Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I don't think I've ever felt this wildly conflicted towards a game, one moment you're out in the open on an adventure that's just as epic as it was hyped to be and then the next moment you're down in a clunky shrine solving puzzles for the retarded wondering how anyone could've deemed this as acceptable content. I don't know how the production was handled and if maybe different teams with a variety of skill and experience worked on it, but it's so clear that certain elements of the game are designed by true professionals with a vision, and others by amateurish lazy designers who didn't know what they were doing. The result is a weird inbetween of the cheap, out of touch games that have been plaguing Nintendo the past couple years (Star Fox, Colour Splash, etc) and the notable return to quality of a game like Super Mario Odyssey.
Exploring the map is really brilliant and on it's own so good that you don't even necessarily need the plot and everything else to make it work. My favourite and most memorable experiences with the game were every time I entered a new area unmarked on my map and after climbing my way up spotted so many things that peeked my interest and made my imagination run wild about what they could be. Even if often times things turned out to be not as exciting as I imagined they would be I still found a lot of satisfaction in the sense of wonder they inspired in that moment, there's a kind of shock value to exploring the unknown that makes a game like this so fascinating in it's early parts. Spotting a giant enemy just standing out in the wild or unexpectedly running into a new region I didn't know was out there made for some of the most enthralling moments of the game.
Controls are really tight too, a lot of people called the climbing gimmicky and unnecessary but I actually loved it. Trying to determine if you have the right stamina to climb a mountain and look for edges to rest on, or specifically timing a final risky jump to make it, and sometimes even attempting to carefully make my way through slippery slopes during rain is all fun stuff. This is exactly how climbing mechanics should work, not Uncharted's edge to edge jumping. Unlike most open world games Zelda's map is an obstacle to master on it's own, you're always gonna be planning to find the most efficient way to get somewhere or storing up on certain ingredients to cook a potion to temporarily let you pass through a harsh climate. That's great game design.
Unbidextually outside the exploration Breath of the Wild becomes a clunky hit-and-miss game of mechanics that conflict with each other and ideas that weren't thought out properly. Combat is simple but enjoyable enough, but it gets brought down by so many poor decisions: you can carry literally dozens of easily acquired health restoring meals that can keep you from seeing the game over screen at all, you can upgrade your armour which I really liked initially until I realised the upgrades are completely broken and can make you practically invincible, and the Guardian powers are basically optional cheats more than they are "mechanics" - I'm disappointed that we downgraded from getting a new item every dungeon that expands your functionality to basically unlocking 25% of kiddy mode as reward for each Divine Beast. This raises the question of whether games require the player to do their own part in making the game fun, and I did start enjoying it more when I chose to stop using many of these things, but I despise when games make me do something like that just to feel challenged. It kills so much of the progression: I no longer felt an incentive to collect items for armour upgrades or like I had to do the Divine Beasts to obtain an essential ability.
Another perfect example of the contradictory game design is arrows: these are extremely useful and it's obvious the game intends for you to always be carrying only a couple. You find chests with sets of 5 to 10, implying that that is the way you're supposed to primarily obtain them. But stores sell them too, which isn't necessarily a bad thing if their prices are high, but very quickly you'll obtain such a massive number of rupees that you can easily buy up every store's supply and get dozens of every arrow type, letting you easily overpower enemies all the time. Same thing goes for the Guardians which if you use your freeze ability on them you can easily take them out and basically just break them, it's clear you're only supposed to be able to do that very rarely but I could pull it off every time. Did the people who decided these things not communicate at all? It's like every time they completed 10% of the game they shipped it out to another team with no context and so sometimes things just horribly conflict like this.
Enemies lack in variety, the fact that a game with 100-150+ hours of content only offers three main enemy types for such a gigantic map is ridiculous regardless of how intricately they're designed. The minibosses don't make things much better, there's again only three main types (there is a unique fourth one that only occurs in one area, something the game could've benefited hugely from having more of) and there's literally dozens of them copy-pasted across the map. One of them is really brilliant and my first encounter with it was amazing, but once my weapons became powerful enough I was able to actually kill it (even it's strongest form) before it even finished it's waking up animation. Another one I realised you could easily lock into it's stun animation and just fire away arrows till it dies.
Shrines were really hit and miss, some of them are extremely clever and others are so stupidly simple you can complete them in two minutes with no effort at all. The combat shrines were actually my favourites early on because they brought some really tactile, difficult combat to the table, but later on you simply become too adequate and your weapons too powerful for them to pose any real challenge and you just have to go in and take care of the exact same damage sponges over and over again.
The Divine Beasts I was OK with, they're nowhere near the best Zelda dungeons but I did enjoy them for what they were and the nonlinear structure is actually a cool idea. I didn't mind the lack of enemies either, you already do tons of combat on the map so getting a break from that was a nice change of pace to me. Being able to do them whenever you feel like is welcome too, it let me do them whenever I really felt like it rather than having to do them to progress the game. The bosses in them are shit though, they're some of the most mindless and easy Zelda bosses ever, just swing till it dies. I'm not kidding, there's one of them where if you have the Master Sword you can take it out in like a minute. This is also again an example of something where they clearly didn't expect that you might have 100 arrows in your inventory, as I think two of them have a pattern where they seem to have thought that most people wouldn't have many arrows so they could make the bosses fly to make them more difficult to hit.
Also I don't know where else to throw this in but for some weird reason the cooking system works in reverse: easy to get, common items will grant you like full health bar restores and bonus hearts, but actually expensive and hard to make recipes grant you like 3-4 hearts. How do you even fuck something up like that?
Visually I think the game looks great, I love the cell shading and the kind of washed out, painterly look of everything. There were a lot of moments that really immersed me into the atmosphere, arriving in my first town while it was dark and stormy out and seeing all the lights come from the homes, or getting caught in a foggy blizzard while ominous ambience played, these are excellent moments that'll probably still stick out in my mind long after putting the game down. I like the ambient direction of the music too, I'm glad they didn't go for an orchestrated Skyrim type soundtrack. It makes the moments actual music does play more impactful too, I recommend avoiding Hyrule Castle until the final boss just for the music alone.
There's a couple duds in the presentation though: character designs are pretty fucking lame at times and even at it's best the Zelda inhabitants have never looked this generic. I feel like they wanted to pander to the anime crowd so much it sacrificed some of the series' personality, a town of Sheikah people ended up just being the trope town. The generic NPCs look downright bad at times, there was this weird part where I encountered one that was obviously supposed to be a quirky, silly character based on his dialogue, but he just looked like a generic middle aged man standing still in place. I was also disappointed that every shrine and every stable was themed exactly the same, since they seem like obvious vehicles for helping to set the atmosphere of different regions. Some ruins were also copy-pasted around the map.
And there's the plot, which, ahhhh? I kinda liked it, the whole premise of this post-apocalypse Hyrule and Link with amnesia is great and occasionally it kinda works, but for the most part I found the story to be really boring and directionless. The out of order presentation of the cutscenes makes no sense, because once again whoever wrote the story obviously didn't do so with the intention of it being told without an order, so you'll need at least like half the cutscenes before you can make sense of anything that's going on. And besides Zelda none of the characters get fleshed out at all, they barely get any screen time and yet they still treat these people we barely know as some really special, "you're attached to them" characters. I already can't remember most of their names or describe their personalities in more than a sentence, and I beat the game just a few months ago.
And the story doesn't do much visually either, in fact it *again* conflicts with what it initially sets up. It's a post-apocalyptic Hyrule where Link failed, you'd think this would be a dark, broken, maybe at war Hyrule, but no. Towns are everywhere, it's peace time, the monsters never come near civilisation for some reason, most people seem completely unconcerned with Ganon being there. There are some people who complain about the Divine Beasts affecting their lives, but there's nothing to actually show that, you just have to take their word for it as they proceed to live in their beautiful towns with pretty sunsets and the kids playing outside. It even goes as far as to imply that some younger people don't really care about Ganon and Link is just some old myth to them, what the fuck?
And finally, I need to say what they did with the final boss, the thing that preludes it , that has to be some of the darkest, grimiest, fart-oozing Miyamotism I've ever seen.
$$$$$$$o putting all those complaints together, I still loved the game. It was far from the promised 10/10 experience, but when it works it works so perfectly that it made me willing to forgive the game's faults and enjoy it for what it is. I really hope Nintendo doesn't get complacent and think this is what people want, because there's a ton of room to improve and build upon what they've established and I do think the open world formula is a perfect direction for Zelda.
Mario + Rabbids
I've only played a couple hours of it but it's pretty good, I'm surprised by the intricacy of the combat system and how much they're able to come up with to keep remixing and expanding on the mechanics. The gameplay in the map is decent, I like that there's a little bit of exploration to it and it does give the necessary breaks from the combat, though it seems a little more aimed at young kids. The visuals are great too, I love what they did to the 3D World aesthetic. The Grant Kirkhope soundtrack is a Grant Kirkhope soundtrack, but it does weirdly work with the tone they're going for.
