f13.net

Ok, so a handful of us have this so I guess it's worth talking about outside of the Switch thread, especially since some of us aren't playing on a Switch. I haven't put a huge amount of time in yet and I didn't really want to write anything until I felt I had a good handle on what the game is. The final thing I felt I needed to see was the BOTW equivalent of a Dungeon and I just finished up one of those earlier. Even with spoiler tags it's probably not worth getting into spoilers yet. Past the starter area it's a fairly open world so it fairly likely we might all be going through stuff in a different order and pace so I'm just going to mention my broad thoughts on the game.

In some respects, this doesn't feel like a Nintendo developed game. Don't get me wrong, it's got the quality level Nintendo is known for when they're at the top of their game but it borrows heavily from Western-developed games in a way I'm not used to seeing from them. Maybe I've missed something along the way since I've only been a casual fan of Nintendo from the Gamecube era on but I can't really think of a game they've developed where they've had very clear and direct influences from other games. They've taken the tower climbing to fill out part of the map stuff that Assassin's Creed made popular. They've got cooking and potion brewing and a prevalence of plants and other crafting materials everywhere that is somewhat reminiscent of The Witcher 3. I'd be tempted to say they borrowed the somewhat poor horse handling from Red Dead Redemption but it may have been this bad in previous Zelda games and I've just forgotten. Point being, it feels very much like the kind of open world games we're used to in most respects. Also, there's something about the bite-sized nature of the puzzles in the Shrines littered throughout the world that feels almost a bit like Portal to me.

The weapon system on the other hand feels very Japanese developed to me, and in particular reminds me a lot of Dead Rising where there's a ton of weapons scattered about and you're almost reluctant to use your best ones because they break so easily. It ultimately doesn't matter to much due to the frequency with which you're finding new stuff but it's still an odd mechanic. My one big complaint with it (which would have been largely nullified had they allowed the use of the Wii U game pad to select inventory) is that switching weapons around interrupts the flow of combat a bit. Combat in general I still don't think they've quite nailed yet, but there it doesn't seem to make up a huge portion of the game and the fact that you can load up on healing items which you can use while the game is paused in the inventory menu means the only reason to ever lose a fight is because of a one-hit kill or because you saved recently enough that it isn't worth wasting your items.

Despite all the possible influences on this game it still feels like a Zelda game and I guess it's important to remember that in some ways the games in the franchise have pretty much been open world games from the start. For the most part there's a largely linear progression in them sure, but they've typically let you wander a lot of that map and find out the hard way that there are areas you shouldn't be in yet. I know Link Between Worlds started to do away with a lot of the linear progression stuff and similarly here it feels like you're given a lot of the tools you'll need before you've gotten out of the starter area. There seem to be some other items which add an ability or ease progression through an area, but so far I haven't hit too many walls where I feel like I need to beat another dungeon or get another item to proceed.

One last thing I'll mention for now is that for the first time I actually give a shit about the story in a Zelda game. I didn't really at the start but by the time cleared out this first dungeon I got to I started getting into it. Like I said though, I'm a bit of a lapsed Nintendo fan and while I played Wind Waker I never really tried Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword, nor have I played A Link Between Worlds (that one is mostly due to never being into handhelds).

Overall this is a very well made game and so far I feel like it deserves a lot of the praise it's getting.

It's probably the best game Nintendo has ever made.

It's a testament to Nintendo's excellence as a game developer. I know that this sounds utterly hyperbolic but BotW shows of all of NIntendo's qualities - alas also some of Nintendo's flaws. Describing it in terms of Assassin's Creed or Dark Souls or "Open World" doesn't necessarily do it justice because while true it leaves out how Nintendo has managed to 'distill' the defining features of those game down to their essence and make them 'fit' into the Zelda universe.

The game looks, feels and plays like a Zelda game even though it has been influenced by open world games and Dark Souls to an extent. It's also very gorgeous - even though the WiiU and Switch only have limited graphical capabilities. It's also a pretty clear deviation from previous games. It's not holding your hand - even a little, combat can get very tough if you want it to and the story and characters are actually great and worth giving a damn about. It even manages to fit the "the world ends and yet I'm spending hundreds of hours climbing shit and collecting flowers" into the narrative.

What I don't particularly like is the collectathon aspect of it. Mind you most of it is optional stuff but they managed to turn this aspect up to eleven. 120 shrines, 900 (!) Korok seeds, 450 pictures to collect for thecompendium. In short, shit's ridiculous.

I also don't really like the control set. I'm 20 hours in and yet I'm still quite often pressing the wrong buttons. The control set is also triggering a few of my pet peeves. Crouch on L3 for example means I'm constantly crouching while moving with the left analog stick because I keep inadvertently pressing it down. Has managed to kill me a few times as well. Jump is 'X', attack is 'Y', 'B' is 'cancel' and 'put away weapons' and 'A' is interact. The game most of the time can't really decide if 'X' or 'A' should be interact.

I really get now why Dark Souls has attack and parry on the triggers and the bumpers. It makes so much more sense when you use the analog sticks for movement and camera control.

That being said Zelda combat is meh. It takes cues from Dark Souls with respect to move sets and also difficulty but it's not nearly as precise and the opponents lack 'tells' there's also not nearly the same set of tactical Options to for example separate single opponents from a pack of enemies. I'm already trying to cheese a lot of encounters.

BotW really feels like a consistent world with different biomes and an environment that feels real (mountains have ice and snow and are cold, biomes are diverse and not monotonous, towns feel like actual towns). The animations are top notch and the general lack of UI hints (progress bars etc.) in favor of animations is refreshing. (case in point coocking)

I'm 20 hours in and I've spent last night just exploring, Walking about and climbing on top of shit without being bored.

It definitely deservers a lot of the praise it got. Unfortunately since it's out on WiiU and Switch almost nobody will play it. If this ever came out on PS 4 and XBox One it would give GTA V a run for its Money.

I'm also quite miffed how poor the WiiU support is.

Game itself is fine. Loading times are actually faster than for the Switch Version.

Game can't even be arsed to use the WiiU tablet controller though. The tablet controller is useless and won't even show inventory or map screens (only a Breath of the Wild logo so that the tablet can't go into power save mode and will absolutely still drain its battery)

Even worse though there are actually still a few cases where you need the controller to play portions of the game. I encountered a shrine yesterday that included a puzzle you could only do with the tablet controller because it was motion control based. IN this case the game actually prompts you to use it.

So they crippled its usefulness to not make the WiiU Version 'better' than the Switch version and yet it's still required to actually play portions of the game.

Fucking MMOs and their ruining every single game with this bullshit.

I'm not sure how to understand this; I can make combat in any game arbitrarily difficult, all the way up to impossible, by self-imposed limitations.  Do you mean that there are difficulty settings or some alternative encouraged-by-the-game play style to increase the difficulty, or something else?

I'm not sure how to interpret that either but there are a number of ways in which combat difficulty can vary. The first is that there don't seem to be too many restrictions on where you can go. You can see the game directing you somewhat by putting some of the mainline quest goals close to the starting area, but if you really want to go for the one on the other side of the map first you probably can but the enemies there will likely hit harder. The second is that there are different ways to approach combat. You can play it safe by trying to use more ranged attacks. Once you get the bomb ability you have no limit on bombs (although there's a short cooldown) but they're only particularly effective very early on unless you happen to catch a group of enemies next to some explosives. You've also got easy access to bows but you can run out of arrows quick unless you want to buy a lot of them. You can charge into melee and rely on healing items if you take too much damage (even early on you'll run across enemies that can one or two shot you), or you can practice the timing on sidestepping, parrying, and backflipping which gives you a powerful retaliation attck when you timr it right.

In general I agree with this statement, but in this case it generally works.  I fucking loathe crafting and always have (which is probably what prevents me from getting into W3), but somehow don't mind it here. 

I find the constantly breaking weapons annoying.  The concept is fine, but it is just too fast.  If they doubled or tripled durability and made weapons a little tougher to find, that would be a vast improvement.

Contrary to previous games BotW doesn't give you a prolonged tutorial and it is not constantly pushing you in an 'intended' direction. It's like the original Zelda in that regard. After maybe half an hour of setup it's basically "go and defeat Ganon" and you could potentially do that. Nobody is stopping you from hightailing it to Hyrule Castle and facing Ganon head on about an hour into the game. There are already (of course) speedruns out there where people did exactly that.

There is an "intended" route but the game isn't forcing you to take it and there is essentially no content that is being gated by item requirements or quest progress. So you could potentially go in a different direction the game intends you to and face harder enemies as a consequence. You could potentially do a "Level 1" run to the end. You can fight any enemy in the game including the final boss with your starting level and equipment and potentially win.

There are also a myriad ways for you to make things easier by being clever about how you fight. Monsters have weaknesses to certain weapon types or elemental attacks. You could wait till it's night and the monsters are asleep and murder them in their sleep. Or you can simply cheese it by sniping them with bomb arrows. You can also avoid nearly all enemy encounters.

There's no difficulty slider, the game simply offers you a lot of ways to make the game as hard or as easy as you want it to be.

I like the respawn mechanic in that game. I usually hate respawn in games because in the mid to end game it's simply an inconvenience to get around the world if you constantly have to re-fight low level enemies in Areas you've been to before or because "scale-up" you suddenly run through deathclaw infested tutorial Areas. A game with resource management and stuff that breaks needs a respawn mechanic though.

Zelda solves this by doing respawns at certain intervals only. What you've killed stays dead - at least for a few days of in-game time (Long enough so that you can actually explore most of the area without distractions). The state also holds across loading zones, so if you enter and then exit a dungeon enemies that were dead before still stay dead.

Once every few days (or every fortnight or so) you get a "blood moon" in game that leads to all enemies (and most item and resources) to respawn with an in-game explanation as to why. The blood moon event is designed in a way that gives you plenty of time to get to a safe area if you're currently rummaging through a deserted Bokoblin camp so that you're not suddenly in the middle of a Group of respanwed enemies.

I'm not sure I would go that far although I really like the game.  It maybe has the biggest scope of any of their games and largely succeeds with what they were aiming for but there are also some flaws in the mechanics. I can only speak for my own personal tastes obviously but while their NES and SNES output is much smaller in scope by today's standards, I think they had a number of games back then that they executed perfectly on.

For me best is not necessarily flawless. BotW has it's flaws but the SNES Mario and Zelda titles have those as well and I have never quite liked the 3D Zeldas before (I started and gave up on Ocarina of TIme and Majora's Mask multiple times and the only one I've finished is Wind Waker)

BotW would be in my personal top 5 of Nintendo first party titles.

You can see hints of that in Skyward Sword. (It's from the same director) It's actually quite impressive how far the team has come if you compare Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild.

I'd have to finish BOTW and put some distance between it before I'd really be able to rank it, even just among the Zelda games let alone all of Nintendo's work. When you look at something like Punch-Out for instance which looks like a boxing game but is essentially a puzzle game, not only was there no blueprint for something like that but the NES and SNES games pretty much executed on the concept perfectly.

BOTW is Nintendo basically pulling a Blizzard by taking a pre-existing genre and adding a polish on it that blows away what most other people are doing with that genre. I'm not trying to take anything away from what they've made here, I'm just not ready to crown it best ever.

You guys are talking this up enough that I'm really wanting to buy it. Stop it.

Sigh, yeah.

Are there enough great games for the WiiU to justify buying a cheap used one?  I really don't want to buy a shitty system to play one game.

Not really unless you like the Nintendo staples (Mario, Mario, Mario, and uh, Mario).

http://gematsu.com/exclusives/wii-u

The most notable non-Nintendo staple games that I paid any attention to were:

Splatoon
Bayonetta 2
Xenoblade Chronicles X
Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate
The Zelda HD updates
Hyrule Warriors (Zelda Dynasty Warriors)

Yeah my Wii U, which I haven't touched in two and half years, still works and my copy of BotW should be arriving this afternoon \o/

Unfortunately I don't think you're going to find a used one for cheap right now Nintendo never really does deep discounts on their games either.

Maybe I can find one locally.  I'm sure with the way the economy has been going, there are some Russians who had to sell all their shit so their family would actually have heat for the winter.   :awesome_for_real:

I'd forgotten how annoying the controls in Wii U games are. And apparently the Switch Pro controller doesn't work with the Wii U so I can't fix that aspect of the situation (right thumbstick and right buttons need to be swapped).

Edit: well at least you can swap Jump and Cancel (X and B).

Does the "Let it Go" app or any of the other Craiglist replacements that've popped-up in the last 4 months work over there?

The shrines I'm ok with since that's actual content. The two I've come across so far that make you use the Wii U Gamepad are pretty bad but the rest have ranged from "fairly simplistic" to "stuck for 30-40 minutes trying to figure out". There have been at least a couple which I solved but not in what I think was the intended manner.

I'm not going out of my way to look for Korok seeds. I can usually tell where I'm going to find one though because of a lot of the time it's under a solitary rock or plant somewhere. The only time I've taken a picture so far is when I've been instructed to by a quest. I can't be bothered with it.

The weather is pissing me off at times in this game. There's nothing fun about getting a quest that requires lighting torches only for it to randomly rain and not be near a bonfire I can use to pass time. Also not fun when it starts raining right when I'm about to start climbing.

I'm going to assume no, but maybe I can find a local version.  They've been pumping a lot of money into tech startups in Moscow.

And yeah, the Nintendo market for shit is strange....  Nintendo is selling official refurbished WiiU's with a warranty on it's website for $200, which is cheaper than almost everybody trying to sell them second hand out of their room.

I'd say that there are three main things of contention for whether or not you may like the game:

- Weapon durability: Shit breaks often. Shields, bows and weapons have a set durability. Only clothing or worn armor and a few key items (e.g. master sword) last forever. Some weapons won't last more than a single fight. Weapons are not repairable for the most part. Shit that breaks is gone. Some weapons can be reclaimed when they break by visiting the person that gave them to you (they make you a new one). Also - at least at the beginning of the game - inventory capacity is limited. You will find lots and lots of weapons and shields (every enemy drops what it has equipped and there are chests aplenty) but the inventory management aspect and the fact that you'll probably have to switch weapons a lot might turn you off. Higher quality items last longer but the fact that even your fancy sword of murdering shit +5 will eventually break may lead to "too good to use" syndrome. Link can't fight unarmed by the way. (Which is a real shame if you ask me)

- Stamina meter: Every physical effort runs down your stamina meter. Climbing, swimming, using the paraglider, some special attacks. If stamina runs out while climbing you drop (usually to your death), if it runs out while swimming you drown, if it runs out while flying, well you get the idea. The meter recharges very quickly and one or two upgrades to it (that are easy to get to early) fix most of the issues you may have. There's also the option to boost stamina via cooking or consumables. That being said it's still a meter that may run out at the most inconvenient of times and if you're like me and watching a meter slowly fade gives you anxiety then it may be an issue. It basically works the same way as in Skyward Sword. Except it recharges much quicker.

- The collectathon aspect: There are only 4 dungeons in game. You get most of your upgrades to stamina and health by turning in "spirit orbs" you get from completing shrines. 4 orbs net you a heart upgrade or an upgrade to your stamina bar. So you'll end up doing a significant number of the 120 shrines that are in game to boost your survivability. The same with item slot upgrades. You need to find Koroks (the small twig people from Wind Waker) hidden all over the map. If you find one they give you a Korok seed you can turn in for additional inventory slots for either bows, shields or meelee weapons. Additional slots of the same type cost more than the previous one. There are 900 Koroks to find in the game but you don't need all of them for fully upgrading your inventory (or so I've heard). You can boost stamina and health by cooking or via consumables quite easily (certain food gives you temporary heart upgrades or Stamina boost) and you won't have to go out of your way to find most of the shrines or Korok seeds you need since you encounter them while exploring the map anyway though.

These things may or may not kill your enjoyment of the game depending on how much you like or dislike them and I can totally see why the game may not be a 10/10 for people who find these game mechanics to be bullshit.

I can only say that for me they weren't really an issue. You find so much stuff just while playing/exploring that you can very easily turn these into non-issues. They may piss you off regardless though.

Not really. I'd say less then ten and even that might be a stretch. At least if you discount re-releases. There's Wind Waker HD, Twilight Princess HD and Metroid Prime Trilogy. Those are all ports of existing games though. Buying a Switch or even a Wii U for the new Zelda does not really make sense (except if you get a Wii U ridiculously cheap) because you'll probably end up playing maybe two or three games depending on how much you like Mario themed games.

Which is really sad.

I own a Wii U and the only things I own for it are Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, Wind Waker HD (came with the console) and the Metroid Prime Trilogy (because the Wii Version is out of print). I also hadn't turned it on for two years Prior to the new Zelda.

It's a great game but it's not "spend 300 bucks to play it" great.

I was stuck on a mountain side for 20 minutes the other day because of the rain. I couldn't reach the top, had too little stamina to glide or climb down safely and fast travelling to a town, skipping ahead and returning to where I was would have probably taken even longer.

The game either needs a time/weather skip similar to the songs in Ocarina of Time or an item that let's you climb wet surfaces.

A solution seems to have presented itself.  A co-worker just purchased a Switch and the game.  He also owns a WiiU that he has no reason to touch now.  I shall borrow said system, buy the game, then hand back when done.  

:awesome_for_real:

When they got orders from higher ups to port this to Switch they were forced to revamp half the game to take out the tablet functionality.

The Shiekah slate was a bigger deal than what it ended up as. I read this in some Kotaku interview.

There is a time skip, even in the rain.  Build a campfire and sit next to it and you can advance time, wherever you are.

You can't light a fire when your stuck half way up a steep mountainside though.

So I picked this up on a whim last week, along with a Switch. No TV, so I've been playing in handhold mode the whole time. I've put in... perhaps eight hours during the course of the week, perhaps a shade less.

My take is that it's a solid, if unimaginative, rendition of the major current trends in gameplay mechanics -- particularly the Ubisoft formula of open-world roaming with point-of-interest collection. Some things are overtly tedious: weapon durability is awful as much noted. Inconveniently waiting out weather is a bore; I've gone and watched clips on youtube while standing in the rain so I can climb a cliff. The goddamned Blood Moon cutscene seems to run every ten fucking minutes for me, and it runs as a cutscene that pulls me out of whatever I was doing. The cooking UX is godawful.

But there's plenty of stuff that's joyful. Paragliding is sheer fun (until the stamina meter gets in the way). Using the motion controls to aim cameras, thrown weapons and bows is lovely and much more accurate than thumbstick aiming. Combat is deliciously frantic when not burdened by durability concerns. And there's a delightful wealth of ways for systems to interact, like using a campfire to light up arrows, then using those to burn down platforms holding up enemies.

What I find it lacks is any kind of compulsive fun factor. I jump in, spend ten minutes running to a shrine, five minutes solving it, and then I either do that again or I put the Switch down and do something else for a while. Play seems designed for sessions closer in length to mobile games. It's not bad, but it's no more than a solid "B" than anything truly inspired.

Thing is, with the Switch's launch title lineup being so sparse, I'm kind of glad Zelda seems to encourage slow play spread over many days instead of blasting through the entire game in a week. It'll last until Mario Kart gets ported, which'll last to the summer release season, but I suspect it'll be a year before the game library gives the console a proper raison d'être.

A friend showed me this at his house on Sunday. I couldn't believe it. The amount of pointless busywork involved isn't immersive, it's tedious. But as you say, a lot of the rest of it looks gorgeous. It'll be great when it's out on PC and the modders get to fix it. :why_so_serious:

Why does this have weapon durability? Ugh.

 I like the idea of the weapon durability - and the kids like the discovery aspect of the whole thing - I just think the shit breaks too quickly.  One or two fights for a weapon is silly.

Breath of the Wild has swords that break down faster than sticks. It's very strange. Least durables axes ever.

So they can devote 3/4 of the controls to managing your equipment?

A human being can survive for up to three days without water, for several weeks without food, or 7 - 10 days without sleep (not all at the same time of course. Humans have the most endurance and can walk or even run for miles (hunting animals was for most of our existence an act of wearing them down and then killing them) and survive hot and cold climates. A human can take an incredible amount of neglect and abuse befoe said human finally succumbs to them and dies. Melee weapons could realistically last for entire generations and often were inherited from father to son to grandson (because they were incredibly expensive) and an AK 47 was literally designed so that untrained goons clueless about weapons maintenance could drag them through the mud of a battlefield or a river and still be able to shoot the enemy dead.

Human characters in survival games are by comparison the most brittle and precious creatures who wither away and die just from walking at a brisk pace during a slight bit of rain and their weapons are about as sturdy as a sheet of toilet paper in a hailstorm.

TL;DR: Survival mechanics are always utterly fucking stupid.

Someone made a good case for weapon durability.

It forced him to learn how to use other weapons and thus he spent allot of time learning the nuance for items he initially disliked.

Again, the problem is more with the ridiculously short amount of durability.  They just needed to...spread it out a bit.

Meanwhile, the open world nature of this game is pretty good.  My kids have probably put 60+ hours into this game already, and have accomplished almost nothing in terms of the main story.  It's pretty impressive how they took some of the tired old concepts and made them so playable.  On the negative side, my 5 year-old is so in love with this game that I have basically had no chance to play it.

Apparently if you have the Link and Zelda amiibos they work with this game. We bought it last night and my son just informed me that Link gives you a horse and Zelda gives you a random weapon (Wii U) 

We had no idea. Cool, though.

Does it give you these things every time you use them?

If I'm not mistaken there's some daily thing you can do with the amiibos. They put out a few more Link amiibos for this game that can get you armor that looks like what Link wears in previous games.

Any amiibo will give you random stuff like chests, weapons or items. A few will give you rare drops like Epona (Link's horse from Ocarina of Time) or armor sets that make Link loook like an incarnation from previous games.

You can use them once per day and special items are rare drops so might take a few days.

Would be a neat idea if Nintendo actually made those amiibo available for purchase on a wide scale and didn't just make limited runs that get completely bought up by scalpers and collectors. i guess though that making scammers rich and making children cry is more worthwhile to them somehow.

Define "any" please.

I used my Samus amiibo, the only one I got and one of the original ones that came out in the first batch four years ago and it works. Gives you random items.. Any amiibo will give you random itemsonce per day.

Armor pieces and special items are only given by certain amiibo though. https://www.gamefaqs.com/switch/189707-the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild/cheats

Yeah this is the thing about amiibos I've always thought was bullshit. Never had a problem finding an Infinties character or the like, but you can never find an amiibo. The cynic in me says Nintendo supplies most of the 'secondary' market much like the seedier game stores did with MTG cards back in the days when there were game stores.

I'm a weak man.

I fell off the bandwagon and bought a Switch. The allure of playing Zelda on the go during my many travels was just too strong. I'm not proud of myself but my local electronics retailer had one in stock and I was there and I had a credit card, well you know the drill.

Had to restart the game and I'm now already again at 70+ hours played on Switch. Combined with my playtime on WiiU I have played that game for probably about 120 to 130 hours. I'm also still hopelessly addicted to it. I'm now at 113 shrines, 3 of 4 divine beasts done, about 120+ Korok seeds found and I've yet to see all of the side quests. Roaming the wild Hyrule countryside is such a Relaxing experience that it really helps me unwind after a stressful day at work. No other game had quite the same effect on me yet. I've definitely put off finishing the game just to roam.

It's definitely one of my absolute favorite games.

Out of curiosity, as someone who has put in significant time on both...how do they compare from one system to the other?

I have actually only played a little myself, but my five year old is basically obsessed with this game.  He can wander around endlessly accomplishing very little (beyond discovering new weapons all the time), although he does find the occasional korok seed and other little secrets. 

Even with my limited play time - and plans to still invest a ton of hours into it still - I have to say it is quite a fantastic game.

The differences between the two versions are not that huge but noticeable.

The Wii U Version only puts out 720p, the Switch Version runs at 720p in portable mode (1:1 pixel matching because the screen is 720p) and 900p in docked mode. The draw distance is higher on the Switch version and the graphical fidelity is generally higher as well. Prior to the last patch the performance of the Wii U version and the Switch version in docked mode was essentially equally mediocre (30 fps with frequent drops in demanding scenes like Hyrule Forest or Hateno Vilage). With the newest patch (Version 1.11) the Switch Version is now at solid 30 fps even in scenes where the performance was bad prior to the patch. Apparently the grass effects (grass swaying in the wind) are very demanding.

The loading times are noticeably (several seconds) slower when using a cartridge instead of internal memory, the Wii U actually loads the fastest from internal memory (haven't tried a disc because I bought it on the eShop). Fortunately you only encounter loads during fast travel or when you reload a save.

The Switch Version looks noticeably better and runs notiveably better than the Wii U Version since the latest patch. Not 'spend $300 Dollar on a Switch' better but you can see the difference. The Wii U Version didn't bother me that much but I'm very tolerant with regards to graphical fidelity and framerate - having grown up with Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 and having played Ocarina of Time or similar games (OOC is 20 fps on the Nintendo 64). Your mileage may vary, obviously.

The only thing I'd recommend is to go for a Switch Pro Controller because most people don't like the Joycon grip and you can only charge Joycons when attached to the Switch so the constant dis- and reassembling can get annoying.

I doubt I'll ever buy a Switch, was mainly just curious.  In any event, I think the Wii U version looks quite good (probably more due to artistry than actual horsepower of course), and the draw distance is notably impressive.

I've had this game since launch, yet between work, family, being turned off from the whole "open world" shift, and being interested in other games, I've barely played this in the last nine months. I know this is a great game and all; I guess after being raised on the linear-path fashion that every game before has just got my brain wired a certain way. I don't "get" Minecraft or Skyrim or other open world/exploration games.

That said, I've been trying to force myself to play and try to find the fun. Having the last couple weeks off from work while my wife handled a family-emergency out of state gave me an opportunity to really try and dive into this again. And it's better this time. I'm getting the hang of the whole system, I've tackled the mini-field bosses and shrines for their loot, and as I've gotten more hearts and a better weapon/armor loadout, it's been more fun to explore and enjoy the game.

I still hate cooking this early in the game because of the time it takes to cook multiple bits, the cooking animation (yes, I know I can skip it, but there's still the fadeout and crap), and how I feel wasteful in making things that give me more hearts than I currently have. I'm sure this will turn around once I get more heart containers and have to cook less often because I can cook more bits together into one meal, but it''s just annoying right now.

But I will press on. Because I'm slowly getting that drive back to see what's on the next horizon.