March 10th
Today's challenge is: Overrated
Like with yesterday's challenge, I had to change my interpretation a little so it wouldn't be a repeat of Day 8. This time, I'm going to pick a game that's understood by everyone to be good, myself included, but nowhere near as good as the majority of people think. There's no need for a big introduction here, as I'm sure pretty much anyone interested enough in gaming to read my posts knows about today's title, which is
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Let's start with the good stuff everyone can agree with: This is a GORGEOUS game, and absolutely fits my preferred palette. There's nothing wrong with the world here, maybe a few rough spots here and there like any similar game would have, but it does score perfects across the board in visuals. Only problem is... That's just about all I'd say is as good as people would say. The rest is either slightly flawed, or has major issues. Let's get into all of that.
First up, the controls and game mechanics. I'm bringing them up first because overall, I really like the way they feel, however I don't think they're flawless. The stamina gauge has to go, it serves no purpose. Having an infinite gauge right off the bat wouldn't sequence break anything, and the only times where it really matters are when taming horses and lynels. It's just annoying. Normally, in a game like this, you'd need an upgraded stamina gauge in order to access a new area, which sort of applies to Eventide island, but food gets the job done. Throwing weapons is absolute jank, and that's too bad considering chucking out some of your inventory at enemies comes in pretty handily. The boomerang works well, but everything else is thrown in the worst ways possible. I'm not even gonna talk about the weapons breaking all the time, but I see absolutely no reason why Link shouldn't be at least a little apt in close quarters combat. He has the bombs, but come on, every other enemy in the game can fight bare handed. And cooking showed promise since you can mix so many ingredients, but you can't actually cook a wide variety of dishes, which was disappointing.
Now, onto some bigger issues. What the hell was that story? Was there even one, at least one in the present? I loved collecting and watching the memories, definitely some great stuff, but in the present time? I felt like there wasn't much. It doesn't make sense that the present era species representatives or whatever got so little exposure when you could almost feel a connection to the ones of the past. I have to mention the blood moon as well. There's a lot of wasted potential here, but at least I'm thinking that it was only there to reduce the game's memory usage by “cleaning it up”. Also, the sheikah slate is a big no, that is so dumb. And oh dear fuck, what was that ending? I felt like I reached the end of a demo, but last time I checked, I was not playing a trial copy. And this, in my opinion, ties in with the biggest issue of all, one which took the game from a 9 down to a 6 or 7 at the very best.
The biggest issue with Breath of the Wild is its skeleton. Outside of the first area, what do you have that constitutes the main game? Four “dungeons”, all available after completing a short quest each, and they're almost all the same, with equally similar “bosses”, then... not only it's time for the final boss, but you could actually go there as soon as you'd gained your freedom. You could have 100 more shrine sidequests, 10 more minigames, and 500 more fucking korok seeds, this issue wouldn't be any less of a massive flaw. The entire "main game" is about as deep as Ganon's Castle on its own (from Ocarina of Time). And even moreso, you have this gigantic and diverse landscape, but probably about 20 different enemy types at the most, which is TINY.
I'm not trying to say Breath of the Wild was a bad game by any means, but the issues I just listed definitely kept it from being a truly great game. And for context, I remember rabid fans being personally offended whenever someone would say it wasn't the greatest game of all time. THAT is exactly what I mean by overrated. I still have high hopes for the sequel, but I'm hoping for more meat on my plate this time. And people better not go DDoS-ing and death threat-ing independent reviewers AGAIN if they think it's a little less than perfect.
Out for Switch and Wii U, and despite the overall negativity in this mini review, it is definitely worthy of being picked up! Last note, you gotta love doing seal jetski while dodging thunderbolts and bombing the fuck out of an AT-AT's legs.
