This game just keeps on giving. I wrapped up a few quests last night, obtained the Master Sword, and am exploring a vast desert now. The shift from night to day is as amazing as other’s have talked about, not just in terms of how meaningful the temperature stuff is, but in the visual cues as well.
I should check out how to pull off screen shots from the game. as there are so many really pretty vistas.
It’s a button on the controller. It’s right below the - button (the map). Once you hit that button, it snaps a screen and you can minimize the game, go into Media, and then if you link to facebook or twitter, upload the selected screenshot to there.
Ah yes, I knew about the button - didn’t know about those next steps. so I guess I need to maybe make a dummy twitter account to post them to. Thanks!
You can also just pull them off the SD card if you have a reader. And an SD card, obviously. :)
Drained the lizard!
For those of you who are completing the memories before beating the game make sure to visit impa after you collect all 12 but before you beat Ganon otherwise you won’t get the different ending.
After just shy of 85 hours time played, which is the longest I put into any game before wrapping it up, I saw the credits roll on Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This isn’t just the best Zelda game yet (by a wide mile); it’s one of my favorite video games of all time.
I don’t remember ever being this engaged by a title. I can’t recall when I day dreamed about a game after it came out because I was stuck at work and couldn’t be playing it. Even as I type this up, I kind of want to fire it up and keep hunting for the shrines I missed out (there are more than a few; I finished the game with 93 completed shrines out of 120)! And side quests! As many as I completed, I barely touched the actual number of delightful little stories told within the game. After 85 hours I did 71 quests out of 133. Don’t get me wrong - The Witcher 3 is still the best written and most narratively satisfying in terms of story content from main story and side quests - but the Zelda stories and the world is just… fun. It’s not mean, or dark, or “gritty” and even when things are bleak because an ancient evil has conquered and has ruled for 100 years, there is still a need to find a disguise and dress up as a woman to enter a city that won’t let men into it. Zelda got some great belly laughs out of me, on top of being just one of the most satisfying RPG experiences in awhile (it never got old finding better and better weapons and upgrading my armor - even in the last hours of the game I was finding new and amazing weapons I’d never seen before)!
This game captured me from start to finish. I rarely felt frustrated, though having a strategy guide and a map helped (and of course YouTube), it brought me pure joy to play it and just exist in its lovely world. I’ll miss Hyrule, as I doubt I’ll put much more time into it having wrapped up the main story. I do intend to try and get all 120 shrines though.
It may not be as technically incredible as The Witcher 3 or Horizon: Zero Dawn, but given the way the world and it’s inhabitants fit together, and the way height and elevation play, it’s the best crafted open world anyone has ever done, and it’s also the best looking in terms of art, in my opinion, as well.
This one game was worth the price of a new console all by itself. I haven’t been this excited about a single title in a really long time - anything else the Switch drops on me is just icing on the cake at this point, as far as I’m concerned.
I think my favorite moment of the entire game was finishing the labyrinth in the northeast corner. And finding the secret underneath. That was a tense moment.
Once you grab the diamond circlet… and all of the hundreds of guardians eyes light up, and start tracking you… I hadn’t killed one yet at that point, and I was scared shitless.
Yeah, that was an amazing moment.
I am also a massive fan of the hidden memories, in particular the final one, where you see the reason there is a field full of inactive/destroyed guardians just East of the first stable you probably found.
Wait, fucking what? I just did the Labyrinth and missed the secret…and here I was, proud of myself for getting through fairly quickly.
I love these posts. Not sure that I’ll ever pick up a Switch (when they are widely available) and have never played a Zelda game other than a couple minutes of Gamecube Wind Waker (which I thought was Walker), but if I do it’s because of posts like this. And I’m legit tempted.
Do it! I’d love to see one of my favorite series through your eyes. If nothing else it would be fascinating to see how an old hand CRPG guy reacts.
I didn’t initially grab the season pass, and it sounds like my cousin is giving me his as he’s not excited for Zelda but got it bundled from Gamestop (he hasn’t received a code yet though). Seeing this detailed I’m really glad to be picking it up.
The trial mode sounds perfect - a fun way to keep playing and having fun with the combat after beating it, but I’m very curious about the mode that will show me where I’ve been so I can check out what I’m sure are vast sections of the map my travels never took me too.
And more armor sets and items are always welcome, of course!
So I started Breath of the Wild yesterday and sunk a good 10+ hours into it. Mind dump incoming. Thoughts WIP.
I have no real Zelda nostalgia, or outright love for open world games or even Souls games for that matter, so I’ve not fallen under its spell like most folk have. I mean, I want to keep playing it but it’s not exactly blowing me away just yet.
Everything’s pretty much as I expected it to be with the biggest surprise being the emergence, y’know, like using a fire arrow on an enemy, setting it on fire then the enemy’s weapon dropping to the floor and setting the field ablaze with you and your horse in it. One of my favourite moments was knocking a Bokoblin chief’s weapon out of his hands, dashing to pick it up, then seeing the shock on his face when he had nothing to defend himself with. That kind of thing is just so great. I love the way the wind effects which direction the fire spreads too.
I’m more surprised by how annoying some fundamental things are about it given the universal raving. I mean, I’ve seen lower profile games lynched for much less.
The menus for inventory management, whether healing myself mid-combat or dropping items to pick up better ones, are needlessly long-winded. I’m only 10 or so hours in and I’m already getting sick of plunging into my menus for basic stuff. This is by far the worst thing.
I spent a couple of hours trying to take down a stone talus before bed. Probably above my ability this early (four hearts) but I nearly killed it so many times, the only thing which was giving me a headache was the camera while trying to circle it (and the hill that I kept tumbling down every time a rock hit me).
If I used target/focus camera my horse would just gallop straight towards it, killing me in no time. If the focus didn’t lock then I’d lose view of the talus altogether as the camera snapped forwards. If I used target/focus AND aiming with my bow, my horse would stay its course and the camera would lock beautifully on to the talus allowing me to circle it perfectly. That’s what I wanted from standard targeting/focus, without having to bow aim to stop suicidal horsey.
So I have two choices when fighting these things: control the camera manually which I think is unreasonable given there’s a focus button, or hold LZ (focus) and RZ (bow). The latter works but it’s unwieldy especially while L thumbsticking and tapping A to adjust speed and navigate. Add to this holding down the d-pad to select a new bow or different arrows while using the R thumbstick to cycle them, pressing B to cancel aiming if I need to (this sometimes dismounts Link if I’m not careful), pressing X to switch to melee (and having to either unhook from targeting/focus to maintain control or manual controlling the camera). It just feels needlessly cumbersome. I don’t remember Wind Waker or Shadow of the Colossus being like this.
Sprint and stealth should be the other way round. Sprint on L stick, stealth on face button. Possibly sprint toggle. Being unable to sprint and move the camera at the same time is annoying.
The controls overall just don’t feel intuitive. Dare I say awkward. Even after 10 hours I’m still feeling clumsy with basic stuff like switching gear in combat, targeting and throwing. And what’s with the ‘Near’ and ‘Far’ thing on the d-pad when you’re dropping something? That’s just weird.
I’ve spent the last 10 hours mostly doing the same sorts of things. Bokoblin camps (oh look, more explosive barrels and precariously balanced boulders…), jelly Chuchus, bats, chests with the same stones and consumables in them, ancient mechanical parts that the game insists on describing to me every time I pick them up, shrines featuring familiar (but still enjoyable) puzzles with the same scripted bits bookending them.
The voice acting doesn’t sound that great either. Hire actors who natively speak in the desired accent!
Final (minor) nitpicks: I think there’s only 3 or 4 post-death Battle Tips on the loading screen and they get very repetitive very quickly after a few deaths! I’d rather see it cycle through the same pool as when you load your save. And Link’s climbing noises are repetitive.
Things I love:
- The lovely sparse music that flirts with some of the familiar themes from the series. Very relaxing and compliments the atmosphere perfectly.
- The cooking and sizzling jingle/animation! I love that thing so much.
- The day/night and weather cycles and how they play with the lighting and colour palette of the environments. I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff. Loved it in Wind Waker and particularly Miasmata.
- Paragliding. I want to paraglide everywhere.
- Cutting down trees to make bridges.
- I noticed a big barrel I could hide in after I’d killed the nearby Bokoblins. Sob.
- Being told off for stealing the Old Man’s baked apple and axe. Shame I couldn’t give an apple back!
- The subtle sound differences between different types of gear made from different materials clinking and clunking on your back, or when you walk on different surfaces. I love that sort of attention to detail.
- Link’s rosy cheeks in the cold areas.
That sounds pretty negative, and I’m not trying to be, but I wasn’t expecting quite so many things to rub me the wrong way, particularly for such a highly praised game. Early doors yet so we’ll see what else is in store…
Go back to the shrine, and look around for a very deep hole with air coming out of it. Find out what is at the bottom.
Or you know, you could just get off your horse and CLIMB the Talus… just a thought…
If there’s one thing you should think about when playing Breath of the Wild, it’s that you should always think about it. :)
Oh man, don’t fight a Talus from horseback - you’re supposed to climb them and wail away on their mining point for profit and swift battle conclusion!
A lot of the control issues (exacerbated by having just played Horizon, personally) melt away as you get used to what Nintendo is doing with their buttons. Also, I never rode a horse except a few times - it’s super complicated and not really worth much, given how short a walk to any given point of interest the game world offers.
After 85-90 hours I never found diving into the menu and dropping a weapon to pick up a new one or eating a food item to be that frustrating, menu wise. It helps when you realize the right-stick turns the entire “page” and that you can just hold it down to the left and almost instantly get to the weapon page, little things like that which come from just playing.
I hope you can over come some of your initial frustrations, it’s really a delight!
The DLC sounds pretty bad, to be honest. Arena modes are always baby’s first DLC so I can’t really blame them. I was hoping for a more interesting hard mode though. Giving enemies more health and damage doesn’t sound very creative.
That’s okay. It sounds like the game doesn’t need DLC anyway.