Four years later and I've taken the dive. Tried this out for an hour or two a few years back and it left me as cold as a Zelda game could. This frustrated and half-apologetic Albert Burneko review sums up how I felt exactly (https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/god-help-me-i-dont-like-the-new-legend-of-zelda-game-1793718635). I'll co-sign on everything he said without repeating much of it, but I'll add that it was neither the limited inventory nor the extremely breakable weapons that sapped my spirits as much as it was the combination of the two. At any rate, that was four years ago and just earlier tonight I dealt the final blow to Calamity Ganon somewhere around the 60-hour mark after logging some heavy hours on this game in the past month or two. I already break it down in memory into three distinct 20-hour sections, each with a different vibe and experience. First came the flustered and overwhelmed and underjoyed component that I've previously described and linked to above. Everything kills you, you can barely climb halfway up a tree, the entire map is black and empty - honestly it just kind of sucks! And then bit by bit you fill out the map and increase your heart count and stamina bar and fill in some map locations, and kind of suddenly you're in the middle chunk of the game, much more confident and capable and empowered to explore. You fill out the map, you're tracking eight side quests at once, you've got multiple story threads unfolding in parallel while you bang out shrine after shrine. And then there's the final third of the game, when the shrines have started drying up and every hour you spend tramping around the vast-but-shrinking Hyrule is yielding diminishing returns on both your power-ups and your enjoyment, so, sure, let's just wrap the whole thing up in short order now. There's a fourth section of the game, an overtime third of the game if you will (that I will not be playing) which would give you a chance to clean up loose ends and track down every shrine in the game. I got to 85 and opted to skip at least half a dozen more that I knew would take fifteen minutes apiece to unlock and finish. Look, at the end of the day I liked this. I almost liked it an awful lot, and it got better and more enjoyable as I went along, and even by fifteen or twenty hours in it was very easy to forget all the headaches and heartbreaks associated with the game early on. But I mean, consider what that means. It means that for fifteen or twenty hours this game is exhausting and tedious and frustrating, and that just kind of sucks. The shrines themselves, and the hunts to find them in some cases, were a true delight and easily the game's highlight. And I thought the divine beasts were fun too - mega shrines, kind of - even if I'd prefered full blown temples. I appreciated more of this game than I disliked, really! But I would much rather play a Twilight Princess or a Wind Waker, let alone an Ocarina of Time, than this big and empty open-world adventure marathon any day. Credit to Nintendo for trying something new here when they could have gone fully derivative. But fuck all that climb-preventing rain, that was dumb as hell!

Reviewed on Apr 10, 2021


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