Finished my run from scratch, truly unbelievable game. It's far from perfect, but so much good even though I will focus on some of the negatives that I hope they fix in the second instalment.
- First and omg it was insanely annoying and that's the fall damage after getting hit. It takes Link like 20 seconds to get up after a hit and I think there should be a button mash sequence or something which allows him to break out of that weird waiting period until he gets up again. So dumb.
- Second and this ties in with the first, but holy smokes the battle physics were really bad in this game. You'd get hit by an enemy's attack and I've had times where I would slide all the way down the mountain and die. It is hilarious yet beyond stupid to watch and experience...just so much sliding effect in this game for some reason which is super frustrating. They need to take a page out of Nier: Automata's book in how to make an experience in a one vs one battle (which is majority of battles in Zelda).
- Third, the combat is way too linear for me. The enemies AI is pretty dumb so instead of making a challenging set of enemies, Nintendo pretty much made them bullet sponges to a degree and the white soldiers are by far the biggest culprit of these tactics. Additionally, I would just side step the Major Test Guardians for the Shrines and the most dangerous aspect for me was running out of weapons to defeat them with (as one example).
- Fourth, the world is too empty for it's own good. This might be nitpicking, but I felt that there was so much to explore and at the same time I felt let-down that I would go like ten/fifteen minutes of climbing/gliding and there wasn't anything....like actually there! I was hoping for some cool hidden Easter egg from one of the previous games, but there isn't much of anything. The snow covered hills of the most northwest portion is a perfect example of this and it honestly felt that was one of the last parts of the game finished and they just ran out of time.
- Fifth and this ties in with the previous point and that the world is too big. I really appreciate how expansive they made it, but at the same time I think they wasted their time by making it so big that there wasn't a lot of quality stuff in the empty areas. I wanted to explore more secrets of the world and perhaps there are ones I haven't simply ran into, but I've done a lot of exploring and it seems they're all concentrated in small areas of the actual map.
- Sixth; the weapons, enemies, and overall material just got boring once you're in hour forty or so. I have no problem with the weapons breaking, but I kept hoarding certain weapons and left others alone like the wizard sticks and anything else that didn't have the durability bonus. The enemies are probably the worst though, they don't really have a lot of character compared to the ones you find in OoT. I also think there are too many Guardians on the map - not that they're hard because they become easily late in the game -, so I would much prefer to remove majority of them and keep the remaining as mini-bosses with stat boosts. Their presence is more of an annoyance than anything else, but still an annoyance. I also really had zero desire to experimentally cook, which it seems the creators wanted you to do. The cooking doesn't really do anything by itself, only when you stack traits on-top of each other they'll eventually become worth it. I found that making creations got really boring compared to the first couple of hours of the game.
Seventh, the music or lack there of was a terrible choice. I know they tried to make the world as possible and immersed as they could, which also meant a lack of a lot of musical potential to keep with the realistic tones. However, that can work for Red Dead Redemption, but not Zelda since look at how good the music was in OoT. There are so many people on YouTube who did their own covers of OoT songs, remixed them, and even created concept albums that there was so much potential here that was lost. Only until the end, you get some of those classic tones that get you in the mood for the final boss fight. This is probably one of my biggest grips and why certain parts of the game won't be memorable to me like OoT was.
- Eighth and that's the horse mechanics should've been scrapped. I love the idea of actually having to train your horse and it being crazy in the first couple of hours of riding, but there are so many medium size rocks the horse just completely stops at that you're more likely pull your hair out than becoming a pro. Additionally, there so few areas of the map that can actually take a horse which still has brutal control issues even after it being well trained. Any horse can not go up any sort of rock incline, even if it's a two degree off hill and that's why it should've been scrapped for the second game. I had to stop using a horse because it got so frustrating for me to actually use it as the game wanted me to.
