Breath of the Wild is one of the best games I have ever played.
I finished all 120 shrines because I enjoyed it so much. About 109 of these
shrines were discovered by organic exploration. BoTW is an intuitive romp and I
loved almost every second of it. Firstly, the game fixed so many of the worst
parts about Zelda games, namely the mandatory minigames if you wanted full
heart containers (looking at you River Boat Cruise). The verticality, which is the
game’s best attribute allows traversability of anywhere you could possibly want
to go. The glider is a truly freeing experience, which means the layout and
contoured world mean something. The map and landscape are a puzzle in itself,
but one with many different answers; a truly liberating feeling in a world
plagued with Bethesda-like sandboxes.
Another amazing attribute is the truly free way of resolving puzzles using the chemistry-physics engine. There is so much fun and
variation to be had. Throwing metal weapons at enemies during a lightning
storm, chopping down trees and rolling them over enemies, sneaking up on enemy
camps and stealing all their weapons, igniting exploding barrels using fire
arrows, using grass on fire for an updraft, freezing enemies then hitting them
with a charged or lightning attack. Just an incredible amount of versatility built
into the game which made many encounters an exciting experiment.
The things I would change/hoping for BotW2 in order of most to least important:
- More meaningful sidequests which maybe tell a story, rather than fetch quests. This was the weakest part of the game – there was no point in doing sidequests for the most part. There were several exceptional shrine/side quests (Eventide Island, Shrouded Shrine, The Three Giant Brothers, From the Ground Up)
- Improve dat framerate drop + draw distance
- Maybe on the controversial side, but RPG elements. Instead of changing clothes for +attack or +swim speed/climbing speed, maybe when you level up you can upgrade abilities which do that. Keep clothes for environments (cold, hot, electricity resistance etc), but many could be rolled into RPG upgrades which would also feel better as a sense of natural progression.
- Weapon degradation was cool but repairing weapons should be an option. Sometimes you get very attached to weapons (looking at you Savage Lynel Clubs). This can be rolled into an RPG element, but also could be standalone – a broken weapon stays in your inventory as unusable with an attack value of 0. You would need a weapon of equal type to partially repair it. Think Fallout New Vegas’ Jury-Rigging repair system (coincidentally my favourite game of all time). This way armour could also deteriorate over time. That said, I still had an inventory full of amazing weapons after killing Ganon. It would be cool to use items knowing I could repair them in the future. That way some of my rarer weapons (elemental weapons) would have gotten more use. Because I didn’t know when I’d come across a new fire weapon, I tried to reserve its uses. Had I the ability to repair it, it would have gotten way more usage.
- Grinding/farming resources for armour upgrades felt unnecessary and externally difficult due to inconsistent enemy loot drops.
I am sad this game is over. I love this game. I am sad I can’t
replay it with different choices though.
Score: 10/10
