I strongly agree with your first point, but am in disagreement with the third and fourth one.
1. Part of what made the initial exploration exciting was the obstacles of it. When those limitations vanish, the game begins to lose much of its appeal. I think that having the ability to effectively erase the obstacles should be more of an aspirational reward, similar to full 60 charge for the master sword when completing the trials; or perhaps as a BIG leap at the end of the upgrade chain. In my opinion, the removal of challenge in the harsh environments is a big miss for Breath of the Wild. I really enjoy the survival elements in the early game, and while I do like building experience and gradually making these less harsh from a simulation standpoint, I don't agree with negating the challenge entirely via armour so much as maintaining the challenge but easing back on it making it for a more comfortable and sustainable experience - with, as I said, complete negation being more of an aspiration reward for longterm play.
Of course, in practice, maybe they had it this way and playtesting found it got annoying, so perhaps changing what already exists might serve to ruin the game. So I don't know the answer. I know Nintendo tested the crap out of this game for experience, and I only played the final product.
3. I find the combat to be exactly where I want it to be in terms of complexity. While it's simple, you can generally do A LOT more in Breath of the Wild than you can in the vast majority of games. Often adding complexity to battle systems, ironically, serves to increase the limits of what you can effectively do in combat as it tends to narrow the methods down of what you need to do to defeat the enemy. One of the best features of Breath of the Wild is that you can achieve great things while feeling like you're discovering a new way of doing them that isn't intended by the design.
4. On story, I am in complete disagreement. I found it had by far the greatest story of the Zelda franchise and that it was past Zelda games that really struggled with story. In the older Zelda games, the story is limited to a very simplistic bare bones narrative that serves as little more as flavour text between dungeons with cliche conflicts. Instead, Breath of the Wild provides one of the most sprawling and engrossing emergent storytelling experiences I've ever seen in a game, and perhaps the first time I've ever seen this in any major console franchise.
2 and 5, are more or less just extra content and just about every game can be improved in these ways; but neither were an issue for me in Breath of the Wild, and I don't think significantly increasing the number of rewards or diversifying background art in temples would improve the game in any significant way. In terms of the size of the content in the shrines, I would enjoy the game less if they began making giant dungeons again - playing older Zelda games, I realize I don't really like the dungeons in any of the other 3D games. While some of the Shrines are similar to others, when it comes to the puzzles in the dungeons of older Zelda games, how many broke down to a series of just finding a hidden key or a switch? My big issue with the older Zelda games is it felt like WAY too much time is wasted in the big dungeons; the Divine beasts and Hyrule Castle was enough for large dungeons, the main attraction of Zelda games (for me) has always been the world, not the dungeons.
As for critics giving Breath of the Wild 10/10, it achieves so much that I couldn't imagine myself scoring it any lower. It might not be a 10/10 game in 2030, but in 2017 it most certainly was 10/10. Penalizing scores on the basis of what games could possibly achieve in the future just defeats the purpose of scoring games at all. Breath of the Wild was a substantial jump over all other action adventure games, and even makes great games like Witcher 3 look backwards/outdated in many ways (and that is still one of the best games available to this day), Witcher 3 was a 10 out of 10 in 2015, and Breatg of the Wild is a 10 out of 10 in 2017 (and I'd say it still is in 2020). Ocarina of Time, for example, was a 10/10 in 1998, but if it came out today, few would score it higher than 7 or 8.
Last edited by Jumpin - on 08 August 2020I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
