#and the plot points are so trivial and stuff the player has already pieced together ages ago but have to be covered in 9847 different lines

[inspector-montoya-fox]

i am in the silliest goofiest of all moods so i decided to take my top 3 ice creams of this summer and share with you which characters they remind me of the most. let me know if you think you are sillier and/or goofier by sending me your favourite ice cream

at number 3 we have Arpeggio as Haagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche, and specifically the mini tub that comes in a box of four flavours. despite the flavour's Latin American roots, i think Arpeggio would savour it because he likes to indulge in different cultures as a certified genius. kinda sophisticated like him, and just like his time in the game, short and sweet

number 2 is a cool remix of a childhood classic: blondie caramel Maxibon with the waffle. I've paired it with Rajan because the packaging is orange, duh but also because it has two different sides. the waffle is Rajan's regal facade, appealing to Westerners, whereas the ice cream bar side is rough and rocky just like the predator within

the Kinder Bueno ice cream is paired with Carmelita and takes the number one spot this summer. is this coupling based on personal bias? maybe! the flavours here are so nostalgic and reimagined into ice cream form perfectly. the cone and hardened chocolate on top form a tough exterior but inside the core is soft and rich, just like Carmelita herself. 10/10 masterpiece

[johannesviii]

So I guess I’m hyperfixating on Death Stranding at the moment

And since I’ve finally finished the story after playing it for like 100 hours over the course of seven months or so I guess I have Opinions(tm) about things I didn’t like in the game

They’re eating at my brain so I’m gonna put them all in a single post to get them out of my system once and for all so I can enjoy the rest in peace

Spoilers, obviously

Hi welcome back to ‘Johannes is obsessing over yet another video game with horror elements in it’! I guess!!

Our latest entry in that category was Until Dawn but since UD can be played in like 6/7 hours and I spent 100 hours of my life on DS, as you can guess we’re talking about a full-blown hyperfixation, the kind that physically hurts because I can’t focus on anything else even after having finished the storyline

But it was super gradual. Again, seven months. I barely made any progress from December to May because I was only doing side-deliveries at the beginning of Chapter 3 instead of... you know... advancing the plot. It became an honest-to-god special interest about two months ago, then 6 days ago while playing chapter 10 it reached hyperfixation levels and now I am in PAIN

I hate my brain

Anyhow

At first I wanted to list the good and the bad hings in it but there’s too many good things to list them all in full, excruciatingly long details, so

Very Quick And Very Incomplete List Of Good Things That I Love

It’s a post-apo game based on travel, logistics, and good will, and it straight up goes AGAINST the whole ‘survival of the fittest’ trope that SO MANY post-apo things try to push!! YES

I insist but it’s built on helping each other and keeping everyone alive, seriously that is my shit right there!

The online community is wholesome?? People leave stuff everywhere, you never see anyone but people put little helpful signs and send you likes, and in my game we almost managed to repair all the roads together

There’s so many new & strange allergies and disabilities and phobias in this post-apo world and? nobody is trying to ““fix”“ anyone?? Like Heartman with his padded floor and his little box that brings him back to life constantly. He’s just... living like that. Nobody’s going “hey maybe you should get another heart operation buddy”

The hero and his phobia of being touched. I. Loved. That. The quiet scenes when he was just talking with Fragile, sitting next to her. In any other context this would just be two people sitting next to each other and talking but it always feels so soft and intimate everytime he allows another human being to just. be next to him. I love it. I love them

Everyone crying constantly because of chiral allergy!!

I loved all the important characters bar one (Bridget/Amelie)!

Why is this walking simulator so enjoyable why am I enjoying the fact that holding L2 + R2 while walking feels like holding your backpack and that you have to relax at times just like you’d have to if you were actually holding a backpack

Seriously. Why

The atmosphere was so great, the music was fantastic and the visuals were on point. A E S T H E T I C

The ghosts!! The giant Beached Things!!! Chiral crystals look! like! creepy hands reaching for the SKY!!

THE RAIN DESTROYS THINGS AND KILLS PEOPLE BY ACCELERATING TIME THIS IS SO COOL SHUT UP

Everytime the game got surreal it was electrifying

THE SURREAL WAR SCENES ON CLIFF’S BEACH

Everyone is using emojis

There’s guys addicted to delivering packages in that game and they’re trying to steal our stuff and we’re like “haha they’re dumb” but we’re basically addicted to delivering packages as the player. So yeah that was pretty fun

Terrorists thinking humanity isn’t going extinct fast enough and wanting to just rip the bandaid and speed things up. Simple but effective concept

People ask for SUPER VITAL ITEMS right next to completely trivial stuff and I’m LIVING for it. “Please fetch my toy dinosaur”. I feel you dude

The most isolated characters are like "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS THING I LIKE" in your emails because they haven't had contact with other humans in years, it's super relatable

There’s a farm where people use the fact that Timefall rain accelerates time to grow food super quickly in one (1) Timefall and harvest everything just before it starts to die and I LOVE that detail of worldbuilding so much

YOU’RE FIGHTING BEACHED THINGS WITH YOUR OWN BODILY FLUIDS IT’S SO STUPID BUT ALSO SO COOL?? I love yeet-ing my own blood at eldritch entities

THE T W I S T S

All the fanservice (bar one detail that I’m gonna complain about later) is on dudes. This game reeeeeeally likes to show dudes naked or somewhat naked. Mostly the main character but this mocap also L O V E S Mads Mikkelsen and there’s a shit ton of homoerotic shots in there

I love Sam the antisocial papa wolf delivery man and if someone touches him or his baby again, I will cry

LOU. LOU LOU LOU PRECIOUS BABY I’D DIE FOR YOU. Wait I did

I love Fragile and how brave she is and how she keeps helping people even if most of them wrongly think she’s a terrorist and yes I will eat this cryptobiote thank you

I love soft science boi Heartman who keeps dying again and again and is a bit too much interested in bodily fluids

I love garbage man Higgs and how complex, funny and still somewhat tragic this memelord actually turned out to be in the end

Seriously I want to stop fixating on this character but you can’t give me YET ANOTHER character who wants to die but at the hands of someone else, that is unfair to do that right after my fixation on the new Doctor Who Master

So yeah Higgs is yet another character who makes me want to grab him by the lapels and shake him and yell WHY! ARE! YOU! LIKE! THIS! STOP! BEING! LIKE! THIS!!

Cliff broke all three of my feelings beautifully and in excruciatingly well-acted scenes that transcended the sometimes lackluster dialogue

John made me cry during That Scene

Mama your background was tragic and terrifying and you didn’t deserve any of this shit and I love you

Deadman was more funny than anything, really, but I still liked him even if he had no sense of personal space whatsoever and it clashed horribly with Sam’s phobias

The ending had some sad parts but was mostly positive, thank goodness

Now I’m gonna explain things I dislike and this looks long but it’s actually only 5 main things so I bolded them to avoid confusion

Things I really disliked (and could have been handled wayyyy better)

We all know it but Kojima isn’t a master of subtlety and some parts of the dialogue kept repeating the same informations again and again AND AGAIN and I was like “ok ok I get it”

The dialogue can be so bad at times seriously

Kojima is a bad writer there I said it

It was particularly annoying with Amelie/Bridget and the fact she’s a horrible person trying (and failing) to justify her actions wasn’t helping

Bridges protocols are incredibly intrusive. All of them. I know it’s framed as bad and Sam hates being spied on all the time and in the end he destroys the device that does that, but I wish someone else would openly criticise it in-game

I guess Deadman sort of did but still

Also I know the whole BB technology was Bridget’s idea, and since she’s the actual villain it’s framed as a twisted, evil thing during the ending, but I wish that had been framed like that much earlier ; a lot of Bridges employees just... seem to accept the idea that their employer is using premature babies and their dead mothers as useful, if disturbing, devices. They seem to justify it by “uh we stole that technology from terrorists” to try to cope with the idea but... yeah.

I mean, one of the points being made very early on is that Sam sees his BB as his child who must be protected at all costs instead of a detection device, but I really wish he wasn’t the only one to object to that thing

Again, the game DOES frame "using babies and their dead mothers as tools” as evil and twisted, I just wish it was given a lot more weight and way sooner

Now let’s talk about the Token Straight(tm) in this game

In any other kind of context it would be a joke! But Death Stranding literally has a Token Straight Guy!

I mean, there IS a few hetero couples among the Preppers. Not a lot, mind you. Like, there’s the Montaineer and his wife for instance. But they’re just there and it’s not what their side plot is about

No I’m talking about this piece of shit right there

This f█cking Junk Dealer guy complains the girl he loves is dead because of Bridges and emotionally blackmails us by sending us old holograms of her before her supposed death (somewhat disturbing holograms too because she looks... pretty young in them), then he sends us on what’s essentially a suicide mission in a BT infested zone, THEN when we give him proof she’s still alive and living in another bunker nearby, he won’t go there himself to check??

But SHE’s like “ok, bring me to him, then!”

He doesn’t deserve you, girl

I’ve already seen several people pointing out that carrying a woman as cargo on your back is... debatable at best and sexist at worst, but that part didn’t really bother me to be honest? She asked to be carried to him and it’s her choice. She was talking to us the entire way too, so that made things a lot less awkward. Also Sam has this phobia of being touched by other people so I bet carrying another human being on his back isn’t fun for him. It was also super stressful to do, to be honest.

And then there’s this EXTREMELY AWKWARD scene when they’re reunited and decide to get married, and thankfully Sam finds it just as awkward as we do because he’s standing super far away from the bunker in a “can’t they talk about this later - I’m right there” way. And I’m under the impression it was intended as cringy, in a “yeppp young people in love are Like That” sort of way, so I can accept that, to be honest. If you don’t take that scene seriously, it’s pretty fun in, again, a cringy sort of way

BUT

Then you receive more emails later and this piece of shit guy complains about her and he’s like “ugh WOMEN” or “marriage is the worst” and they end up divorced in record time and she goes back to her bunker

Which isn’t my problem with this subplot either, I promise I’m gonna explain myself eventually but this context is important. It’s okay to have characters who are pieces of shit like this guy who reeks of incel cologne. It’s alright. Not every character has to be a role-model. It’s good to have characters you can hate.

BUT THEN they get back together later to try to patch things up and you learn he was part of a gang who murdered her parents even though he protected her against the rest of the gang and that’s what I hated about that storyline. I guess if you squint it can be read as “this woman is making REALLY BAD life choices” but I read it as “he saved her so she owes him something, he can’t be entirely bad” and y i k e s this left such a bad taste in my mouth, good lord.

But yeah miss Chiral Artist you’re making really bad life choices please get away from this dude as soon as you can, thank you

Also don’t do this ‘sending Likes’ pose ever again, it was hilarious but also you made me use the word “cringy” several times in this paragraph even though I absolutely hate cringe culture, look what you made me do

Now I have to talk about a scene that was intentionally disturbing as hell but ONE (1) detail in it was disturbing for the wrong reasons

To be honest, I really don’t like the Metal Gear Solid games and one of the reasons is the rampant sexism in them so I... was kind of bracing myself for Death Stranding and expecting it to have at least SOME really bad fanservice with a woman at one point or another but to my surprise?? There was none? All the fanservice is on dudes??? Hello? I really liked that (well at some point Fragile takes a shower in our room but we see literally nothing except her shoulder and then Sam looks away)?? What a refreshing change

THAT BEING SAID

And if you played the game you know exactly what I’m about to talk about

Yep this is the part where Johannes complains about how the bomb flashback was shot

Ok so I guess I should also give some context in case someone is reading this but hasn’t played the game, but the deal with this scene is that our friend Fragile was betrayed by her colleague Higgs who used to be a porter but became a terrorist after meeting the “main“ villain of the game. First he secretly put a thermonuclear bomb in one of her deliveries so she’d nuke an entire city without even knowing it, and everyone after that thought she was a terrorist. And then he tried to do that shit A SECOND TIME, but she noticed and decided to toss the second nuke into a bottomless lake of tar. But he caught her just before she reached the lake and he decided to give her a sadistic choice, which was “teleport away and the bomb stays there and nukes the city, or carry it to the lake but only in your underwear under this rain that speeds up time and it will do enormous damage to your health and your body”

And of course being the hero she is, she decides to take the second option

And it’s an incredibly disturbing scene and it’s genuinely hard to watch

But it’s also the ONLY time a woman is in her underwear in this entire game and there’s A COUPLE of shots that were male-gaze-y at the beginning before she started to run and the really horrific part started.

So in a way I guess it could have been worse? way worse, even

But it still tarnishes an otherwise disturbing (and harrowing at times ; seriously I know I’m oversensitive but it was physically painful to watch) scene with unnecessary shots

We know Fragile had a young body before this happened, this isn’t the point of this scene, guys

Whoever decided to keep these shots (probably Kojima let’s face it), that is bad and you should feel bad

Idk how to do a visual transition for that next one because I do not want to screen that memo

So here’s a screenshot with a nice landscape instead

tw: acephobia

Now I have to talk about something I like the GENERAL IDEA of, but not how the IN-GAME MATERIAL ABOUT IT was written

Because I have to talk about that “asexual world” memo

First I have to say that I absolutely love the fact that a mainstream game openly says in-game “this future is full of asexual people" and?? it’s just that, it’s a part of this world. That’s just how things are. It’s normalised. I love it. For crying out loud this memo has the word demisexual in it. I can’t think of any other mainstream game that had this word in it so far.

It should have stopped there and let me enjoy that in peace but it didn’t

THE MEMO ITSELF WAS CLEARLY WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE THESE CONCEPTS and there’s some really bad stuff there. I’d say it’s accidental acephobia but it’s still there. I’m not the best person to talk about this because I’m bi, but it still rubbed me the wrong way

The words this memo uses near the beginning are “"sexless lifestyle” among young people” and yikes, my dude. “Lifestyle”, uh? Really?

And then it goes on about how these new labels were already more and more common “among young people before the Death Stranding” and it also rubs me the wrong way, in a “wow young people and their weird labels lol” sort of queerphobic way?

However I’ve seen a post pointing out that the line “One theory posits that the Stranding accelerated the proliferation of these sexualities” was maybe a way of saying ‘yo asexuals are causing the end of the world’ but... I don’t see it, tbh? In the context of the game, society is extremely divided and a lot of people live in complete isolation and social norms have heavily shifted and it’s kind of normal that there’s queer people visible everywhere now, aces included obviously, because nobody’s bothering to hide it anymore. It’s a post-apocalyptic world! People are just being themselves! A lot of characters also seem to be bi/pan! They’re just vibing ok

At least that’s how I read that part, I can understand if someone had a problem with that bit but I didn’t

BUT! THAT’S NOT ALL because the memo concludes (I’m paraphrasing) “the birth rate has dropped, which might be a problem, but harassment and assault have also dropped, which is good, so idk it’s 50/50″ and. like. I get the intention. But it’s clumsy as hell and very bad. Please don’t confuse abuse of power and attraction. They don’t go hand in hand. Don’t do that. Please. And you know that aces can have kids if they want to, right. Come on. It’s 2020 my dude. This shit is harmful

Also. Like. It’s the end of the world in this game. People don’t want kids. It... has nothing to do with aces. Reality itself is crashing down. People are reluctant to have kids because reality.exe might f█cking crash down at any given moment!

Or a Beached Thing could VoidOut their city!

Or someone might send them a nuke, not naming names!!

Anyway!!!

It’s really badly written and whoever wrote it should educate themselves and maybe get an ace to re-read their stuff next time??

Again I’m not the right person to talk about acephobia and I bet an actual ace would have plenty more to say about this

Thankfully it’s a memo written in-game by a random Bridges councellor and NOT by any important character that we actually know

"I must preempt myself by admitting that I do not have any empirical data" yeah so, f█ck off maybe

So I’m just gonna call that guy “another piece of shit character” but it still doesn’t excuse the fact that the memo was written by someone who thought it was a good idea to put it in the game

Just let me enjoy my super queer post-apo world in peace and don’t write shit like that in your game thank you and goodbye

Minor stuff I also disliked but it wasn’t as awful

I get that Sam is upset at the end because Lou is dying but the way he said goodbye to Fragile broke my heart. It was abrupt and you KNOW he’s upset and wants to have nothing to do with Bridges anymore and that’s very understandable but it isn’t her fault

Seriously I want them to be friends again

I’m gonna pretend they’re friends again after Lou is saved and that Sam is a freelance porter again and sometimes their paths cross and they just talk together in the middle of nowhere and share cryptobiotes

The pacing is weird, there’s this deluge of plot in the beginning and the end but not much in the middle?

The BT boss fights could have been these epic Shadow of the Colossus showdowns but no, they were relatively standard boss fights. Wasted opportunity

The running on the Beach scene sdfghjhgfdsdfghjhgf that was... dumb

A lot of preppers are interesting in one way or another but some are just boring. Also I wish the design of their bunkers was more varied

Amelie/Bridget’s motivations are all over the place, both creating Bridges AND the Demens is... a lot? I know she both WANTS and DOESN’T want the actual, final end of the world to happen but that is a lot to take in and it’s all very confusing

Who the hell cares about ‘rebuilding America’ I just want to build a network where people can help each other

The ‘likes’ are fun but don’t make much sense

In conclusion

Death Stranding Good

Some stuff Bad

Some stuff Very Bad (but it’s just one memo out of 100+ memos, thank god)

I’m still hyperfixating

Send help

[xb-squaredx]

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review: The Joy of Discovery

By now, most everyone has heard about how amazing Breath of the Wild is, if all the acclaim and 10/10 reviews are any indication. I’m not exactly striking while the iron is hot or likely telling anyone anything they don’t already know, but I’d like to take this review to express my thoughts on this wonderful game all the same. Most of my reviews are somewhat…clinical, I feel. I dissect something piece by piece. The story was good, the gameplay was bad. This is why it was bad, etc. But for Breath of the Wild, I want to try something a little different and talk more about how I felt during the game than focus on all of the stuff in the game. Partially because there is a LOT of stuff in this game and we’d be here all day if I went at it like I usually do, and partially because this game fills me with the kind of joy and wonder that I haven’t felt from a game in a very, very long time.

This game is many things: it is a massive 3D open world game, a game that deliberately defies the conventions of the Zelda games that came before it, and a game that emphases the joy of discovery. Constantly throughout the game I am seeing and learning new things about the world and rules that govern it. Cries of “I could do that?!” have been constant in my time with the game, alongside excited (and sometimes terrified) squeals of “What’s happening?!” Breath of the Wild is a game that is constantly giving, secrets abundant. In the past, open-world games have been called “sandbox games,” games that drop you off in a big ol’ sandbox to play and shape the world around you, and that’s a great way to describe Hyrule this time around. Ravaged by a being known as the Calamity Ganon for 100 years, by the time Link gets around to saving the day, much of Hyrule has been largely overtaken by wilderness, not to mention monsters. It truly is a vast world, larger than several other high-profile open-world games out there, but Breath of the Wild doesn’t just go for scope; it goes the extra mile to make it a world worth exploring.

From forests of many different shapes and sizes, to snowy mountains, volcanos and deserts, there’s plenty of variety within the vast reaches of the game. After what amounts to the tutorial section is completed and players are given all of the tools needed to survive the rest of the game, you are given the option to go wherever you want. It’s even possible to make a beeline straight for the final boss, but good luck beating it that way. Link starts with nothing, in his underwear at that, and from moment one you’re basically on your own. Hyrule is treacherous and while it’s true you can go anywhere…if you aren’t prepared for what lies ahead, you’ll end up dead.

Breath of the Wild is unquestionably the hardest 3D Zelda yet, and that’s due in no small-part to the fact that everywhere you go, there’s something trying to kill you. From the many enemies you fight, to nature itself, it’s quite dangerous to go alone. I learned the hard way that enemies don’t just move fast and hit hard, but they’re also relatively smart too. My first encounter in the game with the common Bokoblin enemies didn’t go nearly as smoothly as I planned. Armed with fragile tree branches, I came upon a group of three. I successfully snuck up on them and attacked, but was only able to dispatch one before my weapons broke. I was able to snag one of their bows, only to discover I hadn’t gotten any arrows. My options were limited, so I ran away. I ran away from what amounted to the basic Goomba of the game. Constantly throughout my adventure, the enemies have proven clever and I’ve had to step up my game to best them. Think you can cheese them out by bombing them when they give chase? They’ll kick your bombs back at you so they blow up in your face. Fighting near a campfire, they might light their wooden weapons on fire for an extra edge. Should you catch an enemy unarmed, they’ll make for the closest weapon they can find and use it to good effect, and quite a few will improvise if no weapon is available. And so it becomes apparent that good tactics win the day.

When approaching any given enemy encounter, there are tons of ways to deal with them. I could just run in guns blazing and beat them all down, or I could pick them off from afar with my bow. Better yet, use a well-placed Fire Arrow on some exploding barrels to take them all out at once. Or I could light the dry grass on fire and let that do the work for me. Or push a rock down a cliff and have it stomp them flat. And on top of all of that, I could choose to be stealthy and run in, steal their weapons (and maybe the treasure they’re guarding) and run off before they even know I’m there. Keep in mind there’s likely ten other ways I could tackle the same scenario I’m not even thinking of, and that should give you an indication of how open-ended a lot of this game is.

This extends to exploration too. I could run through the entire game, or I could tame a wild horse (among other things) to ride through areas a bit faster. You can sail on rafts, or use your Cryosis rune to make ice pillars to cross watery sections. You can climb on almost anything in the game, provided you have enough stamina and then use a Paraglider to get down safely or cover large gaps in no-time. The world design is top-notch in this regard, giving you plenty of ways to get to most locations, and giving you plenty of locations to visit. At almost any random point on the map if you pan around, you’ll likely find something of interest to travel to, and you’ll likely get lost when something else catches your attention on the way to your destination. Breath of the Wild is the kind of game where it’s FUN to be lost, to let yourself be distracted. Some of my favorite moments in the game have often been on the journey to places, and not where I ended up.

When journeying to an important plot-related city, I was suddenly in a small bit of forest and unknowingly in the midst of an enemy camp. A camp filled with archers armed with Shock Arrows. From the darkness streaks of lighting came at me from all directions. Too many archers to count, no way to know where was safe. I could only run and hope for the best. Then there’s the time my horse and I tag-teamed an enemy in a moment that can probably never be replicated. Or the time I took on a skeleton monster while riding a bear. That was on fire. This is the kind of game you can get together with friends and gush about, trading stories. It might just be the only way you can find out about some of the more nuanced systems in the game or learn of an NPC’s existence. Having a game that doesn’t just completely bare itself is kind of…refreshing, as I feel a sense of elation every time I learn something new.

Breath of the Wild seems to be designed with the approach of a Zelda game, but following real-world rules when possible. So physics and common sense rule all, and mastering those rules lets you do some cool or funny things. Most of the time. In superhot areas, for example, you can just drop food on the ground and watch it get cooked. Or discover that a Bomb Arrow instantly detonates in your face when it’s that hot. You can use your Magnesis rune to control metal objects in a variety of ways, like using a metal door that’s been ripped off its hinges and make a walkway to a treasure chest…or use the rune to bring the metal treasure chest to you. If you can imagine it, often the game will let you do it. This leads to some comical workarounds, like making makeshift catapults, and in a lot of cases you can completely trivialize puzzles, combat challenges or platforming if you’re smart enough.

Speaking of puzzles, they’re a big part of the Zelda series, and some might be wondering how this game handles them. Outside of the few major story missions (which are still optional anyway!), traditional dungeons are largely absent in favor of Shrine Trials. Scattered all across Hyrule are shrines that house various trials within. Rarely you’ll find a combat trial or, rarer still, shrines that give you rewards straightaway, since getting to said shrine was enough of a challenge in the first place. Most of the time, though, they’re bite-sized dungeons, usually one or two rooms dedicated to a single puzzle or theme. As with the rest of the game, you can approach most of these puzzles in any variety of ways, some of which might not be intentional but were left in the game anyway. With more than 100 of these things, some aren’t all that fun or memorable, but they usually make me feel clever when I’m done with them, so they’re alright in my book. Acting as fast-travel points doesn’t hurt either, and you don’t even have to SOLVE them to warp to them!

Combat is a fairly chaotic experience, quite messy at times, but in a good way. You often have to adapt, and even when you think you have a plan, it can go awry, so you best be flexible. Link can use a bunch of different weapons now: from swords to spears, hammers, axes and more, with the bow and arrow being incredibly useful. You can find weapons anywhere; some are in chests, others can be found out in the open, or swiped from enemies. Generally, any weapon an enemy can use, Link can use (and vice-versa, so watch out!) But don’t get too attached, as they all break eventually. The weapon durability in this game is pretty much love-it-or-hate-it. For what it’s worth, I think as a concept it’s fine, but can be a tad extreme. It makes every weapon feel brittle, and often I dislike getting weapons from a treasure chest as a result. Coupled with this, you don’t have a lot of inventory space for weapons at the start and though that can be GREATLY alleviated later on, the actual process of upping that inventory can be kind of tedious and hard to figure out…or rather, hard to find the NPC that’ll let you do it. But the game, again, has weapons EVERYWHERE, so I never had to worry about being left defenseless. The Bayonetta-esque Flurry Rush attack is great, a reward for dodging at the perfect moment, and add to that a satisfying parry and combat’s solid.

Exploration makes or breaks these types of games, but Breath of the Wild largely nails it. I already mentioned how the game’s world is designed to almost always point you in the direction of something worthwhile, but it bears repeating. From interesting locales, to treasure, to enemy camps, there’s always something going on. At times, I’ll even stumble upon NPCs out and about when they get attacked by a pack of monsters, so I’ll divert from my route and help them out. There are a variety of sidequests you can engage in, some even unlocking shrines that are otherwise hidden. The areas you visit often have such life in them, so many small details coming together to create a genuine world that I loved exploring and being a part of it all.

That attention to detail shows real craftsmanship at work with Breath of the Wild, and those little touches often impressed me, endearing the game to me even more. From the fact that Link stubs his toe if he kicks open a chest without any boots on, to the NPCs having set routines you can follow them on, there seems to be no limit to the variables in this game. This extends to the weather too, and the time of day. At times it can be kind of annoying though. During rain storms, surfaces become slick and almost impossible to climb. In a game where climbing is pretty much THE way to get around places, sometimes the only way, it really is frustrating when some rain rolls in, usually right when you don’t want it to. Thunderstorms, while rarer, are also causes for concern. Lighting will strike down at times, and if you have on anything metal, you’ll get shocked too…and it’ll hurt. It’s not so bad if you have some wooden weapons or non-metallic armor to switch to, but there have been times I’ve had to pretty much become defenseless due to the rain and lightning. You CAN wait it out, or go a step further and make a campfire to pass the time, but that isn’t always ideal and leads to frustration more often than I’d like.

On the subject of story…it’s kind of a mixed bag. What’s there is genuinely interesting; we’re experiencing a Zelda story dealing with the fallout of the bad guy winning, for one. The characters you meet during the key quests of the game are often interesting and some (including a certain prince) have already endeared themselves to fans. And yet, there’s barely anything to them. This largely comes down to the game mostly giving you breadcrumbs of story, strewn about various landscapes that will trigger a memory in Link, and a cutscene for the player. These memories are the primary way we see Zelda fleshed out as a character, and her interactions with Link are great, right up there with Skyward Sword’s own Zelda (my personal favorite at the moment). And yet, there’s not a lot there to work with unfortunately, which makes it all the more confusing why THIS is the Zelda game that decided to use voice acting. I’ve seen a lot of people bashing the English voices, but I honestly don’t understand the complaints; the delivery seems fine and the voices are fitting enough….my sole complaint is that there’s so LITTLE of it. A character will be introduced, speak a few lines of dialogue…and then go back to the text boxes of old. Major cutscenes get spoken lines, but again, they are few and far between. Considering you can skip pretty much ALL of this if you really wanted to though, I can see why there wasn’t that big of an emphasis on it, but it’s still a shame.

And lastly, as fun as the game is, as much as its game world design is a triumph and the way it rewards creativity is to be commended…it does have some technical issues. No matter which version you play, there are some frame drops here or there, especially in more hectic scenarios. For the record, I’m playing the Wii U version and from what I’ve read, the Switch version isn’t all that different, so if you’re desperate to play it and don’t want to get a new console to do so, you’ll be fine in the Wii U’s corner. That said, the fact that the game can stutter and freeze whenever I fight a Moblin is worrying, as is the 10-15 second loading it has to do if you ever hit the HOME button and go back again.

With all of this said…and I said a lot more than I intended to…these flaws don’t really bother me much. The game’s high points are so high, these come off more like nitpicks than general problems. That won’t necessarily hold true for others (like say….a certain Mr. Sterling), but that’s the case with me. I won’t ever call it some flawless masterpiece; the durability issues, the annoying weather and the fact that you can’t pet the adorable dogs ARE flaws…but they’re miniscule imperfections in a beautiful gem of a game as far as I’m concerned. My time with Breath of the Wild has been…magical. A breath of fresh air (I just HAD to say it!) for the Zelda series and for games as a whole. Few games have gripped me as tightly as this one has. It’s the kind of game you can play all day and forget to eat, a weekend gone in the blink of an eye. As it stands, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a fantastic game I can’t recommend enough. Just like A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time before it, I have a feeling it’ll be fondly remembered for years to come and will likely heavily influence the Zelda games that come after.

Until next time.

-B