Breath of the Wild - Not Enough Zelda

[Music] breath of the wild is one of the best games I have ever played if you follow me on Twitter then you might be surprised of the video is opening with that line because I've spent most of my tweets by moaning how many reviewers overlook the game's flaws and the game really does have those flaws not just nitpicks although I have plenty of those too but huge critical problems that I do not understand how so many reviewers managed to ignore but I'd be equally guilty of not doing my job if I didn't acknowledge that parts of breath of the wild do things better than any other game I have ever played and through that admission I hope I can help you understand how conflicted I am on this game and how difficult it is to properly judge it because breath of the wild is so huge and has so much to do that it's like two games in one on one side you have the incredible stuff exploration links mobility the freedom and the many options you have to move through this world the visuals are heavily stylized and won't be to everyone's tastes but they consistently impressed me I cannot think of another open-world game that does these things better but on the other side you have another game a game that feels frankly unfinished which oddly enough is what you play almost any time you're taken away from exploring when you enter a shrine or what masquerades is a dungeon when you accept side quests that have less depth more fetch than the latest quests in World of Warcraft the game's combat is the best of these but fall short of its potential and has some balance issues that are so terrible it feels like it was made by a team of amateurs in comparison to the experts that developed the exploration you experience through the world that sounds like an exaggeration as I'm reading it back now but this is really how I felt there were many moments I had while playing breath of the wild that I have to stop in place to wonder how a game of this good was possible how on earth did Nintendo managed to make this Hyrule is so vast and beautiful and overflowing with detail and then a few minutes later I would be thinking the opposite how could combat be this bad how could a shrine Puzzle be so worthless why was so much of my time being wasted when there's already an overwhelming amount of places to go and find why is this a Zelda game when there's hardly any of the typical Zelda content the conflict I feel about this game is something I hope I'll resolve by writing this and then making the video I can sum it up like this imagine a hypothetical game that was 20 levels long ten of these levels are some of the best content you've ever experienced five were just okay about average but the other five were terrible how much should your overall reaction be brought down by those bad parts do you just ignore them and focus on the good since that's what stood out the most to you diehard fans who think Dark Souls 1 is the best in the series would say yes you do and I can't say for sure if they're right or wrong I don't know where or how to draw these lines I don't know if you should draw them even though it's clear to me that so many reviewers have they've quarantined off the diseased parts of breath of the wild and responded to only the best of it and that's about as long as I can be vague and spoiler free if you love exploration and video games and you owe it to yourself to play this game knowing as little about it as possible if you want something more deep combat an engaging story any sort of challenge or interesting puzzles then you could probably skip breath of the wild you might want to hear my reasons first though because you might disagree with me fortunately there isn't really much of a story to spoil anyway open your eyes open your eyes wake up link breath of the wild begins with a cinematic there's no menu the first time you start this game it just automatically plays this introduction sequence and gives you control of Linc he's been asleep in this chamber for a hundred years and has lost his memory you're guided by a voice through this small area and walked through the basics of the game this opening is interesting and could potentially get you wondering about what happened why was Linc left here who speaking to you why has he lost his memory ultimately the payoff in the story isn't worth the time spent speculating while it's certainly a story that received more attention than any of the Mario games it's still primarily an excuse for link to travel the world and have an adventure I do think the potential was here for something more elaborate but we'll get to that much later on for now let's focus on all of the things that are introduced here first up is the sheikah slate that I immediately saw as a pack of hearthstone cards and could never unsee it for the rest of the game hopefully I'm alone in that observation and if not at least someone out there will now share my pain now that I've pointed it out that is a shige's Nate take it the sheikah slate is essentially a magical smartphone eventually it even has a camera for now it has a map and I guess some sort of GPS so you can see your location you can use it to inspect your surroundings and mark things in the distance which will then also be visible on your map soon after this you unlock four apps for the phone that you can use for the rest of the game first let's get out of this chamber you're given some clothes in the next room and not so subtly nudged into opening the menu and learning how to equip things then after that you see the exit open as a light at the end of the tunnel but not before you're forced to climb up a wall in order to leave again not so subtly showing that link can climb in this game although my guess is that most players won't realize exactly how important that is in this first stage here you're given a brief but beautiful shot of Hyrule and the title of the game fades into view you're shown a mysterious old man nearby and then left to do whatever you like welcome to breath of the wild go nuts [Music] except you're actually confined more than you might think this starting area is called the great plateau and it's raised on all sides from the rest of Hyrule you can't leave this place until you've completed the game's tutorial where the game succeeds however is that you're still given a lot of flexibility and how you go about completing this area you can also skip some of it on your second playthrough when you know what you're doing the great plateau is one of the best things that this game does because breath of the wild is all about freedom so as much as it may seem paradoxical that it's showing you that freedom while keeping you confined this part is necessary for each player to be prepared to face the larger world before being able to leave here the genius is that my guess is most players won't even notice this and will teach most of the lessons to themselves see the gray plateau is like a miniaturized version of the entire game the whole thing really for starters it's surprisingly large it has multiple areas to go through ruins to see and multiple enemy encampments you have the fields a mountain range the ruins of the temple of time and your first tower to find after that you're given the task to find four shrines on the map compare this to the larger question Hyrule after this you're looking to complete the four dungeons on the map which you can do in any order you like but you're still strongly nudged in the direction of one of them just like here on the plateau your quest leads you to the shrine that grants you the magnesia SAP first but you can ignore that suggestion and go wherever you want just like the larger world there's a hidden mini-boss in an area here one of the stone monsters in the forest and the mountain area is colder than the rest of this part of the map which is also a feature you'll be running into a lot in the larger world preparing yourself to survive harsh environments whether that's with clothes or temporary food buffs but the thing I love the most about this starting sequence is how much it promotes exploration it starts with that sweeping shot when you first see daylight I saw death mountain in the distance and I immediately wanted to go there then when you raise the tower the cinematic that plays is an even better job of this you see all these different towers and a shot of the distant landscape behind them as soon as I saw the snowy one I was sold I want to go there I want to see that I already had long-term goals to keep me playing then as the final thing that pushes us all from great to brilliant you can use the sheikah sleep function I mentioned a minute ago I was curious enough to want to see how far death Mountain was from the plateau and that moment when the sheer scale of this world began to dawn on me was one of if not the best thing I felt while playing this game the grey plateau feels so large at first but it is comparatively tiny to the rest of the game to the point that after you reveal the whole map it's honestly hard to tell where it is anymore without zooming in and that's something you will notice an experience for yourself that there's this much to explore in this game but why is the exploration good I've said it a few times now that I love this part of the game well for starters not everyone will some people prefer their games to be heavy on combat or puzzles or stories I enjoy those a lot too but I also like getting lost in video game worlds and seeing interesting things and those two qualities right there what breadth of the wild excels at there are a lot of cool things to see if you get lost and it is very very easy to get lost in this game by lost I mean sidetracked you almost always have your map and you can fast travel to shrines you found so it's not really possible to get properly lost or stuck with only a few exceptions like Eventide Isle the two main mechanics that facilitate exploration are the climbing and the glider the first finally lives up to that famous line about open-world games see that mountain you can climb it well in Skyrim this means finding a set path and following it to the top or finding literal stairs built into the side of the mountain in breadth of the wild you actually climb it with your hands and feet and it's not some brainless alternative to walking either you have to judge the height of things and compare it to your available stamina for something that appears so mundane on the surface there is a shocking amount of things you can learn here firstly you can look ahead for potential resting spots on the side of whatever it is you're climbing some of these are obvious while others are harder to recognize then there's the ability to jump ahead at the cost of more stamina link is capable of climbing higher at the slow pace his stamina lasts longer that way but you're a lot faster if you jump this means you can do some quick planning to squeeze in a few jumps to climb faster but more importantly that you need to account for the final desperate jump you can do just before your stamina runs out to finish climbs that you otherwise wouldn't this is also useful when it's raining surfaces are too slick to climb when they're wet but after a few attempts you can notice a pattern - when link starts to slip if you time a jump right before that you don't lose any of the height you've gained until that moment it's very stamina intensive but makes climbing possible at least this was one of many little tricks that I taught myself while playing through experimentation and it's one of the best things of the game does rewarding player creativity look this climbing thing may seem unworthy of the praise I'm giving it right now especially since I've criticized uncharted and tomb raider for all of the climbing in those games the difference is that they have climbing walls with a set path to follow breath of the wild lets you climb anything at any point with very very few exceptions so few that it's genuinely not worth me saying it but I want to avoid the pedantic comment correcting me you can climb any surface while you're out in the world it's a decision you need to make and for you to determine whether you can make the climb or if you even want to which was a big reason why I favored stamina upgrades over heart containers as I played there's a childlike wondering climbing things it feeds into that idea of freedom it's the closest I've ever come to reliving how awesome it was to get a flying Mountain for the first time in World of Warcraft it's like some shackles you never knew you had of being broken climb the building jump on the roof jump off the roof wants to ignore the roads in the past we've made go for it climb around them it's up to you have you ever gotten a stubborn streak like that in the game there's a cliff between you and your destination and you're clearly not going to waste time going around even though it would probably end up being faster so you sort of do a half strafe up the jagged edges of the land jumping whenever the game lets you and making a little bit of progress each time this is more glitching through the game than anything else but goddammit you're going to do it your way breath of the wild embraced that and made it a feature couple that with the glider and I think if you haven't played the game that things might start to make sense about why the exploration succeeds there's a lot of verticality in this game you climb towers to reveal the map in each region of which there are 15 and there are a lot of hills Highland all over the world you're taught early on to survey the land for shrines and by extension anything else that catches your interest then when you begin to slowly glide down from up high you have the time to look around and study everything as you descend and they're seemingly always more than one thing that catches your eye on the way down it's up to you if you want to investigate and the fact that it's so simple to get around with all the gliding and climbing is why I said earlier that it was so easy for me to get lost shrine to reward you with spirit orbs that are functionally heart pieces from the previous games you need the same amount for them to be worth something for heart pieces for spirit orbs the difference is you can choose either more life or more stamina with every four that you exchange so shrines already have an intrinsic value and allure for you to find them via exploration but it was other qualities I found that added to the reason to go out looking for things the most subjective one is that the world really is something to look at there was genuine Beauty to be found in this game for me well I do think a few too many of the regions were full of green trees and sprawling grassy fields there was enough variety in the many mountains Highland swamps jungles and desert to keep me admiring my surroundings that looks cool what is it was often the first thing that got my attention next up are the cork seeds which reward players for being perceptive and stopping to look at the things that they pass this is a collectible that initially is extremely valuable because it expands your maximum carrying capacity for weapons and shields there are 900 of these seeds to find in the game and each of them are tied to exploration or a very light puzzle the game trains you to be on the lookout for any potential place one of these guys might be hiding on top of a temple or hiding under a suspiciously placed rock there are patterns in the world that you'll start to notice and nine times out of 10 and whenever I thought to myself I bet there's a Corrick hiding over there I was right and I think most people are gonna feel that way 900 sounds like a lot and it is it's actually insane that there are that many but I am certain you're not meant to find all of these you're not even meant to find most of them 900 seeds isn't there as a number so the game sounds like it has a ton of content it's there because by having so many they can be crammed all over the place for people to find easily without being glaringly obvious I found almost 300 of these seeds across the 150 hours that I played breath of the wild and I am certain that I likely missed another 300 hidden in those same areas I went through this is the equivalent of casting a really wide net for players another person who put in the same amount of hours I did may have also found hundreds of seeds but there are likely to be a completely different set but the most important way exploration succeeded for me and I hope for many others were the stories that I was able to experience myself stories in a way unique to video games and more like situations you may get yourself into in real life the most standard of these were encountering other travelers on the road these interactions were usually boring but a rare few stood out I don't know why but saving a couple from monsters and then learning that they were searching for a blooming flower a silent princess is stuck in my memory as is my first meeting with cast the traveling bird Bart hearing his accordion through the rain in the distance and walking toward the music wondering what the hell it was and then being given one of many riddles to solve which were always easy but were still enjoyable my favorite was finding the jaws of the serpent on the map the bigger moments were when I felt like I was traveling out of bounds there's a tangible sense especially early on in the game that you're climbing to places you're not supposed to get to yet but the game still lets you do it the most memorable of these stories for me was climbing the frozen mountain range in the southwest part of the world this was a very long climb and once I reached the top I discovered that I wasn't prepared to withstand the cold now I had a choice leave so I can become better prepared or push on to find a shrine or the region's tower so that I would have a fast travel point to come back next time without having to do the long climb again of course that's what I did which ended up taking a lot longer than I anticipated I kept pushing on with supplies dwindling as I ate most of my food to replenish hearts lost to the cold before finally finding a shrine and then the tower shortly afterwards I will never forget doing that in this game because it was a situation that I got myself in and then got myself out of there were a bunch of experiences like this for me while I played seeing my first dragon was another one even though they ended up being disappointing when I learned more about them I know full well that this type of thing doesn't appeal to everyone but come with everything else to do with exploration it made this part of the game immensely enjoyable for me it was a real pleasure to get lost in this world which is exactly what I did for my first 50 hours or so I didn't do any of the main quests the game was just this for me during that period but this is only half of what there is in breath of the wild and I think you can make a strong argument that it's even less than that so let's rewind back to the gray plateau after we raised the tower and are given our first quest to reach those shrines you get your first set of four spirit orbs by doing these which you can use to buy an upgrade in the nearby temple of time at the end the mysterious old man who turns out to be the ghost of the king of hyrule won't give you the required glider to leave the plateau until you do this more important than the orbs however are the sheikah sleep powers that each of the shrines gives you these are two sets of bombs a series staple one is the standard sphere version the other is a cube so you can securely set it somewhere which I thought was a neat touch it was also nice of these recharge instead of being a limited quantity puzzles could be designed around the player always having access to bombs because of that Magnus as'll aoz you to lift up metal objects you can move them to make bridges or a set of stairs or to open doors stasis allows you to freeze objects in time this makes them a mobile for the duration of the effect no matter what force is being acted on them so balls won't roll down a decline which is how to try and test you on the mechanic and then any series of strikes you land on something while in stasis will compound by the end so you can launch heavy objects away lastly is the pillar of ice ability I say lastly because this one is at the top of the mountain in the gray plateau and it is likely the final shrine that players will visit there are multiple ways up here too and more than one way to combat the cold it's yet another example of how much freedom the game offers each player to choose their own journey to a destination the pillar of ice is exactly as it sounds you can also make them appear from waterfalls but that twist on the mechanic isn't taught in this shrine the way its introduces by spawning ice under a gate to lift it up from the water below your reward for doing all of this is some story about your past and the destruction of Hyrule that Zelda and link before you lost your memories failed to defeat Ganon 100 years prior you're given some very vague details about Zelda being locked in a perpetual all battle with Ganon and a now corrupted hyrule castle and that you need to save her first though you should visit and reclaim the for divine beasts around the land that were set as weapons to help defeat Ganon before he corrupted them so you're given more details about how you ended up sleeping in the shrine at the beginning because you fell in battle and had to be taken there to be resurrected 100 years ago and have the goal of the game purify the divine beasts save Zelda kill Ganon the other far more fun reward is the glider so let's ignore the story and speak about that I was very excited the first time I got to this point there were so many possibilities for the game building on what it had just done the great Pluto was a gated area because of that Nintendo knew that every player had an array of tools when they left to explore the world weapons a bow a shield probably the knowledge about cooking in clothes the ability to climb glide and all four of the sheikah sleep powers in previous Elbe games many of the dungeons couldn't incorporate the tools found in earlier dungeons that's likely a reason why many of them followed a similarly gated design you do a small set of dungeons find their treasure and kill their bosses and then have those key items for the next grouping of dungeons that you can do in a different order this nonlinear approach still limited what each dungeon could contain however since you can't assume that every player has every tool here in breadth of the wild you have all of this already so dungeons can be built around the idea of mixing and matching different mechanics climb something then stasis and moving platforms you can glide to it then drop a cube bomb to blow something up which reveals a metal box you can manipulate to allow access to some water for a nice pillar or something I can only be vague about this because breath of the wild doesn't do this ever so I can't show any visual examples to reinforce this point at most there are instances where you have to use two abilities together but that's it and even those are really rare I was expecting a dungeon at the end of the gray plateau one that incorporated all of these tools and then introduced a new one that can be added onto a growing list but stunningly enough these are all the tools you get for the whole game not even the excuse of the dungeons president and breadth of the wild add anything to this list instead the only additions you do get are the ability to swim up waterfalls in the Zora quest line and a powered jump ability from the reto quest line the former of which is only required to do a handful of quests in the area that you get it and a cor exceed well the latter is never used for anything specific at all not even the shrines built on any of these concepts introduced by the first ones on the plateau this is such a missed opportunity that it's mind-blowing to me that Nintendo did not think of a way to develop this potential this is the most fertile beginning that I think any Zelda has ever had and it goes on to be the most lackluster series of puzzles and dungeons that I've ever seen in one of these games and I've played almost all of them even calling the divine beasts dungeons might be a stretch for some people they're incredible to look at with a spectacle both from the outside and the inside when he board them and run around their insides like a more organic version of a dungeon it reminds me so much of the awesome scale and Shadow of the Colossus which i think is a comparison a lot of people are going to make and I did enjoy these sections don't get me wrong I like the unique mechanic each one had with controlling part of the robot to make it rotate or move in a way to open different paths they're very well put together but they're also tiny there's no clever grand level design like in many other dungeons in the series they're too small for that the only place that really felt like that was hyrule castle which depending on how bitter I'm feeling when you ask me might be the only thing I consider to be a dungeon in the game period the divine beasts also share the same visual theme have the same introduction from a ghost of the pilot who died inside when Ganon took over they have the same concept to find a map manipulate the beasts unique function and access several terminals to regain control then you kill a boss all four of which share a very similar visual style I'll talk about the bosses more later when we get to combat but for now I want to hammer home how disappointing this was for me I play Zelda games for the dungeons and the bosses those are the things I look forward to the most stay on your I will never forget how awesome some of the bosses looked in a Link to the Past or ocarina of time when I first saw them just like the overlapping level design and challenge and navigating those dungeons was what made me fall in love with the series to begin with and this just isn't in breath of the wild it just isn't imagine how much more rewarding exploration could have been if there were dungeons to find in the world the mazes you can discover T's of the potential here there unfortunately too simple but the idea is still present you can feel it when you arrive all this mystery and intrigue imagine if it gave way to a huge dungeon very little of this game was spoiled for me before I started playing so I really was expecting to an earth some dungeon somewhere as I explored I looked forward to it the whole game stumbling upon the entrance of someplace and having a whole different kind of experience in a dungeon with a new tool and an awesome boss and never happened and I don't know if that's fair of me or not you're going to have to let me know about that I know it's not fair to want more content because breadth of the wild is already brimming with stuff to do like I said earlier I have to stop and ask aloud how Nintendo possibly made this game because it really is that vast and having even for real proper dungeons hidden in the world which would still be too small of a number would be a massive amount of work and yet even understanding that I'm expecting too much I can't stop myself feeling this way because of the zelda in the title of this game it's a great experience on its own but there's not enough Zelda to justify it what I am certain of however is how right I am to be disappointed in the shrines because maybe that's the alternative there are 120 shrines in breadth of the wild if 20 shrines are about the same size of a dungeon when combined then that could be the equivalent of about 6 dungeons that were chopped up into bite-sized chunks and spread throughout the world not so bad if that's how they work right [Music] the shrines are the worst feature in breath of the wild the section is going to be long and overly detailed because I intend to prove it instead of just whining about it so if you're not all that interested in the shrines you might want to skip the combat in part 3 corps exceeds and shrines have one main thing in common they appeal to a completionist mindset longtime viewers may wonder why I'm comfortable saying that khorog seeds are something you're not meant to fully finish yet i forced myself to do almost every puzzle in the witness' beat the end of darkest dungeon and reached the center of the galaxy and no man's sky in those games that is the game those are the main features the main goal in zelda there's a hell of a lot more in the spotlight even ignoring the main quest it's clear that exploration is front and center you could argue that it's right there in the name of the game it's for this reason that I'm willing to give the side quests to pass I enjoy next to none of them although some of the characters had funny lines and were charming and that's ok because they were clearly filler content to me do I wish the game had great side quests absolutely why not if something can be good why not have it in the game but I would have rather had dungeons and more Zelda content instead core exceeds are clearly not something you're meant to obsess over even though the reward you get for finding some of them is important I'll argue later that it's even game breaking the amount of seeds you need for each upgrade slot quickly ramps up so it's not all that worth it for each individual one also while we're here and just mentioned no man's sky am i alone and having flashbacks to how the inventory upgrades here like holy hell that game really did a number on me I can still see it in another game the difference between seeds and shrines is that I think you're meant to do the majority of them I don't think you have to do all of them to consider yourself finished with the game although I don't think it's crazy to go that route if you like but doing more than half maybe even 80 of the 120 is reasonable if you explore most of the world and do all of the main quest or maybe it should be a comparison to the 70 stars out of 120 in Super Mario 64 that's still a lot of hours of content devoted to shrines I did all 120 for the video and just that content alone took me about 20 and that's a pretty accurate estimate because I went through all of my footage and spliced together every shrine mostly because I wanted to be able to review all of the shrines for this examination but also because I'm as crazy as a straw all of these different clips are the 120 shrines we'll be splitting them up shortly for now it's important to know that there are two ways to find all the shrines in the game the first is that you just find it with your eyes or your ears you see a shrine walk toward it unlock it and then ride the elevator down you get off and say yep it's a shrine or you hear it with your shrined are in the slate and play game if hot or cold to locate it this can actually eat up a lot of time as does all of the waiting for the shrines to play their cinematic movies which are always the same and then load in and out the second way to find a shrine is through a quest often this means the shrine is inaccessible until you do a task but it doesn't always mean that which can lead to some trouble when you're measuring the worth of each of these shrines because even though every shrine has the same visual style and recycles the same assets over and over the content inside can be very different I'm going to sound disrespectful with what I say next but I also feel like Nintendo has wasted my time already so I think we'll break even at least I hope so the majority of these shrines are so bad that it feels to me like the developers held up bring your kid to work day and have them all design their own shrine with incredibly simple tools and the ones that everyone liked the most became the bulk of the shrines in the game that's how vapid a lot of this content is so let's split this up because I think that was a fairly bold thing to say and I need to support it first off the easiest examples to get rid of are the combat shrines these are all identical it's the same room with the same enemy it's a medium sized guardian robot who will have an assortment of weapons and shields to use against you and either a small medium or super sized health pool depending on whether it's a minor modest or major trial these enemies always have the same mechanics and the only change in the environment are the pillars that you need to bait them into slamming through when they enter a certain attack mode on harder trials you need to use your magnet powers or your ice pillars to make these barriers which to me made the fights easier because I could guarantee that there would be something to use if you count the tutorial introduction shrine for these fights which I definitely think you should then these take up 21 of the shrines in the game 1/6 of the shrine / piecemeal dungeon content is comprised of just this same fight over and over and over stay with me because it gets worse more often than not the shrines that require the completion of a quest will be elaborate and this is generally the best shrine content in the game the quests I mean not the shrines themselves there'll be a puzzle of some sort in the world or some tasks you need to do Cass will present a riddle like finding the right point to shoot an arrow through two of these rock formations or a woman in the desert will require you to go on a quest to make a drink for her before she'll free up space you can access a shrine which leads to carrying an ice cube through ruins full of monsters and hiding it in the cooler shadow so it doesn't melt while you fight there were 35 of these type of questions in the game on my playthrough there's technically more than that but not all of the shrines require you to have the quest in order to access them just most of them do of these 35 25 of them ended with an empty shrine although I hate the wasted time loading into these things for what amounts to a free pass it's more than acceptable that some of the shrines are like this because some of the quests are complicated enough to justify it so quests like navigating the huge mazes on the map or completing the challenges in the Lost Woods or even tide island which was one of my favorite parts of the game quests like this justified the empty shrine at the end since that's just the reward the shrine puzzle was in the world instead however not all of the quests are worthy enough of this pass and it's made doubly strange because some elaborate quests do have puzzle shrines at the end of them 10 of them do and a few of these are some of the more substantial shrines in the game there's a quest in the Rideau region that requires you to find a bunch of bird children so they'll practice some song in a nearby nest you have to hunt for them in the village then cook some special food for the most troublesome one then you need to solve a puzzle by listening to their song at the nest only then does the shrine spawn and it still leads to a series of puzzles inside yet other quests like holding a snowball at the right angle in the Sun so it's shadow is cast on the panel leads to nothing an empty shrine or lighting these torches in the desert which takes less than a minute it leads to an empty shrine not all of these were made to be equal and it's made worse by some of the shrines you can find without a quests that are also just empty there was this one hidden in a wall that my shrine detector picked up no quest empty inside another in a cold lake that was very easy to find and get to same thing easy to find without a quest no puzzle inside the shrine this is a game that promotes exploring so it should have been predictable that someone like me who enjoyed going to the far reaches of the map would have found some of these shrines before finding the quests this one here which was empty when I found it was linked to some sort of quest in a nearby town a quest that I got a long time later and watched as it instantly auto-completed in my quest log I have no clue if there was some challenge to it that I skipped over accidentally but I don't think that matters for me it was a dead trying this means that there are 29 shrines like this in the game just a bridge with a chest and a chamber of water and not all of them had media enough journeys there to justify that the fact that some of the longer quests like solving the heart-shaped riddle in the rito village or taking photos of the broken monument on the beach still have a puzzle shrine at the end of them after all of this makes a lot of the ones that don't feel suspiciously unfinished the shrines that are left are the ones that you directly find in the wild these also include the starter shrines on the plateau and the simple ones in the areas closest to that starting area I think this split might be a bit hard to follow so let's refresh all of the shrines on the timeline the first group on the left are the 60 shrines you find and then solve a puzzle inside the next 10 are those that have a quest in the world but still have a puzzle trying afterward and the remaining 50 are the 21 combat shrines 25 quests with empty shrines and the 4 shrines that I found without a quest that were completely empty we've already gone over how variable the quality on some of the quests can be I think it's worth mentioning if you other examples real quick though the riddle that requires you to stab a platformer with a specific weapon should have really had a puzzle shrine underneath it I should the shrines that require you to present a scale of each of the three dragons in order to unlock the way especially since this is something you'll have to do many times if you want to upgrade your armor conversely discovering the ruins at the end of the game's biggest Canyon and fighting my way through many broken Guardians was one of my favorite moments in the game even after I was disappointed that I hadn't just found a secret dungeon this was still enjoyable and worth and empty shrine at the end as were some of the minigames like the Goron climbing challenge and the sands hill racing in the desert there are some stinkers in these quests but it was the best scripted content in the game on average which is not something I can say for the 70 shrines in the game that had puzzles in them the biggest issue is that too many of these are overly simple and this is also where we'll be going through the most examples I've went through and split the 70 shrines into the five groups you see now the four on the left of the tutorial shrines on the gray plateau the next group are 15 shrines that I consider to be good and interesting the next group are another 15 that are just okay or borderline bad then there are 32 that are outright bad and a waste of your time or repeat concepts and then there are the 4 at the other end which I'm going to label is terrible because they use the frustrating motion controls a lot of this is going to be subjective what I just said might be something you disagree with some people might like those motion control puzzles whereas I hated them so I'm going to go through each group and explain why I separated these puzzles obviously I can't do all of them but I think you'll be able to understand my reasoning and then decide whether you agree with me or not first let's establish the 4 tutorial shrines as a baseline for what I consider to be a good series of puzzles each of these follows a pattern of introducing a concept and then testing you on it at least two times after that so with the stasis mechanic you need to freeze a cog then freeze a ball and then freeze another ball which you then need to hit wall frozen to move it's a progression on the idea each time same goes for the Magnus ability your bombs and the ice pillar you make a pillar to climb to a ledge then open a gate use it to block a guardian from hitting and then lifts the seesaw this progression of an idea is what is missing in the vast majority of the shrines that I've labeled as bad are only okay for example this shrine requires you to place a bomb on a block and then use another bomb to blast it in the air so you can break through the ceiling this is actually a cool concept timing different bombs but after doing this first part of it you're already done this is the end in this other shrine you jump over two gaps with the glider open and ride the wind and then you're done this is the whole shrine this one gives the enormous undertaking of jumping on a raft and moving water then it goes full frogger and it has three more in a row then you have to use a current and a bomb to open your way and that's it no really this is the entire shrine you shoot an orb off a pillar into the docking pit then you throw a ball through the door it opens into another pit and then you jump up to the end this like many other shrines like it should have been the first phase and first room that builds on this concept instead it's already over same goes for this one which has you shooting a ball in the air so a jumping pillar activates so you can shoot a crystal that's the whole shrine for the most ridiculous example of all there's this one which needs you to freeze an electrified ball so it falls to the floor or you can time a magnetic grab I guess and then you're finished you take it to the inactive power switch and you're done I had to put the controller down after the shrine and really think about how this made it into the game there are others that are so close to introducing a cool concept this one has heavy balls on ropes you shoot the first rope and see that they fall to press down a button then the next room requires you to freeze the ball so you can shoot both ropes without it swinging out of alignment of the button that's a cool idea but you're already done aside from an even easier optional ball for him chest this is all there is to do in the shrine for some of the other bad ones and some of the okay ones there are a lot of repeated concepts the shrine has a fair amount to do with using stasis to launch objects but this is the same puzzle the tutorial used to teach you this mechanic it's repeating that again same for the balls rolling down slots that you need to stop or block it's the same thing or this shrine that was similar to the inside of a giant clock this could have been a really interesting puzzle involving stop certain gears in a specific order or moving on to more complex chambers like this with more mind-bending puzzles instead you ride up to the top make a simple jump and then freeze the gear at the right time which is exactly the same as the very first thing the game taught you to do in the stasis tutorial shrine after you climb these stairs the shrine is over some of the shrines that are okay do build on an idea but are still too simple this one called the timing is critical introduces the concept of a button a ball and a moving platform then it tests you twice after this with a slightly more complex version so there is a progression but it's just not enough there are quite a few shrines that are like this in contrast to these you have some good shrines that feel like they got ten times the attention which is why I'm only half joking about my bring your kid to work the explanation these good shrines are the only ones that feel like actual game designers made them there was one that was an assault course of lava wind and timing jumps with the glider another one that delivers on the promise of timing bomb explosions first with a simple introduction of an automatic thrusting pillar then one you have to control and then a final room that needs to bombs set up in a slightly clever way to solve it most of the shrines involving electricity also followed this pattern they start off simple and gradually increase with each stage of the shrine just the fact that they had stages at all makes it better than most of them unfortunately there was a decent shrine that built on the foundation of the magnetic ability first by having you get a set of platform swinging in place and then timing a jump on them then coiling the spiked balls around the ceiling meme or making them swinging a pattern that you can dart through and then making some stairs to the end and that difference in approach there that those spiked balls had to solutions might be what a lot of you are screaming at your monitors right now that I'm wrong about these shrines because many of them have multiple solutions that they're flexible and therefore fun I understand that it can be enjoyable to do stuff like that but my perspective is that a boring puzzle with three boring solutions instead of just one boring solution is still a boring puzzle and that some of the solutions break these shrines in stupidly easy ways that show such a lack of thought on in tendo's part there's a shrine that has a lot of wind a ball and a dock for it sit in the idea is that you're meant to use blocks that cut off specific fans so that the wind currents left active will roll the ball into the dock from beginning to end so that you have time to get to the rising pillar that the dock triggers when it's active seems like this could have the potential to be a cool puzzle right well not only is this shrine one of those one room one layer only puzzles it's also completely subverted by using stasis on the ball when it's already in the dock and then running to the pillar and this mechanic with freezing a ball mid roll on a slope is something taught to you in the tutorial shrine every player is going to know this imagine if putting a bomb in the slot would work just as well because it's the same shape that's how poorly designed this puzzle is to add insult to injury there are two of these wind current shrines that can be ruined in the same way and look I also understand that there's an inherent problem here which could be something another group of people might be screaming that I'm wrong about breath of the wild is an open world game so that means there's a soft limit on how complexity shrines can be because if you can do them all in any order that means really difficult ones could ruin the experience for players if they happen to stumble onto a challenging one early something like this happened to me was combat in the game the opposite happened to me with the shrines at the end of the game while searching for the final ones I was finding modest and minor combat shrines that I could kill without any effort at all this would be the reason why even the shrines that I've grouped is good or more like the best of a bad lot some of them are interesting but they still don't have much to them compared to some of the puzzle content and level design in the previous Elder games so maybe I'm wrong to criticize them for this missing complexity easy shrines should exist so there are more accessible ones and lots of really difficult ones might ruin the game except I can think of three solutions to this problem and I'm just a guy with a youtube channel not a legendary experienced developer at Nintendo the first solution has to do with how the shrines exist in breadth of the wild in comparison to other open-world games in Skyrim or fallout 4 places you find that you can enter through a load screen or an actual place this is a little abstract without an example so think of a cave in Skyrim has to still be a cave after you've loaded into it or a factory or a sewage plant in fallout 4 the interior has to match the exterior in some way they have to be consistent and are therefore limited on what the interior can be in breath of the wild all the shrines have the same reused entrance they have the same interior theme they even have the same assets and music that plays this means that the shrines don't actually have to physically match their entrance location on the map by that I mean Nintendo could have made a set list of shrines from five to 120 and dynamically changed which shrine you load into depending on how many you've done before that by doing it this way there could have been a real actualized difficulty curve with shrines expanding on concepts from previous shrines because the developers knew that players already had a chance to see them it would have also made what happened to me and possible to happen again all the combat shrines I found early on would have been minor ones then modest ones in the middle of the game and major toward the end same goes for puzzles all of the easy ones would have been the first 20 or so you found in the world and they could have got harder from then on some of you watching might reject this idea because it means everyone gets shrines in the same order and you might see that as boring well the other solution is a tweaked version trines are separated into tiers of difficulty say sets of 10 or 15 that are grouped by being tutorial very easy easy moderate and so on up to very challenging and each set of 10 or 15 could have that order scrambled within its tier with harder versions of each type of shrine in each set so developers can still design these shrines by building on previous concepts while still making it so each player sees them in a different order the third solution would be fewer shrines so some of them could be larger make some of them have more than one spirit orb and stages of progression on ideas so that more can be built on whatever foundations say burning leaves to reveal hidden paths and switches that each shrine is based on this concept could be taken even further with a few rare mega shrines that take a few ideas and go crazy with them maybe have a few interact and overlap with several spirit orbs to find in different rooms maybe there could even be a new chicas laid out that's introducing these mega shrines that adds a new twist to the existing mechanics so there's even more possibilities for the developers to get creative they could have some unique theme and then throttling level design to with multiple rooms and more enemy types or even a boss to fight at the end the name mega shrine is sort of weird though it would be good if they could call them something else instead I wonder what that name could be what it boils down to is this too many shrines were like this one I had to spend time finding it waste time with the cinematics and all of the loading screens also I could run up a hill and dodge metal spiked balls that were coming down to get me or I could not dodge them either even that didn't matter this was the whole shrine and I kept saying to myself that's it that's all there is after each shrine like this that I finished with only 15 shrines that could be considered good another 15 that are only okay and the rest either being bad empty a mixed bag of world quests or the same combat shrine copy and pasted I think it's easy to understand why this core part of breadth of the wild was so disappointing and really brings the game down there's also the problem that it's always too easy to figure out which at the shrine requires if there's no water then you can exclude the ice pillar immediately and same goes for the opposite if there's water than expect to use it magnesia suffers in a similar way if there's no metal objects in a shrine whereas it's not always immediately clear if you're going to need to use stasis or bombs more tools added during the game would have helped a lot with that I also think it's worth briefly mentioning that some of the hidden chests are more enjoyable to reach then most of the puzzles found in each shrine these optional challenges are often still too simple and the items they contain are usually not worth the effort but the puzzle itself is occasionally worth your time the creativity and intent of showed in some of these should have been the baseline for the challenge after a few of the starter shrines it's a shame that it wasn't done that way and I think that wraps it up for the shrines maybe I'm expecting too much from the game on this one but I really don't think so the amount of time that's squandered on the loading alone is enough to prove that these weren't as well thought out as they could have been like why weren't the shrines just a pet stole that raises out of the ground after you complete a quest and it just gives you the spirit orb instead of all that loading and waiting why are there spirit orbs at all instead of just choosing between a heart piece or a stamina piece right then and there after you complete the shrine like why have all the loading to go back and talk to the temple a time guy and then hand it in and wait for the thing to come for the site like it's it slows everything down this unfortunately matches some of my thoughts on combat not all of them but enough I have a feeling that's what a lot of people have been looking forward to in this video so let's get to that now combat enemies and how breadth of the wild turned durability into a four-letter word [Music] the two words I would use to describe combat in breath of the wild are fragile and inconsistent and fragile doesn't refer to weapon durability although now that I've written it it would have been way funnier if it had combat is fragile because breath of the wild is a game that is too easily broken so fighting enemies is something that you have to go out of your way to make enjoyable for yourself because there are far too many pitfalls and temptations that make it too easy however let's start out with being positive because if you do manage to walk this narrow line and find a way to make combat fun then it can be enjoyable and not just a little bit either there's a surprising amount of freedom found in combat that mirrors the exploration in the world and how you can creatively break the games puzzles small enemies almost always come at you in groups these groups are also almost always in encampments in the world that you can approach and plan to engage the other type of encounter are mini bosses but these are few and far between depending on how you play clearing out these camps is the lion's share of combat and breath of the wild so let's focus on that for now freedom is found in messing around with the mechanics you can approach camps in a direct assault and fight them in what usually turns into chaos you can stealth your way in picking off the guards at night and then sneak attacking sleeping enemies for massive damage or stealing their weapons before they wake up so they have to fight you unarmed or you can embrace creativity and get more than a bit crazy metal objects while those can become weapons fire burn enemy clubs to nothing have a fragile weapon of your own early in the game you can deliberately break it over an enemy's head so their weapon goes flying from their grasp then you scramble ahead of the dazed goblin thing and pick it up to kill the enemy with their own weapon when your stasis rune is upgraded you can freeze enemies in place for cheap hits or stasis boulders or logs to smash into enemies push boulders the old-fashioned way to crush them blow up explosive barrels throw bombs but be careful that they're not kicked back at you and the possibilities here keep going far beyond my own Givet e videogame donkey has a great video that showcases how fun this can be however and again it all comes back to how subjective it is playing the game in this way failed to engage me for a significant amount of time after a few camps of doing stuff like this i felt that not only was it inefficient but i wasn't really enjoying it anymore and this gets even more true later on when the harder types of enemies begin spawning in the world with their really big health bars stealth is also fairly simple but it can be enjoyable especially if you attack encampments from the skies you can glider down shoot arrows during bullet time or arrow time I guess to wipe up the tower sentries and then softly land next to the sleeping monsters the stealth killed them not a bad way to play and the option is welcome direct assaults were what I settled on though for both the most fun and the most challenge but this is the part of the game that lives up the most of the idea you have to make this fun for yourself because holy [ __ ] does this combat system fall apart without self-imposed rules and limitations the problems are everywhere but you can find the most in the numbers you heal by pausing the game opening your inventory and eating raw ingredients or cooked meals there's no limit to how much healing you can receive while paused and there's no limit to how much food you can carry and ingredients are everywhere I never came close to running out and cooking recipes that use any Hardy ingredient automatically become full heals after cooking something as simple as one hearty vegetable plus a single Apple turns into a full heal because the game needs to give you full life in order to grant you the bonus yellow armor hearts that are a part of that type of ingredient similar to that some food bus can increase your defense and offense numbers which might make you wonder how damage in defense is calculated if you watch my video on Dragon's Dogma you're about to be shocked that Nintendo did the same thing every heart container is made up of four quarters each weapon has a damaged number attached to it and each number stands for one quarter heart of damage I figured this out by giving bakka bland specific weapons and letting them hit me without any armor on is it baka blends or becau blends by the way I feel like I'm gonna like caught cobbling looks like goblin and they kind of look like goblin so I think it should be book hobbling but baka Blin seems easier to say to me we're gonna go with that we're gonna go with baka Blin that's we're going with so a basic read baka Blin the lowest enemy in the game we'll deal half a heart worth of damage when he's wielding a two damaged stick so each damage point is a quarter of a heart likewise if I gave him a royal sword that has 36 damage he deals 9 full hearts of damage to me 9 hearts multiplied by four quarters in each art is of course equal to 36 so it follows there too things get a little more interesting with some of the higher level enemies these are color based so like I said the red baka blends are the weakest then there are blue ones then black and finally silver the way damage is handled is that higher level enemies have an added damage bonus to each attack for example when unarmed a silver baka Blin will deal six hearts of damage but if you give him the same two damaged stick he now deals six and a half hearts damage so the weapon still does the same no matter what enemy is holding it it's just that higher enemies have a flat number of bonus on top of it for another example if you give a silver buckle in the same royal sword as before with 36 damage that became nine hearts then you would expect it to be the same as the stick the silver baka Blin should added six hearts worth of damage on top of that nine hearts and sure enough that's what happens it's 15 hearts worth of damage if you translate this into numbers than a red baka Blin holding a royal sword is only doing the weapon damaged nine hearts 36 damage while the silver baka Blin is doing 15 hearts 60 damage now let's put armor on link so I can show you how easy this system is to break forever every point of defense you have is subtracted directly from incoming damage it's not a percentage reduction so it isn't like 50 points of defense means all damage is reduced by 50% it means that whatever damage number the enemy has is reduced by 50 so if I have armor on that adds up to 36 defense then that red baka Blin with a 36 damage royal sword won't be able to hurt me as you can see that's almost true the game never allows you to be fully immune instead it lowers the damage down to just one of a heart if I wear even higher defense all the way up to 84 it still deals 1/4 of a heart so this shows there's a minimum amount of damage each hit should do but this is so low it's still effectively zero as far as I'm concerned if I go at the silver buckle in with that same 36 defense rating then it should stand to reason that the armor should cancel out the entire royal sword and all that should be left is the silver Baca blends base six hearts of damage right and this is exactly what happens 36 Armour is negating 36 weapon damage if I bump my armor up to 60 then all of it is now gone the silver Baca blend is now doing 1/4 of a heart per hit just like the red one was and it's the same if I go all the way up to 84 armor in this way upgrading armor breaks the game and I am very lucky that I didn't figure this out until I was already finished with it because it would have been yet another thing I would have had to stop myself from using to make the game fun if you've played the game and wonder why you sometimes took a massive hit of damage out of nowhere and this is why because the world and breadth of the wild levels with you tougher enemies start showing up even on the great plateau you'll find these silver Baca balloons later in the game and with them come better weapons so if you're not upgrading your armor as you play then you are going to get smacked around a lot by the same high damage weapons that you'll start to use because instead of percentage modifiers Nintendo use this batshit insane subtraction system which makes it solo armor players get destroyed high armor players take absolutely no damage and people in the middle have to play a game of chicken on whether or not they should upgrade their armor to make the game a little easier but not too much because otherwise they'll ruin the game by blocking all incoming damage it's worth noting real quick that there are a rare few abilities that still deal a fair amount of minimum damage no matter what armor level you have this Guardian laser for example in Flex 14 and a half damage on a naked link then three and a half with sixty-four armor and still three and a half with 84 armor so there are a handful of instances that it's different hilariously enough though the final fight with Ganon is one of them but okay I feel like I'm picking on the game here but this is too stupid not to mention if you fight Ganon naked with no defense then most of his attacks deal about the same amount damaged his laser does 11 and a half hearts all of his sword slices do 10 hearts so that means a silver buckle in with a rinky-dink royal sword which to be clear here isn't an endgame weapon it's a mid-game weapon does more damage than this huge epic swipe from the final boss even with no weapon this little silver goblin things six hearts as close to it and for the most ridiculous of all a silver mob 'ln with a shitty spear that's on fire we'll do nine and three-quarter hearts worth of damage Ganon's weapon is also on fire by the way so I feel that's a fair comparison so why are the numbers so terrible well because balancing offense and defense like this when you can't be sure if players will even have access to upgrading armor as a nightmare which is why percentages would have been so much better same for that healing problem if players can heal themselves instantly of any damage then it makes sense that enemy should spike damage really high in the game now your health isn't just these hearts it's the entire supermarket worth of food you're carrying around with you to you can view your health and blood-borne in a similar way your health bar isn't just what's at the top of the screen it's all of your blood vials as well the genius there is that to access the rest of that health you have to play well enough to time a heal in the middle of a fight and also recognize that you should heal instead of attacking but also not to heal too early so you don't waste a lot of it breath of the world also has an added security net that if you're at full health you can't be killed in one hit you're left with a quarter heart instead even if you only have three hearts in the attack that's so much more damage than that as long as you have food you are effectively invincible except for when an attack glitches out and deals damage twice quickly in succession which was rare it only happened to me with elemental attacks which I guess deal a physical hit and then a magical one together so they can break through this safeguard something as simple as having the game unpause itself after selecting food and having a second or two of downtime while link eats it would have solved half this problem just like that now you have to run away from enemies and position yourself to heal instead of somehow being able to eat twenty apples and an entire turkey while reeling on the floor the solution to the other half of the problem would be to limit the amount of healing you can carry for each fight a simple way to do this would be that raw ingredients don't heal linked cooked meals do and you can only carry a fixed amount of them in this way you don't have stupid intern Tori limits for picking up ingredients but you can still restrict how much potential healing you can carry at once this could even be something you could upgrade or expand by finding things by exploration more cooked food slots or maybe they would have to be preserved in special containers after cooking maybe you could have four of them at the start four glass jars or cups what's the word I'm looking for here I feel like it should start with a B maybe and that's the first two major problems on this list that I couldn't find a way to bring up until now damage calculations and armor healing and recovering mistakes in consistent rules mobility and balance low enemy variety and weapon durability my hope is that by now you should be getting a decent idea on why I labeled the combat is fragile it's too easy to intentionally break it with food and it's too easy to accidentally break it with armor upgrades now the answer to those problems are to just not use them don't eat during combat and don't wear armor but this brings with it a bunch of really difficult questions that I can't cover in this video about developer intentions and how much responsibility players have to make games enjoyable for themselves and whether there's a right or wrong way to play a game plus the game should still have a healing system ignoring the option entirely isn't a good answer this is a two-way street and unfortunately with the other problems on this list it keeps getting worse because although I eventually did find a way to make combat in breadth of the wild a lot of fun it wasn't like that after my first hour of game time if food and armor are ways players can break the game then balance issues are the ways the developers broke it and this is also something that goes two ways at the beginning of the game after finishing the great photo and being given a glider I wanted to ignore the main quest and begin exploring I had so many possible directions I could go in but I eventually decided to go south I had two reasons for doing this the first was one that I think a lot of people will understand this was the shortest trip to the edge of the map and I wanted to see what was at the boundary the other was at the canyon stretching off into the distance looked like an interesting place to explore so that's what I did if you've played the game extensively and explored this canyon yourself you know I made a terrible mistake here we'll talk about enemy variety shortly but it's important for everyone to know right now that there are roaming mini-bosses in breadth of the wild the one that lives in this Canyon is called the Lionel and despite it being the most difficult enemy type in the game more so than any of the bosses including Ganon it's the only one out of the four types of mini bosses that doesn't get a fancy extravagant health bar in title I got here so soon that I was still armed with my crappy Pluto weapons and being the hardcore gamer that I am I started to fight this thing and got my ass handed to me it's arrows killed me easily every hit was potentially fatal its moveset was way more advanced than anything else I had seen so far and I was still getting used to the controls however these are all good things in my opinion I like it when games put challenges like this in the world to overcome because that's exactly what I did I learned to sprint out of the way of its arrows I learned to dodge its attacks many of them perfectly to trigger a special flurry rush counter attack mode I the player holding the controller was able to learn and beat this challenge so what's the problem then well even though I could beat this monster link could not or more specifically his weapons couldn't I was incapable of dealing enough damage with them before they broke and I was out of options it wasn't that I couldn't dodge him for long enough or anything like that it's that I was literally incapable of killing this monster without better gear this turned me off the combat for dozens of hours after this I'm not kidding either I dismissed so much of it as a gear based game that was all about acquiring armor and weapons and more hearts my response to this may seem extreme but I hate it when games mix gear progression and skill together without making it so players can still skill their way through if they play well enough I loathe that I have to run away from this Lionel because my weapons weren't up to the task now the tragic thing about this is that if I had gone in literally any other direction that's what happened don't get me wrong this is still Nintendo's fault and there are many things they could have done differently to avoid this but this is bad luck on my part for encountering this monster it spoiled any sense of exploration I had in that moment too I actually thought oh I guess I can't go anywhere after all because my gear might not be good enough for some areas it's not that they would be difficult they would be in Cybil this early on in the game because the lionel didn't have a fancy health bar like the stone dallas monster in the gray plateau I thought this entire region was full of this enemy type so I should go somewhere else instead I pictured the whole desert crawling with these guys this is centaur Land stay away there's another direction I could have gone and encountered the line all this early and I went out of my way to test it on my second three hearts only playthrough there's a Coliseum near the great plateau that has a Lionel at the bottom if you go there first right after getting the glider there are enough monsters on the floors above the Lionel that dropped good enough weapons for you to comfortably kill it early on most of them still break but it's possible and this is the sort of thing the other Lionel needed in the canyon but I also said this problem goes two ways weapon durability in this game has been such a hot topic that I've read quite a few articles on it my impression is that many people who have played breath of the wild didn't realize that the world scales with you I don't know what causes it and I don't have the time to commit to another playthrough to find out it could be the average weapon damage of your collection or how many enemies you've killed or how many shrines you've beaten it could also be how many regions you visited or how many towers you've climbed what I do know for certain however is that it's not caused by clearing the divine beast dungeons or at least that my game world started to get harder before I did any of them so it's not a requirement harder enemies bring better weapons tougher fights like I said the most difficult type of Baca Blin started spawning in the starting area after I went back later on with dragon bone weapons instead of basic clubs this is true for all of the regions in the world everything scales as you gain power and experience except for the dungeons so the way I played the game is that I got lost exploring and things kept getting more difficult the first change I noticed were the black Baca blends then the black blizzards eventually I saw my first Silver Moblin and then even a silver Lionel because even they have tougher versions too and I came to the incredibly reasonable conclusion that if the world was this dangerous then surely the dungeons and Ganon must be even more so in these dozens of hours exploring I had done quite a few shrines gained some more hearts and stamina I hadn't really upgraded my armor and hadn't thought to investigate how it worked so that added to how much I was getting smacked around by these high-level enemies more important than all of this however is that I stumbled into the lost woods and found the Master Sword the Master Sword is the only weapon in the game that doesn't break permanently and instead it loses its energy and has to recharge for 10 minutes before you can use it again it has 30 attack damage which is middle of the line it's even below those royal swords we were using earlier however in the presence of Guardian enemies it gains a damage buff it starts to glow and spikes the 60 damage per swing armed with this weapon the world didn't feel all that different in fact I was mighty disappointed that the Master Sword could break at all and in the case of enemy camps often broke before I could kill multiple enemies this legendary blade felt legendarily brittle but when I finally went to finish the dungeon content that all changed what I am about to show you is the boss of the zora domain the great elephant divine beast this is the first dungeon I completed this is the first boss I fought and it's the first time I am ever fighting him this is what happened this is the other way the balance that you can go I had ruined the game by playing it the way I had I didn't get to enjoy boss fights the other three weren't as Extreme as this but they were still so easy that I didn't even know what their mechanics were until I fought them again on my second playthrough with three hearts after leaving the great plateau you can ignore everything and go straight for hyrule castle you can collect an assortment of weapons from within the walls and then go for Ganon that early on if you do this then the game makes you fight all for divine beast bosses in a row before the Ganon fight whereas if you do the beasts first there are no other bosses here and Ganon gets a huge nerf down to 50% health instead these two options are at the opposite ends on a spectrum of insanity even Ganon is a pushover if you do all four of the beasts first 50% health makes the fight a joke with the master sword even in his second phase and then his third phase is even worse than that but if you rush here then it becomes this huge 11 phase struggle that took me over half an hour to do from start to finish and by doing that I got to learn the mechanics of every boss and they were pretty good not overly great or mind-blowing but good enjoyable I wish I had gotten to experience them properly on my first playthrough in the dungeons same for Ganon himself I wish it had been a proper fight my first time instead I felt like I was being punished for playing the game wrong no boss fights for me they were all far far easier than normal enemy groups in the world these are problems born from a gear based system instead of a skill based one and even then the issue is exacerbated by the disposable nature of the weapons you find in the world you can safely scale up enemy camps because you can steal their weapons right there on the spot to make it an even playing field whereas with bosses if the game scaled up these fights in response to some sort of trigger say if you ever pick up a weapon that has more than 40 attack power then the fights become stronger and then even stronger than that if you picked up a 50 attack power weapon well you might not have those weapons anymore when you get there it's highly unlikely that's the case because once you find one you usually find a bunch more but for bosses like this they would want to avoid players experience and what I did with the Lionel at the beginning this may also be why there are so few enemies in the dungeons so you don't break your way and half of them for the boss I also understand that they couldn't have made the bosses scale to whatever weapons you were carrying at the time either because otherwise what's the point of progression systems at all if the game is constantly going to be scaling the difficulty to about even I think that the world scales very well it's easy to understand the stronger colors of each enemy and most importantly the weaker colors never vanish so you can still have a challenge with the newer ones while having opportunities to wreak weaker enemy types that used to cause you trouble that's what progression system should be all about balancing moments when you get to turn the tables and feel powerful but still provide a challenge on top of that the bosses and dungeons fail where the open world succeeds fighting all of the bosses in a row ended up being one of the most enjoyable parts of the game for me but it also provided ample opportunity to notice a lot of little problems and inconsistencies in combat which if you recall from the beginning of this section was the other word along with fragile that I used to describe the fighting in this game inconsistencies come primarily in animations and the flurry rush ability after 150 hours I can't tell you for certain what the trigger is for a successful flurry rush I can hazard a guess but if I'm right than it is one of the stupidest systems I've ever seen ironically enough the best enemy to show this on is the Zora boss that I wiped out after accidentally triggering flurry rush on my first encounter this time we'll be fighting him in Hyrule Castle this enemy has very slow predictable movements in Phase one if you're too close to him he'll do a big blast move if you're too far he'll do the horizontal land swipe and if you're Goldilocks he'll continuously do a forward thrust now my dear viewers if you're experienced with action games that have dodge triggers or parrying systems let me ask you what do you think should be the core idea behind something like that if you're going to parry something in Dark Souls and that's the reward you're trying to skill your way to by getting the timing right and with that reward comes a risk essentially in order to parry an attack you have to be in a position that you might also get hit by it if you mess up the parry then you're going to get smashed if you mess up the Dodge then you're going to get smashed the proposed idea then would be that you should stand in the path of the enemies attack and at the last possible second half the dodge away right to put it another way the dog should remove you from damage that you would have sustained if you hadn't moved the weapon should slicer stab the air wherever you just were and the closer your dodge time was to taking damage the more that it seems like it should be given a reward in this games case flurry rush this is not how the mechanic works seen here I stand in the path of the spear and dodge when I think it's about to come at me and they're just normal dodges no flurry rush it is possible to get this right but it requires very precise timing that is honestly well beyond any other timing challenge in the game and for a while I was ok with that I thought well it's a big reward maybe it really is meant to be that tight it's also a boss after all then I started to experiment I purposefully went to the side of the weapon and long after the attack started dodged and it triggered flurry rush every time as I'm recording this I don't know how clear it will be in the footage so I just want to hammer this detail home if I hadn't dodged these attacks I still would not have taken damage I'm not even in the path of the enemy weapon anymore and yet the game still gives me the fancy matrix reward sometimes I dodged after the attack was close to finished and it still gave it to me so the guess of a conclusion I can come to is that when the game looks to see if a flurry or I should activate it doesn't care about whether you would have taken damage it simply does a check for the area around link to see if there's any sources of active damage if you dodge while those conditions are met no matter where you are then you get a McFlurry rush the next boss in this series seems to abide by these rules with his overhead slam I can strafe and already be out of harm's way before I dodge and still trigger a flurry rush same for some of the Lionel attacks when he runs away and does his sudden charge you can trigger a flurry rush before he would have hit you yet even this far away because he's in an active damaged state the game gives you the reward you can also see examples of this one during the slow-motion dodge animation link actually collides with the enemy weapon from a bad dodge and still gets the Rush mode conversely there were many attacks where link actually does a flip time so well that he flips through the air over a sword that passes so close underneath him but because the game didn't think the weapon was active when I hit the dodge button these don't count as flurry rushes but yet stuff like this does you what makes us immensely frustrating on things like the lyonel fights and the thunder blight boss is that a flurry rush doesn't activate you can sometimes dodge into damage for this Lionel attack I am waiting for a timing window so I get the rush and even flipping Sowell over his sword it doesn't activate then before I can dodge a second time his attack comes so quickly as a follow-up that I can't always dodge it this means that my initial dodge was too late yet if I go earlier than that it can often look like I didn't even dodge an attack at all to trigger the rush and instead just did a backflip that was so fancy while the Lionel was flexing his sword arm that he became stunned enough that I could murder him the medium sized guardians show a similar problem pretty much anything with a spear shows the same thing that the water blight fight did for a bunch of other issues you have the first boss in the series being capable of spawning tornadoes immediately on top of you without any warning or time to react after its first phase change three arrows to the facemask area are meant to stun these bosses but sometimes it just doesn't work but it works enough of the time that it's clearly intended a similar issue for that stun it's meant to last about eight seconds so you can get some free hits in but sometimes they recover instantly for no reason the thunder blight boss has an attack in phase two that I can never reliably dodge ever I've watched a couple of speedruns of the game and even those players don't try to dodge this attack they choose him in a doorway instead so I'm fairly comfortable saying that there's something wrong with this it comes back to the old idea of Bethesda's bug on these dodge timings are they even working properly or slightly different timings for each attack some sort of unique feature they were trying to do and messed it up there's no way to tell this attack still does damage to me during flurry rush because the weapon is radiating fire damage yet Ganon's doesn't do that even though it's the exact same attack sometimes the shrine Guardians will keep on trucking through a pillar and not be stunned even though they're supposed to and this Lionel was capable of shooting arrows that could clip through the ceiling to kill me more than once to and finally there are a bunch of attacks from normal enemies that have no Telegraph's whatsoever and some highly questionable use of hyper armor your attacks usually make small enemies enter a chain of stuns that you can continue to lock them down if you're relentless but sometimes for a reason I can't determine it just doesn't work or they will instantly activate an attack with no warning and knock you away the worst offender for stuff like this are the Baka blooms with spears seen here they have a warning animation that has them twirl the spear once before they stab but if they're waddling around before they do it or if you weren't in range and suddenly do come into range then they instantly trigger the attack at a supersonic speed there's just this general sloppiness to a lot of this and that continues with the controls there is nothing I hate more about breath of the wild than the camera during combat and the lack of a dedicated dodge button the camera is easy to explain I shouldn't have to play roulette whenever I break my lock on and reapply it the right analog stick should switch targets instead of being some weird rotational control that can mess up what direction you think link is going to dodge in sometimes I need to switch targets quickly and this makes the lock-on function a crapshoot to use in group combat but I'm forced to use it because that's the only way to dodge without being locked on whether that's at an enemy or empty space link doesn't dart to the side or do a flip he jumps instead which means that if I want to dodge an incoming arrow while I'm in the middle of fighting I have to just hope that I can do it or that I break the lock and sprint for a while so the arrow misses me these are two problems that I think are really easy to solve and they would go a tremendous way to making group combat fun for me I like that there are hordes of enemies to fight I like that they all bunch up and try to come at you from different angles and attack together it also promotes using spear weapons to pick off stragglers who waddle too far from the group but too often it's so awkward to properly dodge or switch targets even with footage like I'm showing now I am occasionally dodging at random because I can't properly see or stay locked on to what I want purely because of the controls the dodge button should be the sprint button it should function just like it does in neo tap it for a dodge hold it down for a sprint with that set I can finally talk about how much potential there is in this combat system because there is a lot to like during direct assaults switching between melee weapons and the bow is fast and fluid and you're rewarded for quick headshots you're also incentivized to incorporate a lot of Link's mobility options if you're gliding then you can trigger arrow time if there's something to climb then you can get up there to better land your shots or do powerful slam attacks there are so many wonderful hit and run tactics you can use during group fights because of this and when you're smacking around a goblin with its head bobbing through the air with each strike it feels so satisfying I love the downward stab in this game to something that harkens back to the second Zelda on the NES and how awesome it feels to charge at an enemy you just knocked away to finish him off with a jumping attack it just looks so cool and it's so satisfying I tried to do something newer a little more daring with every camp I came across when to commit to a big spin attack when to try to trigger a flurry rush on the biggest monster and while a lot of these encampments were to say me and had the same giant skull as a background the few that utilized the glider and climbing in waves like this made these encounters such a joyful experience it genuinely breaks my heart that the lock-on sucks and there's no way to dodge outside of it because that flexibility is what's missing here link is so acrobatic outside of combat but the moment the weapons come out the game screams no you must be locked on which finally brings us to the next point on the list another thing that squanders the potential of breadth of the wilds combat a lack of enemy variety on a surface level this may appear like a good chunk of content but after playing the game yourself you learned that many enemies aren't utilized very well or to in substantial to matter all that much so even though there are bath slimes in dr. ox and a few elemental variations on all of them since they all die in one hit and appear like mobile traps and actual fights it's easy to dismiss them as not really part of the combat system the most interesting things they can do or when the bats come at you in swarms at night or when an octorok is on the fringe of the battle and shooting you while you're fighting at a camp but both of these circumstances were exceedingly rare when I played same for the wizzrobe enemies I rarely saw these guys and when I did they were almost always alone many bosses have the same problem these are the Lionel's I meant earlier the giant Cyclops monster is called the hynix a stone monster that emerges from the ground and the mini pebble versions of him and the mold uh gasps and monsters in the desert some of these have the same sort of variations as other enemies elemental modifiers or a color system the hynix has a skeletal variation just like the three main humanoid monsters you fight these fights are interesting the first few times you do them except for maybe the stone monsters which are always kind of dull the lyonel fights are the only ones that still feel a little exciting to me now because they have a lot of different moves and require different reactions running away back flips and side dodges depending on what they do the Hynix on the other hand was far more interesting in the first time and then rapidly became one of the most boring enemies a few encounters later this fight can remind me a bit of the asylum demon and dark souls one you can force him to do a slam move run away and then get some easy hits in or you can just shoot his eye to stagger him and cheese the fight you can cheese it even more with stasis so those I shot sorry even easier which is another way you can add to the long list of methods used to destroy the combat system and breath of the wild I do have to say that this fight has a lot of cool details the first time a hynix covered his eye so I couldn't shoot it had me grinning like an idiot as were the variations that had Armour on their legs to block your hits and when I saw he knocks rip a tree out of the ground to use it as a weapon there's probably a ton of things like this that I miss in combat because the game can be so damn easy to break so it had fewer chances to show off the hynix would have remained a much more eventful fight if there were way more mini bosses in the world or if they were confined to certain regions nothing proves this more than them all bugga fights these aren't terribly interesting on their own in fact they're more like a puzzle involving bombs and pretending the sand is lava than a proper fight but the first time I fought one of these was after I had played the game for about 80 hours and to make you all groan with how bad this next line is it was like finally finding water after being lost in the desert a new enemy encounter was so refreshing and hit home how sorely the game needed more things like this but it goes further than that because having them all dug of monsters be unique to the desert region adds a lot of character to this area I know it would have been a lot of work but if each region had its own boss like this it would have made the game a hell of a lot more fun for me some areas already do this with unique wildlife it's a shame they couldn't have done the same with some more fights that use the environment as part of the encounter like the mold ugga does I just want to reiterate real quick breath of the wild is this gigantic 15 region world and those are all the mini bosses there are Lionel's and talus and hynix oh my these are the three you'll be seeing over and over unless you purposefully go to the desert in just three which is funnily enough the same number of regular enemies you'll be fighting this is a bigger problem than the mini bosses the vast majority of your fights will be against these humanoid groups the baka blends the lizard-men and the larger mob lens they all have the same color variations and they all have undead versions that spawn at night despite only being three they're all quite similar mob lens especially they feel like they're just larger baka blends the lizards are far more agile but this brings its own problem they dart away from your attack so much or if you try to close the distance between them that it's often a better strategy to just wait for them to come to you and then counter-attack which adds a lot of unnecessary tedium to these encounters and that's it really for some people this will be the biggest problem the game has that around 80% of all of the fights you have in breadth of the wild will be against baka blends lizards and moblins and while there is a lot of fun stuff you can do with the different combat arenas and encampments throughout the world you could double this number and it would still be considered low but I'm forgetting something aren't I there are two other enemy groups there's the human assassins in the yaga clan and then there are the Guardian robots well the yaga clan attacks have the same issue as The Wiz robes bats and octoroks they're quite rare and only ever attacked me alone when I was out in the world the larger versions with the two-handed wind swords only ever appeared to try to kill me once which is such a waste of an enemy type Yaga camps around the world would have been a great way to get more mileage out of these enemies and during the Gerudo quest line the game shows that it is willing to send more than one of these at you at the same time but it never happens in the world this waste of an enemy type honestly leaves me dumbfounded I don't understand it same goes for the Guardians they likely didn't want the small in medium-sized ones out in the world because then the combat shrines wouldn't feel special but they're already overused in that environment having a guardian like this show up in the middle of a camp or maybe even fighting two at the same time would have been fantastic this is the type of enemy that the game sorely needs by the way something that's a bit more hefty more armored and slow less fodder and more demanding of your attention something like a big armored Knight would have worked as well but no you just keep fighting the mordoor rejects and lizards the much larger guardians are something I'm not sure about I died a lot to these early on getting the parry timing down on the lasers after that these were never a threat to me chopping off their legs is kind of cool as is trying to shoot them in the eye but that these enemies only have the single laser attack makes them feel so shallow just something else that's a shame because I like how they look and move and I love the music that plays as they're charging up their blast it's just that they don't feel like fights to me there can you parry this instead and unless I'm forgetting an enemy and I don't think I am that's all there is oh there are bees the bees count probably I don't think I need to spend any more time on this because the low number speaks for itself in my mind it's very similar to the problem I have with the shrines it deeply confuses me that Nintendo thought this was enough when they poured so much effort into the world that supports these features and so that brings us to the last one on our list weapon durability which I think after how long the section went on deserves its own [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] weapon durability is fairly straightforward and easy to understand but let's review it with some numbers before we get into it at the start of the game you can carry eight weapons on the great plateau these range from starting sticks and buckling clubs and Spears to some low level swords hammers and axes later on you will be able to carry many many more weapons you'll start finding great swords with elemental damage energy weapons that the Guardians use and equipment that is much more fancy and durable than what you started with to put this into perspective the first weapon most people will find is the two damaged stick this breaks in about ten hits for a total damage potential of around 20 whereas the 30 damage Master Sword breaks after roughly 40 hits for a total damage potential of about 1,200 this type of progression can be good and it makes a lot of sense that a legendary blade that seals the darkness should be much more powerful than a stick but I'm pointing it out for the sake of just having some basic numbers for you to grasp the system if you haven't played the game and to also show how reliant the game is on gear combat often involves switching weapons when something breaks this is especially true early in the game when you're using these brittle sticks and clubs and rusty swords this is the feature that I think has received the most attention from players some people love this system and think that the entire game is built around it whereas other people hate it and wish the game had more traditional weapons I can breakdown what I think the goals of this system were into six main points to force the player to use different weapon types and adapt to each one to create big exciting moments in combat to make the Master Sword feel special to allow equipment expansion slots to appear valuable it's a better balanced game and to reward exploration in my mind only one of these succeeds you may already have guessed which one that is let's go through these in more detail than the argument in favor of balance is that if weapons weren't breakable you could sneak into Hyrule Castle early in the game and pick up a bunch of powerful weapons and steamroll all of the content this argument makes a bad assumption in that if weapon durability was removed that it would be the only change that you would still be finding all of these weapons everywhere and you just keep replacing old ones with better ones it also ignores that the world levels with you and that these weapons in Hyrule Castle wouldn't always be this powerful the weapons available here could also have their attack power reduced but in my mind changing the durability system would require a lot more changes to make the game better not to mention that Nintendo clearly didn't care much about balance to begin with considering all the other ways you can break the game making the Master Sword feel special initially works it's a permanent weapon despite needing time to recharge so it does feel unique however this clearly backfires because of this very quality when I played the Master Sword became my pickaxe it became my chopping axe it was the only renewable weapon I had so therefore it only made sense to use it up on stuff like this since it would grow back again afterward it was also the first weapon I would always use during fights before moving on to wasting my breakable ones this ties into the first point on the list this system doesn't really encourage use of a lot of weapon types and a lot of you may have just thought you're crazy of course it does but give me a minute to explain here there's no way to renew your weapons after they're damaged even the Master Sword once it starts to wear down has to be broken completely before it'll begin to recharge since there's also no way to see durability on weapons that means you're heavily incentivized to keep using the same weapon once you've started using it after winning a fight with the Master Sword I would often find some trees or rocks to intentionally break through the last eight hits or so in order to begin the recharge timer so it wouldn't break early in my next fight same goes for other weapons if you're constantly switching you'll lose track of what weapons are already close to broken you want to avoid the situation of having half of your weapons with low durability so it makes sense to keep using the same weapon until it breaks before moving on to another which also frees up a slot for whatever weapon you find next but even if you like all of that and I don't think you're wrong to either because these are decisions right you're playing in a clever way even breaking your Master Sword can be seen as a little trick you learn and take advantage of same with being smart about using your weapons efficiently even if you like all of that there isn't really any weapon variety in breath of the wild this system isn't encouraging much at all the Master Sword is the same as the Royal sword or any other one-handed blade even one-handed clubs are only a little different and have the same spin attack it's the large two-handed weapons that show this better those big swords hammers clubs and axes they all have the same move set they may emit fire or ice or lightning or just physical damage but they're just visual tweaks on the same weapon the only other different one is the spear which I enjoyed a lot but I found much fewer of these than any other weapon type probably because they're also what I consider to be overpowered for locking enemies down with quick hits and long-range pokes there are only three weapon types and breath of the wild I don't think the magical rods really count and just in case I'm forgetting one we can increase that number to four but I don't think I am even boomerangs have the same swing animation as the swords that's still very very low for a system that's apparently made to force you to switch I think most people don't realize this since they defend the system because they're so enamored by the second point on this list which is the only one I agree with and I agree with it a lot having weapons break during combat with a big explosion that knocks the enemy away and since their weapon flying is a lot of fun in the early game when you have so few weapons and they're all breaking regularly when switching between them is a really quick decision or you scramble to steal another weapon that was just flung onto the floor this is all great stuff it's the reason why I enjoyed the great Pluto so much on both playthroughs and also returning to that highly focused system on Eventide Island the weapon durability system is at its best with a low amount of truly disposable weapons and encounters that are built and balanced around that which is why the system like the weapons you carry degrades the more you progress hett su the broccoli man allows you to carry so many more weapons in exchange for Corrick seeds couple this with finding much more powerful weapons and it all starts to crumble now there's so much time being wasted deciding if a fight is worth your special collection of high-powered weapons and returning to the low disposable ones isn't possible because of the appearance of high HP monsters there's a reason why the game takes you from that 20 damage potential stick to the 1200 Master Sword at some point during the mid game there are too many weapons and so many of them are good that I ended up hoarding them all and rotating between my Master Sword and two free spots for some of the average dragon loan equipment I could scavenge from higher enemies in each fight then there are opening chests with weapons in them which makes you have to decide whether it's worth taking what you should throw away for it and then have to open the chest again to do so that might seem like petty criticism but there are so many of these chests in the game and it slows things to a crawl since your weapon slots are almost always full in summary it's not an absence of permanent weapons that ruins the system it's an abundance of breakable ones it's going from eight weapon slots to so many that it takes a few seconds to cycle through them all in the quick select menu it changes from a big exciting turning point in a battle to something that makes you pause and interrupt yourself as you decide what to use next like a man who can't choose what brand of shitty cereal he wants to get at the grocery store and spends 20 minutes staring in all of the colorful boxes until they lose all meaning there are many many ways to achieve the goals on this list that are better than how the game currently works to avoid the other problem early on with finding high health enemies without enough weapons to kill them there could simply be a weak unbreakable weapon or an unarmed punching attack just like the ones the Baka blends can use for when you run out I know bombs can do damage but their basic version does so little that I don't think that's a viable alternative for something like a Lionel or Link could steal an enemy's weapon with a special time Dodger parry if he currently has no weapons available or Nintendo could have been smarter about their encounter designs this isn't a problem with enemy encampments because you can steal their weapons the Hynix also solves this problem with the amazing inclusion of weapons still embedded in its body or hanging on its neck as trophies from adventurers it killed in the past you can steal these weapons in the fight meaning the encounter itself is supplying you with the means to beat it if you're smart or quick enough which i think is a really compelling idea adding this concept of Lionel he could have had a huge quiver full of big Spears on his back that he could occasionally throw at you if you dodged it you could pick up the spear and there you go you have a weapon that could be balanced around this fight that you had to earn for yourself problem solved Guardian enemies and the combat shrines could have had weapons break off after you deal damage to them or they could snap off when they collide with pillars in the arena then they could repair themselves so they can still fight while you go and pick up your new weapon Solutions like this could justify keeping inventory slots really low and the lower the inventory slots the more likely you are to use all of your weapons and not end up agonizing over decisions more often than anything else hell if you did this right link could get away with just having one weapon slot period but the more traditional solution would be to give link more weapons like the Master Sword there are only three weapon types so each of the tutorial trains could give one each versions of the special weapons you're gifted after each of the shrine dungeons so a hammer that's on fire a spear that has a nice modifier and a sword infused with lightning the fourth shrine could have a bow these weapons would be breakable in that they need to be given time to recharge ideally they would have some of the Guardian energy tech so you could justify that they start to renew hits immediately instead of having to be broken completely before they start to fix themselves that way you can switch during combat whenever you want this also means puzzles and bosses can be built safely with the knowledge that every player will have access to these weapons at any time link could still have an open weapon slot to grab enemy weapons that should always be balanced through world level to be just a little better than your permanent ones & korek seeds can now be used to increase the amount of hits your weapons can deal before they break instead of increasing inventory size with these permanent weapons you could also add a new collectible in the world to find and acquire some resource that allows you to increase the power of these weapons as the game goes on just not in a way that breaks the game like Armour does this ties back to the only point on that list of six we haven't gotten to yet exploration isn't really made any better by finding weapons it's cool at first but a reward isn't all that exciting when you know it's going to break soon this is especially true if the weapon is so cool-looking that you don't want to use it I really like the savage look of the lyonel swords and spears and I barely got to use these during my time in the game because they were so rare and broke so quickly if you had permanent weapons from the start then these other weapons you find could be discovered as skins you could use to alter the appearance of your starting ones so that each player could choose what they want to look like there are other solutions too especially if you agree it's later on in the game that the weapon clutter gets to be the problem after freeing the master sword you could start using cork seeds to make some weapon slots permanent maybe weapons are corrupted by Ganon's influence in some way and the master sword allows you to protect some of them through broccoli man's magic my favorite idea that could also improve the story is that link starts with a broken master sword when he fought Ganon in the past he got trashed so bad that the sword was shattered when he was left in the resurrection shrine all he has is a hilt with a jagged blade this could be Link's permanent weak weapon that you could upgrade by questing for lost shards throughout the world it also makes Ganon appear a lot more threatening maybe that could even be incorporated in the final fight somehow to make it more interesting every hit you take during that fight instantly destroys whatever weapon you're currently wielding it's the last boss so you can safely inflict that sort of penalty on the player with an extreme twist on the durability system and with that said we can move on to some discussion on the story and the main quest breath of the wild story is told through a few conversations some fancy cinematics from the dead king of Hyrule Impa the four champions during the divine beast sections and a selection of memories you can find in the world the memories were the most interesting to me because they're scrambled and I love it when stories experiment with a nonlinear order of events this was made even more interesting by the first memory you access since it introduces a bunch of characters and heavily hints at this ritual and bond between Link and Zelda isn't all it appears to be that Zelda may resent link for a reason you're left to wonder about unfortunately the game never unlocks this potential most of the memories are somewhat charming scenes of Lincoln Zelda the don't go anywhere it's still interesting enough that I would have preferred to play that version of the game with Lincoln Zelda together so they can speak and interact with each other when something happens instead they're short flashes of events that try to be quirky or endearing instead of interesting you'd be a perfect candidate for the study the biggest letdown here is why I suggested the change about the broken Master Sword see the story is that Zelda has some sort of emotional block and is unable to access the special power in her bloodline the one necessary to seal Ganon away so she heavily invested in another plan with the Guardians and divine beasts which goes wrong when Ganon krupp small and turns the weapons against Elda and hyrule for the whole game this event is hyped up as a disaster Ganon tricked everyone killed Link and Zelda was left to contain him then later on it's shown that link didn't even fight Ganon he died too a couple of Guardians instead which immediately deflated a lot of the tension when you get to Hyrule Castle at the end of the game that's the first time this version of Lincoln Ganon have met so instead of it being a huge tense rematch of the century with link finally overcoming a challenge that kicked his ass last time it's just him finally doing what he was supposed to do a hundred years ago the main quest is quite short and that's okay considering how much else there is to do in the game some areas got more attention than others though and they suffer from the same balanced problems the divine beasts do some of the areas leading up to the dungeons don't scale especially the Zora domain where you are constantly interrupted by Prince shark fish telling you to watch out for so many dangerous enemies that most players will likely be able to wipe out without any effort but then again maybe this is a joke that failed to land it's so obnoxious that I'm starting to guess it has to be the biggest difference between the four quest areas can be found in the Rideau line the others all have a chain of things to do before you can get into the dungeon Zora has that gauntlet in the rain followed by getting lightning arrows from a Lionel after climbing some waterfalls which is skippable but still something you're meant to do then you use them to attack the divine beast using those abilities and boarded in the Goron domain you have the light puzzle of figuring out how to resist the intense fire in the air then you have to go through what is my favorite combat arena in the game the vertical pillars in the lava this uses so many of Link's mobility tools in a way that clicked with me even though you can cheese it with the bomb cannons I recommend not doing that and being creative with climbing the glider and your bow instead then you have to guide a goron through something sort of like a stealth section in order to board the divine beast the Gerudo quest is similar there's a light puzzle required to gain access to the city then you have to go on a different quest to retrieve something which ends up being a mini dungeon with another stealth section that I was thrilled to discover you could fight your way through instead of automatically failing if you got spotted good job on including that choice Nintendo seriously well done there's even a mini boss in here to be which leads to what I'd argue is the best divine beasts fight with the shadow of the colossus weak points and riding on the sand seal then you have what is also the best divine beast dungeon after this in my opinion in contrast to all of that you show up to the Rideau town get a quest to glide to a nearby area with no combat whatsoever you prove to the Birdman that you know how to shoot a bow and glide at the same time in a very simple puzzle that's nearby and that's it you're immediately taken to the divine beast boarding sequence which visually is very impressive but mechanically it's really boring there's too much downtime gliding between each cannon it's by far the worst one one of these is clearly not like the others in the immortal words of Shania Twain this don't impress any much this is a big contributor to why I don't understand the flawless reception this game has received from many reviewers because there's something that's even worse than this in the game and far more obvious a lot of people would argue that the ending of a game story or movie is the most important part you have to nail down it's definitely the best way to make something memorable but I'd argue everything is equally important the beginning to grab someone's attention the middle to keep their attention and the ending to make everything that came before worth their time breath of the wilds ending is one of the worst fights I have ever played in a game I can say that because it's barely even a fight to be clear I'm not talking about the blood-borne version of Ganon that you fight in the castle that boss is actually pretty good if you're not overpowered I'm talking about the behemoth version that you fight in Hyrule Field afterward there's something very wrong with the story tone and world in this game Ganon's arrival is known as the great calamity that ended the world Hyrule is now a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting in reality though it's anything but that this place is a paradise nature is thriving there's beauty and animals everywhere more than that though the many villages in the game are prospering without exception all of them even with the divine beasts apparently starting up trouble no one seems worried monsters rarely attack anyone the gorons are continuing to expand their mining industry there's a construction company a quiet fishing village that doesn't need a wall or any natural barriers to keep out monsters there's no strife no famine the monsters are all content to mind their business and never attack any of these settlements even those who have the job to help you seem so lazy about it it's like yeah whatever link if you feel like rescuing Zelda then go for it it's cool even that is so vague Zelda is still 17 years old at the end of the game so what sort of time loop paradox has she been keeping Ganon contained and until now how has she been doing it and why is it only now that his power has grown to the point that he's causing trouble again why are the divine beasts only now starting to make a mess of their respective areas this doesn't really matter all that much but I do think more effort could have gone into the story matching the setting or at least an attempt made at matching the freedom to take your time exploring the world that Nintendo clearly wanted to give you because the potential was here to make this something special despite myself not giving one single [ __ ] about anything to do with Zelda or the story after seeing how weak the memory cinematics were I was shocked by how epic I found this introduction to this final fight with Ganon [Music] Zelda's words here pertaining to the series historical use of links triforce of courage and his amnesia in this game are surprisingly strong it creates this momentum this oh it's on let's go let's kill Ganon and it stays strong as you ride forward pick up the special bow of light and then this isn't a fight Ganon can't hurt you I don't think this monster even has AI tied to it it's just a random selection of shifting in place and then spewing an evil breath in a cone in front of him he doesn't try to target it he doesn't try to do anything the whole encounter is riding in a circle waiting for selva to tell you to shoot some targets and then you do that wait some more and do it again Oh also if you get here without ever catching a horse the game just gives you one I thought that was kind of weird I loved parts of this game I know that I'll play it again with the DLC features and hard mode later on in the year but without those additions I don't know if I would want to there's still so much left to see and find it in the world but the thought of having to do just some of the shrines again is enough to turn me off breath of the wild is undoubtedly the best open-world game I have ever played when I am playing it as an open-world game it has so many smart decisions I loved the blood moon mechanic because not only does it contextualize why monsters have now respond in the world it also clearly announces it for you so it's not a guessing game when you want to go back to old areas but even here you can see how it's two steps forward and one step back why is there only one version of this cinematic if you're going to play it each time Blood Moon happens why not have a shorter version or different ones so that I'm not stabbing the skip button Blood Moon happened more than 20 times as I played actually it happened three times in one night one time I think it can be buggy the game is gorgeous but it comes at the cost of frequent frame drops although I do prefer games to have at least 60 frames per second I am NOT a big framerate snob I can happily tolerate a stable 30fps on console games but the key word there is stable I also understand that some dips can be forgiving because it would be a waste to lower graphical quality so much across the entire game just for the occasional rare time that things get really intense breath of the wild however regularly starts to chug whenever there's a of grass and trees in one area as in the first place most players are going to go after leaving the shrine at the start of the game for an even clearer example of this you need to go to court for astoria rate tanks harder than anywhere else in the game most importantly it tanks every time I come here and this is where you upgrade your equipment slots and return to try to pull out the Master Sword when you get a new heart container so you'll be coming here a lot how was this performance scene as okay I don't understand why places where the game regularly starts Istanbul couldn't have been identified and made better during combat things are usually fine except for mob wounds this is another case of a regular problem more often than not when I hit a mob land hard enough to make him enter rag doll mode the game will drop a massive amount of frames or even lock up for more than a second it's even more strange because when I play the game when the switches in handheld mode it runs better unfortunately I'm not able to record footage when the console is undocked so I can't show it I'm curious if hard mode will have large enough changes to fix a lot of problems I have with the game although I seriously doubt it same for the dungeon content that's coming which I first see is just one dungeon that's a little bigger than a divine piece but I could be wrong I don't think Nintendo has ever done DLC for a game like this so maybe it'll be this huge edition that makes the combined game so much greater than what we have now like I said I doubt it but I look forward to being proven wrong maybe we'll be speaking about it in another video at the end of the year [Music] thank you very much for watching this is the first video I've released since updating my patreon with pledge rewards I'll be speaking about them in an upcoming channel video along with explaining why this video took so long to make but right now you can see some names on the screen at people who pledge $5 or more every month thank you so much for the support these videos wouldn't be possible to make without it especially longer ones on new games like this one I also have a recommendation to make which is something I used to do before the channel exploded after no man sky I wanted to wait until things settled to start doing it again and now they have Novica new mix video is very similar to mine and I think he's covered just about every Naughty Dog game by now he has extensive looks of the crash bandicoot games jak and daxter as well as more thorough videos on the gameplay of the Uncharted series and I did I think his video on the gameplay in the Last of Us is the best one that's being done on that game I'd say it's best to start with that one or with the series on jak and daxter which I was able to enjoy without having played the games myself Nova canoe is a small channel that I hope gets at least a little attention from this recommendation is the same methodical approach to games that I go through with everything carefully measured and thought-out I am near certain that if you like my videos that you will like his as well and I hope to see a subscriber count' get a big bump from the shout out thank you again I'll see you next time

Channel: Joseph Anderson

Views: 2,425,869

Rating: 4.6633496 out of 5

Keywords: video game, joseph anderson, critique, analysis, breath of the wild, zelda, criticism, review, nintendo

Id: T15-xfUr8z4

Length: 112min 35sec (6755 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Kizmmit]

Every top voted comment in this thread are people that either skimmed over the whole video or completely ignorant to the points he made in the first place.

400 upvotes for

For example, at 41:00, the author talks about how you can bypass the "intended" solution for the shrine's puzzle by using Stasis. That's not bad puzzle design, that's fantastic puzzle design.

when he specifically addresses this, really makes me wonder if people want to legitimately engage with his analysis, or just simply reject it because they don't like the overall sentiment of the video.

[u/meowpatrol]

From what I've seen so far, I think I'm just going to have to agree to disagree with the author that many of the shrine puzzles are badly designed.

They are supposed to be short so that they don't interrupt the game flow. They're not the typical Zelda dungeons that act as destinations, they're stops on the highway that provide a break from exploring to allow the player to stretch their brain muscles in a different way.

Once the player figures out the basic premise for a particular shrine (e.g. that boulders need to be dropped by shooting ropes with arrows), there's only so much expansion that can be done on such a simple concept before it gets exhausting.

The shrines often have multiple solutions because a player finding her own way to solve a puzzle is much more fulfilling than struggling until she finds the "one true way" that the game designers decided she must use to solve the puzzle.

For example, at 41:00, the author talks about how you can bypass the "intended" solution for the shrine's puzzle by using Stasis. That's not bad puzzle design, that's fantastic puzzle design.

The game designers could have prevented the use of Stasis somehow, but they didn't, because they understand that when the game starts taking away the player's tools (which she has previously been encouraged to use creatively), solving puzzles feels less like genuinely interacting with the world in a satisfying manner, and more like jumping through hoops and trying to "mind read" how a game designer would have built the solution.

"Okay, my way didn't work, not because my solution wasn't valid, but because the game designers want me to solve it a different way. Ugh, well, how would they have intended for me to do this?"

If you've ever played D&D, you'll know what I'm talking about. When the DM has already decided what the "one true" solution to a puzzle is going to be, and shuts down all other ideas, it's obvious. And it makes the world feel less authentic, and a world that feels real is a critical part of what this Zelda is going for.

The game avoids this issue by realizing that an "easier" solution devised by the player is not a failure on the part of the game designer, but a celebration of the player.

[u/cdavis_games]

Seems to be a bit of a mixed reception to Joseph Anderson's videos in here. I must admit, I'm a huge fan. His videos pretty much inspired me to set up my own channel and make similar videos myself (albeit, I'm nowhere near his level both in terms of viewers and quality).

He does nitpick, but I like that. In fact, I think nitpicking is important for a few reasons. (1) while the odd minor gripe isn't a huge deal, if there are lots of things to nitpick at, then there's a very real chance it could have a big impact on the player's enjoyment.

(2) One man's nitpick is another man's immersion breaking experience. Some people think it's nitpicking to complain about the story in Fallout 4 (the problem of you looking for your son, while simultaneously doing random shit for Preston Garvey, etc). I don't think that's nitpicking at all, but if you look at Joseph's videos you'll often see comments like "Why can't you just enjoy the game and have fun in the world?"

(3) Nitpicks are often easy to solve problems which can make their presence in the game all the more difficult to justify.

I also like many of the other YouTubers mentioned here, but they're all different. Joseph Anderson is good at picking out plotholes, but he also goes into depth with combat mechanics in a way I find educational. MatthewMatosis and Noah Gervais are incredibly deep thinkers. I love watching their videos, but my own experiences playing games rarely lines up with theirs. Basically, they're far cleverer and more philosophical than me.

The length of Joseph's videos doesn't bother me at all. I watch in chunks or put it on in the background. I find that once you've watched one 10 minute review of x game you've watched them all. I go to people like Joseph for far more in-depth discussion. It also helps that I don't watch Let's Plays or anything like that which probably frees up some time. I know I'd much rather watch a heavily edited analysis video than than a Let's Play.

I'm not saying everyone should love his videos, but I think they improve the overall discussion around games in a world where the huge gaming sites just chuck up 5 min video reviews full of fancy prose and no critique.

[u/EternalArchon]

Most of the criticism here seems directed at the reviewer and review style(length) and not much of what he said (other than a few defending the puzzles).

Having never played breath of the wild I'm curious about his criticisms on the combat. I've always considered Zelda games to be very casual and kid friendly. Here he seems to be seeking a combat system with the depth and challenge of a soulsbourne game. I'm just curious what people think about that.

[u/BenevolentCheese]

I'm going with a pretty random complaint here, but something I don't see mentioned much at all:

Lack of music.

Zelda is a series that has long been defined by it's classic tunes. They increase immersion, and are beautiful. It's just wonderful running or horsing around Hyrule and hearing the favorites.

But for some reason BotW has virtually no music. The overwhelming majority of your game time is spent in silence, outside of random game sounds. And for me, it never really hit me how bad this loss was until I got to Hyrule castle, and suddenly a lot of the old classics started showing up in brief spurts, and it was wonderful. But it made me despondant that I had played the last 40+ hours without them.

[u/RobotWantsKitty]

Wasn't he supposed to do a video on Mass Effect or the Witcher series? I think he even ran a poll on Twitter or something. Did he scrap that idea? It's been many months.

[u/Lyndell]

I'm here to talk about the begging of the combat just what he says about the Lynel when he started. I think that's what made BOTW so great. That you could stumble upon that early and can basically do nothing to kill it with what you have. That's like real life. That is real. At this point it's either go around or go back, I don't get how doing that could turn you off of moving through the game and not try stealth.

I hate when games purposely set it up in open world that everything will always workout for the player. Saying they should have set up enough weapons around the Lynel so you could beat him, is easy to see and takes me out of games. I'm like "oh yeah. Here is a game telling me to load up here then take this guy on." I love that you go from very fragile to having the ability to destroy most things attempting to mess up your journey.

I like that you have no idea what weapon any particular enemy is going to be holding. You have to be able to pick out the monster, the color, the weapon type and then make sure you know the area you're going to be fighting on. They come in varied groups all with different styles because of the things listed above. Sometimes I still get caught off guard. You go from an amateur to pro in this game like I've never experienced. I think it's amazing. The best part is there are things you could add to make it better or deeper. Easily but it might be almost to much of that was added at this point. But everything in here seems real in how it's laid out.

[u/[deleted]]

This gets closer than anyone else so far to hitting my huge pain point with BotW - it's way too structured. The exploration is really satisfying, as he says in the video, and at first the things you discover through exploration are really cool too. But eventually you realize that the things you're finding aren't unique and cool discoveries; exact copies of what you've found are littered across the world.

Killing a Hinox, fighting that "test of strength" enemy, raiding that giant skull camp, picking the fruit off the trees for a Korok seed, picking up a lone rock for a Korok seed, following a flower for a Korok seed, dropping a fruit on a tray for a Korok seed, all of these things get old after a few times. It starts to feel no different from Ubisoft open-world games where you just have checklists for a few different types of optional content, and you know that any optional content will fall into one of those categories. No surprises.

I distinctly remember finding my first Stalnox early on in a seemingly random corner of an area. I was amazed that I had found something so significant and fun by exploring. But after about 8 hours I had seen all the different world bosses already. If there had been more types of world bosses, more significant and unique content instead of some of the worst shrines (as Joseph mentions using one of the maze shrines as an example), and more interesting quests better hidden in the world (similar to how you find NPCs in the first Dark Souls), this game could have been a masterpiece. I don't care if that would have required the game to be half or even a third as big; it would have been one of the most consistently thrilling 40+ hour games out there.

[u/TheSupremeAdmiral]

Haven't watched the video yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Joseph Anderson has a way of nitpicking that really works for me. Like he manages to always be pretty much right about whatever he's talking about even while I still disagree with him. For example he's very harsh about Darkest Dungeon's very real flaws but I still like Darkest Dungeon and can enjoy it despite having no arguments about his complaints. Mathewmatosis is also very good at this.