Yeah, if you have enough SP restoring items (and especially if you're careful about your combat decisions), you can take down palaces pretty quickly, in terms of in-game days. That makes all the other things way more accessible, of course, since it leaves you with a lot more time to do things in.

Well, Gregg, prepare to cover your eyes and ears come game of the year time  🙂

As part of me wants to leave the topic alone, part of me wishes I knew who stole all your birthday parties. Did a bad man take all the birthdays, Gregg? I'll stop the jokes now because your opinion is valid. I'm just surprised and saddened that you dislike the game so much, and sorry if my glowing take on it made you get the game (I think you already had it and were just saving it but can't remember). I guess the voice acting is mediocre; I wouldn't praise or condemn it really. As far as the story, I can get behind you there, but it just doesn't bother me in the same way. Were there any Zelda stories you did like? As an outsider to the series before this game, I've never thought anyone except the nerdiest of nerds cared about Zelda's story anyway. It seems mostly like a generic and inoffensive canvas.

I'm sorry you'll have to put up with all my Dark Souls and Breath of the Wild talk for the rest of internet time, Gregg. You're still my brave and wonderful pilot. (This is a GOIO reference)

Whenever I think I'm a contrarian and an outlier, I can always look to you.

xtal said
You're still my brave and wonderful pilot. (This is a GOIO reference)

Whenever I think I'm a contrarian and an outlier, I can always look to you.  

Bless you!

I've only ever played the Wind Waker so my experience with Zelda is very limited! Still, after that epic trailer and all the hype I expected something more interesting than the usual 'Kill Ganon, save Zelda, save Hyrule, profit'. That trailer made it look so much more exciting and dramatic, like a Studio Ghibli film or something.

I dunno, like, I didn't go in expecting Planescape: Torment or anything, but reducing the importance of plot to that of a Mario game just doesn't work when it seems every other NPC is banging on about it. 'Link, you must save the princess'. 'Link, you are the warrior of legend'. 'Link, blah blah blah'. Zzz. Not to mention, for a game that has plenty of NPCs I'm struggling to remember 99% of them. The only character I encountered who was interesting was Purah. She was cool.

I look at Anachronox and think, yeah, the story was good, but it was the characters, dialogue, delivery, subplots and side quests that elevated it to incredible. Breath of the Wild doesn't really manage any of that. While some of the voice acting is decent to tolerable, characters like Zelda herself and Mipha sound so utterly unconvincing. I've no idea how Mipha went gold. Hailey said she could do better and the thing is, she could. I could! This is a multi-million pound Nintendo behemoth, not Sang-Froid. I loaded The Cat Lady up over the weekend and the voice acting in that is so much better.

There's a fine line between charming and irritating too that Zelda wobbles back and forth over. Charming is accidentally dropping a rock on the Korok you just found underneath and it crying 'Ouch!'. Irritating is an NPC counting all ten luminous stones that I've brought him, one by one, every. Damn. Time.

I'm also amazed how much people are celebrating that Breath of the Wild removes map markers. Has UbiSoft really made us so easy to please? Go and play Miasmata, I'll be right back here, if you can find me. Don't forget your compass and blank sheet of paper, and don't travel at night!

Do you ever get a shovel in Breath of the Wild? I feel like that would make for some cool treasure hunting.

'Zelda respects players enough to allow them to find things themselves', but the problem I have with this is that... there's not really that much to find or see if you discount the same ol' korok seeds and boring chests. I remember so many more spectacular places in Guild Wars 2 and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (and that was only a few hours long!), and so many curios and cool details in the likes of Proteus and Bernband and Anachronox (like some trainers dangling from an overhead cable way above the city streets, or the Mug Mug shacks hiding in a quiet corner of the Routubes under Sender Station). Hell, I could include Demon's and Dark Souls here too, or STALKER. Hyrule by comparison just feels hollow and, dare I say... *looks around and whispers* soulless? Eek!

I think I preferred the Wind Waker to be honest. It too was beautiful and vast, but I recall it having much better pacing and flow thanks to it being more linear and smaller (obviously). It felt like a more focused and authored experience but with plenty of loose ends that you had to come back to when you had the ability to tie them up. It had real dungeons, no vacuuming up ingredients and craft materials, weapons that didn't break, simpler controls, no inventory faff, better targeting, auto-jump! I miss auto-jump! I remember specific quests and places and characters. Whether I'd be able to stomach the Wind Waker now is another matter but at the time I got a lot more out of it. Breath of the Wild I was starting to feel repetition fatigue a good 10-20 hours in and that feeling's not really let up.

I'm sure there's plenty more to enjoy in the game and, don't get me wrong, there's still a lot I really dig about it, but I doubt I'll be spending much more time trying to find it. I've given it £50 and 50-60 hours of my time which is absurdly generous for me so I've paid my dues I think.

Next game for me is FRACT OSC, Spec Ops: The Line and probably State of Decay. I had a dabble with The Witcher 2 but bounced off it, unlike the first one, weirdly.

Anyway, phew, that was longer than expected.

Eventide Island was really cool. In my experience, moments like this have been plenty.

It's worth acknowledging here that there is a hard-to-define difference between playing a game during its release window-- and without having had your expectations built up-- and playing it a few weeks or months later when you've soaked in the public consensus.

I believe you when you say you've been disappointed and uninterested, to paraphrase you; and I assume you believe me when I try to express-- tripping over my own words while I go-- that Breath of the Wild has become one of the best gaming experiences I've had, filled with revelations. I think we're, in a way, almost looking at different games. Or having wildly different interpretations of the same game, rather. Also noteworthy is that I've looked past some complaints you've leveled, like the story and characters. Both have always been fluff to me, because nothing in my entire life has led me to believe that the Zelda games ever mastered either. I agree with you that neither is good - I just don't care because it hasn't affected every other brilliant thing.

There's also the elephant in the room - that you're a Brit; and so you're just a big sad ball of tea and crumpets, aren't you?

The dog's bollocks! Fish and chips! Crisps and biscuits! Silly mailboxes! (Or is that postboxes?)

No but really, that was a joke to illustrate that I think you're a bit more of a cool hardass, whereas I'm the open-hearted joy-seeker.

While I come to understand your perspective, I'll concede nothing in my own enjoyment - I still recommend every other person on the planet not named Gregg B play Breath of the Wild!

Your mention of the 100-year sleep jogged something in my memory, Dix. I do like the way that Link himself, as a character, is framed in the game. He is still the savior of course, but there's resistance and skepticism from some characters, which I wasn't expecting at all. Also appreciated is the way that Zelda is framed; herself presented-- if you take the fact that she has been fighting Ganon alone for 100 years-- as not only a heroic figure, but the sole reason the world hasn't been swallowed up by Ganon. Even if the vagueness of a 100-year battle is inconceivable.

If that counts as the story, then I do like the story more than I've let on.

At the end of the day, I've fully allowed myself to be swept up in the epic hero's journey.

Quick take: I'm curious, Dix, what's been your favourite place in the game? From a large general area to a small specific one, doesn't matter. For me the answer is the general area of Death Mountain, and the town of the Gorons. I fucking love that place. I still haven't fully explored the Gerudo desert, and haven't been to the two northwest-most regions of the map.

Wasn't Zelda some sort of pirate in the Wind Waker? And wasn't the ocean above a flooded Hyrule? I mean, that's a pretty badass set-up.

I personally like the grassy fields of Central Hyrule and that field with all the smoked Guardians in it, in front of... Hateno? I like fields.

Edit: in front of Fort Hateno!

Honestly, I've written a lot more notes on Zelda than I've let on to here! The thing is, I've discussed all this with so many people in different places that I'm kind of getting sick of hearing myself so the above is a rough summation of my thoughts.

I've not played many open world games to be honest so I'm still working out or 'calibrating' my tastes on them. I've bounced off most of the Bethesda games and now Zelda. It's another interesting data point and State of Decay will hopefully help me further.

In the case of Miasmata it's the way that all the different elements of the game nudge and push you--sometimes violently--into tough and memorable situations. It's the way that exploration is fraught with danger from your momentum moving down slopes (lots of people grumbled about the inertia in Miasmata but it's a fundamental aspect of the game), the weather and daylight affecting visibility to plot your map (and not get lost), hydration, factoring in the journey back so you don't get trapped out in the dark, the creature stalking you. These are all simple elements individually but they all bump and jostle and overlap with each other in all kinds of interesting ways, particularly when you consider the mapping system and the scraps of information you have to work from to find the flora to formulate the cure for your illness. Finding these rare plants on the island, all on your own, is incredibly satisfying because you have to use your wits. And it's worth adding too that the Johnson brothers managed to recreate that feeling of being amidst nature better than any other game I can think of so exploring is its own kind of joy, peril aside.

While Sir, You Are Being Hunted started to run out of tricks towards the end, I really appreciated its focus and the elements it used to put you in sticky situations and make you take risks; drifting searchlights, roaming gangs of robots, dogs, day and night, hunger, bleeding, bear traps, startled birds, scarecrows, shards in awkward places, hunting pheasants, (inedible) raw meat and cooking (and the smoke/light that fire creates). It fits more neatly into an open world survival game but the survival aspects are dialled down somewhat so you can get on with things, although there were occasions when I'd get stuck from starvation. Looting was simplified so that instead of walking into buildings and rooting through stuff you just walked up to the door of the building and interacted with it like it was a giant container. This was weird at first (and clearly a technical limitation) but I thought it cut out a lot of unnecessary busywork, again, allowing you to just get on with things. The fact that it was all delivered with a very quaint British sense of humour and bags of atmosphere, helped by a very minimalist ambient soundtrack (that I swear was channelling some of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II), made it a very enjoyable experience, and one that just managed to escape overstaying its welcome. I don't think it took more than 20 hours to complete, with plenty of deaths and exploring.

Looking further back, there's Guild Wars 2 which I mostly fell in love with because it was a beautiful world to explore and with little surprises sprinkled here and there. And then there's STALKER which doesn't really need to be spoken about. Does Beyond Good & Evil count? I loved BG&E. Just a really great balance of interesting things to do, places to go and characters and story to follow. The best photography quest. Actually, Wind Waker's on Windfall Island was great too. I'd add Wind Waker to my list. Oh, and Brutal Legend. Brutal Legend is a weird one. Loved the world and combat and story, hated all the repetitive quests padding out the (amazing) space.