[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild

[Sjc1000]

The recent game in the Legend Of Zelda franchise has been a massive hit, for both fans of the series and newcomers alike. Once you play it, for even 10 minutes its very easy to see why. After over 120 hours of game play since its release I decided that I am well informed enough to make a review for the people here.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the franchise, the story behind most of the games are very similar. You play as the hero named Link who has to save Zelda the princess. Usually from Ganon or sometimes other evil forces. Each game creates a different story based around these key points, giving each different game something unique. I wont go into the story for Breath Of The Wild, people are too worries about spoilers these days.

I will only do a very brief description of some key areas of the game, with some screenshots to go with them.

What I will cover in this review.

• How it looks
• How it plays
• Small summary

How it looks:

A brief overview
As you may or may not know, Nintendo has never been one for amazing graphics. Usually they go for a cartoon style. They've done the same here, while it is not amazing detail it does look quite good, from frozen peaks to sandy deserts to forests, every area is visually appealing in this game and makes anywhere you go a special experience. Sometimes, however, you will see something extraordinary, a lake with the sun reflecting off it, a waterfall with beautiful flowers around it even heavily forested areas with light peaking through the trees. These things will implant themselves in your memory.

This is by far one of the best looking Zelda games they have made.

See for yourself
[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild
[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild
[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild

The Towns
There are many different towns, each with their own look and feel and loads of side quests to pick up. They all have somewhere to buy / sell items, sleep for the night and other things that are specific to each town.

[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild
[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild
[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild
[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild

Cinematic's
The cinematic's in the game are gorgeous. Each one very different from the last and all of them look stunning. I don't have much else to say about these, so have some screenshots.

[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild
[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild

How it plays

Exploring
You can walk, climb and glide everywhere. The game puts no physical restrictions on where you can go at any time. This creates an awesome feeling of openness. You are even able to go from the tutorial area directly to the final boss.

There is always something worth exploring just around the corner, a small puzzle, an enemy camp, a chest with some loot or some nice scenery. There are loads of things to collect such as bugs, mushrooms, different foods, weapons and other items. You will never find yourself without something to do while walking around.

[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild

Surviving
It's not exactly a survival game, but it's up to you how to play it. You can hunt deer for meat and eat it for health, cut down trees for wood to create camp fires in the rain to stay warm and dry, cook your own food to get bonuses and more health from your meals. You can also cook food for specific things like going to cold places, or hot places. Attack up, defense, electricity resistance, etc. There are loads of food combinations and they are yours to find out!

[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild
[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild

Combat
Combat is fun in this game, there are always multiple ways to take on groups of enemies. Such as rolling boulders down to kill them, shooting a fire arrow at some explosives, sneaking up and killing them with stealth. It's up to you to decide how to kill them. Figuring out the best way to defeat an enemy is really satisfying, each enemy requires different strategies.

You can dodge just before an enemy attacks to go into a 'slow time' mode, where you can get heaps of hits in. Each enemy has different timing and patterns so you will have to learn them all.

Your weapons will break after some use, this makes exploring to find more weapons all the more meaningful, the same goes for shields and bows.
You get different armour suited for taking one different situations, for example, you can get armour designed for taking on electric enemies, of flaming enemies.

You can collect different swords, spears, bows, shields, clubs, etc. Each one is handy for different situations and opponents. You are able to fight from horseback, making it easier to kill enemies with your bow, and long weapons such as spears.

All of these make good reasons to explore to find more gear so you can take on different enemies, or take on the same enemies in a different way. Slowly but surely mastering each enemy.

[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild
[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild


You will run into enemies that are too hard to face sometimes, there is absolutely no shame in running, if you can get away. The game uses these strong enemies to put limits on where you should be going, if somewhere is too hard you can come back later with better gear to get through. This feels a lot better than putting physical limitations on where you can go at any time.

[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild
[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild

Climates
As I said before, you can explore snowy peaks and deserts alike. However, if you go to a snowy area you will start to freeze to death, if you go to the desert you will start dying from heatstroke. You must cook certain foods or acquire specific clothing to handle these conditions. This is an awesome mechanic, it gives real meaning to collecting different sets of clothing and cooking different foods.

[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild

The puzzles
The puzzles themselves are unique and different for a Zelda game, this is the first time they have tried a more open feel to the dungeons and they did very well.
There are a total of 120 shrines, which are small dungeons, 4 major ones and 900 small puzzles to find and solve, each one being different and all of them have a good reason for finding and completing them with the rewards you get. Some of them are challenging, I found myself stuck a few times, but never felt like I was unable to figure out a way.


Wrapping it up
I didn't cover everything here, it's not possible to do so. Everyone's experience will be different. These are my final thoughts.

The combat is fun and challenging when you run into strong enemies, there is always another way to handle it.
Each puzzle is different than the last, they do not feel repetitive and there is always something good at the end.
Exploring is rewarding, both finding items and finding cool new areas.
The story isn't jaw dropping, but its not the major part of the game, there are loads of extra quests and exploration to do.
The music is good and even epic at times. They made it more atmospheric than previous music, so it may be a little slow and dull while you are just walking around. It does really add to the feel of the game though.
Its the first time Nintendo has done voice acting for a Zelda game, they didn't 100% nail it, but most of the characters do a good job.

This game feels like the Zelda game that Nintendo has always wanted to make, there is loads of content and if you like open world exploration or puzzle games you certainly should check it out.

This is by far, my favorite Zelda game. I hope you liked reading my thoughts about it.

[nitrix-ud]

Thanks for the review

I've started playing this zelda game a week ago, so i'm really new, but i can really say it DELIVERS, amazing game.

[Sjc1000]

It's good to see someone else enjoying the game!

[Deozaan]

I just got this game a couple days ago. I'm really liking it so far.

Maybe one day I'll figure out how to get images and videos off my Switch and I can post some.

[Deozaan]

For those who don't know, the Switch has a dedicated "capture" button which can be used to take screenshots or videos at virtually any time while the system is running. This includes while on the system menu. I've been abusing that button since I started playing Breath of the Wild, and have been capturing so many photos and videos that just 5 days into the game I reached the Switch's internal storage limit on videos and had to dig out a MicroSD card to clear out some space.

It's been over a year since the game was released, and somehow I managed to avoid spoilers--mostly by avoiding almost every bit of info about the game. So if you're like me and don't want anything spoiled, consider this your spoiler warning. That said, I'm not going to post anything that has to do with plot spoilers, so if you don't mind seeing screenshots and videos of gameplay, feel free to read on.



SPOILER WARNING!





Early on in the game I wasn't very confident in my combat skills, so I'd try to take out enemies from a distance with bombs if I could. I also wasn't sure which creatures were aggressive and would attack me on sight and which were just passive wildlife who would leave me alone. So when I slid down a hill and saw a mountain goat lower its head and start running in my general direction, I prepared for a fight. Here's a video of how that battle went:

https://streamable.com/8auhu


Later on I tried to recreate a similar scenario, and ended up with a shot I was pretty proud of at the time:

https://streamable.com/yo9l9


Here's a funny thing that happened:

https://streamable.com/2sl70


Here's a double rainbow:

[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild


Can you tell I really like using bombs?

https://streamable.com/vg2bu

Here I am, cheesing a couple of super tough enemies with bombs:

https://streamable.com/sbwz0
https://streamable.com/w4vo6


Here I'm stealing a treasure chest out from under the enemy's nose:

https://streamable.com/l9ls2


You know how they say you should never stand under a tree during a lightning storm? Yeah... It seems I never learned that lesson.

https://streamable.com/hod3r


I was trying to go inside this window:

[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild


I was really surprised by what happened when I fired an arrow at a bird:

https://streamable.com/5lu2s



I realized as I went through all the screenshots and videos that I've taken that I tend to only take screenshots during plot- or progress-specific points in the game, whereas I take videos for cool, funny, or surprising moments as well as sometimes during plot/progress-specific scenes. So I don't have much in the way of just regular screenshots where I'm just enjoying the scenery. Maybe I'll start taking more screenshots now.

I hope you enjoyed watching a few moments of the game I've been enjoying so much this week.

[Deozaan]

Ha! A funny thing just happened to me in the game:


SPOILER WARNING!





At the top of a cliff's edge, I picked up a rock which revealed a hidden Korok underneath.

https://streamable.com/jtqpo

After the Korok cut-scene, I nonchalantly tossed the rock off the cliff and unwittingly hit a sleeping Hinox I didn't know was below. (For those who don't know, a Hinox is a big monster; it's almost like a mini-boss in the game.) I was so surprised by that turn of events that I didn't think to didn't capture that part on video. But I jumped down to fight him and captured the end result of that battle.

https://streamable.com/fkxtj

Shortly after that, I was ambushed by an evil ninja (Yiga Clansmen) during a thunder storm. In this game, if you've got metal weapons equipped during a thunderstorm, you're very likely to be struck by lightning. The Yiga had a metal weapon equipped. I foresaw what was coming, and tried to keep my distance:

https://streamable.com/zl0vu

But as you can see, he teleported too close to me just as the lightning struck.

[Game] Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild

But he was killed by it, so it was a win. (See his weapon flying through the air near the top left of the image?)

[Deozaan]

I finished the game at the beginning of June. I was kind of underwhelmed.

Even though I spent a lot of time with it, and thoroughly enjoyed some aspects of it, I'm left feeling a bit disappointed in it as a Zelda game.


What I liked:


Exploring the world:

It was fun visiting new places and finding and activating (most of) the shrines and towers. The vast majority of my time was spent just looking around either on the map or through the scope, saying to myself, "I wonder what's over there!" and making a beeline over mountains, rivers, and all kinds of terrain to find out what it was. It was fun, interesting, and huge.


The Photo Compendium:

I really enjoyed filling out the photo compendium. I tend to be a collector/completionist, so it was enjoyable for me to snap photos of every new thing to fill up the logbook. This had the added effect of making it easier to find said things in the future due to the Sheikah Sensor, which came in handy from time to time.



What I didn't like:


The Combat:

Maybe I just sucked at it, but it didn't seem like there was a ton of variety in effective strategies. Or rather, I didn't feel the need for a variety of strategies because usually it was easy enough to just attack and block. It started out somewhat difficult against all but the easiest of enemies when you had only 3 hearts and crappy equipment and I died a lot because I was too stubborn to use the various health-restoring items. But there was no real consequence for dying other than having to go back to an autosave from a few minutes before, and you could abuse the system by manually saving in the middle of combat so that if you died and had to reload your save, the monsters you already defeated would still be dead, but your hearts would be restored (to three hearts). Eventually the game became incredibly easy for all but the most difficult enemies (the hardest Lynel variants), which could still kill you in 2-3 hits when you were wearing the strongest armor in the game. And once you learned their pattern they weren't very difficult; they were just time consuming and annoying if you messed up and got hit a few times during the long battle with them.

Combat has always been such a core element of the Zelda games, it's needed to stay fun to keep from getting boring. I didn't really feel that BotW kept the combat fun and interesting. But maybe that's also because this game allows you to spend so much more time with it. If I had played the other Zelda games for as many hours as I played this one, I might have gotten bored of the combat in them as well.


The Shrines:

Zelda games have always been about solving little puzzles to unlock the next room, collect some heart containers or better tools, and progress to the next area. This game has 120 shrines hidden throughout the world (and each one has at least one treasure chest inside). I found most of them to be so simple and boring that within about 30 seconds I knew exactly what I had to do to complete them, and it didn't take much longer than that to follow through with my plans and complete them. Others took longer, either because the puzzles required waiting for moving pieces to get into the correct position, or because they involved combat that took a few minutes, or because the controls were super frustrating and not very conducive to actually solving the puzzle at hand. Yet others took longer only because they were so simple I thought there *must* be more to it and I spent a few minutes looking around in vain for something clever.

Of all the shrines, I can only think of one that truly stumped me. And it wasn't even about reaching the end of the shrine. It was figuring out how to get to the treasure chest. It turns out that the only reason I had been able to reach the end of the shrine on that one was because I was able to "cleverly" do something unintended, which I thought was the only solution to me because I had originally dismissed the "right" way to do it as being too obvious and simplistic. I found the shrines to be a chore. On the one hand, because they were so simple, I was bored and hated doing any of them that lasted for more than a couple of minutes. On the other hand, because they were so simple, they usually didn't last more than a couple of minutes.

To make matters worse, because of the open-world nature of the game, there was no guarantee what order you would encounter any of the dungeons, so they all had to assume you had never seen something like the puzzle inside of it. They could not gradually ramp up the difficulty by building upon the knowledge and experience gained from previous shrines.


The "Dungeons" (Divine Beasts):

Zelda games have always had big dungeons as a major focus of the game. These involved several rooms full of puzzles and combat, and a useful new tool to use on your adventure that gave you more power and allowed you to access previously unreachable locations. The Divine Beasts in BotW are about the closest thing this game has to the traditional dungeons of past Zelda games. Unfortunately, they were little more than glorified shrines. There was a "battle" sequence that lasted a minute or two before you could enter the dungeon, then a puzzle solving segment once inside, followed by a boss fight. The battle sequence was very simple and easy and, as I said, lasted only a couple of minutes. Then the puzzles inside were pretty easy to grasp and it usually only took a few seconds upon entering a new section of the dungeon to look around and know what had to be done. Actually doing it may have taken several more minutes, but wasn't ever very challenging. And then the boss battles were simple, short, and easy.


The Tools:

Zelda games traditionally grant you better and more powerful tools as you progress through the game. This gives you a sense of progression and of becoming stronger and unlocking new areas over time. But due to the open-world nature of this game, you're given basically everything in the first hour or two during what is essentially the tutorial and then you're set free to go and do whatever you want. And indeed, if you're skilled enough, you can go straight to the final boss and beat the game. Not that there's anything wrong with the tools that you're given. They can lead to interesting and fun scenarios.  But again, the open-world nature of the game means that once you've completed the tutorial there's virtually nothing new to look forward to as far as abilities and tools go, with the exception of the abilities granted after completing each divine beast.



In Summary:

In a lot of ways it feels like it was an original game made by a third-party that Nintendo took over and shoehorned Zelda lore into, like what they did with Dinosaur Planet aka Star Fox Adventures^w. All of the things that make a Zelda game a Zelda games were, in my opinion, executed in a sub par fashion in this game, and all of the things that are either non-existent or not a major focus of Zelda games were what I really enjoyed. In other words: It's not that great for a Zelda game, in comparison to the others. But for a game all on its own merits, there's plenty of fun and enjoyment to be had.

That said, the completionist in me felt compelled to find and complete all 120 shrines, and that was such an unpleasant grind that I basically haven't touched it since, and now I don't have any inclination to play the game anymore. But I sure captured a lot of photos and videos of my time spent in Breath of the Wild.

[p3lb0x]

As you may or may not know, Nintendo has never been one for amazing graphics. Usually they go for a cartoon style.

I fundamentally disagree with this notion, while you did touch on it later in this paragraf. I'd say that visually coherent and well done stylistic presentation trumps purely technical graphics any day. And while the new Zelda seems to have a bit of both with regards to volumetric lighting and reflections. It, like World of Warcraft and Super Mario Galaxy makes really good use of their stylistic choices, and I think it is wrong to not call what they do "Amazing graphics". A game like Antichamber is not very visually advanced up front, but it makes for a compelling aesthetic experience nonetheless. Specifically because it combines both the feel of the mechanics and gameplay elements really well.

[Deozaan]

I just came across and watched this nearly 2 hour review of Breath of the Wild by Joseph Anderson. I think it does a great job of explaining the strengths of BotW that I loved, and also of detailing the many weaknesses that caused me to feel dissatisfied with it as a Zelda game. Though I don't agree with--or at least don't feel as strongly as he did about--every one of his complaints, I think he hit every major point that I would have made if I were to go into more detail than I did in this thread about my thoughts and feelings on the game and its mechanics.

Breath of the Wild - Not Enough Zelda


I think I'm going to check out more of his content soon.