I really bounced off Breath of the Wild. A lot of the things that I didn't like about BotW are still here - inscrutable upgrade trees, incomprehensible signposting, a combat treadmill that wants you constantly off balance. The additions, though.... Boy howdy.
I think the ultrahand puzzles made so much stuff much more legible to me. It's way easier to know what a puzzle demands of you when you have a toolkit of predictable pieces in front of you instead of a vague expectation that bombs and stasis should combine "somehow" from BotW. I might have ended up building the same three vehicles over and over but they were fun to make and slightly alter, and the environment did demand I alter them! Using a spring or a rocket is just gleeful, man.
Ascend is a genius act. It's satisfying, it makes you think differently about your environment, it gives you a nice natural exit to some of these caves rather than a Skyrim-esque "and now we loop back to the beginning with a hidden door".
And the chasms.... A key part of the Open World Game is filling in the map and getting bored because your map is filled in. So the chasms just take that away and dare you to go into the dark. It's great! AND, the more you explore the chasms, the more you can infer about the surface (& vice versa) because temples and lightroots are stacked on top of each other.
There's still weird friction. Cooking stuff one meal at a time and then selling it one meal at a time is slow and obnoxious. It's also the best way to make money, but this is never explained and relies on hidden knowledge that means the sooner you run to a walkthrough, the better. Hunting for butterflies and bugs goes from a nice surprise to an absolute slog when you need 50 of them to upgrade your armor, and then you're flooded with useless armor sets that all need those rare bugs too. The plot is threadbare and dodges any serious consequence in a series that famously does not give a shit about maintaining continuity! What's the harm in giving us a bit of consequence!
But all of these complaints are absolutely secondary. The important part is that the graven image of President Hudson must never touch the ground. You need to make wacky constructs to cart lazy Koroks around. There's a rocket here and if you stand on it and whack it with a tree branch you have exactly enough time to say, "My name is Link, welcome to Jackass" before you start plummeting back to the earth. A beautiful, wonderful toy that occasionally (foolishly) aspires to be more.
I think the ultrahand puzzles made so much stuff much more legible to me. It's way easier to know what a puzzle demands of you when you have a toolkit of predictable pieces in front of you instead of a vague expectation that bombs and stasis should combine "somehow" from BotW. I might have ended up building the same three vehicles over and over but they were fun to make and slightly alter, and the environment did demand I alter them! Using a spring or a rocket is just gleeful, man.
Ascend is a genius act. It's satisfying, it makes you think differently about your environment, it gives you a nice natural exit to some of these caves rather than a Skyrim-esque "and now we loop back to the beginning with a hidden door".
And the chasms.... A key part of the Open World Game is filling in the map and getting bored because your map is filled in. So the chasms just take that away and dare you to go into the dark. It's great! AND, the more you explore the chasms, the more you can infer about the surface (& vice versa) because temples and lightroots are stacked on top of each other.
There's still weird friction. Cooking stuff one meal at a time and then selling it one meal at a time is slow and obnoxious. It's also the best way to make money, but this is never explained and relies on hidden knowledge that means the sooner you run to a walkthrough, the better. Hunting for butterflies and bugs goes from a nice surprise to an absolute slog when you need 50 of them to upgrade your armor, and then you're flooded with useless armor sets that all need those rare bugs too. The plot is threadbare and dodges any serious consequence in a series that famously does not give a shit about maintaining continuity! What's the harm in giving us a bit of consequence!
But all of these complaints are absolutely secondary. The important part is that the graven image of President Hudson must never touch the ground. You need to make wacky constructs to cart lazy Koroks around. There's a rocket here and if you stand on it and whack it with a tree branch you have exactly enough time to say, "My name is Link, welcome to Jackass" before you start plummeting back to the earth. A beautiful, wonderful toy that occasionally (foolishly) aspires to be more.