I'm still really enjoying myself in Breath of the Wild, having just conquered my second Divine Beast and a handful of other challenges. I've discussed previously that I enjoy the game most during sequences that are focused and central to the overall narrative of the game. The main dungeons and plot-crucial quests are in general pretty well done. Just like Vah Ruta, the quests leading up to Vah Naboris are really cool, involving some stealth, some hilarious dialogue, and a fun and quirky boss fight. The dungeon itself is really involved too, with some puzzles that left me scratching my head.
What I haven't talked about a whole lot so far is the combat. I'm big on getting the most out of a game's mechanics. I don't want to ever feel like I'm just fumbling my way through a game, relying on dumb luck or button mashing to persevere. Sure, I could probably just stack heart upgrades and cook a tremendous amount of food to easily make my way through the game, but I want to be able to have some small level of mastery over the combat system where that's not strictly necessary. I don't need to be able to get through the game without taking damage, but I think shooting for a happy middleground is reasonable.
Because I like to dig into a game's mechanics, I want to make sure in Breath of the Wild that I'm not ignoring stuff like parrying, charge attacks, or the oft-ignored flurry rush technique. I think the combat system is reasonably well-designed and I feel reasonably comfortable with those mechanics, but I can't help but feel the more I play that I'm battling against the game's controls more than anything else. It becomes frustrating enough that I frequently feel like falling back on button-mashing to progress. It's equally frustrating when this seems to end up being a smarter strategy than approaching encounters in a calculated way.
Maybe I just don't have enough Zelda in my DNA, but I have a really tough time becoming accustomed to Breath of the Wild's controls. The jump button feels unnatural, for instance, but swapping it for B on the controller means it starts to feel weird to sprint, because X doesn't feel any better for that either. If it were up to me, I'd rebind pretty much every button in the game to something else. I can't count the number of times I've accidentally clicked in the left analog stick causing Link to crouch and start stealthily sneaking up on a boss that's staring me right in the face. I also seem to struggle with blocking in general, because the button for that also points your camera toward the direction Link is facing. Ideally, this wouldn't happen at all because it disorients me more often than not.
Because I feel like I'm so often struggling with these controls, I have a much harder time actually becoming comfortable with the game's combat mechanics. It's really fun when you parry successfully or just narrowly dodge an attack so you can follow up with a Flurry Rush, but when I accidentally bring out my bow when I intended to block or violently hurl a spear instead of opening up my ability menu, I start to get a little frustrated. The boss fight in Vah Naboris is a really nice fight but almost every time I died had little to do with being thwarted by the boss and more about grappling with the controls, and that's really annoying.
I also really struggle with the inventory system and think it could have been considerably cleaner and easier to navigate, especially since you deal with so many different materials for recipes and crafting. I find myself pretty often opening my inventory by mistake too, because I'd intended to open the map. Sometimes I even end up using an item because the confirm and cancel buttons are swapped from what I'm used to! I think I'd be much better served by only playing Breath of the Wild for awhile so more traditional control schemes don't subconsciously make me worse at playing this game, but I've never been good at sticking to playing one game at a time.
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