LogFAQs > #898308631

5. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
HERE WE GO, HERES SOME CONTROVERSY.

First off, if you love to explore in video games, I can't think of a game that does it better. You get this huge sprawling world map, and you can just point to something that looks interesting on it and say "hey, I'm gonna go there", and check it out. If you do this, you will no doubt come across countless beautiful areas. I can't remember a game where I just wanted to stop and look around as often as I did here. There is such a wide array of landscapes, and they are colorful, and full of life. The game never explicitly tells you that you MUST go somewhere next, so you have a huge sense of freedom, which gives you that extra sense of wonder when you happen to stumble upon something you didn't expect.

There are plenty of great rewards for exploring too besides just sights. There is the occasional loot to pick up, towers that give you much needed fast travel points, and shrines, which are mini challenges that give you the ability to upgrade your character once you complete enough of them. They vary between puzzles and combats, and in many ways, are almost like replacement mini-dungeons. While you do have a few "main dungeons" here, they do not have nearly the scope of your average Zelda game. Shrines are generally as well done as you would expect. They are filled with clever and challenging puzzles. The combat ones are OK (I'm not a huge fan of Zelda combat, it's fine).

I constantly found myself conflicted about this. The new system kind of works well with the fact that the world map is so freaking huge, they NEEDED stuff in there that would reward you for exploration, but personally, I like puzzles and dungeons over raw exploration, so I missed the usual Zelda dynamic in the end. But it still works well in the end for what it is. My one gripe is that certain shrines are clearly much more involved and difficult than others, but the reward remains the same no matter what. My favorite example is an island way out of the way on the world map. I saw this and thought, "HMMM, wonder whats there!" and left for it. When you reach the island, you lose all your equipment, and have to activate a few different areas, and pick up stuff to defend yourself as you go. I died once doing this, which gets you sent way back to where you sailed from. It is also a pretty time consuming process, 3-4 times the length of the usual shrine that you encounter. My reward was the same as any other shrine. Ridiculous.

In the end, the main things keeping this game from being my favorite Switch game, and maybe one of my favorite games ever, were all the new elements. There are survival aspects, like having to have the right equipment for cold areas or super hot areas. If you don't go to the main town and get the right equipment before getting to areas like this, it is a constant annoyance. This kind of cramps some of the freedom and exploration elements of the game. Most annoying was weapon durability though. Your weapons break, and a lot of them break really freaking fast. It drove me NUTS when I would acquire several decent weapons, just to watch them break in one tough fight. The system might have worked if so many didn't break SO FAST. I just didn't see the value to this at alll, and it was a constant stress/annoyance for me. You can get an unbreakable sword near the end of the game, but at that point, it was too late.

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I call girls "girlies".