I haven’t reviewed anything in a bit, so let’s do it for the biggest game of the year! I actually wanted to write a mini-review for Trinity Trigger when I finished that, but I had so little to say about it, it just wasn’t worth it. Game’s pretty underwhelming.

So anyways, we’ve got the sequel to Breath of the Wild now. I watched the first 2 trailers for this, then nothing else until launch, so I had no idea what to expect beyond “this looks a lot like BotW but it has new powers”.

So now I finished it and I’m gonna do a quick review! Let’s go I guess! This will be a simpler review.

The good

It’s a lot like BotW. Like, a lot a lot. Clearly they took BotW and just added shit to it. A lot of shit, in fact. While it’s technically the “same world” as in the overworld map is largely unchanged… Do you even remember any of the original map? Like really, so much of it is so non-descript, you could’ve told me this game had a new map entirely and I’d still believe you. But the combat, the climbing, most sound effects, the lack of music for most of the game, it’s all here.

If you liked BotW, you know largely what you’re getting into, and that’s partly why I don’t feel like I don’t have to go super in-depth in this review. BotW is hugely popular, a great game, and very much a known quantity. If they had fucked it up here, there may be more to talk about, but they didn’t, so there kinda isn’t.

While the number of shrines is probably the same as the last game  (I dunno I didn’t 100% either game), they’re all in new spots and are different shrines. Good. There’s a lot more side-questy stuff. You’ll get into a village or stable and there’s just gonna be a bunch of NPCs that actually have side things for you to do. Some are good for progress (like all the quests you can do to get access to the great fairies), some are just a fun little thing that will give you probably a fairly irrelevant reward (like food or materials or a small bit of rupees). Some shrines are also hidden behind doing quests, as is opening up parts of the map (sure as clearing up the constant thunderstorm to make a set of sky islands accessible… though also you can totally just do that part without being able to see because the clouds are so thick). There’s just constant stuff to do. Combining what the game calls Side Quests and Side Adventures, there’s almost 200. There’s also koroks again, 1000 of them… I got like 80, lol. There’s 4 “main” dungeons and an extra optional one, plus technically every shrine is just a small dungeon, so for the more “classic” Zelda stuff, there’s plenty.

The world itself is bigger, as there’s floating islands all over the place, there’s a ton of caves to explore that weren’t there before, and there’s the Depths, which is an area that people are saying is as big as the overworld but I’m pretty sure it’s smaller. Though the sky islands are pretty unremarkable, the caves and the depths are really fun. Even if the overworld itself is very close to how it was in BotW (there’s some new stuff here and there), there’s a lot of new stuff to do, new enemies to fight, new boss battles, and I really had fun going through caves even if I found nothing.

There’s new powers! The only really meaningful ones are Ultrahand and Fuse. Ultrahand is basically Magnesis from BotW, except it works on way more different kinds of things and you can stick things together to build stuff. More importantly there’s something called zonai devices, basically things made by an ancient advanced race. Fans, wheels, flamethrowers, cannons and such. So you can take things like platforms, attach wheels to them, and make a car. Hitting any of the zonai devices on a build will activate all of the ones attached to the structure. You can also place a control stick thingy on a vehicle and it will allow you to control it, both steering and reversing. This is a pretty cool aspect, people are building really fun stuff using Ultrahand that I could never imagine, like autonomous mechs, tanks and more. You also, at some point, get an autobuild feature, so you can save favorite builds, get schematics for some premade shit, and get material that’s not around at the cost of zonaite stones.

Fuse is also cool, it basically allows you to attach things to your swords and shields. Like, attaching a minecart to your shield makes it grind on rails better, attaching a TNT barrel on a shield allows to basically use the explosion to both damage enemies, cause fires for updrafts and . Or just straight up you can make weapons hit harder or have more durability, or have them shoot fireballs or stuff. It’s a pretty cool feature. As far as usability, it can do thing like make weapons longer or attacking rocks or wrecking balls to break rocks and stuff. It’s good. Oh and you can fuse stuff to your arrow as you’re about to shoot it, like making bomb arrows or lightning arrows (so you actually don’t find special arrows anymore, there’s only normal arrows now).

I think this game confirms that BotW and this game take place in a completely alternate timeline from the rest of the series. Specifically there’s a scene that mimics the one from Ocarina of Time, with Ganondorf kneeling in front of the king of Hyrule, but there’s so many key differences here that it can’t be the same event (king isn’t Hylian, no young Zelda), but also it HAS to be, since it’s at the time Ganondorf was born as the only Gerudo male for that century. So the only possibility is that this takes place in a parallel universe entirely, not even a different timeline. There’s a few other things, like how it depicts the Imprisoning War, which is referenced in Link to the Past, but this game can’t possibly happen either before or after LttP, since Ganon didn’t revive between the Imprisoning War and LttP, and of course it can’t be after, because Ganondorf was sealed between the “OoT” era shown in the flashbacks here until he wakes up at the start of this game… Oh and no Triforce in either game… So anyways I’m talking about all the story stuff because it’s actually pretty good this time around and Zelda, just like in BotW, is a badass strong character that once again sacrifices everything to be able to defeat evil.

I guess a quick mention of the weapon durability system. It’s one of the dumbest complaints people had about the previous game. There are no legitimate arguments against it, all you ever get is  “I’m mad I can lose my swords even though there’s millions of swords all over the place”, which is self-defeating. So durability is back, and it remains as much of a non-issue as it was last time. Heck, because of Fuse, the fact that you have to switch weapons a lot is actually pretty cool because it lets you experiment with different materials (making the system better than before). And also I see a lot of people saying weapons break after only a few hits, which is obviously false outside of the earliest weapons and proof that all the idiots complaining haven’t actually played the game. Is it a good system? Not particularly, but it’s not a bad system. I see it as entirely neutral. It would certainly be annoying if there were limited weapons, but the game is basically covered in swords.

Is anything bad?

Yes.

They kept the rain. Out of all the really stupid complaints people had about BotW, the rain was one that was actually legitimate. It literally just exists to make climbing impossible and overall waste your time if a quest is literally not gonna progress if it’s raining. And there can be lightning, which is just another waste of time because it’s pretty much a random death unless you take the time to take off metal equipment. Like, sometimes you’re helping that one guy keep his sign up and don’t notice you’re about to get struck and you die for no real reason. The fact that they made an armor that is meant to reduce slippage in the rain while climbing is a bad solution. Just don’t have the rain, or make it not waste the player’s time. It’s fine to have, like, special items spawn when it’s raining… but don’t waste my time.

I kinda hate that the previous powers are gone. No bombs is a bit annoying (you kinda need to farm bomb flowers to compensate for the lack of actual bombs), the lack or the ice one is fine, but the one I miss the most if Stasis, which could just do fun things and I think would work well in this game alongside the Ultrahand power.

Even though Fuse and Ultrahand are great… Ascend is stupid and very circumstantial (basically just a useful tool to get out of a cave), and Recall is only used in a few puzzles and I didn’t really find great uses for it. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing for either power, but I find them lame.

Really minor thing, the fact that activating partner powers and grabbing items are the same button can be a bit annoying. One of the partners lets you ride them, so sometime you’ll be trying to grab shit of the ground and you’ll just end up jumping on the partner.

Overall

Breath of the Wild was a modern take on Zelda 1, being an open world game where you can explore, find secrets and do dungeons in basically order. BotW just happens to have over a hundred dungeons and just much deeper gameplay. TotK is just more BotW, but WAY more. Caves to explore, large area underground with plenty to do, better dungeons, better bosses, and the most underwhelming thing being the sky islands which feel kinda pointless.

TotK has more exploration, more quests, more interesting rewards for the main dungeons, the Ultrahand, and the fuse mechanic has some cool uses. It’s a game where you can play a whole evening, make 0 progress, and still have a good time.

So yeah I dunno what other games this year will even come close to this.