The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Only just now got round to finishing dungeon #1 (vah rutah). Puzzles were more annoying than hard once inside.

Halfway thru the bird one, same thing is applying - feel like just cheating and looking it up cos ive been playing this for over 120hrs at thispoint and I suppose I should stop skipping thru the forests picking mushrooms and making curries at some point (lol who am I kidding)

it's taken me 20+ hours of running away from every fight to discover I can lock on to monsters. just about every monster I've killed has been by dropping bombs from a height. I think the lock may change the way I approach this game

yep you can only do most of the useful fight moves like parries, flurry etc if you lock on - i'm sure there's a tutorial popup during your first battle explaining that?

quite possibly! I have never played a game of this type before so it's all new to me. haven't managed to parry anything in the time since I have learned to lock on. I don't have quick fingers (too old) so for the most part I'm sneaking around clifftops. and loving it.

I played this game a lot and basically never cooked
Except when I needed rupees and then I'd do 5x Prime or 5x Gourmet
Screw cooking, even if the cooking music was super nice

The cooking music is the best! So jaunty. I cooked a lot to make stamina potions so I didnt have to waste any of my shrine upgrades on stamina, at least til I got the amount of hearts for [wont mention in case of spoiling]

BTW the parry/backflip tutorial is in one of the first shrines you encounter near kakariko vilage (or was it hateno?)

I never use them, I never seem to get the button mash combos right :(

fyi if you don't learn the useful fight moves you're going to have a fair bit of trouble at a certain point in the game :)

I forgot shield blocking was a thing and was surprised how many undodgable attacks bosses had. Oops.

CONTROVERSIAL OPINION: this game's balance sucks

what do you mean?

its pretty typical in action rpgs for character growth/upgrades to outpace game difficulty, meaning the early game is consistently challenging and the mid to late game is not except for selected boss battles/special challenges. i'm not very far into this game yet but i'd predict that that will happen from what i've seen so far.

Problem could be that one can play in any way, so I suppose you could over-level early on thus making most of the gameplay too easy?

Example: I beat the water ganon boss in 5 seconds flat cos I just pummeled him with ancient arrows. Didnt get hit once.

I disagree so strongly about the game balance. My bf is combat-brilliant and puzzle-averse and was playing one way, and my mom can't fight for shit and basically cleared all the shrines before beating any but the Zora blight, and me I was upgrading armour exclusively and finding lynels still a challenge, and my niece has a lot of time on her hands and got 120 shrines and my brother had to take her Switch away when she got to 300 Koroks, idk, it seems pretty multi-pronged in the way one can approach it.

My issues with the game are that the English voice-acting is bad, that I'd trade 60 of them shrines for 2 more dungeons, that ultimately if I had to pick between Gorons, Gerudo, Rito and Zoras I'd pick "none, thank you" and prefer to spend all my time scaling the Hebra or Gerudo mountains, that the highs are super high, that exploring Death Mountain was brilliant, the labyrinths were great, that Link basically starts naked so the people who play for "that reason" are in love with him from the get-go, Hyrule Castle was endlessly fun, the plot was terrific and the steampunk acclimatization was effective, the dragons were gorgeous, and the only thing that really made this game even slightly worse off than Skyrim is that there wasn't a giant underground city

I've held off going to the castle yet! I guess I wanted to save it til last though I'm not sure why.

I guess I dont want the game to end? I want to live on the beach in Lurelin village forever.

I disagree so strongly about the game balance. My bf is combat-brilliant and puzzle-averse and was playing one way, and my mom can't fight for shit and basically cleared all the shrines before beating any but the Zora blight, and me I was upgrading armour exclusively and finding lynels still a challenge, and my niece has a lot of time on her hands and got 120 shrines and my brother had to take her Switch away when she got to 300 Koroks, idk, it seems pretty multi-pronged in the way one can approach it.

yeahhh i think i just don't hold with this philosophy of game design -- i don't like this at all! i feel like if there are going to be x interlocking systems in the game then the player ought to have to get good at x things. (rondo of blood would not be a better game if it implimented more jumping-based paths for people who weren't interested in getting good at using the whip.)

and idk i thought my lack of interest in skyrim etc was because the things were poorly implemented -- like, nothing you can do feels tactilely fun or alive at all in any bethesda game -- but i think maybe actually i just dislike the playground as a genre, even when the exploration and combat feel as nice as they do here

any time you encounter a non-optimally fun patch of difficulty, you can mitigate it by going and doing something else non-optimally fun, so the real challenge is working out at any given moment of being presented with two or more kinds of non-optimal fun which kind of non-optimally fun is least non-optimal

yah back to tetris

and idk i thought my lack of interest in skyrim etc was because the things were poorly implemented -- like, nothing you can do feels tactilely fun or alive at all in any bethesda game

horses for courses I guess, cos this makes no sense to me at all.

(with a caveat, I do feel that way about ESO, but that a little different I suppose)

okay, finally found a system and snagged it with zelda. going in.

Enjoy! Try it with headphones too is my recommend - just standing in a field watching a sunset and listening to the wind and soundtrack is..... *mwah*.

FAVE SONGS IN GAME:
- the Riley-esque piano riffing in the Lost Woods
- the moody dischordant tune called "Ruins" that u hear in places like Hyrule castle town
- the tune played in Rito village, esp when I realised it was a slow version of one of the main windwaker songs. I'm NOT cutting onions.
- the nutty, really unZeldalike robotic tune played in Robbies Tech Lab

One of my first times just cruising around on a horse, I went down to the south Faron coast (beautiful) and the pointillistic piano part just kept escalating and escalating until a full repeal of ObamaCare was suddenly upon me

ha, yeah: this game is quite good at letting you know when you've overstepped your boundaries

U mean this one goontie?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_3iE7z3Few

(both the day and night one rule but this one has the OG theme hidden in it and is weirdly melancholy also)

I don't remember, but I only heard it that one time, I think it may have been a night version segueing into a day version or something?

breath of zelda...... language of the mad

have just sneaked my way up to lanryu tower (which shows you the extent of the progress I am making). sneakstrikes are so satisfying.

now hating every minute of trying to get to zoras domain. I don't like this being forced down a route / approach thing at all. hopefully there isn't much more of this.

Zora is not the worst part of the game, but it wasn't my favourite. It was more fun humping around the mountains above Zora avoiding guardians iirc

My five favourite experiences in this game were: exploring Hyrule Castle, ascending Mount Lanayru, getting emotional at Akkala Citadel/Fort Hateno because of how successful the designers created an atmosphere of devastation, everything relating to Gorons and Mount Death, faerie sex, the labyrinths.

The shrines are not a satisfying replacement for more dungeons and I hope the next game features ~many~ Hyrule Castle-style environments. Nothing more satisfying than exploring a castle imo

I just downloaded the DLC pass - the first bit of it is out now. Some kind of master sword challenge whereby it permanently switches up the sword? I'm ambivalent about doing this, because despite everyones sooking about the easily-damaged gear, I've got used to that now and having one sword that just Always Works would feel boring at this point.

I havent even gone into the castle yet either! A few people have said when they did, they accidentally triggered the final ganon boss and I'm scared of doing that I guess?

leaving the castle until last. all beasts done, 82 shrines done, all memories done except the castle one. just did the Rito song shrine quest - that one is great!

my favourite moment so far was giving that leaf dude some maracas

I havent even gone into the castle yet either! A few people have said when they did, they accidentally triggered the final ganon boss and I'm scared of doing that I guess?

i wandered in there accidentally a little while back, when i'd only liberated one beast, and i think i managed to almost defeat ganon - i wonder if it's possible to beat him by mistake early on?

It's definitely possible to beat Ganon early on. There was a charity event I watched on Twitch where a speed runner beat the game in a ridiculous time by going straight to Hyrule Castle after completing the mandatory section on the Plateau at the beginning of the game.

What happens once he's done with? Does it ruin any parts of the game one might not have got to yet (shrines/quests)?

not really. just puts a little star next to your name on the loading screen. you can still go back and replay from the moment before you defeated ganon.

okay, important question: Can you eventually make elixirs and cook meals in bulk? This is tedious.

No

I like the guy that looks like broccoli

what's up i'm playing this now it's terrifyingly huge

korok seeds are validating my completionist anxiety to look behind every single corner and it's gonna kill me

Theres like 250 of them so have fun!

i thought there was 900

Got to the 1st boss. I'm getting the timing wrong and getting impaled by his massive weapon instead of iframing out of the way. Super into this game, it really does feel like they took Skyrim and chucked out all the annoying bits and made the combat not terrible. I'll be interested to know when the fight goblin/pick up weapon/fight another goblin loop is gonna get old.

i've put like 80 hours in and it's not worn thin yet

shit yr right qualx bloody heck

Some of the new DLC additions are quite neat. Theres now a tool in the map function that shows you everywhere you've been on the map. I'm over 150 hours in now, so at this point this is *massively* useful to me to go back over areas I've missed, pick up koroks and shrines and etc.

The other is a pocket travelpoint. Can only use it in one spot at a time alas, but for eg at the moment I'm using it to jump to a spot up over Lanryu Promenade, which is a great spot to wait for the Ice dragon to come by in the morning so I can jump out and farm him for parts.

I might also set it at somewhere like the Southern Mine in the Goron area - there's no shrines anywhere near it so it's a pain to get to.

96 shrines down, and only found 110 korok seeds. its INSANE that there are 800 more to find. totally not going to easily find the last 24 shrines so gonna KILL THIS DARN BOSS.