Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

75% of the 'completion percentage' is just Korok seeds, so you've almost definitely seen all of the worthwhile content above 50%. Unless of course you've skipped the dungeons or something odd like that.

In addition to the "anything odd" conversation, I just remembered when I found a seam near the Horse God fountain. I remembered this because I just found another one in the Hebra mountain range: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9CD7cCUIAA86sF.jpg

@Maxz Moblag is definitely still a thing. I even get it sometimes with bokoblins.

It really is amazing how much of these ind of things they built in. I've been chilling with a lizalfos using lizalfos mask recently and when his buddy caught fire he questioned my presence in the circle

@Haru17 72% is Koroks. 0.8% per seed.

Wow another fantastic morning 105 hours, did the Yiga Base and the boss fight was really fun! After that i did the Divine Beast and it was awesome! Approach, dungeon itself and boss fight! I really liked it all! I also got the Dark Link set from Kilton. Next i'll do a tracked Shrine in Gerudo Desert, the huge skeleton photo and the Thunder Helm side quest. After that it will be Central Hyrule time before finishing secondary stuff and the game itself

@shani - You should absolutely finish Wind Waker - it's a fantastic game .

I know that some people like the simple "no shades of grey" hero and villain and it does have advantages. Personally though I don't find it satisfying as a story trope. I like my villains to have an agenda other than just being a pure force of evil. It might be an agenda I disagree with (they're supposed to be villains after all!) but I think they need a clear objective.

At the very least their followers need to be able to justify why they're following a malevolent force of evil. Like the Yiga Clan - why would they want the return of Gannon? What are their members getting out of it? We meet reformed Yiga Clan members so they are human, not just evil spirits. That doesn't NEED to be explained but the narrative of the game would be improved dramatically if it could be. And to explain that you need Gannon to be working towards something.

In the Wind Waker (and it's not the best example across all media) Gannon spares the life of Link multiple times. He captures blond haired girls from around the ocean because he wants to find Zelda so he can restore Hyrule but the girls he captures don't seem to come to any harm. Basically he's not all about causing hurt and pain for the sake of it - he has an objective. In some ways it's a more relatable objective than the King of Red Dragons.

The Minish cap and Majora's Mask both had villains with a sympathetic back story and agenda too and I loved both of those games too.

So I guess we'll just have to just agree to disagree.

@TNGYM - I don't think I've seen anyone call back to you but that's a great post about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic game design. I think one of the reasons why people have responded so much to BoTW is that your adventure is your adventure. It's what you make of it and the game facilitates that.

@BLP_Software Ahm, actually time is a construct so percentage points are relative.

Anyway, about Ganondorf in the past games, he was always a straight villain. The Wind Waker just gave him some extra character development in the last hour — during and after he was straight up creepin'. Zant was really imposing and mysterious in Twilight Princess, with Ganondorf providing a charismatic stage presence. All of these are capital E Evil villains, they just 1, have dialogue, and 2, have histories.

@Haru17 Well actually, as I put on this thick rimmed pair of glasses and get an inhaler the total time hunting for Korok seeds after doing everything else such as quests, all shrines and the main game, is significantly less. Over half the seeds have been found in around 10-20 hours yet the main game and shrines and quests took 125 so snorts its more like Koroks far less than even 40% of the game.

It's weird to think about though, that something that equals so much takes so little time.

@FGPackers The desert area is my favourite area just because of how much stuff they put there. The Yiga Clan section was just Awesome and the boss fight was really funny. Seal-surfing while taking down the divine beast was so epic and dungeon itself was so cool. It was really challenging with trying to always the layout of the structure as well as the boss fight, but this made it really fun. Also Lady Urbosa is awesome and a pure badass. Gerudo town is also awesome to explore. It had so many things in it and some of favourite characters are in it. It just had a lot of culture and the NPCs had a surprising amount of dialogue depending on time of day and there are some cool and funny things to find when exploring at different times. I highly recommend you spend a good deal of time at Gerudo Town because it's just so awesome! Can't wait to hear more of your experiences!

I recently just discovered that when you attack enemies first with an ice attack, then follow up with an electric attack, it does more damage. I just stumbled upon this by chance. This just blows my mind just because of the amount of detail is crazy. It's honeslty amazing that I'm still finding new stuff!

@StuTwo I made a post a few weeks ago along the same lines, but basically, I agree. I suppose the developers' hands are kind of forced by Ganon being stuck in some sort of regeneration cocoon, so he's a bit busy with that for much narrative development, but I like my villains to at least have a touch of human-esque darkness to them. Often there's some thread tying the hero and villain together, so it's as much the hero's internal struggle as it is about saving the wider world.

Perhaps if they played up Ganon as some sort of a diety figure, it would help explain the Yiga's motivations. You can build up whatever sort of narrative you like about a diety, without the deity having to actively consent. That might have made more sense than "Ganon is A Bad Thing and everyone agrees he is A Bad Thing, but those guys are really on board with that for some reason".

If you're not going to give Ganon a voice directly, creating some sort of narrative around him through myths and stories and doctrines would be a good way of 'colouring in' his character and motivations.

Even something as cliched as "Ganon shall spare his followers when the new world arises" would attach the idea of judgement to Ganon, and relatable devotion to the Yiga.

As it is, Ganon is just another enemy, and arguably a less relatable one than your average Bokoblin. In my mind, he's a fantastic set piece, but not much of a 'character'.

Exactly. I'm OK with it and I know it's more typical than not for the Zelda series and it doesn't hurt my enjoyment of the games - I just always feel like it's a missed opportunity.

It's also a bit jarring that everyone accepts that he's "A Bad Thing" apart from the Yiga Clan. Surely there should be a few good people going about their daily lives who question whether Hyrule under the old King was ever truly good? Whether maybe they deserved it in some way? I just think it'd give the story a bit more texture and depth.

@Maxz I think they kind of covered the Yiga's motivations in the dialogue at Kakariko early in the game. Simply but over a 10,000 year span somewhat logical. They were Sheikah who grew bitter at at the resentment/fear everyone else had over their tech (back in the ORIGINAL tech battle when the tech actually worked right 10,000 years ago), became outcasts, and learned to hate Hyrule as a result. Their support of Ganon doesn't seem to really be about supporting Ganon particularly so much as they share a common hatred of everything Hyrule with Ganon, so they're eager to help him destroy it. They're just convenient allies both seeking the destruction of Hyrule, more than being Ganon obsessed cultists. Notice the lack of porcine symbology in any of their attire/hideout. They don't seem to pay much attention to Ganon at all.

I'm not sure where this game takes place in the timeline. Zelda mentions in her one memory with the knighting speech, she says something about "whether skyward bound, lost in time, or passing through twilight...", a direct reference to SS, Ocarina (arguably ALttP as well), and TP so we know all those events seem to be part of Hyrule's lore of the Legendary Hero (and they're beyond him being the Hero of Time at this point.) We know in SS there was ancient tech, but it was different ancient tech, and as that was the origin story of the whole thing and none of that was around in any of the other games, that seems unrelated. So we know all this sheikah high tech appeared sometime AFTER all the other games, and we know that it was 10,000 years ago that it appeared....so we might conceivably be playing in a Hyrule, 15,000+ years after any other Zelda. But we've also been told that the original LoZ is actually the LAST chronologically, that was the final defeat of Ganon. So if this one is kind of a retelling of the first game, it's arguably the last one and it would make sense that Ganon would be kind of etherial non-human by now after tens or hundreds of millennia going at this. We're a long way from his Ocarina origin story as a Gerudo.

@NEStalgia i don't think we are a long way from Ganon's Gerudo past because Urbosa, right after doing Naboris, talked about a legend. In this legend Ganon past is kind of related to the Gerudo

@Eric258 i'm almost done with Gerudo Town and Gerudo Desert. I just have to do the Thunder Helm side quest, find the Great Fairy, make the photo to the giant bone creature and a Shrine that i tracked before. The thing that i like the most is the music, really fantastic and awesome, quests also were nice

Does anyone know what the highest stat item in the game you can get is? I've just got a +40 Royal Guard's Claymore, pushing it up to 112, but I imagine the Savage Lynel Crusher can go higher:

@FGPackers Yeah but she says that almost in passing like "legends say this happened" She didn't sound like it was some immediate past everyone's aware of, it sounded more like "I read in a book once that in some far away time I've never thought much about, he did that." It didn't sound too detached from talking about the Hero of Time from some time of yore, or talking about the Dark Interlopers for that matter. Ancient legends.

If Hyrule is one thing, they're obsessed beyond imagining with their ancient legends

@NEStalgia when i'll finish the game i'll take out my theory about timeline placement but i have already an idea. I just want to figure it out more finishing it

@OorWullie That's a good idea, and one that would solve the problem, however, that brings me to...

@shani This is a great point, and is actually the reason I'm ok with stuffing food on the pause menu. For all my complaining about it, you feel much more accomplished when you simply use less food in a battle. This makes you, almost, excited to try again and see if you can achieve better results. This is one benefit to the lack of enemy types, as even the hardest enemies in the game can be encountered multiple times in one sitting. I'd rather just beat this guy (and try another guy later) by eating some food instead of starting from zero again, even if that makes the game easier overall.

About the fairies though, the game does a good job of making them sparse enough that I never get to double digits. And outside of their obvious spawning points, I've only found one randomly in Hyrule. I'm sure there's a way to farm them or something, but I'm not going to bother with that. They only restore about 5 hearts too, which hardly helps against the likes of Lynels.

This whole problem I have with the food system is a bunch of smaller issues that conglomerate into one somewhat reasonable one. Thus, there are probably dozens of solutions that would "solve" this "problem" for me, like limiting resources or, like meleebrawler said, eating in real-time, or just limiting the amount of food you can eat. It just seems to be a design oversight; for how well everything else seems to be thought out, the eating system seems like they decided it was good enough and called it quits.

The Zora's first chronological history tablet also mentions Princess Ruto and how she helped the hero.

And maybe I haven't read too well into the Sheikah history, but I kind of always figured the Yiga master (and to some extent his followers) were kind of just trying to suck up to Ganon in the hopes that he'll, maybe, spare them. Probably because the leader reminds me of Zant, who had similar motivations.

@Tsurii Aunuma said at one point it's before Wind Waker which IMO makes no sense. People speculated that this is what led to the flood, but that just makes no sense on the timeline. Not that the timeline makes any sense at all. It was mostly Aounma trying to piece a linear narrative together from a set of disjointed stories because Miyamoto explicitly didn't care at all about story consistency from game to game and never gave it thought

HMK points out that during Link's knighting ceremony, Zelda mentions the Twilight, which proves that TP is within BotW's history. It's debatable how much time takes place between the two games, but that evidence seems pretty airtight to me in favor of the child timeline.

Edit: Maybe that's best left in spoilers.