I was not expecting them to change the original map as much as they have. Not so much in the “oops, I spilled my Fallen Ruins on your Breath of the Wild” sense as in “remember this major landmark? It’s like THIS now.” I have barely started on the main “resolve the four areas” storylines because I’m constantly trying to find my way back to my favorite areas from the first game to see what’s different.
I keep trying to use flying machines to expand the scope of my exploration and I keep coming up short due to wings’ automatic expiration. I guess I should get my horse back out of storage to visit more of those distant towers…
I’m enjoying this so far! I really wish I could remember more about BOTW… Very few of these characters are ringing a bell for me and I couldn’t tell you much of anything about the old map layout. But hey, I guess in a way that makes it feel a little fresher.
I’m not very far yet but right now I’m most intrigued by the underground map. This style of harsh, health-limited exploration feels like something new for Zelda.
i’ve found the writing and voice acting (in english) to be just OK
as someone who only dabbled minorly on the great plateau in BotW, the water seems fine on this one just going right into it, but i think my opinion on the writing is a factor there - if i were more invested in the narrative threads i osmosed regarding breath of the wild, i’d be more inclined to rec you play that one first
if you are mostly interested in the sandbox stuff, well, this one will probably provide you 100+ hours of enjoyment and it seems overall just a bit more robust and compelling…
but yeah there are definitely a lot of cool ideas w/r/t subverting expectations with the map - and i only grok a fraction of them, not being a BotW-head!
this wonderful framing of what I do and don’t love about this game made me think…
forcing this goofy physics game onto a controller also effectively forces the issue of the “edward scissorhands problem” in game design, in which basically every intuitive, non-context-sensitive interaction available to you involves using your weapons. this is one of those classic ludonarrative dissonance problems for designs that have grown up over 40 years without actually changing that much, and nintendo’s solution in this case was to make link an idiot caveman who interacts with all of his magical devices by whacking them with a sword with a rock stuck to it.
it is weirdly stupid, at the same time as it’s also really effectively streamlined from a game design perspective, and I think it’s how they justified offloading so much complexity onto the fiddly shoulder button menus, because your fundamental interaction is still whacking things with your sword to make them go.
lmao i’m glad i’m not the only person who noticed this. i put it behind a “don’t click on this it will ruin the game” spoiler in the group chat it’s so cursed my run
i vastly prefer the emergent tools (and friends) to getting an item called, idk, a “pencil eraser” halfway through the pencil-themed dungeon that allows me to open doors behind pencil statues. “puzzles” in these games are never (?) actually naturalistic but i get no joy from prescribed interactions and all of the joy in the world from “that’s right! the square hole!” with tinker toys
yeah that’s the thing it’s like inarguably better and can only be regarded as a successful, considered effort to save the franchise, but the initial impression of why the game is like this, compared with other physics games or other adventure games, is like, pronounced stupidity
I finally hit a shrine puzzle/challenge where I felt like I was fighting with the physics interpretation of the game. Not sure how much I liked the puzzle but the endorphin rush of finally getting it to the end was huge. Just the frustration of assembling a gizmo that should work on paper getting caught on a small hitch was just excruciating.
