The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch) certainly is something, a sprawling world of mystery and adventure. I'm really starting to get the game, the more I play of it and the more I play of it on the go. It benefits being a handheld game much more than I'd expected, setting a few goals in the half hour I have here of there and just going for it. Even the dungeons have a save system which means that if I have to put the machine down or turn it off I can jump right back into them. Talking of dungeons, I'm now two down (of what looks like four) there much smaller in design and really feel like they can be approached in a number of ways, like most of the game. In one, where I was on a giant mechanical bird flying through the sky, I found myself relying on my glider most of the time, making daring leaps out of windows to bypass locked doors. It didn't feel elegant enough to be the designed route through the area but the genius of the game is the freedom it allows me. When the freedom is taken away, for setpeices which lead up to dungeons and boss fights it's still spectacular. Boss fights now don't rely on that Zelda formula of use the item you found in the dungeon to beat them (as all the key items are received in the first hour) instead using items scavenged from the world. For the second main boss fight I depleted my reserve of bomb arrows, which I'd been holding back on using for the duration of the game and smashed up a very fine spear to strike the final blow. The destruction of the spear distracted me from my main quest, as I now need a diamond to make a new one.
With no idea where to find diamonds I've just been walking around the landscape picking off side quests. Two of my favourite have been leading up to hidden shrines, one involved killing three giant brothers. The way I approached it, or was forced to approach it was fighting the oldest (a presumably hardest) first, it was a struggle. Not helped by the smaller enemies he'd surrounded himself with but I got through it and then moved onto his younger siblings. By the last I'd got so good at my giant slaying that he never stood a chance, my sadness for the brutality of what i'd done turned to anger when I realised not one of the brothers had a diamond on them, instead where full of cooked meats and fish. The next shrine I found, nearby, made a puzzle out of entering it and the solution to getting in was ingenious.
Also on the Switch I played some of the Splatoon 2 Global Testfire (Switch) over the weekend. Hour chunks of gameplay were offered at different times and while it was a struggle to fit them in around life I did get around four matches in. Not much seems to have changed from the WiiU game, the biggest thing I found was that I really missed the map being on the controller (which the WiiU offered) it was a strong visual clue onto how the game was going. Now the results at the end seemed to be more of a surprise, one match I played I was certain that we'd won, the area surrounding me was covered in our colours, it wasn't until the full map was presented though that I released that I'd been focussing on too small an area and we were well beaten. I'm sure this is something I'll get used to, the map is just a button press and it appears on screen so it is still there. The game is still wonderful, it could be a case of absence making the heart grow fonder but it looks sharper and more vibrant than I remember and still plays as well it always has. I'll be interested to see whats added to the game to make it a true sequel, hopefully a decent single player incentive will be part of the package.
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