Mind you, I don't usually agree with Mr. Jim Sterling's reviews, vents or rants, but this time I think he was spot on (considering my actual thoughts about the game, and the fact the ridiculous weapon durability has been keeping me from actually buying the game for my Wii U -- since no way in hell am I buying a €300-something console for one game). Here's the review, in case you're interested in reading it: Jim Sterling's Breath of the Wild review.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Is it "one of the best video games ever made", like the vast majority of the press is saying? Is it worthy of all the accolades and "perfect tens" it has been amassing? Or, like me, do you think it has enough quantity of minor issues to make it more of a chore than it should be?

I know I "should hold my peace", since I don't actually own the game, but I think I've seen enough of it streamed to reach my own conclusion, and, as a fervent Zelda fan, I'm sad to say I don't think this "masterpiece" is for me. It has way too many hindrances to my enjoyment of the game, and I strongly disagree with all the perfect scores it has been awarded so far.

Don't own the game either, but all my friends who did buy it say it's really good.

Keep in mind those are the guys who bought it at full release price, so they're the people that find the idea of an "open world Zelda" appealing, and they're not that numerous either so my statistical population is low. But the comments I hear most are "Best game I played this year", "so addictive it's killing my social life", "it's like living a Miyazaki movie" or "Best Zelda since xxx". I didn't hear one negative or disappointed comment from them.

So I guess for many people, it is actually a genuinely very good game.

I've only been following a walkthrough (at GirlGamerGaB), I too haven't played the game, because you know ... money.

This is the first Zelda game I would be interested in playing, so it certainly has that going for itself.
The durability issue would annoy me as well, however for me the positives would outweigh the negatives in this case.

I absolutely agree though, when mainstream media like a game they really like that game.
They always oversee things that are serious issues in other games, made by "lesser" developers.

Do I see it as a 10/10 game ? not really. Based on watching 8 hours of a walkthrough I'd say 8/10. Not having actually played the game, it feels silly to rate it, but I guess the score would reflect my expected enjoyment.

Mainstream media journalists, especially American, typically have the same gaming background and like the same kind of games, so if one of them really likes Zelda you can bet the other ones will as well. Their scores move in tandem with each other.

Would I buy the game and the Switch should I stumble upon €500 (or a wealthy MILF)? No, with Gran Turismo Sport coming out this year, as well as games like the Guild 3, Elex and Spellforce 3 on GOG, I do have other priorities.

Edit: I did not watch his review (don't like his style).

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.

The limited durability of the weapons has been unfairly maligned. It exists in order to preserve more important aspects of the gameplay.

If you are able to sneak into a high-level area in a RPG early on and get some really powerful loot, this can break the game going forward by making all low-level areas trivial. This would be the dominant strategy.Open-world RPGs avoid this in a variety of ways.

The most common is to confine the player in a small area, and slowly expand it (new islands, roadblocks are arbitrarily removed, etc.), however this would go against the game's entire ethos of allowing players to go wherever they want whenever they want, even sequence breaking to the point of running straight to the final boss and attempting to beat it.

The other solution is level scaling, which frankly has a way of making games boring by at the same time never giving you much challenge, and never allowing you to become more powerful. BotW doesn't do that, it gives you stronger enemies to fight in areas where you might be expected to have more hearts by the time you reach it, however being able to pick up the weapons in that area give you a fighting chance and allows players who think they are skilled enough to not get hit to take on this challenge.

Finally there's level gating, even if you do find a strong weapon you are not allowed to use it without having reached the arbitrary level of stats needed to wield it. Zelda doesn't have leveling up, and they found it more important to keep that aspect of the series.

Weapon durability was the solution they found. You are allowed to go wherever you want, sequence break as much as your own skills allow and the weapons you find throughout the game will enable you, without making earlier areas trivially easy, or making the loot found there meaningless. Even the lowliest of rusty swords can still be useful, because you won't want to waste your powerful guardian sword by whacking bokoblins.


No the game isn't perfect: the mechanics of increasing your inventory space is fun, but having to manage it contantly isn't, and that could have been alleviated by integrating the Wii U gamepad into gameplay which they chose not to do; the framerate takes noticeable dips during harsh weather or in towns; and the introduction of voice acting, despite not being bad per se, it does make Link's muteness even more jarring in the name of keeping him a blank slate for the player to project into, yet it removes the option to name Link whatever you want thus making him less of a blank slate, they're conflicting design decisions and they should've gone entirely in one direction or another.


But you know what, the game is still pretty goddamn amazing.

I read that his review earned him a DDOS attack; lol... 7/10 is quite a good score, though.

Personally owning a lonely Wii U, i am waiting my copy by the 30 March from Amazon... I have gathered the same sentiments from forums, users reviews, the everything breakable fast problem, the generic storytelling not going as far as what happened and why hundred years ago, and the lack of indoors, similarity of shrines design, plus the framerate dips...

But I can't comment on that, and don't care... I just am glad to get my hands on a Wii U game i may enjoy and the perspective to play a Zelda game normally, without damn motion controls in the way at every corner...

Edit : Amazon is early, sent my copy scheduled for Tuesday.

Maybe I'm a little too far into the game to really be impressed by the Guardian Sword's stats, but I recall that the Guardian Sword was neither powerful (24, I believe?) nor particularly durable, even by the game's standards. Does look very pretty though, especially when combined with the Guardian Shield. Not sure if it has a bearing on visibility at night though (rain, long grass, and cover of night all affect how well enemies can see you, so why shouldn't a bright, glowing sword & shield set?)

Yeah, but the Guardian Sword++ is 40, and you can find ones with special abilities like "durability up". The only sword stronger than it that I've seen is the Master Sword, and that one varies from 30 to 60 depending on the enemy you're fighting. There are certain two-handed broadswords and axes that can go up to 60, but they're slower and preclude you from using a shield, so the Guardian Sword is still pretty great to have.

I agree with him and I even made a whole thread on the matter.

I also agree with him that Nintendo's fans are quite toxic.

This is the thread. It describes what I would prefer from a durability system.

The game's pretty goddamn good. I mean, yeah, the fanboys can be obnoxious (though the same could easily be said of the PC faithful), but the game is excellent. A masterclass in open-world design, super solid mechanics, and a fantastic aesthetic. It's really something special.

From what I have read, if you ignore every optional task (including the game's 4 dungeons and 120 shrines) and go straight to the final area of the game, you are *not* going to have an easy time.

I agree with a bunch of Jim's points, but I still find the game pretty amazing. Even when I am annoyed at the cheap kill or the utter uselessness of my bombs at their start level the moment you get off the Plateau the first time, I find myself still pressing on for an hour and then two exploring, wondering what is at the top of the peak and checking out the view.

Weapon brittleness is a problem though. seriously, coming on a camp and going through three weapons to take out five enemies is ridiculous.

But the thing I really hate is the rain. I seriously hate it. It just ruins the game, You can't climb so if you are in the middle of a mountain, or waiting to climb five feet to get into a shrine you just literally have to wait five minutes for the rain effect to stop before you can actually do anything in the game. It is tedious beyond reason. Nothing like standing next to a shrine on a mole hill and walking away from the game for five minutes so arbitrary effects can end. And the rain requires everything to be wooden lest lighting f-ck you up. This would be OK if it was only the Zora scenario, but it is the whole world at any time.

The open world is awesome, but it is not like the original Zelda, you have a lot of characters pointing directions, map markers, side quest trackers pointing the way to everything, but you can still find a ton of stuff on your own.

Despite its problems, the game still is amazing. It does so much right, that it causes some of the bad things to stand out more than they would in lesser games.

I can assure you the world is not empty. The world is filled with 120 shrines, 900 Korok seeds to find, enemy camps, treasures, side quests galore, massive enemy encounters in the wild, horseback riding. Hunting is pretty awesome, tons of different animals, lots of different plants and bugs to get a hold of, cooking foods for health and status bonuses, bugs and enemy parts for elixirs. This is a Zelda game, not a Elder Scrolls game, there is a reason to the layout, not just we made a big world map.

As for it being easy, no. This game is hard, and you might be able to walk straight to Gannon, but you won't make it there unless you can avoid and run away from everything, and you will still have a 99.99% chance of dying. I have only managed to beat one of the massive encounters I have come across and it took a long time, the use of many bombs and all ten of my bomb arrows.

Uhhh...There are no side quest trackers. Only to show where the original quest givers location is. Just the main missions, of which there are few, give you waypoints. And the only map markers available are for towns and shrines, anything else you have to manually place yourself.

That's actually one of the things I loved about the game. When you get a quest it doesn't show up on your map, or there's an arrow on your minimap pointing to its direction, you get a set of directions and landmarks as reference to guide your way, then the best course of action is to climb to high ground, scour the horizon with your telescope, and manually mark the general direction of where you think it is on your map.

It might not be original Zelda, I confess I've never played that game, but the description you gave sounds more like Assassin's Creed, and I think it has more in common with how Morrowind handled directions.