The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the most over rated video game of 2017

With 2017 coming to an end many people are starting to consider their favorite games of the year, and now I'm forced to wonder what people are considering THE GotY. The big one. The end-all-be-all of modern gaming. I imagine many people are considering the new Zelda. Looking back it's not very hard to find all the love that Zelda: BotW garnered for itself. I get it. Nintendo fans love their games to DEATH, but I cannot sit back and listen to people sing praises for a decidedly not so fantastic game.

Don't get me wrong, I liked this game. The world is mostly beautiful and the gameplay is fresh for the franchise. BUT many of the new things brought into the game are not fully developed ideas, or they are over developed and thus caused other parts of the game to become very underwhelming.

As an open world game, it falls for many of the boring, repetitive tasks one would expect from it. The map is wrought with towers and shrines, and there are plenty of side quests to do. The towers are not a big problem really, but the shrines are above all the Achilles heel of the game. There are 120 shrines randomly scattered in Hyrule. That's 60 shrines too many. They all look the same. They all offer the same rewards upon completion: a somewhat random weapon and an orb. We'll get to the flawed weapon system later on, for now it's just important to know that the reward is not consistent with the difficulty, quality or the surrounding area of a shrine. Out of all 120 shrines, probably half of them are decently creative. And about half of that half is something challenging. The other 60 shrines are either duplicates of shrines in varying difficulty or really poorly designed.

Much of this problem is caused by the freedom offered in the game. Because the player can choose to go anywhere from the start of the game, they will encounter the most challenging shrines and the easiest shrines just as often from beginning to end. Early on this isn't obviously a problem because you have so much to explore, but after dozens of hours you get bored of doing the same thing over and over again without any sense of progression. This is amplified when you consider that your reward for completing a shrine is a disposable weapon. There are so many times where a hidden, optional dungeon could've been implemented really well, only to find a stupid shrine in its place. That brings the whole experience down quite a lot. The sense of untapped potential is a prevalent feeling throughout this game.

Something great about the game is the overworld. It's vibrant and full of interesting locales and NPCs to help build up a believable Hyrule. This is the games strongest aspect. Yes, all of the locations are the same as usual. You have the forest, desert, mountain, ocean and volcano zones. Nothing surprising there. Don't expect there to be any climate you wouldn't find in real life. They just about cover all of them.

The combat is good, but not as great as Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. Every enemy encounter feels like a challenge. The game isn't well balanced, though. Some enemies resort to using raw power to amp up the difficulty. This is especially evident at the end where you get hit once by a low level enemy and lose most of your hearts. This results in you being forced to open the menu and use a healing item... every single time you are hit. Nothing like pulling you right out of the action to keep the gameplay flowing!

The new weapon system is terrible. A staple of the Zelda franchise is using a plethora of creative and meaningful weapons and tools to solve puzzles and beat up enemies. That's gone. There are essentially 4 types of weapons in this game. A short weapon, a big weapon, a long weapon and a magic rod. The can swap out the model to look like a club or a sword, but the animation is the same. The only real difference between one weapon and another is attack power. Some weapons are just BETTER than others. Later in the game you will be decked out with high level weapons, but constantly you will be picking up shitty weapons. Why? Because your nice weapons will break. If you are stuck doing a run of low level shrines, eventually all of your nice weapons are gone and all you are left with is the junk you picked up at those shrines. You see the problem that arises from this? There is no progression. The power of Link is totally dependent on what shrines you've been completing in the past hour of gameplay. Again, this comes back to the freedom of the game. You can give freedom to the player, but that should not sacrifice progression. If a player wants to do end game zones first, they should get end game rewards. The risk vs. reward aspect is key in this regard. Making all of those rewards temporary is BS, because it gives you no incentive to do any of the shrines. If I could do the hardest shrines first, gain the best equipment, then steamroll the rest of the game... that would be great! That is how you give the player choice.

Another annoyance is the over abundance of the SAME enemies in ALL areas of the game. Most Zelda games pride themselves on interesting enemy designs that fit to their dedicated zones. NOT in this one. From beginning to end you're fighting pig men, lizard men and robots. Even the bosses are the same creature every encounter.

The dungeons, if you want to call them dungeons, are interesting little puzzles that are executed neatly. They easily could've been shrines if they were re-skinned. That's all I can say about them. The lack of real dungeons is a serious omission and makes the game feel incomplete.

The open ended nature of this game its weakest element. Nintendo did not understand how to make the game feel free to explore while still offering a consistently fun and rewarding game. The best example I can give is the very end of the game. Hyrule castle is presented as an enormous challenge. To get through it and fight Ganon, one must defeat an onslaught of tough enemies. BUT there's one way around this... if you take what you learned from the game (which is to avoid difficult situations completely) then you can easily climb a pillar behind the castle and glide directly to Ganon's chamber. This lack of attention to game design is almost game breaking in many situations like this. They tried to sell this as a feature of BotW, but it shows the game was far out of scope. They put so much attention on making the world big and beautiful, so everything else suffered. Deadlines were pushed multiple times. This is the result. Instead of forcing the player to take the plunge and tackle a difficult situation, you are given the tools to ignore it entirely. This is not good game design. The intention is to give the player freedom, but there's TOO much freedom here. Difficulty in games is the core of what makes them fun. When you take that away and tell the player "Hey you can easily ignore all of this hard stuff, play as you see fit," a lot of what makes the game fun breaks apart.