3/5 ★ – sheldoman's review of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

I got so close to finishing this but the last castle frustrated me enough to make me quit forever. This might be an unpopular opinion but I think this game is a bit of a mixed bag. The stuff it gets right is SO GOOD but there are plenty of frustrating parts of this game that the fans sort of sweep under the rug. The map is huge and the world is pretty awesome and fun to explore. I spent so many hours just running around finding the different villages and shrines and fighting random moblins. I had a lot of fun with most of the shrines. Some were a little frustrating, like the ones that used motion controls, but mostly they were cool. The quest to find the memory spots was pretty fun and seeing the flashbacks really fleshed out the story. I hated the inventory management parts of this game. Not only did I have to worry about arrows, food/potions, and collectibles, but the weapons, bows, and shields added a whole other level of work to this game. I like the idea of a wide variety of temporary weapons that break pretty fast but I wish there was a default sword or something that didn't break so I didn't have to worry when my weapons were running low. Early game I had to grab sticks and rusted weapons that would break in 2-5 hits. Eventually I got the little seed people to expand the limited inventory slots but by the time I found their village I was done most of the temples. One of the reasons I quit when I did is that I had run out of shields in the last dungeon fighting those laser dudes and nobody was dropping more. Along with that last point, I really didn't like the whole food healing system. So in previous Zelda games, most enemies would hit you for 1 or 2 hearts and you'd find more hearts in dungeons or faeries or whatever. In this one, I felt like everything was hitting me for 3-5 hearts and I was constantly eating food. I wasted hours gathering certain types of food and then standing by a pot and cooking meals. I would max out the meal inventory spaces and then have to come back a couple hours later to make more. Why do the enemies hit so hard? I thought it's because I didn't have the good armour so I wasted a lot of time upgrading stuff and getting the best armour in the game and I was still constantly getting hit so hard that it would take away most of my life. In previous Zelda games, I loved taking on big scary monsters and using my sword/shield/tools to defeat them and in this game I felt like I was mostly avoiding big guys because I knew they could kill me in two hits and I would be wasting all the food I had just gathered. There are a lot of great things in this game and I wish I could like it the way a lot of others seem to. I think if the fights were more like previous Zelda games on this same huge map I would probably love it. The new systems are cool ideas but just don't really work for me.