So, after roughly 40 hours spent in The Legend Zelda: Breath
of the Wild. I think I can finally conclude the game is good. Its damn good. It
is next level good. The game takes the promise of an open world and expands
upon it. Yes, it has the “you see that mountain, you can go their” mentality,
but it actual does something with it.
Almost every location has something of significance for you to
encounter. The game’s world is a veritable sandbox complete with a whole bunch
of systems to take advantage of. For example, during a thunder storm, you can
disarm an enemy and replace their weapon with a metal one. Because metal
conducts electricity, that poor little bokoblin will end up like Toad in the
first X-men film. Hell, you can even snowboard down a mountain, jump off into
bullet time, and fire off a few arrows into some unsuspecting enemies. It is
truly a special adventure.
Gone are the traditional dungeons. In their place, we get
Shrines and Divine Beasts. The Shrines are basically small little puzzle rooms
which offer a reward once you beat it. The Shrines are quite like the Test
Chambers in a Portal Game. This is even true down to the aesthetics of a
Shrine. Shrines are fun and offer multiple ways to solve a puzzle. Sure, some
solutions are basically breaking the rules of said puzzle, but the game does
not care. Most times when you leave a shrine, you will feel smart, but
wondering if the way you beat the Shrine was the way intended by the
developers. The Divine Beast is like a
traditional dungeon, but smaller and lacking traditional puzzles. All the
Divine beasts have the same objectives: 1) reach the map, 2) reach the 5
control points, 3) reach main control point and beat boss. Because you can
tackle these dungeons in any order, they all assume that it is the first divine
beast you have encountered. Thus, you hear the same tutorial dialog every time
you do a divine beast. It gets pretty annoying to be treated like a child every time you enter a dungeon after the first one. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, thanks Bird Person. I been through this before. Stop treating me like I just huffed a whole gallon of super glue and paint. This isn't my first rodeo, it's my second.
When they say, the game is an open world, it is. You can run
right from the starting area to the final boss and win the game right then and
there. Gannon will turn you into soup faster than you can ask what’s for
dinner, but if you git gud you can win. The whole game can be boiled down into
one phrase, “GREAT! I’LL GO GRAB MY STUFF!!” Everything you do in this game is
basically prepping for the final showdown with Calamity Ganon. Every 4
Shrines you complete nets you an upgrade to your health or Stamina. All the
dumb little korok seeds, upgrade your inventory. Beating a dungeon allows for a
giant robot animal to fire a laser at Gannon during the final fight. In a way
this game reminds me of Mass Effect 3. Both games are about prepping for an
ultimate showdown against an unstoppable foe. They also have very poorly
handled endings, but we will cover that in a bit.
I almost forgot that is the first official Zelda game with
voice acting. It’s not bad, very Saturday morning cartoony, but not bad. If I
had to compare it to another game it would be Kid Icarus Uprising’s voice
acting. This is also the first Zelda game to push waifus/husbandos at you like
non-fucking-stop. There are whole swaths of people who want to play with
Sidon’s guppy ( he is a fish man), then there are the others who want to be
sentenced to death by Snu Snu’ed by the Gerudo.
However, the standout waifu and even character is Zelda.
This game makes you feel for Zelda’s plight and one can even relate to her on a
multitude of levels. She is a nerd (she just wants to study the ancient Hayao Miyazaki-like
robots) who is forced to take part in a prophecy she wants no part of
personally. She does not even like Link when they first meet. She thinks he is
a weird mute guy who acts as her father’s watch dog. Speaking of Link this is
the most expressive he has been since Windwaker. Breath of the Wild link is a goof who loves cooking, snowboarding, hates the cold, likes to
cross-dress on occasion and bombing dodongos. You even find a diary entry Zelda
wrote that the only reason why he is silent is because the whole world is
looking at him. He is the hero of legend, anything he says can and will be
scrutinized to hell. It also a way to ensure that people believe he is braver
than he is. Link will not go around
the Citadel proclaiming that every store on the Citadel is his favorite.
If I have one complaint about the game is that the end game
is a bit weak. Once you have beaten the Divine Beasts and acquired the
appropriate weaponry, the game basically says, “ Okay scrub, now go fight
Gannon.” At this point in the game you can continue to do shrines and side
quests, but you must try to fight the urge to kick the giant pig ghost’s butt.
Once you beat the game once, you could lose all incentive to continue playing.
You beat Gannon, You Saved Zelda, You Did it, You WON. There is no post game to
be found yet. When you beat the game, you are kicked out to the main menu and
then forced to reload the save right before you entered the final boss room. It is a bit anti-climactic. You do not get anything for beating the game
other than a star on your save profile. My advice would be to hold off on
beating Gannon until you are truly satisfied with your progress. However, the
final boss is not that hard with the proper preparations in place. It creates
this weird paradox, you want to be overpowered for the final boss, but you
also want a challenge. I don’t believe the boss scales up as you get more
powerful. So just be wary that you might curb stomp the final boss after a
whole bunch of batman like prep work.
Overall Breath of the Wild is truly a fantastic game and
probably the game of the year. I loved my time with the game and I’m still
slowly chipping away at the fun side quests and shrines that I missed during my
initial run. Now it’s just for completion’s sake and not to slay the beast in
Hyrule castle.
9/10
P.S. TO HELL WITH WEAPON DEGRADATION. MY METAL SWORD CAN WITHSTAND
MORE THAN 3 HITS GOSH- DARN-IT. I GET WHY THE SYSTEM IS IN PLACE, AND IN SOME
CASES, IT DOES CREATE A BIT OF TENSION. IN SOME CASES, IT HAS EVEN FORCED ME TO
USE THE ENVIRONMENT TO KILL BAD DUDES IN CLEVER WAYS. HOWEVER, ALL I WANT IS A
SWORD THAT WILL NOT BREAK AFTER A FEW HITS. THERE ARE OTHER WAYS TO REWARD
PLAYERS FOR CREATIVELY DEALING WITH BAD GUYS LOOK AT MGS 5!!!!
