Breath of the Wild

This is going to be a longer review because apparently everyone loves Breath of the Wild but frankly I hated it. And I want to rightly explain why I found it to be a miserable slog. I played about 20 hours, tried a couple different strategies to make it fun, but I gave up upon approaching the second Divine Beast. Not only do I consider it the worst Zelda I’ve played, but one of the worst games I’ve ever played. This review has four parts: how tedious the game, how the challenges are disappointing at best, how the game doesn't give good player direction, and how the aesthetics are all over the place.

To call this game tedious is such an understatement. Nearly everything is designed to waste your time and effort. First, let’s talk about that huge desolate overworld.

It is vast. It is empty. The distances you are expected to travel in this game are the biggest culprits in wasting your time. You could easily shrink the world by half or more and not lose anything of value. There’s simply no reason for everything to be so big and spread apart. They give you horses, which can’t climb and are therefore useless in any attempt at exploration (not to mention the time spent wrangling the horse). They give you gliding, which requires you to waste your time climbing to a high peak. Either way, if you want to go anywhere in this game, it’s a chore. Exploration is at minimum a 20-minute affair.

Aside: I don't know who thought it wise to make the rain disable your climbing, but it is baffling that they put in a mechanic that entirely roadblocks your exploration. I was in the middle of trying to cross peaks, it started to rain. I literally just put the controller down and walked away. It's like the game doesn't even want to be played.

Cooking. The cooking system at first seems interesting, but soon reveals itself to be another dull time waster. There’s no reason you can’t just find food to replenish hearts or stamina or whatever. No. Instead, you have to spend maybe 20 minutes cooking all the random things you picked up over the last two hours and make meals. There’s no reason for it. It's just an unnecessary middle step put in there to waste your time. It doesn’t matter if you skip the cutscene, the amount of time it takes just to go through the inventory and cook is ridiculous and menial.

Let’s talk about Challenges. First the shrines. The shrines are probably the most disappointing part of the game. The bad shrines are bizarre motion control nonsense that have absolutely no place in the game. The “good” shrines all end before there’s a satisfying puzzle. All the shrines seem to be designed to be under ten minutes which is just not enough time to setup anything interesting. The best shrines in the game leave you feeling intellectually blue-balled.

I only played through the first “dungeon” AKA divine beast. And I loved everything about it. It was cool puzzles tightly designed, the boss was great. The Divine Beast was awesome I have no issue there. It's like the only redeeming feature of the game.

The overworld enemies are obnoxious. Nearly everything 2 or 3 shots you. It actually makes the minibosses the least threatening thing because the basic enemies don’t telegraph their attacks as much. It's far scarier to have a bokoblin come up from behind and poke you for 1/3 of your health than some huge telegraphed swipe taking out 1/2 your health. Despite getting more hearts, getting better armor, and upgrading the armor, nothing seemed to make any noticeable change in receiving damage. All the 2-3 shot attacks makes fighting awful because every time you are hit you have to go into the menu to eat.

Oh and speaking of the overworld: if the combat system is going to be that punishing, then my god have a decent auto-save system. This is the first game I have played in probably a decade where I had to redo parts due to forgetting to save. Making the player go into the menu and save constantly is not acceptable anymore. Get with the times.

Let’s talk about player direction.

This game got so much praise for not telling the player anything. I have no idea how this is a good thing. Maybe you can do this with toght design and lots of play-testing but it feels like the game wasn't play-tested at all. When I first played, I completely missed the horses and all the starting shrines outside the tutorial area. I gave up and stopped playing, because I had no idea what to do and couldn't find any shrines or anything of interest. It was only when my friends told me that I missed stuff along the road that I gave the game another shot.

I had no idea why lightning randomly strikes and kills you. I looked it up online. I had no idea you could upgrade your armor. I looked it up online. I played 20 hours and never found out what to do with the seeds. Never found the tree-guy. I have no idea how you're supposed to find the tree-guy. No one puts him on the map. I looked it up online, but still couldn't figure out where exactly he was. Is this cool? Is this fun? No. It's obnoxious. Just tell the player how the game works. FFS.

Finally, we get to the aesthetics. The shrines are so incredibly dull. The shrines reminded me of Portal, except without GlaDOS or comedy or fun. It's this strange sterile environment that is completely disconnected from the entire rest of the game. They never do anything with the shrines, like you never go into a ruined shrine or something. They never even attempt to make it interesting. It's devoid.

They also reuse all the assets for every shrine, rather than differentiate them based on type or location. At least change the coloring or something. 120 shrines that all look the same. I find this incredibly sad for a first party AAA title.

The Divine Beasts have the same issue. They are sterile except for sterile looking enemies. They don't do nearly enough to differentiate them from each other aesthetically, and they seem entirely separate from the rest of the world.

Sure the outdoors look very pretty. They also look vast, empty, and repetitive. There should be interesting things in the overworld, rather than just vast swaths of land with copy-pasted seed puzzles strewn everywhere and an occasional shrine. There should be actual set pieces and different generic mobs, not copy-pasted bokoblin tribes and copy-pasted stables. Like it's not impressive to make a world big when you copy-paste almost everything and leave lots of emptiness.

I gave up on Breath of the Wild. After the Lost Woods annoyed me with its tedium I decided to get to the second Divine Beast, because the first Divine Beast was actually fun. By the time I got there, however, I was too worn down by the game to go any further.

Apparently people really like this game for some reason I cannot fathom as it doesn’t have many redeeming qualities in my eyes. I will not be returning to Breath of the Wild. It is a terrible experience and terrible game. There are much better games worth your time and money.