The only think trash about BotW was Dark Beast Ganon. Calamity Ganon was fine, but Dark Beast was just pointless.

The ending itself was a good one though. It gave closure to the main plot and gave us an idea if what Zelda and Link are doing moving forward. Not the best ending, but a decent one.

What did you expect a medal?

BotW I found to be a game of amazing scope that did very little with it.
The best parts of the game are Eventide Island and the Master Swords trials, which force you to interact with the wealth of tools and mechanics the game provides so that you can advance.

The rest of the game suffers though, because the stronger you get, the less creative you have to be.
You could set up an elaborate set of traps for that monster, or you could just twat it in the face with your weapons. You could chain your metal tools to conduct electricity, or you could just move that box.

Sets of optimal action are discovered, and patterns begin to emerge. This makes the game kind of dull over long stretches in particular, but the game makes no effort to try and make playing in chunks more appealing.
This is especially true because while content is presented in a very unique way, i.e. you have to find it, it is very standard in execution. You quickly figure out that only completing Shrines and collecting Korok seeds has a material impact on your character, which makes it THE THING you spend most time doing.
Shrines and Korok seeds can be fun, but they also feature often repeated content, and they tend to really blur together looking back at them.

This isn't helped by an unremarkable story and fetch quests being the standard side quest.
There are creative moments, but there are also a lot of repeated dull ones, which makes these an unenvolving distraction from the fun you might be having in the larger world.

Because the game can be incredible, but you have to make your own fun even when the game presents more time and resource effective ways to proceed. Creativity isn't incentivized beyond the start, and the stronger you get the duller the game gets. Which is a problem in many open worlds, but it's also something I hope they will address in a sequel.


I've focused on the negative, but I think the game is alright. 7/10

I just felt the story was sort of pieced together instead of being well thought out. Overall it just felt soulless to me. And I guess it's kind of unfair to compare, but being spoiled by great stories in games like Xenoblade, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, etc. has made me expect just a bit more from Zelda's storytelling department. And it sucks because Zelda is that kind of franchise that can have a kickass story behind it but the memories consisted of disjointed pieces that you had to put together, and when you did put it together it was underwhelming. 

Honestly, OoT's story was much better. It was in real time and doing what you did, felt like it mattered in the game. While the memories, it's like if you find them you find them, if you don't you don't. And when I did find them they're just little quips with little to no substance to them. In Ocarina I vividly remember meeting Ganondorf for the first time, meeting up with the strange Sheik and listening and learning from him (though we learn it's a she later on), the time travel aspects allowed you to learn how the world changed over 7 years, and for a 1998 game this was great. Not too heavy in the story department, but enough to keep me invested. Twilight Princess is still the best in terms of storytelling in the series imo, with Skyward Sword taking second. 

And it's not that BOTW didn't have an interesting premise. A destroyed Hyrule and destroyed Master Sword, that's interesting. But instead of experiencing those events and having those events keep you invested in the story, the story is just retroactively told to you. And there are times where flashbacks work, it's a great plot device. But a game shouldn't rely on that one plot device to drive an entire story. Not an interactive game story anyway. But that's just me. And again, being a JRPG fan, story is something I value, and I understand others don't expect much story from Zelda, but I hate that it has potential to tell an amazing story and it doesn't. 

Enemies can attack you through other enemies; they do this all the time with spears. Also, if you get stunned and knocked off a ledge, you typically fall to your death. The camera is awful for lining up throws and exacerbates this whole issue: surely, you've experienced the korok rock ring puzzles. Throwing exploding barrels or bombs is always an adventure. Lynels or battles indoors or near walls, rocks, etc. really highlight the camera issues, because it will lock on the enemy and pan around you, making jump or sidestep dodges virtually impossible or resulting in you hugging a wall and getting buttf*cked by the enemy. 

The open world camera is great, until you have to fight an enemy near anything or that is fast. Lynels abuse the camera, as you need to use the right dodge, but the camera will track AROUND Link. You end up having the wrong orientation to view the attack or move in the right direction. Also, if there's any climbable surface around, Link will decide to grab it, expose his back, and get slaughtered. The bolded part makes no sense, as I've completed more of this game than 99.9% of players: I understand how it works.

There were WAY MORE than 3 gyroscopic puzzles, and a few shrines had several puzzles within them. Most people agree that they are terrible, so you must have loved them lol. The aforementioned lynels or any enemy that necessitates dodging will get tons of free licks in when you crouch instead of dodge. You also can't run into a jump with the button mapping: both of those are mistakes that other games know not to make.

Yeah, while I was beating the Master Sword Trials, I was totally thinking, "I don't know how this game works." Go on reddit and find all the people saying, "I'm stuck on "Modest Test of Strength" shrines...

Yeah, it basically ends with two nothing cutscenes that felt like movie stingers, not even trailers.

I've gotten stabbed through countless enemies with spears, while fighting another and dodging a third's arrows. 

It doesn't really make sense to have 120 shrines, when they could be fewer, longer, and give more (full hearts, stamina rings, etc.). Take the seeds: you only need about 400 to max out your inventory, yet there are 900. Collect them all...for a trinket?

The button mapping is a mess, especially crouch, run, and jump placement.

The reward for the shrines is armor that is literally no better or worse than in-game purchased or quest armor. To make matters worse, the materials for upgrading the gear are MUCH harder to obtain than those other sets.

No, most of the game is impressive.

This is a fair criticism, but they put run and jump opposite each other and only allowed you to swap them. Running jumps are effectively out, because Link immediately loses running momentum.

Hence, why my score is so high, despite my disappointment. The exploration is amazing.

This is hands-down the best part, but I didn't really take issue with the durability.

The divine beast bosses were so good, which created a stark contrast with Ganon's mediocrity.

The open world experience is awesome, even if somewhat limited, in terms of inhabitants. The space more than makes up for that.

I've written a lot about how the camera can cripple Link in combat, given how the mechanics function.

You ever fight a lynel? Ever have that fun moment where they charge and your dodge turns into a crouch? Ever have the camera spin around, so you can't tell if he slashed down or across? Ever have that fun moment when you want to jump back, but the camera totally jacked your relative positioning, so you;re now jumping to the side? You ever fight a lynel?

You get all 900 seeds? You know you only need ~400 to get all the inventory space. You know that getting the other 500 ONLY earns you a trinket? You think that doing more than double the work it takes to get a functional reward should earn the player a non-functional one? Please tell me you don't work overtime.

There should not be 120 shrines, of some are extremely short and some extremely long, all to have the same reward. Pare them down on increase the reward for getting all of them. Getting them all nets you garbage armor.

Friendly fire is a mystery that results in disastrous consequences for the player, especially in the Master Trials. Spears are the single greatest offender here.

OoT was much more tightly woven together, but it also wasn't nearly as open world: this is a catch-22 that doesn't bother me as much as the functional issues.

I think they did a lot with it, but left a lot of potential on the floor.

Never experienced these camera issues, not at all. The right analog stick should be enough to handle most if not all situations. Along with lock on. And um...weapon collision has worked like this for some time, in most games. Programmers and artists aren't going to program weapons to only go through an enemy and stop and then you have to pull out the spear from the enemy, etc. This is a common place practice in gaming, but I haven't had issues with it because of perfect dodges, perfect blocks(parry), or just pulling out your shield at the right time. There's ways to avoid it, I don't put blame on the developers because I don't know how to take advantage of the controls and maneuvers Link has.

Throwing barrels, bombs, etc...never had a problem with that either. If you're close enough, you can lock on. If not, the bombs have enough of a blast radius for the margin of error I think. The only indoor battles I can recall are the Yiga Clan, if you fight them and the shrines of course which I feel have more than enough space to control the camera. Again, being in a wall trying to sidestep...isn't that kind of your fault? I'm kind of sensing blame on the game mechanics vs. blame on how well you play. Like I've said, every time I've died in BOTW, I can honestly say it has been my fault. I understand there was a better way to handle the situation. Sorry the camera has given you so much trouble, but I haven't had trouble with the Camera myself.

Both are better than putting aim on it though...

Almost all of my deaths have come from enemies attacking me through other enemies, Link's surface stickiness, and a wonky camera action. You fight Taluses in caves and near rocks, all the time. Hinox(es?) are typically in wooded areas. Lynels are often near both (top of the Lanaryu mountains, etc.). Link backs into a rock, wall, tree, etc. and snaps to it. The crouch being mapped to the move button is something every FPS has moved away from, probably since Halo. There's a reason that crouch is the right pad button and run is down on the stick: it works a million times better. Try as you might to lock on to fast enemies (small guardians, big guardians, lynels), they will swing the camera around you and screw Link's dodge orientation up. Using the right stick to address this makes no sense, because the Z-targeting was designed to preclude that need and keep Link locked on to an enemy. Also, how do you Z-target, adjust with the right camera, re-Z-target, then dodge? How many thumbs do you have!? 

Aside from that, I found the game to be laughably easy, but that ease did not bother me: it made the exploration more inviting. Think of all the games (I'm looking at you, FFII!) where they randomly put insanely strong enemies next to beginner level ones. 

Double post...I love you?

Pretty sure this guy is just trolling in retaliation to the guy who said he thought Witcher 3 was trash - which he became defensive before randomly attacking Zelda faster than a Trump-hugger slings out a “Like Hillary would have done any better!” comment.

His posts are comedically over-dramatic. It also makes no sense that someone who hates a game would play it to 100%; that would be incredibly foolish because the game is MASSIVE!

I fucking love the game, have finished normal and (almost finished) hard mode, and even I haven’t attempted 100% despite my 330 hours recorded. A 100% run is a feat you’d only expect from people who like the game even more than I do.