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Sunday, April 9, 2017

Breath of the Overrated

So I preordered a Nintendo Switch.... received it in the mail about 5 days after launch (stupid Best Buy) and have been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ever since. There are some great, great elements to the game.

Unfortunately, one of the worst things is the combat. It's so bad it actually RUINS the entire game. It's not about dying a lot, which does happen, but the targeting is so inaccurate yet it demands precision. Link is always getting hung up on climbing a nearby obstacle, making him a easy target for a one-shot kill-- which even the lowest enemies are capable of, by the way. Not only capable of, but they do it often, leading to frequent deaths.

Link can only target in 4 basic directions, think 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, 9:00 yet he needs to be able to target in 8 directions. Makes for a frustrating experience.

 All the enemies can do one-shot kills, but it takes about 100 hours of gameplay before Link is strong enough to one-shot kill even the lowest enemy. Gee, that sounds fair. This is supposed to be the "Champion" the game keeps going on about.

The enemies are faster than Link. He's so unbelievably sluggish you'd think at least he'd have enough health to compensate. But nope. Again, play for 100 hours and maybe you can last 10 minutes before getting one-shot killed.

It's ridiculous how game reviews are giving this a 10/10 when the combat mechanics are nearly completely broken. A big part of the game is broken, so it's impossible to rate a game like that 10/10.


There's so much wrong with the combat, and the game requires you engage in combat to advance. If there was only exploration, that part of the game gets 10/10. But the combat gets 3/10. Average the 2 together and Breath of the Wild is a 6.5/10 game overall.

While it's immensely fun to wander this huge world, especially on a handheld, and the puzzles are usually fun, the broken combat mechanics destroy so much of the fun and it's a shame that Nintendo won't get the message to improve it because of all the fawning reviews.