Played Too Late: A Critical Analysis of Breath of the Wild

[Mongrel]

Oh, that reminds me. A while back you asked me which you should play first, RDR1 or 2. I waffled a bit and kinda gave you the "both orders are fine" bit. Anyway, since then I've rethought my position and I absolutely believe RDR2 first.

Reasoning? Or would that be a spoiler thing?

Is it because the story is stronger in conventional chronological order, even if the gameplay and/or environment takes a bit of a step back?

[nosimpleway]

eyes: "the text is RDR2"

half of my dumb brain: "I never got my Registered Dietician certification, though."

the other half of my dumb brain:

[Thad]

Where does Zombie Nightmare fit in?

[Mongrel]

I think that's a full mod for RDR? Or was that an actual mode they released? Either way it's an extension of the RDR storyline, IIRC.

[Friday]

Zombie Nightmare is a "what if?" scenario. It features returning dead characters (and I don't mean as zombies, I mean characters who died in the main story start off alive again) and is firmly non-canon.

Though it's a lot of fun.

You remember all the silly bullshit alternate endings and like the magical girl Heather stuff in Silent Hill? It's like that.

Reasoning? Or would that be a spoiler thing?

Is it because the story is stronger in conventional chronological order, even if the gameplay and/or environment takes a bit of a step back?

Stronger in order, yeah. There are other concerns, like how playing RDR2 first will make you miss upgrades to the user experience in RDR1, something I even just talked about in this thread. But like I said RDR is a story-driven game. Best to focus on and maximize that aspect.

[nosimpleway]

So I'm playing Legend of Zegend: Breath of the Weath (having had my fill of Smultimate as detailed in that other thread)

And yeah I'm getting a lot of winking callbacks to previous games, all the way back to the NES. Yeah, you start out almost naked but there's an old guy right there who tells you it's dangerous without some equipment, everybody gets that one

But also, also
this is the first game I can think of where you can meet some rando out walking around, who is quickly revealed to be an agent of evil who tries to kill you
And to me, at least, what that means is: even now, over thirty years later, Eyes of Gannon Are Everywhere.

[Friday]

Sadly, not almost every NPC will eventually turn into an Eye of Gannon if you talk to them enough times. It still amuses me decades later that every town past the third one is just a few plot point and healing NPCs completely surrounded by legions of bats.

[nosimpleway]

I played Breath of the Weath too late, by which I mean I played it after reading this thread of thoughtful analysis. No, hold on, I mean I'm only playing it after succumbing to the calloused grip of my own anhedonia, where my brain literally does not let me enjoy things.

Probably just gonna repost thoughts from the stream-of-consciousness experience in the Talking Time Discord so if you're one of the like four people who also read that then this isn't gonna be much new stuff:

It's weird how cooking is so stressed by the game, there are tons of materials to find even early on, and all of them work better cooked, and nobody tells you how to actually cook them. There's a sidequest to get the clothes that will help you stave off the cold enough to reach the shrine on the mountaintop as part of The Tutorial, and the game pretty clearly spells out what you need to earn it -- cook this recipe! -- but still doesn't tell you how. I didn't get the clothes until after I got the paraglider, because by the time I figured out how to cook food I realized I was still missing one of the ingredients for the recipe, and just made a handful of Resist Cold potions to drink on my way up.

"I am... Rhoam Bophadeeznuts Hyrule, the spirit of the departed king." "Yeah, I figured, the game played a few notes of the leitmotif you've used for the last twenty years every time you showed up."

I instantly disliked how looooooong you have to climb up Shiekah Towers to get to the top, and only loathed it more the later into the game I got and the more I had to fight through to get to the tower in the first place. For all their advanced magitek, the Shiekah never figured out stairs.

I took a wrong turn and ran into a Lynel while I still had four hearts, regular clothes on my back, and a pointy stick. That did not go well, so I avoided Lynels for quite a while. Which I assume is intended by design! But by the time I had the courage to go back and actually fight the damn thing for realsies it could only do a quarter-heart of damage. Link was still a drama queen bitch about getting ragdolled halfway across Lanayru with each quarter-heart hit, but that's two issues already discussed ITT.

The next Lynel I found was a White-Maned one, which I... avoided for quite a while more. Once I finally started killing those I explored quite a bit more and ran into a Blue Lynel. Okay. Deep breath. Run run run stab stab sta-- wait, that's it? Yeah, Blue Lynels are weaker than White-Maned ones. Running into mooks out of difficulty order is also, I assume, part of the intended experience, but it's also kind of weird that nobody ever points out monster growth trends. You're supposed to puzzle it out yourself, fine, but doing that requires you to already know the heirarchy by experience. (Yes, Red is weaker than Blue across the board, which is one of the many callbacks to LoZ '85, but there's no indication of whether black, green, or white is weaker or stronger than blue.)

The fact that regular monsters carry the same weapons you can, to great effect, is another difficulty factor that's not made entirely clear. Yeah it's cool that I got a bunch of Knight's Broadswords from clearing out this monster den, but I would have avoided it if I had any indication that the Bokoblins inside all had Knight's Broadswords if I could have gleaned that information before getting stabbed in the face with one.

Stealth is wonky, Link's wearing some big stompy boots to the point that half the time he can't walk up to a Moblin while it's asleep to Sneakstrike it. It took several failed attempts to realize that a Lizalfos that's lying down camouflaged cannot be stealthed at all. Once I bought the Shiekah Armor it became the default outfit, and only partly because my only other option for a very long time was the Soldier's Armor that I swapped into only after monsters saw me and combat started.

In short, the entire earlygame is walking around with the "if you're at full health, you can't be oneshotted, you'll be left with a quarter-heart" mechanic saving your life over and over while you learn the ropes. It's not really very fun.

"Eldin Tower" man I know it's an open world and everything but you wouldn't think Nintendo would just openly rip off Fromsoft like that, I know this game wants to be Elden Ring so bad but come on

this got me the expected reaction in Discord and so I copypaste it here

Every video game you play has at least some level of Video Game Bullshit in it. In this case, I got a real headscratcher while exploring the volcano area, where it's possible to cool off by, uh, sitting in the hot springs. The water is cooler than the air.

Another fun reference: you go into the lost woods and are immediately prompted to go north, west, south, west before the puzzle really gets underway.
and holy shit what a deep cut, the Master Sword pedestal has two Silent Princess flowers blooming off to the left, and one more center-right. As in:


Eldin, the region named for Din. Faron, named for Farore. Lanayru, which is Spanish for "The Nayru". And then Tabantha, which is named for Lucca's dad from Chrono Trigger.

I asked the channel "When you pick up a rock and a Korok appears underneath, do you immediately put the rock back down on the Korok's head, or is that just me" and the overwhelming response was "yeah, obviously, duh, who wouldn't"

I'm up exploring Akkala and have to bring a flame to the furnace at the lab again. I find the source flame, get out my torch... it immediately starts raining. Guess I'll just go fuck myself then!

Finish at Akkala lab, keep exploring, dodge the Lynel out on the prairie, reach Skull Lake. Start climbing the massive pillar of stone with the shrine on top, get halfway up, and it starts raining. Guess I'll just go fuck myself, then! (I went and browsed the web for eight in-game hours until the rain stopped, to hell with leaving and starting over later just because the RNG decided to give me the finger)

Sometimes you find giant ice crystals with stuff inside once you melt them. You can melt them by equipping a fire-elemental weapon and just holding it near the ice. Later on I found some snowballs, and figuring I'd melt them to see if anything was inside, stood there with my flamesword until the snowball rolled away from me, up a cliff, over to a snowfield, where it kept rolling until it had bulked back up.
logical part of me: I guess at some point it got small enough that the gusty wind could pick it up and take it away, then once it started getting bigger it had some momentum to go with the tailwind to keep moving
other part of me: I scared it :(

"Is that a giant whale skeleton? Weird that it's out in the desert."
"Oh, it has little bone protrusions on its back. So the giant whale, what, had little tiny wings?"


The really baffling thing about weapon durability is that weapons are less durable than the monsters you're killing with them. If I'm fighting a Hinox or a White-Maned Lynel or something I'll go through four or five weapons from start to finish. Yeah I guess a lot of these are 100 years old, or cobbled together by monsters that probably don't have a super-advanced grasp of metallurgy and the craft of smithing, but god damn. First time I fought a Major Test of Strength guardian the reward in the bonus chest was a Knight's Halberd. Get the fuck outta here with that, I broke four weapons better than Knight's Halberd on the Guardian's face in that fight alone.

Actually funny: Zelda scolds Link in a flashback that he's good, but not unstoppable. Link is not visibly damaged as she treats whatever little scrape he ended up with. They turn and look down the hill, at the veritable mountain of corpses Link cut down to get there. Bokoblins and Lizalfos by the dozen, no shortage of Moblins, and two White-Maned Lynels.

Anyway at this point I have done over 100 shrines, and in running out of sidequests to do I have to engage with the horse-catching mechanics. I caught Zelda's horse('s great-grandchild, I assume, based on the lifespan of horses) and the Obvious Reference To Ganondorf's OoT Horse (which I named Ganonhorfe). And from what I understand... that's that, I can be done catching horses now, if I want one better than either of those then I can shell out realmoneys for an Amiibo. And the horses are... still not good? Yeah they're faster than running but I don't have to fight Link to run in the direction I want (unless he's near an edge, ha ha ha) and they can't go over cliffs or paraglide or climb, and from what I've read they can die for realsies and take 1000 rupees to revive. Why bother with any of it?

But as has been observed, by the time you're up to the late game, monsters aren't really worth fighting for the piddling prizes you get. (Unless they're a big setpiece monster, because you need those rare drops to upgrade your armor -- I still need like eight Huge Guts from those White-Maned Lynels.) Korok seeds are pretty redundant. I have enough hearts from shrines, and enough upgraded armor, that monsters aren't doing massive chunks of my life meter in damage anymore. The first third of the game is brutally difficult and everything can twoshot you, the last chunk of the game is kind of dull because Link is approaching his full Flashback Cutscene Power and only bosses are anything like a threat. The bit in the middle is pretty good I guess?

[Friday]

The midgame is the best part, yeah. So I guess the Devs were 2nd edition DnD fans because Breath of the wild exactly follows the same difficulty curve: at the start everything one or two shots you and you are left seriously questioning what the hell the devs were smoking and why didn't they just start you with higher HP to fix this problem, the midgame is great and well balanced combat where you feel threatened but the combat has some push and pull to it, and the endgame is boring because you're so incredibly strong that nothing outside of very specific fights with bullshit mechanics can hurt you.

Also agreed with the horses thing that they were not really worth it. I love horses though so I went out of my way to engage with them and ride them around as much as possible, but if you are just interested in getting from point A to point B as fast as possible, horses are not actually that helpful.

For me, the best part of the game wasn't any real mechanic of the game. It was more just exploring the world. It was fun and I appreciated the craftsmanship of the landscapes and forests and such. I just wish there was more meaningful stuff to find.

And yes, if you don't immediately drop the rocks right back onto the Korok's head there is something wrong with you.

[Friday]

also at some point I'm gonna need to talk about how fuckin' horny this game was. I kept teasing about it in my early posts but then I burnt out on writing about this game.

Like, not horny "for a Nintendo game" though that is also amazing. It's actually just one of the horniest non-porn games I've ever played, holy shit.

[nosimpleway]

The game isn't bad, mostly, and certainly compared to some of the crap I've talked about in the Whatcha Playin thread. But I keep scratching my head and going "This was revolutionary? This was Greatest-Of-All-Time material?"

I'm led to understand that Tingdom of the Kingdom fixes a lot of complaints by virtue of not being developed for the WiiU and graduated up a hardware generation partway through development

[nosimpleway]

I have dubbed this sort of thing "Emergent Frustration". And hoo boy god damn, is Breath of the Weath full of Emergent Frustration.

Energetic Rhino Beetles are possibly the most skittish critter in the game. They come out at night, sit on the trunks of trees, and if they hear anything -- obviously including Link's big stompy footfalls -- they fly away and as far as I can tell, do not respawn, at least not for the next couple of in-game days.

To upgrade the last set of armor, I need fifteen of the little bastards.

I know where they spawn already, I've seen them around. Hell, I've probably traded four or five to Beedle already, because nothing in the game ever hints that they're anything but something to brew into potions until you've completed all 120 shrines and upgraded the reward armor set twice. Anyway, there's some woods on the north end of the map, and the beach on the south side both tend to have a few at a time.

The forest is also filled with Octoroks, which more or less ignore stealth and are loud as shit both where they spawn and where they target the rocks they spit, so I start at the beach.

It starts raining. Beetles do not like the rain.

So I head to the forest. Knowing that the beetles come out at night, I spend the morning searching out Octoroks (and the occasional wolf) to clear them out. They stay dead and don't respawn until a blood moon brings them back, so I should have the evening to myself. Pretty sure I've got the area clear of monsters, so I go to build a campfire to skip the wait til nightfall.

It starts raining. You cannot build a fire in the rain.

So I wait for the rain to stop, skip four hours ahead to nightfall instead of eight.

I put on the ninja suit, duck down, creeeeeep slowly up to a tree with a beetle on it...

Stalfos erupt from the ground, startling the beetle. It flies away. Stalfos can spawn more or less anywhere as long as it is nighttime, you see.

I don't even bother pausing the game to put the controller down and tent my fingertips onto my temples. Stalfblins, or whatever the fuck skeleton moblins are called, aren't any threat. Or they were like 100 shrines ago before I had an extra twenty heart containers. At this point in the game they just pop up to interrupt whatever it is you're trying to do.

Deep breath. Defeat the skeletons, chasing down the skulls and crushing them so they don't revive. I sneak up to another tree and catch one (1) beetle that I need.

Then the malice starts swirling, little embers rise from nowhere in particular. The Blood Moon rises, and revives all the Octoroks in the forest. They more or less instantly scare away every beetle, because god damn if I ever saw another one.

I'm pretty sure that's every possible fucking random event that could have interrupted this specific task. There are games where Emergent Frustration is the whole point. Is Zelda really one of those, though?

[nosimpleway]

I got a text that my daughter finished the thing she was doing at the nearby high school, so I got in the car to go get her.

I had to wait to pull out of my parking spot because the parking space directly faces the road, and someone had stopped at the stop sign on the corner... six feet back from the actual sign, so that they could block me on my way out of where I was parked.

Two blocks away, some dipshit kid on a scooter came zipping out of another apartment parking lot directly into the road in front of me, forcing me to step on the brakes to not run him over.

Pulling into the high school parking lot, a big-ass truck ignored any established rules for right-of-way and cut me off.

And because they couldn't see me past this big-ass truck, another car cut me off pulling in.

Then I had to wait for the high school band, having finished their performance, to wheel their instruments across the parking lot in front of me.

As I prepared to pull into a parking spot and go get my daughter, I got the message that I could just turn around, she was waiting for me at the gate. So I turned around.

Two self-centered idiot boomers saying goodbye to one another decided to do it in the middle of the road so they could block traffic. Big hugs! Okay bye! See you next time, it was lovely. No wait, another big hug!

And really that's what it's like to play Breath of the Wild. The game can't let you fucking do anything without being interrupted by a rainstorm, so you can't climb. Or a thunderstorm, unequip your gear. Here's some skeletons, better stop to fight them, how come the skulls are more mobile after you smash the bodies apart anyway? Hey, there's some Keese, better take care of those before they freeze you solid or make you drop your equipment! Wait, what were you doing again?

[nosimpleway]

You know, thought I, wrapping up a dungeon that was one of three Guardians outside and either Moblins or Lizalfos inside, it's weird that a game with like a dozen monsters and three miniboss fights didn't have room for, like, Iron Knuckles. Like there are these statues hanging around the ruins and sometimes they animate and chase you as Armos and then once in a while one of 'em gets a life bar and reveals itself as Ike and gives you a much tougher fight.

...but I guess that's just Decayed Guardians and Guardian Stalkers, huh. Oh well.

And then I fought the biggest wet fart of a final battle imaginable and finished the game. I don't suspect I'll replay it and I can't say I'm really interested in trying Tears of the Kingdom.