SamSki The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Review

Overall, Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece of a game with freedom, exploration, and creativity at its core. However, there are a few areas where I think the design could have been improved: 1. Ganon’s Difficulty: As a player who has tamed all the Divine Beasts and prepared thoroughly, Ganon feels too easy. A scaling system where he becomes harder based on how well-equipped the player is when they fight him would have made the final battle far more satisfying and rewarding for all kinds of players. This issue alone outweighs all the other problems combined in my opinion, because Ganon is supposed to be the ultimate final showdown—the fight the entire game has been building toward—and he ultimately feels far too easy. 2. Weapon Durability: Weapons break frequently, which interrupts the flow of combat and exploration. While this encourages creativity and experimentation, it often feels more frustrating than strategic. I think a repair system would help solve this problem while still preserving the durability mechanic. 3. Champion Ability Cooldowns: Champion abilities only recharge after all charges have been used. This can encourage players to intentionally waste abilities before entering difficult fights just to start the recharge, which feels unintuitive and disrupts the flow of gameplay. 4. Master Sword Recharging: This is essentially the same problem as the Champion Ability cooldowns. The Master Sword only begins recharging after its durability has been completely depleted, which can encourage players to intentionally use it up before entering an area where they want it available again. 5. Limited Inventory Space: Starting with a few weapon slots and having to hunt Koroks for expansions can feel tedious. Players who want to experiment with a variety of gear are forced into repetitive side content, which reduces the sense of freedom early on. 6. No Way to Keep Track of Recipes: There is no way to keep track of the recipes you have already made or discovered. I would recommend adding a food section to the Hyrule Compendium where players can see recipes, default pictures or pictures they have taken themselves, and the names of the dishes they have made. 7. No Dedicated UI Section to Drop Items When Opening Chests With a Full Inventory: This is annoying because you have to close the chest, drop an item from your inventory, and then open the chest again to get the item from the chest. 8. Limited Stamp Variety: The small selection of map stamps forces players to reuse symbols for unrelated purposes, such as marking shrines with treasure chest icons or using cooking pot icons to mark Link’s house. 9. No Option to Store an Image in the Hyrule Compendium Without Saving It to the Album: There is no option to save an image directly to the Hyrule Compendium without also storing it in the album. This requires players to manually delete photos afterward, which is inconvenient and unintuitive. 10. Dinraal, Naydra, and Farosh Being in the Monsters Category in the Hyrule Compendium: Dinraal, Naydra, and Farosh are categorized as monsters in the Hyrule Compendium, despite their descriptions literally stating that they bear no ill will toward people. A separate category for them would make more sense. 11. No Text Explaining What the Inventory Is Sorting By: The inventory has a “Sort” option, but the game never tells you what it is actually sorting by. The resulting order can feel random, and I never fully understood how the sorting worked even after beating the game. FINAL SCORE: 9/10 - Masterpiece