Personal review on Legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild (Nintendo Switch).
Intro
Sorry, if you’re reading this, don’t expect I will praise this game into heaven like it was made by the hands of - any god you believe in - himself. Far from it actually, I want to spill my guts about all these reviews I’ve seen passing by. Professional reviewers: 97/100 Based on 96 Critics. User Score: 7.6/10 based on 8959 Ratings.
I remember when this came out, the reviews were raving, 10/10, “Best game made till date and probably will be for a while”. First of all, there are no perfect games, so I was skeptical as it was, since I already tested it on my Nintendo Switch press event. So i was completely baffled when I read these non-stop good reviews.
So, me being me, I decided to test it myself, and believe me, this game is far from a 10/10. What did all these reviewers play? They reviewed a different game than me? I’m so confused.
Like I wrote in my Switch blog, I’m not the biggest fan of the Link & Zelda series, so I checked out this game with a fresh mindset. Is that the main issue here? That all these critics blinded themselves with nothing else than nostalgia?
Story
Well, to be honest, the story is kind of lame. You wake up after sleeping for 100 years after the calamity. And you have to rid Hyrule of the evil Ganon (who else) in Hyrule castle. There are some small bits that make the story somehow bearable, like the 4 champions of other races that are trapped inside the Divine Beasts ruled by Ganon, who themselves are spreading havoc to their corresponding cities.
The game forces you into this open world sandbox RPG environment, and let’s you discover everything yourselves. And this is the only part where I’m a bit conflicted with myself. The game lets you figure out everything yourself, it won’t force you to do specific things. So you mostly don’t get any guidance, it just let’s you go out there and die. Very Dark Souls-esque. So, in some way I like this take on this game, but on the other hand, and this might sound stupid, but this is my PERSONAL review after all. I’m an adult now, with real life responsibilities, when I play a game I just want to follow the story, have fun and be done with it. So sometimes I kind of expected a helping hand telling me exactly what to do, or where to go. I left myself pondering and running around for hours with having no clue what to do. Since all the areas I was trying to scavenge in, I ended up getting slapped into infinity by the monsters there. Which is something small I’ll come back on.
Gameplay
Like I mentioned before, the game just pushes you in this open world with a mindset of “go figure it out”. All you know after following the main quest for some minutes, is that you need to climb up high towers to unlock certain parts of your map (although you can access the parts just fine without). So, hello Ubisoft’s Assassins Creed & Far Cry (as example) game mechanics. Which is what I ended up doing in the first few hours, trying to get my map complete, after getting completely stomped in some areas because the same iteration of the same monsters were there, but just with better stats or other colors, I gave up for a while. Sometimes I just started dying when I had no clue what was happening when trying to get to said towers.
Apparently, the developers had way too many time on their hands, and started adding insane amounts of tidbits to the game. For example, when you go high up the mountain, the air starts getting colder, and you literally start freezing (I had to found out later). But you have no clue how to fix this. Found myself in a lot of situations just asking my Switch pretending it to be Siri. “Switch, what do you bloody want from me, how do I solve this”. And this is something that I liked, but also disliked. Yes, I’m a conflicted person, deal with it.
But the cold air is just the start. If you throw some peppers in a cooking pot and munch them down, you’ll survive for some minutes without a problem. So you’re all happy, but then you get to a snowy mountain, and the fun starts all over again. Apparently you need a BETTER elixir, or winter clothes.
How do I find them, do I craft them? Do mobs drop this? Side quest? Tips? - “Switch, how do I commit suicide”.
The weather also changes all the time in the game, there might be a quest where you have to drag a lighted torch from place A to B. But then it starts raining, so you have to restart your quest.. Happened a lot that I had to stand idle next to quests because the weather wasn’t the ideal situation. Like, WHAT. I don’t want to spend time on this, this is a game goddamnit.
I exploded a couple of times in the game, like, literally, and I had no clue what & how it happened. Apparently when theres thunder, you aren’t allowed to be equipped with anything metallic. It’ll “explode” due to the thunderstrikes. ( ꒪Д꒪)ノ Or when you’re in a flammable area, you can’t carry wood weapons or shields, since they’ll simply burn.
Which brings me to the next point. This game uses Stamina, it isn’t the first game that does this. So I can’t blame them, but it uses it in an annoying way sometimes. You can nearly climb EVERYTHING in the game. Which is very cool, but especially the first 20 somewhat hours of the game, you’re out of stamina all the time. In the middle of climbing sessions you just fall to your death.
Or when you’re sprinting, while trying to get away from mobs, and you are paragliding whilst jumping from a mountain and cling on another mountain 100 feet further, it all seems really cool, except it all uses the same stamina bar, and you just fall to your death since you just used all of it. Or when swimming in low water, you just drown because the current of the water was a tad too strong and you are 1 feet short for making it across the river, it makes you feel bad for these judgement calls, “Oh, I’ll just swim across this river”.
You just did a mega cool stunt, surfing your shield from a mountain, jumping off a cliff and clinging onto the mountain, you will JUST make it to the top climbing. Aaand then it starts raining and you lose your grip. So you start slithering down. And can’t make it anymore, and fall to your death after all.
There are area’s where you have to switch to fire-withstanding gear, teleport to the next tower because you want to finish a side quest, immediately change your armor back to cold-resistance armor, back to climbing gear stats. etc etc.
You might see it as a challenge, but seriously, these are things I don’t want to be bothered with to be honest. I’ll go play dark souls if I want to get bend over and get laughed at by a game.
More rambling, horses… You can have horses as a companion, so you can go travel Hyrule a bit faster. But, you don’t get Epona this time, since Nintendo wants you to buy amiibo’s, so you can actually have the Epona skin in the game. So that for a starters, I really don’t like. Second, if you find a wild horse (there aren’t a lot just standing around), you have to stealth mount it, otherwise it’ll run away.
Then you have to start soothing it, since it’s startled, otherwise it will stop ignoring your requests. I can live with that, even though it’s a bit ‘meh’. Next up you have to register it to a stable, so you can “call” it at any stable whenever you want, which seems like a fine idea. I might be comparing it too much to the Witcher 3 for now, but when I whistle in the game so my horse would come back to me after I’ve been going loco on an enemy camp, I don’t want to see the text “Looks like horse - insert name - can’t hear you”. No, I want the bloody horse to come galloping to me instantly so I can run over goblins. It’s trying to hard to be realistic which is sometimes a turn off. I think I maybe rode 3 horses in the entire game, I’d rather climb a mountain and spend my time just paragliding into the abyss.
With that said, after the final boss, I think I missed a lot in the game, you can cook special meals, elixirs, but I still have no clue how to make elixirs, I only bought them off merchants. I still have no idea how to properly cook a decent meal in the game (Not far off of real life). I just improvised and see what happened. Kind of left a bitter taste in my mouth afterwards.
This game is trying to be an open world RPG so bad, it kind of forgot to actually be one. It’s side quests are not even close to “meh”, it’s mostly just like “find me 10 of X ingredients so I can be happy”-quests, which I found quite annoying quite rapidly. The gain from them was mostly just not worth it after all. It totally forgets the RPG parts like leveling, there are no levels, skillpoints, skill upgrades, anything basically. If you don’t have a decent weapon, you’re still royally f*cked. (Ah, there are skill upgrades, but only one for only 3 of your skills, and it’s barely noticeable to be honest) It has some cooking, but no crafting, something simple like making arrows from the horns you find of goblins and all the twigs you can pick up. I secretly think it was a feature that was left out in the end, and would’ve been one of the best features of the game.
The battle system is also quite meh, I barely ever used the ZL function so you could jump and avoid enemy attacks, mostly you’re just running around with a bomb anyways throwing it at enemies (thank god it didn’t use mana or something). The deflecting-something with your constant breaking shields was semi okay feature though. Especially in the final boss fight.
Now, the biggest annoyance in the entire game, are the bloody weapons. You are slashing your way through an enemy camp, where monsters can easily kill you with 1 stab. There is this 1 enemy left, and while you want to stab him to death, your weapon suddenly explodes. Yes, really, it explodes. Every weapon, and I mean EVERY SINGLE WEAPON, will break while using it. Some can withstand like 5-10 whacks before it breaks. Some 20, some even more, but that’s more for end game. The chance you will wield the same weapon after just 1 single enemy camp is so small, and that’s just disgusting game mechanics for me. You won’t tell me that I found an ancient shrine with this badass treasure chest with a super awesome shiny weapon with awesome stats. But dare use it, you will be able to kill 2 monsters! So badass. Ugh. I also found myself pressing the wrong buttons in the middle of a fight in the beginning a lot, if your weapon breaks it won’t auto-equip one for you, so you’re just waving at a big ass boss with your fist. Same with switching different kind of arrows in a fight, selecting another bow, another shield, another skill. All you have to do is mash buttons constantly, and it’s pushing me away from wanting to attack a camp, just can’t be bothered pressing 60.000 buttons for some goblins.
Same for the bows, you finally saved up for arrows, since they are hell of expensive in early game. You just picked up a bow from a death monster. You shoot 3 arrows and your bow explodes. No, no, no.
I was really close on just quitting the game because of all these small things.
Now to the good part
But hey, there are some good things! (I know, you won’t believe me after all this rage).
I kind of liked the game was so open, you could travel to all cities, look for all hidden shrines, which were a blast until certain parts. There are a total of 60 hidden shrines (temples) scattered around the world, and sometimes they’re fun to find and to do, but mostly, they’re really easy, or you have to use a skill you’ve never actually learned how to use properly in the game. So you are just staring at the puzzle like “what”. Example time: You can make ice blocks in ice, but you never really have to use it, except for finding some hidden chests in water, or in some boss battles. But the game is not actively pushing you to use the skill, so you simply forget about it. When you enter a shrine where you need to use this skill, you just simply forgot. This sounds as a lame excuse, but if I just spent 10 hours without having to use the skill, the game is doing something wrong.
I would’ve loved if they grouped up some shrines to make them larger so you’d have to find less, and make it more satisfying to finish them. And make them more rewarding than they are now, for eg. a very low level weapon (jaj…). Only reason why I kept grinding them was basically because, if you finish 4 shrines, you can upgrade your stamina or your hearts. I stopped at 42 shrines, so I did have a decent amount of hearts & stamina for not dying instantly and doing enough sprinting etc.
But that’s about where my “good parts” paragraph stops. Even though the story was quite straight forward, I still wanted to finish the 4 divine beasts, so I could get rid of Ganon more easily, but even that final part was quite disappointing, I even think it was one of the easier bosses in the game, it just takes a while longer. I didn’t really feel satisfied finishing Ganon, I actually felt more relieved. So I could go play other games… (again, this is a personal opinion lads)
The verdict
Since this game kind of got me coming back, and in the end I still wanted to finish it even though I was frustrated at so many tidbits. I will rate the game about 6.5 or 7 out of 10. But it definitely doesn’t deserve much better. Which is why I wanted to write this review even though there are so many. The scores this game gets aren’t justified.
TTT.