God I'm tired. Don't get me wrong, Breath of the Wild is one great colossal game with an examplary open world foundation many brethrens wishes to imitate.
The landscapes are diverse and beautiful, with an amount of technical finesse which offers so much optional freedom for multiple replays. No single journey is going to be the same, be it your technical prowess, revelations or how the game hands itself over to you with its dynamic weather climate, funny enemy ai and other weird oddities one may discover.
You can freely choose where and how you wish to progress any time after the introductory segment, and the real cherry on top lies with the tools you are given and their wide range of usages. There's exploitable and roundabouts ways to solve puzzles, to the point that the simple straightforward answer might go over your head.
While the main campagn is short, it does offer 4 main dungeons, cool locales with their transpiring stories, but the real meat and bones of botw lies in searching out for Shrines (mini dungeons), koroks spread all out over the damn place. And beating sub bosses for good materials to uograde your gears that you may or may not find while exploring hyrule. It's an addicting and immersive endeavour that can keep you sinked in Botw for 100s of hours.
That being said, the dungeon design (even the main dungeons) isn't too aestetically diverse and some obtuse design of finding certain shrines and solving riddles alongside myriads of npc sidequests are hardly worth the effort due to underwhelming rewards, which can be be a real test of your patience and sanity.
While the landscapes are absolutely gorgeous with distinct landmarks and a cohesively laid out world map, the areas themselves usually either consists of shrine areas, (these are the areas that generally stands out)
goblin/lizard lairs or stables. This is how it is for a good sum of the world map and once you notice the constant pattern it can get predictable, mundane and at times...boring.
Poor weapon durability is a thing and you constantly need to swap out and either hold on to, or farm new weapons with a good output, which thankfully is remedied by enemies scaling both in hp, damage output as well as being armed with better weapons as you complete more shrines and unlock towers. The merit is that you have to keep a sense of rationality with your weapon inventory and an insentive to unlock more weapon slots, on the other hand it is a constant annoyance almost every combat when weapons also lose their durability fast against stronger enemies which you will constantly encounter late game.
Enemy variety frankly isn't really too great either. And by the quarter mark you probably will have seen most of them.
Half of the shrines are comprised of either 1v1 gauntlets with the same single enemy or hallways leading you straight to the goal, while the quests themselves for finding the shrines serves as the replacements.
I prefer my traditional more compact Zelda so I wouldn't even rank this top 5 of the franchise, but as a game on its own merits, botw is a good entry with untapped potential and faulty aspects below its adamant surface, which Botw 2 probably will remedy and build on.
The landscapes are diverse and beautiful, with an amount of technical finesse which offers so much optional freedom for multiple replays. No single journey is going to be the same, be it your technical prowess, revelations or how the game hands itself over to you with its dynamic weather climate, funny enemy ai and other weird oddities one may discover.
You can freely choose where and how you wish to progress any time after the introductory segment, and the real cherry on top lies with the tools you are given and their wide range of usages. There's exploitable and roundabouts ways to solve puzzles, to the point that the simple straightforward answer might go over your head.
While the main campagn is short, it does offer 4 main dungeons, cool locales with their transpiring stories, but the real meat and bones of botw lies in searching out for Shrines (mini dungeons), koroks spread all out over the damn place. And beating sub bosses for good materials to uograde your gears that you may or may not find while exploring hyrule. It's an addicting and immersive endeavour that can keep you sinked in Botw for 100s of hours.
That being said, the dungeon design (even the main dungeons) isn't too aestetically diverse and some obtuse design of finding certain shrines and solving riddles alongside myriads of npc sidequests are hardly worth the effort due to underwhelming rewards, which can be be a real test of your patience and sanity.
While the landscapes are absolutely gorgeous with distinct landmarks and a cohesively laid out world map, the areas themselves usually either consists of shrine areas, (these are the areas that generally stands out)
goblin/lizard lairs or stables. This is how it is for a good sum of the world map and once you notice the constant pattern it can get predictable, mundane and at times...boring.
Poor weapon durability is a thing and you constantly need to swap out and either hold on to, or farm new weapons with a good output, which thankfully is remedied by enemies scaling both in hp, damage output as well as being armed with better weapons as you complete more shrines and unlock towers. The merit is that you have to keep a sense of rationality with your weapon inventory and an insentive to unlock more weapon slots, on the other hand it is a constant annoyance almost every combat when weapons also lose their durability fast against stronger enemies which you will constantly encounter late game.
Enemy variety frankly isn't really too great either. And by the quarter mark you probably will have seen most of them.
Half of the shrines are comprised of either 1v1 gauntlets with the same single enemy or hallways leading you straight to the goal, while the quests themselves for finding the shrines serves as the replacements.
I prefer my traditional more compact Zelda so I wouldn't even rank this top 5 of the franchise, but as a game on its own merits, botw is a good entry with untapped potential and faulty aspects below its adamant surface, which Botw 2 probably will remedy and build on.