Breath of the Wild finally has a review I can agree with, page 1 - Forum (2025)

That's a very spoiler-heavy review.

As much as I appreciate Jim Sterling - I love his style, and he has some very relevant points regarding business ethics in the gaming industry, he does have one big swollen fucker of a chip on his shoulder about Nintendo, and I have no idea why. I don't see anything overly wrong with his review - it's his valid opinion, it's professional, and it isn't overly malicious in the way that many online reviewers tend to be - but I do feel it to be "reluctant praise" tainted by his past history of railing against Nintendo.

Anyway, a few points:

I've not found the enemies overly powerful in BotW. Sure, many of them can take you out in one or two blows, but I've rarely been in a situation where those blows were entirely unavoidable. In most cases, I noticed that I failed to watch my back, and there are enough defensive options - your shield, dodging, repositioning, scoping enemies out in advance (and thinning the herd with your bow - especially useful for bokoblins on guard towers). The most powerful enemies in terms of sheer attack force have other weaknesses. Moblins for instance tend to be slower and clumsier - countering with a flurry is much easier with them. Yagi assassins are quick and difficult to both hit and avoid, but are also predictable to a fault. The skeletal bokoblins at night tend to be a bit irritating, but it's fun to grab a head, kick it off a cliff and watch the body run after it (or die from the distance).

The way that the game so actively provides you with so many tactical options to thin the herd and get a drop on enemies from a distance is evidence enough that you're not supposed to dive in with swords and arrows blazing. It rewards stealth. I mean, you have a cave with open windows, an open entrance, filled with explosive barrels and sleeping enemies. And if the hint isn't already unsubtle enough, there's a burning lantern dangled on a rope in plain sight, right above the barrels. Weapon durability ties into this - your melee weapons are not meant to be your primary method of attack. Their transient nature is another element of resource management designed to dissuade you from unnecessarily wasting them. They're not designed to be keepsakes or trophies.

Besides, one of the big problems I've had with open world RPGs over the years is that, as you advance and obtain more powerful weaponry, it tends to make running through lower-level regions a bit of a drag. The Elder Scrolls games are particularly guilty of this. With BotW, you can collect, say, a few Royal Broadswords from enemies in the Garudo desert and then go back to the Great Plateau or Hateno, where most advanced weapons will take out any enemy with just a single hit. It becomes dull, and ordinarily would encourage you to plough through bokoblin camps with reckless abandon. Stick around in these easier areas though, and you find your weapons gradually being whisked away from you as they break, replacing them with weaker weapons, encouraging a more tactical approach.

(Also, there's another tactical element to the final blow of any weapon in that it issues 2x damage.)

One criticism where I do agree with him is how inventory management is handled for cooking and firestarting, which is really clumsy. I try to keep a supply of baked apples on hand to top up my hearts, but the fact that you can only hold five at a time in your hands to drop them onto a fire makes baking them a bit of a chore. Also, I occasionally had the problem where I would drop a flint rock and pile of wood to start a fire, only for the flint to roll just far enough away to spark when I hit it but not light the wood.

The blood moon isn't all that common - I play for around 2-3 hours at a time and get around one blood moon every session. Although, yes, the cutscene does get repetitive, but it's only 20 seconds long. Did have fun with that one once when I was camping at an old bokoblin fire - when morning arrived, I was surrounded by five confused-looking bokoblin, who all instantly rushed for their weapons.

Comparisons with Assassin's Creed regarding the towers were inevitable, and I have a feel that it was a deliberate reference, although towers in BotW are a little more involved. For one thing, getting up them is a bit more of a challenge. In most cases, your stamina won't be enough to reach a platform, although so far I've found that the challenge usually involves finding a peak to paraglide off. I hope it gets a bit more challenging than that. More importantly though, reaching the top only unlocks the map segment itself with the region names. Unlike AC, it doesn't reveal everything on the map - you're left to identify all of that yourself from the top of the tower with your own eyes.

On the whole, my one biggest disappointment is that the game was so obviously designed to incorporate the Sheikah Slate on the Wii U GamePad, but because Nintendo wanted a consistent experience across Wii U and Switch, they seem to have abandoned that mechanism at the eleventh hour. But BotW is occupying all of my gaming time right now, and it really takes a special game to demand that much attention from me.

And am I the only one that finds the presence of voice acting in BotW generally off-putting? 98% of the dialogue in-game in unvoiced, and that's actually in-keeping with the Zelda style. Not even Skyward Sword or Twilight Princess had it. Nintendo games in general derive a lot of their atmosphere from a general reliance on unvoiced characterisation - it feels out of place here.

Post edited March 16, 2017 by jamyskis

Breath of the Wild finally has a review I can agree with, page 1 - Forum (2025)
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