The Legend of the Zelda: Breath of the Wild sure as shit is an amazing game, as evidenced by the "175 hours or more" that I put into it over the past three months. It's filled with lots of adventure and excitement, and I'm not a Jedi, so that's okay.
However, as great as it is, it's not without its flaws. Some of those flaws are subjective design choices (Camp "Weapons Breaking Is Cool" vs Camp "Fuck This Shit"), but some of them are just objectively stupid, head-scratching, only-Nintendo-would-do-this decisions. The result is flaws that are fairly minor, yet still inexcusable since they hurt the experience and were easily fixable precisely because they're minor. And this is the internet so it wouldn't be right if I didn't bitch and moan about it while unnecessarily using coarse language...
1) Convoluted Cooking Procedure
You walk up to a pot ready to cook some tasty and useful meals, but the only option the game presents to you in response is to "sit" and pass the time. So you open up the menu, navigate to your materials, press "x" to start holding the materials you want to use, pick them, then exit the menu and, oh, NOW there's a cook button. Why the hell didn't you just give us a cook button at the start that, when pressed, results in immediately opening up the materials menu ready to hold whatever I pick out? Why did you make it so convoluted that I had to google how the hell to do this basic gameplay mechanic? Why, Nintendo, why?
2) No Fast-Change Into Outfits
Wanna switch from your Climbing Gear into your Zora Armor so you can swim the fuck out this lake? Well, go into the outfits menu and individually select each damn piece. One. At. A. Time. (Sigh) Really, Nintendo? Why couldn't you just have an option to change to an entire outfit that you have all the pieces to? It's already a pain in the ass having to navigate the main menu to change outfits—which happens a LOT since they're so beneficial—but now you have to make it three times a pain in the ass?
3) No Hero's Path Mode From The Get-Go
The first DLC expansion has a Hero's Path Mode that lets you can see on the map exactly where you've been and, more importantly, where you haven't yet been. This sounds great since the world is unbelievably huge, exploring everything is a big part of the fun, and knowing exactly where you have and haven't been is integral so you don't miss or overlook anything. Gee, sure would have been nice to have that from the get-go instead of unnecessarily being a part of paid DLC. Dicks.
4) Neverending Rain
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| Me too. (Yes, I saw this on Reddit...) |
Is Hyrule located near Nintendo of America in Seattle? Because it never stops fucking raining in this damn game! And don't get my wrong, having grown up in a desert and living the last ten years in drought-stricken California, I love me some rain. In real life, hiking in rain is one of my favorite things. In BOTW, hiking in rain makes me want to murder every last employee at Nintendo and make it rain blood. Climbing is vital to exploration, but the rain fucks your shit right up, making it damn near impossible to climb stuff, even with Climbing Gear and full stamina. For Pete's sake, why didn't you make rain a rare occurrence if you wanted it to be an obstacle? Or make the set bonus of the Climbing Gear rain nullification?
5) Wild Armor Needs Upgrades
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| More like Tunic of the Mild, am I right? |
Find and conquer all 120 shrines and your prize is the retro throwback-to-original-Link Armor of the Wild. Neat! Oh wait, it comes with each piece at the paltry baseline of four defense points, necessitating four armor upgrades and having to tediously get a bunch more dragon parts all god damn over again, just to be of any use this late in the game. Fuck you, Nintendo. Seriously. And the set bonus is an increased Master Sword beam, which pretty much nobody ever uses? Double fuck you. How about increasing the attack damage of the Master Sword overall? Do you even know how much work 120 shrines was? Do you even know what rewards are?
6) No Option To Turn Off Subtitles
For some godforsaken reason, Nintendo gave no option to turn off the subtitles during cinematics. All you can do is change the voice language; the subtitles are fixed to the language your system is set up in. If you're listening to the voicework in a language you actually know, there's no reason to have subtitles. And if you're anything like me, if there are subtitles on the screen, you can't not look at them, so you're distracted during the whole cinematic and finding out what characters are saying before they actually say it. God damn't, Nintendo. Every other game ever made has subtitles options, so why can't you?
7) Yiga Clan Has No Chill
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| The bane of every BOTW player's existence. |
After defeating the master of the Yiga Clan, those clannies started randomly attacking me while out in the wild. At first, it was fairly rare and not so bad. But at some point, it started happening all the god damn time; it felt like it happened every ten feet. It really started getting in the way of my exploration. Can't you make this something that happens like once every couple hours instead of every ten minutes, Nintendo? Jesus Christ, Yiga Clowns, I'm trying to play a game here. Piss off!
