This review contains spoilers
The stand out thing for me in this game was just how much there was to do, and how self-guided it all was. By having so many different and varied activities, and not having much of a linear path through the game, it really let me pick it up and figure out something potentially different to do each time I played. And that really helped prevent things from getting stale - there was never really a moment where I felt stuck doing something that I didn't want to be doing, since game sessions usually started with me having a particular objective in mind and then wandering through the world doing various other things on the way to accomplishing (or not accomplishing) that goal. Maybe I'd start out wanting to get some shrines done, but then I'd run across Addison and help him out, and then go Korok hunting, and by the end of the night I haven't even made it to the shrine I was heading toward to start with.
I had an inexplicable amount of fun lighting up the depths - and one of the real highlights of this over Breath of the Wild was the ability to use shrines and light roots to find each other. Each time I would find one, I would put a star marker on the map where it's twin should be - and that helped me get all of the shrines, which is something I didn't do in Breath of the Wild. Since the shrines are the real highlight of these games, I was very happy to have gotten them all.
I'm still a hoarder in video games, and the weapon durability mechanics played to my worst instincts there again. Every time I got a decent weapon, I basically refused to use it - either stashing it at my house or just heavily increasing my weapon slots so that I could avoid using it.
I also sequence-broke the game by exploring thunderhead isle and getting the fifth sage before the game wants to lead you to her. That meant that I never actually got the quest to clear the thunderstorm up there, and only found out about it listening to a podcast later. The game did account for the sequence break possibility (there was some dialog "oh, you already found her" or some such thing) - it would have been nice for it to still give me a marker for how to clear the thunderstorm.
I also had a bit of a frustration with the final boss fight - I had loaded up on healing items, and had a few -- but not a lot -- of gloom healing food items. Of course, since you're fighting gloom enemies for about the last half hour of the game, that turned out to be a disaster - but once you are in Gannondorf's chamber (even before the fight starts) you can't fast travel out in order to change up your supplies. That meant I needed to reload an earlier save and redo a decent chunk of the endgame - which was a bit frustrating.
That being said, the final fight sequence was incredible - specifically the sequence where Dragon Gannondorf and Dragon Zelda are facing off in the sky, that was one of the most memorable end game sequences I think I've ever experienced.
I'm marking this as mastered even though I didn't fully 100% it - I found all the lightroots, did all the shrines, and got enough Bubbul gems to fully satiate Koltin (and then some) - but didn't find every cave. (Koltin says there are 64 left). I also came nowhere near finding all the Kork seeds.
All in all, an incredible game - it is incredibly rare for me to play a game this long and not start to get a bit bored with it, and I never did with this one. I don't think I've ever put 189 hours into an open world before, but I can see how I did with this one. For most of the summer I basically couldn't wait until I could put in a few hours on the Switch to keep playing.
I had an inexplicable amount of fun lighting up the depths - and one of the real highlights of this over Breath of the Wild was the ability to use shrines and light roots to find each other. Each time I would find one, I would put a star marker on the map where it's twin should be - and that helped me get all of the shrines, which is something I didn't do in Breath of the Wild. Since the shrines are the real highlight of these games, I was very happy to have gotten them all.
I'm still a hoarder in video games, and the weapon durability mechanics played to my worst instincts there again. Every time I got a decent weapon, I basically refused to use it - either stashing it at my house or just heavily increasing my weapon slots so that I could avoid using it.
I also sequence-broke the game by exploring thunderhead isle and getting the fifth sage before the game wants to lead you to her. That meant that I never actually got the quest to clear the thunderstorm up there, and only found out about it listening to a podcast later. The game did account for the sequence break possibility (there was some dialog "oh, you already found her" or some such thing) - it would have been nice for it to still give me a marker for how to clear the thunderstorm.
I also had a bit of a frustration with the final boss fight - I had loaded up on healing items, and had a few -- but not a lot -- of gloom healing food items. Of course, since you're fighting gloom enemies for about the last half hour of the game, that turned out to be a disaster - but once you are in Gannondorf's chamber (even before the fight starts) you can't fast travel out in order to change up your supplies. That meant I needed to reload an earlier save and redo a decent chunk of the endgame - which was a bit frustrating.
That being said, the final fight sequence was incredible - specifically the sequence where Dragon Gannondorf and Dragon Zelda are facing off in the sky, that was one of the most memorable end game sequences I think I've ever experienced.
I'm marking this as mastered even though I didn't fully 100% it - I found all the lightroots, did all the shrines, and got enough Bubbul gems to fully satiate Koltin (and then some) - but didn't find every cave. (Koltin says there are 64 left). I also came nowhere near finding all the Kork seeds.
All in all, an incredible game - it is incredibly rare for me to play a game this long and not start to get a bit bored with it, and I never did with this one. I don't think I've ever put 189 hours into an open world before, but I can see how I did with this one. For most of the summer I basically couldn't wait until I could put in a few hours on the Switch to keep playing.