Breath of the Wild: Fire Rod Havoc

Forget those Treehouse livestreams. All the silly talking and trying to be funny don't do the game justice and you should just let the game speak for itself. There are some direct feed gameplay videos over at GameXplain and Polygon, where I would suggest watching those instead. No commentary, no fuzz, just the pure experience.

Halfway through the Polygon video there is even a neat discovery: the Fire Rod is actually one of the many disposable melee weapons. It's not only the first time that we get to use this item in a 3D Zelda game, it also looks pretty crazy, shooting large fire balls that jump through the area, setting everything on fire.

The Fire and Ice Arrows also look and SOUND very awesome. I love this feeling of powerful weaponry and combined with the slow motion effect combat in this game could become really fun. I'm only disappointed that the Ice Arrows don't seem to freeze water, but maybe that's because the water wasn't deep enough. I know that there's already the Cryo Rune to create ice blocks, but there should be alternative ways for everything.

Seemingly there is no Magic Meter in this game (technology is the new magic) and classic magic items now have turned into resources. You collect Fire and Ice Arrows, Korok Leaves and Fire Rods, but they will get used up eventually. If you're out of stuff, you always will have the Sheikah Slate Runes to help you out, but the environment probably provides you with the necessary tools, whenever they might be useful, e.g. finding an axe in a house near a tree that wants to be a bridge over an abyss.

I would love to see the Whip and Ball+Chain return as additional melee weapons. Especially the Whip seems likely as an alternative way to get to places (Grappling Hook style) and as a melee weapon, but it rips after a while... Hammer and Claymore already can be spotted in the demo, so these type of melee weapons will also return. And if there's a Fire Rod, in the very least an Ice Rod should be there as well. Maybe even Water and Sand Rods as well. Give us all the things to play with!