The Besties - Why Zelda: Breath of the Wild could still be GotY in 2021

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

Griffin and Justin are off galavanting for a week, leaving the rest of the podcast, Plante and Frushtick, to carry on The Besties name. In honor of that, we're doing a deeper dive into one of the greatest games ever discussed on the podcast: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. What were some of its best ideas and how do we expect things to play out in the still-unnamed sequel? Other games discussed: Flight Simulator on Xbox Series X, Curse of the Dead Gods on Game Pass, and Wildermyth. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

Chris Plant, I don't know what we're going to do, but it's just you and I today. Wait, it's just us? Just us. That would explain why Griffin and Justin aren't here. Very astute. Yeah, no, it's just us. The last time we did an episode that was just us was the Just the Two of Us episode, which was a couple months ago. And I feel like at this

point we probably i don't know i think we need a name for these episodes what what what would be like top of mind for you would it be called like um the besties 2.0 is that like an original well first of all i think that's a drag on the other guys. I don't think we would want to imply that this is an upgrade from when they're here. Bestie's bonus. Bestie's B-sides. That feels like too much of a downgrade. Yeah, now we're knocking ourselves at that point. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. we're knocking ourselves at that point. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. How about, how about besties resties?

The besties resties? The besties resties. We are the resties of the besties. And, I don't know, I guess we're going to talk about it. Yeah, not like we're taking a nap.

I want to make it clear. It's not like we're like resting. Yeah, I wasn't confused. I wasn't confused there. Yeah. Not like we're taking a nap. I want to make it clear. It's not like we're like resting. Yeah. I wasn't confused. I wasn't confused. I didn't think we were taking a nap. It seemed like you were confused. It seemed like. No.

So you get it. You get that like it's the rest of the things. Yeah. And we're the rest of the besties. Like the remainder of the besties. That also is true. Okay. It's a lock.

We're doing it. Okay. Okay. Okay. also is true okay it's a lock we're doing it okay hello welcome to the Besties Podcast. It's a video game club that goes all year long, has nothing to do with books. My name is Russ Frushtick. I'm joined today by Christopher Thomas Plant. Hello. I am so hot. I am so hot right now. Why is that? I'm recording, so I moved to sunny California.

It's very warm in sunny California. You know what? It's actually not too bad in Orange County right now. The OC. But, the OC, thank you. I believe it's actually the OC bitch. I don't say that word except when I'm quoting TV. But I am in my office, which for some reason has terrible

sound. So I have to wear a blanket over my head and the microphone while we record. And I'm sweating everywhere. I did not know that I could sweat so much and from so many places at the same time. I will be dehydrated in mere seconds. You know, you might say, you say that you didn't know you were capable of that, but I knew you were capable of that because I've seen you run around during E3 and boy, get sweaty. That's true.

I look like I've been running around Death Mountain in Goron City. Am I right? Is that a good segue? That was a great segue to what we're going to be talking about today, which is a brand new newly released game that just came out i just said three things that mean the same thing

it is the legend of zelda breath of the wild chris plant let's start off by asking why are we talking about the breath of the wild we're talking about breath of the wild because uh regular listeners might have noticed that we've talked about a lot of Zelda lately. And I was wrong. It's basically the long story short of it. I was not down on Breath of the Wild, but I would say that I wasn't as warm to it as maybe other members of this team have been, you know? And I think I've been trying to figure out why that is and i'm sure we'll talk about it in the show but the long story short is i started playing it again finally

during this whole move process because hey it's on switch why not turns out and and this is going to shock people breath of wild a pretty good game pretty good i think i think i think nintendo did it this time and it should be noted that we're not going to just spit because we've done this before several years ago we probably spent a lot of time talking about how great breath of the wild is but that is not our plan today you're going to ask a pretty interesting question today and the question is what things haven't other games stolen from breath of the wild but should steal from Breath of the Wild. Yeah, basically what still feels kind of ahead of its time,

even after all these years. That's the nicer way to put it. I put the edge on it. You sort of presented it in a nicer way. You made it kind of like, ooh, like you were laying down the gauntlet to the folks at Electronic Arts and Atari. That is true.

Very accurate. Okay, so before we jump into that, we're going to have a quick break, and then we'll be right back. Okay, so we're going to start. And again, we've got a big list here. We're going to talk about a bunch of things that we feel like were, as Plant said, way ahead of their time for Breath of the Wild, and is kind of shocking that we haven't seen them in more games. That's not to say that these things haven't appeared in some games, but I would say broadly speaking, we don't see them often, or we don't see them executed as well as they are in Breath of the

Wild, and we are here to change that. You want to start out, Plant? Yeah, I'm going to start out with the thing that I have really enjoyed the most. and this will get it why i think i i didn't bounce off the game but struggled with it when the game came out i remember distinctly it was right before a game developers conference in san francisco and i had the game on my brand new switch i think it was like a review build right yeah and i was able to play this while traveling and it blew my brain out of my nostrils anyway so i'm on this flight right and and i'm and i'm loving this but i'm also under the the pressure that i had when i was you know doing a lot more reviews of like hey i need to write about this I need to see as much of this as possible. That is not the way to play this game, it turns out.

And I think that was part of it. And then I think the other part of it is I was a bit of an asshole, and I needed to see if you could break the game, and just how well would the game work if I didn't take its cues, just a little bit not like you know follow the the the breadcrumbs everywhere but like i would be like okay this mountain is in the way clearly it doesn't want me to go this direction i'm gonna spend an hour scaling this mountain to see where i can get and then like use food to get into places that i should not get into

because you get these buffs and and effectively break the game. And that's not fun. It's neat. It's neat that the game lets me do it, but that would have been good for a second or a third or a 50th playthrough and not a first one. So this time I have gone into it and kind of just tried to meet it on its own terms,

which you should really do with every game when you're reviewing it, I now know in hindsight. kind of just tried to meet it on its own terms, which you should really do with every game when you're reviewing it, I now know in hindsight. And in doing that, what I've been really impressed by is how it kind of lets you have it both ways. I'm not rushing to, you know, there are the four big bosses that you need to go complete, which are the kind of the big dungeons of the game. I'm not really prioritizing that. So I'm not like just completely mainlining it but i am you know going from tower to tower in the game to open up the map sure and what i'm i'm just like so impressed by is you know there's the ubisoft way of doing kind of towers where you climb them and

and reveal part of the map and they you know do this in far cry where it's kind of like a little tiny puzzle uh platforming puzzle yeah and that's i mean when you said like you wrote on the rundown here the towers feel like accomplishments that was the first thought that i had was how uh the assassin's creed games do those towers or far cry as you said yeah and the towers in this game also do that and actually do it poorly um they're. It is not pleasurable to climb the tower itself. So that's not what I mean. But getting to the towers, actually looking across the landscape, spotting it with your binoculars, and then gradually making your way across hills and valleys and mountains and streams.

And in making that effort, every time I did it, it felt like it had been designed perfectly for me. Like it felt so intentional and so beautiful. And there were like landmarks, you know, pieces of, you know, destroyed civilizations. And I came across strangers on the way who you know were willing to sell me things and each one felt like its own mini adventure despite me very much choosing my own direction there you know like it's not like i was on some very clear defined path yeah or i was and i just couldn't tell and either either way, it doesn't matter. It's magic and I adore it. And it's a thing that I weirdly I've seen open world games move away from the tower thing because they don't want to be like Ubisoft, which I think is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater of like. The tower baby.

The tower baby out with them. Yeah. With the tower bathwater. Sure. baby out with them yeah with the tower bath water um uh and i think the core idea of it of you know having these pillars that invite you across the landscape that you then get rewarded for by learning more about the area that you're already in that is so fundamentally good it's just been wrecked by you know so many games like okay well now we're gonna put a hundred of those in it and it's gonna be a time sink and it's not going to be rewarding yeah i think there are like 10

maybe in total and i do i have had the same feeling you had like the common occurrence would be like i'm gonna climb a tower i'll see three towers in the distance i'll pick one of them and go straight at it and obviously some of that i'm gliding, some of that I'm riding a horse, some of that I'm fighting through guys. But the fact that you can really go at any order for them is pretty remarkable. And as you said, it does feel like a level that was designed between those two towers when really there wasn't. I mean, arguably the entire map is like the level that was designed,

but it makes you, the way the game is built, it makes you feel like you're having these unique handcrafted adventures when you're almost not. So yeah, no, that's a good point. I actually never hadn't really thought about the towers since I originally played it. And that does sort of remind me how damn good they were.

I want to let the listener know that Frush put together an outline for this episode. And it has a list of potential things from the game for us to talk about. And the very first thing on the list is the biggest troll. I almost wanted to start with this, to be honest. It's the biggest troll. We could not start with it because we would have lost half our listeners.

Yeah, but the people that stayed would have been so dedicated. That's true. So again, just a reminder, we are talking about mechanics

that other games should steal from Breath of the Wild but haven't or a nicer way to put that and the mechanic that I'm going to talk about is

meaningful weapon durability, specifically breakable weapons in Breath of the Wild. And why haven't more games stolen this? Yeah, why haven't they? As people might know, the weapons in Breath of the Wild break after you've used them a bunch of times. People feel very strongly one way or the other about whether this is a good or a bad thing many people believe it's a bad thing it makes you frustrated and scared to use the weapons because oh no i'm gonna lose my awesome sword forever and i'm never gonna get it back and i get that i get that argument but i actually think that having thoughtful interactions with the items that you pick up along the way is important.

And I do think by having durability, it forces you to put yourself in situations that you would not ordinarily put yourself in. As an example, you come up upon a bunch of ice monster guys and and you've got your fire sword, and you take two swings, and then the fire sword breaks. And suddenly you're kind of scrambling, right? Because you have to figure out, oh, hey, where am I going to, how am I going to take these guys down

using non-ideal weaponry? Whereas you think about Skyrim, for example. In Skyrim, you have your kit that just mows down every bastard that comes your way, and it's not a problem. Now, there is durability in Skyrim. It's totally arbitrary.

It has no impact. You fix things for like two pennies and never think of it again. Whereas in Breath of the Wild, you genuinely think about how should I spend this? It's a really important early game because you have like no

inventory slots so what you're filling with your inventory whether it's like a bunch of sticks or like a log or whatever you're going to get early in the game really really matters um it especially matters in areas like what's the name of that island you land in and you have no items oh it's like out on the east part of the map um whatever it's called um there's like a number of moments where it like really matters how you're filling your inventory and i feel like you don't get that experience with weapons that don't break even though i know it like isn't the like power fantasy you might want it does force you to make interesting decisions in the same way that like you make those same decisions in a game like Spelunky or whatever, a rogue of some sort.

You're constantly like having to make those tough calls. Are there ways to improve this system? Yes, undeniably. Weapon durability is not perfect. I think it could be better in um in breath of the wild 2 but i do think it doesn't get as much credit as it should for really making people get more creative with how they play through uh breath of the wild and if you hate me now i'm sorry uh so okay i much like my feelings with this game, I have gone on a jury. A jury? I've gone on a jury? I've gone on a journey with weapon durability. Um, I even wrote on Polygon, uh, we did a whole team roundup of, you know, what are our opinions of weapon durability, and I definitely came on the more negative side.

the more negative side um and once again dear listener i'm wrong i am so wrong and i'm not i but i'm but i'm i don't know if i would include it on this list of things that people should uh rip off or borrow i think it works really well in this very specific type of game which is all about forcing you to survive in a weird way i like i am not a huge fan of survival uh games on pc i didn't like starting all the way back with minecraft and then working to like actual survival games um i i have struggled to get into them it it never really clicks with me in terms of like collecting resources and yada, yada, yada. But I think this game borrows a lot from those ideas. And I think breakable items is a huge piece of that. I think it really wants you to always feel like you could be at risk, even when you are pretty far along in the game.

I think this kind of disappears once you have like a trillion hearts, obviously. But for like, I don't know, 20 some hours, no matter how far you are, there's still risk. And I think you need that, that level of risk, since you can choose any boss fight that you want to go to in any order right um i i think if you if you had uh just could get the best weapon early on and then

just hold on to it i think it would create a descending um arc not even an arc you basically be like if you think think of a normal story arc, it's like you go, you climb the mountain, and then you face your toughest obstacle, and then there's the ride down, right? That's like nice and comfortable. Sure. This would be like, oh, you start at the top of the mountain

and then it's just all the ride down. And that's not super compelling. I think it would just be, I think it would not feel super rewarding to just you know blast through the rest of the game uh because you have super awesome weapons and yeah and like so in like skyrim or fallout or something like that there are obviously guides that are written that's like okay you just started the game if you run for three hours in this direction and go into this cave and open this chest you can find a sword

that you will use for the rest of the game and the only equivalent of that in breath of the wild is the master sword and the master sword is gated by how much heart uh how many hearts you have so there is that that's basically them preventing you from doing that thing but other than that like there's no weapon that you could pick up early in the game that's just gonna like you're just gonna keep for the rest of the game because it's just gonna break so there's really no point in going that ham to find something incredibly useful also the gear kind of scales as the more you play i don't know yeah i i i think the the other thing that i kind of turned me off to this early on wasn't the weapons it was the shields and it was because i saw all these amazing videos when

the game came out of people surfing on their shields downhill and shields are breakable and i it's so silly that i dwelled so much on that but in my head it was like here's a game that is all about experimentation and it punishes you when you try to do it it like forces you to grind to collect things so that you can actually do this fun thing um but now like again being honest with myself i always have too many shields like i always have too many you know and i'm it's not like i can't just get more um so i i i realized that i i think i was thinking about it too much i i think i was like thinking about intellectually why do i not like this why do i not like having just unlimited nice things rather than just kind

of feeling it um and like again being real with myself like hey is this actually bothering me am i ever really wanting for weapons um does the game ever really punish me like i fear it will by having you know breakable weapons the answer is no like i'm always comfortable you know you have sort of convinced me i don't think that riding your shield like a surfboard should decrease the durability. Sorry. That should be one thing that they can change that for number two. I'm glad we're in agreement on that.

Good, good, good. I want to hear your thoughts on, you have a thing here about micro dungeons, and I want to know what you mean by that. Well, I mean, it's pretty straightforward i basically i'm talking about the shrines what i wrote here was the micro dungeons are like 90 of the game which is true there are 120 shrines if i recall and each of those shrines is like as people have played the game it's a little puzzle or a multi-room like mini dungeon that

takes like 10 minutes to beat um these are just like bite-sized chunks and then as a reward for beating those you'll get um you know things that turn into more stamina or more hearts that experience i love and i think more games should focus more on that because i feel like yeah i keep going back to skyrim but it's like a good example of like another open world game. Skyrim has small dungeons. That is true. A lot of those small dungeons feel very samey and familiar, whereas the dungeons in Zelda and Breath of the Wild

are constantly throwing like new puzzle mechanics at you. Some of them are like you're rolling a ball through like one of those dumb what's that puzzle that i hate you hate those puzzles we talked about this on it takes two yeah labyrinth you have like some weird vendetta against these like uh what would you call them like um cracker barrel i think they're called labyrinth puzzles like a wooden labyrinth puzzle i think that's what they're called. But it does throw like a lot of variety at you in each of these dungeons. And if you don't like one of those dungeons, for example, you hate one of those dumb rolling ball puzzles, it's 10 minutes. Like it takes no time at all to like leave and just do something else.

Whereas I feel like a lot of times you'll get locked into a dungeon in another open world game that might take like a half hour or 40 minutes to like blow through. And you don't know whether it's worthwhile, what you're going to get out of it. It's just like kind of a slog. Whereas here you constantly know what the reward is for going in and doing it. And you know that it's like a bite-sized thing. So if you've got 10 minutes before dinner or something like that, you know you can knock one out and feel like you accomplished something without having to like, you know, really sink a lot of time. Also, those shrines open up fast travel points.

So you're constantly being rewarded just for like stumbling upon them, which is great for like map exploration. You're really encouraged to like hop and uh hop from a shrine to shrine to like really blow through the map um yeah i don't know i i kind of feel and i talked a little bit about this during the zelda bracket episode from a few weeks ago i would kind of be fine if there were no big those four big dungeons i could kind of lose and be okay with like i like that they're there but i think the real star of this game are the shrines and i could play an entire game that's

just that um the closest thing that we've gotten is immortals phoenix rising which is very similar to breath of the wild that had a lot of these. They were not nearly as well designed as the Breath of the Wild dungeons, for whatever reason. There were just some design limitations there. But I liked that they were trying to do that. But there's also a lot of story and story-related dungeons in that as well.

So it kind of veered off the path a little bit. But yeah, I don't know. I really like that small stuff yeah i'm i'm honestly surprised that this was on the list for you because you are such a you know you love a fine wine of zelda dungeon you were the person who like really stood up for skyward sword hds uh what is it time Time Pirate Dungeon? Yeah, great dungeon, the Sandship Dungeon. And we have some people who reached out to us on Twitter this week who said there's a problem with this game. It's that it doesn't have good dungeons.

And I think that's relatively fair. For the four big dungeons that are there, they're not my favorite. I don't think they're bad. No, I think they're fine. They're fine. They're totally passable. That don't think they're bad. No, I think they're fine. They're fine. They're totally passable. That's not why you play the game. I would be shocked if they don't go the opposite direction

of what you're asking for with this sequel. Just because I feel like they had to have heard fan feedback, and then they'll be like, okay, we'll make some good dungeons we're gonna put some good classic zelda dungeons in this game but i agree with you i i hope they they don't because every minute that i'm in a dungeon in this game i'm bummed out because i'm not in the world yeah like that's why i play this game is to be in this big open world space oh so you don't like the shrines either well i don't mind the shrines because the shrines are so short

that i know that i'll be in and out the shrines really work for me well is like either the first thing i do or the last thing i do when playing like i'll try to get to one before quitting or I'll try to wrap one up but they're like nice entry or exit points from a session with the game. But yeah, most of the time I just want to be exploring and meeting

really strange, weird characters who have very meaningless missions for me that are not super rewarding in terms of my wealth as Link, but are just kind of fun things to go do. They're excuses to explore the world. I do want to mention before we move on from that, because you mentioned the point about

they're not being great dungeons, and I agree with that. The four main dungeons are not great. I do think the shrines, if took a bunch of like really great dungeons throughout in all of zelda's history and like blew them apart and scattered them across the map so such that like one third of a dungeon was here and another third of a dungeon was there that's what the shrines are like room to room, effectively, they are rooms from Zelda dungeons

that are just isolated to the point where you don't need to commit the time to finish the entire dungeon. Wait, wait, wait, wait. So what you're saying is Breath of the Wild is the war zone of Zelda games. The Call of Duty war zone? The Call of Duty war zone of Zelda games.

I was not saying that, no, but go for it. If you want to say that, we'll write that on your tombstone, buddy. Oh, thank you. Wow. That's going to be a delicious pizza. To make this more of a universal thing of, hey, what would we like to see, or how would we like to see

this in other games? I think that the takeaway for me is, I would love open world games to have less filler, more killer. Like less, you know, I don't need to climb 100 towers, obviously, like we talked about earlier. But yeah, I would love for instead of having these like campaign missions that, you know, I go into the mission closet at some point and then spend an hour doing a campaign. I would much prefer that they're just these incremental things.

I figure the Compounds and Far Cry, I guess, is their version of this. campaign i would i would much prefer that they're just these incremental things i i get i i figure the the compounds and far cry i guess is their version of this um right so yeah and those are always kind of yeah and it's being done um i i have i have one more on my end okay and then i think you might have one or two more things that you want to get in here. But the biggie here is letting people break the game. Just letting people break the game, straight up. Which does not seem very Nintendo-y. And this gets into systems. I think this gets into weapon durability.

You had mentioned before this that the weather actually matters. And when you have a game that has all these weird systems, like weapon durability, or when it rains, it limits how you can climb, or you're affected by cold weather or heat, or specifically with your character, that you can freeze time and charge power up against something so you can hit it across the map, or use magnets, all of these different things.

When you do that, you're going to not like large chunks of it because because it can't be carefully curated it can't be the classic nintendo thing the mario thing where it's like we know exactly how you're going to engage with this and we're going to refine it within an inch of its life um this is very much the opposite where where, sure, you're going to have frustrations with it. But on the flip side, you're going to have so much agency that when things do work, it's going to feel like only you are experiencing that special thing within the game, right? This is a game for everybody, but what happened between you and the game that that was just for you. Say if you like, you know, put Boko Goblin squid guts or whatever

on a steel box and then write it halfway across the map, you know, floating through the sky, like some sort of weird, I don't, I don't know, some sort of, you know, length bird. Yeah, one of those YouTube clips of people doing outrageous things with the physics.

It makes me wonder whether, it makes me wonder how much of this stuff came up in testing, and they were cool with it. It seems like it must have, right? Because the initial design of the game, which, you know, they've talked about, was designed within this game that looked like the original Legend of Zelda on the NES.

But it had, like, physics interactions. And I have to imagine if you're going to start at that point, which is, like, how wide open does this game become if you have, like, actual physics attached to it? You got to know that, like like wild things are gonna happen i don't know that they knew that from the starting point you could launch yourself on as you said on a box straight into like ganon's face using like physics i don't know that they plan for that necessarily but they definitely plan for something super wide open and you know as you, like, Mario games do not do that. Like, you know, hardcore speedrunners will find ways you can wall jump in a specific way and do something super wild. But 99% of people will never be able to pull that off. And it's not the intention of it.

Whereas here, the intention is to break it in really interesting ways where you're sending electricity through you know a chain of swords or using bombs to set up a chain reaction and i can only hope i mean we have no idea but i can only hope that breath of the wild 2 whatever it ends up being called will lean into this even further because holy cow it just makes the fact that i can still watch YouTube clips of Zelda today and it's now four years after the game came out is outrageous like it's really unheard of compared to any other Mario game I can think or any other Nintendo game I can think of yeah and it's a thing that I I think I think do you think developers have gotten better at understanding this I think Fortnite is obviously an example here but player expression is key.

Like that is what people want. They want to be able to have a goofy thing that they can share with their friends on text or that they can, you know, stream or that they can clip and throw on YouTube. Like that, it feels good to have a moment that is your own. Yeah. your own yeah and it's wild to me how i still see a lot of games coming out that are so determined to have a hyper um preset experience right and i you know i know that not everybody on the show loved death stranding but something that i've liked about kojima's games as he's you know changed in his career is here is somebody who went from making effectively playable movies with the early Metal Gear Solid games and now is making these bizarre, you know, the stories are serious, but the worlds themselves leave infinite room for you to have humor in them in terms of Death Stranding. You can just create whatever weird roads and paths you want to your heart's desire

that you can cause chaos. And I think it's important for people to recognize a game should be both things. That it can be authored and that should be available to the majority of players but that you should allow as much authorship as possible for the player if they want to come in. And if they want to erase 90% of what the creator wrote and do their own thing because that's funny to them or that's interesting to them or it's provocative, why not? Like, why is that?

Why is that? Why would that ever be a bad thing? The original material still exists. Like, it's still? Why is that? Why would that ever be a bad thing? The original material still exists. Like, it's still going to be out there. So, yeah, I hope that we see more creators allowing for that sort of freedom and that creativity in their games. Yeah, I think there is absolutely still room for the, like, very guided experience. You know, incredible games like Limbo or inside are examples of games like do not have a lot of right you there's one way to beat those puzzles pretty much

um and those are still incredible games they're also games that i really have no desire to ever play again um yeah it's just like the nature of it uh if you're gonna have to follow this one path to get through it that i just am not super encouraged in playing it again. So, yeah, I think a mix is always good. And if the options are, oh, people might make some goofy physics object happen, you know what? Just roll with it. It'll end up in some YouTube clips.

And I don't know. People will click on it and tick tock it is that what they do now tick tock yeah that's what i do do you have any final thoughts for for people uh who i guess you know all four people who have not played breath of the wild or people who are considering playing it again yeah i would reiterate plant's point at the top of the show which was if you're just starting out don't try to be too clever for your own good just play the game how you think the game wants you to play it at least until you get your sea legs and then you could start like exploring and having more of an open

experience but for the most for the starting area is really meant to teach you all of your tools that you have at your disposal so you just like kind of lean into that after that though and i think honestly when we're talking about like games that totally break them you know let you break the mold like no game has really done it quite as good as breath the wild has and yeah man i just want to see more of that from Nintendo. You know, the, what is it? Mario Maker is another good example of a great series of Nintendo really bucking their tradition and letting you get really, really wild with their IP. And I only hope, again, that Breath of the Wild 2 will follow suit. Yeah. I mean, my big thing is learn from my experience you know which is

your opinion can change like it's totally okay there are some people on twitter who gave me grief about uh liking the game while also being mad that i didn't like it in the first place and like that's good you one we should all and can all have different and unique opinions that are personal to us. And your opinion is based off of your experience and your context and the moment that it's being conceived in. And those things change. You know, your tastes change. The food that you liked when you were a kid is not the food that you necessarily like as an adult. And that's pretty cool. like as an adult um and that's that's pretty cool so i i recommend uh if you have other games out there that maybe you have been meaning to go back to that you didn't like the first time like near

on a model like i think that would be great for you to go back and try that again discover that you maybe like it um i i just i'm not to make it about that but sure we can make it about that. I guess. Yeah. No, I think the other thing too is like some things are better when you know how it works. And like we talked about this, I think on a previous episode with Dark Souls of like, oh, the Dark Souls, Demon's Souls games got better for me with each one because I felt more prepared each time I started one up

from what I had learned the previous go through, right? Yeah. And I think part of why I'm enjoying Breath of the Wild right now is I do know how to kind of exist within it. I do know how to meet it on its own page. It's not all a surprise. And when I first played it, that part was so novel and cool that this world really was foreign to me. Like to a point it was kind of intimidating at times how much was going on and now because i i know the gist of how it works because i'd made

it about this far i made it past two bosses in the past i'm i'm more relaxed and i'm like not in a rush and i kind of know some places that i want to go revisit and i know some areas that i hadn't seen before that are still kind of new to me. And that is a really comforting feeling. It's like the benefit of getting to play a sequel when the sequel isn't even out yet is kind of how it has felt. Cool. I completely agree. With that, we're going to take a quick break.

And we'll be back to talk about that very same sequel. Hello. welcome back. We are talking about The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2. 2! I put a question mark on it because we don't know what the hell this game is called. And Nintendo won't say because they insist that by saying the name, it's going to spoil something about the game. I don't know if that's like a Nintendo thing. Like they they have a weird definition of what considered what's considered a spoiler.

Or it's like the Legend of Zelda. Ganon's the good guy now, which it could be. You don't know. I mean, it's not. It's just people. People have speculated that Ganon's the good guy. People have been wrong about a lot of things. That's true.

And I suspect this is one of them. Ganon being the good guy is to Zelda games, what the people who are like, actually the parents in Frozen, they were the parents of Tarzan. And all the Pixar movies and Disney animation are all connected. Like,

yeah, it's fun to think about, but it's not true. Like it's not going to happen. That's not magic and Tarzan. Come on. That's true. Except for those drums by Phil Collins.

Yeah. Hell yeah. It was magic. Um, yeah. So we're going to talk about breath of wild to relatively short because I mean, what is there to talk about other than you kind of look like Finn the human in it with your busted like the robot arm oh yeah you've

got a robot arm you got robot arm and you can maybe transport through materials is that right well yeah we should talk smack the big thing the thing that seems to be consistent because again they haven't showed very much but what they have showed is sky is all about the future of zelda and it's funny because we just played skyward sword coincidence maybe but uh this game also has a lot of sky stuff in it um the in the latest trailer that they showed you know link or someone like link is jumping out of the sky. Presumably there are dungeons in the sky. There are towers in the sky. I don't know. Honestly, what I've seen of Breath of the Wild,

even though I'm going to play it like a maniac, has not totally wowed me yet. I was kind of hoping for something weirder than what they've shown so far, which, again, mostly seems like a lot of what we've done before but sky but yeah you know i don't know so my my fear and mentioning the ganon thing and like some of certain like a sudden obsession with lore in this series i'm kind of worried about that a little bit because you know that skyward sword is the the very first game yes in the zelda timeline right

Sword is the the very first game yes in the Zelda timeline right and there's part of it that's like oh no is this game a prequel to Breath of the Wild is that why they're not calling it Breath of the Wild 2 right and that this is set we know that there was a hero before even the heroes of the Age of Calamity spinoff game, right? Yes. I believe that's correct. And I could see how this would be connecting those two worlds. That you're connecting the Skyward Sword world and this. And the fact that Nintendo was in a hurry to get Skyward Sword HD out so that people actually play it. Yeah, but the castle was in the ground and then it gets pulled up.

So what's the implication? That the castle went down again? That's true. I think it's but the castle was in the ground and then it's it gets pulled up so what's the implication that the castle went down again that's true that i think it's in the future i think it's after the events of the last one i hope so i i i definitely hope so i do i i would i want to acknowledge your like canonical uh talk and talk about lore for a second i i feel very strongly about a few series that have lore and really shouldn't um one of them is metroid has like way more lore than it should have uh and and i feel the same way about zelda to some extent now zelda has generally been really good which is to say they acknowledge all the games have similarities. Obviously, there's always a Triforce and the Ganon and Zelda and Link are always in there. And there's the Master Sword.

But all the only like linking aspects from like a lore standpoint have really just been, hey, this keeps happening. It's like, you know, destiny for these things to keep happening the same way but other than that they really branch out so you don't have to worry about like returning characters as much or returning environments there might be some nods here and there but generally speaking they like really stand alone and i worry if it starts going down this road of like and don't get me wrong, I love anime, but like hardcore, like attack on Titan levels of depth to Zelda where, you know,

I'd rather just experience this world. I don't need it shoved down my throat in like a ton of cut scenes. I thought the way they did cut scenes in breath of wild was like very tame and minimal and wasn't overwhelming. And, but I'd be worried if they kept going down this road where they like keep voicing people and like giving all this backstory that just does not need to be there. Yeah, the degree of difficulty for the sequel skyrockets. Because something that the original Breath of the Wild benefits from is, I mean, speaking of anime, you know, you don't have your memory. is i mean speaking of anime you know you don't have your memory yeah so really the story is you going from place to place and having these episodic adventures where you meet somebody

and they're like hey you probably don't remember this but here's what you need to know for this next hour and a half and then you go on your own you know contained emotional journey and then you're on your way right and everywhere you go people are telling you the backstory that you need and it kind of makes sense um the sequel if it's truly a sequel suddenly you you you lose that um i think the sequel also has the disadvantage you know going back to the shrines i mean they put they they really did it felt like everything you could do with with shrine design with like well i think those the shrines are built around the four powers right you get so they'll have to

have new powers so i i mean we've already seen one of them one of them reverses time which is brand new uh you mentioned the like thing you turn into like a weird water droplet and like shoot through surfaces so i'm sure that's one of them it'll be interesting to see if the old powers also come back the idea that you could have, like, eight of those powers at once would be really interesting, but again, that might make it too difficult to, like, have that many variables. I just want to play it. I think it'll be very good.

I have not seen anything in the trailers that's like, oh, this is going to be, like, a totally different experience. And the way that I felt about Majora's Mask, which, again, we talked about during the bracket thing, the idea that i felt about majora's mask which again we talked about during the bracket thing the idea that majora's mask took what was going on in ocarina of time and totally changed it into something that was completely different and was still incredible

and awesome and super memorable um you know still sticks with me so i'm hoping that they are as adventurous with breath of wild too but they might not you know now that they are as adventurous with Breath of the Wild 2, but they might not, you know, now that they have this framework, I don't know if they want to risk what is easily one of their most successful games. Yeah, I mean, that's the tough thing, right? You create the greatest game of all time, and then it's pretty hard not to just keep remaking the greatest game of all time. Yeah. I mean, then again, they could just release another version of Mario Kart

and be fine. Yeah, that's true. How about we get into some questions? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. From Dr. Gannon, we have Breath of the Wild took what I love most about Ocarina of Time.

I should mention this is Dr. Gannon 7. Oh, thank you. I was really worried that this was Dr. Ganon 6. Yeah, no. Breath of the Wild took what I loved the most about Ocarina of Time, and let me just keep exploring new and different places. What do you all love the most about the Zelda franchise, and did Breath of the Wild lean into or out of that aspect?

Oh, yeah. Hardcore leaned into that aspect, because the thing I love most about the Zelda franchise, despite what I said about the dungeons and Skyward Sword, the thing I love most is getting lost in those worlds. And I think Link to the Past does that incredibly well. I think the original NES Zelda does that incredibly well. And over time, it kind of lost its way where it started becoming a much more guided experience, Skyward Sword being the epitome of that. So Breath of the Wild really did return to the core, I'm totally lost in this giant world and slowly becoming a master of it experience. So hell yeah, love it. For me, it is the collecting the weapons that give you, or like abilities that give you access

to other parts of the world right and uh obviously this game leaned out of that it gives you most of what you need up top to to get through everything and i understand why it needed to do that because it's a big open world and you can go in any direction that you want that said i think there is a zelda game that already kind of solves for this which is legend of zel Link Between Worlds, which lets you rent or outright buy the abilities that you need to get to whichever part of the map that you want to go to. So you don't get everything right up top. You do actually still have to gradually accrue it. So there's some kind of reward system in there.

At the same time, if you want to go anywhere in the map, you can. You just got to, you know, rent a center your hookshot and take that risk. And I don't know. I honestly don't know if that's actually what I want in Breath of the Wild 2. But if they wanted to recapture that appeal of you know gradually improving then that's the way to do it but again i don't know if that's actually right i think for most system games you look at spelunky like you want to have your core abilities from the beginning and then it's about your skill not so much about you know whether you've played enough of the game to unlock

everything yeah i do have one critique, though, and that's I feel like it should not be called Rent-A-Center because you never actually rent the center. Hmm. Right? No, that's interesting. Unless you can. No, you can't.

You can't. So Donovan McDab has the next question. And Donovan, a new Nier fan, speaking of, congratulations to Donovan on discovering a wonderful game uh do you think a hook shot would have enhanced or deterred exploration it's an obvious fan fave and i get why they didn't include it but how fun would that be i'm gonna say right up top uh it would not have helped in this specific game i think uh let me explain yeah go ahead i really didn't like uh how the horse worked in the game the first time i played similar of like i'm in a hurry why doesn't

the game give me what i want um me baby um but then when i stopped being me baby i realized oh no this game is mostly just meant to be seen on foot anyway and the horse is like available if you really need it and you're in a rush to get to get across like land you've already been across basically yeah um but otherwise not especially useful and uh now i understand why they limited access to the motorcycle dlc until after you've completed the campaign, I believe. Because it would bust the game. Like you should not be zipping through this world. And I think the same thing would be applied to the hookshot of here is a game that is all about, you know,

your effectively gear gating or gating your skill or your readiness for parts of the game with like mountains. And can you literally climb over them with your endurance and i think hookshot would just bust that right open so i think the only way a hookshot would work would be well i guess there are two ways one is you get it at the end of the game and say whatever you've already broken it or two it has like the length of the hookshot is tied to your durability so you can zip up the mountain to the exact height that you would have zipped up um had you you know had that much

durability to climb it just makes it a little faster the only issue is then you would have to say that it can't work during rain yeah so the the slight twist that as you were describing it came to my mind was it's not a hook shot. It's like a slack rope that you can throw physically throw and attach to things so you can swing under it, but you can't necessarily use it to, you know, get height as it were. you know get height as it were so just picturing like you're you're above like a chasm and there's like a tree like an indiana jones style moment i think would fit super well for this environment and for breath of the wild like the format the only question is how would it fit given that you already have the um the glider and how does it like work outside of the glider something to think about i i think there will be some version of that just because it's like it's mobility and and these games are entirely about mobility but i do agree like i think they will limit the amount at which you will be able to like use it right out of the gate yeah this is a comment from sophie that i wanted to include

i bought a switch in january and breath of the wild is this is a comment from sophie that i wanted to include i bought a switch in january and breath of the wild is my first game i've ever played it feels like the perfect gateway to gaming um i am so curious about this because everything that we mentioned earlier about you know um how i bounced off of it because i was making all these bad faith decisions. I would assume that maybe this actually is a great game for first-time gamers. I hate that word. But first-time people in that you can't help but kind of follow the way that it's guiding you without you knowing it. Sure.

There's that rule to guide people through a room you just use light that your eye will always go to where there's light the brightest spot in the room yeah um and i think that if you were just hopping into this then it would truly feel like magic um because you would not you would both not probably think to try to break it and two you wouldn't know like all the nitty-gritty tricks that game developers use to guide you without you knowing you're being guided right um i think that'd be like such a cool and special experience yeah i i am like i'm super thrilled that sophie dug this game and totally shocked that anyone who's not played a game before can jump into this game because it's honestly like one of the harder games that I've played

and I've played a lot of games like mechanically speaking there is a lot going on in these games and I'm mostly I'm talking about the combat because I do think they'll like puzzles and stuff can be handled by people that haven't played a lot of games but it's hard for i would never recommend this game to like someone who's never played a game before i definitely recommend something that is much more straightforward like a journey or a limbo for example just because you're really asking a lot of people to master stuff like a 3D camera and aiming and managing health and the cooking system and the inventory. There's just a lot going on here.

Awesome. Maybe I'm wrong, because I obviously didn't have that experience of this being the first game I've ever played. But to me, it seems the total opposite of that. But that's awesome that Sophie dug it. Russ, what else have you been playing? What have I been playing?

I've been playing a lot of stuff on Game Pass the last couple weeks. As people might know, Flight Simulator, the newest Flight Simulator, came out on Xbox. It obviously came out on PC last year. And when it came out on PC, it ran like dog shit on my PC which has a very old graphics card and being able to boot it up on Xbox I'm on a Series X and it runs great and the load times are

super fast because it's running on that W or what is it NVMe drive and it looks just gorgeous and streams in all the data for the cities, and the controls are good. My only complaint is that the flight sticks

that I have for the PC do not work. They're like Thrustmaster flight sticks. It seems like they would because they support other Thrustmaster flight sticks. They don't work. Hopefully, updates will come, but that is worth checking out. If you have Game Pass and just want to see the technical marvel that is worth checking out if you uh are really if you have game pass

and just want to see the technical marvel that is flight simulator definitely give it a shot even if you only play for like 10 months yeah and there's like a uh kind of like an intro option that you can do that just starts you off in the air yeah you don't have to learn all the the difficult stuff about you know takeoff and landing which is quite difficult um if you do want to learn those things i you know it's going to take you a few hours um but yeah it's one of those games that i just find immensely rewarding the only bummer of it is it's it's a it's a game that you have to kind of commit a good chunk of time to when you're playing it. And you want to do that while you relax, right?

Like sure. Part of the, what's cool about the game is you can fly from, you know, New York to LA and it takes that long to do it. And that's very neat. And not a lot of people have that much time to, to do such an accomplishment.

You can fly to Boston, you don't need to fly to LA. No, there's only one flight and you gotta do it they made the entire world in the game and you can only fly one flight it's very unfortunate you're playing one other game

oh yeah the other game I'm playing also on Game Pass is Curse of the Dead Gods which came out on PC in February we might have talked about it justin might have brought it up at some point it's a roguelike the the hook of it is basically um the combat is kind of similar to hades but um you're constantly being um thrown these curses that like make the combat harder so for example you've got a torch and when you're in torchlight you take less damage uh you know maybe you'll get a curse where your torch goes out at random

intervals or stuff like that and so as you progress through the game you're you're making these tough choices of like oh can i will i risk getting more curses in favor of like having a more powerful weapon for example um returnal did something similar i like it it's it's neat it is i think maybe a little too punishing which says a lot i normally have a really high tolerance for this stuff but it's pretty harsh early on um so i would have kind of liked something that was a little more welcoming early on but i know a lot of people dig it. It's had like a ton of updates. The last one was a, um, damn, I forget the name of that.

Uh, Metroidvania, um, dead cells. It had a dead cells themed update. So they've like, they've added a ton to the game. So,

uh, we're checking out if you dig roguelikes and, and, uh, Hades, uh, but wasn't quite my jam, but definitely very interesting. I, I'm going to share what is currently my, my top contender for game of the year. But wasn't quite my jam, but definitely very interesting.

I'm going to share what is currently my top contender for game of the year. And I'm burying it at the end of this episode. Why am I doing this? Incredible. I think you played a little bit of this. I did play a little bit, yeah. It's called Wildermyth. And how do I describe it? Man, I keep playing things that I think are not the type of game I like

and then I love it and I just I'm really changing talk about changing your taste I I just need to try everything because what I think I like and what I actually like have gotten further and further apart Wildermyth is like um I'd say it's like getting to play dnd with the world's best dm buddy and not having to play with other people so you you um are you're effectively playing dnd you create like uh three characters at the very top and you can randomize them and they have attributes like maybe they're poets or they're selfish or they're greedy or they're heroic or they're leaders they have a mix of their own traits and then uh you randomize what they look like who they are um and you start on your

adventure and the adventure is like relatively contained uh you know you're just going about the land trying to you know fight out some uh i guess like toxic evil that has taken over the beast in in the the land and the setting's like very typical dnd um and all that's like fine whatever you know there's infinite games kind of like that the combat is okay um it's turn-based and you can have like an archer or you can have uh uh the swords uh person and then you can have a a sorcerer who is my favorite because the way that the mechanic works is you take over uh objects that are in the environment. And then each of those objects has unique powers. So you might take over a plant and it'll grab onto the enemy

and pull them to the ground and hold them in place and deal damage to them so they can't keep pushing forward on their attack. Or you'll detonate a table or chairs and it shoots wood into all the nearby enemies doing like pretty significant damage um so yeah you just kind of get a good flow going and again all of that so far good but not great but then the story progresses and the choices it gives you based off of the type of characters that you have it feels straight up like magic like i i am sure that the system that they've created for um

allowing you to inform the story is somehow simpler than like okay they literally just made a deal with the devil and they're performing black arts but it sure feels like the latter um i am so engaged with the characters that i have and it feels so uniquely like my own story so for example mike maharty uh who just joined polygon as the reviews editor and uh does uh the fire escape cast he was playing this and when he told me about it he's like oh i had this one dude who got really depressed after my first adventure and like literally went away from the the his group and just like was gone for like years i think and then came back and then didn't talk anymore and the leader of the group because the leader is motivated by people engaging, suddenly

got depressed because they weren't able to motivate this member of their party. And that just happened between missions based off of stuff that had happened in the campaign before it. For me, I had, and I'm curious if you had any experience similar to this, this is just the first couple hours, so I don't think these are huge spoilers. I stole, one of my characters, she stole an eagle's egg and survived and then raised the eagle on her own

and then let the eagle free. And now the eagle brings his gifts. Another character, he was kind of a recluse, but he actually stumbled across this dude water nymph, and they pledged their lives to each other. And now between campaigns, he goes and lives with this man in the river, and they seem to have a very happy life together. And then I had this one character who was greedy,

and she had the option to steal a gem. And I was like yes she was definitely stealing the gem that is very in her character and she did it immediately embedded in her right eye and now it is slowly taking over her entire body um with optional evolutions so like i don't have to go through those evolutions but i'm doing it because it's cool and like the most recent evolution is the gemstone took over her leg and it made her like 0.5 slower but uh increased her like defense or dodge by like five percent and i was like wow that's that's a great deal like why would i ever say no to that but now i'm starting to think like oh i probably should have said no to it because the gem is probably going to take over my entire body and journey like that's the real cost it's not the 0.5 speed that i'm losing um it it is a trip and the other really smart thing it does

is so you you kind of barely design these characters up top you go through the entire first mission which is about hour and a half two hours and then after that is when you do things like go and buy new weapons or assign points and stuff like that um or throughout even throughout the campaign you know you're you're upgrading your abilities and adding new skills um so it does a good job of getting past uh something that i really struggle with with so many rs, which is like, welcome to the RPG. It's going to be the most exciting 100 hours of your life. Unfortunately, we're going to need you to sit down with a piece of pen and paper and decide everything about your character for the next hour, knowing nothing about them, knowing nothing about their peers, and knowing nothing about the adventure. Which, like, I always end up regretting

the characters that i create where in this game again like the trick it's playing is it's making me feel like i am a huge part of the story when in reality i know that the game is doing most of the heavy lifting and i think that's what a really good d uh dm does when you play dnd with them is they they make you feel like an essential part of the story and like an active storyteller when in reality they're probably doing most of the work yeah i did not play nearly enough to see a lot of that wild stuff i was really just taken by like very early on just the simple idea of like oh this is this other person in the world you decide do i hate this

person do i love this person are we friends like what is your backstory and that will then like slowly fill in like that's one of the earliest decisions you make is the first buddy you meet is this someone you are in love with or a rival with and um just that it starts simple and then to hear that it goes really wild is great. That's really encouraging. And those changes are, like, legitimate. Like, it's not like, oh, you know, it changes a word or two. The first pair that I have, they're, like, childhood good friends.

They're not romantic. They're not rivals. And then the next pair that I got, it's a rival with somebody in the first pair. And, like, they don't like each other yeah they you know they they respect each other in that they need each other to like survive but like that's about it um and how again how the game pulls this off and then as the game goes on now I've actually broken up my party so I have like two or three people going on one part of the adventure while other heroes are going on another part of the adventure.

And it's connecting the story in its own way through that. So some people just aren't aware of stuff that's going on on other ends of the story. I don't know how the spreadsheet is balancing the story on the back end of this yeah it's wild it really breaks my brain um but it's it's on steam correct it's on steam and don't be turned off by the art the art is like has a little bit of it's it's pretty simple it looks almost like um color pencil drawings yeah um and at first i i was like i'm not sure what this is um this seems like a not childish but i i i couldn't get a read on it

it's not that i didn't like it i just i couldn't tell what it was and no i was wrong um it is it matches the energy of the game which is just just this really special, lovely, sensitive place to be. The compassion that it shows for its characters, while also letting them be quite fallible, it rules, y'all. And I really hope that some of you give it a chance. of you give it a chance and i i know for a fact we will be talking about this game more in the coming weeks and and unquestionably at the end of the year when we do our big you know best use roundtable yeah just to put a pin in this i do want to mention it runs great on my macbook air which is oh always nice when you can just run a new pc game on a macbook air and not have to worry about whether it runs well it runs runs great. That is great.

I did not know that, and I am 100% switching from playing on PC to playing on my MacBook now. There you go. That rules. I want to thank the following people for writing really nice reviews on the Apple Podcast Reviews thing. I'll go really

quick. Chinana Splits. These are just rant. I picked splits uh these are just ran i picked you nailed it no you nailed it don't apologize you nailed it chenana splits uh c radman 94 contented fen natalie c a can man uh lord neck hob 21 mexcellent american uh lindsey sunny jim 91 Mexcellent American, Lindsay Sunny Jim 91. Oh, wait, no, that's two names. That's Linz.ly and Sunny Jim 91, G Squirrel Go, and my favorite was I Never Had an Egg Sandwich, which I feel very sorry for that person. I apologize.

So thank you very much for those folks that wrote reviews as well as everyone else that wrote new reviews. We really appreciate it. I also wanted to thank everyone for listening through this episode, which obviously was different because it's just plant and I. But, you know, hopefully you dug. You know, it's a little more chill. Just the besties. Resty branding and everything.

Hopefully you dug the slightly slower pace. I know people sometimes want us to go a little slower. It can be tough with a bunch of people in the room, but now just two of us, we're just chilling, kicking back, drinking some brewskis. I got one other thing before we wrap up, and it's something I forgot to do last week,

and I apologize. And it's our honor. It's what we played. We played this week, wrap up and it's something i forgot to do last week and i apologize and it's our honor it's it's what we played we played this week the legend of zelda breath of the wild uh you spoke about uh flight simulator on game pass uh which you can now play on xbox series s and x and curse of the dead gods which i think you're kind of like lukeon, but maybe we'll give us some more time. And then both of us played Wildermyth, which is the D&D style storytelling game that apparently runs well on a MacBook Air. So you can play it on PC, but I would do it on that. I was playing on a large monitor, and honestly, I think I would enjoy it more on a laptop.

So I think people should check that out. What are we doing next week? Next week, we are closing in on the school year kicking off in September. So we thought before it got busy in terms of video game releases, we'd take a look back and talk about some of our dorm room favorites. Oh. Multiplayer games that are, like, awesome to have people over to play. Obviously, given the scenario, maybe some of these you're

going to be playing online but that's fine too that's okay uh griven and justin will be back and and we'll dive in i'm sure to the smash brothers and mario karts of the world but also some deep cuts so please join us for that and that's going to do it for the besties be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the best friends play the world's best games Besties!