I like the opening few hours of botw more than this honestly, but it’s starting to grow on me
play both imo, but yes you will need a break
7 Likes
I guess to be fair you could beat BoTW in like half an hour…
now that i’m getting into story stuff i would caution against playing this first, there is little exposition as to who anyone who recognizes Link is and moments like (big desert spoilers) battling through a hellish sandstorm to reach once bustling Gerudo Town only for it to be abandoned and full of chittering bug zombies that look like corpses until you get too close imo wouldn’t hit for me if i hadn’t been there before
playing both of these back to back sounds awful tho
8 Likes
I’m about two skytowers short of completing the surface map. The Sky map feels thinner than I was expecting but I also barely touched the MSQ stuff yet so I assume there will be developments that puts more stuff up there. Right now the highest priority is finding a dispenser with the gel pins. I found them once in the wild and that was a fun bit of emergent learning when i first saw them. I thought they were some kind of fuel tank but when I moved it with the hand tool I saw them phasing into the environment. I’m hoping there’s an upgrade or two for the hand like more rewind time juice or a farther grabbing range.
2 Likes
I was like, “This Ultrahand thing is neat, but it’d be even neater if they’d make it so you could automatically rebuild stuff with materials that you’d built before but that sounds really complicated, so I bet that’s why they didn’t do it.” But then it turns out they fucking did.
5 Likes
Yeah I recommend a trip to the plateau (and beyond) where Breath of the Wild started
1 Like
oh shit, didn’t even occur to me to go check that bit out
i will tune back in when it’s sub 30, like the last one
it makes fighting enemies feel less like a negative resource drain, though! the base of the weapon seems to decide moveset, but the fusion parts are the main source of weapon power, so you get meaningful upgrades by fighting things now. you can actually stock up on monster parts so that you have regular access to strong weapons, rather it being by chance of finding one in the wild. you only need a base weapon to fuse it to, which are a dime a dozen.
it’s very worth it to destroy the weaker fusions on the weapons you pick up and replace them with the monster parts you’ve found.
so far the change has been really positive for me; fighting monsters meaningfully improves my ability to fight harder monsters, rather than it feeling like the resource sink it was in botw. the system is a little fiddly (describes basically every system in this game), but i think i do like the change.
14 Likes
Worth a trip east and a buncha side quest bullshit so you can get what’s surely the best hat in the game:
Went to the castle in search of clothing but haven’t found any yet.
All I want are clothes really, haven’t found too many pieces so far and almost all of them are from the previous game. I figure Nintendo didn’t add a glam system and you won’t be able to apply any look to any piece of gear but I dunno, I guess these games aren’t all that difficult, I guess it’s not that big of a miss…even though it is a miss.
Game is very good though.
13 Likes
already loved this but the shit i stumbled onto and spent the last 90 minutes or so working through was just way way off the charts
i’ve always thought one of the big ways botw ultimately faltered was that almost everything was so bite-sized, including the beast wars dungeons… i remember that really coming into focus when it became clear that the virtuoso dungeon space of hyrule castle in that game was just soundly unmatched by anything else in it. i don’t even really remember any other real long-form setpieces in it at all i don’t think-- lost woods, maybe?
anyway, one of the most thrilling things about totk is that it’s already rectified that a few times imo
also leave it to nintendo to be the ones to finally bite from software with any level of insight i guess???
15 Likes
playing breath the wild! the weapon break mechanic is good actually. i think it’s clever and a little exhilarating to be hitting a monster and have the branch snap! it’s easy to switch to a new weapon and there’s plenty of things to find even in the first 30 minutes. i already have two ( 2 ) bows! sick! i was remarking to friends earlier ab how much better at games i am when i have gained back some of the brain cells after being horribly depressed.
it’s so calming to walk around and see the wind blowing and the dirt rising up from the ground! also, as soon as the old man points to the dilapidated church, i was like ’ oh, i know what that is ’ and i was right. just pure joy being a zelda fan playing this so far.
zelda forever
10 Likes
I love caves. Caves fix how unengaging I found the exploration in the first game. Now I feel like i’m making discoveries instead of finding yet another copy-pasted shrine or korok filler. The korok puzzles have generally been better too as its a lot less ‘put the brick in the brick shaped hole’ non-puzzle that swamped botw
15 Likes
it really does fix a lot of the problems with the first game
though the storytelling is not much better and the tone asks a little more of you anyway, that might be my only real complaint
7 Likes
I was feeling just kind of fine about this, did the rito dungeon, it was like, fine, liked it better overall than the divine beasts in botw but still felt a little thin
but then, I found the intricate cave networks connecting the bunker with the hyrule castle gatehouse and just had a wonderful time spelunking… especially the part where I dug through a giant pile of rubble only to slowly unearth a giant stalfos boss battle
if the game has more moments like that I’ll be very, very happy.
2 Likes
There was a chest hanging by a rope over a pool of water next to a ledge so I shot an arrow with a keese eye making sure it’d hit and the rope broke but then the arrow and eye fell quicker into the pool and somehow the chest BOUNCED OFF THE EYE IN THE WATER AND FELL OFF THE LEDGE.
4/10
9 Likes
I think the weapon limits may be a bit of a me problem. I do agree fusing is more interesting than BotW but my frustration is that the weapon slots are also effectively tool slots and the more useful tools you find (and kinda need to keep) the less weapons you have access to and subsequently must minmax to ensure you’re keeping pace with damage and enemy types. BotW had this problem but Fuse is just an extra step which I don’t enjoy as much as building or new traversal mechanics for the feeling of freedom/brain stretching it gives me.
It’s a me problem because I want to be prepared for every situation and dislike the fussiness of having to go into the menu to unfuse (why isn’t this part of the ability) and then re-fuse new objects just to see what they actually make.
I am vomiting seeds on Hestu but to little avail.
I’ve been exploring more and am noticing they seem to have made the surface intentionally a bit less full of stuff to accommodate the new space more. On the plus side I thought it was neat when you get back to your house.
4 Likes
Me too though and I care less about feeling prepared. Fusions make sense of BoTW’s superfluous RPG elements and they could cut some other systems if they wanted to.
3 Likes