Well, I beat the game.
[spoiler]I had the Master Sword and Hylian Shield in my inventory, but I was convinced that there would be a fight against a proper Ganondorf after, and so I decided to save them and just use Royal Guard Arms.
I was very disappointed after the Pig Ganon fight after the initial hype of a horse fight came off. And the Master Sword ended up having only one use in my game: chopping down trees.[/spoiler]
Currently walking through [spoiler]Rito Village from Hebra ā managed to actually get a strike in the the Snowball Bowling minigame ā and itās both refreshing an daunting how much of the map Iāve not gone through in my current attempt to hit all the towers. Thereās so much of Hebra and Rito and the northern forest regions I havenāt explored compared to me spending way too much time in the Plateau that I can do anything.
Like, that was given when I first left the Central Plateau, but it still churns in my mind.
As for Stuff, are you ever able to get the tunic in all of the promo art? Is that something around Hyrule Castle or given to you by Impa after getting the memories? Am I playing the game wrong? Is this too many questions?
Anyway, hereās my map so far:
[/spoiler]You get the tunic from Impa by talking to her after seeing at least one Memory from the Album.
Keep it upgraded and itās the single best piece of armor, defense-wise, in the game. That and its āsee enemy healthā bonus are good enough, but it also looks nice, so I basically never take it off if I donāt have to. I just upgraded it to level 4 finally and its defense is kinda insane.
Yeah, I guess the magic number to get all of the inventory slots is somewhere around 400 or so.
Iāve heard whispers of something you get for korok completion and it sounds lovely.
Question : Does BoTW have dungeons like in other traditional Zelda games? Also, can you save your position in the middle of the dungeon or do you go back to the beginning when you reload your save data?
It has 5 structures that are most similar to ādungeonsā, and serve similar purposes of making you slightly more powerful and providing you with a mcguffin. Theyāre also part of learning about what exactly happened 100 years ago.
Thereās no required order to do the dungeons in, but the game does try to guide you toward them in various ways. I think I did the first couple of them āin orderā and then diverged. And, of course, as speed runs have shown us, youāre free to disregard them entirely and run straight to Ganon. But uh, save that for a second playthrough maybe, because they real meat of this game is in taking your time to carefully explore the world, which is very well-crafted.
You can save anywhere, and the game is also very generous with its autosave checkpoints.
Also, the 120 Shrines dotted across the map are quite satisfying mini-dungeons. Each one of them is typically equivalent to one of the larger āpuzzle roomsā of a traditional Zelda Dungeon, but with often more of a reliance on the gameās surprisingly stable physics system. There are spatial navigation puzzles, environmental manipulation, logic challenges, and occasional straight-up fights. Some of the shrines are hidden behind riddles in the overworld, which will appear in your quest log after you read about them or hear about them from an NPC, and they feel a lot like finding secret stairs under a burnt tree or whatever in Zelda 1. You figure out what part of the landscape youāre supposed to shoot an arrow through or set on fire or whatever, and then a glowing shrine rises out of the ground. Itās neat. The shrines also comprise the gameās fast-travel system and you can freely teleport between shrines youāve activated, starting from very early in the game.
Has anyone like, ripped the in-game map and put it online yet?
I donāt know if the data was ripped from the game, but hereās a google-maps like that apparently also has all of the Koroks.
What @kevlarSweaterVest posted is correct, but also: donāt go in expecting traditional Zelda dungeons. Theyāre nowhere to be found here. While there are the 120 shrine mini-dungeons (and most of them are clever and fun, and some are longer than youād expect), the main dungeons are all smaller and less involved than what youāre probably used to from Zelda. They have some clever puzzles and they each have a cool gimmick involved, but thereās very little combat in them, you donāt get new items in them that let you solve the puzzles, no keys for doors or anything like thatā¦
I donāt say this to discourage you, just to temper your expectations a bit. Itās an utterly fantastic game, but just know that there are very few traces of the classic 3D Zelda formula to be found.
Would there be any interest in a ātips for new playersā thread for Breath of the Wild? I like writing up guides for getting started but it seems like posting it in a random post here will just get lost (and also Iād need to spoiler the whole thing because I know some people will want to figure out all the gameplay tricks themselves), and I donāt want to make a new thread for it if itās going to just be clutter.
Alternatively, we could make a spoilers thread where people are free to post unmarked spoilers so that this thread can be safe for people who are still going through the game or are new and want tips.
Re: Dungeons
[spoiler]Finished the Rito great beast last night and managed to get half of the terminals before I even got the map. I think my diversion away from the descendent I did last night took me longer than the entire quest leading up to the beast, the beast itself, and the Ganon beast combined.
I definitely think thereās a discussion to be had about if the beasts outside of the Zora ones were rushed (with the Zora one being the proof of concept that got fully fleshed out), but I also have to admire the beasts being not only dungeons that can mostly be done in any order while inside of them, but are representative of the animals the Beasts are plus dungeons that still work while tilted/angled differently. All of that effort into their design slightly makes up for their lack of difficulty and length, at least for me.[/spoiler]
I definitely like the dungeons, though I do miss the intricacy and size of the classic Zelda dungeons. Iād love to see what they could do with the kind of puzzles they have in the shrines and in these dungeons (especially with how most of them can be rotated and shifted and changed) on a larger scale.
One thing I miss from the previous dungeons was they way they tended to build on a theme, introducing their central mechanics earlier and making them more and more complex as you go. My biggest criticism of the Breath of the Wild dungeons (which I otherwise enjoy) is that each terminal is disconnected from the last. While this does mean you can tackle them in any order, I think it also means that you donāt really get to build up to more and more complex puzzles as you go.
I think Link Between Worlds strikes a good balance between nonlinearity and theme-building in its dungeons, but of course, those have the advantage of not being spaces you can rotate and change so Iām sure itād be much harder to do with Breath of the Wildās dungeons.
Given the choice between classic Zelda dungeon design and Breath of the Wildās amazing world design, though, Iām gonna come down on the Breath of the Wild side of things. Iād love to have both, but if I can only have one, give me the only game to ever make me enjoy open-ended exploration.
honesly, a game with a BotW-style overworld with just a bit more of the 3D zelda style dungeons and some fun Zelda items would be my favorite game of all time.
Kah Okeo is bad
Thank you for the answers, though I donāt believe the second question from my previous post have been answered.
What happens if you save in a dungeon, go back to the title screen (or outright turn off the console), and load that save data? Does the game save your exact position or does it send you back to the beginning of the dungeon?
I havenāt tested this, but if itās like anywhere else in the world then it should put you in the same time and place you saved. You do get a fast travel point at the entrance that you can teleport to, as well.
Iām not sure if I can agree with this entirely. (Gerudo spoilers follow)
I just did the Gerudo great beast last night, and it not only felt way better to complete than the Zora one, but it was clearly meant to build off the mechanics taught to you during the shrines in that zone - assuming you donāt beeline the great beast as soon as you get to the desert, youāll have probably done 1-3 shrines building on how the electricity mechanics work before the great beast requires a thorough understanding.
It felt way more like the traditional Zelda dungeon experience than the Zora GB, but I get the feeling I liked that one less than a lot of other people.
I did the Gerudo great best first and it definitely was my favorite dungeon and had the best lead up; sand surfing around a giant mechanical camel shooting lightning around you is great.
God yes, I donāt know how anything would be able to top that.
I wonder what they could do with this style of overworld to make it distinct next time. I know Nintendo doesnāt generally like to make a new game unless they can do something new with it (obviously with some exceptions, like the New Super Mario Bros. series), so I donāt foresee them just giving us a big, wide-open landmass to explore again. And thatās fine, because I donāt think theyād be able to replicate the joy of discovery a second time in a row. Just look at the diminishing returns on that in the Dark Souls series.
But there are ways they could twist it. One thing they could do is go for a very different setting but still design it with the same world design philosophy and focus on player freedom. That could be amazing and both retain the excitement of open-ended exploration and give players of BotW totally new kinds of things to experience. Maybe go back to the open ocean, for example, or set it in a huge Sheikah magi-tech metropolis during the era when they built things like the Guardians.
