Cancer of the Wild
A lot of my opinions aren't brand new or something that I haven't complained about earlier at great length, but I wanted to condense my thoughts into single post now that I've gone through the game
Pros:
(+) The shrines, even when I can whisk out the combat shrines, or the maze ones, or the ones that forced me to break my weapons or whatever, all of the shrines come together to bring an extra dimension to this game, I thought all of the gimmick tools were unique and the shrines really had some out of the box ways of making you use them,
(+) While on the topic of shrines, amongst the 60 I've done, I didn't need a guide for any of them, they've successfully made shrines that make logical sense even if you sometimes have to trial and error to figure out the exact system at play, and I really have to emphasis, some of these shrines with the extra mini-challenge for chests really DO an amaaaazing job, while others don't explore their mechanics in totality and just end as soon as they begin
(+) The story is nothing to write home about, but I think it works, anything that's more showing less telling is better and they don't exposition dump you genshin style where the text is literally bleeding out of the tiny text box
(+) On some occasions the game really has an interesting sense of cartoon-ism, oh you're destroyed a beast made out of bones? Well they can re-animate AND use each other's heads. You throw a bomb at a pig and the weapons knocks out of their hands, you can shock a horse and THEN find a way to tame it
(+) And finally and possibly the most underrated thing about the game, a layer of unpredictability, the game is filled with "aha" moments where you're like "will.....this work?" and then it does, I've solved countless of shrines where I was coming up with techniques on the fly to make my life easier and it was honestly astonishing how much creativity you can come up with
This is me scratching the boney frame of this game to dig out some positives, onto the negatives
Cons:
(-) The combat was designed by a team of developers who made it and then refused to let anyone playtest it, absolutely fucking cancer, the combat is at the level of atrociousness where it should be enshrined in the hall of fame for experience-ruining sections for games, the best thing you can do in the game is don't even hold up your shield to try to parry or dodge anything, go up to the enemy and spam normal attacks, or literally if you don't want to exhaust your weapons just throw bombs at them
(-) The OSTs are insanely fucking bad, I was running away from most combat encounters not only because they suck, but so that the fucking blood worm they unleased on my eardrums would stop burning up my ear canals, the composer took inspiration from pieces of rock falling down a mountain, and it's THE SAAAAAAAAAME IT DOESN'T CHANGE
(-) Open bodies of land that have nothing in it (believe it or not the game is actually pretty fucking short most of my time was actually spent going from A to B trying to unlock towers, hell if I even stopped doing that I'd have been done with the game in a week)
(-) Weapon breaking bad,
(-) Rain == slippery bad,
(-) "Grab this blue torch and go from A to B" bad,
(-) Horse kicks you off if you oversprint bad,
(-) Thunder shocks you if you equip a metallic weapon bad,
(-) Environmental hazards that require specific gear bad (they do this on 3 separate occasions, heat, fire and snow, all of them different variations of cancer)
These are mechanics that you're constantly dealing with and they put a damper on your experience insanely fast, the first time rain hit me outside the fish area I was like "oh.....so it's THAT kind of game", for the sake of pseudo-realism it creates embarrassing hurdles to simple tasks whose only way of completion is at the risk of being annoyed as opposed to being challenged,
Yes, these hurdles don't make the game meaningfully challenging, they make it ANNOYING
(-) Lack of direction splits two ways, for shrines and for the overworld,
Shrines:
I've talked about this at length but I can't emphasis how important having invisible direction is, some of the shrines are straight up "hit ball so it goes in hole" and it's as if they forgot that weapons break in 2 seconds in this godforsaken game, just put an invisible funnel or fix the shooting direction so that the player can go through the process more easily, why in god's earth are the puzzles designed so that you KNOW the solution but it takes FOREVER to solve, when in reality it should be the other way around, you should know the solution and the puzzle should solve immediately,
Other times the shrines NEEDS you to use arrows while it provides you with none, all of these are fixable issues if the game just GAVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED, don't make me go hunt for materials for trials,
Gyroscope puzzles are a better case for "how the fuck did they not add invisible walls or helpful direction to make this easier?" and they just didn't they didn't really give a fuck, on one hand there's 60 ways to solve a puzzle on the other executing the puzzle in it's intended format is a pain in the ass
Overworld:
The game teaches you about combat at specific parts of the game that you can entirely miss, this is also why I think the game's idea of freedom of choice is a veneer of bullshit, it fucks with the game's OWN interests, on some occasions you need to talk to a specific NPC so that ANOTHER specific NPC can pop up and sell you a bra and panty so you can enter le woman village,
(-) Bosses:
Thunderblight was cancer because the combat is cancer others were gimmicky and I don't really give a fuck about them, Ganon LOOKED really cool though, props to them for making him look all mushy and gross, very Silent Hill 5 final boss of them
Closing thoughts:
BOTW is a game where every critique you have for the game is at something that was designed with pure intention, none of this is an oversight by the developers, whether come rain or lightning, the game speaks to it's roots and builds on it's own archaic design
This is a PS1 game masking itself as a modern game, all of these elements you can find dating back to that era, even the beloved gliding of the game which brings ease of access you can find as a core mechanic in spyro the dragon (not to say gliding is some copyright design)
BOTW at it's core has all the right things to make it playable and interesting, but it's downfall is the inclusion of elements that exist only to beat and extend otherwise straightforward tasks,
Something as easy as climbing a pile of rocks is only an activity that could be made tedious and annoying in a game like BOTW, which perfectly summarizes why I did not like it at the end of the day
Cancer.
A lot of my opinions aren't brand new or something that I haven't complained about earlier at great length, but I wanted to condense my thoughts into single post now that I've gone through the game
Pros:
(+) The shrines, even when I can whisk out the combat shrines, or the maze ones, or the ones that forced me to break my weapons or whatever, all of the shrines come together to bring an extra dimension to this game, I thought all of the gimmick tools were unique and the shrines really had some out of the box ways of making you use them,
(+) While on the topic of shrines, amongst the 60 I've done, I didn't need a guide for any of them, they've successfully made shrines that make logical sense even if you sometimes have to trial and error to figure out the exact system at play, and I really have to emphasis, some of these shrines with the extra mini-challenge for chests really DO an amaaaazing job, while others don't explore their mechanics in totality and just end as soon as they begin
(+) The story is nothing to write home about, but I think it works, anything that's more showing less telling is better and they don't exposition dump you genshin style where the text is literally bleeding out of the tiny text box
(+) On some occasions the game really has an interesting sense of cartoon-ism, oh you're destroyed a beast made out of bones? Well they can re-animate AND use each other's heads. You throw a bomb at a pig and the weapons knocks out of their hands, you can shock a horse and THEN find a way to tame it
(+) And finally and possibly the most underrated thing about the game, a layer of unpredictability, the game is filled with "aha" moments where you're like "will.....this work?" and then it does, I've solved countless of shrines where I was coming up with techniques on the fly to make my life easier and it was honestly astonishing how much creativity you can come up with
This is me scratching the boney frame of this game to dig out some positives, onto the negatives
Cons:
(-) The combat was designed by a team of developers who made it and then refused to let anyone playtest it, absolutely fucking cancer, the combat is at the level of atrociousness where it should be enshrined in the hall of fame for experience-ruining sections for games, the best thing you can do in the game is don't even hold up your shield to try to parry or dodge anything, go up to the enemy and spam normal attacks, or literally if you don't want to exhaust your weapons just throw bombs at them
(-) The OSTs are insanely fucking bad, I was running away from most combat encounters not only because they suck, but so that the fucking blood worm they unleased on my eardrums would stop burning up my ear canals, the composer took inspiration from pieces of rock falling down a mountain, and it's THE SAAAAAAAAAME IT DOESN'T CHANGE
(-) Open bodies of land that have nothing in it (believe it or not the game is actually pretty fucking short most of my time was actually spent going from A to B trying to unlock towers, hell if I even stopped doing that I'd have been done with the game in a week)
(-) Weapon breaking bad,
(-) Rain == slippery bad,
(-) "Grab this blue torch and go from A to B" bad,
(-) Horse kicks you off if you oversprint bad,
(-) Thunder shocks you if you equip a metallic weapon bad,
(-) Environmental hazards that require specific gear bad (they do this on 3 separate occasions, heat, fire and snow, all of them different variations of cancer)
These are mechanics that you're constantly dealing with and they put a damper on your experience insanely fast, the first time rain hit me outside the fish area I was like "oh.....so it's THAT kind of game", for the sake of pseudo-realism it creates embarrassing hurdles to simple tasks whose only way of completion is at the risk of being annoyed as opposed to being challenged,
Yes, these hurdles don't make the game meaningfully challenging, they make it ANNOYING
(-) Lack of direction splits two ways, for shrines and for the overworld,
Shrines:
I've talked about this at length but I can't emphasis how important having invisible direction is, some of the shrines are straight up "hit ball so it goes in hole" and it's as if they forgot that weapons break in 2 seconds in this godforsaken game, just put an invisible funnel or fix the shooting direction so that the player can go through the process more easily, why in god's earth are the puzzles designed so that you KNOW the solution but it takes FOREVER to solve, when in reality it should be the other way around, you should know the solution and the puzzle should solve immediately,
Other times the shrines NEEDS you to use arrows while it provides you with none, all of these are fixable issues if the game just GAVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED, don't make me go hunt for materials for trials,
Gyroscope puzzles are a better case for "how the fuck did they not add invisible walls or helpful direction to make this easier?" and they just didn't they didn't really give a fuck, on one hand there's 60 ways to solve a puzzle on the other executing the puzzle in it's intended format is a pain in the ass
Overworld:
The game teaches you about combat at specific parts of the game that you can entirely miss, this is also why I think the game's idea of freedom of choice is a veneer of bullshit, it fucks with the game's OWN interests, on some occasions you need to talk to a specific NPC so that ANOTHER specific NPC can pop up and sell you a bra and panty so you can enter le woman village,
(-) Bosses:
Thunderblight was cancer because the combat is cancer others were gimmicky and I don't really give a fuck about them, Ganon LOOKED really cool though, props to them for making him look all mushy and gross, very Silent Hill 5 final boss of them
Closing thoughts:
BOTW is a game where every critique you have for the game is at something that was designed with pure intention, none of this is an oversight by the developers, whether come rain or lightning, the game speaks to it's roots and builds on it's own archaic design
This is a PS1 game masking itself as a modern game, all of these elements you can find dating back to that era, even the beloved gliding of the game which brings ease of access you can find as a core mechanic in spyro the dragon (not to say gliding is some copyright design)
BOTW at it's core has all the right things to make it playable and interesting, but it's downfall is the inclusion of elements that exist only to beat and extend otherwise straightforward tasks,
Something as easy as climbing a pile of rocks is only an activity that could be made tedious and annoying in a game like BOTW, which perfectly summarizes why I did not like it at the end of the day
Cancer.