Time played is an estimate because the Switch UI is really bad for some reason.
To formally begin the review: I, uh. Wow.
This experienced baffled me, at every point and stage along the way. I will start by saying that I genuinely believe that making this game into a physics-based "construction" game was a truly awful decision. Nearly every puzzle in the game is either awful or rendered completely and utterly irrelevant; somehow even more so than in BOTW, which ALREADY had that issue! The mechanics in this game absolutely ruin any sense of coherent shrine or temple design that would've otherwise been possible, resulting in the worst dungeons in the series (seriously, what even are those fire and water temples).
Many people, even those who enjoyed the game, called the cutscenes snoozefests, and they're right! The voice acting is barely above passable and the writing is so bland and boring that you wonder why anyone would suffer through the cutscenes if it wasn't Zelda. I thought this game actually did some solid things with the actual character of Zelda, but not only were they made so much more boring by the memories (which I didn't even know were in the game until I beat it) and the ending completely undoing any sort of stakes or consequences the story had set up! Wow!
The combat is essentially the exact same thing as BOTW, with the bonus of the 'fuse' feature to add some extra spice, but it's all pretty much useless because the same strategies work every time. Flurry Rush or hold the attack button with large weapons. What fun.
The Depths sucked, the sky islands were boring and copy-pasted across the whole map, and the main overworld had its entire sense of exploration hampered by the fact that you can just fly over everything, either with a paraglider or a flying machine permanently!
All of my issues are piled on top of the game's pretty lackluster performance, as it feels like in many of the most important moments (including the final boss!) the game would drop to as low as 10 FPS! They've been working in this engine for like a decade and it's still not optimized like what lmfao
I did enjoy some stuff about the game, like I thought many of the dungeon bosses were good or at least interesting. I thought the score was good (if a little too minimalist at times) and art style was still nice. Character design was also a high point, especially the new Ganon design, which was MILES better as an antagonist compared to Calamity Ganon.
idk this was very scatterbrained but I played this game for a while and I had many mixed thoughts but I was very let down overall. I still had fun, but honestly the best thing about this game is that now the team that works on Zelda is (hopefully) down with BOTW style games!
To formally begin the review: I, uh. Wow.
This experienced baffled me, at every point and stage along the way. I will start by saying that I genuinely believe that making this game into a physics-based "construction" game was a truly awful decision. Nearly every puzzle in the game is either awful or rendered completely and utterly irrelevant; somehow even more so than in BOTW, which ALREADY had that issue! The mechanics in this game absolutely ruin any sense of coherent shrine or temple design that would've otherwise been possible, resulting in the worst dungeons in the series (seriously, what even are those fire and water temples).
Many people, even those who enjoyed the game, called the cutscenes snoozefests, and they're right! The voice acting is barely above passable and the writing is so bland and boring that you wonder why anyone would suffer through the cutscenes if it wasn't Zelda. I thought this game actually did some solid things with the actual character of Zelda, but not only were they made so much more boring by the memories (which I didn't even know were in the game until I beat it) and the ending completely undoing any sort of stakes or consequences the story had set up! Wow!
The combat is essentially the exact same thing as BOTW, with the bonus of the 'fuse' feature to add some extra spice, but it's all pretty much useless because the same strategies work every time. Flurry Rush or hold the attack button with large weapons. What fun.
The Depths sucked, the sky islands were boring and copy-pasted across the whole map, and the main overworld had its entire sense of exploration hampered by the fact that you can just fly over everything, either with a paraglider or a flying machine permanently!
All of my issues are piled on top of the game's pretty lackluster performance, as it feels like in many of the most important moments (including the final boss!) the game would drop to as low as 10 FPS! They've been working in this engine for like a decade and it's still not optimized like what lmfao
I did enjoy some stuff about the game, like I thought many of the dungeon bosses were good or at least interesting. I thought the score was good (if a little too minimalist at times) and art style was still nice. Character design was also a high point, especially the new Ganon design, which was MILES better as an antagonist compared to Calamity Ganon.
idk this was very scatterbrained but I played this game for a while and I had many mixed thoughts but I was very let down overall. I still had fun, but honestly the best thing about this game is that now the team that works on Zelda is (hopefully) down with BOTW style games!