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 brobdingnagian 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 brobdingnagier 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 brobdingnagian 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?