Praising Zelda: Breath of the Wild Because We Know Nothing About Its Sequel

hello there lovely p polit alex from nintendo live here and it's that quiet part of january so well actually it's been slightly less quiet than usual january's but we have this on on this schedule so we're gonna do it anyway yes we're just gonna be talking about breath of the wild because you know what it's bloody lovely and i don't think there's a time when it isn't appropriate to just talk about how lovely breath of the wild is and i'm not going to be doing it alone because that would be me in a closed room and i might go a little bit mad uh so please welcome mr john and mr zeddon or zeon hi i'm mr john hey it's me mr zeddon well thanks for coming that's how you say my name when you're not from america apparently well i mean it's not but it does it's it's it's what's called a meme it's a meme you'll learn all about them in due course indeed um but what we're gonna be yeah we're just gonna be talking about breath of the wild and what we love about it who wants to start i don't know i don't even know where to begin it's such a huge game do you know what i like i like the mountains in breath of the wild i love the landscape i just love so many open world games completely get large landscapes wrong and they make them sort of a little bit too condensed it's something i definitely found in immortals where the landscape you know sort of you had these peaks and troughs and everything everywhere but as a result you always felt like you were in kind of like a valley at nearly all times breath of the wild none of that it feels like you're just in these huge expansive areas because everything's just on such an enormous scale you just look up into the distance you can see all those mountains over there is it's like real life i suppose it's the difference between like being in a town and being out in the country and i'd rather be out in the country this game just fixed open worlds for me because honestly i feel like open worlds um before breath of the wild they were hubs for linearity they were big open sandboxes with little icons that sometimes say hey go here and talk to an npc then the nbc goes hey go over here they go over there and you come back to the nbc and that's kind of the formula of what openworld's had but breath of the wild doesn't have that you kind of make your own waypoints whenever you want to and as alex was saying like sometimes the mountains are just so intoxicating you want to climb them and get to the top and when you're at the top you find like a cork or something then you look off into the distance you see another mountain you want to go to and it's like the objective is what you want it to be rather than just being a dot that you're following the whole time it's just so ingenious so last night i played just a little bit which i i think all you guys probably had some time with the game too but i i went in and i know like i felt i felt the urge to open up my map and kind of like find out where i was because it's been a long time since i've played and i didn't i just kind of ran around and i somehow i like still remembered where i was because like things seemed like it was somewhat recognizable even though i was in like a snowy mountain area where i i could barely see a thing i still managed to figure out what part of the map i was on and uh and while i was running through i um i thought that there were some like old i can't remember if they're if they're old dragon bones or if they're old dinosaur bones or whatever like the wind fish oh sure sure and so i um i thought i was kind of like thinking in my head like ahead of time about if i was in an area that had one and like a minute or two later i ended up coming right around the corner and there one was and it just it felt like such a rewarding feeling because the the game is constantly like with all of its giant mountains and things it it still feels like such a mystery to jump in but yet it it felt like riding a bike just getting back on and and um and and being in that that town sort of that like we all grew up in in in this game you know like um like it's been a while since we've been here but coming back we still recognize things but things are still new i started playing this again over the christmas period and i went back in i can't remember the last time i played it like actually sat down and played a good chunk of it like i think i dabbled for a bit of footage that i needed but i hadn't played a lot and i went back into it and i you know i knew where i was you know and i was just you know rummaging around and things like that and i found an area that i've literally never been to and this is my second playthrough i'm playing through on master mode now i i i i just can't even begin to think of any other game where i've put yeah i'm actually gonna check because i've got to open at the moment i'm gonna check how long i've played breath of the wild because it's a blooming long time i recently found out how long i played smash bros and it was potentially too long um 460 hours or something that's probably gone out by now um breath of the wild i've played 235 hours and i know that i'm personally on the lower end of the spectrum for people who play breath of the wild a lot but even so i can't think of many games where i've put 235 hours into it and i just happen to find without even trying i just happen to find somewhere that i've never been before and in fact opening this up again just you know just before we started recording this just to you know sort of have it open so i could refer to things if i needed to i found somewhere i've never been before i know and there was a hinox and everything and how does it do that the game is so big and open and inviting and yet has so many secrets so many secrets just under the surface and admittedly the place i found was literally under the surface not all of them are under the surface but i just every time i go into the game and i sort of occasionally i'll think i must have seen everything every single time i think that i'm proved wrong out of curiosity i just checked my play time too and i'm at 330 hours and i have literally done everything well in terms of percentage i've done everything in breath of the wild i found all the carx seeds i've been to every location and once i found all my korok seeds i think that my map said i was at like 99 point something percent and i was like what on earth am i missing and i rummaged around for a while and it turns out the thing that was off my map was this one room in hyrule castle which i'd never been in before and it's the room with the king's uh journal in there and somehow that's quite an obvious room in the library area but some i missed that um and even though i've been everywhere there's still things i'm still discovering um like the other day it was reported but the other week it was reported that you can feed squirrels acorns and then that got me thinking what else can you feed and i knew for a while that you can feed dogs meat and you can feed horses apples but it turns out you can also feed the goats and the cows and basically any animal in that game it's just this living breathing ecosystem and it makes sense but it's nothing i ever considered i i found out that you can feed the deer the deer will eat apples and i tried feeding a fox you can't the foxes won't eat anything i i tried i tried poultry i tried fresh meat nothing worked um but yeah you can just feed the d it's really hard to do because generally if you go anywhere near the deer they are so easily spooked and they just you know junior birdman the heck out of here and yet if you can sneak up you know i did it from a cliff i've got a clip that i can show in fact because i put it on twitter and you can you know if you do it from a cliff from a high enough place drop the apples down they'll just wander over and they'll very happily just eat the apples and the apples despawn and you just there's no situation where that's going to be of any benefit to the core gameplay or any benefit to you know sort of combat or you know actually getting on the back of a deer because it's far easier to just land on them you know using the using the glider there is no need no purpose to that and you know what i love it there is no need for it and yet it is still there it's that extra creamy layer of richness that makes breath of the wild the wonderful stroganoff that it is it's experimentation that kind of makes everything work and um i hear a lot of criticisms about experimentation too because i know a lot of people for one don't like weapon durability but for me that's kind of a layer of improvisation in this game um it's a game you have to decide uh a split second what you're gonna do are you gonna climb that mountain you're gonna go around it are you gonna power glide off a tall cliff uh and if you see an enemy camp are you gonna fight them if you do you're probably gonna lose a weapon you also might gain a weapon i think just that split-second decision of whether to keep a horse whether to keep a weapon or to do anything is part of why this game is just so fun to explore and move around him has has anyone ever uh this is something that i i don't know if i've discovered somebody must have seen it but i'm curious to know with you guys i've already spoken to john about this but zeon have you ever shot an ore deposit with an arrow shadow what an all deposit with an arrow i i don't think so what happens the arrow catches on fire and you can then use that to like have a flaming arrow oh genuinely genuinely useful but oh i i hear you cry what if you're in a situation where there are no war deposits but you really need a flaming arrow and there are no you know sort of torches nearby or anything like that um you can just drop a piece of flint shoot it and it also catches fire i just and then so can you pick it up and it becomes a fire arrow in your inventory no no no no no it doesn't become a fire arrow that's bonkers okay okay well hey i mean come on happen but like it's to that point though there's so much cool stuff in this game like i i found out recently that if you have a a bomb which is shika technology uh if you put the bomb down and then get a blue flame which is in one of the towns and then light an arrow and then shoot the bomb it will impact because it's using the chica tech and again it makes sense but it's something that you just wouldn't do unless just someone discovers it online and it's bonkers how much stuff is just packed into this i i mean i i just want to go back to zeon because he was asking about the um you can use the flaming arrow because you can walk over with a bow drawn and your uh arrow can catch fire from the arrow that is on fire from the flint know pretty much immediately i think you can pick it up if you're quick enough but it just becomes something that creates a source for you to use it's interestingly and now that john's just said those things i've got to try it i'm i'm just gonna see what happens if you shoot an ancient core with an arrow whether it oh no is that going to be sheikah fire because if it is i haven't got a bow equipped i'm going to have to uh it's going to blow up yeah i don't know about that i don't know whether anyone would bother trying to do this oh nothing happens what a disappointing game what a yeah damn this game it's this you know what you can do i really like this game but this changes things it changes everything it's just not immortals you know that game's got more quests in it i love the skill tree i thought it was a lot funnier honestly you know it really hit hit my funny bone in the right place okay let's not let's let's not rag on immortals you know the is a perfectly fine game it's just not breath of the wild though is it i mean come on i think that's also a big thing too is i i don't want to bring um comparisons in but immortals can use as a skill tree to build your character breath of the wild though from the very beginning what you start with are what you go through with the entire game the bombs the magnesis all of that stuff that is what you get from right from the beginning and you end the game with that and somehow it doesn't get stale if anything experimenting is just what makes the game even better it's almost like since the developers give you this like sort of i don't want to say like a limited set of of moves or or resources in that regard or skills that it's like the developers they they knew what they wanted you to be able to do in the game and they just took it like an extra step further by including all these extra elements like like how um alex was saying and you guys were saying how you can shoot ore and it starts a fire um and uh you can do all these extra crazy things with bombs and and arrows and like how that um there's that new video that released recently of somebody shooting an arrow or an ancient arrow basically like across the across the map and hitting a guardian i don't even what do you even say to that 1 400 feet for that arrow too meters we measured it meters of meters yeah sorry that's insane i just don't even know where you'd even begin with something like that but i think what you were saying about the you said you didn't want to say it gives you a limited tool set but i think that's absolutely the point is that they give you a limited tool set but it's it's not like you know sort of you press you know with swords you can attack you know it's the sword is made of metal therefore it conducts electricity everything has properties that affect that affect everything else and it breeds creativity because you do have a limited tool set it forces you to be creative it forces you to think outside the box and do things that you would that would do absolutely nothing in most games and you know just things like you know you can throw your weapon at someone and and but it's metal and there's a thunderstorm it's a classic example you throw it in an enemy they pick it up and they get struck by lightning it's just it's just beautiful and like the classic example of holding a cuckoo near a moblin the moblin attacks the cuckoo then all the cuckoo friends come along and start attacking it there is just a level of consistency that realistically you don't really get in i'm struggling to think of other games where there's this level of consistency and this level of just well what they describe as the chemistry engine there's nothing else like it that i can think of except maybe something like minecraft but even then it's not quite the same degree yeah like like something like red dead uh red dead two like my girlfriend's been playing that a lot over the past year two years maybe even and she's constantly finding new stuff and and now now that we're talking about breath of the wild in like a similar way um it it it kind of gives me a similar vibes where they uh you know they've just put so many details into the game that players aren't always going to find in their playthroughs like you've there's realistically you've put how many hours again 230 and john's put over 300 and i'm five i'm like i'm like a fake fan over here with my measly 160. is that old i i know right but yeah see i want to be able to play this game for the rest of my life and find korok seeds so i am i'm i'm still finding them and but i'm happy with that and that's the crazy thing though is that we're we've put so much time into it and we're still finding new stuff and that's i don't want to say that's stupid because it's not it's just it's a beautiful thing and it how is it how is it possible i'm going to bring up a point and also counterpoint my own point but i love the feeling of mastery in this game i love discovering that moblins when they talk when they go in the water they die immediately so you can like you can pick up something of magnesis and push them into the water and they're scared when they see something floating they'll run around so if you kind of point them towards the ocean they all just die when they go to a certain depth and i love that um but there's one thing i i kind of like kind of done so at the start of the game guardians are very intimidating uh like you go to central hyrule field and you see a bunch of them just roaming around and that one shot you so you kind of you from that point you learn to kind of make your own path and don't necessarily uh just go through the field the entire time but when it comes to the end game when you have a bunch of hearts you've got a full inventory i find that guardians are less intimidating and um because i can just parry their attacks instantly because their their window is pretty big and once you've got that down i don't think you can really miss a shot i i don't think i've really missed a guardian laser parry in a long time have you played sorry to interrupt but have you played master mode yeah i know master mode does delay the attack sometimes i do appreciate that sometimes and that's the thing that really gets me is okay it seems to be inconsistent which which in theory that sounds like oh that's a bad thing but it's no no it's specifically trying to throw you off they're faking you out and when that happened to me the first time i played master mode i was just like oh for god's sake we're gonna be doing this now are we but that's the best thing about it it's not master it's not the best thing about mastermind it's just ah carry on you know i i do really appreciate that actually because i think it does make it less predictable and that's something that the game usually strives for but just those usual guardian encounters can get quite predictable especially for quite an intimidating enemy i wish that's something they kind of mixed up a bit like maybe giving them more than just the laser attack and i think this kind of extends to the master sword to be honest i feel like the the the system of always um changing your weapons out is a great one and the master sword while it does um need to recharge every now and then once you've done the uh the trial of the sword it kind of trivializes things because not only is the recharge time fairly small um i think you just kind of stick with a master most of the time and it kind of contradicts the system a bit to me i've never done i need to i haven't not an announcement what am i talking about i have a confession to make i've never done trial of the sword because i very foolishly told myself oh i won't do trial of the sword uh you know until i can do it on master mode i don't know if you've ever tried to do trial of the sword on master mode but it is a soul-crushing experience in the best way possible it's there's this one room and i know any everyone who's done trying to the sword on master mode will be immediately going yeah yeah i know that one it's basically where you you go into this room it's in the beginner levels and there's all this water and these three i want to say three lizard foss and unless you like react immediately one of them sees you straight away and if they see you it's game over because you know your best bet is to attack them and not knock them in the water because as soon as they're in the water you're gonna start using up your you know the arrows that you need so desperately and that's that's game over for the rest of the thing and even then they're re they're regenerating all their health all the time it is soul-crushingly difficult and at the end of the day you're playing on mastermind you're playing the trial of the sword on master mode it should be soul-crushingly difficult and i think they absolutely nailed it yeah i realized my criticism is the game gets too easy after 300 hours which isn't much of a criticism but i do i do hope breath of the wild too does have a bit more spontaneity in some of their some of their enemy designs well i i mean it doesn't completely negate your argument and i would say it's absolutely a 100 valid argument but i kind of felt like the the flying guardians i can't remember the exact name for them it might be flying guardians um that's what i know them as yeah they pretty much completely made me have to rethink everything i know about guardians especially again i don't want to harp on about it but again on master mode they see you from about 4 000 kilometers away and your usual tactic of running up and slicing the legs off and ha ha what you're gonna do it completely goes out the window it just doesn't work anymore because they'll just happily hover above you and then slap you with a laser and you can reflect it it's true but again this is on master mode so sometimes they'll fake you out and you'll quite often come across more than one at once and so you've got two lasers to worry about and if one of them hits you you get stuck in a cycle it's just yeah yeah flying guardians i i love to hate them i absolutely love to hate them i encountered some last night when i was playing and i just nope i just turned around and went the opposite direction yeah they're just they're one wonderfully horrifying but i think i'm just i'm just playing as we speak now i should be recording it really but i'm not um i'm just seeing the um oh it was evan tied aisle oh yeah those those sections are just absolutely there are a couple of things like that there's also the other sort of shrine where you're in the dark constantly in the like darkened forest those things are just those are just magical and it's not like what's cool about that example too alex is if you bring the master cycle into that forest it lights up everything oh my gosh they did that on my master on my master mode game play through and i've got the master cycle and i didn't even think of it that's so funny last night when i was playing i was driving around on the master cycle and was like how do i turn this bloody light off i didn't even think about about it's like practical purposes as a light despite it being and again it's that level of consistency it's a light it illuminates dark areas but the stupid monkey brain in my head did not make that connection it it's it's so great because like like you guys were kind of saying earlier like each each item is not only like a sword is not only just a sword um a fire source uh um a pile of logs that you throw on the ground in the goron mountains you know now just suddenly become uh a place that you can sit and rest which which happened to me last night i um i wanted to turn it to night time because i was searching for the red dragon which i i can't remember any of their names but i was oh thank you yes starts with a d yeah um so i was searching around for the dr that dragon last night and uh and yeah so i went up i was high up on a cliff and i like i threw some logs down and it instantly started on fire and i was like whoa i just i forgot that that's what happens when you're in those different parts of the of the game and it's it's these little things that even even if you've already done it before there's so many little little details sunken into the game that you're constantly just being re-surprised by things i was wearing i think i was wearing some mountain attire uh at one point and then i went down to to this um oh i was trying to run faster so i threw on the dark link outfit and and it was night time and i ended up going to the stables to go rest until morning and and the people there were totally scared of me and it's just like every single little little moment like that just puts a smile on my face just because the developers took that extra time to make the world just that much more believable and they didn't have to do any of that um just like in the same way how you how how a sword like i was starting to say a sword is not only a weapon that you can swing at someone you you can you can throw it at them you can trick them into picking it up you can um you can um you yeah you can use it as a source for lightning you can pick it up with throw it with your magnesis it's all these extra little elements that they've added that i don't want to say they they shouldn't have done it just feels like they didn't have to and they did and it makes the experience just that much more rich and and allows you to to excusably play the game for over 300 hours and and that's not the craziest thing i've heard two things there's here now when i was korok hunting i didn't want to use up on my flame arrows because there's limited quantity of them and when you're in the ice region there's a lot of corox which are just under big cubes of ice and you've got to melt them so what i did was i just equipped my flame sword i didn't use it i just held it and that works as a heat source and you stand next to the icicles it melts them so you're losing up none of your inventory but you're just utilizing what you have and it's so clever it also keeps you warm in a mechanical sense it keeps you warm yeah it doesn't like do mega things but i'm fairly certain the great flame sword keeps you warmer than the normal flame sword i'm i'm really not certain about that but it sounds right in my head so it must be right it makes sense it's cool yeah it it it just does do your point about darkling too um zeon i remember discovering not that long ago if you're standing on a table and you talk to someone most npcs will call you out on it they'll be like hey i'm not gonna talk to you if you're standing on a table yeah if you go to like um to terrytown and stand on one of the star on the uh the market stalls and talk to someone they won't sell you things i'm i'm playing the game right now i'm going to tarrytown and i'm going to see whether this is the real deal oh i have a breath of the wild confession i still have not gotten nearly anywhere with terrytown that breaks my heart i haven't found the is it the brothers is it just terry's i don't remember exactly what you have to go find but i have to i haven't found them some people oh yeah yeah okay and i i refuse to use a strategy guide so i've just been like letting it happen and i haven't i haven't found him yet would you accept some some friendly advice um i'm not going to write it down but i'll i'll try to keep it from memory that that i see and that's the thing is i've wanted oh my god sorry i've got a i've got metal things equipped and there's lightning happening i need to change oh no i'm like bow as well god damn so so when i so quick quick side note here um before we get back to terrytown when so earlier i don't even remember when it was last year but i replayed the original legend of zelda and i've i've started that game a few times and never really put my whole effort into it i've probably played halfway through and just stopped every time and then uh philip summers he created a hand-drawn game guide and we did a video on that in an article and it kind of gave me a reason to go back and play the game and and i always think about what it would what it must have been like to experience different things in different moments like one of my favorite things to think about is like how when the original alien movie came out apparently they didn't advertise it by showing off the actual alien or anything so anybody who went into the movie and saw was really scared by the alien because they had no idea what was what was coming out of that film yeah i think the original trailer for alien i i think i have but it's probably once and then i probably watched 10 other videos afterwards it is like incredibly minimalist like it tells you nothing about the film like to a ridiculous degree where it's just like are they advertising a film or like uh anything else a pack of cards i mean that's a terrible example but it no and that and sorry go on i was about to make your point i think so go ahead yeah yeah and so you know like the original legend of zelda has kind of um it kind of it just has that mystery about it where you know back then you don't you didn't have games like breath of the wild where the detail alone catches you a game like zelda on the nes had details um riddled all over the place but now our our attention spans are uh you know we're we're not um we're not used to to running around and exploring a game like that because that's we have way more epic things but but i wish that i could have lived in a time where you know we were we were standing around on the playground and chatting trading secrets about the original zelda or in the break room because i i hear stories about people doing that back in the day and breath of the wild is his base can for a lot of people can be that now i remember i was at a tattoo shop with um with a friend years ago and uh the the guy behind the counter was playing zelda and while while my friend was getting a tattoo i went up uh throughout the throughout the session because we were there for a while and we just chatted about the game and it's it's such a special thing that um that a game can can like not just transcend um so many different just different cultures and age groups and and different people and we all kind of like pokemon or just i guess that's just the special thing with video games in general and and that's is that it they all just bring us together and i think that's the thing that i love most about breath of the wild and why i haven't used a guide is because i love like you know i've learned so much just sitting here chatting with you guys about this game that i didn't already know and um it's just it's so crazy like how why why is this game so big how did they do it not using a guy i feel is so important like i i definitely went to um the goron town the wrong way so what i did was i didn't get any uh like elixirs to negate any um like fire or anything what i did was got lots and lots of food i climbed up death mountain and i was on fire the whole time going to downtown i was flaming i was just running as fast as i could trying to find out what the town was i'm pretty sure you guys probably didn't do that but the fact that you can do that then when you finally get there you can buy uh actual heat resistant armor um it's just such a fond memory because i know i was doing it wrong but the fact the fact you can do it though is what makes it special yeah the game doesn't reprimand you or anything for doing anything wrong because there's pretty much no wrong way to do anything in the game incidentally i've just got to palace and he's told me to hurry up and get down from standing on the table and i think what you were saying about um you know sort of like the idea of talking about a game like the original legend of zelda zeon i think that's the sort of thing that i had with the original pokemon games you know the the playground chatter and that is something that you don't generally get these days but i think with breath of the wild even with the internet even with everyone finding out everything immediately it still works because it is it is so content rich to such an incredible degree that there's no way that everyone can possibly know everything there's there's probably stuff that nobody has found yet still despite the game being what nearly three years old now is it three or four years old now in two months four years old and we're still just finding out you can feed bloody squirrels yeah i think it was last year that i and people people debate whether this is actually true or not but i discovered that uh lawlin village is uh outside island from wind waker and um whether it really is that's up for debate but the layout is so similar like you got that giant tower in this in the middle of the town and the houses are near identical places to that game and the fact just that small reference was packed into this village that by the way a lot of people haven't even seen whenever you talk about northland village people are like wait which is that one i've never been there before it happens so often i i love lowland it's an entirely pointless village arguably it serves no major purpose in the game but again the sort of village just sort of just sort of rich and beautiful and pointless you know and it's but it's just there and it's got a culture and you can find fishing spears that are rubbish absolutely terrible weapons but you can pick them up you can use them as weapons if you like and they're slightly better than a broom and there's oh there's gay it's just so dense it doesn't it it's a very confident game because the developers were probably fairly confident and they didn't care that ninety percent of people won't see probably fifty percent of the game maybe more yeah if you look at achievements for games you will see how few people complete games i finished uh near automata not that long ago and on xbox i think the achievement for getting the final ending is around four percent it's tiny half 96 percent of players did not get through the entire game wow and with breath of the wild we don't have those stats but it's going to be similar to that for sure um but the fact that all that stuff is there in the first place is what makes it just so uh it's just the reason we're talking about this today it's just there's so much to talk about there's so much to discover and um it's part of the reason why breath of the wild too despite not knowing a thing about this game i'm sold like there's no there's nothing that could unsell me on that game no i i agree it's just i i don't i don't know what they could do wrong how much they could get wrong in order for breath of the wild to to be not at the very least a passable game unless they like even if they stop making open world or something like they've just breath of the wild they got so much right they took so long with it as well that they clearly refined and you know sort of how many how many games realistically can boast having you know a development cycle that long and oh we had all these ideas and not just have people going well that'd be nice but you know we don't really have the time they were just like ah we'll just delay the game three times you know because it was originally supposed to come out in 2015. what was it uh 2015 eventually came out in 2017 of course that's that's a big delay for a game that originally had whilst not a concrete release date of release year that's um that that that's that's a bold move but i don't think we'd be talking about this game now in this way if they hadn't delayed it no and they hyped it for so long too they announced it alongside wind waker hd and they basically gave us this powerpoint presentation where it's like with the next game we're going to break conventions please be excited for it and then we didn't hear about it for a long time but yeah the confidence that they admitted in doing that is just so uh like no other publisher or developer can do that no it's a well i mean i'd i'd love to be proven wrong of course but i've never seen any any publisher take nearly the risks that would be involved in making a game like breath of the wild and it's not just the gameplay but everything about it the style the control the damage the aggression no that's robot walls um that's a reference no one will get i'll cut that out hey you leave it in if you want someone will get it the richness of the game play the interactiveness every single element plays off everything else and i just just wouldn't happen it just wouldn't happen please prove me wrong developers because i want more games like this i'm going to bring up one criticism that i don't agree with by hearing i kind of want to hear zeon's take on this actually so a lot of bigfoot sorry i've just discovered if what i just got a corox seed by hanging on a wall and it refreshed my stamina oh what that's like a run strand well i don't know because the amount of time it takes to get a corox seat but even so what god breath of the wild damn that's interesting yeah john you were saying i want to bring up a criticism that i hear quite often that i don't agree with myself but i kind of want to hear zeon's take on this um okay okay a lot of people feel that breath of the wild story was underwhelming and that that that single player aspect of the game the core story didn't live up to expectations now i can agree in some aspects that the story wasn't as grand as some other zelda games however i feel like when you spend that long in a game and the hour the the the story the hour count for the story occupies maybe 10 hours it's not a very long single-player event probably more than that like more like 40 perhaps but in the grand scheme i feel like that is a very minimal amount of the game does it matter that that part's underwhelming when the rest of it's so good i think it's a tough thing because i think if you you're right when you compare how much you how much time you actually sink into the game and thinking about like last night when i played for an hour hour and a half or whatever i didn't experience really any story at all i i shot a dragon i got it scale i dropped it in a fountain that i hadn't already done the the statue talked to me a little bit i talked to some of the there was yeah well i mean i'm not criticizing i'm just saying isn't it wonderful how you know you've played the game yeah however long and you still hadn't done that oh yeah that's true that's true and um but yeah i didn't experience any story at all you know i talked to beedle a little bit and i think when you look at it from a from a perspective of being immersed in the world um somewhat like i've heard i had an old co-worker when he played red dead he would sit down and he would ignore the rest of the world and he would treat it like like a role-playing experience and i think breath of the wild does a great job in that regard of making you feel like you actually exist in in the in hyrule and um but one of my favorite games is majora's mask and that game i feel like is is is the way that it is because of its story and i feel like breath of the wild doesn't really capture that same sort of magic and so i don't think like for me i i don't i don't know if i necessarily wish that breath of the wild had more story because if i was running around and and i had you know um a companion character constantly nagging me about going and hunting or hunting down this this dragon to go find the scale and do this mission i'm not sure if i would feel as immersed in the world but but at the same time i do i do sort of miss um of just um i do sort of miss that i guess from from the game as well so i don't really i think i do i think i do want more story from breath of the wild too because we'll always have the the standard breath of the wild to come back to um but uh but it's it's an interesting topic because i don't yeah i i don't think they made the wrong decision by not including so much story but it's i can see why not everybody is is happy about it because i i go back and forth on the topic but what do you guys how do you feel about it well it's interesting that you bring up majora's mask because whilst i agree majora's mask has a very deep narrative to it i think it's actually closer in some regards to breath of the wild than maybe i've ever really thought about before because although yes it does have this deep narrative and lots of stuff happens and not a lot happens if you don't interact with the world but that it's kind of that kind of parallels with breath of the wild in the sense that what everything you do is essentially of very sort of little consequence because you have to go back in time because you have to reset things and breath of the wild everything you do is generally of very little consequence you will sometimes do things that have an impact on other people's lives but you never really get to see the full picture of it and it's the same with breath of the wild in the sense of i suppose the biggest thing you do apart from the main story which you can do in what i don't know what the speed current speed run record is but like you can just run up and defeat ganon like right away with a broom um but you know generally apart from that the biggest thing that you do i think is is probably tarrytown and realistically what do you do you built a town and some people have somewhere to live that's nice some people get married but but but that's it it has no greater impact on the rest of the world in the same way that i suppose any of our lives have no great impact on the rest of the world i'm getting philosophy philosophical now i think another parallel between those two you need to play near alex you too alex i think you resonate highly i think another parallel between majora's mask and breath of the wild too is neither of them really thrive in dungeons like they're both they're both fine sure but majora's mask is better when you dive into the characters and the world and you properly delve into their side quests the dungeons themselves they're fine i wouldn't say they're as good as ocarina in fact a lot of them i don't think of that great but the game itself thrives when you're diving further in breath of the wild likewise um the divine beasts again they're fine they're not the highlight of the game um i feel like both of those games are better when they're not trying to be traditional zelda i agree wholeheartedly i think the um in the same way as you said with majora's masters i mean i i don't think we're gonna have much argument if i were to say the best quest in that game is the couple's mask oh no not sure i mean that is um that is easily one of if not the highlight of the game it's just you know this wonderful deep story that is genuinely moving at times as well and there is so much you learn about it and it yeah at the end it's a very little consequence because you know the whole resetting time and everything but it is a genuinely moving story and something i didn't fully appreciate until i was well not as old as i am now but holder certainly when i was younger i just thought hey this is a long mission um i still really enjoyed it but i suppose i didn't really know what it was specifically i couldn't put in a you know a point as to what it was that made me enjoy it so but it is just so wonderful because it's about the characters and you get a lot of that in breath of the wild it's about the characters i wouldn't say it was um as deep as um as majora's mask by any stretch of the imagination but it's that same sort of small scale um involvement there's small scale stories stories about genuine people and characters that i don't think you really got in things like ocarina of time or you know links awakening maybe i mean maybe link's awakening a bit but you know we're sort of getting into sort of details and you know something like twilight princess it was nearly always about the grand scale and i'd whilst the grand scale is fun i don't think it's the best i'm reminded of that one tiny mission um where you bring together a gerudo and a hylian buy that heartland oh i love that one it's it's so small but it just it just feels so powerful you know it's it's all these things that come together they're not grand they they don't really set the world on fire nothing you do has major consequence but when these when these small things come together it just feels cozy and the fact that the the guy tries to reward you and he gives you like 20 rupees and she's like is that all i'm worth there's a real character in there real intrigue it's not just you know sort of a standard you know it's not just like a dialogue box where he says oh here i'll give you 20 rupees and she says is that all i'm worth that would still be fun but the fact you actually received the 20 rupees and so you yourself are sort of thinking like you cheap get and then it changes and then you get additional rupees afterwards that's that's the level of detail the fact that it's an actual interaction within and plays off the way that the game rewards you and the reward system that's that that just it i i love that every single time every single time i come across the heartlake or heart pond whatever it is i'm always just like oh yes this one again i think i forget how funny this game is like when you're in the grudo town and you go up to the seals and like you say something like let's seal the deal or like what's another one let you talked to the guy um and he's talking about the master sword he's like oh there was a hero 100 years ago and one of your options is i am he there's there's some brilliant dialogue in here it's proper mimi isn't it in a way better than triforce heroes though like the dialogue garden there's a fight there's a fine line and they manage to ride it perfectly that's one thing that i really hope and speaking of story and uh and all just like the lovable characters um i really hope that breath of the wild too just takes that another step further since now that we we have a staple gameplay formula which of course nintendo is probably changing up anyways i just really hope they put more time into some of the the side quests because i think i i i personally put majora's mask sort of on this pedestal for its side quests like i i don't love the the game for it's it's mainline story it's everything else that surrounds it and and breath of the wild it does have a lot of that um but i felt that the some of the side quests not that i mean they're not i don't want to say that they're not important um because they they definitely are to the experience but they didn't affect me as much as as they have in in majora's mask as an example um and um and i really want to see more just just more just more side quests where you you feel like it wasn't done in 20 minutes or um because i guess i think that that's one thing that some of them felt a little bit a little bit shorter and and uh and i i want them to feel like a more a more proper adventure i guess like the couple's mask for example because that takes you a long time to get through and i i can't i'm trying to think i mean i guess terrytown from what i've heard is a pretty grand experience but um but i i still haven't done it myself so i guess i can't say well i think there are enjoy finding 78 rush rooms you have to do wait who did you have to do that for someone or is that yeah there's one person who's like i need 70 rush rooms go find them formula not all side quests are equal some of them aren't the best i'll be honest there um i do feel like though all of them kind of lend themselves to the ever moving structure of the gameplay like with the restrooms for example you don't have to stay in one place you can pick those up throughout the entire game and you're fine doing that um and i understand your point exactly zeon um i think having a grand scope side quest that takes longer would be good but i also don't necessarily know if it works that well with breath of the wild because all these side quests are brief i think that's just to keep you moving the entire time yeah that's a good point and i suppose the town or like you know in in something like majora's mask you're the your land to explore is you know is much smaller and you don't have as many things to um i don't want to say waste time with but but to spend your time on so in that game i mean they are two completely different games in that regard where the the side quests in my opinion make the game they are the reason to play um we're breath of the wild the the exploration is there the story um i don't i don't want to say it takes a back seat um but uh but it it is not the it's not the focal point for from my from my perspective at least the you know just playing the game and experiencing its world as the as alex would say the meat of the matter can i just say he definitely didn't he definitely didn't just tell me to say that no it definitely didn't cut that part out i just want to say can i just say kilton this mad little goblin person who sort of goes that's a piece he's terrifying until you encounter him well yeah i mean like i'm fairly certain you see him you see like the back of his head and it looks quite menacing and that just happens to be like absolutely a mask or something he's wearing backwards he turns around he's a goofy little bugger who hit this little moustache and he sort of goes and he he has his own currency because he loves monsters so much i just you don't really know what's going on with him but you still you still trade him as parts anyways what does he do with those parts we'll never know maybe he eats them maybe he just adorns his his balloon with them i don't know i've given him so many bokoblin fangs i don't quite know what he's going to do with them but he loves monsters to the point that he's introduced a new currency which is used nowhere else and realistically it's of very little consequence because you're still quote unquote selling items monster parts which you would likely do anyway for rupees to get specific things but you you do it and you get mon and you use that monster then buy things from him it's he's the tom nook of breath of the wild because he he you're getting mon from him so that you can get stuff that he sells by giving him mon back it's it it's it's it's illogical and it's wonderful and you've got all these recipes you can make egg for example and you can make a cake and you can make spicy rice and i love i love the cooking system i think it's wonderful i do wish there were more recipes like more oh well yeah i mean i did i did find you know sort of i think it was uh sugar um sugarcane butter egg and wheat and you make a cake like i guessed that and that was so good that was just that was it because that's what you do in real life you put those ingredients together and you get an egg not an egg a cake you get a cake and it translates over here and yeah you can find it out but i think it's fairly subtle as well and you fight new recipes just by seeing posters on the wall and you're like oh combine those ingredients i make the thing above it and it doesn't ever spell it out to you for those ones there are some where it does absolutely some people will say hey can you make me a monster cake and you can make a monster cake but so many so many just like you can make i swear you can make like risotto or something you can make pretty much anything and you can also just cook five mighty bananas together to make a really overpowered meal um or indeed one one hearty radish seriously one hearty radish the most overpowered recipe in the game fried wild greens full health back yeah and there is something to be said too about you know walking into a a stable and seeing a poster on the wall and and the game like like you said it i mean it shows you how to make it but it doesn't add a recipe instantly to your inventory it it makes you actually figure it out on your own and it just adds to that sort of immersion factor of the game and i love how dynamic the dialogue of the characters are too to bounce off what you're saying about uh kilton is that his name i always forget i always want to say okay keaton keaton that's that's majira's mask you're back onto that one exactly i know um but when i was at the stable i was talking to the one of the guards that was there and he mentioned that kilton was in the surrounding area so i like i quick walked outside and like took a glance and i was like no i'm not here for that i'm gonna i'm gonna do my thing i'm gonna go to sleep but it it's great how the game is constantly changing around its world it the the game believes the world is real and it just makes it all the more better for the player what i love about this discussion is with any other zelda game i think you kind of talk about moments like in ocarina of time we'll be talking about the time when you go to the bottom of the world and it's all spooky down there or when you go to lord jabba jabu's belly and you carry around the the the princess aura and that yeah that's fine that's all great but we're talking about the minute gameplay details i think that's kind of the difference with breath of the wild is you make your own path you do everything yourself so what stands out is playing it rather than experiencing what they want you to experience i think that's just that's the key thing this discussion has just brought to life that breath of the wild is something for you rather than something that everyone experiences the same i i don't think anyone can have the same ex any two people can have the same experience i i just i just do not think it's possible because the game has so many variables the game world is so huge but not so huge as to be like painfully big i think that would be uh that would be a mistake if they were to make it any bigger than it really is you know as it stands it might be a bit too much i could be wrong i'm not a game designer i'm not the man who has the perfect game in his head i but i i think that they have just there have been so many so many areas where they could have fallen flat where they could have maybe done too much or not enough and i think that they have balanced everything so to a degree that i didn't even think was reasonably possible i mean obviously you know you could argue that there are areas where the game is slightly imbalanced maybe you feel that the weapons break too soon that's not uncommon and i think those are valid arguments i wouldn't say i agree with them but that doesn't mean that they're not valid but when you look at the complaints for breath of the wild they're all very very minor with a few exceptions there'll be some people for whom the game just doesn't work but it's like oh well i didn't you know i i wish the climbing was a bit faster i wish you didn't slip down in the rain that's a common one but you know what it's like okay is that is that your biggest problem with this massive open world game is that during one kind of weather you can't climb things efficiently is that the biggest complaint you have about this 300 hour game that's that's going to count for something and that's exactly me i mean my biggest complaint is that the guardians get a bit trivialized after 300 hours and i think that's this that's that's what makes this game so good is that i think this is my favorite game just period same um full stop and i i have things i can criticize about it and but those things just they don't matter that much but the bigger thing is how is breath of the wild two possibly going to top this the breath of the wild is now a top tier brand and they're following it up um that that's something you can't just do iteratively um this game is set a precedent for redefining what zelda is and if they just do it again i don't know if that's gonna have the same impact it will still be good but the impact won't be the same um so just imagining how on earth are they gonna not not reimagine again how on earth are they gonna follow this up i can't even begin to comprehend what they're gonna do i mean i'm sure we've got some ideas that maybe we'll be you know potentially looking into in a future video but yeah we should do that it's your speculation there's nothing we can garner about how they're going to top this whether they're even able to top this i mean i'm sure nintendo are over the moon about breath of the wild but the developers are maybe going oh god we've set the bar really high because every other open world game that i've gone to play now i i i'm still able to enjoy them i'm not going to suggest there are rubbish now but i have absolutely been spoiled by breath of the wild it has spoiled open world games for me i enjoy skyrim i really do but i i don't enjoy it like i used to because it's not it's not like breath of the wild it doesn't it it's i i think i think an analogy in my head for breath of the wild compared to other open world games other open world games it's like driving around a test track you're given the keys and you drive this car around and around in circles and make you know twists and turns and it's really exciting but you do it a few times and you know you start to see the same corners and you know you start getting things getting a bit samey breath of the wild is like being given a dune buggy and having this just this colossal expanse of which to drive around it's not a track it's not linear in the slightest it's just just go just go and you sort of think and do what just go you'll find something to do and you do and everything is just bloody marvelous so last night when i when i sat down to go play i i i had mixed feelings about picking it back up because i was being like like i mentioned before i was being dropped in kind of a random area and i didn't know what to do and i have a lot of a lot of the shrines done and i've done a good majority of the game but there's still little things here and there and i was trying to think of should i open my map and look around and try to find a destination to warp to or what and eventually i did after exploring a little bit i went to an area that seemed unfamiliar and um and i found the i found one of the the shrines where you're supposed to drop the dragon scale and and like i said i hadn't done that one yet somehow and so i from reference of from where i i looked at the map and i tried to remember where i had seen that dragon and i went to the area that i thought it was in um and uh and that in that same time that's when i re-experienced dropping a log on in in the uh the fiery areas and it it started on fire and it able to it was it allowed me to get to night time so i could see the dragon and i was exploring the area that i thought it was in and i encountered a lionel and i i started just i i haven't played this game in a while so a lionel was was a pretty terrifying thing to me which is kind of nice because like you said john guardians are are not as scary in the later game but but lionel's still just they crush me into the ground and because they're just they're so fast and i think this might have been a silver lionel um and uh but yeah so i was fighting this lionel like trying to decide if i if i actually wanted to take it down or if i wanted to continue my pursuit of trying to find the dragon and all of a sudden i look up and see like i can see on the top my screen there's just a bunch of fire and i'm like is this from the lionel that it shoots something i don't remember lionel's having fire arrows and it's literally the dragon that i was searching for so while i'm fighting with this with this lionel i i shoot up an arrow quick i actually hit the dragon a scale falls down i'm i'm rushing away from the lionel because i'm running out of hearts and i'm too lazy to open up my menu and actually heal myself i grab the scale and i just teleport it out of there but it was such a rush to experience all of that all in just one string and and it was so natural and with with a game that we've sunken so many hours into it it just doesn't feel like you should be able to find these these constant surprises over and over again and um and i was utterly amazed by just how how the experience was and um and it's something i'm going to be thinking about for a while now just because it was so so organic and so rich i just yeah it blew my mind that it was it was such a magical thing that all came together that i that i happened to find the dragon in the spot that i thought it was and i was having this epic battle at the same time blowing through my my ancient weapons and my i wasted a couple royal bows and it was just such a such a cool thing and and i bet we all have stories like that too which is like you said um like both of you said too with with a game like ocarina of time if we were discussing that right now between each other we would probably be coming to talk about our our favorite moments from in the game and how we experience them but but here we're coming to the table with new experiences themselves and and that's the the best part about the game is it just never it's never over i think that about sums up the experience really doesn't it i think i i mean i think in theory we could sit here for another couple of hours and continue talking about things i mean i'm sure the stuff we haven't even touched upon like using melons to push down switches um which is something that i discovered again over the christmas period you don't need like weighted objects you can just drop melons they're good for it as well but we i think maybe we need to sort of knock it on the head and it's been it's been wonderful gushing about breath of the wild with you two and um and thank you to all the people who are still here somehow thank you so much for watching if you like this video then why don't you go to the comments and tell us your favorite thing about breath of the wild and hit that subscribe button that's dull but it'll it'll do and be sure to check out nintendolife.com for all sorts of lovely nintendo related content thank you again for watching bye bye yeah see you later like every time i want to say something dumb now it's just in the sonic the hedgehog voice and i think it's i think it's both of your fault

Channel: Nintendo Life

Views: 171,468

Rating: 4.9290586 out of 5

Keywords: Nintendo Life, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Switch, NX, New 3DS, Nintendo UK, Alex, Jon, Zion, breath of the wild 2, botw 2, botw, botw secrets, analysis, discussion, chat, history, 3 years later, 4 years later, good, bad

Id: T4EIDtZ1aqY

Length: 62min 4sec (3724 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021