—First off, I want to say I did spoil myself on the story. I won’t mention spoilers here but for context’s sake of the review, I’ll just mention that.—
This game irks me. It irks me so much. It basically takes the events of Breath of the Wild and says “oh, THAT happened, who cares” and it pisses me off because while it was no masterclass story, it just makes no sense for Hyrule to have recovered and forgotten about it that quickly! Yes, there are mentions of the Great Calamity, but they’re relegated to footnotes. Gone are any traces of Ancient Sheikah tech outside of of Sheikah residences; what happened to it?
What else irks me is the gameplay. It’s the same as BotW, which itself is fantastic, and did NOT need any improvements. The ability to stick things to arrows and nice QoL stuff of the like is one thing, but CRAFTING? The crafting just feels like an afterthought. Yes, so much is dependent on the crafting, but it just feels like very little thought was put into it, and it bogs down what was once a tight gameplay experience.
So then why am I giving this a 3.5 when it sounds like I hate it? Well, at it’s core, it still plays like Breath of the Wild, which is still one of my favorite games of all time. What upsets me so much is what Nintendo considers to be “improvements” are just weighing down the formula of an already fantastic game.
What people had asked for in a sequel were 1. temples (which are indeed in), and 2. filling in the empty spaces that plague the Hyrule map. Instead, we got empty aerial, empty Hyrule, and empty subterranean maps. Some improvement.
Three and a half stars. I will ONLY play through it two times!
This game irks me. It irks me so much. It basically takes the events of Breath of the Wild and says “oh, THAT happened, who cares” and it pisses me off because while it was no masterclass story, it just makes no sense for Hyrule to have recovered and forgotten about it that quickly! Yes, there are mentions of the Great Calamity, but they’re relegated to footnotes. Gone are any traces of Ancient Sheikah tech outside of of Sheikah residences; what happened to it?
What else irks me is the gameplay. It’s the same as BotW, which itself is fantastic, and did NOT need any improvements. The ability to stick things to arrows and nice QoL stuff of the like is one thing, but CRAFTING? The crafting just feels like an afterthought. Yes, so much is dependent on the crafting, but it just feels like very little thought was put into it, and it bogs down what was once a tight gameplay experience.
So then why am I giving this a 3.5 when it sounds like I hate it? Well, at it’s core, it still plays like Breath of the Wild, which is still one of my favorite games of all time. What upsets me so much is what Nintendo considers to be “improvements” are just weighing down the formula of an already fantastic game.
What people had asked for in a sequel were 1. temples (which are indeed in), and 2. filling in the empty spaces that plague the Hyrule map. Instead, we got empty aerial, empty Hyrule, and empty subterranean maps. Some improvement.
Three and a half stars. I will ONLY play through it two times!