The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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

Definitely.

I was having some fun searching for towers, but that mostly means avoiding 95% of enemies, who are almost almost all too tough to fight. So I guess I should prioritize getting hearts and stamina and, it seems, arrows, which I keep running out of. I keep bumping into things that are insanely overpowered, like this dancing magician who lights me on fire, or, I assume, the giant green snake I saw flying through the night sky.

Buy arrows any time you can

yeah even late game I'll still always buy every arrow from each vendor I come across. those things weren't plentiful ime

I thought of something you should try not to do - probably not an issue this early on - but don't sell off any ancient machine parts. some of those are very rare drops and you need them to craft ancient weapons/upgrade armour later on

I must have missed the arrow store. I assume there's one in that first town, though I immediately got distracted and am now in the middle of nowhere, trying to scale a tower without robots shooting lasers at me.

in the first town, yes, and you'll also come across vendors/merchants as you wander

they do gate some areas in this game actually - via cold weather/lava. access to those areas requires certain armour

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

― Norm’s Superego (silby)

yeah! the big problem i have with "comedy drag" is that usually they make the person in drag look ridiculous and treat them as a figure of fun. that doesn't happen at all in breath of the wild. link's manner of dress, in fact, isn't treated in a demeaning or humiliating fashion, even by people who know perfectly well what his biological sex is.

josh:

the dancing magician who lights you on fire isn't "insanely overpowered" once you have the right tool to deal with him, and the giant yellow snake isn't a boss for you to kill (you'll probably learn more about the snake later).

you can buy arrows, but if you want to save your money the path to zora's domain is a pretty reliable source for grinding arrows.

Every stable you can buy arrows from beedle no?

they do gate some areas in this game actually - via cold weather/lava. access to those areas requires certain armour

― ||||||||

not at all, you can use food as a time-limited substitute for having the necessary armor

that's true actually - I just forgot because I mostly ignored those meals

the only meal I reliably used was 5 bananas

after i beat the game i looked up an faq on how the cooking system works, if you use a mighty porgy you can use two mighty bananas to get to level 3 and use your other two cooking slots for duration-boosting

longest duration involves using a bladed rhino beetle, frankly i could never get enough beetles to use them for cooking though

lots of beetles in a forest filled with shooty underground guys in the north-east corner of the map.

if you wield a wooden shield, arrows that enemies shoot will stick into it. when you put the shield away, they'll automatically go into your inventory. Probably said upthread, but bears repeating. worth it in a pinch.

early game (first ~ 20 hours) is a lot of finding creative ways to kill bobolinks or w/e they're called w/o depleting your weapon stash. i don't recommend playing the game in any particular order, but I do think that doing the Sheikah Slate quest in the Hateno village is worth it to upgrade your sat-nav thing. and also to obtain bombs that hurt (weakly) bad guys

i've played the game twice through, from load screen. important learning on second play-through: use the map-markers liberally, and don't be shy about teleporting from area to area at will.

75+ hours played. thought it would be more

any advance on that ?

If I can't fight something without it killing me before I can even do any damage, then yeah, I consider that overpowered. Once I am able to defend myself against or destroy most enemies, then *I* will be overpowered. I'm sure eventually I'll get the thing that does the thing, but until then, I've got to avoid all but the most easy enemies. Though I have killed two or three people that turned into vengeful assholes, they weren't too bad.

Anyway. Just been exploring. Lots of climbing.

that was less of a "you n00b" thing and more "man it's really satisfying when you face off against enemies who kicked your butt early-game and kick their butts"

josh do you know about evade and flurry rush ?

I’ve just started a new save - I forgot how unforgiving the early game can be with little stamina, everything breaking all the time and only three hearts. my 75 hours standing me in good stead though - already off the plateau, got a good mix of weapons in my inventory and only died once

it’s easy to miss a lot of basic stuff

Have you ever sunk 95+ hours into a game before coming back to the starting zone and accidentally stumbling into the tutorial?

lol yeah no me neither pic.twitter.com/TSFBNNYE1N

— negaoryx (@negaoryx) December 20, 2018

it’s easy to miss a lot of basic stuff

Have you ever sunk 95+ hours into a game before coming back to the starting zone and accidentally stumbling into the tutorial?

lol yeah no me neither pic.twitter.com/TSFBNNYE1N

— negaoryx (@negaoryx) December 20, 2018

if you wield a wooden shield, arrows that enemies shoot will stick into it. when you put the shield away, they'll automatically go into your inventory.

A similar trick is to find one of the bokoblin camps where they shoot at you with bomb arrows, but wait til its raining. The arrows rain down uselessly around you and you can collect em.

is evade and flurry rush when you dodge at the right time and are able to get several attacks in?

Dark Souls is super unforgiving early on, but at least your weapons don't break. and you can quickly build up your stats.

the stats in Breath of the Wild are inside you