Let's discuss the good first.
I'm certain there's a delicious core tucked away in this game's four true dungeons, side quests, and settlements. The numerous shrines that dot the landscape of Hyrule add a reminder that there are plenty of challenges to be completed, and good reasons to explore each region.
The art direction is inspired with pastel colors, and spiritual moments of calm reflection where you want to pause and admire the soft pitter-patter of rain in the early morning; which is perfectly accompanied by gentle piano notes that cause you to involuntarily scan your eyes towards the distant yellow sky that fortells the dawn of a new day full of adventure & triumph.
The world is huge, alive, and almost magically interactive with both hero and villain alike, allowing each soul to play the game their way, and decide which way to go and how to get there. If you can dream two (or three, or five) things interacting with the world or each other, or that lizalfos over there, there's a pretty good chance you can. It warmly invites players' creativity to experiment and find the most fun or effective way to deal with situations. And the cooking.
OH MAN, the cooking!
Enemies on horseback, passive-tempered animals in the wilderness, regional bosses, and travelers all along your way make this one feel like the most inhabited Zelda ever. Because it is.
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The (kind of) Netral Zone!
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I haven't made it very far yet in this game. I haven't gotten to one of the main dungeons yet, which I'm expecting to be of at least traditional console Zelda quality or better. This doesn't mean I haven't played the game for a considerable amount of time though. On the contrary.
The starting area did not impress me after about a half hour. I found myself being greeted with fun, exciting environments and fresh new things to do and learn at first. Soon after I started to get frustrated with the amount of time I spent running around and doing the same activites with very little context as to why it's even important to do them. This is fairly accurate represntation of my experience with the game so far.
The story is decent so far, but I'm lacking characters that I should really care about, or much substory. The pre-molded Zelda tale is dandy, but what else can you show me? The voice acting is good when it's good, and unfortunately weak and not exactly gripping from several of the main characters. The British accented ones in particular. Nothing to write home about, nothing to scoff at.
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This is where the Award-Winning features yell at their retarded cousins.
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Now the gloves come off, there's no beating around the bush with this issue.
The stamina wheel.
Do you like staring at green circles? Then this is the perfect game for you! In Breath of the Wild, you will spend minutes at a time running into an open background or climbing over a mountain at the speed of smell. This doesn't let up, presumably ever. I dread seeing a vast open area, or lake, or steep cliffs, as I know I'll have to either trudge through what is utterly boring, or swim or climb for God knows how long. If your puny stamina meter that takes 55ever to build up to an almost acceptable capacity -at the cost of precious heart containers-runs out during certain activities, you are boned, and die. You may be good at Zelda, but this is not regular Zelda. Get used to dying.
Remember those first four mandatory shrines that were all the same premicial blue sparkly design with a short puzzle? You will be doing that a lot if ever hope to have a chance at beating this game. Up to 160 times. This game appears to be about beating shrines and gathering heart containers more than anything else. The shrines are fairly high quality-basic Zelda-tier puzzles- but after so many it's more of a punishment for the player to keep getting coerced to do more, more, more shrines!
Enemies are desiged like what you can expect from Zelda, no comment necessary. More challenging enemies found throughout the game seem to change colors to gain more health and damage dealing capacity. You'll notice new enemy colors more often than new enemy types.
Let's talk combat. The mechanics are more complicated this time and work fine, but are not my personal favorite. There's no auto-equip or drop weapons option which is annoying as your weapons break ALL..THE..TIME. Get used to pressing start several times per fight against a mob to manually select your new weapon that just broke after a few hits. There's no shortage, but don't get attatched to anything. A N Y T H I N G. This is not weapon durability done well. Fallout games are an example of weapon durability done well. It happens enough to be considerable, but doesn't annoy the player or bleed them dry. BOTW does weapon durability annoyingly and inconvienently.
Remember how I said the world is huge, and how the art direction is inspired? That's mostly true. Mostly. The world is expansive and filled with lots to do, except when it's not. Large open areas with but a mushroom and saphire to collect or an enemy or two are coupled with hyperutilization of the *cough* wonderful *cough* stamina wheel where you literally spend minutes doing nothing but pressing B and holding up. This will happen in lots of the less inspired areas of which there isn't much to look at. The game looks nice, but is severely lacking in some textures, especially rocks for the mountainous terrain you will be continually staring at for long periods of time over and over, until it rains AGAIN and you slip off said mountains because the game sometimes doesn't want you to play the game at this very moment. You, the player, can wait and do nothing some more. It isn't my personal favorite art style for a Zelda game, but I have strong opinions on Zelda art styles, and can see why others would disagree with me. It's easy on the eyes, although I can't help but feel it would have looked better sharper in full 1080p vis a vis 900p.
BOTW has bigger is better syndrome. Don't get me wrong, most of the world is great fun to explore and get lost in; but a fair amount of it isn't. This isn't Skyrim or Shivering Isles, where every square inch is something you utterly in awe of, and can look forward to traveling around aimlessly because the world is simply breathtaking and completely immersive.
In BOTW traveling can be adrenaline-pumping or incredibly pretty, but it's never drop-dead gorgeous.
I'm so frustrated with Breath of the Wild because it should be a great game, but it's made to be as aggravating as possible because such easy-to-tweak parts of the game that could have corrected by a few lines of code prevented it from being one of the best in the series.
In short: This game does not respect your time; it makes a mockery of it. I'm somewhat disappointed in Nintendo, whom to my memory has not done this before in a game of theirs I've played. I understand that open world is the hottest genre right now, and I respect and admire Nintendo for bravely doing something different with such a beloved franchise as Zelda. However, to deny so many mid-level flaws in this game is to be dishonest, or would be groupthink induced überwilling a game into the level of greatness that you want it to be thought of as.
Every game has flaws, and this a certainly a good, much better than average game that I would easily recommend to everyone. However, it falls short of being a great game. I grew up on, and cherish the Zelda series, but this one, if I was to rate it today, is not in my top five Zelda games. It's a 7/10 for me dawg.
I typed this all on my phucki phone.
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