The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

fgti’s scheme is good

we are here for you josh. this is a safe space. I will not call for your removal from the board and have removed you from my badposters.xls

Cool. Coming from Dark Souls, there is no "right" way there, but there are wrong, practically irreversible things you can do, and big mistakes to make, that can seriously impair enjoyment.

I think dark souls was a really weird entry point for you. DS is awesome and there’s a reason there’s an entire genre called “soulslike” games. But it’s no sort of measuring stick other games. In general, although it sometimes makes sense to compare one game to another, especially games in the same series, I try to approach each game on its own terms.

the best way to play this game is to just noodle around in pursuit of some proximal goal and not worry about if you get distracted and wind up somewhere else. Just live in the game, man.


Otm

^yes so many play sessions were like shaggy dog stories

I like FGTI's approach, but I did a variation - lots of cooking and not a lot of fairy fountain stuff. The fairies start asking for a LOT of stuff in exchange for the later upgrades, and they aren't that necessary if you have some of the better dishes in your inventory.

I also managed to get through the game without almost any horse combat. I think there was some kind of horse combat training game upon which I never stumbled.

Long story short, I mostly wanted to make sure there wasn't something that if I missed or forgot to do early on I would seriously regret. Like, "oh shit, I should have told that dude in that field 'yes!'"

I'm pretty sure that the only thing you ever lose access to, in the whole game, is the interior of the divine beasts, after beating bosses. You need not regret anything.

so basically play it as just a bunch of adventures and puzzles and challenges, or, if I want, story mode.

play it however it makes sense to you! if you're craving a challenge, head straight for the castle in the middle. you'll probably get your ass kicked and realize you need better equipment. the way to get better equipment and weapons is just to explore and do quests. there's no correct or incorrect order to do the quests, you just kind of figure it out.

personally the way i played it was something like

*takes out binoculars*
whoa, there's a shrine way up there on that mountain, i'm gonna try to get to it
*many adventures take place on the way to the mountain*
fuck, wait, it's cold on the mountain. i need some sort of cold-repelling food before i try it again.
*adventures take place. the sun goes up and down several times. i totally forget what i was doing, while also completing 17 other shrines and finding a fairy who wants to have sex with me in the woods*
oh yeah, i was going to try to find that shrine on the mountain!
*many adventures take place on the way to the mountain*
etc

if you want structure or to be told how to play the game, here's a way:

defeat the four divine beasts, then go to hyrule castle in the middle

otm

those fairies are extremely horny

but just keep in mind that another way to play is try to find a tree at the top of a large slope and then blow it to pieces and have fun pushing the logs down the hill

do we think you might not fully appreciate how novel and brilliant botw is with all its freedom and fluidity - if you're not invested in the zelda franchise having never played all the key mainline games ?

lol for some reason 90% of the times my partner would sit down to watch me play for a bit, I'd be at the fairy getting ready to upgrade like 7 items. "uh no it's not allllways like this I swear"
leisure suit link

love those fairies

xp that was my experience as well!

every time i visit the fairies i think about george constanza's desire to date an extremely tall woman

I wonder if BOTW being someone’s first open world game dulls its impact a little. I feel like if you haven’t slogged through dozens of similar but terrible games over the years you might not see it as particularly mind blowing. But stuff like how you never need to do X in order to do Y, you get every ability from the outset, you can go literally anywhere as soon as you leave the plateau, the geography being meticulously designed to constantly reward you for exploration but doesn’t FEEL meticulously designed, you can experiment without breaking the game, fire and ice and magnetism and gravity and momentum all work as expected which encourages you to dick around with them, etc—it’s like aw yiss they finally got it all right.

otm - a lot of the systems are perfectly tuned and feel "right", which might not be so exciting unless you have experienced lots of other games where similar systems are a toil.

it's kind of like the jump in super mario bros 3, which is still one of the greatest jumps of all time. unless you have played a bunch of 2D platformers with subpar jumping mechanisms, you might not appreciate how perfect it feels in SMB3 and how hard that is to accomplish

for me, part of the wonder of BOTW was how pleasant the exploration and wandering was. in a lot of open world games, you can technically go anywhere from the beginning but for all practical purposes, there are gates set up where you need to approach things in a certain way, or spend some time leveling up before heading out toward the center. like in red dead redemption 2, i guess if you wanted you could take your horse and head to the edge of the map as soon as it starts (maybe not?), but other than small side quests, you won't find much to do there until you've progressed far enough to unlock the main story missions and some essential gear and abilities. there are elements of that in BOTW, but the sense of freedom is much more palpable.

Yeah. People have speedrun the whole thing in a half hour at this point (though they used some glitches), and the game doesn't stop it.

I like the idea of it, but the weather and night and day dynamics can be a drag on just having fun exploring.

2. Stuck to the main quest religiously until Zora's Realm was completed, as the ability you get from defeating the Divine Beast there is extremely useful.

This is certainly something I recommend also. And when doing so, dont bother fighting the Lynel you'll see when you're told to go get electric arrows. Just get em and nope out of there then go buy some elsewhere instead. Lynels can wait, believe me.

(that said I wish I'd tried to defeat one sooner than I did, once I discovered they drop such powerful weapons)

xp slipping in the rain while climbing and tiresome skeleton enemies are two other middling bits of the game. it's still very good, though.

let's just wait till josh gets a metal sword and it rains

This is certainly something I recommend also. And when doing so, dont bother fighting the Lynel you'll see when you're told to go get electric arrows. Just get em and nope out of there then go buy some elsewhere instead. Lynels can wait, believe me.

If you want a similarity to Dead Souls, there's nothing quite as satisfying as defeating your first Lynel after being remorselessly powdered by them for weeks

Some of my favourite things happen at night in the game - gilding over akkala in a thunderstorm, with the lightning revealing the field of dead guardians for brief seconds at a time, was major goosebumps

this is pertinent to my interests because i burnt out on this game on the way to the sora quest so maybe i should try again. it'd be my fourth time. i kinda hate both the boss battles and the fucking shrines.

My bf told me he beat that Lynel, and I spent hours desperately trying to accomplish what he had claimed to accomplish, beating a Lynel so early game

I failed and I am now convinced he was lying

If you can get the parry move down, you can beat them without getting too banged up, but that's not an easy move to pull off, over and over.

fgti, I think your anti-cooking stance will need rethinking with that lynel

tbh I just spam them with bomb arrows, I never got a real technique down. I cant trigger flurry rush for the life of me.

I'm not convinced you can parry those fuckers, and I fought a few in a row once in a misjudged quest for shields. I did once, purely by accident, glide up into the air on a fire draft and landed on his back, an amazingly badass move I could never reproduce

my recent thing with lynels has been grinding to get my ancient armor set upgraded, the bonus on that gives me an 80% damage boost with ancient weapons (which are ubiquitous at this point in the game) that STACKS with mighty food, it is very satisfying to just go in and pound on lynels that way

takes goddamn forever to get that armor and upgrade it though

Huh, I didnt know that was what "ancient proficiency" was!

Apparently too - though I havent tried this - if you're on a lynel and whacking it around the head it doesnt do any weapon damage.

unlocking those map towers seem to be a good plan. had fun wondering around this morning, saw some cool stuff, like rogue robots and other creatures I never seen before. the oddest thing might have been some sort of cave or rock formation with several clumps of flowers in it. A flower reacted magically when I got near it, but I was unable to pick it or chop it down or anything.

there is a little game you can play w those flowers!

zelda thread posts making me want to start a new file :o

^^

Well, I have no idea what the little flower game is, so I left.

Ancient Armour was my favourite tbh

Generally I liked wandering around like a ninja in the Sheikah armor. The Radiant Suit was fun and actually pretty useful when it was artificially dark. Right before going to the castle I expended a ton of hoarded items to get the Dark Armor, which was entirely pointless but cool looking I guess. I kind of wish I'd upgraded the barbarian one to the point of it being worth wearing, but that would have required becoming a lynel rancher

lol @ lynel rancher

the spooky merchant in this was so cool

yeah I opened that up way too late in the game. some of the enemy masks looked fun to mess around with and evil horse gear was probably dope, but instead I cashed in tons of monster parts for the armor set...which looked sick but was pointlessly risky

the stealth armor is my standard go-to armor, particularly since it gives a speed boost at night

i also use the climbing armor a lot when exploring

i'm super pissed that the harem girl armor is basically cosmetic-only and not upgradeable

(i know it's a pretty regressive and dangerous trope to even have in a game, but i feel like they did the trope about as well as they could have, and i quit ff vii in disgust when it got to the drag part)

also i wish there was another game with this same engine and another map to explore, i know nintendo is hell-bent on innovating whenever they're not making a mario game but i wish they would milk this game a little bit more

The Gerudo drag works imo because Link is an androgyne and he looks good in it

The Gerudo drag works imo because Link is an androgyne and he looks good in it