Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

@FreasurePlanten The 'BotW is overrated' topic is definitely reoccurring in this thread. I agree with you about absolutely despising weapon breakage — it just made certain aspects of exploring and fighting not at all fun even though exploring is kind of the point of the game. BotW also felt a little too aimless to me; I feel like Echoes of Wisdom had much better density to it and was also much better at keeping you on the plotline even as you explored in whatever order you preferred.

BotW is an interesting one for me because on the one hand I enjoyed it less than most other Zeldas, but on the other hand if you forced me to give it a rating I would probably give it a 9/10 simply because of how impressive the game is (not as a Zelda game or a game in a genre I prefer but simply as a game) and also the cultural impact

@FishyS I agree with everything you said. I only played the beginning of Echoes of Wisdom, but the scope made it seem more focused, so I suspect I agree with that part as well. In fact, when Breath of the Wild came out I reviewed it for an outlet and I awarded it a 9. It's not particularly what I was looking for, and it disappointed me qua Zelda game (and my most expected game for years), but it was undoubtedly a landmark for the series and the Switch.

@FreasurePlanten If I could make an argument for the weapon durability system of BOTW, I would say this. It's definitely a mental hurdle to get over when it comes to the fact your favorite weapon might just break on you (I know that was an issue for me at first), but once you get over that you realize that the game is always feeding you better weapons, and thus replacing whatever you lost with something superior. And once I realized that, I gained an appreciation for the system (and in fact I think it's even better in TOTK.) So, while I think it is can really be frustrating at first, the more I played the game and thought about it, the more I realized it was one of my favorite and one of the most well-designed video game systems I had seen.

@Bigmanfan The weapon durability argument has gone on plenty of times. I think it's fair to say some people just hate it even if they play for 50 or 100 hours and others like it. And maybe the largest category are fairly neutral towards it.

@FreasurePlanten For me it isn't BotW that's the worst. It's Tears. BotW takes the series into a new direction, but it still feels like the devs cared on some level about retaining the lore (yes, I know lore is never the forefront of the series, but the devs treated that side of the community far better back then than how they've been doing now), and the gameplay mechanics felt fresh and interesting.

Tears of the Kingdom was the start of them taking the series into a direction which loses all interest with me. The ideas presented in that game were no longer really fresh, and most weren't even well fleshed out. The skies and depths were basically wide but shallow areas with no actual depth to them. The sandbox mechanics watered down puzzle design to the point where you could easily cheese them. The Zonai parts basically punished you for using them, given how many resources it took just to get ahold of them. It punished players for taking the creative route to everything in the game, and prioritized optimization due to how sparse everything was. It doesn't help that dungeon design got stronger in theme, but weaker in puzzles. All to the point where it was possible to pretty much avoid doing the entire main puzzle of one dungeon.

Echoes of Wisdom further killed my interest in the series. It brought a hollow open world to 2D Zelda by expanding A Link to the Past's map. The storylines just didn't hit with me, and the dungeon design was pretty much so linear that it didn't really even feel like those places existed. Puzzles were fine, but the lack of proper combat really hurt the game for me. All to the point where I found myself spamming the sword ability when I got into late-game just as a way to avoid enemies. The side quests are completely meaningless and net you nothing of worth, outside of one quest which has it's own smaller scale dungeon and boss (which was pretty good, and I wish Open World Zelda would do more of these). The still world rifts were also painfully by the numbers- to the point where they started to get painfully boring towards the end. Once you do one, you do them all- with them serving as a sort of shrine replacement. Instead of a clever puzzle though, you basically get to go through the hell that the Tears of Light brought to the series in Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. Somehow they managed to make that less fun, which is amazing to me given how unfun it was in those two.

I'm holding out that the next 3D Zelda will have better designed dungeons and a world that's more atmospheric like Twilight Princess' world. However I feel like with how many misses the Zelda team has had with mechanics and core gameplay, I'm probably going to wind up as disappointed as I was with Echoes and Tears.

Also, ironically I'm probably the only person who has no issues with weapons breaking. Especially given how easy they are to get ahold of.

@FishyS I suppose, and to each their own of course. I'm not really arguing anything trying to prove myself right, because it is subjective at the end of the day. Rather, I'm just trying to present a different way I looked at it while playing, and could maybe help others enjoy the game more as well.

I just don't wanna hear another thing about Zelda from anyone until the next big one comes out. Like, Zelda discourse was already pretty tiring but Breath/Tears made it feel more repetitive, people bringing up the same points over and over with nothing new to add, with people just settling into pre and post Breath camps - like how the Sonic fandom does it.

@Bigmanfan That's totally fair, you had a well argued case, although I admit (with my own strong personal biases) when I read it I thought that I don't personally associate 'must get over mental hurdle for a super basic aspect of the game (and not everyone gets over it)' with 'good game design'. But given how popular the game was I am fine to admit I'm probably wrong.

Personally I never had a favorite weapon, I just hated it when a weapon broke in the middle of a battle and all I could do was walk away (or just sort of be soft-locked if it was inside a shrine which required weapons and I now had none). Or even just repeatedly swapping weapons during a battle was just annoying. It made combat not fun for me. There are many games which encourage you to explore and get better weapons in a variety of ways and BotW chose... one option from the several most common. Is it the best possible method? I don't personally think so, but it's good that some people like yourself actively like it and it's clear it wasn't a deal-breaker for most.

And sorry if I came across as snappish... I don't have many pet peeves in gaming, but my hatred of weapon breakage in BotW is near the top 😆 Right below the nigh non-functional d-pad on the pro controller 😝 (I love my pro controller but it literally can't play some games simply because of the d-pad).

Sorry 😆

@FishyS don't worry, it's nothing personal.

@N00BiSH There are only so many unpopular opinions so they tend to cycle 😆 I mean... there are zillions but they ironically have to be semi popular unpopular opinions about popular well known games to get any discourse. If someone comes in and says some random eShop game has the best combat system ever created there will likely be silence in reply.

@FishyS This is true. Such is life.

@N00BiSH I mean you don't have to respond to any of it if you don't want to see it. It's going to keep happening until the next game comes out and brings people the same situation. Just like any other series that takes things in a different direction from what the original games had. Animal Crossing is always going to have discourse around it now due to the direction New Horizons took. They'll be damned if they keep the new formula for the series, and also damned if they get rid of it for the original formula. Same applies to Zelda.

That makes me wonder what the new controversy will be when the new game comes out 😆 I wonder why people are so much more heated about some series. There are infinite things about e.g. Kirby one could argue about and have different opinions about but it seems far less common than in some series.

@FishyS I feel like part of it will be the old fans (group I'm in) not liking the new game because it'll be more aimed to the newer fans who started with New Horizons. That, and the update model being abysmal again.

For some, it's just because they live on rage and discourse(see: a good chunk of the Sonic fandom). For others it's a desire to see improvement when they feel part of a franchise isn't at its best. Both just tend to intersect a lot either intentionally or unintentionally.

There's no pleasing everyone is the problem. As a fan of both Pokemon and Sonic I've come to accept this for a while now. With the former in particular I see a lot of ideas online on how to "improve" the series that I personally think would push it in the wrong direction.

And no series is exempt from this. It still amazes me that any fan of 3D Mario can dislike Mario Odyssey, but each to their own I guess. And Zelda has split the fanbase on pretty much every entry since Majora's Mask from what I can remember, although the overwhelming feedback has generally been positive (as there aren't really any "bad" Zelda games).

I probably should have read through more of the posts in this thread before posting my own... sorry for that. I didn't mean to bring up much heat about it, I genuinely had a kind of realization as I was going through the games in the series in my head and thinking "would I rank this higher or lower than BotW"? And I was a bit surprised by where I would rank it. Which is still hard to come to terms with as Zelda is one of my favourite franchises and they've been doubling down on what made Breath of the Wild so popular.

@VoidofLight I haven't yet played enough of Tears of the Kingdom, but I have seen points similar to yours around and I probably would agree with some of them as I am terrible at doing the constructions and I prefer tighter puzzles. I also don't think that take about Tears of the Kingdom is as unpopular as the same one about Breath of the Wild. I think TotK was always more divisive and derivative and didn't get the near universal appraise that BotW got.

As for the other points about weapon durability... my sentiments are pretty much the same as those expressed by @FishyS. I personally also didn't feel that the game was constantly providing me with stronger weapons as I went along... I noticed I would avoid, later in the game, fighting weak enemies because I didn't want to lose my now stronger weapons. I also avoided using my best weapons pretty much at all as it was very deflating to see them break and get stuck with weaker weapons again. I didn't mind tools breaking in Animal Crossing, for instance. I just think things weren't well implemented in BotW.

The type of discussion you started is literally what this thread is for so don't worry about it. It often gets a little heated but it's all fun and games so hopefully it rarely gets heated enough to make anyone feel bad. And no one is expected to go back and read all 633 pages to see if a topic has been discussed before 😅 Even though topics repeat somewhat the precise perspective of a new person is usually at least a little different so I still find it interesting personally.