July was a month games needed. It single-handedly was able to make up for a pretty lackluster couple of months before it, and delivered one of my new favorite games and a viable front-runner for my end of the year awards. Not bad! I’m glad it led the charge towards me not having another month as fruitless as June (I played less than 10 new games!) through the rest of the year. So, now, before we get into months with games like Super Mario Odyssey and Danganronpa V3, let’s talk about the year’s biggest surprise (for me) and why July made me very, very happy.
Category: Nintendo
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Games of the Month – March 2017
About time, right? Every time I’ve sat down to write this one, I end up giving a whole game its own treatment instead. And, y’know, Zelda happened. Then Persona… but we’ll talk about that one soon enough.
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Let’s Talk About Breath of the Wild’s Problems
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen me in the last month or read my latest post on the game, but the new Zelda is real good, ya’ll. I thought, instead of singing its praises all year long, I could take a minute to talk about the issues I have with the game after spending upwards of 80 or 90 hours with it. Yes, it’s up there with the most fun I’ve ever had with a video game, but it’s far from perfect. If Nintendo follows up Breath of the Wild with something similar, here’s how it could be improved.
I. The Reward System
One of the biggest issues with Breath of the Wild is its almost nonexistent rewards outside of the shrine loop. Since BotW loads you up with almost all of the permanent upgrades you’re going to get right from the beginning, there’s very little in the way of meaningful progress you make outside of gaining more hearts and stamina. That kinda sucks. The actual *play* of Breath of the Wild is so incredible, it’s easy to let this slide for a very long time. But when you’re dawning on your final hours and wrapping up shrines and sidequests I kept thinking, what exactly have I gotten from this?
The unique sidequests and mini games are fun, and I think Nintendo saw the act of doing them as the real reward, but after getting *another* stash of nearly useless rupees I found myself curious if this shallowness felt as obvious to anyone as as it did to me. Whenever you find a chest in a shrine or dungeon, what’s the best that can happen? You’re forced to drop a lame sword from your inventory to pick up a slightly less lame sword. The *one* occasion where they ditch this is when you get the Zora’s armor. That thing rocks and I couldn’t believe they would give you such a cool ability just as an equippable item. And then they never do it again.
Wouldn’t it have been better if there was a larger variety of equipment to find, or maybe even some kind of equivalent to Heart Pieces, or a larger arrow or rupee bag…or just… something? In trimming the fat from older Zelda games, I think Nintendo cut a little too close to the bone.
II. The Dungeons
-SPOILERS- If you haven’t finished the Divine Beasts you may want to skip past the next two sections . -SPOILERS-
So what’s up with these guys? If you’ve frequented as many Zelda forum posts as I have in the last month, you’ve probably heard the same complaint over and over: The Dungeons Suck, and are the worst thing Breath of the Wild did to the series.
I disagree.
I think I’m in the minority that believes the Divine Beast dungeons are (for the most part) very well crafted and are some of my favorite content in the game. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. I do miss the themed levels from the rest of the series, like the Shadow Temple in Ocarina of Time or the Snowpeak Ruins Mansion in Twilight Princess. The closest we get to that is the Salamander Beast, which culminates in you flying into a volcano to explore a giant lizard. That’s pretty awesome.
The Divine Beasts themselves were all exciting to explore, if a little on the short side. Instead of feeling like an expansive “dungeon” of Zelda’s past, they mostly feel like a larger, more involved version of one of BotW’s many Shrines. Each one has a gimmick, with the Elephant’s water spewing trunk being the most unique, but the Camel and Salamander’s level shifting rotations are super cool, too. The bird is the weakest of the bunch from start to finish. Its gimmick is to… slightly shift to the left or right. It’s not bad, but it’s definitely bland in comparison. Do I wish that Zelda dungeons of old were still scattered about? Absolutely. Would I wholeheartedly trade them and lose my unique, weird animal challenges? Probably not.
Would I kill a person to get a spooky shadow temple filled with ReDeads and Poes? Just give me a name and I’ll take care of the rest.
III. Boss Variety
Soooo… like what happened here? The first Blight you fight is fine. It’s not mindblowing, but it gets the job done as your first boss. Then you fight the second one and you realize that this is all the game has to offer. Get ready, because this is when I continue talking about Ocarina of Time’s Shadow Temple. It’s maybe my favorite level in gaming, okay?
This is the mini-boss of one dungeon in Ocarina of Time. Nothing in Breath of the Wild compares visually with how unique and weird Dead Hand is.
Then you ride a spooky ghost ship to the actual boss of the Shadow Temple.
What happened, Nintendo? You remember you use to make incredibly weird stuff, right? Each of the four bosses of the Divine Beast dungeons in Breath of the Wild are almost visually identical. *But* one of them stands out above the rest and helps me forgive them as a concept, if only for a moment.
The boss of the Camel dungeon is Thunderblight Ganon, a flying dude who shoots lightning and teleports quickly around the arena, forcing you to learn how to dodge and parry or be stricken down in moments. Once you master this section, he flies high above the stage, and you instinctively shoot arrows at him to no avail. He rains electrified pillars down at you and you’re forced to sprint around the room and avoid them as you come up with a new strategy. It took me a solid couple of minutes before I even considered grabbing these pillars with my magnet to send them flying back at him to win the fight. It’s one of the most frantic fights in the game that actually ends with a well-crafted puzzle, and I wish I could say that for literally any of the other main bosses in Breath of the Wild.
There are, surprisingly, some other really unique boss fights in Breath of the Wild. They just don’t come at the end of a dungeon. During the Gerudo quest to find away inside the Camel Beast, you sneak through a hidden camp full of thieves and end up fighting their incompetent leader in another of the game’s best fights. You do the typical stabba stabba stabba, but there’s also an element of using your other abilities to take him down. He’s also just a fun character that I wish ended up with more screen time.
Then there’s the giant dragon resting on top of a snowy mountain. You fight it by jumping off the peak and slow-mo shooting weak spots off of it until you bring it down. That blew my damn mind. Same goes for the Skeletal Hinox and the Desert Gobble Gobble Boy (that’s his name don’t look it up that’s just his name ok). These fights are optional in a Zelda game with the lamest collection of main bosses in the series. That’s weird, right?
All of this isn’t to throw unnecessary shade at Breath of the Wild. I’d be hard pressed to say it isn’t tied for my favorite Zelda game of all time. But at times it just doesn’t feel like a Zelda game, which I guess is what makes it such an oddity when compared to the rest of the series. It feels like a bunch of geniuses borrowed Zelda elements and slapped them into an unrelated open world masterpiece. And that’s okay!
Nothing is perfect, but getting pretty close still makes for one of the best games of all time.
(Nintendo, please make a weirder, darker side story using this engine a-la Majora’s Mask and I’ll never say anything bad about you ever again ok bye bye)
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Zelda: Breath of the Wild is Nintendo’s Modern Masterpiece
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild seems like the game Nintendo always intended The Wind Waker to be. In many regards, Wind Waker is my favorite Zelda game to date. The aesthetics were more on-point than anything else in the series, the world felt wide enough that anything could exist in it, and the dungeons were just side attractions to what the game was really about: Exploring. I don’t know that anything outside of the Souls series has ever matched the feeling of sailing to a brand new island for the first time and discovering what secrets it had in store. A lot of the time…there wasn’t much, but the feeling of wonder and excitement about just the possibility of new things to see was enough to keep me sailing through that incarnation of Hyrule for the past two decades.
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Pokemon GO is the Best Game I’ll Play in 2016
Sorry for the Game of the Year spoilers, but this can’t wait.I’ve been playing Pokemon GO relentlessly for about a week now. There’s a lot to say.
First off, I’ve never seen any video game become a cultural phenomenon the way GO has in my life. Nothing even comes close. Pop songs, dance moves, and YouTube videos all become a part of the general pop culture lexicon. Your friend at work will show you Gangnam Style, then you’ll show someone, and soon that thing has half as many views as the population of the earth. But video games? Very, very rarely. Your mom may call and brag about her FarmVille and Candy Crush scores right before she sells her iPhone with Flappy Bird on it on eBay, but a game from a recognizable franchise? From Nintendo?
I had no faith in Pokemon GO. I’m too used to being hyped up and crashing back down when expectations crumble. There’s no way they could actually make the most perfect concept for a video game work. There was no way.
I’ve been staying out with friends until 6 in the morning hunting Pokemon throughout the real world… driving around to different towns and meeting other players doing the same. I was strolling through a park and a guy rolled up in a car and asked what team I was on, right before a guy across the park heard us chatting and shouted “POKEMON GO!!!!” I’ve asked myself a lot of questions over the past few days, but one sticks out more than the others: “HOW is this real life?” More than half of the people I see *anywhere* seem to be on their phones swiping Pokeballs up at Rattatas, traipsing behind Walmart to catch a Geodude, or cruising slowly through town to refill their bags at Pokestops. This game came out ONE WEEK ago. A week. That’s all it took. And the world is different now.
Can I tell you the last time I walked around the streets of my small town in the middle of Kentucky? No, I can’t. Nobody can. But they can now now. Just tonight on the way home, there was a meetup at our court square with more cars parked than I’ve ever seen there before in my life. Dozens of people were walking through town with similar goals in mind. Everyone was chatting up strangers that they’d never met before about a game that brought all of them together. I’ll be saying this again and again, but I’ve never seen anything like it before in my entire life. These people would have never met. I would have never talked to any of the 100+ strangers I’ve had conversations with this week without Pokemon GO. We would have stared at our phones with our headphones in, nodded as we passed on the way out of Walgreens, and never thought about each other again. Instead, now we scan every inch of visible area for someone looking at their phone. We run up to each other and ask about recent catches, levels, or whatever. We’re all a part of something now. And, at least for one short week in 2016, the whole goddamn wreck of a world was brought together over a phone game about cartoon animals.
Pokemon GO is a beautiful, wonderful thing.
All of that is said without mentioning how important this series is to so many of us. I’m 23 years old and remember begging my family to get Pokemon Yellow for me. I finally got it, and me and everyone else in my elementary school dumped all of our childhood hours into it. Into playing it. Into imagining Pokemon were real and pretending to be them on the playground. Into wishing we could stroll around with our friends to find a Pikachu and take him home with us.
There’s a Pikachu that I found at my college, and my friends and I all took him home. It’s real.
It’s silly how a fictional property can mean so much to so many people, but this one does. I’ve never been super into Star Wars, and Five Night’s at Freddy’s (wow that game is hugely popular) is a little after my time. But according to the number of people running around my city, the cities around me, and apparently all over the entire planet, this series means something to a lot of people. And the enthusiasm around it had drawn even more newcomers in. A thirty-something friend of mine with no prior interest in Pokemon has joined more than a few of our late night catching sessions just because it’s so much fun to run around and see what’s out there.
Is Pokemon GO actually a good game? I don’t know. Probably not. It’s repetitive and grindy in the way all MMOs are, and those who sink the most time into it end up with the best stuff. The promise of bigger and better features sound more appetizing every day, and maybe one day GO will be a genuinely good product outside of the social aspect. But right now, that’s a tough one to call. The dopamine hit of seeing a new silhouette and then having your friends all split up to narrow down its location is genuinely thrilling. But as for the rest… well, eh. The game’s actual mechanics aren’t what we’re all excited about. There’s very little in the gameplay that represents traditional Pokemon games in Pokemon GO, but the feeling of adventure is there. Moreso than it’s ever been.
I don’t know what else to say about Pokemon GO, except that I wish I was in town with that group of people playing it right now. This whole thing is going to end and everything’s gonna go back to how it was. I want to drain every ounce of magic left before this genie’s out of the bottle. I’m sure with content updates and new generations of monster being added that we’ll have a steady resurgence of hardcore players, but a huge chunk of the casual audience isn’t going to keep this up forever. I hope there’s enough to keep this fun for a long time coming, and I hope I’m not one of the first to get burnt out.
I can’t believe this game exists. We don’t deserve Pokemon GO. But we needed it.
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Game of the Year 2016: #07-#01 – That Was Taking Too Long
That was really going slowly wasn’t it? Something something kill your darlings. I really like doing the individual posts, but sometimes real life impedes the progress, and I’m really just ready to start writing about things from this year now. So…let’s speed this up a bit.
hippochippies 