I am super into this game. Everything about the way it plays, all the mechanics, the characters I’ve met so far and the story, it’s delicious. The trickiest thing to adjust to so far is telling my hands not to do Dark Souls things, like click the left stick to lock on, which crouches in this game, or trying to dodge roll in any direction.
Also, I’ve found I prefer holding the joycons separately rather than using the grip. The grip makes my hands rest too far towards the middle of the grip instead of resting my thumbs on the sticks, because the handles don’t come out far enough from the middle and aren’t big enough to fit in the curve of my hand. Separately I don’t have a problem. The right joycon actually doesn’t feel weird to use at all, with the stick in the middle of the controller, but hitting the “d-pad” buttons on the left joycon does. It’s partially because they’re further apart to simulate face buttons of their own and aren’t in a single physical plus shape, but also because the WiiU controllers had the d-pad and face buttons set a little bit inward from the sticks instead of directly down. It’s taking a bit to get used to, certainly, but it hasn’t caused me to die yet.
Hey if you’ve seen nothing about the game at all, there’s a cool secret on the great plateau, down in the forest area.
Really? alright i’m heading down to the forest area then, I have it on wiiu so the massive controller size is what throws me off.
Thought I was less than 10 minutes away from playing this (on Wii U)…
but since I rarely download games instead of buying a physical copy I now have to redownload and install BotW since you can’t choose where to install a game if you have a usb drive or stick in (and I wanted to just keep it on the Wii U).
yay!!! 
I’ve been playing a ton of Breath of the Wild since I got it last night. One of my favorite little things in the game so far is that it finally does what I’ve wanted an exploration based game to do for a while: for quests and sidequests where somebody needs you to go to a different location, you can simply turn off the waypoints and get there based on the real world directions the characters give you. At least, that’s how it’s worked so far in the several hours I’ve put in.
Also, probably one of the coolest things I’ve seen in the game so far was when the blood moon happened out of nowhere. I was mining ore in this secret nook I found in a mountain, looked up, and suddenly saw the moon and sky turning bright red. Seeing that happen with no explanation or warning made that a super cool moment.
There were some sidequests and treasure hunts in Red Dead where you had to navigate based solely on provided directions and landmarks. That’s the only time I remember feeling like a real explorer in a game.
I got that feeling from navigating Greenvale in Deadly Premonition, myself.
Hey just as a reminder to everybody playing Breath of the Wild: you can take screenshots! If you’re on the WiiU, your screens are captured when you press the Home button, and you can post them to Miiverse. On the Switch, you can hit the capture button and there are so many picturesque moments in this game it’s so beautiful.
I have no sense of directions I put waypoints on and I still get lost lol.
Okay new protip: if you spend 10 minutes cooking up a bunch of stuff before proceeding into unknown territory, make a manual save, 'cause that’s super annoying to do twice. Also don’t underestimate how much you’ll need to cook. It’s worth even just cooking lots of single-ingredient, low-level dishes, 'cause when you start getting ganged up on you start burning through healing items pretty quickly.
This game is so awesome.
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Yeah i got into this scrape where I swear everything wanted me dead I made it out alive with only a few baked apples left lol.
You can return to the Great Plateau by fast travel to a shrine or something, right? I totally missed the forest while I was up there, I’m gonna have to give that another go.
And a +1 for using the Joy-Cons separately in each hand rather than the grip. It’s like the Wiimote and Nunchuk but untethered so you can be even lazier.
Also, if you got any amiibos, those’ll give you a ton of stuff. Tapped my original generation Smash 4 Link amiibo and got freakin’ Epona Ironically I haven’t gotten that great a haul from the three BotW amiibo I got with the game, the two versions of Link and Zelda, but still, a bunch of cooking/crafting materials is nice to get.
I’ve only really had one “emergent gameplay” moment so far though; I set a field of grass on fire because I remember seeing you could do that, and then realized the blaze was heading towards a camp filled with explosive barrels. I was standing far, far away and still took two and a half hearts of damage when that all went up.
I still haven’t set grass on fire, come to think of it, even though I know you can. I have had some cool emergent gameplay moments, though. I don’t think I have a Link amiibo, unfortunately, but I did name my first horse Garyl, so I’m not that upset about it.
Spoilers for Zora history. I really like the reworking of the Zora in this to be not just water-based high elves. The inclusion of stonemasonry and the king being a powerhouse in his own right makes it much more believable that the Zora would have a civilisation here and that it would be so magnificently elegant. Also, having only met one of the four champions, Sidon is a worthy Groose-style character so far, and really hot.
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I am extremely glad that Nintendo took the same philosophy about BotW’s weapon degradation that it did with Color Splash’s battle cards. Namely that resourse-based fighting is best when it’s encouraging new gameplay styles rather than punishing the player for doing things.
There are more than enough weapons to go around, so losing one doesn’t feel like a great loss, but they aren’t always going to be weapons you typically use, and it keeps you on your toes when you have to change tactics mid-battle because all you have left are a bunch of axes.
It’s also super satisfying to hurl my almost-broken weapon in an enemy’s face and have it explode for critical damage.
My only complaint is I wish there was a quicker weapon switch. The quick-switch that’s there is nice but in the heat of battle I need a button I can push to pull out a random weapon from my pack.
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Alright, I give up.
This is in the Ree Dahee shrine and I cannot figure out how to get to this chest that probably only has 20 rupees in it. I feel like it involves those metal barrels, but they’re not exactly stable footing. I’ve gone on and done a bunch of other stuff but I’ve stamped this chest and returned to it twice now because it’s
really bugging me.
(wow these pictures the capture button takes aren’t really that big or detailed)
Finished that Shrine early this morning:
[spoiler]Gonna keep this hint obtuse, but you used the Magnetism to get the barrels up there, right? What have you been interacting with to make the platforms move for the timing puzzles?
Also where did you get that hood? Currently rocking a bandana but I kinda hate looking like Hyrulian Kid Rock 
[/spoiler]
Also sorry for the double post, phone posting is weird sometimes.
Gah, I knew it’d be something simple that I was missing. Thanks.
That hood was from Kakariko’s clothes shop, fairly cheap if I recall too. It’s pretty rad, but there’s a Sheikah skarf in there that I want even more but costs a stupid amount of rupees…
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No problem, I figure that given how much this was inspired by the original Zelda, trading info w/ people is basically how they want us to play since they don’t have Nintendo Power guides to gouge us with lol
[spoiler]also i just bought the hood and everything out of the shop, so now I look like Garrett from the two good Thief games
is there any use to gems besides selling them, or is there crafting material to make weapons better like in Skyward?[/spoiler]
Edit:
if you see a shiny blue owl-rabbit thing, shoot it with arrows for rupees
