This year's Game of the Year list will be late, idiot.

For those who expected me to be dead: sorry. For the others who enjoy my annual Top Ten Games of the Year list, I regret to say that this year's list will have to be postponed until at least January. There were a ton of great games in 2017, lots of which I haven't had time to even look at, and I want to make sure that I finish all the games that are of interest to me before finalizing my list. I already have a good idea of what it will look like, but there are more than a few stand-outs that I simply haven't had time for.

Unlike professional game journalists who are paid for this sort of stuff, I actually want to finish the games I talk about rather than take a look for an hour, read the blurb on the back of the box, and make a decision. I announced this a few months ago but it bears repeating: I'm knee-deep in writing my first novel, and as of this post I'm actually editing the first draft. That goes before playing (and ranking) video games. I hope you understand. That said, I expect like fifty people ever to read the list when it gets finished anyway.

In any case, stay tuned to this spot for updates.

Blog Hiatus Announcement

At the beginning of this year I posted some huge plans for this blog and other projects I was thinking about trying out over 2017. While I am proud of everything I do, especially that grueling Legend of Zelda Retrospective (which, I'll have you know, was completely spur-of-the-moment), the fact of the matter is this blog simply isn't pulling in numbers and I feel like my time could be spent on something more productive.

When I first starting posting on this blog at the beginning of 2015, I only ever expected for my reviews to get a handful of views and I'd call it a day after a few months. Two and a half years later, I somehow accrued somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,000 lifetime views with several posts being read per day. Frankly, I don't know where these views are coming from since Google won't show exact traffic sources, but the fact that anybody has read my stuff gives me a tremendous sense of joy.

At the same time, I can't shake the feeling of ambivalence my blog seems to give off. In two years, the blog has received no followers on Google and my Facebook page is filled entirely with my very close and beloved friends and family to whom I reached out. Internet frauds are always lambasting how they're under abuse and get doxxed or whatever, but you have a platform on which to expound upon your views.

I never once expected to reach any sort of heights with this blog, but I will admit the main point I wanted out of this was to have a dialogue about the things I liked. And no, I don't mean "shouting about stuff, turning off comments and ratings and telling everyone I'm a victim," I mean I just outright wanted to discuss stuff here. Looking at the general feedback of my blog, conversation isn't really what people are here for.

One of the most frustrating elements of Blogger--a problem I don't think can be solved--is that I can't tell the engagement rate of my content. Blogger does share important information with its users, especially when it comes to the likes of traffic sources and demographics, but the most all-important statistic of all is completely missing: viewer retention. On my equally tiny Youtube account, I can see just how long people watch my videos and what point the viewer becomes disinterested--if I were a more active video producer, that kind of information is extremely constructive as it gives an idea of what audiences want to watch in their videos.

I'm totally willing to admit that people just don't want to read blogs on the internet anymore. I'm also willing to admit that my blog is probably just niche and uninteresting for people, though I take great pride in what I do and how I create content here. I have never gone out of my way to promote my blog outside of my small social media accounts (which will be linked at the bottom), so just thinking this blog has gotten so many views this far is nothing short of miraculous. Fact of the matter is, this is the only type of content I'm interested in producing. I don't care about Youtube, I don't care about making videos. I've always been a writer, and I will be until the day I die.

I don't like talking much about myself, but my goal in life has always been to write fiction. But on the other hand, I'm not a very popular guy and I don't have professional contacts at all. I'm more of by-the-bootstraps type of person and I want to succeed with my own talent, though Subjective Objective has kind of revealed exactly what that entails and it's pretty demoralizing. Maybe if I can squeeze it in I'll go and make a few silly videos on Youtube. But these twenty-page nightmares are simply more trouble than they're worth, and without the all-important critical feedback I can't tell if people are dropping my blogs after reading a sentence or coming back for more every day. This is all for your entertainment, and if I don't think you're entertained then I'm not entertained.

Long story short, I'm not done with this blog entirely. Just last night I was thinking about writing a review for Edgar Wright's new film Baby Driver, but I'll wrap it all up here by just saying you need to go see it. But when people can just go to highly-produced content like Red Letter Media or Matthewmatosis, it makes these quaint little blogs feel obsolete. I'm working two jobs and going out of my way to stress myself out over this blog, especially like I did for the Zelda Retrospective, does more harm than good. And since I'm a pitiful Millennial working with a useless degree, I don't have insurance to cover the stress of "nobody is reading my blog on the internet."

But that all goes back to my main goal: fiction. I took a very long break from writing to find a voice with this blog, and at the end of the day I think it more than succeeded with that goal. I want to say with absolute clarity that I understand getting anywhere with fiction, especially at the rate publishers are picking up and dropping new titles on a daily basis, is even more of a pipe dream than finding an audience with this blog. Even if I write the best story you've ever seen, there's no guarantee that it'll even be looked at. I'd love for that to happen, but if you've read this blog you know I'm a pessimist.

So to wrap this all up, I'm not quitting the blog entirely and I'm not announcing that I've got some big novel coming out or whatever. Simply put, I lost my focus and this blog helped me get it back. After all is said and done, you'll definitely see more here. I'm just way too busy and spread way too thin to continue at this rate. You should see how many drafts I have that I simply never finished, if I had the time I wish I could write them all at this moment but I just know I'd kick myself for distracting myself unnecessarily.

If you like what I've written, please share it with your friends. Blast me in the comments if you want, say hi on Twitter, I really don't care. If I see any sort of increased traffic, I'd be glad to come back and continue churning out more hyper-contrarian reviews for all of you. But right now, I have a story that needs to be written--not read, but written--and me reviewing the Akira manga or Twin Peaks can wait until my pet project is done.

I hope that you all enjoy my blog, and I'll see you at the end of the tunnel.

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E3 2017 Day One Wrap Up: EA

I'm so done with this shit. E3 is the pits: an indulgent, hedonistic ritual to showcase video games we could all just watch as press releases. Since developers need game journalists and game journalists need to justify their jobs, E3 is half a celebration of excess and half game journalists just repeating what we could have watched with our own eyes with a snide "take" on everything. You're game journalists, nobody cares about whatever conversation you're trying to peddle.

EA, the first developer to create video games out of their own employees' blood, began the show a day early--as if they couldn't inflate their ego any further--and opened their show with a completely detached and boring show from a drumline in sports uniforms that I could not possibly care any less about. The reason for this needless waste of time? Why, announcing the new Madden product will feature a story mode, because that worked very well for 2K's NBA 2K16.

After some meaningless business talk from an EA suit, the conference then switched over to Battlefield 1, a game which single-handedly ruined the release of my favorite game of last year. Apparently they're putting out paid DLC with more maps to divide their playerbase--a draconian practice Titanfall 2 discarded because that game and Respawn are awesome. Beginning with their Battlefield 1 showcase, EA introduced the main thesis of their show: EA is hip with the kids, so here are a bunch of lame, unfunny, cringe-inducing game streamers who shouted at the TV and caused much euphoria among pre-teens who don't want to play video games.

The subsequent twenty hours of the show were dedicated to FIFA, announcing...??? It was here that the streaming thesis fell apart entirely with some no-name Youtuber fumbling over the most basic of tasks: reading a teleprompter. I would have been embarrassed if I wasn't choking to death on my laughter. The game this nobody ruined his life over? The new Need for Speed product. Did you play the last one? You won't play this one either!

The developers of the critically-acclaimed Indie Darling Brothers then took the stage to announce their new game, A Way Out. This new game will force the player to ruin their experience with a co-op partner through the entire experience. The presenter couldn't remember his own name, so why would I trust someone like this with my very hard-earned and valuable money? Pass.

EA's disgraced team Bioware teased a new game which was only a CG trailer and promised the "full trailer" at Microsoft's presentation. I'm sure Bioware can definitely handle a new project after Dragon Age II, Mass Effect 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Mass Effect: Andromeda. If you're not comfortable showing me gameplay--and Bioware should never feel comfortable--then please get right out of my rugged face, I don't care at all about CG non-game trailers and you shouldn't either; these don't show you a thing about the game and can be manipulated in ways that don't reflect the game at all. The presenter also referred to the game as "vast" so I'm sure it's going to be a worthless open-world title.

~sports~

"Thirty minutes of pure, unadultered Star Wars" sounds like a brand new circle of Hell that Satan created just for Millennials. "Someone," whose name I can't remember and will be referenced solely by the name "Someone," very excitedly announced that EA took common sense into account and will implement a new offline single-player campaign into Battlefront 2. However, Someone's enthusiasm rubbed on me so much that I'm probably going to skip the game out of spite. It looks pretty fun, actually, and all the vehicle combat looks great--it's just a shame that the actress involved had to be excited to show off the story mode, because now I'll just think about how annoyed I was for a few seconds while watching EA's conference.

All in all, I'd give EA's 2017 conference an F-. I'm sure a lot of people would really appreciate the Star Wars stuff, but as a human being who can't handle anymore of the franchise at this point I'm lukewarm. The presenter was obnoxious and I'd rather just play Titanfall 2, but I'm mildly interested. That indie game threatening me with forced co-op pissed me off, and a combined hour of sports was purely uninteresting to me. Of course, there's Bioware's new embarrassing game to look out for, but only for the fact that if this game does poorly, EA will probably sell them off or something.

A note on the other E3 conferences this year: I'm extremely busy the week of E3 so I probably won't have my reactions up as timely as this one. Truth be told, they'll probably be up the day after the conferences air, if not a bit later. I'm trying to keep things on track but life stuff is more important than video games. As always, follow my social media accounts (one of you better do it this time) if you want to stay updated.

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The Original Persona Broke My Spirit. (Review)

I first heard of the Persona series when the third game was hitting its stride, though I never actually played the franchise until much later. I'm not one to skip entries in a long-running series, so despite the fact that mouth-breathing idiots say that someone can start the Persona series with Persona 3 before moving on to Persona 4, that type of flippant ignorance never really sits well with me. Instead of jumping right into the casualized, pathetic dating sim of the third game and the redundancy of the fourth, I decided to sift through the mountain of Shin Megami Tensei titles I vaguely knew the series was related to. Although the original games were either hard to find or outright unreleased, luck was on my side: Atlus released updated ports of the original games on the Playstation Portable and copies were both abundant and affordable. I thought, why not? If I'm gonna be a hipster, I might as well go all the way and play through these old games new, stupid Persona fans outright reject. It's not like they're nightmarish dungeon crawlers straight from hell or anything, right?

Review: Persona

Megami Ibunroku: Persona is the hardest video game I have ever played. Ninja Gaiden Black is difficult, but it's beatable. The venerated Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne might be a descent into madness and corruption, but it only took me two attempts to crush what I believe might be the most satisfying final boss of all time. It's not even the main course of the game that's a hellish meatgrinder, though that's still a significant criticism.

Persona is a first-person dungeon crawler in the vein of earlier Shin Megami Tensei titles, a common through-point of each spinoff of the series. For example, the Persona and Devil Summoner series might have gone in wildly different directions from the Shin Megami Tensei mainline series, but the early entries in both of these spinoffs retained much of the series mainstays: negotiating with demons in order to strengthen the player's party, heavy emphasis on spellcasting, dark moral decisions, and imagery of a ruined Tokyo sprinkled throughout.

Fusion Accident

Negotiation is one of the more entertaining aspects of Persona; in previous Shin Megami Tensei titles, players were given a choice between being "friendly" or "threatening" to demons when initiating dialogue, then going down a small dialogue path before either recruiting the demon into the party, gaining an item, or receiving money. Money and items are still available as dialogue choices in Persona, but one of the biggest differences is that the original Shin Megami Tensei featured between one and three human party members while the rest of the party would need to be filled with recruited demons. Lower-level demons could be discarded by fusing two or three together, resulting in a constant flow of new allies with new abilities and stronger stats.

Since Persona has a full party at most times, demons themselves can't be fused but rather give the party a card of themselves which can be fused with other cards and turned into a new Persona. While a few demons can be created from fused cards, most of the equippable Personae are unique as deities and concepts from world religions; unlike demons, a Persona is a manifestation of the user's will, so stronger Persona users evoke godlike beings as their Persona.

To be frank, this system is worse than Shin Megami Tensei in multiple facets. The benefit of a successful negotiation is not tangible or immediate; rather, the player will have to wait until they find a Velvet Room--the Persona series version of the Cathedral of Shadows--and fuse Persona from the cards gathered. Cards and held Personae are highly limited, and to add to the frustration the game is very strict on who can equip which Persona. Each character is aligned with several tarot arcana which in turn dictates which newly-fused Persona can be equipped; additionally, each character will have certain affinity with each arcana, which ranks as worst-bad-good-best. Characters like Reiji only have one or two arcana aligned with good affinity, while only one is considered best and the rest are unusable. The protagonist, on the other hand, carries affinity with most arcana and is more versatile as a result.

Aside from the annoyance of being forced to create a small pool of Personae narrowed down to align with the cast's best affinities, each Persona has a very small skill pool considering they're fused from demons with a set amount of skills. In other Shin Megami Tensei titles, demons could be tailor-made to carry lineages of skill sets to create unstoppable monsters by the end of the game--look no further than the legendary Nocturne Daisoujou recipe to behold what truly nightmarish combinations can come about from tinkering around with demon fusion in specific circumstances. Even though the game is renowned for its difficulty, I fused a Daisoujou roughly halfway through Nocturne and it carried me all the way to the end of the game with the skills I fused for it then.

Persona is not as deep or satisfying in large part due to how narrowly-focused the fusion mechanic has become. Because MAX-level Personae can only be returned for new fusion totems or items, no skill lineage can be created throughout the course of the game; for the most part, this means a Persona will only have a mish-mash of skills from their parent demons and will never, ever be able to pass on whatever skills it may learn. In most cases, a Persona will be fused for two or three skills while it learns new spells that completely outclass the ones it begins with. It's almost baffling that a game with such strong ancestry would make a decision this poor, and to think it might have been the blueprint for the rest of the series is a bit mind-boggling.

Spellcasting is almost universally required for combat due in large part to the game's completely mishandled positioning system; while the ingredients for a neat combat system were all in place, Persona very often misses the mark. Characters and demons form a grid when starting a battle with each side composing a five-by-five square. Each attack type then targets specific points on the opposing side; for instance, Masao attacks in a sort of "W" pattern, with his direct front attacking the first two blocks in front of him, the attacks on either side taking only one block, and the furthest blocks on either side taking two blocks again. Reiji only attacks the front row, while Maki can attack the entire enemy formation--so long as she's in the back, in which case her gun can't be fired.

The characters' strengths and weaknesses do make the battles engaging as positioning becomes a concern later in the game, but by the end each encounter becomes increasingly more difficult to the point of lunacy. Having to keep in mind each formation for each selection of enemies is horribly tedious and makes the final few dungeons incredibly difficult. In a series known for punishing the player for every little mistake, the final dungeon in particular can be a true nightmare. Spellcasting is a godsend as it allows players to attack any target from any position without worrying about positioning. Although spells cost a significant amount of magic to cast, the developers seemed to know that this would be the preferred method of attacking anyway as characters are fully healed upon leveling up. Furthermore, characters have an entirely different level for equipping Personae compared to their natural character level--for example, a character who throws around spells constantly might be two or three Persona levels higher than their character level, which will allow them to equip a Persona which might be higher than their natural level. Of course, this only applies to characters who have been using spells with regularity, so those who aren't using their Persona at all times might not be able to equip a Persona they have best affinity for because their Persona level is too low.

To be totally fair, the heal upon gaining a new level mechanic gives the game a very brisk pace allowing players to just constantly throw themselves against enemy crowds since levels are fairly easy to come by; rather than forcing themselves to run back to a healing fountain earlier in a dungeon, it's usually more feasible to use items and power through to the next level. The only thing I want to ask is this: if the developers intended the characters to be played almost exclusively as spellcasters and reward those who go down this path, why even bother with the convoluted grid? I can't say I hate combat outright in Persona, but forcing unnecessary changes is a misstep that hinders a system that could have been perfectly serviceable in a very good dungeon crawler.

Moral "Choices"

While the previous Shin Megami Tensei games focused on the player's conflict with their internal alignment, Persona merely punishes players who make wrong dialogue choices. It's interesting to see the ways in which the game tries to incorporate elements from the mainline series, but the presentation for these choices is weak at best.

Shin Megami Tensei typically offers moral choices when the player comes across decisions that fall under "lawful" or "chaotic" alignments; lawful characters believe in absolute order and helping the weak, but without a failsafe in check this can lead to fascist systems in which those under the law are punished for stepping out of bounds in the least. So basically, college campuses. Chaos, on the other hand, favors absolute power and freedom over all else. Naturally, the weak are crushed in this environment while the powerful thrive. So basically, the current Presidential Administration.

The choices given in Persona don't have much weight and are instead focused on forcing the player to stand true to their convictions when faced with difficult situations. It allows the protagonist to feel like a true leader at points, but the story and gameplay benefits are entirely too weak; answering correctly for most dialogue choices only allows the player to fuse decent mid-level Personae via special totems, though by the time I reached the end of the game I was still too underleveled to even equip them. Oh, but I'll get to that.

In one situation near the mid-point of the game, the player is forced to make a series of dialogue choices to help out a plot-crucial NPC. If the player answers all three questions incorrectly (each question has three answers, by the way) the player will then be given the bad ending--several hours later, well after their old save data has been overwritten. It's a needlessly cruel way to punish players for an ambiguous round of questions and I would personally not blame anyone for dropping the game if they got this ending; Shin Megami Tensei has always focused on "not evil, but not necessarily right," though some players will obviously lean toward one alignment or the other. Grey morality as a system thrives in the franchise, and having the neutral route as a secret surprise for players who don't become too embroiled in the extremes of either side is icing on the cake. Persona has no grey morality and the choices will come back to haunt players who didn't pick the correct options, but even if the player picks a choice they feel is right the plot continues as if nothing happened and later shames the player for picking that choice.

"Ruined" Tokyo

The franchise-standard imagery of a destroyed major city appears in a bizarre turn in Persona, though the concept of ruination is vague. Near the beginning of the game, the characters play an occult game called Persona which awakens them to their own ability to summon a Persona. After visiting their terminally ill friend Maki in a hospital, the characters are dragged into a strange version of their town where hospitals are replaced by forests and old houses were never demolished for business offices. The town is under the rule of local business owner Kandori, who is attempting to pull elements from a twisted version of reality into the real world in order to rule as a god.

The real standout character is Maki, the terminally ill student whose personal conflict becomes the main driving force behind the story. Psychology and spirituality are mixed and implemented to stunning degree as the characters race to save the town from Kandori and Maki's inner demons. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is somewhat rote in comparison; the protagonist is a standard silent hero who the party simply follows because he has the best hair, while the other two main party members Nanjo and Masao are often only used to fill in the plot. Nanjo is an analytical and haughty rich kid who feeds backstory to the player, assembling the plot in his head as he learns more information. Masao, on the other hand, is the free-natured punk with a heart of gold. You can guess exactly what these characters will say when they need to say it.

One of the interesting elements of the party dynamic is the fifth member, a student who also took part in the Persona game. After entering the twisted town and rescuing Masao, the player can accept help from one of the other characters who will accompany the party for the remainder of the game; these party members are typically background noise and only really help as additional damage during combat, but one of the final party members adds a significant amount of new dialogue and context to the Kandori subplot.

Reiji is the definition of a secret Easter Egg as the character requires an unreasonable amount of hoops to jump through in order to unlock him as a party member. He also demands the player deny help from every last one of the final members until he's finally unlocked, and if the player missed any requirements for Reiji they'll be stuck with one of the weakest and most bland characters in the game. Reiji isn't even worth it for much of the game; aside from having the worst affinity set in the game, he can only attack the front row and his ultimate Persona is weak against the final boss. He makes up for this in raw power and the interesting plot details he adds to the story, but you'd think he'd be an instant win button for all the trouble it takes to unlock him.

The plot moves forward at a very brisk pace--my save file was around 30 hours by the end--and twists and turns in interesting ways. The game's strongest point is definitely in its dungeon design, not totally incomprehensible like mainline Shin Megami Tensei but still labyrinthine enough to force players to really consider their forward path. For what it's worth, the plot is serviceable enough.

The Final Boss.

Pandora is one of the most unbearably difficult final bosses I've ever encountered in a video game in my entire life. Her dungeon is a complete slog to navigate and even includes a pitfall which can drop the player back to the very beginning of the dungeon from a point very close to the end and one floor is entirely full of pitch-black chambers that snake around into horribly confusing pathways. The final floor is a confusing maze full of damaging tiles nearly every other step full of demons that are themselves nearly max-level with a wide coverage of elemental repel; since demons are so high-level on this floor players will have to grind out levels near the healing fountain in order to actually recruit for new cards.

The first form of Pandora is simple enough, but it begins the battle by reminding the player very quickly that this is in fact a Shin Megami Tensei title, often using turns to buff up with Tarukaja before casting party-wide attack spells. I'm not exaggerating when I say that here, in the final encounter of the game, I felt my jaw drop as soon as I realized that Pandora was going to give me an eleventh-hour kick in the asshole. The training wheels were off. I'd beaten Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse without a single game over. I cleared Nocturne on normal as my first mainline game, I was ready. Nothing would stop me.

My under-leveled Personae and woefully unprepared skill set, which actually consisted of various debuffs and high-level spells, completely crippled my chances of defeating the final boss.

I thought about how simple this game would have been had I only the option to fuse all these stupid, worthless Personae together to form one of my beloved world-ending debuff nuke demons, but this was not meant to be. I had about three of the five ultimate Personae already pre-baked, but not a single one of my characters was high-enough level to equip them. The protagonist was closest at level 57, but his ultimate Persona was level 62. Nanjo and Masao were dragging along behind the rest of the party at a dismal shared level of 46, utterly collapsing my chances of recruiting higher-level demons for fusion. Naturally, because everything about Persona needs to be as convoluted as possible the recruitment level for demons is not the highest level of the party but actually the combined average of the party; since Masao and Nanjo were at such a lower level than everyone else, my party average was no less than six levels lower than the protagonist who was nearly level 60. Yeah, no recruitment in this dungeon.

The worst part about this horrible situation? I'd been there before. I played through the entire game before on Easy Mode, before I knew about fusions and moon cycles and debuffs and Matador and ONE MORE GOD REJECTED and reaching out to the truth and crying about Tokyo Mirage Sessions. See, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona was my first game in either of these series. I'm not some wimp who comes into a franchise at the midway point even though I did exactly that with Nocturne, I'm a man dammit and I'm not about to skip some neat dungeon crawler because some loser waifu idiots wrongfully think Persona 4 is a good game.

Dungeon crawlers were one of the first game genres I was ever exposed to; watching my dad play Shining in the Darkness for the Sega Genesis was an interesting formative memory. It's a fairly little-known spinoff in the Shining Force series and replaces the series trademark tactical strategy combat for a pure first-person dungeon crawling RPG. I was always so enraptured watching him go through the town, stock up, talk to all the characters and listen to the king's plight. I loved watching him navigate through the corridors and rush some poor snakes and whatever other monsters were lurking around--in the darkness.

One of the main reasons I got into this series, and why I'm so bummed about the direction it's taken in recent years, is because I always wanted to break into this style of game. I've always had a very horrible sense of direction and something about the winding corridors of these types of games always intimidated me, but I was just so enthralled by watching my dad confidently play through Shining in the Darkness that I could never drop my fascination with the genre. At the same time, I've always been so intimidated by the style that I never knew the best place to start. I figured Persona would be a great entry point, given how widespread the series popularity has become and since by then the team had so much experience with their mechanics by this point, I was sure it would be a great jumping-in point.

The first time I played Persona, I went into the Pandora battle on easy mode with all my basic, first-level Personae equipped and no idea what debuffs even were. I was beaten so handily that I turned off the game and thought I'd never come back. With the release of Persona 5, I thought I'd come back and take a look at the game with a more weathered pair of eyes, only to constantly come up against nagging issues--specifically, the fusion system. I never thought I'd end up having trouble with it after so much experience, but yet again Pandora completely trashed my team and I was sent back to a save room half an hour away from the boss which I'd already been fighting for half an hour.

To this day, across two full playthroughs, I've had to give up on the final boss of the game. I feel like I could probably grind it out and get those beastly max-level Personae, but what's the use? I already told you about how brilliant the pacing of the game was, how I never once had to stop and grind for experience or spell cards because it's such a smooth ride throughout the game up until the very end. Even the dungeon before Avidya World is fairly difficult, but by the end it felt like the game was merely trying to destroy my spirit. And for now, while I write this review, it's still broken.

The Port

Two versions of Persona exist: the original Playstation Megami Ibunroku: Persona and the PSP remaster Shin Megami Tensei: Persona. Everything about the PSP version is better, and for players who buy the game digitally they can actually play it on a Vita or Playstation TV. It seems redundant to play a game remade for portable systems on a TV, but the spritework and level design looks brilliant on a nice television.

The Playstation version of Persona, released in the West as Revelations: Persona, is less easy on the eyes and I feel much of the reworked visuals went a long way in helping me to enjoy the portable remaster. The city of the original game is a huge, ugly 3D map which requires the player to constantly rotate and double-check locations on a minimap to discern where anything is; the PSP remaster, on the other hand, features a beautifully-drawn 2D map segmented into portions which allow for very simple navigation. Moreover, the Revelations release featured some very odd changes: the town was relocated to a generic American city and all character names were changed to reflect the setting. 

Nanjo became Nate, Reiji became Chris (which caused some very major confusion the brief time I spent with this version of the game), and while other characters suffered some strange sprite alteration no character was hit harder than Masao. Poor, oafish Masao became Mark and was completely changed into a black kid. The horrifying realization that this was likely done because his initial Persona is dressed in tribal attire and the character's negotiation skill is "dancing crazy" is sobering and, while very hilarious, somewhat uncomfortable. Not only this, but the game's difficulty was tweaked by lowering the encounter rate and increasing experience values across the board. It's a pretty horrid way to play an already middling game, though the minute-to-minute dungeon crawling is still just as good as the PSP version. There's also a completely optional side route--not side quest, a full-blown secret campaign hidden from the player--that was completely removed from the Playstation release, though the PSP remaster naturally restores it.

The biggest drawback to playing on the PSP is honestly a rather big one: Megami Ibunroku featured an absolutely stellar soundtrack, a tense and lively mixture of hard rock and unsettling industrial music. It seriously helps set the tone for an eerie trek across a nightmare world and contains some of my favorite music tracks of the Playstation library. The PSP remaster, on the other hand, has replaced nearly all music with annoying, loud, ear-grating J-Pop that actually sounds like it came from the Persona 4 soundtrack. Seriously, at one point I had to stop playing the game to look up a similar track and make sure it wasn't just lifted from the later game. It utterly destroys the atmosphere of the game and every single time I hear "leave dis berry memly" I want to shut the fucking game off and refund the two copies of the game I bought because I can't help but love it.

No seriously, listen to this crap.

To make matters far worse (and funnier), the singer utterly obliterates the pronunciation of the lyrics. I know it's very gauche to make fun of an ESL, but the lyrics are botched to such a ridiculous degree that it's nearly impossible to discern what's actually being conveyed. Just look at the first verse of the song:

Leave this buried memory
This fear-ridden self-consciousness
I'm just a lone prayer

The first line is sang decently with the exception of the obvious Engrish errors, but with the second the entire song collapses in on itself. "This" has been almost entirely skipped past, causing the reading to sound more like "s'fear-ridden" which sounds more like a contraction of "it's." "Ridden" in "fear-ridden" is almost entirely skipped because of the enunciation, while "self" takes two syllables to pronounce. "Consciousness" is fine, if not bizarrely slurred. Rather than "This fear-ridden self-consciousness," it sounds like the singer is shouting S'FEAR-RIN SEH-ELF CONSCIOUSNESS. And that's just silly. Where things take a very dramatic turn for the worst, and the point the song cannot possibly hope to pick itself up over, is the final line where the singer completely forgets the sentence article "a," so rather than the singer telling the listener she is "a lone prayer," which doesn't make any sense, she's telling the listener "I'm just lone prayer." This signifies that she herself is identified as "Lone Prayer," which just makes no sense at all. Hell, the first time I heard the song I thought the lyrics were pure gibberish, then eventually I convinced myself it was:

Leave this valid memory,
Spirits of consciousness
I'm just one player

It still doesn't make much sense, but at least it doesn't sound like garbage.

This is the first verse of the stupid battle song which the player is going to hear with almost permanent frequency, especially in later stages of the game where every three or four steps will cause a random battle to occur. Even if the player nukes the enemy field in one spell, it's almost impossible to skip the first verse of the song. That's disregarding the weird chorus which throws around Japanese lyrics with reckless abandon. In short, the music is a complete mess which makes no grammatical sense and shatters the tone of the game. In a word, it sucks. And don't get me started on the abysmal world map theme which is plagued with poor enunciation, weird grammatical errors, and just a very poor melody. The only good song in the game, and ironically the only one I'd consider great, is the final boss theme. It's even better than the original soundtrack, strangely enough.

There's rumor of a fan patch which replaces almost all of the shitty J-Pop with the wonderful soundtrack of the Playstation game, but I'm not here reviewing a fan fix. If you really want to play the game and don't mind getting your hands dirty--and I want to point out that I suffered through the PSP music so you should too--I recommend at least looking into that.

Given the slew of improvements to the PSP release it's obviously stupid to ever assume the Playstation version is better in any capacity other than music. I always thought of a game's soundtrack as being one of the least important aspects of game design until I played Persona on PSP, but after comparing the two I'm almost stunned that anyone at Atlus thought this was a good idea. If you have to play Persona, I'm sorry that your only option is the musical equivalent to someone spraying diarrhea on a wall and proclaiming it as art.

Verdict

For the majority of its run, Persona is a great dungeon crawler that runs at a brisk pace through some of the best-designed first-person dungeons in the industry. Not overly complex like Strange Journey or mindlessly stupid like Persona 4, Persona has the makings of a great entry into the dungeon crawler genre. That said, the finale of the game utterly destroys the masterful pacing set up in the game's narrative and core mechanics, then spits in the player's face by offering a final boss seemingly lifted from a different game entirely. It's broken my spirit for now, but I don't think I've given up yet--watching the ending on Youtube just doesn't have the same impact. I won't review Persona 2 until I beat Pandora on my own though, so you better hope I get my ass in gear.

Review: The Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild

SPOILER WARNING.
Despite the fact that many of my reviews are clearly mired in spoilers, due to the very recent release of Breath of the Wild it would only be fair to warn all of you readers that this review will spoil the entirety of the game. I'll be discussing the plot in great detail, as well as several of the game's secrets and surprises. If you've already played the game or don't care about spoilers, then please grab a cup of coffee and enjoy my review.



After the success of A Link Between Worlds, the ultimate fate of the Zelda series was left uncertain. On the one hand, the game sold well and was received with open arms from critics and fans alike; on the other, Link Between Worlds was still just the latest incarnation of the handheld titles, and more often than not the game steeped itself in tradition rather than innovating on the franchise. More pressingly, Nintendo's Wii U console had already failed by the time of A Link Between Worlds released and no single game was going to save it--even though the console was merely two years old, Nintendo had all but given up on the poor thing. In 2014, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was announced to roaring excitement, and to top things off Nintendo was dedicated to releasing the game on the Wii U. Breath of the Wild was even going to release the very next year! But like all good things, this never came to pass. A new console launch crept up by necessity, and after an arduous development cycle the game finally released on both the Nintendo Switch and the ill-fated Wii U.

Review: The Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild

Breath of the Wild feels in many ways both a direct apology for the critically divisive Skyward Sword as well as a spit in the eye to everyone who didn't like the previous console entry. The Zelda franchise had been down a long, noticeable spiral toward linear and frankly mediocre gameplay for over a decade by the time of Breath of the Wild's release. It almost seems like Nintendo caught wind of all the fan complaints and finally decided to take drastic measures to create a new title in an effort to blow away both new and old fans.

In a sense, Breath of the Wild is something like Nintendo breaking the glass on a dormant idea: giving the Zelda franchise a reboot. This concept has been swirling around the entertainment industry for a few years now and it's certainly not a new phenomenon, but recently creators have been utilizing this trick with unnerving frequency in, for example, movie sequels. The basic premise between a hard and soft reboot is that the former might keep concepts, character names and traits, while completely eliminating complete character and story arcs--if not the entire world. Marvel is famous for this type of reboot, though considering recent sales figures it's probably for the worst. A soft reboot, on the other hand, acknowledges the events and character arcs that constituted a franchise while introducing new characters or concepts. As a simple contrast, DmC: Devil May Cry and Ghostbusters 2016 are hard reboots while Star Wars: The Force Awakens and now Breath of the Wild can be considered soft reboots.

As in The Force Awakens, Breath of the Wild acknowledges several key events and characters from Zelda history: Link's incarnations are referenced having fought "the twilight" and Ganon is such a consistent threat that the characters are now able to pinpoint his reincarnation nearly to the second. One of the focal points in the story, in fact, is the fact that Hyrule is seemingly over-prepared to fight Ganon: ancient weapons from the Shiekah known as Guardians are unearthed, and while Zelda trains a woefully unprepared Link to battle Ganon, Champions from Hyrule's four main races--the Rito, the Zora, the Gorons, and the Gerudo--are tasked with piloting the Divine Beasts, special Guardians designed by the Shiekah to help fight Ganon. When the battle begins, Ganon easily corrupts both the Guardians and the Divine Beasts, swarming them with manifestations of his Malice as well as copying himself to take control of the Beasts. The Champions are all killed, Link is mortally wounded, and Zelda seals herself and Ganon inside Hyrule Castle until Link can heal and try again.

A strange story element, and one of the most widely-speculated aspects of the game prior to its release, was the fact that Rito and Zora were portrayed alongside one another despite The Wind Waker revealing the Rito as a distant evolution of Zora. The Rito are accustomed to subsisting on the various specks of land making up the Great Sea; why the Zora couldn't thrive in an ocean is completely beyond me--maybe they're freshwater fish--but the game made clear the fact that Rito were the evolved form of Zora, and the Zora likely no longer existed. Looking at the species representation of the game, it's clear only two major races didn't make the cut in Breath of the Wild: the forest-dwelling Kokiri tribe and the woefully-underrepresented Minish. Concept art has since been revealed showing the Minish were planned to be in the game and were sadly scrapped, and it's not too far-fetched to believe the Kokiri were always going to evolve into Koroks at some point in time. Their forms were specific for The Wind Waker because, like the Rito, it was easier for their seeds to spread across the ocean. That said, I'm not such a stickler that I wouldn't buy the notion that Koroks couldn't be the inevitable form of the Kokiri--they were children, after all--but it seemed instead like Nintendo wanted to be as safe and inclusive with this title as humanly possible.

The reasons for this are simple: for one, while Skyward Sword reviewed well with critics, it's not as well-liked with fans. In fact, a quick check of the Metacritic score shows a user rating of 8.1--taking into consideration the negative review bombing which commonly takes place on Metacritic as well as what I'll refer to as the "Zelda curve," this still seems like a fairly low number for a title in such a venerated franchise. Nintendo is extremely protective of their intellectual property; after Metroid: Other M failed both critically and commercially, Nintendo all but scrubbed development of the series. While a cheap spinoff did release in 2016 (also to negative reviews), the company was so protective of the franchise that they sent a DMCA notice to a long-awaited fan remake of the second game in the series--a game so good I retroactively changed my game of the year list to place it at the second spot--simply to "protect their property." I'm more of the mind that this is just what Nintendo does when a franchise isn't doing gangbusters either critically or commercially. The Metroid franchise has never been the greatest-selling IP in Nintendo's catalog, so it's not a surprise they ignored the Metroid 25th Anniversary simply because the latest title didn't do so well.

But this isn't Metroid we're talking about. Zelda is about the biggest thing in the entirety of video games; in my review of Ocarina of Time, I proclaimed that the search for "video game's Citizen Kane" has long since been solved, and Ocarina was that title. The franchise single-handedly created the Action RPG genre and ushered in an era of games that shaped the industry's landscape forever. That's not even to mention the ludicrous sales associated with each new Zelda title; as I mentioned in my Twilight Princess review, this is a series that sells consoles by itself. But like I also said in that review, this is a franchise that was suddenly imperfect in many people's eyes, a series which had long lost its way. While Majora's Mask was a controversial title, it gained its reputation as an odd, daring side story which tackled dark subject matter in a heavily atmospheric world. Twilight Princess, to some (me), was just bad. And with Skyward Sword, that downward trend was only confirmed.

A Link Between Worlds brought back love for the series, but that was a handheld sequel to a game made two decades ago and not a sprawling, brand-new 3D Zelda title. While many people hold at least one top-down Zelda as a favorite game of the series, 3D Zelda games are always met with a certain gravitas in the industry. After Skyward Sword, Nintendo was left with the broken remains of their franchise, and with no thanks to the failure of the Wii U it would take desperate action to revitalize interest in their series. If you were in their shoes, what would you have done? That's not rhetorical, I'm literally asking that. On the one hand, it would have been simple to just go back and make another old sequel, but that presents another, more irritating problem:

This is how nightmares are born.

The Zelda timeline is a huge, distorted, ugly, intimidating mess. Callbacks to previous games in the series range from shallow reference to important world details and there's absolutely no consistency between games--even those in the same "timeline." The princess of Zelda II is referred to as "Princess Zelda I," but I really doubt she's the princess from Ocarina of Time--especially given that didn't take into account the princesses of A Link to the Past or A Link Between Worlds. Hyrule is apparently suffering from massive, world-destroying tectonic activity as the Hyrule from Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess share almost no similarities, and that's not to mention the fact that the Gerudo tribe has apparently been exterminated entirely between Ocarina of Time and A Link to the Past.

What Nintendo needed to do was simply not encourage the drooling timeline idiots demanding an explanation to the shallow plot for their children's toy. Zelda is like Final Fantasy: each world is different, but concepts and characters can just exist with no explanation necessary. Just because a few of the games are canonical sequels doesn't mean the entire franchise needs to be connected, which is further complicated by the fact that Hyrule was completely eradicated by the gods prior to the events of The Wind Waker. All that was needed was a simple throw-away line that the Great Ocean was the apocalyptic remains of Hyrule. I had no problem with the franchise being composed entirely of episodic vignettes about a kingdom besieged by monsters and a lone hero rising up to stop the tides of darkness with the help of a powerful princess and a magic triangle. Rather, Nintendo had to cave to the ravening horde by stitching together a patchwork mess and just calling it a day--which is why Link's hat, given to him by Ezlo, is suddenly just some stupid, impractical piece of armor for ancient bird-riding sky warriors. The amount of dumb inconsistencies this timeline creates is frankly too annoying to bother with, but the fact that it exists at all leads to an even bigger problem:

What do you do with a series with four detailed timelines, all with distinct races, art styles, mechanics, and tone?

The easy answer is to start from scratch, but at that point the game wouldn't really be Zelda. While it would be easy to just throw a dart at a board and hit any one game to make a sequel to, it would just be that: another Zelda sequel. If the series was given a hard reboot, then why bother calling it Zelda? At that point it's just another open-world game with a blonde protagonist and elements of exploration.

The solution? Jump the plot forward ten thousand years into the future and just do away with specific callbacks. Breath of the Wild is full of references to past games, but they don't particularly feel like major pulls from the series past. Instead, they're just Easter Eggs. In a sense, it's exactly what I wanted from a Zelda game in terms of story. The story is apocalyptic like Wind Waker, there's a frightening moon like Majora's Mask, species from Ocarna of Time and Wind Waker are present, the Master Sword shines in the face of evil like A Link to the Past and Twilight Princess, and Fi somehow still exists despite being a chunk of metal for several millennia.

The references to Skyward Sword--the Goddess Statue, mentions of the Goddess Hylia, Fi being referenced in a flashback, the nearly-nonexistent presence of the Triforce and no mention of the Goddesses outside of those stupid Twilight Princess provinces--are absolutely the most clear examples of references to past games, but this is what I meant when I say the game can feel like a spit in the eye to people who didn't like Nintendo's stupid robot waifu. It's like Aonuma himself looked at all the negative reception and created a game that was designed totally different than Skyward Sword, but then sprinkled in references as if it was the most recent story in the franchise. The events of Skyward Sword had been so long forgotten in even the next game in the timeline that suddenly cramming them into Breath of the Wild feels horribly forced. If there was a sudden revival in worship of Hylia at some point in Hyrule, the developers should have included that as an element of world building--and if it actually was in the game, then I completely missed it and it should have been conveyed more clearly. Rather, I'm of the mind that it's the former and Aonuma simply did not care.

Despite the very clear similarities between the plot of Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild, the games could not possibly have been designed differently. As Breath of the Wild begins, the player awakens as Link and is given very limited hints to where to go. After climbing from the opening cave and activating the first tower, King Rhoam tasks the player with tackling the first four shrines in exchange for the paraglider. The opening gives players a brief glimpse into the level of preparedness they'll need to take in approaching many of the game's challenges, as two of the shrines are located inside areas of extreme weather conditions. It's not strictly necessary to obtain the paraglider; some speedrunners have supposedly found methods to skip the "tutorial," but the paraglider is still a vital component to traversal. Whereas the first hour of Skyward Sword tasked players with a linear tutorial and overly-written cutscenes, Breath of the Wild drops players into a miniature version of the world before opening the far greater land mass of Hyrule.

Where Skyward Sword draws out its opening and takes hours before introducing its antagonist, Breath of the Wild gives the player the quest "Defeat Ganon" the moment they activate the first tower. Naturally, this quest is completed the moment the player beats the game, signifying that the first major quest is the most important. While many subplots and events occur between Ganon's first and final appearances, the goal of the game always leads back to the first quest to defeat Ganon. The biggest downside here, though, is that Ganon has been utterly ruined as a character. Not like he was always this terrifically-written character to begin with, especially as the series went along, but his characterization in games like The Wind Waker made him one of the most memorable villains in video game history. Where the character was just a simple bandit who managed to come across great magical power in the games leading up to Ocarina of Time, The Wind Waker managed to humanize the legendary villain by giving him a purpose and an extremely relatable motivation. In Breath of the Wild, Ganon is literally just a manifestation of the most evil horror in history, prior character development be damned.

Tutorials still exist, but they're far more stripped down than in any other 3D title in the series. In most cases, a simple pop-up screen will detail button prompts and mechanics that players might miss out on such as parrying, but gone are the days of long-winded recaps and explanations of concepts which might take a whole one button press to accomplish. While I'm stoked that Nintendo seems to have learned their lesson after decades of fan complaints, the truth of the matter is that this is partly due to the fact that many mechanics from the previous games have been scrubbed clean. Granted, content bloat was certainly a serious problem of the Zelda series by this point, but some missing features are just baffling.

A few returning skills are purely delightful; for example, the parry returns from Skyward Sword, though this time the parry window is far more punishing: not only are monsters far more damaging than any in the series since the original Zelda, but item degradation is a serious concern and missing parries can seriously damage shields. Item durability has been a sticking point in much of the criticism of Breath of the Wild, and I don't have much to add. However, the problem is far more serious than most professional reviews would let on; if I rated games on a numerical scale, the poor implementation of weapon degradation would knock the game at least a full point immediately. Weapons feel like they're made of bread at best, and it's such an extreme departure from the direction mainstream games are taking in terms of durability mechanics that it seems like Nintendo was trying to go to the absolute breaking point--get it?

The point of durability in many games is to make sure players keep a variety of weapons on hand at any given time. For example, a player might be conflicted over their Spear of Ass Spankery for its insane damage or their Shortsword of Whatever because it can attack twenty times in a second; with durability, the player will be forced into a situation where they will want to minimize the threat of their weapon breaking by simply alternating between their favorite weapons. It's almost a faux pas to make the comparison at this point, but an example of this is the later Dark Souls games. While Demon's, Dark 1 and Bloodborne have slow-building durability, Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III contain durability meters that degrade much faster but fully recharge when visiting a bonfire. The player can choose to respawn enemies and restore both their health and weapon durability, but a skilled player will likely have a back-up alternate weapon in case a situation becomes dire. A simpler reason, of course, is just to add variety to playstyles which might become dull if the player sticks with the same weapon over the course of their adventure.

Breath of the Wild eschews this in such an insultingly stupid way that I have to wonder if Nintendo did it as yet another kick in the face to people complaining the series was too easy. Players might have weapons they gravitate toward or some weapons they outright cannot stand, but because of the durability mechanic in Breath of the Wild there's always a very real threat that the player might only have access to the latter. All weapons of a specific type control the same: boomerangs and swords have short swipes and can charge a spin attack, though boomerangs can be thrown and caught; longswords, hammers, and great boomerangs attack much more slowly and have spin attacks that cause Link to spin around in a circle, followed by a ground slam. Spears will always attack in a jab with a flurry attack to charge, and finally wands can throw the element of their chosen type. I'm sure there are more weapons I'm forgetting, but these are the important ones. For my part, I couldn't stand the heavy weapon types--I replaced the weakest heavy weapon the instant I picked up another weapon I liked and actually had to force myself to use my surplus of heavy weapons to make sure I had my favorite weapons for situations I thought they'd come in useful. The point is this: I made myself have less fun because the alternative was to waste the weapons that I'd actually have fun with.

Aside from the fact that some weapon types might be outright dull or uninteresting for some players, there's also the irritating fact that all the weapons combined have less movesets than the sword from Ocarina of Time. For example, the quick swipes of the standard sword can be further simplified as "horizontal swipes," though the finishing attack is (I believe) vertical. Simplified even further, the sword combo is always the same sword combo, the heavy combo is always the heavy combo, and so on. Ironically, bows have more variety and all you do with those is point a cursor and kill things. Compare Breath of the Wild's standard four-hit combo with the various attacks from Ocarina of Time:

If the player only taps the attack button, Link swings his sword horizontally--and only horizontally. If the player holds the analog stick forward and taps attack, or if the player locks on, Link will attack with a vertical swing. A thrust attack can be utilized ending in a vertical slice upward by holding the stick forward and Z-targeting, and finally Link can release a short stab if the player holds up the shield and taps the attack button.

The point in these various attack modes is to give players a great deal of utility when fighting monsters in multiple scenarios. The player could pull out their ranged weapon and attack a flying enemy like the keese, but an important component in every Zelda game is the conservation of consumable items. Rather, the player will have a much easier time dispatching something like a keese if they simply lock on and take advantage of the game's built-in vertical slash. Breath of the Wild is bafflingly much more simplistic in terms of combat, restricting attack combos to the same four-hit attack for each weapon type. To make matters even more stupid, none of these weapons have a simple vertical attack. Link does a decent job at aiming his sword at targets he's locked onto, but the fact that the only solution is an imperfect one when the same series did away with this problem in its first iteration is insulting. Again, it's like Aonuma saw that people rejected Skyward Sword by the thousands and decided to take away that game's promise of swordplay by limiting the player's attack options to nothing. And don't give me some shit about just finding some arrows and shooting at keese; arrows are extremely expensive in Breath of the Wild--well, compared to earlier games when they simply dropped from shrubs and grass.

Lock-on even takes a step back from prior games in the series. Z- or L-targeting didn't just give players the ability to focus on a single enemy at a time, it also intelligently framed combat in a cinematic and easily-understood image, completely doing away with the camera control issues which plagued the 5th generation of consoles. The targeting mode used in Breath of the Wild is finicky at best and reminds me much more of the lock-on used for the Monster Hunter series. While the camera does manage to stick to an enemy that doesn't move around much, it's far too easy for the camera to either get distracted or simply decide it doesn't want to track said enemy anymore.

This one problem turns the already-nightmarish Thunderblight Ganon boss into a busy, annoying, unintuitive nightmare. The boss zips around the arena, breaking lock-on at any given point and rushing in to deal several hearts' worth of damage as well as paralyzing Link in one hit. To make matters worse, players need to reorient themselves to face the boss if they want to raise their shield, but the best method of defeating this boss is to jump backward and use the flurry attack after dodging--though since the player is already unable to track the boss's movements, this makes what would be a fun battle of dodging and parrying into an eye-bleedingly horrible affair and easily one of the worst bosses in the history of the franchise.

Another problem in this fight stems from a removed mechanic, one which I absolutely dread thinking is gone forever: the dodge roll. Rolling has always been a great mobility option and given the more action-oriented direction of the series, a well-timed dodge roll could have worked in tandem with the dodge-jumping used for flurry attacks. There's literally no excuse for the roll to be completely removed, but here we are: the first 3D Zelda without a dodge roll and it actually suffers from its removal. The developers could have found a thousand and one ways to both implement the roll and find creative uses for it in the context of Breath of the Wild, but they went the easy route and just cut it completely. All in all, combat is functional and flows quickly, but this is largely due to the annoying durability problem and limited movesets for each weapon type. With more variety, this could have been one of the best in the franchise but as it is now, the combat in Breath of the Wild is simply tedious. I found myself avoiding combat whenever possible, a negative trait for a game with this much polish.

Instead, the developers refined the stamina wheel from Skyward Sword and I guess this is just permanently replacing the magic meter. Don't get me wrong, Breath of the Wild does in fact benefit from the removal of magic, but the way stamina is handled in this game is completely wrong. The player begins the game with a shortened meter and are given the ability to increase their stamina by trading in "spirit orbs," rewards for completing shrine puzzles. Four orbs can be traded for one-fifth of a new stamina wheel, up to a maximum of three, or a new heart container. While players should naturally be tempted to go for more maximum health, the game's free-form climbing mechanics make exploration difficult if players aren't augmenting their stamina. The developers likely intended for players to increase both stats evenly, but the core theme of the game is to explore everything and that theme is hampered with a smaller stamina meter.

Confusing this point is the ludicrous damage enemies deal out to the player even from the start of the game, and rather than hearts dropping in the wild players need to instead gather and cook food. The prevalent theme of Breath of the Wild is that of survival, and the necessity to cook food is one of the most notable examples. Ingredients give various effects such as increased stealth, extra stamina, stronger resistance to elements and so on. The game teaches the player the importance of cooking while still on the Great Plateau; the two shrines located in extreme weather conditions require the player to cook a hot meal with peppers, which are situated right outside of the gate leading into the cold area. Just slightly further away from the peppers is a small enemy encampment with a bowl used for cooking; given the cooking tutorial by Rhoam near the beginning of the game, the cooking element serves as a minor riddle in order to progress.

Naturally, armor sets are sprinkled throughout Hyrule which give players various resistances and defensive boosts. The need to cook, for example, warm meals or meals which increase the player's stealth capability can be entirely negated once the player picks up armor sets such as the Snowquill set--which boosts the player's cold resistance to its highest point--or the Stealth set. Most of these armor pieces can be bought in stores, and no armor is inherently better than another. I'd go so far as to say armor is one of my favorite aspects of Breath of the Wild if only for the sense of progression it allows players; where cooking arduous meals is a core component in the early game, this is completely removed once the respective elemental armor set is picked up. Cooking can be an irritating necessity when first starting the game since Breath of the Wild does not contain a recipe book--a feature which desperately needs to be patched in--but retrieving helpful armor and negating the need to cook is a great reward.

Rather than spending time cooking meals just to survive, cooking in the later game ends up resembling alchemy from other open-world games. Elixirs can be created to give Link such boosts as attack and defense, as well as all manner of bonuses in between. While not necessary like the extreme weather recipes, players can benefit greatly by cooking up several elixirs before heading into battle; only one effect lasts at a time, but unlike past games Breath of the Wild does not feature any sort of bottle system. Cooked food (EDIT: a good friend corrected me in this, apparently there is a limit to cooked food which is stupid), raw materials, key items, and armor have unlimited slots for the player, but in an annoying turn the player has a very limited amount of melee weapons, bows, and shields to equip.

Forcing the player into a situation where they might have to throw away a weapon they're attached to is a harsh-enough punishment for any game of this size, but given the game's already crushing durability mechanic this just comes off as cruel. Players might find a rare sword that vastly overpowers a weapon they quite like, but it could have a much lower durability than any of their other powerful weapons and end up being a liability instead. The fact that the player will be forced to make these kinds of decisions is an absurd limitation--if the game only had severe durability or limited weapon slots, I feel it would have been a much better system. The mere act of carrying around gear to survive shouldn't lead to stressful situations, but Nintendo wanted to go all-in with the survival theme and this is the result. I also believe this could also have been slightly alleviated if the game had not made the move to the Switch at all; as a business decision I know it would have been too risky to leave the game on a dead platform, but too many useful quality of life improvements were dropped as a result. The touch screen could have trivialized much of the headache surrounding inventory management, and being able to look down at the screen for a map at any time would have been a godsend. As it is, the Wii U version utilizes its platform even worse than the superb HD Remasters of The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess.

An NPC named Hestu can be found throughout the world who can upgrade the player's maximum bag size in exchange for Korok Seeds. These seeds can be found by various means throughout the open world, often indicated by a telltale jingle somewhere in the open world. It's likely the developers never intended for players to seek out every single individual Korok--they wouldn't have thrown in nine hundred of the little bastards if that were the case--but the puzzles they give players are short and fun. The rewards are well worth it, especially if the player is having problems managing their inventory.

One of my biggest complaints about Hestu is simply that his first appearance does not work with open-world game design. If players take the standard ground route to Kakariko village he'll be found on the side of the road, then later he's found closer to the center of the map. The big problem here comes from the open-ended design: in my first trek to Kakariko, I climbed a tower and used the paraglider to sail across to the side of a mountain overlooking the village, coming in through the back and foregoing the natural entry altogether. I didn't find Hestu until a bit later while searching for Link's Memories, and if I hadn't gotten lost taking an NPC's directions I likely would never have found him--or worse, I'd need to resort to a guide. Hestu gives me the idea that Nintendo is still thinking with an intended path in mind, despite the fact that the game so brazenly declares that the player can go anywhere and do anything. If Hestu is any indication, the developers still had a small inkling that they wanted players to go down an intended path. Of course, this is also indicated in the forced tutorial section on the Great Plateau which serves to naturally teach players how to use their Sheikah Slate powers naturally, but it's far from the free-roaming game the developers would have players believe.

Another problem stems from the game's insistence on following vague directions and hints. Don't get me wrong on this: I adore the fact that this game refuses to just set a waypoint in a fit of laziness. Even The Witcher 3, my favorite open-world game, still sets waypoints for the player in many instances rather than respecting the player's comprehension and sense of direction. The problem with Breath of the Wild is that directions given by many NPCs, especially with Link's Memories, are vague to a point of frustration Although I will admit that maybe I'm just coddled--I'm not too proud to admit that recent "innovations" in the genre have caused expectations for the player to be lazy, and I'm definitely guilty of this as well.

I don't mind the thought of Zelda taking hints from genres like old roguelikes or the hardcore mode from Fallout: New Vegas, but many survival aspects are implemented unevenly. The cooking mechanic only exists to give health, but at a certain point the player is likely going to only be cooking for mid-boss health items rather than for survival; because fast travel is so easy to use, bosses are the only times when a player will ever be in a dangerous situation. Furthermore, inns can be used to restore player health but there's no fatigue mechanic whatsoever. Fatigue would have gone a long way in immersing the player in the survival aspect, giving players incentive to find shelter and rest. The developers wanted to have their cake and eat it too, but tying everything to restoring health or giving stat bonuses is a shallow implementation of a mechanic that could have really helped the game to stand out.

Fast travel points are unlocked in three ways: the first is in discovering towers. Towers are becoming an annoying standard in open-world games but I believe Breath of the Wild implements them fairly well; rather than unlocking a slew of check-list items across the in-game map, activating towers merely fills in the map and gives players a centralized fast-travel point. Because the paraglider uses a very small amount of Link's stamina, the player can easily stand at the top of a tower, pick a location, and freely glide to that point without much difficulty. The only time I ever found myself panicking when paragliding was when surrounded by a number of Guardians, but timing their shots and briefly letting go of the paraglider often dodged the bullets with time to spare.

Guardians serve as the Beamos in Breath of the Wild, and unlike many of the other returning monsters from the franchise these enemies have seen a drastic overhaul. Beamos were always an annoying staple of Zelda dungeons, but not in such a way that I wish they'd been removed. Rather, seeing a Beamos scanning a room in previous dungeons would always lead to situations where the player would have to tread carefully to avoid their gaze, but by the time the Beamos noticed it became more of a trick to avoiding their laser. Guardians take this concept and stretch it across miles of open land in Hyrule Field where cover is hard to come by. As Link has annoyingly been stripped of his dodge roll, avoiding beams can be extremely difficult even if the player is far away from the Guardians themselves. Additionally, Guardians can cover vast distances in seconds, vastly outpacing Link on foot.

Horses can be tamed and kept in stables and these are often the best method of outrunning a Guardian, but confrontations can still be very tense. Because traveling through the air is so much easier and less hazardous than simply running on the ground, horses have very limited utility and are typically only useful when the player needs to cover more land than the paraglider can cross, though taming horses can be tricky. If the player doesn't already have enough stamina, taming a horse once can take several minutes of mounting the horse, tapping the button to calm it, being knocked off and starting the process over multiple times. Taming a few horses when the player comes across them is usually a good idea, but seeking out a horse is often more trouble than it's worth especially when the player then has to lug them to the nearest stable, which might be miles away. One good horse can last the player the entire game, but otherwise it's mostly cosmetic. Taming a horse can lead to a pretty cool moment during the final boss, but only if the player has grown attached to their own horse and actually cares about that sort of thing.

The second method of fast travel is also useful in fighting the final boss: conquering each Divine Beast. Each of the four Divine Beasts will take a sliver off of the final boss's health up to a maximum of half his entire health bar, and because the boss can be extremely difficult it's not recommended fighting him until after all of the Beasts have been purified. Additionally, without defeating the Divine Beasts the player will be forced to face each of the Beasts' Blight Ganon bosses in a row before facing the final boss at full health--unless the player is ready for one of the most difficult boss rushes in all of video games, it's more of a hassle than it's worth. The Beasts themselves situate themselves in useful fast-travel locations, giving the player just that little extra incentive to tackle them before the final boss.

Not only do the Divine Beasts give access to new fast travel spots and help with the final boss, the Champions inside each Beast will bestow to Link a special spell, each with a multitude of gameplay perks. Mipha's Grace almost entirely does away with the need to cook healing food as it not only heals Link for his full health upon death, but also grants him extra hearts at once. Revali's Gale allows the player to create an enormous updraft which allows the player to skip massive vertical challenges in the world, which in turn greatly reduces the need to grind orbs for the stamina bar. The other two powers are purely combat-focused, and each one of the spells exist on a cooldown rather than being tied to magic meter. I'm also overjoyed with the return of big magic spells, of which the attack spell is almost directly similar to the lightning spell from A Link to the Past.

The Divine Beasts serve as Breath of the Wild's dungeons and they're somewhat interesting, though each of them is far too short and none of them have enough enemies to be challenging. That said, the puzzles in each Divine Beast require some very precise timing on the player's part, and many of the puzzles required to finish the dungeon are some of the best in the series. Players need to utilize all of their skills in tandem in order to clear most of the challenges in each dungeon; I mentioned in my review of Majora's Mask that I appreciate the smaller dungeon count as it gives players a greater sense of accomplishment when finally overcoming them, as rather than feeling like a checklist it gives the player the sense that a large chunk of the map has been dominated. I'd have preferred a larger number of dungeons, but the four in Breath of the Wild are some of the best in the series and the abilities they give serve as great power boosts. Regrettably, Breath of the Wild does share one of my main complaints with A Link Between Worlds: because no intended order exists for each dungeon, this means there's no sense of progression when deciding on an order to take on each Divine Beast. Some do feel harder than others--Thunderblight Ganon, for instance, is far harder than any of the other bosses in the game--but the game never gives an indication of which Beast might be more difficult. Since the Beasts can still be approached in any order though, the game's difficulty is balanced accordingly which completely throws off player progression.

Cooldowns are the new method of forcing the player to conserve their power, a holdover from the recharging magic system used in A Link Between Worlds. Players are given two different types of bombs--each on their own cooldown--which greatly helps in narrowing down the dozens of items players would typically have to keep track of. Unlike previous games, every single spell and ability is tied to its own internal cooldown, some being much longer than others. Cooldowns also change depending on the strength of each power; Mipha's Grace takes an extremely long time to recharge, while bombs can be recharged in a matter of seconds. Magnesis and Cryonis have no cooldowns, while Stasis takes longer to recharge. An NPC can upgrade Runes to be more potent as well as reduce their cooldown timer, which might not seem like a major boost but can strengthen the player's abilities quite a bit. The only item from A Link Between Worlds not tied to a cooldown is the bow and arrow, which suffer from the same paper-quality durability as every other weapon in the game. Ironically, bows last far longer than their melee counterparts, but this might have something to do with the less frequent uses for the bow and arrow. Arrows are also somewhat difficult to come by with some players opting to just stand around in enemy camps and run around while monsters shoot at them, picking up the resulting arrows after grinding for several minutes. Players can buy arrows from shops, but currency is better saved for more expensive items.

Rupees can still be dropped by enemies, though the amount found this way is generally low. Enemy encampments often feature a single chest which unlocks when the player clears the camp, and shrines will usually have one chest with a high number of rupees. What makes currency so annoying in Breath of the Wild is the frankly ridiculous price of many important items; full armor sets can range anywhere from 1,500 rupees to a staggering 5,000 for every piece of gear. The fairies which are used to upgrade individual pieces of armor might not require rupees to upgrade gear pieces, but players still need to invest large sums of money in order to access each fairy. For the final fairy fountain, the player needs to drop ten thousand rupees to unlock her. Each fairy upgrades items in the same way, but the player is only allowed to upgrade their gear in accordance with the number of fairies unlocked throughout the world. If the player only has three fairies unlocked, they can only upgrade their gear three times--if the player wants to upgrade all the way, they'd better start saving early. This also means eschewing other useful investments throughout the game, one being a quaint house which I actually never found until I read about it online.

Outright grinding has never been a problem in modern Zelda games, barring the unfortunate Triforce hunt in the original version of The Wind Waker. The original game arguably forced players into searching for rupees in order to buy some of the more ridiculous items, but this was a holdover from older role-playing games which forced players to constantly buy new pieces of gear throughout the adventure. Breath of the Wild was co-developed by Monolith Studios, developers behind the enormous Xenoblade and Xenoblade X, both games which are heavily inspired by MMORPGs. That influence is felt most clearly in the late-game activites in Breath of the Wild, not the least of which is seen in the game's massive rupee dumps like player housing and fairies. More insidiously, players will need to grind out raw materials in order to upgrade individual pieces of armor; for example, the Champion's Tunic is one of the first pieces of armor the player can find and it's even given for free, but in order to upgrade it players need to carve off parts of the three dragons roaming around the open world.

The dragons spawn at set intervals, often at night and always in one fixed location. These dragons will drop one item per spawn, and it's always the first body part the player shoots off. If the player is unable to get the pieces they need, they'll then have to go back to a rest point and start all over again. This is only for one upgrade, mind you, and even then only one of the two materials needed to upgrade. Not every piece of armor requires materials this annoying to procure, but many of the best pieces of armor do--the Barbarian Armor, Guardian Armor, and Champion's Tunic just so happen to be among the most infuriating and time-consuming.

To really make all this more annoying, by the time the player has fully upgraded these pieces of armor they'll likely have nothing to use it on. Ganon is the ultimate goal of the game and everything builds up to his and Link's confrontation; despite this, Ganon can easily be beaten with armor found early in the game without any upgrades. If the player has defeated every Divine Beast, Ganon is even easier; in fact, most of the more difficult parts of the Ganon boss battle can be completely trivialized with Urbosa's Fury and none of his attacks can completely break Daruk's Protection. Playing the game normally, as it were, is a far more lucrative use of the player's time than pointlessly grinding out upgrade materials. The reason being is that there is absolutely no post-game to speak of.

Post-game content exists for players who both want to get the most out of a video game and have defeated every challenge found in the main game. Ganon is a mildly difficult boss, but he's nothing special; so long as the player finds the Master Sword and finishes the four dungeons, the final boss can be beaten without much effort. While Lynels and Guardians can be a fun distraction after the player has beaten the game, there's not much of a reason to fight them other than for the materials they drop. In many games, especially role-playing games of this type, the player will be collecting materials from some of the strongest enemies and rare monsters in order to build up to a secret or elusive target, one much harder than the main game can muster. Xenoblade X is a great example of this with numerous monsters dozens of levels higher than the hard level cap, but no such trial exists in Breath of the Wild. The obvious answer might be "they'll add in a superboss with the DLC," but downloadable content requiring a secondary purchase should never be the incentive to keep the player invested in the main game. Breath of the Wild is in desperate need of super-bosses which only give rewards to players who can beat them, and even then they should be nigh-impossible to players without fully-upgraded armor. The only other alternative would be for higher difficulty options which basically force players to upgrade their armor.

Higher difficulty modes have been standard since Skyward Sword, typically in the form of Hero Mode. Every single re-release of a 3D game, as well as A Link Between Worlds, has featured a variation of Hero Mode with the sole exception being Majora's Mask 3D, a game I already have very mixed feelings about. Hero Mode, or Second Quest in the original Zelda, gave players a mode which allowed players to approach the game in a new context, often with much harder enemies and some element of the game being different. In Ocarina of Time 3D and Twilight Princess Remastered, for example, the different element was the entire game world being reversed. Breath of the Wild, the most free-form game in the series, could have used Second Quest in order to revamp enemy placement as well as gear drops, giving the player an experience not unlike a roguelike game. Even concepts such as permadeath could have easily been implemented if the developers had taken the time to flesh out the concept.

Instead of Second Quest or Hero Mode, players are given nothing. There's nothing at all to do with the game after beating Ganon because there are no substantial rewards for continuing to play the game. Hero Mode could have given players reason to upgrade their materials and Second Quest could have been used to randomize parts of the world, but the only vague conclusion given by Nintendo was "wait for the DLC." I don't want to. I have no interest in playing Breath of the Wild anymore, and I highly doubt the DLC will change that.

One of the biggest reasons I completely lost interest in the game lies in the third method of fast travel the player can unlock: the shrines. Shrines are introduced as soon as players activate the first tower, which Rhoam presses the player into completing in exchange for his paraglider. While these first four shrines give players access to their Runes, this also manipulates players into forming a sort of routine: find a shrine, complete its annoying puzzle, and get a small reward. Each shrine gives players a spirit orb and contain secret chests, but when activated each shrine also gives players a fast travel point. By the end of the game, players will be able to fast travel to nearly every square inch of the map so long as they've been scouring the landscape for shrines; while the fast travel aspect is a boon, I'm less satisfied with the implications of these shrines and their easily handed-out rewards.

About twenty hours in, I had already found the location of the Master Sword and made it a point to come back to it each time I upgraded my health. One dungeon down and six heart containers later, I returned sure of my chances of finally retrieving the sword. When I inevitably died, I became frustrated and took to the internet for answers. In order to obtain the Master Sword, the coolest sword in all of video games and the turning point in all Zelda games since A Link to the Past, the player was required to boost their maximum health to thirteen heart containers. Even if the player finished every single Divine Beast, that still left them with five full heart containers before they were able to pull out the Master Sword, assuming they used the first four spirit orbs from the Great Plateau for a heart. In that case, the player would need to complete an additional twenty shrines before they could use the Master Sword.

Much like the confused grinding progression of the post-game in Breath of the Wild, it makes no sense for the player to wait until they've beaten all four Divine Beasts before pulling out the Master Sword. As the Deku Tree tells the player, the sword is only at its fullest power when facing monsters corrupted by Malice; outside of Guardians on the world map, this means the Master Sword is only at full power when players are inside a dungeon. Not shrines, only Divine Beasts--the Master Sword won't activate its full power even when facing Guardians in dungeons, so it is never going to be used to its full potential unless used in dungeons. So what's the point in finishing every dungeon first if the player is unable to use the best, most amazing sword in all of video games to clear them out? And don't forget, once a Divine Beast has been conquered there's no way for a player to return to the dungeon inside of it.

With this in mind, I started to scour the world for my shrines. Finding shrines is rarely a problem, especially once players climb enough towers and have the ability to scout them out from a distance. Since unvisited shrines glow orange, it's very easy to identify them against the landscape--with that in mind, I made my way through the rainy plains in the south. My first problem arose almost immediately: as soon as I hit the new area, it began raining.

Aside from the environment growing hot or cold, weather events like rain and thunderstorms can begin at random intervals throughout the world of Hyrule. Storms carry one of the biggest risks in the game, as any piece of metallic gear worn by Link can cause him to become struck by lightning. The game gives ample warning when the lightning is about to come down, and opening the player's inventory will show each dangerous item with a spark over its image. Lightning can kill a player even with a large amount of hearts, so it's advised to put away everything as soon as the weather indicator shows storms.

Part of the charm of Breath of the Wild is the various ways in which the game's multiple mechanics will interact with each other in deep, unique ways. Lightning during thunderstorms is one example, but players can still use it to their advantage. If facing down an enemy in a storm, players can throw a sword at an enemy to trick them into picking it up. Given that most enemies will take the bait, it won't take long to have them fried with electricity the moment the weapon is picked up. Rain can also put out fires, but the player can start a fire of their own. Grass is highly flammable and if it spreads enough, the fire can grow at a rapid pace. Not only that, but a large brush fire can cause an updraft which the player can then use to jump over and activate their paraglider for a much higher jump. These are only a very few examples, but given the sheer scope of the game it's highly impressive just how many ways the developers were able to tie each mechanic into one another and create a vibrant and living world.

Rain also has one major side effect which greatly hampers exploration: walls that could normally be climbed by the player will cause them to slip and lose much of their progress, and since stamina is such a precious resource there might be times when the player is unable to proceed up sheer cliffs without waiting the rain out.

Thus did I find my next hurdle: shrines for days on the mountain above, but no way to actually reach them without waiting out the rain. My next course of action was to get out some firewood and use its ability to wait for time to pass to skip the rain. And there did my next problem arise: the southern plains were completely open without a canopy to wait under. The weather report showed that the rain would last for hours to come, and since I had only finished Divine Beast Vah Ruta I didn't have the incredibly important Revali's Gale to scale the cliff. The solution? Give up and go somewhere else.

Because I only had two heart containers from shrines and one from a Divine Beast, my search for twenty eight shrines had resulted in an hour of wasted effort and not a thing to show for it. Worse yet, if I decided to devote spirit orbs to stamina and make my quest a little easier, that would just increase the already annoying time investment spent looking for shrines for their heart containers. I eventually said screw it and went off in another direction. By the time I got halfway done with my stupid quest, over five hours had passed and I was officially done having fun with the game. Shrines almost always consist of physics puzzles and tests of strength, with the very rare case of a long mini-dungeon. Breath of the Wild contains 120 shrines and almost all of them are single-room puzzles that use one Rune at a time, occasionally branching off to a second room for a few rupees. When faced with the same monotonous content over and over, a very real pattern starts emerging.

At this halfway point, I realized that I was level-grinding. Sure, it might not be exactly the same as fighting monsters and leveling up stats, but the exact same concept was being applied to my quest for the master sword. Level grinding. Breath of the Wild returns to a concept from the original Zelda: in order to obtain stronger weapons, the player must first prove their strength by obtaining hearts. With The Legend of Zelda, players needed to obtain five hearts for the White Sword and twelve hearts for the Magical Sword. Five spare heart containers can be found in the wild, which means by the end of the game the player will have gained up to eleven hearts simply by clearing dungeons out normally. In order to prove their strength to the old man to obtain the Magical Sword, players only need to find one extra heart container throughout the entire game, and the White Sword can even be retrieved before the first dungeon is entered.

The prerequisites for the Master Sword in Breath of the Wild are so utterly absurd that part of me wonders why they even bothered. A much better alternative would have been to unlock the Master Sword at six hearts--if the player picked up a heart container from the Great Plateau and finished two dungeons normally, they'd be ready to pick up the sword. Additionally, the player could do eight shrines extra and go complete some dungeons afterward. This is supposed to be the biggest Zelda game of all time, and you're going to tell me with a straight face it's a perfect ten despite taking steps back from the original game made three decades ago?

And don't say that the Master Sword would be too overpowered, because it absolutely is not. With a base attack power of 30, the Master Sword is one of the weakest end-game weapons in the game and there's no reason to use it other than taking out Guardians or using in dungeons. I found myself using the Master Sword more as fodder to pad out wasting my far superior weapons rather than its intended use as the baddest-assest sword of all time, the Blade of Evil's Bane, you get the idea.

Even more frustrating is the stupid idea that the developers couldn't have merely added more features to the Master Sword. As I mentioned in my review of A Link to the Past, one of my favorite parts of the game was discovering the great side quest which allowed Link to temper the Master Sword through short side quests. Moreover, the second half of both The Wind Waker and Skyward Sword focused entirely on Link's quest to revive the Master Sword from its weakened state; it's clear by the frequent exhaustion of the sword that it is far weakened from its original state and I hope to god it's because Fi is dying a slow and arduous death, but the fact remains that this was a feature entirely forgotten about while developing Breath of the Wild. Writing this, I have the sinking feeling that this mechanic was put on the table and rejected by Aonuma because it would have been too similar to the Goddess Flame portion of Skyward Sword, though I'm going to ignore the possibility because it would be too utterly stupid if that was the case. The player should have been given the option to strengthen the sword's power, reduce its cooldown, give it the Evil's Bane power permanently, remove its cooldown completely, allow the player to shoot beams without maximum health, and strengthen it overall much further throughout the game. If that was the reward for thirteen hearts the sword would have been totally worth it, but instead the player must search out dozens of shrines just to be able to wield one of the most annoying, flimsy weapons in the entire game and still be expected to thank the developers for the cheap nostalgia grab. Why bother?

I just have to wonder how much of these problems came about because the game needed to be open world. It's not just Breath of the Wild, either: a large amount of Japanese games have been following the Western trend of open-world video games recently and few of them have been able to implement it well. Worse than that is the very real precedent which caused many Japanese developers to distance themselves from linear game design. Breath of the Wild is a response to Skyward Sword, one of the most notoriously linear games in the Zelda franchise. Final Fantasy XV was made open world entirely as a response to Final Fantasy XIII being composed entirely of hallways, but for what reason? The game barely makes use of the open world and players have to constantly spend money on chocobos if they want to travel across the map at a reasonable pace. And what exactly went on with Metal Gear Solid V? That game was clearly unfinished, but there was absolutely no reason to drop that game into two gigantic open maps. I don't think it's a very controversial claim that Ground Zeroes, the much smaller prologue to Metal Gear Solid V, was a far better-designed game as a result of its constrained environment and plethora of mechanics. If The Phantom Pain had been designed in the same way with multiple Camp Omega-sized installations rather than a big empty map, it would have been a much better game.

The solution to each and every one of these games should have been to just do what worked rather than throw everything into a big pot and hope something stuck. Breath of the Wild is at its best when the multitude of physics-based rendering and environmental details are working in tandem to create a world that feels believable, not when rushing through miles of empty plains looking for an ugly shrine to go grind out spirit orbs for an extra two seconds' worth of climbing. The shrines are absolutely not a decent substitute for dungeons, and just because they share similarities doesn't mean the frankly idiotic number of them should even exist. I'd take one extra dungeon if it meant the shrine number was cut in half, because frankly I hated doing shrines in the first place.

By the time I finished the game, I had somehow completed just over eighty shrines and of them, maybe a handful were memorable. Because of the gigantic size of the world, Breath of the Wild also performs like a budget Unreal 3 game on the Playstation 3--the idiot journalists who gave this game a perfect score and completely overlooked the glaring, horrible optimization and unforgivably massive framerate drops no longer have any right to say they have standards for the industry. Where was this overlooking of framerate issues when Drakengard 3--a game featuring strong female characters in control of a matriarchy, which one would think is exactly what Western game journalists have been bitching about wanting for years--was being shoved out the door by an impatient Square Enix? My guess is they were off fellating whatever unnecessarily beloved Western Indie Hipster Darling (WIHD, pronounced WEED, you're welcome) was out at the moment, or more likely heaping praise on some EA turd they were "encouraged" to score highly.

That's not to say the game is totally bad; in fact, the story is full of endearing characters and fully-fleshed out towns and environments. Well, if you're not considering the voice acting. Breath of the Wild should forever remain the most damning example of why Zelda should have never, ever featured voice acting throughout the franchise, and I hope to god Nintendo ditches it for the sequel. All of you morons clambering to hear Zelda say "open your eyes, Link" got your wish, and they even drugged the actress before they recorded her lines just like you wanted. Anyway, it looks great and the cel-shaded artstyle makes for one of the loveliest games I've ever played, especially one with this much variety. Truth be told, the open world aspect does little to impress me, because frankly I think the only way a game of this type will ever overtake the likes of The Witcher 3 would be a game with the vast swathes of meaningful side quests of that title and the deep levels of interaction between mechanics like Breath of the Wild. Still, The Witcher 3 only lost to Bloodborne for my game of the year list when it came out, and a big part of that was that Bloodborne simply had the type of world I'd rather see in a game.

Bloodborne, Nier, Dark Souls, and Ocarina of Time paint a picture of the types of worlds I would rather explore in video games: not massively open worlds, but massively closed worlds. Video games don't need to imitate real life with these giant sandboxes for players to glaze their eyes over when it's entirely possible to get the same result out of a game one tenth the size of your Skyrim or Breath of the Wild types. How many people genuinely believe Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is actually better than any of its previous games? Even had it been completed with the Island of Flies area, nobody in their right mind would say it even touches any game in its legacy aside from maybe Metal Gear Solid 4, but even then that's a more satisfying conclusion than anything in The Phantom Pain. I'm not impressed by huge worlds anymore. Cyberpunk 2077 is the closest possibility of me batting an eye at an open world game again, but even then it'll only be because CDProject Red took criticisms to heart and make the game as interactive as Breath of the Wild. Zelda is not impressive because of its scope, it's impressive because of the little things that bring it all together.

I'll leave you with one final note before wrapping up. Near the end of my adventure in Hyrule, I decided to start scrounging up money to upgrade my armor in case I decided to pick up the DLC. My log of side quests had been getting enormous at this point, and to be frank I had never touched any of the side content aside from shrines and material grinding. I thought, why not? I had just finished Nier: Automata, one of the best games I think I've ever played in my entire life, and still had some time to go before Persona 5 came out. I figured, I've got more Zelda so I might as well go for it.

After taking the first quest--kill three Guardians for some guy I had only talked to once and didn't know at all--I went on my way. The Master Sword makes hunting Guardians much easier than they had been before, so I made my way to a valley where the guy told me to go hunting. I dispatched the monsters and returned to this random guy for my reward. After a curt thanks, he gave me fifty rupees and sent me on my way. Thinking this odd, I took another quest: rescue some sheep from bokoblins down a beach somewhere. Again, I slaughtered my foes and went back to hear more about what was going on with the sheep. A curt thanks and fifty rupees later, I felt my heart sink.

This is the same series with such great side content as the Kafei and Anju wedding mask from Majora's Mask or the simple, lovely quest to heal Link's sick grandmother with a fairy. The side quests in previous Zelda games might not have composed a giant checklist, but I'll always remember them for the feelings they left me with after all was said and done. And Breath of the Wild does have some interesting side content, the Link's Memories main quest being a stellar example. But then you press the right directional button on the quest log and come across fifty checklist side quests given to you by Whocares Von Fuckoff for a hundred-rupee reward if you manage to kill eight thousand bears in the wild tundra which cost Nintendo eight thousand dollars to render because they forgot to fill it with any other meaningful content. Scouring this list for a single piece of content worth my time, I kept thinking back to my time with The Witcher 3, when I could enter any single town on the map and become embroiled in the personal politics of the locale, inundated with rich writing and hours of optional side content.

And here's Zelda, apathetically asking me to go kill a dozen bokoblins for one hundred rupees and we'll never talk about it again. Ten out of ten! Best game ever! I'm not human anymore because Zelda made me forget how to feel! That'll be three hundred bucks for your Switch, please. Lord help you if you picked up the Wii U version, because all the useful options that could have made it the better version of the game were scooped out to keep parity with the Switch version which already has an advantage in framerate and resolution. Who cares? You'll buy it anyway. More people bought Zelda than they did Switches. Buy it, you hungry fool!

Verdict

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild made me feel incredibly hollow inside. After eighty hours of bumbling around looking for pointless shrines and grinding money to build a house that did absolutely nothing, all I can say is that I like the terrific art style and am impressed by the depth of its mechanics. The characters are pretty likable and the game has one of the best backstories in the series, but the minute-to-minute action of Breath of the Wild is frustrating at its core. I can't believe I nearly bought a Switch for this game, because I'd hate to write a review this negative for the only game on a brand new console for the first five months of its release. It's two steps forward for the series, and dozens of steps back.

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