The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild absolutely earned the perfect review score it got from us and nearly every other outlet. However, because this game is so fantastic, there are a few small annoyances that detract from the experience in minor ways. In the interest of reflection, let’s consider five of these imperfect qualities.
1) Weapon Degradation : Weapon degradation systems are polarizing in all games, and this remains true for Breath Of The Wild. As good as the game’s combat feels, having to constantly swap through weapons even in the latter parts of the experience gets pretty annoying. It’s also not very realistic either. What metal sword smashes after 10 hits? It doesn’t further immersion or survival, it just creates a nuisance.
It also discourages players from engaging in random combat. Whenever you encounter an enemy camp, it forces you to weigh its potential reward against the damage it does to your inventory. Why break two swords fighting monsters just to get one back? Again, the combat feels great, but broken weapons deter me from using it as much as I want to.
2) One-Hit Kills : While it’s great to see The Legend Of Zelda reach new heights in terms of challenge, even skilled players have to admit there are times where the combat feels openly cheap. Armor fixes this a bit, but not entirely. It’s understandable if an enemy takes a big swing and telegraphs an attack. That at least seems like a one-hit kill. Should Link really be dying in one hit after a Lizard touches him with its tongue though?
Especially with massive bosses, there’s plenty of merit in one-hit kills, but it’s too easy to come across stuff like that in totally random encounters. Breath Of The Wild does offer a legit challenge most of the time, but let’s not kid ourselves: there’s a bit of occasional cheapness in play too.
3) Horses Start To Be Useless: Horses are an iconic part of Legend Of Zelda imagery, but they honestly don’t matter much in Breath Of The Wild. We all probably squealed with glee when we encountered our first stable in the open world. You might’ve even caught a horse and registered it with a funny name.
However, especially as you start finding shrines, there’s almost no need to travel anywhere by horse. Fast travel points become so frequent that it’s easy to both explore and tackle main quests without one. Sure you can use a horse if you want to, but the mechanic doesn’t feel encouraged as much as it probably should.
The easy solution to this would be to make it so you can only fast travel to shrines that are complete. In that way, at least horses become a necessity for those without puzzle skills. The stamina and taming systems are interesting, but they aren’t very important.
4) Needs More Voice Acting: Nintendo accomplished a great feat by peppering this game’s open world with plenty of charming NPCs, but sometimes it feels like they don't have as much personality as they potentially could. The voiced cutscenes we get to see are really awesome, but in 2017, it feels seriously dated when the rest of the interaction happens in text boxes.
With its gameplay engine firmly established, I’d love to see the next game offer voices for more or all NPCs. The world is plenty alive already, but a presentation change like that would make it even better. It’d also be pretty easy to keep text boxes in there for players who prefer the classic style.
5) Performance Dips: As both a swan song for the Wii U and poster boy for Nintendo Switch, it’s a little frustrating that this game has as many performance hiccups as it does. It’s a very playable game, obviously, but it would’ve been great to see those framerate dips at least eradicated on Switch TV mode. In battles with lots of enemies on screen, it’s occasionally hard to get Link to do exactly what you want.
This game will likely be remembered as a modern classic, but some obvious slowdown moments do detract from its shine a little bit.
The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is available now on Nintendo Switch and Wii U.
How are you enjoying Breath Of The Wild so far? Are any of these annoyances bothering you? Tell us in the comments section!
