This review contains spoilers
Found a lot to love, and a decent amount to mildly dislike.
Dungeon items were better utilized here than in most Zelda games. I found myself reusing older items constantly throughout islands and later dungeons, whereas in previous games I would grab an item, use it in its dungeon, and never use it again. I liked how connected it felt in that way.
Everybody speaks on the art style and the soundtrack, and yeah they’d be right. Both elements were great! I can see why the toon style kept returning.
I think this entry has a fairly great narrative! I think it does an excellent job stringing together story events and continuity from OOT. I found this incarnation of Ganondorf far more compelling than other versions of him. I like how they tie his country to his motivations and how he’s a little more than just “I was born evil” and that’s that.
The ending of this game might actually be my favorite in the series. Between what happens narratively, thematically and the excellent final
showdown with Ganondorf, the final few hours of the game left me on a constant high. The flooding, waterfall arena was so kino.
The game isn’t all great though. I think sailing is a cool mechanic on paper but in practice I found myself sort of meandering from Point A to be B for a large part of the game until i got the Ballad of Gales. Sure I had fast sailing but it still felt like I wasn’t very engaged with gameplay during those moments. There are islands to stop on but not many of them are very interesting and I found exploration to be not very satisfying.
The infamous triforce hunt is probably not as bad as it in the original but i did find it to ruin the pacing of the final chunk of the game, with repetitive enemy combat sections and tedious map chasing.
The highs are extremely high, yet the lows are definitely present.
Dungeon items were better utilized here than in most Zelda games. I found myself reusing older items constantly throughout islands and later dungeons, whereas in previous games I would grab an item, use it in its dungeon, and never use it again. I liked how connected it felt in that way.
Everybody speaks on the art style and the soundtrack, and yeah they’d be right. Both elements were great! I can see why the toon style kept returning.
I think this entry has a fairly great narrative! I think it does an excellent job stringing together story events and continuity from OOT. I found this incarnation of Ganondorf far more compelling than other versions of him. I like how they tie his country to his motivations and how he’s a little more than just “I was born evil” and that’s that.
The ending of this game might actually be my favorite in the series. Between what happens narratively, thematically and the excellent final
showdown with Ganondorf, the final few hours of the game left me on a constant high. The flooding, waterfall arena was so kino.
The game isn’t all great though. I think sailing is a cool mechanic on paper but in practice I found myself sort of meandering from Point A to be B for a large part of the game until i got the Ballad of Gales. Sure I had fast sailing but it still felt like I wasn’t very engaged with gameplay during those moments. There are islands to stop on but not many of them are very interesting and I found exploration to be not very satisfying.
The infamous triforce hunt is probably not as bad as it in the original but i did find it to ruin the pacing of the final chunk of the game, with repetitive enemy combat sections and tedious map chasing.
The highs are extremely high, yet the lows are definitely present.