READ BEFORE YOU ACCUSE ME OF BAITING
(I wrote this back in 2019 but finished it now because boredom)
Metacritic is a beautiful website in which people from all over the world unite to rate everything a 7 out of 10. Literally everything.
This makes it all the more exiting when a game manages to overcome this and somehow gets an 8, or sometimes even gets a fabled 9.
With the exception of games that have a really small sample size, any rating past 95 is considered to be in contention for the best games of all time.
Lets rip the fucking band-aid off, shall we?
Breath of The Wild is by far and away the most Overrated game on that list (97/100).
And I ain't shitposting, I wrote this whole damn essay bitching about it.
Paolo's Definitive Breath of The Wild Review
View attachment 276146
I'm dividing this review up into 3 parts
- Gameplay (largest segment)
- Presentation (not as long)
- As a Zelda Game (conclusion)
Less gooo.
Gameplay
I'm going to judge this game as an open world game, because that's what it is (at least gameplay wise). Sure, there are elements of zelda stuff, but at the end of the day, it copies every single pivotal design choice from open world games. Naturally, the first thing on the chopping block is the world itself, the single most important thing for a game like this.
The world in this game is super expansive with a ton of areas to explore, and with some areas having special shit that happens there (like the island that traps you). These were by far my favorite parts of the game.
Unfortunately, everything else in this game is extremely barren. Even with all the places to look, there is hardly anything to find. Outside of the typical campfire of mediocre enemies with a weapon in a chest, the only real thing to find are shrines, which are boring puzzle rooms that are almost always so laughably easy to figure out that the only real challenge is one of patience. The puzzles inside of the shrines are also completely arbitrary. Aside from all looking and sounding the exact same the location of the shrines have no bearing whatsoever about the puzzles inside. You could randomize all these shrines and it wouldn't make a remote difference (except the intro ones, obviously). Compare this to a game like Skyrim (which is FAR from a perfect open-world game), where all the caves and locations are all heavily dependent on environmental location and all have historical backgrounds pertaining to the region. In addition, once you complete a shrine there is literally no reason to enter it again. They just serve as teleportation points that really don't have any right being as obscurely placed as they are. The game is a mile wide but an inch deep.
Moving away from shrines, there wasn't a single NPC in the game that has any notable sidequests (the things that open world games are known for). Compared to Marjora's Mask, a far more linear game, the absolute lack of content really becomes clear with how a game with a world roughly 200x it's size fails to have even close to the amount of content. The only notable content quest-wise in the game was the picture quest and the dungeons, I'll focus on the former. The picture quest essentially has you traversing the world to find the locations of a bunch of pictures to uncover past memories. This sounds cool, but a lot of these pictures are so unnotable and generic that they could be in taken in hundreds of spots in the game. Even after exploring the entire map I was only able to find about six of them (landscape, mountainview, moblin path, ect) only to have to google the rest, which I didn't feel guilty for because their locations ended up being so arbitrary I never would have found them (the forest leaves being the most egregious example). I will talk about the cutscenes later on.
As for the divine beasts, I do appreciate the attempts at setting up backstories here. There are hints of putting effort into the world and showing the history of stuff. My favorite by far of all the villages was the Gerudo one, because of how much effort there was put into the characters there and the whole Yiga thing was sicck. The actual dungeons themselves though are god awful to say the least. It goes without saying that the dungeons in Botw suck. Even the most diehard botw guys still seem to agree that the dungeons were lacking. But to beat a dead horse further, the aesthetic design and sound design of all the dungeons are by far the worst 4 of the entire series, and as an open world game, these dungeons are especially puzzling. I would have preferred these divine beast quests be more akin to a quest from Oblivion or Skyrim, where you meet characters and traverse new areas rather than just watching a cutscene and doing a glorified shrine. There wasn't a single puzzle in the divine beasts that even made me remotely puzzled. None of it was fun in the slightest, and it wouldn't be a stretch to say that the game would be significantly better without them.
The last thing I'll comment on is the movement and physics, in which I'm actually not too negative about. The innovating ways to use the debree around you to fight is awesome, and I wish there was more of it. I like climbing, I love the glider, and I LOVE shield surfing. The problem is that almost all of these mechanics are kind of ruined in various ways. Once you get past the very first level enemies in the game, hitting enemies with the magnet and boulder launches stops being nearly as effective and weapon durability becomes a real hassle, meaning that if you are too weak to charge in, you are left spamming bombs at the pack of enemies and slowly picking at their health until you feel like you can put up a fight. Climbing is useful but also ruins a lot of the challenge, because moblin trails and army camps are now cakewalks, and Revalis's Gale just adds insult to injury to an already barren environment. The glider can only be used downhill and since the hills are so course and the environment consists of slowly rising large hills, the glider isn't as good as it seems. Shield surfing is by far the most missed potential because very few of the downhill surfaces can be slid on effectively and the glider is almost always better in getting to where you need to be, not to mention that it eats up your shield's durability, which again is a very important thing. Weapon durability as a whole is an issue, with good weapons being discouraged from use which prevents you from approaching most enemies unless you want to spend 10 minutes spamming bombs, which is almost never fun. It's a shame that the most optimal strategies in this game (climbing, shrines, bomb spamming) are also the least fun and take 0 advantage of the game's unique engine.
Presentation
I love the game's atmosphere. It has that sort of fresh-out-of-a-psyc-ward vibe that makes your eyes squint and widen at the same time. I can admire the sound design in portraying the overrun, barren, and broken state of the world around you, as well. However I can't help but make this comparison between the soundtrack of Botw and modern contemporary art. It's not bad, I mean it does it's job well, but it's so minimalistic and unambitious that it's almost criminal to see how highly appraised it is. Even during the cutscenes the audio mastering seems off. You can tell that the voices have been boosted in the back and have had their treble significantly lowered, which makes the voices sound further away than they're supposed to be. The music loop in the actual game is also much shorter than it should be, with a lot of low piano melodies repeated till the point that it's almost annoying. And when you somehow manage to make ambient piano become annoying to listen to, than I struggle to find any redeeming quality behind the soundtrack. Compared to other open world games (Jeremy Soule), or even the Zelda series itself, the soundtrack looks especially shitty. Such a beautiful game really deserves a better score than this.
Perhaps the worst thing in the game presentation wise is the cutscenes, which don't seem to serve any purpose rather than showing Zelda and Link reminding the player than Ganon is a bad guy. Normally I don't have a problem with this in open world game, even if the knowledge isn't super important, it's cool to uncover more about characters and the world around you. What really hurts these cutscenes though is the voice acting. Oh my goodness the voice acting.
The voice acting is so unbelievably bad. I've heard 30 year old men on Newgrounds voice Zelda better than this person did. It's painfully obvious that the girl who voiced Zelda isn't actually British but is trying hard to sound like she is, which makes it hard to take her seriously. Zelda and Mimpha both sound so unbelievably robotic and unemotional that it's almost like being British is their only defining character trait. What's more confusing is that King Hylia isn't British, but Zelda is. Zelda sounds more like a 50 year old American woman with dementia trying to impersonate a British accent than an actual teenage girl, princess or not. The voice cast ranges from terrible to mediocre, with the Goron elder and Guerdo queen being the best performances, which weren't anything great by any means. Any sort of fangirl who would normally eat up the whole Zelda Link thing they were going for would instead be left dissatisfied and confused as to what exactly the point was. This is by far my least favorite rendition of Zelda, which is funny because I hadn't even bothered to determine how I rank them until this game. The only good thing about her is the aesthetic design (yoga pants aside), which again, is only adequate, and not amazing.
As a Zelda Game
This game was apparently trying to create a new formula for the series by trashing the standard "dungeon-story-dungeon story" type that the rest of the 3d Zeldas fall into. In that sense, I'm totally on board. I think think that ambition like that could revitalize the series and make it great.
However their idea of ambition wasn't to create a new formula for the games, but instead to resort to one of the most overdone AAA stereotype ever- Open World.
What exactly about this is a new formula? There already are tons of open world games that are much richer and better than this one and those are continuing to be made. I wanted Zelda to do something new, not do something as old and as saturated as Open world. Probably the most familiar game type of all at the AAA level. I feel like that is perhaps the largest insult to the Zelda series as a whole.
This game isn't bad by any means, it's just not great. Certainly not the 13th best video game ever created, you Metacritic idiots.
I'm not asking you to hate this game, you can still have a preference for it, but Botw elitists not to stop preaching about how it's miles ahead of other games in the genre or how it's somehow new or innovative. Because it's not. It's a shallow, generic, open world AAA game that has been done millions of times before. Just because Nintendo made it doesn't make it better.
---
That's a wrap.
Let me know if I'm wrong or right. I like internet attention.
Dionicio3 diss track if I feel like it
peace
(I wrote this back in 2019 but finished it now because boredom)
Metacritic is a beautiful website in which people from all over the world unite to rate everything a 7 out of 10. Literally everything.
This makes it all the more exiting when a game manages to overcome this and somehow gets an 8, or sometimes even gets a fabled 9.
With the exception of games that have a really small sample size, any rating past 95 is considered to be in contention for the best games of all time.
Lets rip the fucking band-aid off, shall we?
Breath of The Wild is by far and away the most Overrated game on that list (97/100).
And I ain't shitposting, I wrote this whole damn essay bitching about it.
Paolo's Definitive Breath of The Wild Review
View attachment 276146
I'm dividing this review up into 3 parts
- Gameplay (largest segment)
- Presentation (not as long)
- As a Zelda Game (conclusion)
Less gooo.
Gameplay
I'm going to judge this game as an open world game, because that's what it is (at least gameplay wise). Sure, there are elements of zelda stuff, but at the end of the day, it copies every single pivotal design choice from open world games. Naturally, the first thing on the chopping block is the world itself, the single most important thing for a game like this.
The world in this game is super expansive with a ton of areas to explore, and with some areas having special shit that happens there (like the island that traps you). These were by far my favorite parts of the game.
Unfortunately, everything else in this game is extremely barren. Even with all the places to look, there is hardly anything to find. Outside of the typical campfire of mediocre enemies with a weapon in a chest, the only real thing to find are shrines, which are boring puzzle rooms that are almost always so laughably easy to figure out that the only real challenge is one of patience. The puzzles inside of the shrines are also completely arbitrary. Aside from all looking and sounding the exact same the location of the shrines have no bearing whatsoever about the puzzles inside. You could randomize all these shrines and it wouldn't make a remote difference (except the intro ones, obviously). Compare this to a game like Skyrim (which is FAR from a perfect open-world game), where all the caves and locations are all heavily dependent on environmental location and all have historical backgrounds pertaining to the region. In addition, once you complete a shrine there is literally no reason to enter it again. They just serve as teleportation points that really don't have any right being as obscurely placed as they are. The game is a mile wide but an inch deep.
Moving away from shrines, there wasn't a single NPC in the game that has any notable sidequests (the things that open world games are known for). Compared to Marjora's Mask, a far more linear game, the absolute lack of content really becomes clear with how a game with a world roughly 200x it's size fails to have even close to the amount of content. The only notable content quest-wise in the game was the picture quest and the dungeons, I'll focus on the former. The picture quest essentially has you traversing the world to find the locations of a bunch of pictures to uncover past memories. This sounds cool, but a lot of these pictures are so unnotable and generic that they could be in taken in hundreds of spots in the game. Even after exploring the entire map I was only able to find about six of them (landscape, mountainview, moblin path, ect) only to have to google the rest, which I didn't feel guilty for because their locations ended up being so arbitrary I never would have found them (the forest leaves being the most egregious example). I will talk about the cutscenes later on.
As for the divine beasts, I do appreciate the attempts at setting up backstories here. There are hints of putting effort into the world and showing the history of stuff. My favorite by far of all the villages was the Gerudo one, because of how much effort there was put into the characters there and the whole Yiga thing was sicck. The actual dungeons themselves though are god awful to say the least. It goes without saying that the dungeons in Botw suck. Even the most diehard botw guys still seem to agree that the dungeons were lacking. But to beat a dead horse further, the aesthetic design and sound design of all the dungeons are by far the worst 4 of the entire series, and as an open world game, these dungeons are especially puzzling. I would have preferred these divine beast quests be more akin to a quest from Oblivion or Skyrim, where you meet characters and traverse new areas rather than just watching a cutscene and doing a glorified shrine. There wasn't a single puzzle in the divine beasts that even made me remotely puzzled. None of it was fun in the slightest, and it wouldn't be a stretch to say that the game would be significantly better without them.
The last thing I'll comment on is the movement and physics, in which I'm actually not too negative about. The innovating ways to use the debree around you to fight is awesome, and I wish there was more of it. I like climbing, I love the glider, and I LOVE shield surfing. The problem is that almost all of these mechanics are kind of ruined in various ways. Once you get past the very first level enemies in the game, hitting enemies with the magnet and boulder launches stops being nearly as effective and weapon durability becomes a real hassle, meaning that if you are too weak to charge in, you are left spamming bombs at the pack of enemies and slowly picking at their health until you feel like you can put up a fight. Climbing is useful but also ruins a lot of the challenge, because moblin trails and army camps are now cakewalks, and Revalis's Gale just adds insult to injury to an already barren environment. The glider can only be used downhill and since the hills are so course and the environment consists of slowly rising large hills, the glider isn't as good as it seems. Shield surfing is by far the most missed potential because very few of the downhill surfaces can be slid on effectively and the glider is almost always better in getting to where you need to be, not to mention that it eats up your shield's durability, which again is a very important thing. Weapon durability as a whole is an issue, with good weapons being discouraged from use which prevents you from approaching most enemies unless you want to spend 10 minutes spamming bombs, which is almost never fun. It's a shame that the most optimal strategies in this game (climbing, shrines, bomb spamming) are also the least fun and take 0 advantage of the game's unique engine.
Presentation
I love the game's atmosphere. It has that sort of fresh-out-of-a-psyc-ward vibe that makes your eyes squint and widen at the same time. I can admire the sound design in portraying the overrun, barren, and broken state of the world around you, as well. However I can't help but make this comparison between the soundtrack of Botw and modern contemporary art. It's not bad, I mean it does it's job well, but it's so minimalistic and unambitious that it's almost criminal to see how highly appraised it is. Even during the cutscenes the audio mastering seems off. You can tell that the voices have been boosted in the back and have had their treble significantly lowered, which makes the voices sound further away than they're supposed to be. The music loop in the actual game is also much shorter than it should be, with a lot of low piano melodies repeated till the point that it's almost annoying. And when you somehow manage to make ambient piano become annoying to listen to, than I struggle to find any redeeming quality behind the soundtrack. Compared to other open world games (Jeremy Soule), or even the Zelda series itself, the soundtrack looks especially shitty. Such a beautiful game really deserves a better score than this.
Perhaps the worst thing in the game presentation wise is the cutscenes, which don't seem to serve any purpose rather than showing Zelda and Link reminding the player than Ganon is a bad guy. Normally I don't have a problem with this in open world game, even if the knowledge isn't super important, it's cool to uncover more about characters and the world around you. What really hurts these cutscenes though is the voice acting. Oh my goodness the voice acting.
The voice acting is so unbelievably bad. I've heard 30 year old men on Newgrounds voice Zelda better than this person did. It's painfully obvious that the girl who voiced Zelda isn't actually British but is trying hard to sound like she is, which makes it hard to take her seriously. Zelda and Mimpha both sound so unbelievably robotic and unemotional that it's almost like being British is their only defining character trait. What's more confusing is that King Hylia isn't British, but Zelda is. Zelda sounds more like a 50 year old American woman with dementia trying to impersonate a British accent than an actual teenage girl, princess or not. The voice cast ranges from terrible to mediocre, with the Goron elder and Guerdo queen being the best performances, which weren't anything great by any means. Any sort of fangirl who would normally eat up the whole Zelda Link thing they were going for would instead be left dissatisfied and confused as to what exactly the point was. This is by far my least favorite rendition of Zelda, which is funny because I hadn't even bothered to determine how I rank them until this game. The only good thing about her is the aesthetic design (yoga pants aside), which again, is only adequate, and not amazing.
As a Zelda Game
This game was apparently trying to create a new formula for the series by trashing the standard "dungeon-story-dungeon story" type that the rest of the 3d Zeldas fall into. In that sense, I'm totally on board. I think think that ambition like that could revitalize the series and make it great.
However their idea of ambition wasn't to create a new formula for the games, but instead to resort to one of the most overdone AAA stereotype ever- Open World.
What exactly about this is a new formula? There already are tons of open world games that are much richer and better than this one and those are continuing to be made. I wanted Zelda to do something new, not do something as old and as saturated as Open world. Probably the most familiar game type of all at the AAA level. I feel like that is perhaps the largest insult to the Zelda series as a whole.
This game isn't bad by any means, it's just not great. Certainly not the 13th best video game ever created, you Metacritic idiots.
I'm not asking you to hate this game, you can still have a preference for it, but Botw elitists not to stop preaching about how it's miles ahead of other games in the genre or how it's somehow new or innovative. Because it's not. It's a shallow, generic, open world AAA game that has been done millions of times before. Just because Nintendo made it doesn't make it better.
---
That's a wrap.
Let me know if I'm wrong or right. I like internet attention.
Dionicio3 diss track if I feel like it
peace
