Breath of the Wild
Entry posted by EricBall
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Earlier this summer I heard an orchestral medley of Zelda themes and it reminded me that I hadn't bought Breath of the Wild. When it first came out I didn't have a Switch and couldn't justify buying one just to play Zelda. However, my son got one a few years back for Christmas so now I just needed to spend the $$ to get the game. So I picked it up and I've been playing it since July 1st. I haven't finished it yet, I still need to grind a while to get Ancient Armor and upgrade it before taking on the castle and Ganon (although I suspect this isn't required).
I can understand why many people love this game. However, it's not without its flaws.
One of the big complaints from many players is weapon durability. I will admit in the early game there's a significant risk to having your only weapon break mid-way through a battle. But later in the game it's more of an annoyance.
My bigger issue is not being able to keep all of the weapons I want to. I'd like to be able to store weapons I'm not planning on using but might want to use later. Right now I've got a lot of elemental weapons filling up my inventory. They're cool to use and great in certain situations (e.g. fire weapons vs ice monsters). However, their durability isn't great and they have limited world spawns. So they sit in my inventory. Maybe I should just embrace the temporary and use them (and figure out how to use the elemental rods effectively).
Related to weapon durability is the blood moon. I think the design decision behind the blood moon was to ensure players had a way to accumulate weapons and materials in the late game. I'm kinda doing this now as I need to kill Guardians to obtain 90 ancient gears to buy and then upgrade Ancient Armor. However, the blood moon takes away my incentive to try to clear out the various monster encampments. In fact, during the early game it's often better to avoid conflict to preserve weapon durability & arrows.
The game sometimes takes "let the player figure it out" too far IMHO. Would it have been so bad for the old man to tell Link to avoid the disabled Guardians? "You've seen the Guardian carcasses? Well some aren't completely inactive, it's best to run away if you find one - you won't be able to damage it." OTOH one advantage of picking up this game years after release is other players have done the investigation and datamining to figure out almost everything about the game. So this means I don't have to stumble around trying to figure out the cooking mechanic, what weapons are the most durable, or where a particular memory is located.
But back to the grinding. Grinding is almost unavoidable in an open-world game and BOTW is no different. For completists finding all 120 shrines, all of the Koroks, all of the treasure chest, and obtaining & upgrading all of the armor can be quite the grind. In BOTW upgraded armor provides bonuses in addition to simple damage protection. So having armor which makes you unfreezable, unshockable or immune to fire can be a great benefit. And for those upgrades the required items aren't difficult to obtain.
However this isn't the case for Ancient Armor, which provides additional defence against Guardians (which are one of the strongest enemies) and when upgraded provides a bonus when using ancient weapons (which are particularly effective against Guardians). So if you're going to be taking on Guardians you're going to want to have upgraded Ancient Armor. But to obtain and upgrade Ancient Armor you need ancient materials (ancient gears in particular - 60 to obtain, 30 to upgrade) and you need to defeat Guardians to obtain ancient materials. (Yes, it is possible to loot dead Guardians to get ancient materials, but not enough to obtain 60 ancient gears.) So you need to attack & defeat Guardians without Ancient Armor in order to get Ancient Armor to make it easier to defeat Guardians. Ugh!
None the less, I'm really enjoying the game. OTOH I don't think I'm enjoying it enough to buy the DLC.
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