LTTP Breath of the Wild IS another OoT moment

[Worldshaker]

Breath of the Wild is almost great. It just needs good themed dungeons. The little puzzle rooms scattered throughout font cannot substitute them. The open world aspects of it was very well designed but it was something already done years prior in other open world and survival RPGs on other consoles and PC.

Ocarina gave Zelda another whole dimension. BoTW does not even in the same league as that "Oot Moment" especially if you were alive in the Snes Era.

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I agree with this completely. I think BoTW is a great game, but it doesn't come close to having the impact OoT/3D gaming did with the N64 era.

If BoTW had a better progression system, actual dungeons, real boss battles, and a story that was better told/layed out it might come close.

BoTW did change the way people look at open world games, but its flaws hold it back from achieving GoAT status.

If they can fix these issues with the sequel then maybe it can set the bar for open world games even higher than the first.

All of that said I still think BoTW is a fantastic game worthy of it's praise.

 

[lvl 99 Pixel]

The game keeps track of how many enemy of each type you have killed and as the counters go up so do the quality of the weapon drops. They could fix the balance as early in the game weapons break too quickly, but if you are the type of player that doenst care about durability too much and just kill everythibg on sight the game rewards you with extremly durable weapons that take too long to break, to the point that you start tossing them yourself to make room for other weapons

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The problem with the weapon scaling is it feels so rudimentary and cyclical. Bokoblin > Blue Bokoblin > Black Bokoblin >Silver Bokoblin, which apparently scales depending on how many enemies you slay. So if you don't enjoy fighting and rather avoid them, you're going to be vsing the weaker versions that carry worse weapons (afaik, I avoided fighting them most of the time because it wasn't interesting).

This would be improved if it worked like elite enemies in Diablo where they had a lot of variation on their abilities, or better AI and movesets but they're pretty much just stat raised recolours and its about the most boring way to introduce new enemy types via scaling you could possibly do.

So what you're doing for most of the game is acquire weapon > break weapons on enemies > stronger weapon get > enemies get more hp > break weapon on enemies > stronger weapon get.

Sometimes you're not even fighting stronger enemies or getting better weapons, you'll just trade some of what you have for new ones in a meaningless fight against the 10th identical enemy encounter and maybe some crafting item to make the game even easier (though this has always been a problem in Zelda with like heart pieces)

 

[Lobster Roll]

Music doesn't fit a mood. It sets the mood.

They chose to set the most boring type of mood imaginable.

And I'm not even sure what mood they set. Awe? Peacefulness? Whatever it is it's not very satisfying or interesting. It certainly doesn't create any really strong emotion or feeling in someone while they're playing the game. It's a total waste.

And if it truly does fit the mood, then what a waste it is to not use music to go beyond what the visuals are already communicating to us to create something more than that. The overworld music is so bland, light, and airy that it makes essentially no impact on the experience. Whether it's there or not, the experience is identical.

And the worst defense of all is the idea that somehow people got sick of the overworld theme in past Zeldas. This seems more based in rhetoric than in reality. The worst that will happen is that the music gradually is tuned out, which is a far better outcome than having music that makes no impact whatsoever.

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Lol you're out of your mind if you think BOTW has a "boring" mood. Goodness.

 

[Wamb0wneD]

There's music in BOTW? All I recall is a every once in a while there'd be a few twinkling piano notes.

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I know you won't listen to a single one of these and probably just make the same ridiculous claims some other time.

This meme needs to die. Y'all come across as reductive, ignorant and dismissive with this hottake.

 

[wavebeam]

Lol you're out of your mind if you think BOTW has a "boring" mood. Goodness.

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Of course it's boring.

The music is not adventurous, or exciting, or scary. It's not atmospheric. It doesn't really have anything important to add to the experience and can regularly disappear without consequence.

Really any direction would have been better than music whose chief attribute is that it's not pronounced enough to bother anyone. It really is that dull and has that little impact.

 

[wavebeam]

I know you won't listen to a single one of these and probably just make the same ridiculous claims some other time.

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Criticism of the music is almost always centered around the overworld ('piano' music).

The tracks you posted are examples where music matters and makes a difference to the experience. The overworld is not like that.

 

[Lobster Roll]

Of course it's boring.

The music is not adventurous, or exciting, or scary. It's not atmospheric. It doesn't really have anything important to add to the experience and can regularly disappear without consequence.

Really any direction would have been better than music whose chief attribute is that it's not pronounced enough to bother anyone. It really is that dull and has that little impact.

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I think this is a situation where it's best for me to forego arguing and to keep letting you talk. I'm very interested in this "any direction would have been better". Can you provide some examples of music you think would fit better thematically?

 

[lvl 99 Pixel]

The minimalistic music worked fine. Its just another thing exacerbated by the world being so massive that you hear the same piano tune for a hundred hours ( would actually be more grating to have an epic overworld theme for that long kind of like DQ11 did)

 

[wavebeam]

I think this is a situation where it's best for me to forego arguing and to keep letting you talk. I'm very interested in this "any direction would have been better". Can you provide some examples of music you think would fit better thematically?

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You brought it up already. Oot main theme. It has an adventurous start. It slows down to something more somber and reflectful. It conveys the feeling and weight of an adventure, and even seems to capture the rising of the sun and the ending of the day.

Pretty effective for a natural landscape with day night cycles.

What was the mood that BOTW music fit into by the way? Is there one?

 

[BadAss2961]

No way.

OoT literally helped pave the way for 3D gaming as we still know it today. Its mechanics, world design, and graphical prowess were completely new at the time. That era as whole, but especially this and Mario 64 were absolutely mindblowing in ways that we might never live to see again.

BoTW still uses mechanics from OoT. It's a good looking game artistically, but limited to weak hardware. It doesn't do much that hasn't already been done before.

 

[wavebeam]

The minimalistic music worked fine. Its just another thing exacerbated by the world being so massive that you hear the same piano tune for a hundred hours ( would actually be more grating to have an epic overworld theme for that long kind of like DQ11 did)

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Well it's a concession to the size of the world, if nintendo really thought people would get sick of a more traditional theme. It's just bizarre that people feel the need to defend it beyond its practicality.

 

[Deleted member 33533]

Music doesn't fit a mood. It sets the mood.

They chose to set the most boring type of mood imaginable.

And I'm not even sure what mood they set. Awe? Peacefulness? Whatever it is it's not very satisfying or interesting. It certainly doesn't create any really strong emotion or feeling in someone while they're playing the game. It's a total waste.

And if it truly does fit the mood, then what a waste it is to not use music to go beyond what the visuals are already communicating to us to create something more than that. The overworld music is so bland, light, and airy that it makes essentially no impact on the experience. Whether it's there or not, the experience is identical.

And the worst defense of all is the idea that somehow people got sick of the overworld theme in past Zeldas. This seems more based in rhetoric than in reality. The worst that will happen is that the music gradually is tuned out, which is a far better outcome than having music that makes no impact whatsoever.

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It's the sound of the quiet wilderness. It accents the actual sounds of nature and enhances them. The point of the soundtrack is to be able hear nature, the sound of nature is as much of the soundtrack as the actual composed tracks themselves. It's called Breath of the Wild for a reason.

It's supposed to feel like the mood you have when you're hiking. It's not supposed to be epic or exciting. To say it doesn't have any emotion or mood is just false. You can like it or dislike it but it does what it sets out to do.

Also it's not that people got tired of Hyrule Field themes in past games but that you don't spend even a fraction of the time in the field in those games as you do in BotW so using the same approach could get very annoying after hours out in the field.

 

[wavebeam]

Oot will always be the more unique artistic achievement. The oot format is notoriously difficult to get right, even for nintendo. And within that structure oot still has the most embellished and meaningful brush strokes.

Botw operated in a genre with a long history of successful franchises from many different developers. How much those other developers will feel the need to adopt from botw remains to be seen.

 

[Lobster Roll]

You brought it up already. Oot main theme. It has an adventurous start. It slows down to something more somber and reflectful. It conveys the feeling and weight of an adventure, and even seems to capture the rising of the sun and the ending of the day.

Pretty effective for a natural landscape with day night cycles.

What was the mood that BOTW music fit into by the way? Is there one?

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No, I mean specifically when would that theme fit into which moments of gameplay? The soundtrack of BOTW changes dynamically depending on the actions and locations of the character the stimuli that surround them. As for suggesting the OoT overworld theme, that is a suggestion that falls under the "opinions can be wrong" category. At no location nor situation would the loud & bombastic OoT overworld theme fit thematically with anything that is happening in BOTW.

 

[Rndom Grenadez]

GotG only to be surpassed by BotW 2 because it will fix the main problem with BotW, the dungeons.

 

[ColonelForbin]

It's a fantastic game. I'm close to beating it. Sooo many things I love about it. One specific thing I don't. Horses. I just don't see them as necessary. I like to run, explore, climb, and I feel horses are too restrictive to this.

 

[80s Old School]

Well I rock with Link to the past being the best Zelda and I actually like dungeons in a Zelda game sooo...Breath of the wild is a Brilliant game though.

 

[kiaaa]

BotW is the building blocks for another OoT so hopefully BotW 2 actually hits that mark for me.

 

[wavebeam]

It's the sound of the quiet wilderness. It accents the actual sounds of nature and enhances them. The point of the soundtrack is to be able hear nature, the sound of nature is as much of the soundtrack as the actual composed tracks themselves. It's called Breath of the Wild for a reason.

It's supposed to feel like the mood you have when you're hiking. It's not supposed to be epic or exciting. To say it doesn't have any emotion or mood is just false. You can like it or dislike it but it does what it sets out to do.

Also it's not that people got tired of Hyrule Field themes in past games but that you don't spend even a fraction of the time in the field in those games as you do in BotW so using the same approach could get very annoying after hours out in the field.

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Why not go beyond that though. My point is, they had more latitude to describe the world musically than I think people want to admit. They chose an incredibly vanilla approach.

And it's not like there aren't considerable doses of silence already with the music cut out. Why not have the music accomplish something when it cuts back in?

 

[wavebeam]

No, I mean specifically when would that theme fit into which moments of gameplay? The soundtrack of BOTW changes dynamically depending on the actions and locations of the character the stimuli that surround them. As for suggesting the OoT overworld theme, that is a suggestion that falls under the "opinions can be wrong" category. At no location nor situation would the loud & bombastic OoT overworld theme fit thematically with anything that is happening in BOTW.

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The OOT theme is not loud or bombastic!

You're narrowly focused on the idea of fitting music to particular gameplay or map sections. Which is fine, games have been doing that for a long time now. It's not some sort of unique achievement of BOTW, much less an argument for its quality. I'm talking about the impact the music makes when they go to it.

For instance, the battle music is not good in BOTW, but at least it conveys some excitement. In that sense it fits a battle, but it also achieves something emotionally too.

When the piano motifs cut into BOTW, they are not necessarily being fitted into something. And they are not accomplishing anything. The natural world has already been described graphically and with sound design. The poster above likened it to a hike. Did the graphics and the soundscape create that feeling? If so, the music does nothing to add to the experience. Are the graphics and sound design an empty slate, and we just project the feeling of a natural, pristine world because the music told us to? Then I stand by my statement, no approach could be more boring than the one Nintendo opted for.

The Zelda 1 overworld theme does not in any way fit into the ugly, brown, simplistic grid based world of the first game. It completely rescues it and breathes the feeling of adventure into it. OOT's theme is not about fitting into Hyrule Field. Its goal is to sell Hyrule Field and the adventure that it kicks off.

You're acting like they had no margin to select the mood of this game based on the particular variety of climbing, or sailing, or landscapes you find yourself in. As if they could not have ascribed a feeling of adventure to climbing, or of danger to sailing, or of mystery to one of the landscapes.

Since you won't fill me in on the mood of the game, which will remain a mystery I guess, maybe you can tell me why, in defense of the soundtrack, people tend to post music that is the antithesis of everything in the overworld that you're celebrating? Why is no one able to defend the endless piano motifs of the overworld without referring to Hateno Village, or without damning it with the faintest of praise that it 'fits,' or through robotically describing how it changes depending on what you're doing?

Why does this music need so much explaining when past Zelda music, and indeed, other tracks in BOTW, pretty much speak for themselves?

 

[Deleted member 33533]

Why not go beyond that though. My point is, they had more latitude to describe the world musically than I think people want to admit. They chose an incredibly vanilla approach.

And it's not like there aren't considerable doses of silence already with the music cut out. Why not have the music accomplish something when it cuts back in?

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It does accomplish something. Like I said, it accents the sounds of nature and whatever you happen to be doing at the time. Like when you happen across ruins and hear a melancholy but distant piano which highlights the something long lost. It really conveys the feeling that Hyrule was once something but it fell to ruin and so much time has passed that only whispers of what it was remain. It's just those remnants and nature which have taken its place. The music does a great job of accenting that without being a loud exploration theme song. And as it has been proven this is not the only approach the game takes, there are more "active" tracks that work differently.

You're arguing on the basis that the music does nothing and I just don't agree with that.

When the piano motifs cut into BOTW, they are not necessarily being fitted into something. And they are not accomplishing anything. The natural world has already been described graphically and with sound design. The poster above likened it to a hike. Did the graphics and the soundscape create that

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You have the wrong idea. The music and the sound design are one and the same. The piano is meant to be part of the sound design in the same way the sound of wind, footsteps, animals, etc. are. It's more fitted to the sound design than any old overworld music. Ocarina's field theme is a solo, it has no relationship with the rest of the sound design which is fine as it's a different type of game.
Saying it doesn't accomplish anything because it doesn't fit within a specific mold of VG music is narrow minded imo.

 

[RedGator]

You walk around a barren world with bits and bobs strewn about. No real sense of progression outside seeing hearts and stamina get larger. All challenge is mitigated by being able to carry many heals. Parry system is incredibly easy as well. Then you have the chopped up story that IS interesting, but so incredibly short. Not to mention a bland final dungeon and a laughable final boss -snip

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I really enjoyed BotW but man I couldn't agree with you more. The best thing about it is how inventive you can be with the mechanics and the fact that if you have an idea of a cool way to do something, it's probably doable. But it lacks so much everywhere else, like you said. The game has barely any personality, there's little character or life to the world's locations and the fact that there's one texture set recycled for 120 shrines really sticks out and hurts the experience for me.

Stroke of genius on Nintendo's part though. I don't think it's a coincidence that BotW has less of the things that a Zelda usually has, and that it got the reception it did. I think Nintendo recognised the growing trend that people could care less about those things and instead prefer open worlds to be more of a fuck about.

Funnily enough, I was pleasantly surprised by Luigi's Mansion 3's hefty opening sequence setting the scene, which I felt was more Zelda-y than BotW.

 

[Anthony Hopkins]

Does BOTW have a good story?

 

[Datajoy]

I like botw a lot but it's probably my fifth favorite Zelda and fourth or fifth favorite switch game.

 

[BetterGraphics]

It's a special game. It's one I won't forget playing, and despite the disagreements here, I feel that developers and designers will use it as a reference point for years to come.

Maybe my favourite of all time, or at least right up there.

 

[ThreepQuest64]

You walk around a barren world with bits and bobs strewn about. No real sense of progression outside seeing hearts and stamina get larger. All challenge is mitigated by being able to carry many heals. Parry system is incredibly easy as well. Then you have the chopped up story that IS interesting, but so incredibly short. Not to mention a bland final dungeon and a laughable final boss that is made EASIER if you did the intended story beats.

A few outstanding shrines and genuinely cool events aside, there are many games to me better than it the year of it's release, more if you bring in the entire generation.

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Have to agree with everything (except for the final dungeon because I'm not there yet).

It is remarkably polished but I sort of expect that from such a name and from Nintendo. I definitely have more fun with the game than I initially expected and it really does have its moments and I like doing more overworld stuff (always loved overworld sidequests in previous Zeldas). But I don't see the exceptional scores for myself due to the reasons you have given. I also don't know why the rudimentary combat system doesn't get more flak while other games do so. Just because combat weren't great in any Zelda doesn't mean it has to stay that way. For a game that let's you fight A LOT I expect more; in combat incorporated physics and environmental combat is good but overall it could have been much better.

It's a good game but it couldn't evoke that OoT feeling I had and it's definitely not a game I will replay once a year like OoT, nor is it my GotY, let alone GotG or even GOAT.

 

[Wamb0wneD]

Criticism of the music is almost always centered around the overworld ('piano' music).

The tracks you posted are examples where music matters and makes a difference to the experience. The overworld is not like that.

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"There's music in BotW?" isn't just centered around the overworld.

 

[th1nk]

I just wish it had actual themed dungeons and bosses with more visual variety. I got bored of the shrines after a while... if BOTW2 fixes that, it will be perfect!

 

[Lobster Roll]

Does BOTW have a good story?

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Does any Zelda game? The stories are written for children.

 

[Acheteedo]

It's a magical game, game of the generation easily. I'm so psyched that we get another crack at the universe and style with a sequel.

 

[Deleted member 18161]

Breath of the Wild is the best videogame of this generation and one of the greatest games ever made.

I played OoT at launch too which is also up there as the best game ever made especially as it was released in 1998.

 

[fourfourfun]

Breath of the Wild is almost great. It just needs good themed dungeons.

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It did have 5/6 good themed dungeons, it just needed to lean into them more on the part where you actually go inside them in terms of things to fight. Externally, they were very much themed around the element faced to gain entry. I thought the entire quest -> battle to enter -> inside the beast -> boss routine was actually pretty good. I think it suited the game, much more than "here is a door that will go underground and you must now go through x series of rooms" traditional dungeon style. And those wouldn't really suit BOTW anyway, which also makes 1 to 1 comparisons rather unfair on both games.

What I did like about the dungeons it had was how they were essentially one interconnected entity, no rooms to speak of, but the actual creature itself was like some huge device to manipulate to success. A bit like the Water Temple OOT and its water levels, but way less frustrating. Great music too, which shifted as you gradually unlocked the control terminals.

And I remember being around for OOT launching and remember the criticisms laid at its door in comparison to what LttP offered, certainly around richness and diversity in the entire map.

 

[MeteoraVII]

Does any Zelda game? The stories are written for children.

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This revisionist history people have with Zelda stories is getting kinda annoying.

It's okay to love Breath of the Wilds despite its garbage storytelling without putting down the other Zelda games' stories.

Zelda games have ALWAYS had some effort put into their storytelling. They used to be brimming with fantasy lore, world-building, memorable characters, stakes and magic.

Majora's Mask is literally one of the most widely speculated and diversely interpreted pieces of narrative found in gaming. Like, there were actual themes, motifs and a structure — things that are barely present in BoTW at all.

 

[Lobster Roll]

This revisionist history people have with Zelda stories is getting kinda annoying.

It's okay to love Breath of the Wilds despite its garbage storytelling without putting down the other Zelda games' stories.

Zelda games have ALWAYS had some effort put into their storytelling. They used to be brimming with fantasy lore, world-building, memorable characters, stakes and magic.

Majora's Mask is literally one of the most widely speculated and diversely interpreted pieces of narrative found in gaming. Like, there were actual themes, motifs and a structure — things that are barely present in BoTW at all.

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I'll concede MM. Nothing else really rises above children's book narratives. Lore and world-building are separate from narrative, and in truth the lore and world-building are the strongest in BOTW because that's what the entire narrative leans on.

 

[Leo]

I really don't see how BotW's story is that much worse than any other Zelda game except for maybe MM.

They are all very simple, what makes them special is how well presented the world and characters are, everything is rich in personality and atmosphere and a basic fairytale turns into this big, involving epic.

BotW takes a bit of a different approach, but is basically the same. They way they presented it by pieces of memories makes total sense with the structure of the game, because the story never gets in the way of gameplay and exploration, you access it in your own pace just like everything else you do in the game. And discovering little bits of information about this world while you explore it goes perfectly well with the pace of discovering its land. I think it was very well thought.