eRonin

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: open your eyes and die a lot

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I played about five or six hours of this on Saturday, over three sittings - the most I've played of a video game in one day for a while. That was enough to clear the opening area / prologue with what I thought was a pretty thorough investigation, though I'm sure I missed lots of stuff.


I'm happy to report that the Wii U version is perfectly fine. It looks lovely. Yes, the framerate sags a bit at times, but somehow I find that it 'settles down' after 10 or 15 minutes of play - though more likely I just stop noticing it because I'm so engrossed in the world. Either way, I haven't encountered any technical issues that have affected my enjoyment. 


I think it's astonishing. I have laughed out loud so many times: with glee, or when I've died in some hilarious fashion, or just when thinking 'I can't believe they've actually made this'. I've never encountered a game quite like it. It hasn't just borrowed from open world games; it's swallowed them whole, digested them, then pooped one out as a beautiful new thing. It used to be said of Nintendo that they made games which had no indication that other trends in gaming ever existed - that's never been less true than with Breath of the Wild. 


An example: you learn very early on that to make areas of the world visible on your map, you've got to climb up and activate some big old towers that litter the map. Okay, fine - it's a cliche by now, but whatever. But unlike every Ubisoft game for the past ten years, the towers don't put any new icons on your map, and they don't actually 'unlock' anything - you only get to see the map. This changes everything! So you use your binoculars from the tower to figure out what you want to do next, and you place your own stamps on the map according to what you want to do. You set out for a place for no reason other than it looks interesting - and invariably, they've put something cool there.


To an extent, this is kind of what Zelda games have always done - characters giving you directions with in-world references rather HUD markers, etc. But combining this with an open world which is extremely serious about letting you go where you want gives the whole thing a dizzying feel. I love that in the prologue area, you can keep asking the first guy you meet for more help with the thing he wants you to do, and he'll just tell you to get lost and figure it out by yourself. And he really means it!

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1 hour ago, marginalgloss said:

. I love that in the prologue area, you can keep asking the first guy you meet for more help with the thing he wants you to do, and he'll just tell you to get lost and figure it out by yourself. And he really means it!

 

I think that was a neat touch!

 

Alas, my wife hit a wall with the combat, it just makes her too anxious. We were at the exact same point in-game, so we've decided to continue playing one file (and that I would mark shrines I found on my commute so we can play them when both of us are at home).

 

She played for 4 hours yeseterday, which again, totally un-characteristic of her. Hopefully playing together will let her continue enjoying the game!

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I'm totally with your wife on this one. Combat in games, specifically combat that occurs in real time - even in its most benign forms, like Mario jumpin' on Goomba heads, makes me super anxious and I tend to not play those games

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I'm finding with the combat that I will try to focus my attention on one enemy, watching closely for the attack indication so I can time my dodge properly for a flurry attack, and wind up getting clobbered by another enemy from behind that I either didn't notice or that had moved to flank me.  I mean presumably I'll get better at combat with practice but for right now it does get pretty stressful.  But I'm still fighting mostly bokoblins and one-on-one swordplay is not necessarily the best tactic since they show up in groups of three or four.

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2 hours ago, jennegatron said:

I'm totally with your wife on this one. Combat in games, specifically combat that occurs in real time - even in its most benign forms, like Mario jumpin' on Goomba heads, makes me super anxious and I tend to not play those games

 

Yeah, I also think this game makes it even more stressful with the weapon degradation - it's a tough game even for people who don't mind the combat. 

 

I think I'm going to try to find bright and colorful games that focus on exploration and collection, I almost want to see if she'd enjoy 'No Man's Sky'. I do think she enjoys the "cuteness" of the world in Zelda though, those Great Fairies are awesome.  

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This game is like a drug. Again played like 3h session and it's soon 1:30 here in the night. Workday tomorrow, damn Zelda you are so good you are ruining my sleeptime!

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8 hours ago, YoThatLimp said:

I think I'm going to try to find bright and colorful games that focus on exploration and collection, I almost want to see if she'd enjoy 'No Man's Sky'. I do think she enjoys the "cuteness" of the world in Zelda though, those Great Fairies are awesome.  

 

This brought to mind Grow Home / Grow Up. If you haven't already played either, I'd recommend them. They share some similarities with BoTW, like hand-crafted worlds full of cute touches and a focus on collection, though the Grow games are much smaller scale and have no combat.

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10 hours ago, Laco said:

 

This brought to mind Grow Home / Grow Up. If you haven't already played either, I'd recommend them. They share some similarities with BoTW, like hand-crafted worlds full of cute touches and a focus on collection, though the Grow games are much smaller scale and have no combat.

 

Good call! I also picked up Abzu as she really loved Journey when we played it together.

 

 

Has anyone seen

 

Spoiler

The giant dragon? or Giant in the woods? I stumbled upon the Giant last night and was surprised to run into boss fights in the wild. I saw the dragon this morning while on the train flying north of the map. 

 

**Edit: Including an image 

 

vMrTP9b.jpg

 

 

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Really impressed with this game's tutorialization... there are a bunch of spots in the opening area where the game just presents you with a designed setup and invites you to poke at it until it teaches you a new mechanic. One that comes to mind is a couple of precariously-placed boulders that are basically guaranteed to roll into a ravine and crush some bokoblins. You can tell they really took the criticisms of the last few games' opening tutorials to heart.

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YoThatLimp, those spoilers are related to shrine quests, I believe. Not sure if they have other roles. 

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Well I beat the game. It uh, sure has an ending. I'll put the rest of this in spoiler tags but it shouldn't have any real spoilers in it:

It's interesting how after beating it I sort of lost any and all desire to play any more of BOTW. By the end I found myself thinking the open world design was a mistake. It's far too easy to undermine any sort of encounter design in the game which means certain bits just lose any tension and the bits where they try and restrain you just feel cheap. I feel like if they had just made this but about half the size and more focused they'd have a much better game. I felt like I spent 20 hours playing a Zelda game and 30 playing a game that really wanted but failed to be Shadows Of The Colossus. All the open world encounters end up playing out the exact same way with the same five or so boring enemy types and there's barely any progression in your abilities so I just felt like I was doing the same things over and over and I didn't need it spread out like this. I still like the game but I heavily suspect the backlash to this game will come fast and hard. And while I do appreciate the lack of 6 hours of tutorials I feel like the real solution to that was not to make a Now That's What I Call Music! compilation but for video game mechanics.

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On 3/8/2017 at 7:05 AM, YoThatLimp said:

 

Good call! I also picked up Abzu as she really loved Journey when we played it together.

 

 

Has anyone seen

 

  Hide contents

The giant dragon? or Giant in the woods? I stumbled upon the Giant last night and was surprised to run into boss fights in the wild. I saw the dragon this morning while on the train flying north of the map. 

 

**Edit: Including an image 

 

vMrTP9b.jpg

 

 

Regarding your spoilers GIANT SPOILERS IN RESPONSE:

 

When I was trying to find the location of that picture that Impa sends you to find to recall your first memory, I didn't read what the painter said very clearly. He was all "Yeah! It's on the border of the snowfield" and then I stopped paying attention. Ended up wandering around the snowfield for a while, slowly running low on heat saving items and wondering when I would find that gate and finish this super early tutorial quest. Instead I found a fucking dragon's nest at the peak of a frozen mountain. I was out of items that saved heat and slowly freezing to death, face to face with a giant dragon in a puzzle/fight (he doesn't really fight back) that has you gliding from peak to peak peppering him with arrows. I was also down to my last 5 arrows. The crazy part is, I beat the fucker and opened the connected shrine. Even crazier than that, the dragon I fought didn't look like yours. I don't think I fought the same dragon from your picture. Multiple dragons?

 

This game is great.

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Without being specific, somebody just 'sang' me the Calamity Ganon story in rhyming couplets and it was godawful! Is it intentional? The writing everywhere else is very good.

 

Example:

Divine Beast, Guardian, princess and knight



Their plan to rout Ganon was looking airtight.

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4 hours ago, dartmonkey said:

Without being specific, somebody just 'sang' me the Calamity Ganon story in rhyming couplets and it was godawful! Is it intentional? The writing everywhere else is very good.

 

Example:

  Reveal hidden contents

Divine Beast, Guardian, princess and knight

 


Their plan to rout Ganon was looking airtight.

 

 

 

this segment hurt my inside. Doesn't help that we've already been exposed to this story already at length!

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I can't look at the spoilers because I'm so slowly advancing in the game even after like 12h of playing.

 

But I saw

 

Spoiler

"Howl's Moving Castle" in the Gerudo region. This game is unbelievable

 

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I really want to play this fucking game but I don't really want a Nintendo, and I've been wracked over the past week trying to figure out this conundrum.

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Cheap secondhand Wii U? There must be some deals around or upcoming.

 

5 hours ago, eRonin said:

 

this segment hurt my inside. Doesn't help that we've already been exposed to this story already at length!

 

I know, right? I'm pretty sure it was crit path the first time. It immediately brought to mind Gruntilda in Banjo-Kazooie! But she's presented in a fun, goofy, fairytale way. This seemed to be serious, which made me wonder if I'd missed something and this dude was a struggling, rubbish lyricist or something. I cringed through the whole thing!

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2 minutes ago, dartmonkey said:

Cheap secondhand Wii U? There must be some deals around or upcoming.

 

Out of curiosity, I've been checking Amazon over the last few weeks to see if there would be any WiiU price drops... and $250 for a used/refurbished WiiU is the best I've seen. It's the strangest goddamn thing considering how often those $250 PS4 w/ game deals keep coming up.

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I'd probably investigate stores or Walmarts/Best Buys/Regional Equivalents that have just had an influx of Switch gear and will be looking to flush out their Wii U inventory on cluttering up their shelves in the near future.

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29 minutes ago, Zeusthecat said:

 

Out of curiosity, I've been checking Amazon over the last few weeks to see if there would be any WiiU price drops... and $250 for a used/refurbished WiiU is the best I've seen. It's the strangest goddamn thing considering how often those $250 PS4 w/ game deals keep coming up.

I've been obsessively trawling Ebay since the switch released. Almost every auction of a fully functioning unit is in the ~$250 range.

 

Fun fact, you can get a Nintendo certified refurb with a 1 year warranty for $200 straight from them. So that's my benchmark for buying straight from another person. $200 is still really steep for a Zelda machine, though.

 

Wii Us don't exist on store shelves anymore. That shit is gone, man. If you search for Wii U on best buy's website it redirects you to the Switch.

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Honestly, it's the same with the New Nintendo 3DS - it's like I'm not sure I want to spend $200 on a thing that will be "old" the second I get it hah. 

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I have beaten a video game!

 

I never got tired of playing the game. I got apparently exactly 100 shrines without explicitly trying to, and then felt like it was time to fight Ganon.

 

But the best hours were definitely the first... I dunno, two thirds of the game, when I didn't know what would be over the next hill, around the next cliffside, through the next forest, across the next river. Once I got through the third Divine Beast, I'd climbed every tower, and explored every area to my own personal satisfaction.

 

I shouldn't have saved the Gerudo for the end, 'cause it's my least favorite area in the whole game, haha. Deserts don't do it for me... Oh well. I'm actually far from tired of the game, but also I don't like the prospect of scouring the land all over again for those nooks and crannies I might have missed. I'll save the sidequests I still have for... when I play it again later this year?? If I do??

 

I'm super curious to see what the DLC will be. Specifically the additional "story". Will it be post-game content? Flashback memories? Hmmm!

 

NOW

 

ZELDA LORE QUESTION TIME (LOL WHAT??)

 

i thought the rito were supposed to have evolved from the zora in wind waker, but here they are existing alongside each other

 

what's up with that??

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