine beast this one's gimmick is a continuously rotating central crankshaft with selectable direction for the rotation and unlike what we've seen previously every one of its terminals utilizes this gimmick in some form the terminal count has been reduced from five to four in order to align each of them with one of the elemental themes from a previous divine beast and this has been compensated for by making each of them longer and more complicated there's also a central underlying theme of putting clockwork back together which always utilizes the central crankshaft there's still no cohesion between the terminals they're solved independently but this is the first time each terminal has been made individually interesting enough to justify that choice usually making use of the clockwork system to access them and then employing a number of other techniques inside the puzzle room the wind room has you freezing and altering the rotation of a giant fan the electricity room synchronizing some spinning chambers to complete a circuit the fire room navigating a ball through a convoluted pipe over lava the water room draining and raising the water level for use with cryonis these don't compare to the best of what the series has to offer in terms of dungeon design but there's still considerable upgrades from the base game and this is hands down my favorite divine beast after the terminals have all been activated and you use the clockwork system one last time to open a door you're brought in for a boss battle against monk maz koshiya who is likewise my favorite fight in the game it's a multi-stage ordeal with a lot of imaginative attacks that sees him cloning himself teleporting becoming a giant firing the guardian laser throwing metal orbs that he electrifies and rolls around the arena by tilting it he utilizes an interesting mix of new techniques techniques you've seen before and techniques that you've kind of seen before and can exploit if you realize this and it's enough for me to call him a legitimately great boss fight the only one in the game i'd give that title to i also loved the moment when he first moves you've been coming across these static figures all game and seeing one of them clench their fist at me was really surprising and exciting which makes the fact that he stuck the landing all the more gratifying your reward for these endeavors is the master cycle zero an incredibly poorly thought out item that's so fun i almost don't care for perspective dlc pack 2 introduces both a fix for horses as well as something that usurps horses in basically every possible way it's fast it's resilient it can handle rough terrain it does require fuel which really only exists to make the supply of junk you've collected by now have a bit of use beyond selling it and it won't stick to roads automatically but these are very minor concerns it handles extremely smoothly barring the decision to map its throttle to the face buttons which does make simultaneous driving and melee attacks difficult but overall it's a joy to drive around hyrule at the very least horses were abandoned for something that adds a lot of fun to the game even if it needs to be acquired during a new play through to fully enjoy a lot of people would have initially gotten the master cycle on their complete or nearly complete save file myself included while it is a substantial enough reward to put at the end of the dlc by doing so nintendo ensured that anyone who obtained it under these circumstances wouldn't actually have that much to do with it as a retrospective addition to the game it works a lot better most of breath of the wild's dlc is very clunky with no clear best time to obtain it but this doesn't apply to the champion's ballad and it feels like core content overall though i don't think this is a good showing from nintendo in terms of what they delivered as dlc compared to what they could have delivered the trial of the sword and the champion's ballad have good gameplay that rises to great in its best moments which is always the most important consideration but a lot of the rewards are questionable and the story content is an absolute joke the armor sets are horribly uninspired badly designed and seem like nintendo knew they'd sell through nostalgia alone so felt no need to put any effort into making them interesting and everything else straight up should have been in the base game or could have an argument made for it you've likely noticed the tone of this section getting considerably harsher and that's because a lot of the issues in the base game are fairly understandable in the context of its production by the time development began on dlc however nintendo's pipeline was far better established and their resources far less limited this content certainly did not cost a third as much to produce as the rest of the game and the blatant corner cutting used is far less defendable this kind of full season pass is a relatively new market for nintendo to dip into and the classic defense of the company has always been that no matter how bad their corporate side gets the games will always be good parts of this dlc live up to that defense but others don't and they feel like they don't because nintendo realized that they could get away with it why should they spend the time to create new mechanics for phantom ganon's armor why should they integrate it with the rest of the game instead of chucking it in a chest somewhere everyone likes ocarina of time right at the moment i'm aware that it's nowhere near as bad as what a lot of publishers tried to pull with post-launch content but it is worrying and if they continue with this business model in the future i can't help but be concerned that it's a trend that will continue nintendo's never exactly been shy about leaning into nostalgia and it's not inevitable that this will be pushed to the point of becoming genuinely anti-consumer and frankly i think many people would say we've already reached that stage so no i don't like nintendo's approach to the dlc and in some areas i think it even detracts from the base game but not enough to significantly detract from my impressions of the base game so let's return to that and wind this video down [Music] at the start of this video i called breath of the wild my favorite single player game based on the script you've been listening to i wouldn't blame you if you forgot this at some point the game is loaded with elements that either don't speak to me personally or that i take legitimate issue with however while i certainly don't claim any encyclopedic knowledge of video game history when i say no such combination of beauty and freedom has ever appeared in the medium i wonder how many people would challenge that at the same time this came at a great cost almost everything that isn't directly related to these core strengths feels at least to some degree like a step backwards from its predecessors breath of the wild sacrificed so much to obtain its core vision and it worked the developers achieved something nobody had ever seen before a genuine revolution the reality of revolutions though is that they fade and even a few years after release we're already seeing breath of the wild's ripples begin to materialize across the video game landscape the great and painful thing about being an innovator is that you create footsteps for others to follow in with the backbreaking labor poured into your exciting new idea relegated to the realm of standard design practice shortly after it makes its way into the world's hands that's not to say that breath of the wild doesn't currently maintain its throne or that it won't be remembered as an important game but i'm not nearly so confident that history will treat its standalone quality with the same kindness that contemporary audiences have there are many keenly felt trade-offs that went into its creation trade-offs that fundamentally will not be required by its successors even here though i admit that i'm torn because even outside of this context breath of the wild's peaks and valleys are just so extreme it's a game that couldn't manage more than one regional mini boss but also took the time to add a unique idol animation for each of the monster masks that link can wear whatever the future holds for it though for now i find it hard to stay stuck in those valleys for too long i said at the beginning of this video that i was not going to treat breath of the wild as an object of reverence and i think i stuck to that but the reality is that i do have some reverence for it a common thread i've noticed in critiques of the game is childhood with reviewers making allusions to childlike wonder or how the game made them feel like a kid again and yeah i get it the simple joy of video games is something i tapped into effortlessly when i was younger but has gotten significantly less common over the years and breath of the wild did enable that feeling that's a powerful trait which can overcome a lot of critical examination i've also talked about the framework of breath of the wild now being firmly in place and the most exciting part of this is that it applies to the zelda development team as well with all of these radical changes complete i'm greatly looking forward to seeing what they're able to do now that there can be more of a focus on refinement and polish it's an interesting new era for the series one that i'll be watching very closely in the time to come speaking of which thanks for watching everyone as i said this is the first encompassing retrospective i've made and i'm interested in trying my hand at more of them in the future so please give me your honest feedback it's always appreciated but particularly in a case like this if you liked the video please consider liking subscribing hitting the notification bell the usual plugs and if you'd like to get more of me you can follow me on twitter mr mockrock twitch mockrocktwitch one word and i also have a patreon patrons twitch subs or youtube members get perks like early video access content polls a discord server and more later people we've just taken a look at all the best animations in smash and as per tradition there must also be the worst now the animation in these games overall but ultimate in particular is very today's contender comes to us from the best-selling video game of all time and recent smash combatant the avatar from minecraft genericized to steve

Channel: MockRock

Views: 599,339

Keywords: breath of the wild, botw, breath of the wild review, breath of the wild retrospective, zelda review, zelda retrospective, the legend of zelda, zelda, breath of the wild analysis, breath of the wild critique, retrospective, nintendo, the legend of zelda breath of the wild, breath of the wild 2, botw 2, zelda news, review, zelda 35th anniversary, arlo, kingk, pointcrow, joseph anderson, zeltik, croton, skyward sword hd, zelda speedrun, breath of the wild speedrun, legend of zelda review

Id: 1Rqn_YtYPl0

Length: 277min 55sec (16675 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021