On Breath of the Wild

I awoke in a strange tomb, filled with machines that were alien to me. A voice that I didn't recognize and whose source I couldn't identify begged me forward. I exited the tomb to find a world that was not only alien to me, but ruined and hostile. This world I was tasked with saving, and save that world I did. Along the way I helped people out in small ways, finding ingredient for their cooking or taking pictures for them, and in big ways, stopping beasts that threatened their homes or saving them from attacking creatures, and I recovered my memories along the way.

It had been 100 years since the times that I remembered, and all but a few that I cared about were long dead. I stopped my training and preparations short to finish the mission by destroying Ganon and saving Princess Zelda. Afterwards I went back out into the land I now remembered was known as Hyrule to continue finding the ancient shrines that granted me strength and to continue doing what I knew how to do, help people. I helped a man build a town from nothing and find a wife. I showed weapons to a child who had heard about them from his now gone grandfather and who desperately wanted to see them himself. I helped so many people it became hard to find more people who needed help. I found some men tearing down an abandoned house down and bought it for myself. I invested in that house, made it nice, made it my own. I settled down. Hyrule is safe, I hope.

I finished Breath of the Wild this week for the most part. I beat the game, all the shrines, and the side quests. I still have some unupgraded armor and some side tasks that aren't tracked that I haven't done, but I've done the things that I really care about. Truth be told I don't have a lot of experience with open world games. Prior to BotW I guess you could say the last ones I played was Metal Gear Solid V and Shadow of Mordor though Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is more similar to BotW. I'd say that the closest experience that I've had to Breath of the Wild would be World of Warcraft. They both really capture a feeling of exploration, especially during the my early time playing the WoW in the base game and its Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions.

The Legend of Zelda series of games is one that's near and dear to my heart. If you take the original game's release date of Feb 21, 1986 and do the time conversion to American Central Time, my birth was only a handful of hours off. Like Link, I'm also left-handed (though that's changed for Link since motion controls) and I have pointy ears. I saw people play the first two Zelda games but the first one I really got to dig into and beat for myself was A Link to the Past. I've been hooked ever since and now that I have Breath of the Wild done, all I need to do is wrap up my playthrough of Majora's Mask and I'll have completed every canonical Legend of Zelda game, console and handheld.

Running out of significant things to do in Breath of the Wild has been bittersweet. I've loved the game immensely and I've been glad to do everything that I've done and am sad to have run out of major things to do. If the game would let me I'd gladly cross the great canyon that separates Hyrule from the rest of the world to the north and west or drive a sand seal through the Gerudo Desert to parts unknown.

It was so amazing to play a game, not just a Zelda game, that pushes you out into the world and says "Go where you want. Here's your goals, but I'm not going to stop you from doing what you want to do." There are entire zones that aren't necessary to any of the main quests. This is very different from the previous entry Skyward Sword which was very structured/linear. Like many people I enjoyed Skyward Sword but I didn't finish it until a year or more later because I just wasn't drawn to it. I've been consumed by Breath of the Wild for the past week and a half and I really think that's because it's really earned being called an adventure game. You quest and explore and are HEROIC. It's truly amazing to not know exactly how to get somewhere or what you'll encounter along the way.

One of the recurring complaints about Breath of the Wild has been w/ the durability system they added for weapons and shields. While it is frustrating for a great piece of gear to break, it creates a tension and adds a layer of strategy to the battles that I really enjoy. It adds value and strategy by forcing you to consider what weapon you want to use against a particular enemy and making you make sure you have a good spread of weapons for the enemies that you're encountering. Finally breaking out the weapon you've been saving for a special occasion or an enemy that's just pissed you off is incredibly satisfying. All they really needed was a nicer UI for dropping/exchanging items.

The oddest thing is that I don't know if I'd want a Breath of the Wild 2. The Zelda games generally have the same rough story/map, it'd be too much if they had the same gameplay as well. For a mechanical successor to BotW to succeed it's going to need to take place somewhere new or have a different story archetype. Even if there's never another Zelda that I love as much as Breath of the Wild I'll still be incredibly happy. They've done something incredibly magical with it that was the Zelda game that I wasn't even aware was the one I've always wanted.

Skyward Sword Impressions

You start with six hearts. What. The. Hell. I’m just kidding, I don’t actually care about that, it did catch me off guard, though.

I’m one temple in on The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. It’s a really great game so far, and I definitely look forward to completing it. This year is the 25th anniversary of the Legend of Zelda series, a fact which the game makes known within it. The motion controls are pretty great; choosing which way to swing my sword hasn’t been as tedious as I originally thought it was going to be. We’ll see if my opinion on that stays throughout the rest of the game.

New Systems
I’m finding myself really into the game's new questing system. Sidequests are more official now since villagers will have speech bubbles above their heads when they have something important to say to you. When you are asked to go on a sidequest, it is explicit and the you will have to select whether or not you want to take it.

The game also features an item upgrade system. There are various items that can be collected throughout the course of the game. So far I’ve found bugs and jewels of various sorts. They can be given to a particular NPC and he can use them to upgrade your items to have new powers. This varies from increasing the number of slots in your pellet pouch to making your slingshot fire a spray of pellets instead of a single pellet. Those are the ones that I’ve seen so far and I’m eagerly looking forward to seeing what other potential upgrades there are. These new features really give Skyward Sword some feeling of being a somewhat western-style RPG. This is an interesting decision that Nintendo has gone with the game and I approve of it wholeheartedly.

Also new to the game is a stamina gauge and, with it, running. No longer will intrepid adventurers feel that their fastest way to cross the land be by rolling everywhere. The stamina gauge is also used for climbing, carrying heavy objects, and particularly acrobatic sword maneuvers to allow them to be easily performed, but not spammable. If Link runs out of stamina, he fails at whatever the current action is and you have to wait while the stamina gauge recharges.

No Boats or Trains
A fairly prominent feature of the game is bird flying.  It’s a much smoother feeling transportation feature than Wind Waker or Phantom Hourglass’s boat riding or Spirit Track’s train conducting. It features the three boosts mechanic that players will remember from Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess’s horse riding. If you swing the remote up and down, your bird will flap its wings and ascend without losing speed, allowing you to dive and move quickly without sacrificing speed on the ascent. The problem with this is that the rhythm and strength of flap needed for the game to register the motion is very finicky. The flailing that I have to perform to get it to work often sends me wildly off course, rendering the whole point of the exercise moot.

Gripes
I have never crossed a tightrope without Link tipping over and needing to climb back up on the rope. It took me forever to realize that to correct Link’s tilt you’re not supposed to tilt the remote, you’re supposed to point it in the opposite direction like a flashlight. Tilting the remote does nothing. Nintendo chose to eschew 4 years of Wii game design convention for some reason.

Speaking of eschewing game design conventions. When you’re playing a Zelda game, and there is a big eyeball on the wall, what you do you? You shoot it, right? The game gives you the slingshot not long before you go into the first dungeon. The first real puzzle of the dungeon has an eyeball on a wall above a door. However, when you pull out the slingshot, it shuts tight and is impervious to your pellets. Fi, the spirit of the sword or something and your Navi replacement for the game, notes that the eye follows the tip of your sword. I decided that I needed to make it dizzy. I swung my sword left and right and nothing happened. I swung my sword up and down and nothing happened. After trying to shoot the slingshot and get out my sword so maybe it’d open its eye in time to be hit I looked up the solution online. I was supposed to swing my sword in a circle to make it dizzy and open the door. So congratulations go to Nintendo for going against 20 years of Zelda game design tradition and making the first puzzle of the first dungeon an unintuitive use of motion controls.

Motion Minus
One of my biggest problems with playing the game doesn’t appear to be the games fault. It’s the Wii Motion Plus. While the technology is more sensitive that the standard Wii Remote controls, it seems to be prone to accumulating error. Over time its origin (how it’s oriented so that it thinks you’re pointing straight forward) seems to drift, making actions difficult to perform. In many cases you can press down on the D-Pad and it will recenter itself to its current orientation but there are times when you can’t do this and are forced to pause the game where you can recenter it. It can really break your immersion to have to do this, and it can really harm your gameplay if it happens at a critical moment. I’m just glad that since I bought the special edition at Wal-Mart’s Black Friday sale I didn’t have to pay extra for a Wii Motion Plus controller.

Right-Hand Bias
The games is only slight right-hand biased. I've had two issues with it so far: one is minor and the other is cosmetic. All weapon wielding enemies I've encountered hold it in their right hand. Since they hold the weapon mostly upright, this means that you cannot usually initiate your attack with a left-to-right swing, which is the most natural swing for a left-handed person. The game slightly favors right-handed people in this way. The other way that it favors right-handed people is that if you want to hold your sword in a cool way, such as pointed behind you, you can't do this and it will look really weird. Overall, I had worse fears and am not bothered by this.

I know that I complained quite a fair amount of the past 900 or so words, but I really do like the game. It’s still a very solid game and lives up to all my expectations about the quality of Zelda games. The graphics are, of course, not that great. The models all look very good, but the environments do leave quite a bit to be desired. As with Twilight Princess, the more stylized scenes do look absolutely gorgeous. If you like Zelda games, then I’ll bet that you’ll like this game. I love it so far.

Backlog Update

I'm healthily making my way through  The Legend of Zelda. I'm seven dungeons in and I have the White Sword and the Blue Ring. It's been really fun, although I have to question how some of the items are supposed to be compelling.

Oh, look! It's a...ladder?

I dug some more into Super Meat Boy. I beat Hell. Now it's just getting stupid hard. I'm putting it in my, "I don't actively care about beating this game" bucket.

I really need to get back to work on Portable Ops.

Spirit Tracks Thoughts

I beat Spirit Tracks last night, and it was actually really great. I felt like the game did a wonderful job of fully utilizing the touch aspect of the system that it was on. It was a wonderful improvement on the solid gameplay already found in it's predecessor, Phantom Hourglass.

One of the most welcome improvements was the fact that in the "central dungeon", in this game a tower, which is returned to several times during the game, previously completed portions of the tower do not have to be repeated. Many of the items in the game are variations on standard Zelda items: bombs, bow, boomerang, whip. There was also an item which let you blow gusts of wind (using the microphone) and a wand which let you do some really neat puzzle with sand. The wand would hard the sand and make it stand up as a raised platform, allowing link to create barriers or elevator himself.

Princess Zelda plays a more crucial role in this game since her spirit became disembodied. She follows you throughout the game, but not in an annoying way. As a spirit, she can possess certain armored enemies called Phantoms. The Phantoms only occur in the central dungeon and come in a few varieties. The co-op'esque gameplay provided by this mechanic allows for wonderful and interesting interactions with your items.

The boss battles were all wonderful, the ones at the end were especially great.

This game does feature extensive train travel as a core of the game in a way that is somewhat similar to Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass, though in a more rigid way. There are some special gates that facilitate travel via teleportation, so overall, it's on par with the travel in the other two.

Overall, it was a wonderful game.