Breath of the Wild has come up a lot recently and I’m like damn I still really need to play it, but probably hitting open world fatigue for a long while after this. I had like 4 stunted attempts to make headway through HZD and am much better enjoying the “mid-game” since there tends to be decent situational variety in any direction (stronger mix of creatures and terrain, ammo and weapon potency). As long as I keep a hardline against map clutter and checklists by wading past in great swathes to return every so often and bulldoze a few.
I just realized some of these tribal tat’s are basically the Decima logo, ha
Forgot how these both came out the same year, therefore extra comparison. Which has probably been done at length or I might’ve dodged. Controlling Link is probably much nicer than Aloy’s rubberband gangle and snap (or lack of) to terrain. It’s funny how with so much talk online and especially combed here - I’ve still only gathered a vague impression of what makes BotW so distinctly special or grown in nature. The 4-5 hours I half watched a friend playing didn’t strike, so I’m really curious as to how I’ll feel about it.
I like Horizon a lot more once you start seeing the Empire’s architecture; the capital city is marvelous and gave me real Dinotopia vibes (a vibe I’ll be forced to chase the rest of my life). It’s just so far away! I loved the reveal of the dungeon spaces underneath the world, and how elaborate they are – it makes the world feel like more than a potemkin facade – but they’re not a perfect fit for their combat or character model.
The Cauldrons are great and especially in that unreadable sprawl, sense of overwhelming scale. Though I also, not really to any detriment, saw them immediately similar to the Assassin’s Creed tomb or lair “secret locations”, isolated and more concentrated puzzle solving sections that can vein into outer/deeper world building. There’s more examples in a gen of games since and even Breath has those oft mentioned Shrines but I gather they’re a lot more fragmented. It’s a general setup but rang very similar to AC here.
i wanna gonna try to get a few more cool screenshots but i think i need to grind to kill the boss on this floor
edit: ok i beat the boss and then stumbled upon this guy while trying to figure out how to leave the first tower since the guard man at the exit still won’t let me pass T_T
so the psx version’s dithering and higher resolution is nice, but it lacks shadows. the guy on the top hat to the right of justin is affected by shadows if he walks over toward the shady side of that building on saturn, but there’s no such lighting on psx except for more accurate shadows cast by the character sprites themselves. the floor textures on psx are nonsensical here, too. it’s… a quandary when going by a quick glance.
…screenshots don’t really do it any favors—it actually kinda looks nicer on psx in stills, but the saturn’s water has this great animation to it that the psx lacks almost entirely.
not as clear-cut a winner on the saturn end as i used to think, but i’d say it still comes out ahead.
it’s worth noting the remastered port is apparently the both of best worlds graphically and you can remove the awful texture filter on the PC version with mods
from what i’ve seen it lacks a lot of the specific saturn touches (like the water and the look of smoke transparencies, etc) but removing the filter likely does a ton to make it more appealing to my eyes (while i’d probably end up missing the crt filter and… well, there’s also a widescreen hack for the saturn version)
btw, if anyone wasn’t yet aware that the saturn version has been mostly translated:
