The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Americans Hate Tingle: Invoked. The Trope Namer doesn't appear, but in the DLC, Link can gain the Tingle Set as a Joke Item. Its only real benefit is that it increases walking speed at night, but it has horrible defense, and NPCs will be noticeably frightened if Link talks to them while wearing it.
  • Awesome Bosses: Monk Maz Koshia, the Final Boss of the Champions Ballad DLC. Yeah, first of all, the very revelation that you have to fight a Sheikah monk hits most players as a shock, as most of them do nothing except sit in their Shrines and give Link instructions on how to complete their Trials. Then you find out just what this guy is capable of. In effect, he is a Final Exam Boss, his attacks and abilities reminiscent of other enemies you fought previously, including the Yiga Footsoldiers, Yiga Blademasters, Thunderblight Ganon, Master Kohga, Hinoxes, and the Guardians, but also has a few tricks of his own like creating multiple copies of himself. Yeah, you truly want a challenge, this is the guy.
  • Base Breaker: Princess Zelda is popular among some circles for being hot and having one hell of a tragic backstory, but other people simply find her whiny and dull, with her voice going hand-in-hand with the annoying factor. Her serving as the last line of defense against Calamity Ganon for over a hundred years has also won over fans for being a Crowning Moment of Awesome, but to others it just feels like a dolled-up version of her usual Damsel in Distress treatment.
    • Ask any Zelda fan what they think of Revali, and you'll probably get an equal amount of responses along the lines of "Oh my god, I love that guy!" and "Oh my god, fuck that guy!". To his fans, his cold, aloof, and downright mean personality make him a breath of fresh air compared to the other Champions, and his grudging respect towards Link that builds up while you explore Vah Medoh is a nice bit of character development. But people who hate him simply find him to be too mean to like, making him come across as a total asshole who some argue had his death coming to him.
  • Broken Base: Many players were upset that the game had proper voice acting at all; others didn't mind so much. Though there's another Broken Base within that Broken Base: is the English dub better than the Japanese original? But that's just another battle in the ongoing Subbing Versus Dubbing war.
    • Going even deeper is a third Broken Base within the voice acting conundrum: is Zelda's English voice specifically good or bad? Even people who generally like the English dub criticize her for sounding too weepy and mopey, while others argue that it's fitting given the tremendous amount of pressure she's under.
    • Is the weapon durability a cool new twist on the Zelda formula that encourages you to play carefully and smartly, or an annoying hassle that shouldn't have made it past the playtesting stage?
    • Overall, the vastly different feel of this game and what it could potentially mean for the future of the series has attracted a lot of debate. Plenty of fans feel that this game was the breath of fresh air Zelda desperately needed while fans who prefer the older style of games feel that Breath of the Wild barely feels like a Zelda game at all thanks to the lack of dungeons, unfocused story, and the emphasis on crafting and breakable weapons. The game's massive success and sequel has led to that camp of fans worrying that the series could never return to its old formula since it's clear that this one sells.
  • Catharsis Factor:
    • Bomb/Fire arrows + Exploding Barrels = Entire Bokoblin settlement destroyed. Simple, but satisfying.
    • Once you complete the goal at Eventide Island, you can go back and wreck revenge against the mobs that kept smashing you - including that Hinox - with your real weapons. You don't have to, but it's SO satisfying.
    • When you finally get the Thunder Helm, lighting is No Sell against Link, and it's extremely satisfying to simply stroll untouched through one of the thunderstorms that had previously OTKed him.
    • When you start the game, Guardians are nearly indestructible and unbeatable juggernauts of death. When you finally gain the weapons you need to blow them into spare parts, try not to smile as your former tormenters lay broken at your feet. Though if you're good at timing your shield counters, the catharsis can come as soon as the very start of the game as you deflect their heavily-damaging beams right back into their faces.
    • Slaying a Lynel. These mini-bosses are hard, with a wide variety of attacks, ridiculous damage output, and they look pretty awesome to boot. A battle against one of them will likely be long and hard, but winning feels very rewarding.
  • Demonic Spiders: Despite the game's small enemy variety, there are still plenty of beasts to be on your guard around.
    • The key threat of the game would be the Guardians: every last one of them is a pain in the ass, even the decayed, immobile ones. They relentlessly target you before firing beams of energy that have good tracking and hit hard. And by hard, we're talking six hearts worth of damage hard... in a game where you start with three. As long as there's ample cover the Decayed Guardians and Guardian Turrets aren't so bad, but the Guardian Stalkers will chase after you, and there's a flying variant too. Killing them can take forever with conventional weaponry which will lead to several broken weapons, and even though you can easily kill them by parrying their beams back at them, you better not flub up the timing because the result will either be one heavily injured Link, or one dead Link. And in Master Mode where they delay their shots, it's all too easy to botch a parry.
    • Lynels are mercifully rarer than Guardians, but are every bit as threatening. They've got the speed and ferocity you'd expect from a lion-centaur hybrid, and it doesn't matter if they're wielding a sword, crusher, or spear: they hit hard, even the "weakest" red variety, and they've got huge health pools that will take a while (and several weapons) to eat through. Fighting them at range isn't an option since they'll bombard you with volleys of Shock Arrows, meaning that you'll often want to fight them up close and personal, which demands you to have mastered the art of Perfect Dodging so they won't utterly maul you.
    • Electric, Black, and Silver/Gold Lizalfos are just as annoying as their weaker counterparts. But unlike the wimpier Green and Blue ones that have low health and the Fire and Ice ones that can be one-shot with the element they're weak to, these guys are annoyingly durable and are often packing nasty weapons such as Tri-Lizal Boomerangs and Lizal Spears. And unlike the elite Bokoblins and Moblins that are slow and easy to hit, these Lizalfos are bonafide Lightning Bruisers that will zip and zoom all over the place. The Electric ones also have the nasty ability to discharge a powerful electric field with a huge radius, and they have no elemental weakness to instantly kill them with. If you're visiting the Faron jungle early on to stock up on Hearty Durians and Mighty Bananas, be careful because the place is infested with these damn things.
    • While most Keese are literal examples of Goddamned Bats, Electric Keese cross over into this territory. While they're still fragile and only take one hit to kill, that's of little comfort when they can electrocute you for massive damage and sometimes attack in swarms. Even if you kill them they're still a threat, because their electrically charged bodies will often come hurtling straight towards you before vanishing.
    • Most wild animals aren't a threat in the slightest. Unfortunately, bears aren't most animals. They're tanky, fast, hard-hitting, and can't even be L-targeted. And in the colder parts of the map, you'll find Bokoblins riding them into battle. Luckily they're rare to the point that it's not uncommon for players to never run into them in over hundreds of hours of gameplay, but it doesn't make their rare encounters any less tense.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: The Four Champions are all runaway successes despite their meager screentime. Mipha for being an attractive fish girl with a gentle heart and an adorable crush on Link, Urbosa for being ridiculously cool and drop-dead sexy, Daruk for being a total bro, and even the controversial Revali is wildly popular for being able to back up his boasting with his skills and for having a good character arc. The fact that they aren't in the game anywhere near as much as they should be is one of the major complaints fans have, which would be rectified with the Ballad of the Champions DLC as well as their prominence in Age of Calamity.
  • Hype Backlash: The game is arguably gaming's ultimate example of this, due to a very unfortunate combination of its nearly unanimous "10 out of 10" magazine review scores and the infamous "Skyrim with a Zelda skin" stigma that it is plagued by.
    • And that's not even mentioning how much controversy was stirred up by the game's numerous incredibly massive changes to the "formula" that Ocarina of Time had previously served as for the Zelda franchise...
  • One-Scene Wonder: Magda, aka the "crazy flower lady". Quite a lot of Memetic Mutation with her like this one.
    • Fi's voice-only appearance in the final flashback is brief, but incredibly memorable for its poignance despite her divisive reputation from her home game.
  • The Scrappy: Yunobo is hated not because of his personality (he's a friendly guy with a solid character arc) but because of the hellish escort mission where you have to slowly lead him up Death Mountain, where just about any obstacle or enemy will send him into a panic that actively gets in the way.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: While most players don't have an issue with the game's realistic environmental effects, the rain is their biggest beef. You need Link to climb a mountain, a tower, or a wall, and and he's like Spider-Man until it starts to rain and he slips and falls. Even worse, waiting the rain out is a problem, seeing as the only way to suppress time is using a campfire, which you can't start very easily if it's raining. Yeah, rain is pretty annoying. And god help you if the current storm is a thunderstorm, because if you currently have anything metallic equipped, lightning will home in on you, knock you flat on your ass (when it doesn't kill you outright), and make you drop your weapons.
    • Weapon durability also catches a lot of flack because there's no way to get around it, and they all break after mere minutes of sustained use. This wouldn't be so bad if A: you had a decently-sized weapon inventory and B: there was a way to repair your weapons like in other games with weapon durability, but you're out of luck here. Weapon inventory is painfully limited even with Hestu's upgrades, and the only weapon you can "repair" is the Master Sword, which takes a while to restore itself after having its durability worn out.
    • Speaking of inventory, if you open a treasure chest and the item is a type with its inventory maxed out, you'll likely find yourself screaming internally at the sight of the "Your inventory is full." message, followed by you slooooowly putting it back in. While you can easily just toss a weapon and open it back up, it adds to the tedium where a simple option to toss a weapon in exchange for the weapon would have easily circumvented it.
    • As in Skyward Sword, the stamina wheel can be a real bother when you're sprinting. Even with it upgraded, unless you're ready to constantly pause and hork down stamina-restoring food and elixirs, anything more than a few seconds of sustained running will leave Link walking at a slow crawl as he waits for his stamina to build itself back up.
    • Merely getting across bodies of water can be a slog no matter what. Swimming usually isn't an option since it burns through stamina and you swim slow (and that's when you aren't actively being pushed back by a current), leaving you to either sloooowly cross rivers or swathes of ocean by carefully hopping across Cryonis blocks (which you can actually break if you land in the water and re-emerge from under them), using a hard-to-find Korok Leaf to steer a sailboat, or say "screw it" and glide across with the help of Revali's Gale which isn't an option across large distances like with Eventide Isle.
    • The enemy variety, or lack thereof, can be disappointing because in a mere hour or so in a game that can take hundreds to do everything in, you're likely to see every one type of every species there is. And not only is it repetitive, but it can be an active detriment to immersion since you'll be seeing them in every environment instead of ones they'd make sense to be fought in.
  • Take That, Scrappy!: The unlockable Tingle outfit added as part of the game's DLC comes off as a walking middle finger to the controversial Manchild. Its defense is terrible, its ability is situational to the point of near-uselessness, and to top it off, wearing it will freak out everyone you talk to.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Breath_of_the_Wild/YMMV?oldid=1905364"