The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a video game for the new Nintendo console the Nintendo Switch. It has revived numerous critical and fan based praise but is all the praise? While overall there are some things about the game that really could have been better or taken out all together.

So the first thing I want to talk about before the positive stuff is the negative. Firstly the performance issues; I know it’s a new console and everything but could Nintendo have tried a bit more to make sure the frames didn’t drop every time I hit a Moblin (there are some big enemies in the game that at one point before they patched it would cause to the game to almost crash or at least it seemed to freeze every time) which usually gave me a heart attack because I probably didn’t save for the past hour. Nintendo has since fixed performance related things when they released an update for the game a while back. Granted this took about a month for them to send out an update which is really unacceptable. Nintendo has also released another update which no one really knows what it does but it may have something to do with what’s coming down the pipeline later this year possibly. Next I’m going to complain about horses, yes I’m that petty but honestly it’s something that I was just really confused about. The distance to how far you can whistle to your horse is so small why even bring your horse along in the first place. They really do become irrelevant later on once you unlock a bunch of shrines to teleport to. Overall I’m glad horses were in the game to begin with but beyond needing them to go to unexplored areas once you get there you just leave them behind to climb up the cliff to get to the shrine or whatever. The weapon system is ok, it doesn’t really bother me that everything breaks after two swings but inventory can get cumbersome sometimes. Speaking of the inventory I’m not a fan of the Koroks quest. The Koroks are these tiny “forest children” beings that go around the land planting trees and such. Well these little boogers decided to take the biggest korok’s seeds from his maracas and it’s your job to go find them all. Guess how many there are in the giant vast land of Hyrule… go on I dare you I’ll wait… 100 you say? 200 hundred even? No certainly its 500 right? HA HA HA HA! Try 900! Yes there are stupid Koroks scattered all over the huge map! Do you know what you get for finding all of them? “Certainly since the quest lets you expand your inventory slots that it’ll just keep going right?” I hear you ask. Well no… up to a certain point the guy won’t give you anymore slot spaces for your inventory. Instead once you find all 900 he gives you one of his “seeds” and that when you learn a dark… terrible… smelly truth to what you’ve been gathering the whole time. Its dumb… really really dumb!

But that’s about all all the complaints I have for the game. There may be some other stuff but I’m sure I’ve rambled on long enough. Alrighty now to the positive things, first thing is I love how they implemented a physics engine. Traditionally the Legend of Zelda games have been rather fixed in how you were supposed to approach things and in solving puzzles. In Breath of the Wild however you have so much more freedom in how you solve things. For one example there was a motion based puzzle in which you have to guide a ball through a maze in order to solve it. Well all you really need to do is turn the entire maze upside down and it makes things so much easier. Little things like that is what Breath of the Wild is all about.

Overall Breath of the Wild is a excellent game that’s had some of its problems fixed with updates. If you’re not sure about buying an entire console to play it it’s also available for the Wii U but if you’re a huge Zelda fan and are planning to get Breath of the Wild then yeah it’s totally worth it.

 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anonymous Student Author – Spring 2017