Rotten Red Rod fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Apr 26, 2017

seiferguy fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Apr 26, 2017

• Game starts strong but gets weaker as it becomes familiar. This is partly from no end-game and partly because so much of what makes the game good - the aesthetics, the joy of discovery, unraveling the mechanics that control the world - are all present right at the beginning. There isn't much in the game that isn't immediately available, and while that discovery process lasts a long, long time, there's nothing waiting to take it's place.
  
• I never knew how much I missed dungeons until they were gone. I've always preferred the exploration in Zelda games and thought of the dungeons as foreboding hurdles I would reluctantly overcome - but without the milestones of long, complicated dungeons to balance out the exploration I found the game robbed of some satisfaction.
  
• The 4 "dungeons" the game does have are badly compromised, both by being non-linear (both in their order and their completion) and by just being more like...portal levels? The first dungeon took a long time, the second one less, and by the time I did the Rito dungeon (last) I'm sure I wasn't beating it the right way (flying in and out of random windows and doorways rather than solving any puzzles to work a gondola or whatever. So what if you fall off, you just spawn back again. I dunno, on the one hand I liked the freedom to solve a dungeon "my way" but on the other hand I didn't have anything like the feeling I had doing dungeons in, say, Link to the Past.
  
• Best Zelda characterization ever, by far. I was not expecting to get a well written character out of this game but there's this, what would you call it, contrast? between the Zelda you see in the memories and the evidence you have before you in the present. Like, Zelda in flash backs doesn't have any mojo, feels like a failure, is ate up with trying to succeed and getting nowhere. But what happens when Gannon shows up? The 4 champions bite it, even Link falls, and Zelda has to find the strength to deal with him. So the game presents you with the this reality of waking up and seeing that Zelda has been holding Gannon at bay for 100 years, but then all the memories contrast this by showing how everyone - herself, her father, the other champions, maybe even the blank slate of Link if you want to read it into him, all think of her as the weak link of the prophecy- but she was the only one who actually came through in the end. She spent her life worried she'd let everyone down, but in the end it's the once lauded champion now scrambling not to let her down, scrambling to match her heroics.
  
• Loneliness. That's another theme that runs through Zelda - she's alone in the present because she's literally physically alone with Gannon, locked in endless psycho-spiritual combat like the God-Emperor of mankind from 40k, but she was alone in her past too, stuck with a problem no one else could help her solve, and expectation she couldn't meet, and even her closest companion offers nothing more than hopefully-supportive silence.
  
• I did think it was kind of silly at the end that When it teleported me to Hyrule field it grabbed the horse I happened to have out...a rando equine name Blue I had been riding for all of ~3 in game days. Not "Dekku Nutt", the cute brown horsey I'd ridden for dozens of real life hours, not "Liberty" that I saved from life as a goblin-steed, or even "Royale", the pure-white horse I'd laboriously tamed as a welcome-back gift for the Princess. Nopes, just a rando horse that wasn't even fully tamed and that threw me while dodging pig colossi lasers. It's ok Blue , I know it was scary _{(but Dekku Nut would have not have thrown me just sayin`).}
  

Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Apr 27, 2017