Link’s Awakening

Everything to do with the story is excellent, but the gameplay is frankly lacking imo.

That’s a fair assessment. I also found BOTW pretty sub-par. But TOTK makes BOTW look like an alpha build of a tech demo. It’s the game I expected BOTW to be. I only put like 20 hours into BOTW before I just went and defeated ganon to finish the game; I am still playing TOTK and I got it a week or so after launch.

BTW: Link to the Past was my favorite Zelda game until TOTK.

A lot of BotW and TotK’s systems are too damn simple for their own good.

The armor system works by simple addition and subtraction. The numbers correspond to quarter hearts. If an enemy attack was going to do, say, 12 damage, and you have 4 armor, that hit now does 8 damage, with a minimum of 1. Which is why a single trip to a clothing fairy will be the turning point from “everything one-shots me” to “I am made of adamantium.” in TotK especially you’d find boss monsters that one shot you before you can even get a good look at them, later in the game they’re complete pushovers.

Similarly, the weapons actually function more like ammunition than “weapons.” You only have so many shotgun bullets, only so many SMG bullets, and only so many BFG bullets. You can swing this sword only so many times before it breaks. Shields, weirdly, aren’t that badly designed. There’s a use case and an abuse case, if you use a shield correctly it will last. They didn’t implement this with the weapons, like you should use a hammer against hard foes to smash their armor and swords against soft targets. Hitting things with elemental weapons that they don’t counter should break them, like it should be okay to hit ice enemies with a fire sword but normal enemies will wear it out, etc.

You don’t find common weapons you’re willing to break and rare better weapons you wan to take care of, the weapons ramp up basically to match the enemies so at the beginning of the game you spend 3 minutes killing a red bokoblin with a stick, and at the end of the game you spend 3 minutes killing a silver bokoblin with a Royal Highfalutin Claymore.

“Oh, I broke my weapon, guess I should fiddle fuck around with the weird quick menu system to pick out another. This doesn’t slam the pace of the game to a halt at all.”

I kinda like the idea of a weapon durability system that rewards players for understanding the combat system, where if you just hold left stick forward and mash Y you’ll run out of weapons before you run out of enemies, but if you engage with the systems, attacking when the target is vulnerable, using the right weapons on the right enemies, your supplies will last longer. This would support a play model where you prepare for an adventure stocking food and gear, then go out on the adventure managing your supplies. Maybe you find very cool weapons along the way, maybe you manage to live off the land if you’re particularly skilled.

But that’s not what we got, and it doesn’t work very well.

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Yup, I finished BotW, and only because my kids wanted me to. I would frequently hand them the controller to make me some food or whatever, and I ended up looking up a guide to find the shrines for some special equipment because finding them wasn’t fun. The boss fights were okay, but they got pretty same-y (basically, find the one secret, then smack it a bunch).

It has little to nothing to do with the Zelda games I love, so I didn’t bother getting TotK since I’ve heard it’s largely more of the same. Instead, I bought Link’s Awakening and Skyward Sword and had a really good time. Those are great Zelda games, BotW was kinda meh.

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It did. In TotK only, put (almost) any weapon or shield on the ground in front of a Rock Octorok and let it inhale it and spit it out. You’ll get back the same base weapon, with the same fused item, at full durability, but with a rerolled modifier. Each Rock Octorok can only do this once, so kill it afterwards so that you remember which ones you’ve used. They’ll respawn at each Blood Moon so that you can repair again.

Some special weapons can’t be repaired this way, so you have to use a workaround. If you want to keep whatever you have fused to them, go to Tarry Town and have the goron separate it. Then fuse the unrepairable weapon to anything that can be repaired. Feed that to a Rock Octorok, then take it back to Tarry Town and have it separated. The “unrepairable” weapon will good as new.

My Eldin map is covered in stamps showing where Rock Octoroks are, and I have a full inventory of strong weapons because I switch when their durability is low and then go on a somewhat tedious repairing spree when most of my weapons are flashing red.

It forces resource management, decision making, and engaging with the full array of tools you have at your disposal. It also means you never run out of the need for more good weapons.

It isn’t about realism, but creating a resource-management gameplay loop. Need better gear? You have to regularly work for it. It also encourages using weaker weapons in weaker areas, which makes the difficulty more consistent and fresh.

As someone that has no nostalgia for the series, I have to agree with them. Halo was mid

I have played halo 1, 2, 3, and 4 front to back on legendary. It is one of my only accomplishments as a gamer, I have completed almost no other games. No ODST or Reach for me though, because I am unlucky.

Halo is a shooter from a pre-call of duty, pre-titanfall, pre-brink, pre-mirror’s edge era. It doesn’t have really any interesting movement mechanics, and the . The grappling hook in infinite is maybe a response to this other, better variety of FPS, but I still think it kinda comes up flat. It has basically no interesting cover mechanics. Post-doom, quake, unreal tournament, and boomer shooter, though, and those had good movement, so who fuckin knows what their deal is.

No, halo’s much slower. Halo, you have a slower walk speed, your enemy projectiles are supposed to move much slower since they’re all plasma based and you’re usually offered the opportunity to have hitscan weapons. So your movement still matters, it’s just less interesting. Most of the appeal of halo comes about as a result of this slower movement speed affording more easily made levels, with more interesting level design, and more easily made enemy AI with more interesting behaviors. Basically, where other shooters make the core gameplay as fun as possible, on the player’s side, making the player a more interesting character to control and use, Halo would rather make everything else as fun as possible, everything around that core.

Most FPS’s just have like, open spaces, and then corridors, and then big rooms, and that’s basically it, because they can’t make the level geometry super complicated without screwing up the player’s movement options, or over-complicating everything since the player can either look at enemies or look at the level design and usually not at both at the same time, which is also why they mostly always try to keep you moving towards the enemies, or why unreal tournament relies so much on you memorizing the arenas.

I think this means that when most people evaluate Halo, they’re doing so by measuring it against other shooters, and against this other philosophy, and Halo obviously ends up as pretty mid when measured against that. It also doesn’t help that Halo can be pretty hit and miss with this philosophy, since this relies more on very consistently interesting changes in level design and enemy variety to keep things spicy, and this novelty tends to wear off as the series inevitably chugs along. It also doesn’t help, the number of mid shooters which followed in Halo’s wake, or are reminiscent of halo specifically because of this lack of mechanical complexity, this minimalism, but without understanding what made Halo good, was that they made up for it with a lot more hard work poured into the rest of the game.

I don’t think it would be a major mistake to call halo mid, especially on the average, and especially as the series chugs along, and there’s really just less and less to do in order to make it interesting, both in the story and in the basic design. At the same time, the series does have some pretty high highs, and probably Halo is one of the most interestingly designed first person shooters I’ve seen, because it’s so hard to see the depth at first glance.

I did, and I stand by it.

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