A comprehensive list of things that Breath of the Wild does well:

[Thyme]

this game had quests?

[Nyerp]

well tec i seem to fundamentally disagree with you about how obnoxious the castle was. guardians making the very act of entering it a pain, turret guardians everywhere, parts where you're locked in and forced to fight time-wasting enemies. i just wasn't having any of it. the very fact that you CAN skip most of the castle is emblematic of botw's poor design decisions, and i certainly had stopped really enjoying the game at that point and was fully allowed to abuse the game's non-linearity as an easy way out. the castle definitely didn't revitalize my interest in the game. i guess the weapon excuse was a roundabout way of saying that i didn't find any of the enemies fun to fight and just wanted to get the game over with lol

[C.Mongler]

lol yea I was fatigued that's pretty much why I was like fuck this shit I'm goin'


I only played like 45 hours tho, not hundreds lol

[Kalahari Inkantation]

i was fatigued too of course but as you know i was also stupid enough to force myself to power through all of botw regardless of my feelings about it

the castle certainly didn't revitalize my interest in the game, but having played through every last bit of it fully i do still think the castle represents nintendo's best attempt to realize the extremely severely flawed set of concepts that is botw

nintendo's best attempt to realize an extremely severely flawed set of concepts, however, is still an extremely severely flawed and underdeveloped set of concepts, and doesn't at all redeem the game in any meaningful way - hyrule castle may be the best botw has to offer, but even botw's best is some of the zelda series' worst

in fact i would argue that it's even more offensive that the very last 0.5% of the game is one of the few segments that feels as if it has so much as an iota of thought put into it, because it's evidence that they knew their ideas could have been implemented at least somewhat better all along

it's beyond obvious that for whatever reason, nintendo simply didn't feel the need to put any serious effort into structuring botw beyond its brief bookends

[Kalahari Inkantation]

anyway i finally completed this game once and for all wednesday morning

oh i fully expect ganon to be less of a threat than an average lynel lol

i thought i was exaggerating when i said this but wow, he really did turn out to be no more than a glorified lynel-guardian hybrid, and i'm almost certain his damage output and health were both lower than that of the high level lynels lol

mipha's grace triggered once, but i never died or used any healing items

meanwhile, the more powerful lynels almost always both trigger mipha's grace and force me to eat a few full recovery meals

and i didn't get touched even once in phase 2 of the fight lol, despite this form allegedly representing ganon at his purest and most destructive ever

i didn't exactly expect the final fight to be hard, it is nu-zelda after all, but come on

well, i will say that phase 2 was quite entertaining as a visual spectacle, at least

[TooB]

Phase 2 would've been great if it wasn't just a glorified qte

[Thyme]

anyway i finally completed this game once and for all wednesday morning

final score





"thyme why are you doing this to yourself"

[Kalahari Inkantation]

the postgame stats have me at 55.74% completion, despite the game itself also clearly displaying that i've completed all 20 main quests, all 90 side quests, all 132 shrines, and all 18 memories

somehow that doesn't qualify as 100% completion because i haven't found all 900 of the useless copypasted korok seeds, lol

utterly ridiculous

the game's own statistics counter exemplifies just how horribly balanced its """content""" is

well there's not much more for me to say that i haven't already covered extensively in the last 19 pages, but what i can say now for certain is that this is the single most disappointing game i have ever played

what's particularly bewildering is that somehow i am diametrically at odds with botw's otherwise near universal critical acclaim, i guess i simply fail to see what's so magical about it (especially compared to the other popular open world games of the past 10 years, and also compared to other zeldas), and don't at all understand how the vast collection of severely flawed concepts and insultingly lazy design decisions that define botw somehow went entirely unnoticed by the overwhelming majority of its players

in the 200+ hours i've spent with this game i have experienced absolutely everything it has to offer, and i would say maybe 10% of that total playtime was actually fun

if i had played botw in a vacuum, i'd have come out of it fully expecting the general consensus to be at least moderately critical, but instead the industry's near unanimously positive reaction to it makes me wonder whether i accidentally played a completely different game, it simply doesn't make sense to me

anyway i finally completed this game once and for all wednesday morning

final score





"thyme why are you doing this to yourself"

i am hesitant to offer this game so much as a 7/10, but to its credit at least it looks great, it isn't technically broken, there are some moments where it doesn't quite feel like a chore, and even less commonly there are sometimes minutes of genuine fun to be had

truly though, in terms of gameplay breath of the wild does practically nothing well

[Hiro]

I really enjoy the castle and took multiple trips to it during my playtime