This should get its own thread I guess, right?
Anyway, I’m terrible at it, who has some tips for a newbie? I’ve only played for about 45 minutes, and in that time I’ve made a little bit of progress in the game (got some diamonds, some equipment, hit some Sheikah Stones), but I feel like I’ve made no progress at all in how to approach things. I just get overwhelmed every time I walk into a new screen with seven different things dancing awkwardly in my direction to murder me.
We talked about it a bit in the Switch thread, but I think you wanna spend your early diamonds on a spear and heart containers. This is definitely the kind of game that is hardest early on and almost too easy later because you eventually have a ton of health. Both heart containers and the spear give you a little more room to make mistakes.
I also found Zelda’s shield ability really useful early on, much more than Link’s. If you’ve got stamina and time it right it not only protects you but reflects damage back so it’s worth figuring it out.
I haven’t seen you play but I did watch a couple streams on twitch and it seems like a lot of people mash buttons too quickly. Maybe try to slow it down and take an enemy or two at a time. And clear every screen to get those diamonds! I’m swimming in those things now.
I’ve also only played 45 minutes, but I played a lot of Crypt of the Necrodancer. What helped me a lot with that game was reading the designer talk about how he wanted to make a roguelike with turns passing in real-time, not a rhythm game. It just that the rhythm game is a really convenient (and fun) wrapper to express the passage of time.
In other words, think about the maps as puzzles rather than a rhythm / reaction game. Enemies usually have at least one specific move pattern that completely defeats them and you’re just trying to figure out where on the screen you can do it. The rhythm part of the game is really forgiving. There’s one action per beat, but it doesn’t really matter where in the beat you do it as long as you do it before the next beat. Getting out of the rhythm mindset and into the puzzle mindset helped me a ton with CotND and this game seems to have amped that up a lot with single-screen map design.
Another nicety in this toolbox is enemies will not start moving on a screen until you move. So you can spend a minute looking at all of them and making a plan safely as soon as you enter a screen, then try and execute it.
I prefer Link’s shield ability because you can keep it up while you walk and you don’t have to precisely time it for anything, it just works. It still reflects physical objects (not fire), but so far I don’t care about reflecting fireballs.
That’s cool. Is Link’s shield directional? I thought I was blocking and got hit from behind, while Zelda’s blocks everything. But if that’s not the case then the character choice matters even less.
Reflecting laser beams is pretty good, though.
It’s directional, but I’m always walking towards the aggressor. Also, it can knock the shield out of certain unit’s hands, and push and corner other problematic guys. I don’t know their names off the top of my head, but the red knight guys and some lizard guts with spears.
And I haven’t encounters the lasers yet myself.
Playing Crypt of the NecroDancer is a huge benefit here, as all the movement patterns are cribbed from that game, and the visual noise here actually makes it harder to parse what’s happening vs. the very simple sprite art in CotND. Like, the spiders move on diagonals only, which is hard to tell, especially with the weird Zelda fake 3d perspective.
I would probably enter a single room over and over again and isolate a single monster at a time that you want to learn. Practice individuals until you can beat them consistently, before tackling combinations. If there are rooms where you can’t pick your battlefield, if ore it and come back. There’s nothing stopping you from running away all over the place until you get some better gear/ more hearts.
Some weapons are just easier than others. Range really helps you in the beginning because it gives you a margin for error. I find the AoE (broadsword, flail) weapons harder to use than the dagger, because I can never judge exactly when I’ll attack. Spear, longsword, or rapier are all great. If you can upgrade with titanium or obsidian, definitely do that.
I find the blocking and reflecting timing very hard to grok. Fortunately, they’re rarely necessary. Actually, I find the timing for almost all of the subweapons kind of difficult, but I’m used to the more limited verb set in NecroDancer.
This game does seem entirely overwhelming for new players, with the various boots and rings and such. The fact that you can just run away into more dangerous screens makes that even worse.
Buying the spear has helped. I didn’t do that before because I didn’t realize it stuck around; I assumed it was lost on death or slowly used up like the shovel and torch.
Yeah it could do with a better indication of what is a consumable or will wear out on the shop screen.
Glass weapons wear out. All others are forever.
I played through it once (with Zelda), and have been running a couple of Ironman runs with Link. The game does get much easier at the end when you have two rows of hearts and multiple bottles of potion. I basically brute forced my way through the ending, because, well, because I could. Once you’ve found, e.g. a fairy, the witch, and the lute, it’s kind of impossible to die, which also means that rupees lose all meaning, because you have several thousand because there’s little to spend them on and you never die.
The combination of iterative RNG roguelike and overworld map progression is a little weird. The RNG maps means that you can get really lucky or really unlucky on your starting location and what’s around it. For later runs, that isn’t so much of an issue, but for the first run, it means you can go the wrong way and hit harder enemies right off the bat, which seems like it would be frustrating. Even on later runs getting a weapon right away can be a big benefit in the early game.
I’m not interested in speed running or anything, but I’m going to play through at least one full game as Link, and I may play around with some of the subweapons a bit just to figure out what they’re for. There’s also apparently a couple of hidden characters, so I’ll probably unlock those.
I wasn’t tremendously interested in this game until I realized that the soundtrack is composed Danny Baronowsy (Crypt of the Necrodancer, Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac). Baranowsky + Zelda music makes it almost an instant buy for me without even hearing the soundtrack. After listening to some of the music, I’m buying this as soon as I get home.
I just had a chance to sit down and finish the game. It was an enjoyable experience. I don’t think it’s anywhere near as great as some reviewers make it out to be, but I’m glad I bought it.
My first hour or so playing the game I must have died 20 times, but once it clicked the rest of the game felt like easy mode right up until the final dungeon.
I did not get much use out of any of the tools and utility items that I found, but that’s probably based on the order that I found them in. I never really needed a boomerang AND a hook shot as an example, because they more or less did the same thing for me (except in one specific instance where I had to use one for traversal). However I would have used the boomerang more if I hadn’t found the hookshot first. And other items I never used it all and I never quite figured where I would want to use them.
I don’t think I 100% of the game, because I think I was still missing one heart at the end. And there was one Gadget I never located, but I didn’t try very hard to go looking for it. I was mainly just playing through the story and unlocking everything that I found along the way.
Early on my favorite weapon was the flail. But once I upgraded my weapons and found several other variants I ended up liking the spear, which seems to be getting universal acclaim from most players.
I’m not sure exactly how randomized the game is, or what to expect on a second playthrough. I don’t know if each tile set in the overworld is handcrafted and they’re just mixed up, or if each tileset is procedurally generated and then mixed up. And it looks like the dungeons are 100% procedurally generated, so I think I know what to expect there.
I’m really liking this game a lot overall but…
I agree that the difficulty curve is kind of a mess. It’s not even just a matter of getting the hang of the enemies and the flow of the gameplay. At some point (for me, at about the 1/3 point of the game) you’ll have 8 hearts and a weapon that does damage from several spaces away. The monsters haven’t gotten much harder and I’ve already learned most of their quirks. Even if you die, you’ll come back to life with your super sweet weapon and heart containers.
I know that the roguelike formula wasn’t going to work for a Zelda game like this and the difficulty had to be tuned for Nintendo’s mass audience, which is fine. It’s just that the game is really hard when you start out and I’m not sure the difficulty tuning is going to appeal to anyone. Some people are going to get very frustrated and quit the game early, and those that soldier through it are probably going to find the game too easy at some point fairly early on.
It seems like the overworld is made up of more or less a fixed set of tiles that are arranged randomly. There are probably more tiles than map squares, but some are either mirrors or made of the same components, so on subsequent runs you’ll see some that feel new-ish but they’ll all be familiar.
Random zelda is a thing:
This has some of the same potential, but I don’t think it quite gets there. I wish that maybe the tools available were randomized too? There aren’t enough gates, so you have too much freedom. With some caution, it’s possible to just sweep the entire overworld so that you have all the tools, before approaching any of the dungeons, at which point you also have like 8 hearts and upgraded weapons, and so the dungeons are kind of trivialized.
E.g. I don’t know why I’d ever use the Rito Feather, or the Deku Leaf. But I’d like to be forced to do so.
Similar to the indie / roguelike origins, I think that repetitions / permadeath is probably the “proper” way to play this.
It does feel like a proper Zelda game though, I love the mashup-ness of the components, with LTTP overworld, OOT era races (Gerudo / Goron), Minish Cap character designs, BoTW item degradation, etc. I’m glad Nintendo is being so playful with their licenses.
I agree that I kept expecting harder enemies as I ventured into new areas and outside of a few examples, they just aren’t there.
I finished this game and then went right back into it on permadeath mode and then finished that. I think I’m done with this for a while now, but I really had a blast with it. Easily one of my very favorite Switch games.
Permadeath mode was a really great experience. The fact that the difficulty is so front loaded I think actually helped make it less frustrating since you aren’t investing a lot of time in each run. The first 2 hours are quite difficult and I died a lot of times. It takes a ton of exploration before you can get a couple heart containers added to your life total. There are lots of deadly creatures all over the map that can kill you easily. It’s a slow process to get a decent life total, a better weapon, and some bottles to fill with potions. Once you get over the hump and get strong enough to survive the only real problem is a few of the bosses. I accidentally went after the hardest one first – the Glockenspiel Hydra and only very narrowly won that battle. It’s a really good length game where you really feel your power grow as you explore but the game doesn’t last long enough to drag once you’re too powerful to die. It’s challenging but very achievable, unlike many roguelike type games.
I do wish there was a bit more variety, especially given that there is quite a bit of Zelda to draw from. A pool of like 8 temple/boss types from which each run picks 4, for instance, would have been neat.
I wonder if there’s a plan for an expansion or anything like that. It seems like they might have left space to add more characters, and the Master Sword isn’t even in the game, afaict.
If you’ve been on the fence about Cadence of Hyrule on the Switch, now is your chance to test it out free. There’s now a demo for the game in the eShop.
You can also start the install to your device from here.