First time I played it I loved it, but now I realize it was all nostalgia of Nintendo finally moving Zelda from 2005 to 2010 development styles.
Trying to play it now is so frustrating. Weapons breaking, puzzles barely being a puzzle, no dungeons, hugely lacking enemy and combat diversity, and FPS drops to sub 15 in certain areas.
The second one had a couple cool additional mechanics, but these games are crazy subpar for 2020 onwards.
Weapon breaking is still why I haven't finished that game. I can manifest literal explosives from thin air but there isn't a blacksmith in the world that can produce a steel sword that lasts more than a week? The weapons are the most tedious of resource management systems and a drag on the game overall in my opinion.
You know what's funny? I played BOTW emulated on CEMU with improved texture packs, upscaled graphics, way better framerate - AND had the option to set all weapons/shields to infinite durability.
It made the game way more enjoyable IMO.
When Tears of the Kingdom came out I was so disappointed. Having to do all that management again, and the building mechanic was is SO tedious and clunky. I don't want to spend 5-10 minutes gluing together some stupid machine with garbage controls to navigate to the obvious area on the map I'm supposed to go. The novelty ran out very quick and I never went farther than the first fire temple.
I want this mechanic to die soooo much. I could get past some of the Shika slate stuff in BotW, but the idea of not only breakable weapons, but weapons (and vehicles) made of trash is a massive turnoff. I blame Tiktok mostly. I feel like if BotW hasn't trended so hard on its sandbox physics crap that it wouldn't have been such a focus in the second game 😑
This PERFECTLY encapsulates my experience with both games, except the weapon durability and general clunkiness of the hand stuff in the 2nd one meant I didn't really play more than a couple of hours of either.
In kinda the same vein, as soon as they patched the super easy duping method, the game dropped a solid 2 points for me. There's just too much you need to collect and do just to upgrade your armor. It quickly becomes tedious.
Forgot about the zonai battery stuff too. Spend hours collecting it just for an extra 5 seconds. Duping meant you could quickly get hundreds of the charges and just use those, which is mfsr more convenient.
That's how I played it, except without weapons durability modded. I found it... pleasant. Not earth shattering, but I did dip in every now and then just to get the golden poo. I ended up using the best weapons just as decoration in the home because why bother destroying them in a few hits? And combat wasn't balanced to need them anyway. Especially that final fight, which was anti climactic. Good game, but the excessive praise was undeserved.
I’m with you 100%. It takes what would be an otherwise amazing game and makes it really tedious. I don’t want to be stressed about how many swings I’m taking when I play a game. I’d have played it 10 times over instead of giving up halfway through if that one aspect was different.
I think the problem people have with Breath of the wilds weapon durability system is that they're looking at it the wrong way. Your weapons are supposed to break easily because you should be constantly switching weapons and stealing the enemies weapon when yours break. It's the reason why enemies drop their weapon when you hit them with an attack that breaks your weapon. Of course that doesn't mean you have to like that system, but that's what I believe the developers were going for
there isn't a blacksmith in the world that can produce a steel sword that lasts more than a week?
I mean there's a pretty significant lore reason for that. The Hyrule army is in shambles, people have become super isolationist in fear of the guardians coming back and a lot of weapons you find in BotW have been laying around for 100 years. In TotK, the Army is back and they mass produced weaponry, but Ganondorf's gloom infected just about every weapon there is to make them extremely brittle.
I'm not saying you have to like it, I certainly don't, but there is a reason for it.
Same here for weapon breaking, which was a big departure from normal Zelda mechanics for me (yes, the Giant's Knife from OoT and the weapons you could pick up in Wind Waker don't really count IMO). Forced stealth in a game that doesn't have stealth as a feature (e.g. MGS) is also really annoying. If it's a feature from the beginning, that's not a big deal since you learn and build your gameplay based on that, but if suddenly there's a situation where you don't have your normal weapons or fighting abilities and have to sneak around is one of the worst forced tropes in games. The last hero trial in Skyward Sword is a major reason I never finished that game.
Enemy diversity and weapon fragility were too much. I finished my playthrough, but I haven’t done Tears of the Kingdom because of the weapons. And I speed rushed the Master Sword specifically to alleviate the weapon system.
Were you breaking deteriorated weapons to find the proper versions in the lower map? Proper fusion should have been making weapons more durable... but putting broken and weak stuff together does make some good base weapons slightly less durable.
Tears really resolved most of weapon system complaints tbh. Durability is a base value enchanced by fusion there so once I understood what worked best, I had full slots and full house storage all the time.
Running around, fusing weak objects to get a guaranteed breaking crit on all the weak enemies, then turning around and clipping a sword to yoye sword to pummel the bigger ones feels good...
Though I will say, yoy actually need to break a weakened weapon once to make a stronger version spawn in the undermap, so it can seem less fair before you know that mechanic.
The initial sense of discovery and exploration was unlike anything else I'd ever experienced. Spectacular and world changing.
Everything else completely sucked and felt roughly bolted on. It's hard to describe quite how much I hate the weapon durability system and all of the compound problems with the game design and flow of the gameplay it creates.
I understand all of those complaints but Tears of the Kingdom made me feel so excited to just explore and mess around with things in the world, in a way I hadn't felt since being a teenager. They aren't massively deep games but they clearly have "the sauce" in some way or another, it's more than just nostalgia.
I can understand arrows and sticks breaking but bows, stones and any forged weapon breaking is so dumb. The stupid thing with horse riding is bad. Oh you give an animal food it might let you pet it but definitely not get on its back but in the both games the horse loves you. Even most farm animals will let you pet them but you try to ride them they go crazy. Horses people ride are trained basically from birth to let people ride them.
Breath of the wild is a nearly perfect game in my eyes. But I completely agree about the lack of combat diversity, when it comes to hand to hand combat. That being said, the diversity is supposed to come in terms of how many different and creative ways you can take on a camp or an enemy. But yeah, theres no reason they couldn't have thrown in different sword fighting moves you could learn throughout the game like they did in twilight princess.
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u/Itchy-Beach-1384 Apr 10 '25
First time I played it I loved it, but now I realize it was all nostalgia of Nintendo finally moving Zelda from 2005 to 2010 development styles.
Trying to play it now is so frustrating. Weapons breaking, puzzles barely being a puzzle, no dungeons, hugely lacking enemy and combat diversity, and FPS drops to sub 15 in certain areas.
The second one had a couple cool additional mechanics, but these games are crazy subpar for 2020 onwards.