Pasting this here from a comment I made in a tangential thread:
I played through this game hoping for the best this past weekend. The highest praise i can give is that while the presentation is perfect, the gameplay is half baked at best and frustrating at its worst.
The echoes are a great idea but they’re seriously lacking in depth. Maybe 5 of them can be used for almost every “puzzle”. The stronger combat echoes trivialize the combat. The dungeons are too short and simple save for maybe one or two of them. Thinking i liked gerudo, zora, and faron the best.
I was totally mesmerized by being able to traverse a “2d” zelda map in the manner that some of the more vertically inclined echoes. They even present you with some classic zelda dungeon rooms that can be maneuvered in the classic way or be completely subverted by the player if you remember you’re playing the new game. which is very satisfying the first few times. However, by hour ten and in the last few dungeons that novelty wore off and it became very clear they forgot to make any kind of challenging puzzle involving clever echo use beyond flying tile + platboom or water tile. i don’t think zelda games have ever been or have supposed to be “challenging” but I don’t think i’m off base asserting that some puzzles aren’t immediately solvable in older games.
The menus are dogshit and waste you time. The dialogue boxes waste your time. Resetting mini games waste your time. Making smoothies wastes your time. Sorting through your 127 echoes wastes your time. I’m not sure why this is acceptable but the only answer is that ppl buy it and complaints don’t have to be heard after they have your money so fuck it i guess. The only way to get a solid game out of these stooges is to force system memory limitations on them again.
Oh did you want to play in the old style? don’t worry we put that on a timer and you can go into link mode and feel what it’s like to play a tight lovingly crafted game for a few fleeting moments before your juice bar hits 0.
The dialogue itself is good. the tutorials aren’t annoying. tri is a good companion. i adore the art style. There is a lot of observational skill involved with some hidden items and heart pieces. I had fun, but I feel like they stopped just short of making a 10/10 to intetionslly a 5/10 baby game. Games are for children. just go play Tunic
WdyT?
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I’m almost done and having fun playing it, but if I have to come up with a critique it’s that all the gameplay systems feel way too flat so they don’t give the player a feeling of progression. Number 2 critique is that the water cube is completely OP for how early in the game you can get it.
Water cube is nothing compared to the Crawltula. Available immediately after the tutorial dungeon; hit it with the tractor beam, hold down “R”, and it will carry you up any wall you like.
Dang gonna try that on the last dungeon, I always forget you can use the follow since it hardly comes up
Games like this have a really hard time delivering on their puzzle elements because of their very broad target audience. They can’t make puzzles too challenging because it will negatively impact sales but they can do the opposite to little effect.
I think the portal series is about the maximum difficulty you can make a puzzle-focused game that is still attempting mainstream appeal.
This is why modding is more interesting to me than most base games. It sounds like EoW has the core necessary for modders to create a niche puzzle-action-platformer similar to how Portal 2 resulted in Portal: Reloaded (the best puzzle game I have ever played), Mel Stories, and the workshop at large.
Hopefully there will be enough interest in creating/fostering the EoW modding scene to create something that I imagine you and I would both prefer
Just completed it, I thought it was charming, and mostly loved the worldbuilding finally getting away from the botw/totk world. Scrolling through echoes is terrible though, give us some vertical categories!!
But I didn’t invest any $ in it, so I’m less attached to it that way. If they made a lot of these games for like $25 a pop they would be hits, but I don’t really think this is a AAA game per se.
If the switch had a handheld counterpart like previous nintendos then it would def be released on that. Being on a home console raises the bar above what they acheived
I find the echo system able too give me the fun parts of the last 2 Zelda games without the annoyance of needing to stock up on inventory.
The best Zelda game in recent years was Tears of the kingdom with the easy dupe glitch
