So you're probably asking what's so good about this? Well my friend, that is exactly what i'm going to get into in today's Breath of the Wild review. Talking about why breath of the wild is so freaking awesome. So i want to start out by talking about the story of breath of the wild. It's a pretty simple one. But i do want to dive into it before i start talking about the game itself.
The story starts out with link the main character awakening from a slumber that he's been in for quite a long time he arises to see that the kingdom of hyrule has been completely ruined by an evil known as calamity ganon. This evil appeared about a hundred years ago and laid waste to the entire region as we know it.
But the kingdom didn't go down without a fight. They resurrected ten thousand year old, ancient tech known as the divine beast in order to try to defend themselves from ganon. But it didn't work out very well and in fact ganon ended up taking control of the divine beast in order to wreak even more havoc on hyrule.
The only thing that the people could do was to trust zelda the legendary and powerful princess to use her powers to contain ganon at hyrule castle. But this process made her a prisoner of calamity ganon and it's link's duty to slay him before he escapes from being contained and finishes the job of destroying everything therefore.
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Once awakening and going through the introductory stage of the game, it's revealed that link needs to kill calamity ganon. This brings me to my first point about what makes breath of the wild so awesome. It's the complete and utter freedom to do whatever you want when you want to do it when the king pulls you aside and says hey you got to kill calamity gannon.
You can literally just go and do it. You could skip all other aspects
of the game if you want to and if you could somehow manage to make it work, you
could kill him right away.
The game does point you in the right direction and it does have a logical progression for how to do things. But it's entirely up to you if you want to follow it or not.
For example once your goal is revealed, you're supposed to go meet with impa who explains the remainder of the story and how ganon took over the divine beast and all that. From here you can go through the story and kill the divine beast or you don't have to even if you're like most people.
Follow the story logically the way, it's supposed to be followed. You can still kill the divine beasts in any order at any time without question if you kill half of them and then decide that you want to fight ganon you could do that as well.
Everything about this game gives complete and utter freedom and control to the player. It's not just the story that allows you to play the game the way you want to play it. The world is completely open to you without restrictions or level requirements or anything like that. There's nothing keeping you from anything.
Because you can climb every single mountain and ride through every single valley if something looks out of reach. It's not because there's always a way to get to it the world and the gameplay mechanics are interconnected. They're in a constant state of flow, it's quite obvious that the world design and the game design were extremely coordinated. They build off of each other to make an extremely immersive and open-ended game.
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You can approach every single enemy in a different way whether you're using boulders that you found in the world to crush an enemy by knocking it down a mountain or shooting an arrow at a wasp nest to make the wasp attack them. Every approach will be entirely different. You can use the world to your advantage and to help you progress in the game and it's up to you to figure out how to do that.
This brings me to my second point about why breath of the wild is so
great. The game doesn't hold your hand many modern games irritate me. Because
they assume that the player is like absolutely incapable of doing anything on
their own.
They have to explain over and over how to use things and they drag on through boring and slow and tedious tutorials in order to reaffirm you that you know what you're doing.
But breath of the wild doesn't do this and it's much more rewarding to play for example early in the game. You have to get across a ravine and you don't really know how to do it. So instead of the game saying, hey walk over to the tree and chop it over to cross the ravine. They just show an old man chopping down the tree and he's like oh hey can you help me chop it down.
Next thing you know you have yourself a bridge everything is pretty simple and you can figure it out if you have any ability to use context clues whatsoever. But this is the case all the time and it doesn't change as the game progresses later in the game i saw a raft in the middle of a cold lake and if i jumped in the lake it would have killed me.
So as i looked around to try to figure out how to get to the raft in Breath of the Wild , i see an axe sticking in a tree well i put two and two together and determined that if i chop down these trees. I can make a little bridge to get over to the raft.
Another example is when you meet the person who introduces you to elixirs, right next to that there's a platform that's just out of reach for you to get to the next shrine. You can't seem to get it and if you hit the spikes it damages you and then a few minutes later you meet a guy who's like hey i have an elixir that
gives you speed. So you have to put two and two together and realize that you drank the potion. Then paraglide over to the thing and you can make it inside both the freedom of choice and the lack of hand-holding work brilliantly together in order to let you approach situations differently every single time. Honestly it is beautiful.
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But approaching situations differently is pointless if you're bound by the world that you're given. As i mentioned before the world and breath of the wild gives you this ability. But i also want to spend some time talking about the environment of the world itself. Breath of the wild has one of the best open worlds i've ever seen.
It's one of the few that actually feel alive instead of it feeling like
the world revolves around you. It feels like everything's gonna happen
regardless of if you're there or not traders still go about their day no matter
if you're around them or if you want to talk to them. You see enemies hunting
animals and fighting off keys at night time.
Everyone is constantly going about their own business when thinking of an open world that feels alive most people probably resort to grand theft auto 5 and while grand theft auto 5 is undoubtedly one of the best games ever made. It's a much different feeling los santos has a feeling of artificial life.
There's mindless cars with people who yell random things at you just driving around in circles all day every day buildings seem to be working. But you can't go inside of them and you can't interact with them. There's literally airports where people just fly around in circles all day every day.
This is fine for a game like grand theft auto, but when you're given absolute freedom like you are in breath of the wild. It's important that the world actually makes you feel like you're free .
This one does it perfectly there are cool things to explore around every corner and walking around the map is worth it. Because you never know what cool locations or items you're gonna find, you can find giant caves with abandoned skeletons in them random dragons drifting through a canyon.
So many other cool and interesting things that you never want to stop exploring. In fact since i've started working on this article, i've explored the world for another 20 plus hours. Because i was running out of hard drive space walking around and seeing things is the best part of the game.
But you don't have to walk. Because there are quite a few different ways to travel around the world and these things help to make the game. So freaking awesome you can travel by horse, motorcycle, and paraglider and lots of other either weird or interesting forms of transportation.
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They all have their advantages and disadvantages. But they're all extremely enjoyable to use. There is a fast travel option, but this is one of the few games where i don't feel like i have to use it due to the world i mentioned before.
These awesome forms of transportation, there's no reason to skip out on finding something cool the horse riding in particular is worth talking about. Because it's one of the best horse mechanics that i've ever come across in a video game. You have to train and build a relationship with your horse to improve its stats and make it better at being a horse.
You need to comfort it, when it does good things in order to reassure it to behave better. The more you do this the better your horse becomes. Because of this i enjoy riding around on horseback and it never gets boring. But like i said there are still the other options that make traversing the world. Even more exciting and interesting so i touched on the idea of freedom of choice.
I talked about the fact that the game doesn't hold your hand and i finished up with the world in the transportation in this game. Now it's time to tie this all together with little odds and ends the combat. Breath of the wild is surprisingly complex for as simple as the rest of the game is starting with melee.
There are a wide range of ways that you can damage or attack enemies the weapons vary from boomerangs to spears, to pitchforks to bats. Each one of them have their own distinctive advantages when it comes to the enemies during these combat situations.
There's a nice feature that i've never really seen before in a game where the enemies actually have to arm themselves. They don't summon an axe out of midair they have to run and pick it up off the ground before. They attack you and if you knock it out of their hands guess what they're gonna go back to pick it up.
Breath of the Wild is a super cool and strategic dynamic of the game and it's
extremely interesting to see it on the range side of things. There are
different calibers of bow and arrows.
There's also spears and boomerangs that you could throw at enemies ranged is pretty simple and there's a slow motion mechanic that is super satisfying to use.
On top of these two things there are also your rune abilities which could be used in combat or just for navigating the world or completing a dungeon. These abilities include bombs magnesis the ice thing that i could never remember the name of and stasis which freezes time and allows you to build up potential energy in an object.
This one in particular is super cool and it allows for some neat situations to unfold throughout your journeys. The combinations of ways in which you could face your enemies builds off of everything else i've mentioned before. It creates a true and utter freedom that cannot be matched in gaming if you don't want to go to situation head on just wait for the enemies to go to sleep.
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When it turns night time and attack then there are also tons of items weapons and armor that could be used to enhance your experience. You could forage for different types of mushrooms and natural substances that help you make your special elixirs or simply look for a new ability enhancing dish.
You can cook these items are everywhere and each region has different variations of things that you could use when it comes to the cooking in particular, i love it. Something about the simplicity of how you gather all the ingredients in your hand and throw them into the pot is super satisfying and i just love cooking in this game.
All of these items are pretty helpful as you travel across hyrule to work on completing new dungeons and exploring every nook and cranny of the world. Now i kind of want to talk about the shrines, there are over 120 different shrines around the map and as you complete them you get these things called spirit orbs that you can use to upgrade your stamina and your health.
Special items that you could find in treasure chest. Each of these shrines are like a dungeon that are either filled with puzzles or enemies to fight the puzzle ones are pretty cool. It can be interesting to use your rune abilities to solve them. But i will say honestly they get old pretty fast by the time you're ending your gameplay and you're 50 hours deep into this game.
The puzzles become a bit repetitive and sometimes they aren't the most enjoyable thing in the world. But i will say they are a crucial part of the gameplay and at least for the first 20 hours the challenges were pretty fun. As a whole however the shrines do help to add on to all of these other things and give more of a sense of purpose to the game.
So they are another thing that helped to make this game so freaking awesome. Now obviously i am a pretty big fan of this game, but i'm not going to say that it's completely perfect. There are quite a bit of issues with frame lag and random stuttering and i do think that the music could be improved upon a bit. The only real thing for music are some subtle you know little piano keys here and there and some noises.
Overall if Breath of the Wild had a better soundtrack that was consistently playing. I
think it would be a bit of a better experience. But even with all of this it is
a great game.
If you make it to the end and fight all of the divine beasts and kill ganon i guarantee you that you will have some of the most satisfaction that you've ever had in a video game.
Breath of the wild is a true masterpiece and it's a game that i would definitely recommend picking up and playing if you have a nintendo switch. I wish i could go back and experience this beauty for the first time once again. Overall breath of the wild is a 10 out of 10 experience with only a few issues that come up every once in a while.
Overall it is worth it and i hope you give it a shot anyways guys that is gonna be it for today's review so i hope you guys enjoyed this one did take a bit longer than the previous one. Because well this game takes a while to play and honestly i spent more time playing it than i should have. But we're not gonna mention that if you did enjoy this game. I will see you guys next time and peace.
