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

[Kalahari Inkantation]

on the plus side, i've finally finished every single one of the 132 shrines, and i'm finally finished collecting armor

all that's left is tackling hyrule castle and finishing off two reaming castle-area sidequests, challenging ganon, and then that's it

after all these years i'll finally be freed from the ball and chain that is botw

[Thyme]

don't be surprised if you're OP on ganon's fight lol

[Kalahari Inkantation]

oh i fully expect ganon to be less of a threat than an average lynel lol, i'll probably not use my absolute best gear and powers just to prolong the fight for hopefully longer than two minutes

[C.Mongler]

fight ganon nude, fists only

[Nyerp]

reaming

freudian slip?

[Kalahari Inkantation]

reaming

freudian slip?

lol wth

i have no idea how that happened, i can't even blame autocorrect because it was a desktop post

it was supposed to say "remaining"

And on that note, I now have 0 reaming sidequests.

There's just one thing left to do.

[Kalahari Inkantation]

oh, and by the way:

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

Hyrule Castle.

gee who'd'a' thunk a zelda fan might appreciate traditional zeldalike dungeon crawling in a zelda game !!!!!!

why isn't MUCH more of botw like this

hyrule castle is infinitely more fun than the 300 hour mind-numbing slog the rest of the game is, and that's despite the fact that you're still fighting the very same six maddeningly lazy recolored bullet sponge mooks in the castle as you've by now annoyedly mowed down (or rushed past) literally a thousand times over

now imagine if this game had fewer (read: 0) copypasted shrines, more hyrule castles, and enemy variety

it's as if only the very end of the game had so much as a modicum of thoughtful, cohesive game design put into it, and isn't simply 'okay lol how about we literally just cover the entirety of the landscape with 132 tiny disparate units of this exact same structure with the exact same cutscenes and the exact same text and the exact same music and the exact same æsthetics, and have like 1/3 of them be the exact same fight with the exact same enemy, and i guess maybe come up with a two-room five-minute puzzle for the rest of them or smth idk i mean w/e you just KNOW they'll eat it right up no matter what we do because they have such low expectations for us lmao'

they must have figured that they only really had to put any significant effort into the last 10 minutes of the game so that nobody would catch on to the cheap trick that makes up the other >99% of it

well, i suppose it worked for the masses (how depressing), but clearly not for me lol

[C.Mongler]

What hyrule castle did you play, mine just required climbing over like 3 walls and boom I was fighting ganon. It was the worst dungeon in the game lol

[Kalahari Inkantation]

well you could just catapult yourself to the highest floor but completing the castle-area sidequests requires you to thoroughly explore it lol, and believe it or not there are snippets of lore in this otherwise plot-starved game to be found within the castle too, all of which you'd miss if you sped directly towards ganon

but even the castle is only good relative to the rest of botw because in itself it's still mostly arbitrary structure to climb over, what's pathetic is that somehow even that little bit of structure is a huge improvement over what the rest of the game is like so i welcome it lol

christ i should have just beelined to hyrule castle from the shrine of resurrection to begin with

it feels like a good 66% of the measly 10% of botw that is fun is concentrated in the castle, and thoroughly perusing the interior equips you for the impending fight anyway

[C.Mongler]

eh i got the story bit after the first wall i climbed up lol

[Nyerp]

gotta agree with c.mong here. when i finally got to hyrule castle, i looked for the last zelda memory and just skipped past most of the rest of it because the enemies were all really annoying and i didn't want to waste my easily breakable weapons before getting to ganon.

[C.Mongler]

yeah i guess that was more my thought. i saw the mobs of doods to fight and other castley things but was like, why waste my time, i'm here for the big fish baby   and it's not like the game put a door or anything in my way so fuck it maaaaan

[Samus Aran]

i explored pretty much the whole castle because i wanted to find the shrines in there and i wanted the hylian shield and i was just having fun exploring it

[Kalahari Inkantation]

gotta agree with c.mong here. when i finally got to hyrule castle, i looked for the last zelda memory and just skipped past most of the rest of it because the enemies were all really annoying

yeah i guess that was more my thought. i saw the mobs of doods to fight and other castley things but was like, why waste my time, i'm here for the big fish baby  and it's not like the game put a door or anything in my way so fuck it maaaaan

So you both basically just completely skipped the castle?

i wholly understand that by that point any reasonable person would have severe brap of the wild fatigue and be tempted to just get it over with asap, but in doing so you've invested hundreds of hours into a largely unrewarding slog of a game only to completely bypass its least obnoxious parts lol

it's true that you don't need to explore the castle unless you're interested in completing all quests and shrines (which, of course, i was), but imo even so it's still worth exploring as it's a breath of fresh air and the only thing close to a true dungeon in all of botw

it's not a good dungeon in its own right, mind you, but it stands out as much better than just about anything else botw has to offer because it's a somewhat structured labyrinth to explore with quests to complete and snippets of plot to discover (beyond that one memory) and decent rewards to obtain

for example:

and i didn't want to waste my easily breakable weapons before getting to ganon.

the weapons found in the castle are almost certainly better than the ones you enter with lol

and the hylian shield as kaz said (which is locked behind a stalnox, oh joy, but at least this time you're decently rewarded for engaging with yet another stupid stalnox, and thank christ, it's the last you'll have to fight)

now i'm definitely overvaluing the castle simply because it's novel within botw and actually somewhat traditionally zeldaklike in a game that otherwise hardly feels like zelda at all

but it's easily the one area in which botw's set of features are at their least annoying lol

[TooB]

I didn't think the castle "felt like zelda" any more than the rest of the game