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Writer's pictureMatthew Osborne

Zelda: BOTW is it worth it?

Legend of zelda: breath of the wild (for ease I'm just gonna use BOTW in abbreviation) is actually a quality game which I was hesitant to play for a hot minute there. So in context I just spend 60 odd hours over the last month or two playing breath of the wild, now that might sound like a long time for a game which people can get through in probably a third of that time, but the number of side quests, which I still have not received 100% on is just immense... So botw pretty much follows on where the spin off game, age of calamity, finishes, with calamity Ganon taking over hyrule and the fabled hero falling into a deep slumber for 100 years. 100 years is pretty much enough time for hyrule to turn to crap, this pretty much means that all the guardian figures brought in for protection are overrun and turned evil, the divine beasts have thier heroes sadly slaughtered and the beasts are now running rampant causing chaos in hyrule. And ofcourse hyrule castle pretty much has been taken over by calamity Ganon and is near impossible to access. Your rule as the fabled hero, link, is to free hyrule from calamity Ganons grasp, this may sounds quite straight forward as your normal legend of zelda game, but I think the drawing point for me through this game was the open world aspect. You often get these sorts of games, pokemin and previous zelda games where you have to complete things in order to progress through the game. That is not the case with botw, botw allows you to complete the game however you see fit, whether you want to max out your hearts and stamina and visit every shrine, if you want the best divine beast powerups, or even if you simply want the best Armour and weapons for you end game fight, the possibilities are endless as to how you want to play and its completely how you want to play. I commented before on the sheer number of side quests avaliable throughout this game whether this be as simple as completing any of the 120~ shrines, completing your memory bank, or even just helping Amy npcs in need, there are many ways to keep yourself entertained without playing the main storyline.

Whilst playing this game you are likely to face the divine beasts, the glorious beasts can only be defined in one way... divine. Each of the four beasts are different, and each have their own challenged and rewards, if you go for the elephant divine beast to begin with you will be granted with miphas grace which will save you from dying once then needs a recharge. If you go for the eagle divine beast you will be rewarded with revalis gale, this gale allows you to be blasted up into the air to gain real height on your glider, but be warned, your glider still has the same amount of durability. With the lizard divine beast you will be granted with protection, whilst using this it will shield you from any damage, making you near invincible. And the final divine beast is the camel, this camel will grant you with lightning to strike down on your opponents when needed. All of these are very useful in endgame.

The Ganon fight was defiently a highlight of this game for me, you first have to make your way into the heart of hyrule castle, this means you are killing gaurdians left right and center. as soon as your inside the castle you're hit with a cut scene with wraps up your divine beast storyline and also deals most of the damage for you, this fight is relatively difficult as you need to deflect some of ganons attack while dodging others, and they come at random orders. One truly amazing thing I found about this fight w as that it wasn't actually the end of the game, once you defeat calamity Ganon, you have to face dark beast Ganon, this fight is a wee bit easier, you receive the most powerful bow in the game and need to shoot glowing circles which are the only places where damage will be dealt. There is one complaint I have about this game though, they have made the main storyline of this game into a two parter, (excluding age of calamity) so as soon as you defeat Ganon your kind of booted back to the main menu and need to reload a previous save file where it knows you've defeated Ganon, this kind of grinded my gears as I would have loved to see my efforts pay off and have hyrule cleansed, but I guess we will have to wait for botw 2 to release sometime within the next year, and until then just keep grinding those shrines.


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