Monday, April 10, 2023

Breath of the Wild Switch Log, Entry 1

game's title sequence on the Great Plateau cliff

In less than five weeks Tears of the Kingdom will be released on Nintendo Switch, where the wait will finally be over. For me personally it wasn't that much of a wait, however, where I'm nowhere even close to what I wanted to have accomplished before that games hits the shelves. And one of my main goals was replaying Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch, which I hadn't even started until today.

So far I've only really played the game on the Wii U with two fully completed save files, one in Normal Mode and one in Master Mode. I'd love to achieve the same on the Nintendo Switch at some point, but time has been getting scarce and there are so many good games to play... I'm even putting some other games aside for this, like Fire Emblem Engage, but they can wait. Well, I don't think I will be able to complete Breath of the Wild in the next four weeks, but I will certainly give it a try.

Still, this is supposed to be just a relaxed playthrough in Normal Mode. With Master Mode I want to achieve a fully custom Hyrule Compendium in the end, but this will take a lot of preparation and I certainly won't be able to do all this in such a short time... Here I won't take any pictures at all and just sweep over Hyrule efficiently, without having to worry about missing anything. I probably also won't be blogging as much as I did in the past, because I've seen it all before and writing these posts also takes time.

donning the Nintendo Switch shirt in front of a tunnel through ruins and decayed Guardians leading to a shrine

Nevertheless, I wanted to talk about the Great Plateau a bit, which can't be praised enough for what this has accomplished. It's the best video game tutorial ever made and I'm already having a great amount of fun with this alone, where it's essentially a small Zelda game in itself.

And this wasn't actually the first time I've played the Great Plateau on the Nintendo Switch, because I did so a couple of times last year to create and prepare a "bingo battle", where you have to clear tasks on a bingo card. It was really well received and I will share this in the future, but thanks to this I basically know the Great Plateau like the back of my hand. 

But with all this I'm also imposing some small challenges on myself, mainly getting everything around Mount Hylia without the Warm Doublet, so I can collect it from the chest in the woodcutter's hut at the end. This chest would be missing otherwise, but still show up on your Sheikah Sensor, so I try to avoid getting it normally. And it's easy to do with enough Spicy Peppers.

Anyway, I really hope that Tears of the Kingdom will follow up on that and offer a similar tutorial area, preferably on the sky islands. At least there it won't be so laughable that you apparently can't leave the place without the Paraglider. And it will offer a more interesting experience if the game starts in a completely new place.

at the edge of the Great Plateau, looking over Hyrule with the castle and Death Mountain on the horizon

Well, that's it for now. I'm off to play some more and hopefully solidify my memories about other places in the games as much as I have for the Great Plateau. Well, I believe that I still have an excellent memory of the game, where I was quite good at HyruleGuessr the one time I've played it, but we will see about that...

And this is mainly the goal of this playthrough: to have one more tour through Hyrule before Tears of the Kingdom comes out. Since both games will share the same overworld, it will be interesting to see what has changed. And the fresher my memories are, the better I can spot the differences for when I analyze the new game from top to bottom.


Progress:

  • Shrines: 4/136
  • Koroks: 15/900
  • Talus: 1/40

2 comments:

  1. Any weapon/material combinations off the top of your head you wanna try? Can't wait to see what people do with some of the already powerful ones like Lynel, royal, and elemental weapons. Savage Lynel bow (shoots 3-5 arrows) with keese eyeball could be insane.

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  2. Elemental stuff first. Like, can I make an ice sword or shield from White Chu Jelly? I'm worried that it will only freeze things for a single blow, though, like the Poofshroom.

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