Play's Too Great: Critical Anal Success in Baldur of the GUILE

[Friday]

by Friday, age eleven

Hello, and welcome to an extremely wordy and overwrought "review" of the new hot Zelda Game, Breath of the Wild.

What's that?

Huh?

Oh, it turns out that there's an even newer hot Zelda Game and Breath of the Wild is now "Boomer shit".

Fair Warning: This One is Going to Be Long, and I don't even know how long. I may take breaks in writing and post this in chunks. All I can promise you is that I will not be approaching Tim Rogers levels of personal anecdotes about how I once went to Japan and I knew this Girl who hung out with me and American McGee at a Sushi place and I asked him about e4m1 and he said "Dude."

But it's probably gonna be pretty long. I have a lot to say and some of it is about myself as I, as a person, relate to this game called Breath of the Wild.

SO LETS GET THIS FUCKING SHOW ON THE ROAD

PART 1

THE BIRTH OF VIDEOGAMES

In October 1958, Physicist William Higinbotham created what is thought to be the first video game. It was a very simple tennis game, similar to the classic 1970s video game Po --

Oh shit, sorry. I forgot this wasn't a youtube longform 45 minute video essay done by a Millennial for a sec. So we don't have to do that kind of pretentious time wasting crap. Instead we will do this other pretentious time wasting crap.

PART 1: WHY AM I DOING THIS

A: memes

Also, as I played this game, it really hit me in a weird place. I found myself at once enthralled by it, enraged by it, annoyed by it, impressed by it, and most of all, stimulated by it, in an extremely sexual way. And also non-sexually. And no the sexual stimulation part isn't 100% a joke it's only like maybe 40% a joke? We'll get there

In any case, it tickled the part of my brain that I like to call my "dev sector" in a way that... probably no other game I've ever played has. Let me explain.

I'm a game developer. It took me a long, long time to admit this to myself, but I am. And I'm actually pretty okay at it. I'm not a professional game dev because I have literally never gotten any money from doing it nor has anyone hired me to do it. But I make games. That makes me a game developer. Some of them were and are bad, some of them are okay, and some of them are actually pretty good. I've been a DM or GM for so long now that I don't even know how long, and I make my own rules and campaigns for the most part, only borrowing the skeletons of existing systems as a starting point. My campaign has a fucking patch record that goes back several years. I tinker with numbers and gamestate and gameflow nigh constantly, never satisfied beyond a temporary "okay this is good enough for now." I made a hobby RPG on RPGmaker VX Ace that R^2 and several others here played, and they told me it was pretty good for a hobby game. I concur with that assessment . I spent an absurd amount of time designing the skills and stats that are the numbers that make that game function, and now have come to understand that I overdesigned it. I made a section of ek2 that was so incredibly awful that I had to completely gut it in order for anyone other than Niku to play it. I made like half of ek3 and while my sections were an improvement over the incredibly sadistic design of my ek2 areas, they still were so hard that I had to release an "easytype" version of the download that simply made my areas less insane and left everything else alone. (Wait, shit. I think I also nerfed a really annoying part in yyler's area too. Whatever.)

The point I'm trying to make here is this: I'm a game dev, and I have a lot of experience making games and the numbers behind those games that make the games go, but I'm flawed. I don't want this review to come off as "entitled" or anything like that, like you see with a lot of the outrage videos you can find on any game on youtube.

That being said, I DO claim a level of objective ability to comment on the nuts and bolts behind a game that exceeds most people making videos on youtube because I HAVE MADE GAMES. A LOT.

Seeing things from the other side of the fence is important. Players endlessly bitch about problems they think are real that are, in fact, either not real entirely or not even the problem they think they are. They have no concept of what being a game dev is. In general, if their tone and words are to be believed, they profess that it is "easy" and problems are "obvious" and the solutions are "blindingly simple."

They are wrong.

I could go on and on about this topic, but for brevity, let me just say this: Most people do not have any idea of the challenges of making a game because they have never made one.

I have. Many times. And so I am sympathetic and empathetic to a game's flaws in a way that you will not usually see.

On the other hand, I'm also a lot better at identifying them.

Breath of the Wild is perhaps the greatest game I've ever played, except it's not because of a slew of minor annoyances, and one gigantic flaw that is a greater sin than all the other ones combined.

PART 2: THE TITLE OF THIS THREAD

"Played too late."

Well, it's certainly many years since release. But that's not actually where "too late" comes from.

"too late" refers to one thing and one thing only.

I played Breath of the Wild after I played Elden Ring, and I wish I hadn't. I wish I had played Breath of the Wild back near release date, when Elden Ring was still years away.

But why?

Because Elden Ring fixes Breath of the Wild's biggest sin. Don't get me wrong, it also introduces many new ones. They are, after all, different games with different focuses and design. Elden Ring is combat focused with a side of exploration, Breath of the Wild is exploration focused with a side of combat and puzzles.

When I played Elden Ring for the first time, I told my friends that this was it. This was the game I had been waiting for all my life. And I also said that the fact that it was a Fromsoft game, a Souls game, a Soulslike, a Dark Souls, whatever you want to call them, was basically irrelevant. I said that it could have not been a Souls game and I would have still considered it the game I had been waiting for my whole life.

So when I played Breath of the Wild, finally, after receiving a hand me down Switch from a friend of a friend, I was ready to test that claim. Breath of the Wild should have been the game that proved that I didn't need my dream game to be a Souls game.

It didn't.

PART 3: THE GOOD

Breath of the Wild is a beautiful world. It lets you go anywhere and do anything in any order you want. It wraps the player in a blanket of peace and tranquility and adventure and absolutely DRIPS with wonder.

Let me tell you about one of my favorite things I experienced while playing Breath of the Wild.

I was exploring a mountain and after finishing it, I jumped off the peak and glided down to a nearby series of ponds. Most of Breath of the Wild's areas are beautiful but relatively undetailed, this pond was not. There were rocks and small ledges arranged with such care and aesthetic consideration that I knew immediately that someone had poured part of themselves into this tiny corner of the world. There were trees growing around the water, fish swimming in the water, frogs splashing near the shore, and bugs moving over the surface. I walked through this little slice of the game with an almost solemn pace, viewing this landscape from multiple angles, with the thoroughness that it deserved. I found four (!?) Korok seeds all clustered around the pond and knew that this tiny chunk of Breath of the Wild had been loved by someone on the dev team intensely.

I also knew that most players wouldn't find it, and if they did, they'd just collect the Korok seeds and leave like a locust stripping the area bare of relevant resources.

But it didn't bother me. Normally it would in most games, but I understood that Breath of the Wild was different. It did not demand anything of the player. You were free to explore at your own pace, on your own terms, and unless you were one of those insane people who 100% everything, the game was simply not designed to be fully excavated by any one person. For example: There are 900 Korok seeds in the game, but you only need 441 of them to completely max out your inventory of weapons, bows, and shields. And even that is a gross and needless waste of your time, because of how Korok seeds scale in terms of how many you need to unlock that next slot. You can make it through the game with 90% of your inventory unlocked on only perhaps 150 seeds.

Suffice it to say, the game is built around missing stuff. And that is, ultimately, a good thing, and something it shares with Elden Ring.

There's more. I liked the combat with the Lynels. Shock, Friday the Dark Souls Fan likes the thing in Breath of the Wild that is most like Dark Souls.

The Shrines were mostly good. I've seen people say they were "boring" but I was always up to see what puzzle the shrine I had just discovered would throw at me.

The Divine Beasts were mostly just big shrines, which was fine. The bosses were okay, nothing special.

Calamity Ganon is my favorite Ganon in both terms of aesthetic design and mechanics. Absolutely knocked it out of the park with him, loved it. Final form was a big let down though. I guess they were just going for a cinematic experience over an actual battle, which I get, but I still felt let down a bit after the absolute baller Calamity Ganon fight.

The GLIDER! The Glider fuckin' rules. Every game should have a Glider. I'm worried I'm going to replay Elden Ring or Dark Souls 3 or whatever and just keep killing myself jumping off cliffs because I think I have a Glider

GERUDO TOWN BUT WE WILL GET TO THAT

The story was good. It was presented in a fragmented way, but again, as a Dark Souls fan, this was nothing new to me.

The sheer size and scope of the world was insane. Loved it and loved exploring it.

That one girl in Impa's house that clearly has the biggest crush in the history of Hyrule on Link but you can't do anything about it NEVERMIND THAT GOES IN THE NEXT PART

PART 4: THE BAD

That one girl in Impa's house that clearly has the biggest crush in the history of Hyrule on Link but you can't do anything about it

lol I don't care about Zelda at ALL literally EVERY OTHER GIRL is better than her in this game and she's the fucking canon ship fuck this non-gay earth

alright alright she's cute

I mean whatever it's a media produced by a japanese person, of course the most boring girl is the official ship

okay my fucking wrists and fingers hurt from typing and editing this I will continue Part 4 later

next time: fucking rain

[Friday]

PART 4 PART 2: THE RAIN

hi welcome back to my review do you want a cookie i made cookies

anyway let's take off the all lowercase casual tone for a moment and go

Full. Fucking. Tryhard.

That's right bitches, I too can use proper punctuation and capitalization. I can even write in normal, readable sentences and not in these infinitely long grammatically incomprehensible nightmare beasts that I pepper so often into my paragraphs that one could say, upon reading it, that the entire fucking dish is just pepper. Where is the meat? you might ask, as you shovel yet another giant spoonful of pepper into your mouth.

The meat is here, friends. And the meat is rain.

Why the fuck does it rain in Breath of the Wild?

"Because it's immersive and shit," you reply, one hand on your dick swiftly masturbating yourself to completion over a poster of Zelda. It doesn't matter what Zelda. Just the concept of Zelda itself.

"No," I reply to your reply. "I don't mean it like that."

"Uhhhhhgggg," you say, as you cum.

It will be the first of many orgasms you have while reading my review.

To be clear, I do not claim that you are masturbating and cumming because you are reading my review. No, that is unrelated. The fact is that you, a generic denizen of the internet, are constantly masturbating about Zelda. At all times. Forever. Eternally.

Because Zelda gets a pass.

The year is 199whatever. You are 12 or 13. You love two things: Sugar, and Zelda. You open your newest copy of Nintendo Power and look at the screenshots for the newest Zelda game.

You cum.

The copy of Nintendo Power you are holding is further stained. Twenty-five years later, you read some dipshit on the internet say the following:

"Ocarina of Time is actually kind of bad"

For the first time since you were 13, you stop the constant, eternally stroking of your Zelda-loving penis. You freeze. The camera begins to rotate around you, revealing that your room is covered, wall to wall, in Zelda posters and merch. Froth begins to bubble forth from your lips. Furiously, you shit and vomit and type in reply to this dipshit that "ZELDA OOT IS A PERFECT GAME AND IT IS THE BEST REPRESENTATION OF THE HEROES JOURNEY IN ALL OF ARTISTIC MEDIA" even as you know, for a fact, that the best representation of the heroes journey is the fucking Iliad. It doesn't matter to you.

What matters to you is Zelda.

When I read youtube comments under videos about games, even just like OSTs, there is always a particular kind of comment to be found, sometimes more than once. It reads, in general, as follows:

"When I was 12-22, in 199X/200X, I played (this game) with my (mom, older brother, friend, dad, cousin, uncle, aunt) and we had a lot of fun. My (family member/friend) did (a cool thing while we played it) and then later got (cancer, run over by a truck, shot by a cop) and now everytime I play (game) I think about them. This game means so much to me because when I play this game I think about my dead (family member/friend)."

What the person is trying to express with this comment is that this game means more to them than "just a game." To them, it is a very personal part of their lives, a linchpin, if you will, in the makeup of their experience and personality. They cannot play this particular game without tearing up as they remember the good times with their dead family member/friend. Even just hearing a certain theme from the game conjures not memories of the game itself, but treasured, sacred memories of their loved one who they played the game with. They do not in any circumstance think about the flaws of the game in question, but if you were to ask them about said flaws, they would reply "who cares about that? This game is an important piece of my life and a living memorial to my dead family member/friend."

Zelda, as a series, is everyone's dead cancer mom game.

But why? Surely not every single person on earth has a dead loved one who they played Zelda with. I certainly don't, and yet I am not immune to this insidious mind worm entirely. I too hold Zelda in a level esteem that frankly, it does not deserve. Zelda games are flawed. Even the best ones. So why does this series just... get a fucking pass?

Why when Elden Ring came out did people harp endlessly on the fact that it reused enemies, and yet when I read reviews of Breath of the Wild, I do not see a single complaint about how Breath of the Wild only has seven fucking enemies excluding bosses in it, populating the entire gigantic world?

Seriously, what the fuck? how the fuck did Nintendo get away with that? Elden Ring has 573485677 enemy types and reuses them fairly sparingly. I'm not saying that Elden Ring wouldn't be a better game if it had no "palette swaps" in it and instead had enough distinct enemy types to never reuse anything, but the amount of criticism Elden Ring received about this topic compared to the amount Breath of the Wild got is night and day.

And that's just one example of the "pass" that Zelda games get. The list goes on and on.

Why?

I have a theory. My theory is that Nintendo occupies the same space in people's brains that Disney does. It's an ostensibly kid-friendly company that is responsible for a bunch of warm, gooey memories from our formative years. When you hear the word "Disney" you think of incredibly potent, emotional memories of you curled up on the couch with your mom enjoying snacks, feeling safe, comfortable, and at peace. Mulan plays on the TV screen. It is 1999. 9/11 has not yet happened. You have not yet had the agony and suffering of the world poured into your head, forever ruining any chance you may have had at long term peace and happiness because unfortunately you were born with some degree of empathy for your fellow man. Capitalism, though looming in the background, has not yet ravaged your life to the point where you can no longer afford housing and food. You are, in short, still a fucking kid. And you are happy and warm.

After you finish the movie, your mom kisses you and tells you you can stay up late if you want, there's no school tomorrow. She hands you a plate of cookies and you go to your room and sit down to replay Mario 64 or Zelda OoT or Link's Awakening or A Link to the Past or Blast Corps or Earthbound. Your brain neurons form an association, a bridge, that solidifies into concrete in your mind. "Nintendo", your brain says, "Is Good."

25 years later you are depressed and you read some dipshit on the internet call OoT "kinda bad, actually."

You shit and vomit simultaneously.

I've found, broadly speaking, that it is very difficult to discuss art with people. Not because people don't want to talk about art, in fact it's one of their favorite things to talk about. I ask people all the time what their favorite game is, their favorite book is, their favorite movie is. It's a great way to get to know them and an interesting topic that usually leads to a pretty interesting conversation as we, two people who don't know each other well, inflict our opinions about art on each other.

The problem is, the thing that gives me difficulty when I talk about art and games, is that I very often find myself not talking about the game with that person but their emotional attachment and experience that surrounds that game.

It's understandable! I don't blame them for it and I have plenty of my own emotional attachments and experiences regarding games and art. That's what fucking games and art are SUPPOSED to do, of course! They are MEANT to evoke strong emotional reactions from people. And I wouldn't have it any other way! I love that art makes people feel things, and not just feel things, but feel things so strongly that they might actually even cry!

The thing is, when I say "the combat in OoT sucks, it's mostly waiting around" the person I said this to will often reply "MY DEAD MOM WHO DIED OF CANCER LOVED THAT GAME." and unfriend me on facebook even though I don't use facebook.

Brother, I just wanted to talk to you about the mechanics of the video game. I am not here to tell you that your dead cancer mom was wrong to form an emotional attachment to it.

But that's the thing about art. Discussions about art are littered with invisible land minds. Yes, that's not a typo, though it's a pun. They are land mines that exist in people's minds. Land Minds. You never know who is gonna have a dead cancer mom about fucking The Sims 4 or whatever. People have strong emotional attachments to art that makes talking about the art at times, nearly impossible. Any critical statement is taken as an affront on this sacred belief that the art or game in question is "important."

But Zelda rises to another level. It is, I dare say, the highest level I've seen in this behavior.

(Well, except people who played World of Warcraft vanilla. The level of nonsensical emotional driven dick stroking about that game makes all other dick stroking of all other games, combined, look like a tiny speck in an infinite void compared to the burning sun that is the average WoW vanilla player's ravenous defense of their beloved game whenever anyone says "actually WoW is kinda bad". So if you're a big Zelda fan and you've been reading all this thinking "wow Friday what the fuck is your problem jesus shut the fuck up and just let people enjoy things" you can take some solace that your zealotry will never even begin to scratch the surface of the religious fanaticism that certain vanilla WoW players have.)

Zelda isn't "just a game" to people. It's a sacred institution. A masterclass of art and adventure. I see bumper stickers that are Zelda themed as much as I see all other video game bumper stickers combined. If video games were a religion, Zelda would be the Pope.

The problem is, it fucking rains in Breath of the Wild and I hate it.

And no, the rain isn't the big sin that I talked about earlier. It's just a thing that I hate about the game.

I don't hate that it rains. I don't like the fact that it makes it harder to see and adds a bunch of visual noise to the screen, but I will accept those things because the fact that it rains does indeed increase my immersion into the world. It rains in real life, so it should rain in Zelda if Zelda is attempting to simulate a world.

No, what I hate about the rain is that it makes it so all climable surfaces become slippery and basically unclimable.

What. The. Fuck.

Imagine you made a game where a primary mechanic was jumping. You know, like a platformer. However, periodically, at random, you also made it so for about five minutes, you could not jump.

So the player is now stuck. They cannot play the game, not really. Sure, they can still walk. Maybe they can try to find an alternate path though the level even that does not require jumping. This may work or it may not, but in either case, you have changed "jump over this small gap" into a colossal waste of the player's time.

That's what Breath of the Wild does. Sometimes you can manage to find a way to get to where you wanted to go without climbing, or with a route that includes a lot of ledges that you can climb up despite the rain, but often you cannot and have to either wait or go somewhere else.

Luckily, Breath of the Wild includes a function where you can start a fire and sit down in front of it to pass time instantly, therefore dispelling the rain.

Except THE RAIN FUCKING PREVENTS YOU FROM STARTING A FIRE SGAIFghsoithw3yt098234y51rnnhfsdjlkbgne

Yes, I know. If you find an overhang you can start a fire in it's shelter even in the rain. Cool, immersive. An overhang is not always present. I have to report that Breath of the Wild made me STOP PLAYING THE GAME numerous times, and just sit there, waiting for the rain to stop, midway up a mountain.

Why why why why why why WHY was this put into the game? In what universe did they imagine that this feature would do anything other than piss players off? It's so OBVIOUS what the PROBLEM is and the solution is so BLINDINGLY SIMPLE.

See what I did there?

As much as I hate the rain mechanic in Breath of the Wild, I can forgive it. In the end, it's just a thing that is annoying. A misstep in design, to be sure, but not the thing that makes Breath of the Wild not my dream game like Elden Ring is.

Remember, I think Breath of the Wild is a great game. A game that was seminal in open world design. A game that other games, including Elden Ring, drew inspiration from. And that leads me into part 5.

PART 5: THE DNA

next time, on Friday vomits onto a message board and inflicts her stupid, biased, and completely worthless opinions on you, we will examine what came before Breath of the Wild, what came after it, why, and what Breath of the Wild is at it's core.

Hint: It's a Zelda game that isn't a Zelda game that isn't enough not a Zelda game.

[Newbie]

Did you make sticky recipes? Does anyone?

I can answer that question: I made sticky recipes—in TotK. Why did I never do that in BotW? I don't remember.

No conclusion.

[Friday]

I can say with total finality that:

1: I don't know what a sticky recipe is and

2: everything I cooked was just like MEAT MEAT APPLE APPLE MUSHROOM

3: and then later ATTACK UP CRAB ATTACK UP CRAB ATTACK UP CRAB MEAT MEAT

[Newbie]

OH, gross, I hate when I realize I've been remembering phantom memories. It turns out sticky frogs were not in BotW, so my recollection of having them but never bothering to make them into potions because I couldn't spare the monster parts was ENTIRELY FICTITIOUS

UGH UGH UGH

[nosimpleway]

ATTACK UP CRAB ATTACK UP CRAB ATTACK UP CRAB MEAT MEAT

It's time for crab.

[Friday]

Oh yeah! I forgot the other favorite thing I found when I played.

So nestled down in the southeast corner of the map is this tiny little fishing village on the beach called Lurelin Village.

It's basically Hawaii and I love it. It's so chill and serene. There's some cool stuff to do down there, like an ocean treasure hunt and a few shrines, but mostly just crabs hanging out on the beach and some Koroks. Nearby there's a lovers pond that has one of my favorite side quests where you help some shyboy get with a Gerudo girl.

It's great. I love places like this.

I heard someone complaining about the "original" Lurelin village being pointless and "not useful to the player" in a review about Tears of the Kingdom, and it annoyed me because buddy, you have missed the fucking point of Breath of the Wild.

I think things that just exist in a world are great. I talked about this a little bit in my top 100 games thread when I discussed Symphony of the Night and it's Confessional. I think SotN is probably the worst "game" of all the Igavanias, or at least, I think all the follow ups were better balanced and tuned to the player experience. But they all lost something that SotN had. SotN felt like I was actually exploring Dracula's Castle, while all the later games felt like I was progressing through videogame levels. Sure, they were better designed and all that, but it lost something compared to SotN's meandering and often "pointless" atmosphere. The Confessional stands as the ur-example of this kind of design. It doesn't help the player in any way, nor is it a required room to visit. And yet it stands out in my (and many others) memory not because it's a good room in a videogame but because it's a good room in Dracula's Haunted Castle.

Not everything has to serve the player or "be useful to the player". Sometimes it can just be a thing that exists in the world that the game is set in, and not only is that okay, but actually it makes the game better. It makes the game more than just a game. Make the best game in the history of the planet and it is, ultimately, still just a game. People will enjoy it, of course, but you've limited it, constrained it. But make a world that the player can visit and explore, even a flawed one, and that is something else. It sparks the imagination.

Oh also I loved Horse God just repeatedly threatening to eat you

[nosimpleway]

Hey, "not useful"? That's malicious slander against the Confessional and I will not stand for it. The Confessional will give you exactly one (1) Grape Juice, which heals 20 HP.

[Mongrel]

Well that's fuckin' weird... where did Thad and my posts go?

[Thad]

The other Zelda thread could not contain Friday's posts.

[Mongrel]

Well I guess my question now is "Why does that thread not show up when I look up my recent posts?"

[Friday]

PART 5: THE DNA

Welcome back to Friday pontificates painfully pointlessly yet passionately while also practically arranging her platitudes in a particular way that makes you pause because it's hard to parse.

PART 5.1: WHAT CAME BEFORE

The first open world game was The Legend of Zelda, for NES.

(Okay, small digression. I am aware that whenever you say "the first game in X type was X," some well educated nerd who is highly knowledgeable about videogame history will show up and tell you that actually there was some Atari game or computer game from 1978 that was technically first. So, yes, the first open world game to actually exist was Adventure for Atari or Wizardry Two point Three for PC 47892375 dash commodore or whatever.)

Zelda for NES was a direct inspiration for Breath of the Wild, and stated as such. So let's examine what TLZ was.

You could go basically anywhere immediately. Some of the dungeons are gated behind certain items, but two of those items are easy to obtain (bombs, blue candle) so really that just leaves three dungeons that are hard gated: The one where you need the Raft, the one where you need the Whistle, and the final dungeon that requires you to have completed all the previous dungeons. Other than that, certain areas are gated behind the player having certain knowledge (the path through the lost woods, up up up the mountain) which can be obtained in the game as hints. So while TLZ is an open world experience, it is not without a few barriers that limit the player from truly going wherever immediately.

Crucially, I think what defines TLZ and separates it from other more primitive open world games that came before is the sense of exploration, and more importantly, discovery.

Stay with me here. I'm drawing a distinction between exploration and discovery, because this is going to be very important later. You can explore a featureless large maze, but there's nothing to really find. You still map it out, mentally or on paper or perhaps the game will do it for you on an automap, but if there's nothing in it except the entrance and the exit, you are not discovering anything in it except where the exit is.

I think TLZ's genius was that it filled the game with cool shit to find.

You can find hearts. You can find a letter than turns into a medicine bottle shop. You can find rupees, you can find assholes who take your rupees to repair their doors. You can find gambling games. You can find a power bracelet that lets you warp around the map. You can find sword upgrades. You can find a secret shop that has a very expensive ring that doubles your defense. In short, you can find shit. Some of it is very meaningful (sword upgrades, double defense, warping) some of it is middling (rupees) and some of it is kind of useless (gambling houses, door repair charges). You never know what you're gonna get! Exploration can lead to anything at any time. That makes exploring and grinding screens by bombing every rock and burning every tree feel rewarding even if it is sort of irritating.

I should also mention Metroid here, a game released like half a year later that basically was Zelda but with a sci-fi theme and a sideview. It had a lot of the same design in that it's an open world with a bunch of cool shit to find in it. I think TLZ has aged better, but Metroid shouldn't be forgotten for being an early open world game.

Then you had the GTA games.

Now the GTA games are an odd duck because while they are open world and they do have shit to find in them, they don't really focus on or encourage exploration much. You're more expected to just go through the story and maybe go on a few joyrides. Maybe you decide to stop roleplaying a criminal and start roleplaying a good guy so you stop doing the missions where the rob stores and just go on a huge cop killing spree until they finally send in the national guard and you feel morally conflicted about shooting them because they're not cops so you let them take you down. Anyway the point is while GTA games are open world, they are not the same kind of open world as Zelda or Metroid. There's not a focus on exploration and discovery.

Anyway then Open World games became bullshit handholding lead you by the nose grocery lists of locations and quests to check off your list for a long time. I won't go into "modern" open world design much because you all know what I mean when I talk about this. Suffice it to say that as time went on, the worlds became less open and more like a ride. Players started to ask "what the hell is the point of having an open world if the UI is just going to show me where everything that is interesting is?" People started to get Open World fatigue. It seemed like every fucking game was Open World, but pointlessly so. The Formula for Open World had become concrete, set. Little flashing marks in your heads up with how many meters to go. Checklists of sidequests. Horrific UI elements covering your entire map, entire screen. Long gone were the days of exploration and discovery.

Then Nintendo was like "what if we actually delivered on the promise of OoT?"

And thus, Breath of the Wild was born.

PART 5.2 WHAT WE HAVE NOW

OoT was a cool game. I remember the first time I saw someone play it. They booted it up on their N64 and let the title screen play out. Link riding Epona across a massive Hyrule Field. That music. The gears in my head began to lubricate.

"Man, it must be so much fun to just explore," I said to my friend, watching that incredible title screen.

"It is," he replied, smiling.

Turns out it wasn't.

Oh, you found another secret hole in Hyrule field. Here is your 20 rupees. Here is your bombs. Here is your bundle of 10 arrows.

OoT has some exploration but all of the discovery is bullshit. It's not worth your time to comb for the hidden shit because the hidden shit is bullshit. Pieces of heart exist to find, yes, but they tend to be more clearly marked. They usually involve a semi-side quest rather than just finding a secret. In any case, OoT is kinda bad because the combat is mostly just waiting around for the enemy to drop their guard so you can hit them.

Breath of the Wild is OoT as we all wanted it to be. And all it needed to do was just be Zelda 1 again, but even moreso.

Where TLZ gates you a bit, BotW gives you your full suite of abilities and then lets you go wherever the fuck you want. There's never a "oh, I have to come back here later" moment in the game because you never do. You can always complete the area you find. Even the areas that are too cold or too hot to explore without certain armors can be explored anyway with cold resist or heat resist potions/food. The Divine Beats can be done in any order. Hell, Ganon can be done at any time when you feel you're strong enough. It would have been easy for the Devs to say "okay Ganon has an energy field that only the four divine beasts can penetrate so you have to do them before you go to the final boss" but they didn't. You can just walk up to Ganon right away with your stick, three hearts and a dream if you want.

It's fucking great.

So what's the problem, Friday?

PART 5.3 NOT A ZELDA GAME BUT NOT ENOUGH NOT A ZELDA GAME

Breath of the Wild would be a better game if it wasn't a Zelda game.

It already broke free from "The Zelda formula" to such a degree that that's bascially all anyone could talk about six years ago when it came out. "This is a new kind of Zelda," every review said. And they were right!

But they were also right that it was still a Zelda game. And in my opinion, that is what holds Breath of the Wild back from true greatness.

You want hit points in Breath of the Wild? Nah, you get hearts. Each heart is worth four HP though and defense is calculated as a flat number. You want exp so killing monsters feels more worthwhile? Nah, exp isn't a Zelda thing. (Except Zelda 2, of course, which is just one of the reasons why Zelda 2 fuckin' rules.) So instead monsters drop monster parts and their weapons and sometimes camps will have a treasure chest that only unlocks after you kill everything. Trouble is, their weapons generally suck and you already have 100 moblin fangs or whatever. Oh and that cool sealed chest? Yeah, inside was another weapon or maybe some Ice Arrows. Meh.

Why not just have exp that you gain from killing monsters? It doesn't have to level you up in a traditional way, though it could. Maybe you could spend it on more inventory spots or like passive increases to weapon durability. It doesn't really matter, it would make killing shit feel a lot more worthwhile. But nope, can't have exp because exp and Zelda don't go together.

Alright, what about gear? Maybe you could find a cool ring that --

You get three slots for your armor. Helm, Chest, Boots. That's it.

Do me a favor and for a moment imagine Breath of the Wild but there are two Ring slots. And you can find Rings anywhere. Anywhere. In Monster camps. In chests behind waterfalls, at the bottom of lakes. As rewards for sidequests. What would the Rings do? One might increase your movement speed by 5%. Maybe later you find another that increases your move by 10% in a tougher zone. Maybe one increases your defense by 1, by 2, by 3. Attack up 5%. Attack up 10%. Heat resist. Cold resist. Climb speed up. Swim speed up. Extra stamina. More. How much more exciting would it be to find a new Ring that had a new effect?

But instead we get Shrines, Korok Seeds, and Weapons.

NEXT TIME:

Part 6: Weapon Durability.

[Yoji]

There's really no upside to the rain at all? I thought I heard an NPC say some kinds of animals only come out in the rain, but fuck if they actually say which ones. And even then, that hardly seems like a good tradeoff; in exchange for maybe seeing a rare bird you can eat, you get no more climbing ever.

And if I remember right, The Phantom Pain at least had a little give and take with rainy weather. It'd destroy your cardboard boxes, but it'd also mask the sounds of your footsteps.

[long, valid talk about media and young, impressionable minds]

I catch myself having to amend a lot of talks with folks about my own favorites and whatnot, usually confessing with some variant of "well, it sure seemed good and/or important when I was 16 years old." Honestly, it's kind of made me a little afraid of revisiting personally important ones like Xenogears and realizing they're actually trash.

Project Phantasma is still perfect though COME AT ME

[Friday]

Despite the tone of that section, I don't actually mind people forming strong emotional attachments to art/media. I have plenty of my own, after all, so I'd be a massive hypocrite if I said it was wrong for people to do that.

It's just that, with video games in particular, it can be hard to discuss the mechanics of the game when you have to get through people's emotional attachments to them. OoT is probably the Ur-example of that, but I mean if you want to go more for things that I like to make it a fair example, people have the exact same kind of emotional attachment to Dark Souls. Which has plenty of mechanical problems of its own. I mean, hell, so does Elden Ring. But a lot of the time criticising Dark Souls on a gameplay/mechanical level will bring out the same emotional defense that you'd get going after OoT.

You see similar stuff when you go after movies or books (remember how people would react if you had anything negative to say about Harry Potter in the before times? The one and only upside to Rowling coming out as a massive fuckface transphobe is people are now more accepting of someone saying negative things about the books, even if it's not related to transphobia or Rowling herself in any way) but it's a lesser reaction in my experience. Or at least, people are more willing to accept that maybe their favorite movie might have shoddy camera work or whatever. Except Marvel movies, I guess, because when Martin Scorsese called them less films and more amusement park rides (which is 100% correct, by the way) the Marvel fanbase responded by calling him a hack has been who hadn't made a good movie in decades, which I mean, The Irishman is literally sitting right there and also even if he was a hack has been he'd still have been 100% correct.

The point is that people get really touchy over things they like being criticized, even if the criticism is fairly light. Like I consider OoT a good game that paved the way forward for a lot of 3D action games, including fucking Dark Souls which was as stated by Miyazaki a direct influence but that's not good enough for a lot of OoT fans. It has to be this sacred thing, the best game ever made, a perfect 10 out of 10. Because I played it with my mom and she died.

[Friday]

One of the reasons I love Dark Souls is because of Blighttown, which is objectively not fun and kind of shoddy and shitty. But it fits the overall tone of the game and the message the game is going for so well that I love it anyway. But, like, I'm not going to object if someone plays it and says "this fucking zone sucks." Because it does. My emotional attachment to it does not change the fact that it's a horrible, shitty zone. It might be intentionally horrible and shitty, and I can point that out and talk about how it's part of the message of the game (hint: it's a metaphor for depression and how depression can only be overcome with an insane level of determination and effort) but I will not say to the person who hates Blighttown that they should not hate Blighttown. It is in fact even designed for the player to hate it.

(Also the whole game is a metaphor for depression and how depression can only be overcome with a truly herculean level of persistence, dedication and single minded focus. You could even argue that Blighttown sort of belabors the point and that the message could come across without it being such a goddamn awful experience, and ESPECIALLY could come across without forcing the player to climb out of it after the initial descent. It's not like I look forward to playing through Blighttown again, after all. The area objectively sucks and isn't fun. But still, I think it exists as sort of the core of Dark Souls. It's dark, dreary, and horrible even to a degree that exceeds the rest of the game, and after you finish climbing out of it, the game starts to look up in tone. You go to Anor Londo, which is a literal ray of hope and sunshine, and though you still have a lot of work in front of you, you've started down the path of recovery. Of course, Anor Londo itself being a fucking lie sort of pulls the rug out from under that, but then again most players won't ever discover that bit. Dark Souls is weird, okay.)

[Friday]

Also if you think it's weird that I'm talking so much about Dark Souls in a Zelda thread remember that Dark Souls is just Miyazaki going "what if I made a whole game about the fight from OoT against the Iron Knuckle"

[Thad]

[long, valid talk about media and young, impressionable minds]

I catch myself having to amend a lot of talks with folks about my own favorites and whatnot, usually confessing with some variant of "well, it sure seemed good and/or important when I was 16 years old." Honestly, it's kind of made me a little afraid of revisiting personally important ones like Xenogears and realizing they're actually trash.

I'm not in a huge hurry to go back to Xenogears either (mostly because fuck the platforming sections), but I've come to kind of enjoy looking back at old favorites, even if they're not as good as I remembered. And I'm not just talking about games, that goes for all kinds of media. On balance I'd rather rewatch Batman than He-Man, but He-Man is still a lot of fun even if its flaws are a lot harder for my adult mind to ignore.

Even where something is an ambitious failure, or overrated, or just not what you remember, it can still make for fascinating conversation. We had a pretty good conversation about the NES TMNT a few months back, and my opinion on Final Fantasy 7 has fluctuated over the years from "best game ever" to "massively overrated" and settled somewhere around, well, it's complicated.

For the record I don't love Ocarina of Time either. It's certainly not a bad game, and I understand why people love it, but it feels like a step down from A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening in every way that matters, and that's not me looking back at it with the benefit of hindsight, it's how I felt in 1998.

I enjoyed the fuck out of BotW, and on the whole I like its aimlessness. I picked it back up a little bit ago and I'm enjoying going back, but also thinking maybe it's getting on about time I finish it and move on to the next one, now that I have it.

I'm also digging Oracle of Seasons, which I missed when it came out and kind of bounced off when I tried to play it years later. This time I'm coming around to why people like it; it's not as good as Link's Awakening, but it's an interesting take on the formula that brings its own twists to the table.

[Romosome]

okay I'm still reading this because Friday decided to put every single word she's been saving up since she stopped posting regularly into THIS VERY POST but I have to say up front before I forget

in an odd twist of fate my Dead Cancer Mom Game was NOT Ocarina of Time, despite me being obsessed with it and believing it was the Best Game Ever. It was fucking Goldeneye.

And I was about to talk about how I didn't convince myself Goldeneye was the best game ever made instead of a hilariously janky piece of shit that was all we had at the time, except..on reflection I think I DO, it just doesn't come up that much.

My point is that through sheer luck I didn't have my Adult Injury patterned onto Zelda

[Friday]

One last sidenote before we move on to talking about the game some more:

My favorite thing with the whole Scorsese/Marvel drama was when people told the Marvel fanboys that The Irishman had just came out so Scorsese wasn't a has-been and then some of the fanboys reported that they watched it and that it was "boring and stupid."

Which, I mean. Of course they thought that. It's a fucking movie. It doesn't have either a quip or an explosion or a laser every 73 seconds, so they cannot fathom why anyone would enjoy it. It is eternally a mystery to them why it was critically lauded and widely considered one of his best works.

95/86 on RT compared to Infinity War which is 85/92. Sorry but the numbers don't lie bitch, The Irishman has more of them.

By the way, the true measure of whether someone is a brainless idiot Marvel fanboy who cannot orgasm without a laser firing while a quip is said or a genuine human being is what they thought of Black Panther, the only Marvel movie with anything to fucking say. And hooooo boy did it say it. Still boggles my fucking mind that that level of straight fire was put into a mainstream fucking Disney movie.

Spoilers for Wakanda Forever:
Like the best part of Wakana Forever is when Killmonger shows up in the afterlife and Shuri yells at him and he's like "lol hahaha what the fuck, y'all only doin' shit now because I woke you up to how direct action is not only needed but morally obligated, y'all were a bunch of coward pussy little bitch fucks"

[Romosome]

the actual test is just whether they like Spiderverse more than MCU