Take away my gamer badge if you want, but Breath of the Wild didn’t feel like a Zelda game to me, it felt like a Xenoblade game.
It’s not a bad game at all, of course, I just don’t like it as much as say, Ocarina of Time or Windwaker.
I wasn’t a fan of the lack of real dungeons, the small pool of enemies and the even smaller pool of bosses (Bosses are usually my favorite part of Zelda). It all got very same-y fast.
I usually don’t like to complain about graphics, but I really wasn’t a fan of Breath of the Wilds art style. There was very little texture or definition to anything, which made the characters faces look like a blob of colours sometimes. I usually love cell shading too. In my opinion, Windwaker did it much better. It probably helps that Windwakers character designs complimented the style.
It also sucks that Ganon was reduced to a generic evil purple cloud without any character other then “ROAR!”. He was an interesting, intelligent and intimidating character in Windwaker (I know I keep using Windwaker as an example shut up).
I kinda miss when Zelda games had that Dungeons and Dragons kind of feel to its world, with uncanny things like redeads, wallmasters and deadhands living deep in dungeons that felt like no one had set foot in them in hundreds of years.
I hope the new Breath of the Wild is at least going to have some more variety than the first one.
EDIT: Oh, and the music. The Legend of Zelda series has some of the most memorable music of all time. However, BotW went for minimalist piano tinkling with no real memorable tracks. I struggle to think of more then one. Not saying the music was bad, but again, it just wasn’t Zelda. Zelda music isn’t supposed to be forgettable background piano ambiance.
I don’t like how all adventure games seem to be homogenising into clones of the Witcher 3. It’s a design with some severe limitations, even when executed very well.
Have you played Witcher 3 and BotW? They’re almost nothing alike in my view apart from superficial shit like “guy with sword rides horse and fights things”
Seamless open world fantasy RPG where the main gameplay loop is exploring to fight mobs to level and find crafting ingredients, occasionally finding points of interest where you fight unique variants of creatures or go through small dungeons to get special loot, when you want to move on in the story you go to a big main dungeon or boss arena. See also Elden Ring and the two latest Pokemon games.
Seems pretty similar to me.
Nah, for me the traversal in BotW makes it a totally different experience than TW3. Climbing over mountains and gliding around is so different to riding a horse along a predetermined path. The Witcher is so story-dense as well, while Zelda aggressively is not. It’s side quests are also much more engaging. BotW’s shrines and dungeons are much more about puzzle solving than the Witcher where you go in and kill everything, or maybe talk your way through.
You have a point with Elden Ring but are completely wrong about Witcher 3 imo. The main appeal there was completing the narrative content. Fighting random mobs was near-pointless, especially if fighting monsters that were a higher level which would be arbitrarily given 10xHP or whatever. The PoIs on the map were much more of a traditional “Ubisoft model” style open world.
I enjoyed Breath of the Wild a ton, but I definitely get what you mean. I do genuinely love the exploration aspect of it, but aside from that it feels very…shallow. Without the dungeons, it feels like there’s no core to the game. I could have done with a few more towns too.
All valid points but I know they’ll have future games with the classic format of dungeons and stuff, so it doesn’t irk me that this game has more bite sized stuff across landscapes. So I love it, it’s either my favorite or second favorite with Ocarina- again it’s hard to compare when the format is 50% different.
I bet even Tears is already gonna have some more deluxe dungeon areas.
Also, the thing I really loved is that they used the Zelda franchise to just suddenly butt into the open world RPG genre and just completely fix almost all the major issues with those games.
- Artificial zone barriers? Nope
- Hidden linearity? Nope
- Over leveling? Nope
- Boring travel? Nope
- The actual experience of playing and enjoying the game being completely anathema to the plot?* Nope.
*Looking at you GTA San Andreas, where you murder thousands of people to clear your name after being framed for a single murder.
*Looking at you every game with an established plot time limit that just mysteriously freezes for days weeks and months while you fuck around and play with bugs
*Looking at you every game where you need to save and/or avenge the death of your wife and daughter before you have a mental breakdown, but first let’s fuck around and play with bugs
Seriously, they literally tell you in BotW that your quest is to become a badass and to do that by leveling up basically. The thing you intrinsically want to do and which is hardly even acknowledged in a lot of RPGs.
*Looking at you every game with an established plot time limit that just mysteriously freezes for days weeks and months while you fuck around and play with bugs
Tbf from what I recall it’s sort of implied that zelda’s seal is about to break and you should probably bear calamity ganon soonish before she gets her shit wrecked, but you can dick around for in game months before bothering lol (I know I did)
Yeah that is somewhat of a time limit but they definitely establish it’s been working for 100 years and that there isn’t a hard time limit, she just woke you up because it’s getting difficult. And then they tell you explicitly to go travel about the world and get stronger so that you can kick Ganon’s ass
A lot of games will open up with like, your kid getting hauled away or whatever and you’re screaming with rage and then you dick around
A lot of games will open up with like, your kid getting hauled away or whatever and you’re screaming with rage and then you dick around
me playing fallout 4
after 6 ingame months of making settlements and collecting random crap i remembered that i had a kid lol
Counterpoint: you’re not allowed to like things in slightly different ways than me.
Anyways I’m stoked that the new Zelda seems like it’ll have some darker elements. I think my favorite zelda game might be twilight princess.
Same. it was neat for a bit but the lack of dungeons got old quick and the shrines felt like they were included as to save dev time or space on disk. I don’t regret playing it, but I came to it pretty late in it’s life cycle and had already gotten the “open world with climbing” experience from conan exiles and some VR games (climbing is apparently easy to impliment in VR and fun, so lots of devs do it).
