Scer
3 reviews liked by Scer
Before I say anything, let me get this out of the way. A lot of this review is going to be negative. You may be staring at the 4 star rating and going, huh, that's strange, why's it so negative if he gave it a 4? Well, I don't think it's bad, far from it I think it's really good. I really did enjoy it a lot. But there are just so many things where I'll go "Oh, this system is neat!" and it just has seventeen asterisks about the problems with it anyways. And I don't think they're necessarily nitpicks, I think they are legitimate criticisms, but they're just... Not enough to make it not fun? So overall, still a really good game, in spite of what I'm going to say.
I'd like to get the story out of the way first. When it comes to the actual plot, I find it just very hard to... Care. I like a lot of details about the world, about the characters, I think Paya is charming, Purah is fun, Urbosu is cool, Riju is sweet, and so on. I think the villagers are pleasant to talk to, Link's dialogue options are fun to play with, and the emergent story - if you treat BOTW like an 8 bit game where half of the story is the player's own actions - is fun. It's all building up to fighting Ganon, which you do on your own terms when you feel like it. That said, when it comes to what happens in the past, I just find it extremely hard to... Care? The past characters have very little screentime, very few lines of dialogue, you get an idea of their personality but the story just isn't about them, and that's okay but it still makes their scenes boring, with perhaps the exception of Zelda herself since she gets more scenes showcasing different aspects of her personality, and finding her journal in Hyrule Castle fleshes her out a bit. On top of that, the scenes can be gotten in a random order, and as far as I can tell don't really have variation based on when you find them to account for which others you've found, which makes them feel like they could have taken part in entirely different universes for all it matters. Lastly, while the emergent storytelling and the actual characters inhabiting the current world are cool, I wish there were more cool scripted moments. There's a total of like... 4. The build up to the secret beasts. 5 if you want to include Hyrule Castle. Immobilizing the beasts is cool, cinematic, involved, and reminds me of some of my favorite moments from the rest of the series, like the battle on the Eldin bridge in TP.
Moving on, I'll more or less just go over a bunch of systems. Firstly, weapon durability. I feel like this system is overstated both by people who dislike it, and people who do. I fall mostly on the former. It's cool that weapons breaking, early in the game, encourages you to fight with weapons you normally might not like bokobo clubs. Likewise, it's cool when you break your weapon midfight and have to scramble for a different one or change up your fighting style a bit. But this also just... Sort of stops happening, doesn't it? As you get better and better weapons that last longer, a bigger inventory, and especially the master sword, you just sort of stop being put in this situation, especially since unless you run out of weapons entirely, you can literally change your weapon midfight. So the benefits are very overstated, IMO.
On the other hand, I also feel the negatives are overstated, or at least mischaracterized. It's not like weapons are breaking so often that you don't feel you can use them without wasting them, in fact it was the other way around - I literally could not get rid of the weapons I found fast enough. Between shrine rewards, random weapons laying around, and enemy drops, I just constantly had a full inventory. In fact, I vividly recall having 4 flame greatblades at one point, and not because I was hoarding them, I just got them faster than they ran out. It made the weapon rewards just feel so lame. Personally, I'm not a big fan of pieces of hearts as rewards in other Zelda games to begin with since none of the games are hard enough to make "find 4 of these to take 1 extra hit!" compelling, and despite this they managed to make something less satisfying than that in the form of weapons I don't need that ask me to drop something else because I ran out of inventory spots like 3 flameblades away. It's even lamer if the weapon reward is worse than what I have instead of just the same/barely an upgrade, because then it's effectively no reward. Compare this to the feeling you get when you, say, upgrade your sword to the razor sword in Majora's Mask and it's night and day.
Moving on, exploration was relatively fun in its own right. The actual act of moving around the map is fun, the paraglider is a stroke of genius, and I really enjoy the way the map is designed to both guide you towards certain areas of it and have hidden areas just out of the way where you might not think to look at the first place. The notion that if you look around a corner, you'll find something, is never broken. I've heard some comparison of the towers to ubisoft towers before playing the game, but I really don't see it. They're prominent points you can see from a distance, but they aren't marked on your map, climbing them actually requires some thought at times (The bogs, the bogs!), and they don't reveal that much. They're very convenient warp points and oyu can see a lot, but a lot of things are around corners, hidden, or even just behind a mountain that you can't see past from the tower. Good high grounds to look out from, but far from the only ones. Really, the only problem I have with exploration are with the climbing mechanic, and the rewards.
Firstly, I do think that "exploring for its own sake" can be a reward on its own. If you find a cool looking area, a cool view, a ruin, whatever, that's cool. Finding a town that's optional and out of the way, all of that is cool. Even just the fact that you find a shrine or a korok is, for a while, cool. The problem comes when those rewards start feeling repetitive. It's not like you have 20 models of what a shrine exterior look like, or even less so the interior, and with the high amount of reward/test of combat shrines, a fair amount of the time I'll get inside of a shrine and it's just kinda... Boring, as a reward? Like, oh, I found a shrine, again, wish I found something cooler. I'm already not a huge piece of heart fan in other Zelda games, but even less so when almost every reward is a piece of heart. Koroks are particularly boring. Sure, you don't need to find all of them, but you also don't really benefit from finding a small amount, either. I found around 60 and I was already having to pay 10, 12 seeds for an upgrade, which is ridiculous. Your reward for finding this korok is 1/12th of an inventory slot that you don't even need because you're overflowing with weapons and unable to find ways to use them faster than you get them. Thanks?
Second, I think climbing gets less interesting as you go on. A lot of the paths I ended up taking was just, oh, here's a mountain here, let me take a straight line path to where I need to go. Why bother finding an interesting path when the direct path works? I think the main culprit is that sloped walls let you regen stamina if the slope is gentle enough, so often you end up being able to just climb walls that ought to be much harder to climb than they actually are, and it feels like by doing that climb you are robbing yourself of a path that could have been better to do straight. I just climbed to a tower to go into Gerudo, paragliding all the way past the desert because I had enough stamina to make it anyways. I climbed into Zora Domain, skipping much of the path that a friend told me he went through, which sounded a lot cooler than my experience. Of course, it’s not like I had to go the way I did, but it’s still what my experience ended up like. Actually, this is a recurring theme in BOTW. A lot of the time, I end up doing something that doesn’t feel like the “intended” way, and I’m not entirely certain how right it is, and it feels like the intended way was probably more fun but fuck it, it worked.
The above carries over into my experience doing shrines and divine beasts. A common feeling I had was that whatever solution I found worked, but it wasn’t necessarily a satisfying solution, or it made the puzzle feel so… Meh? Because it could be trivialized that way. I’m having flashbacks to a shrine where the puzzle was getting a ball into a hole by having it be carried by wind, which would raise a platform to let you complete the shrine. I just statised the ball, walked over, and finished the shrine, ignoring what felt like the actual intended puzzle. I’ve heard people say that the openness in how you can approach these problems is in and of itself neat, but for me I just wish it was a bit of a tighter experience once you do get to a challenge even if choosing where you go was open. This isn’t always the case, admittedly. If every possible solution feels right, then it’s not a problem that there are multiple solutions. Hyrule Castle is very open, but everything you can do feels right, so it doesn’t really hurt it to be open.
Moving on to combat, I don’t particularly love it when action actually happens. Working around combat is cool, seeing how to approach a particular camp of enemies, sometimes using stealth, sometimes picking off enemies, sometimes using the environment and so on, but the actual combat isn’t too interesting. Flurries are too easy to get and too effective, bullet time is insane when you can trigger it at will (ie enemies that let you float or such), and most importantly of all, food is so plentiful as to make any mistake completely meaningless if it does not lead to you getting one shot killed. The only limit on your food is how willing you are to deal with the tedium that is managing your inventory to cook things, and that’s just kinda sad. It also made making elixirs a little annoying so a lot of the time I just… Didn’t bother, and walked through a snowy area with whatever food I already had on me because the alternative was to teleport, make elixirs to deal with the cold, then teleport back, and walk back over. You can experiment to make better food, but why bother when generic meat with salt and maybe some rando fruits you found over the adventure will already give you a full heal?
Weather is in theory cool. It’s neat, in theory, that if it gets cold you have to put on warm clothes, vice versa with hot weather, that if it rains it’s harder to climb, that lightning affects metal weapons, etc. But in practice, I just find it annoying. You can switch your equipment at any time for 0 cost, so switching to warm or cold clothing isn’t particularly interesting, you just need to do it and then go on and play as normal, or use an elixir and once more just ignore the mechanic. Thunderstorms just make me unequip my weapons and either ignore combat, or use my bow. Hell, I’ll probably ignore the weather as a whole and just try to skip the thunderstorm if I can help it, since climbing during one is basically impossible, same reason I just… Skip rain. Visibility being poor doesn’t help. I’m not a particularly big fan of the armor system, either. It always feels incredibly binary, either you take way too much damage or you take no damage because of damage reduction being flat. I had a +3 upgraded basic hylian set and it was all I ever needed to make it through the game.
I’m sure there’s other complaints I could come up with. And as I mentioned above, this feels like a laundry list of complaints, and I don’t think it’s nitpicking, I think it’s genuine criticism. These are all issues, and I think all of them are relatively bad, but then when I think about the game… It all just comes together anyways? Sure, I have issues with the food and I think flurry is too easy to get, but then again, Zelda combat was always easy. It doesn’t really matter that I have infinite food, because in other games you wouldn’t take enough damage to need that much healing anyways. Sure, I think armor is lame, but it's at least lame in a very passive way where I can just ignore it. Sure, the shrines were a bit disappointing a fair amount of the time, but when they were, finding them in itself was fun at least. Sure, I wish finding things was a tighter, more controlled environment, like in the older games, but climbing feels good even if on a critical level, I think it’s too strong and lets you skip things you really shouldn’t skip. It just… Feels good. I still think these are problems, but I enjoy playing it anyways. Ultimately, this is more to get these problems off my chest than to convince whoever’s reading this to not play the game, because frankly you’ve probably already played this game, and if you haven’t, you probably should.
I'd like to get the story out of the way first. When it comes to the actual plot, I find it just very hard to... Care. I like a lot of details about the world, about the characters, I think Paya is charming, Purah is fun, Urbosu is cool, Riju is sweet, and so on. I think the villagers are pleasant to talk to, Link's dialogue options are fun to play with, and the emergent story - if you treat BOTW like an 8 bit game where half of the story is the player's own actions - is fun. It's all building up to fighting Ganon, which you do on your own terms when you feel like it. That said, when it comes to what happens in the past, I just find it extremely hard to... Care? The past characters have very little screentime, very few lines of dialogue, you get an idea of their personality but the story just isn't about them, and that's okay but it still makes their scenes boring, with perhaps the exception of Zelda herself since she gets more scenes showcasing different aspects of her personality, and finding her journal in Hyrule Castle fleshes her out a bit. On top of that, the scenes can be gotten in a random order, and as far as I can tell don't really have variation based on when you find them to account for which others you've found, which makes them feel like they could have taken part in entirely different universes for all it matters. Lastly, while the emergent storytelling and the actual characters inhabiting the current world are cool, I wish there were more cool scripted moments. There's a total of like... 4. The build up to the secret beasts. 5 if you want to include Hyrule Castle. Immobilizing the beasts is cool, cinematic, involved, and reminds me of some of my favorite moments from the rest of the series, like the battle on the Eldin bridge in TP.
Moving on, I'll more or less just go over a bunch of systems. Firstly, weapon durability. I feel like this system is overstated both by people who dislike it, and people who do. I fall mostly on the former. It's cool that weapons breaking, early in the game, encourages you to fight with weapons you normally might not like bokobo clubs. Likewise, it's cool when you break your weapon midfight and have to scramble for a different one or change up your fighting style a bit. But this also just... Sort of stops happening, doesn't it? As you get better and better weapons that last longer, a bigger inventory, and especially the master sword, you just sort of stop being put in this situation, especially since unless you run out of weapons entirely, you can literally change your weapon midfight. So the benefits are very overstated, IMO.
On the other hand, I also feel the negatives are overstated, or at least mischaracterized. It's not like weapons are breaking so often that you don't feel you can use them without wasting them, in fact it was the other way around - I literally could not get rid of the weapons I found fast enough. Between shrine rewards, random weapons laying around, and enemy drops, I just constantly had a full inventory. In fact, I vividly recall having 4 flame greatblades at one point, and not because I was hoarding them, I just got them faster than they ran out. It made the weapon rewards just feel so lame. Personally, I'm not a big fan of pieces of hearts as rewards in other Zelda games to begin with since none of the games are hard enough to make "find 4 of these to take 1 extra hit!" compelling, and despite this they managed to make something less satisfying than that in the form of weapons I don't need that ask me to drop something else because I ran out of inventory spots like 3 flameblades away. It's even lamer if the weapon reward is worse than what I have instead of just the same/barely an upgrade, because then it's effectively no reward. Compare this to the feeling you get when you, say, upgrade your sword to the razor sword in Majora's Mask and it's night and day.
Moving on, exploration was relatively fun in its own right. The actual act of moving around the map is fun, the paraglider is a stroke of genius, and I really enjoy the way the map is designed to both guide you towards certain areas of it and have hidden areas just out of the way where you might not think to look at the first place. The notion that if you look around a corner, you'll find something, is never broken. I've heard some comparison of the towers to ubisoft towers before playing the game, but I really don't see it. They're prominent points you can see from a distance, but they aren't marked on your map, climbing them actually requires some thought at times (The bogs, the bogs!), and they don't reveal that much. They're very convenient warp points and oyu can see a lot, but a lot of things are around corners, hidden, or even just behind a mountain that you can't see past from the tower. Good high grounds to look out from, but far from the only ones. Really, the only problem I have with exploration are with the climbing mechanic, and the rewards.
Firstly, I do think that "exploring for its own sake" can be a reward on its own. If you find a cool looking area, a cool view, a ruin, whatever, that's cool. Finding a town that's optional and out of the way, all of that is cool. Even just the fact that you find a shrine or a korok is, for a while, cool. The problem comes when those rewards start feeling repetitive. It's not like you have 20 models of what a shrine exterior look like, or even less so the interior, and with the high amount of reward/test of combat shrines, a fair amount of the time I'll get inside of a shrine and it's just kinda... Boring, as a reward? Like, oh, I found a shrine, again, wish I found something cooler. I'm already not a huge piece of heart fan in other Zelda games, but even less so when almost every reward is a piece of heart. Koroks are particularly boring. Sure, you don't need to find all of them, but you also don't really benefit from finding a small amount, either. I found around 60 and I was already having to pay 10, 12 seeds for an upgrade, which is ridiculous. Your reward for finding this korok is 1/12th of an inventory slot that you don't even need because you're overflowing with weapons and unable to find ways to use them faster than you get them. Thanks?
Second, I think climbing gets less interesting as you go on. A lot of the paths I ended up taking was just, oh, here's a mountain here, let me take a straight line path to where I need to go. Why bother finding an interesting path when the direct path works? I think the main culprit is that sloped walls let you regen stamina if the slope is gentle enough, so often you end up being able to just climb walls that ought to be much harder to climb than they actually are, and it feels like by doing that climb you are robbing yourself of a path that could have been better to do straight. I just climbed to a tower to go into Gerudo, paragliding all the way past the desert because I had enough stamina to make it anyways. I climbed into Zora Domain, skipping much of the path that a friend told me he went through, which sounded a lot cooler than my experience. Of course, it’s not like I had to go the way I did, but it’s still what my experience ended up like. Actually, this is a recurring theme in BOTW. A lot of the time, I end up doing something that doesn’t feel like the “intended” way, and I’m not entirely certain how right it is, and it feels like the intended way was probably more fun but fuck it, it worked.
The above carries over into my experience doing shrines and divine beasts. A common feeling I had was that whatever solution I found worked, but it wasn’t necessarily a satisfying solution, or it made the puzzle feel so… Meh? Because it could be trivialized that way. I’m having flashbacks to a shrine where the puzzle was getting a ball into a hole by having it be carried by wind, which would raise a platform to let you complete the shrine. I just statised the ball, walked over, and finished the shrine, ignoring what felt like the actual intended puzzle. I’ve heard people say that the openness in how you can approach these problems is in and of itself neat, but for me I just wish it was a bit of a tighter experience once you do get to a challenge even if choosing where you go was open. This isn’t always the case, admittedly. If every possible solution feels right, then it’s not a problem that there are multiple solutions. Hyrule Castle is very open, but everything you can do feels right, so it doesn’t really hurt it to be open.
Moving on to combat, I don’t particularly love it when action actually happens. Working around combat is cool, seeing how to approach a particular camp of enemies, sometimes using stealth, sometimes picking off enemies, sometimes using the environment and so on, but the actual combat isn’t too interesting. Flurries are too easy to get and too effective, bullet time is insane when you can trigger it at will (ie enemies that let you float or such), and most importantly of all, food is so plentiful as to make any mistake completely meaningless if it does not lead to you getting one shot killed. The only limit on your food is how willing you are to deal with the tedium that is managing your inventory to cook things, and that’s just kinda sad. It also made making elixirs a little annoying so a lot of the time I just… Didn’t bother, and walked through a snowy area with whatever food I already had on me because the alternative was to teleport, make elixirs to deal with the cold, then teleport back, and walk back over. You can experiment to make better food, but why bother when generic meat with salt and maybe some rando fruits you found over the adventure will already give you a full heal?
Weather is in theory cool. It’s neat, in theory, that if it gets cold you have to put on warm clothes, vice versa with hot weather, that if it rains it’s harder to climb, that lightning affects metal weapons, etc. But in practice, I just find it annoying. You can switch your equipment at any time for 0 cost, so switching to warm or cold clothing isn’t particularly interesting, you just need to do it and then go on and play as normal, or use an elixir and once more just ignore the mechanic. Thunderstorms just make me unequip my weapons and either ignore combat, or use my bow. Hell, I’ll probably ignore the weather as a whole and just try to skip the thunderstorm if I can help it, since climbing during one is basically impossible, same reason I just… Skip rain. Visibility being poor doesn’t help. I’m not a particularly big fan of the armor system, either. It always feels incredibly binary, either you take way too much damage or you take no damage because of damage reduction being flat. I had a +3 upgraded basic hylian set and it was all I ever needed to make it through the game.
I’m sure there’s other complaints I could come up with. And as I mentioned above, this feels like a laundry list of complaints, and I don’t think it’s nitpicking, I think it’s genuine criticism. These are all issues, and I think all of them are relatively bad, but then when I think about the game… It all just comes together anyways? Sure, I have issues with the food and I think flurry is too easy to get, but then again, Zelda combat was always easy. It doesn’t really matter that I have infinite food, because in other games you wouldn’t take enough damage to need that much healing anyways. Sure, I think armor is lame, but it's at least lame in a very passive way where I can just ignore it. Sure, the shrines were a bit disappointing a fair amount of the time, but when they were, finding them in itself was fun at least. Sure, I wish finding things was a tighter, more controlled environment, like in the older games, but climbing feels good even if on a critical level, I think it’s too strong and lets you skip things you really shouldn’t skip. It just… Feels good. I still think these are problems, but I enjoy playing it anyways. Ultimately, this is more to get these problems off my chest than to convince whoever’s reading this to not play the game, because frankly you’ve probably already played this game, and if you haven’t, you probably should.
Going Under
2020
introducing my new startup:
"tappi please have sex with me"
goals: tappi having sex with me
target market: tappi (human)
management: me - ceo
"tappi please have sex with me"
goals: tappi having sex with me
target market: tappi (human)
management: me - ceo
Going Under
2020
It's a game about coming together with the workers of several failed startups and burning Amazon to the fucking ground while also smashing Alexa under your feet, and unionizing. It has so much contempt for the utterly contemptable and so much love for the absolutely lovable. This is so obviously my shit that it's almost funny.
I could do some boring minor criticism of it from a mechanical perspective, but it feels so beside the point. It's a good time and does its job of supporting the revolutionary spirit this is all about. Solidarity forever.
Played on Linux through Proton.
I could do some boring minor criticism of it from a mechanical perspective, but it feels so beside the point. It's a good time and does its job of supporting the revolutionary spirit this is all about. Solidarity forever.
Played on Linux through Proton.