Another day, another accusation of review bombing
(archive.vn)
Comments (42)
sorted by:
"When we do it there is no problem, because we're just fighting these nonexistent bad guys!"
Funny how the review bombs with positive reviews isn’t equally reviled
Only the negative reviews are fake - even though companies have been paying for fake reviews ever since reviews existed.
You mean Kotaku has taken to arms again?
While I tend to disagree with the bad reviews in a lot of ways based on only what I've seen (haven't gotten it yet), they seem to be generally legit reviews. Albeit a lot of what is in that screenshotted review linked is just personal stupidity, if you paid $70 for a Switch game expecting "next-gen" graphics and a performance and fidelity mode, sorry, you suffer from being an idiot.
My main disagreement in general is I reject the notion that every full game release must push the envelope in every single facet from the previous one or be "just a DLC." If the first game was fun and the new one is more of the same of equal or better length, then it's fine with me. I don't remember much bitching that Doom 2 was just more Doom, but more of "wow, we get more Doom!"
I'll be interested to see whenever I do play this, which probably won't be soon honestly. Will at least wait until I can pick it up for $40-50.
It may never drop to $40. Nintendo games hold value so hard.
I wouldn't be shocked if it didn't. I don't really mind the higher prices of their games for that reason though. I can buy a physical copy and sell it if I really want to. I got BotW bundled with my Switch used, so I can't really compare it....but if I were to look at my copy of Astral Chain or Xenoblade 2, I paid $50 each for those and I could drop them on eBay three years later and net at least $40 for them. It's way better than any other physical games that I don't even bother with anymore because the residual value is so bad.
The problem with calling this a review bomb is that a huge portion of the playerbase has not only already played it, but finished it, long before its release date. So the common defense of how its a review "bomb" in that they couldn't possibly have done so is gone.
It looked like it was being penis bombed to me.
I've read a lot of criticisms on discord that it doesn't feel like a classic Zelda game, it's boring, and it takes the worst aspects of BotW and expands on them, like weapon degradation (weapons break in 20 hits or less) and added a ton of unnecessary crafting. One guy said "There's so much padding now. You can't just find a raft to cross the river - you have to find every component and build the raft first. It's BOTW but with x10 the grind." He also complained about Zelda's voice actor.
Just hearsay though, I haven't played it myself.
I've been enjoying it so far. Played it all weekend. There's almost always a stockpile of needed pieces lying around anywhere the game expects you to do something, and if you're always collecting more Zonai Device capsules whenever you see a dispenser, you'll always have a surplus of gadgets to build with when you feel like it.
Once you get the autobuild ability, you can even spend a currency to generate the parts you're missing if it comes to that.
Have played.
Doesn't feel like a classic Zelda game. Neither did BotW.
The "crafting" thing is basically two components: one, you can combine anything you find with your equipment to imbue different effects. It's kind of tedious but you can mostly ignore it.
Then there's the construction bit where you can stick a bunch of stuff together to make contraptions like wagons and rafts and hot air balloons. It's mostly ignore-able as well, except in shrines where it's directly related to solving puzzles.
Zelda's voice actress still sucks. And why the fuck do they have her out investigating unknown phenomena? She's a goddamn princess!
Otherwise, if you liked BotW, this feels like more of the same but with islands in the sky and extra puzzles to solve and extra padding. (Made the trek to an observation tower but didn't bring the gear to solve the puzzle to let you in to the tower? Fuck you, have fun making the trek again!)
Also, almost no music. Again.
I'm no weeb, I don't speak Japanese, and I haven't watched anime in years, but I found Zelda's voice actress in BotW so annoying I flipped the game to Japanese voice. Much easier on the ears.
Will they let you do English subs with Jap voices? That'd be ideal.
Yeah. There's so little voiced dialogue anyway, it even works for my youngest who is a slow reader.
Maybe it's because I've only listened to clips due to not having either game myself, but I don't think she's that bad.
Her voice didn't bother me at first, but after watching a cutscene that both features Zelda and repeats fairly often enough times, I'm quite sick of it!
They wanted to make her a tomboy who wears leggings and sneak in ass shots, and I don't blame them.
Eh, she was always an active participant, even as far back as Ocarina of Time, but not like this. And aside from military conflicts, which princesses would not have participated in, the others are nothing like sending your sole heir to the Hylian royal bloodline down into a pit that has weird sickness-causing gaseous ooze coming out of it.
I found it to be contrived and dumb, and I say that as someone whose greatest claim to fame is creating Zelda-related stuff with more than 1 million combined downloads.
How many zelda games from Gamecube onward have you played?
The funny part is, the king of "generic open worlds" Ubisoft looked at BotW and thought "I can do better." So they created an entirely original IP in Immortals: Fenix Rising, with good VAs with solid writing while still being completely non-linear and then gave the world a shit ton of things to do in it. Basically improving upon all of BotW's flaws.
But it wasn't Nintendo/Zelda, so it completely flopped and was 50% off in a month. Its certainly no 10/10 masterpiece but if people consider BotW 10/10 then Immortals is easily 12/10 relative to it.
I started Immortals probably a couple days after I finally finished BotW. I wish I could explain why but it just didn't grab me. I'm going to give it another chance at some point though, because it took me a long time to really warm on BotW, but once I did I didn't put it down.
It's a shame it flopped though, because I don't think it's a bad game at all, and I'm generally pretty critical of Ubisoft games.
One big flaw of the game that BotW did do much better, is that unlike BotW (which gives you all your traversal skills in the tutorial) is that it locks your various moves to the shop, which requires you reaching the mainland to access. Even then, a lot of "necessary for puzzles" upgrades to those moves also need to be bought means you run into a lot of "need to come back" moments early on. Its an extremely retarded move on their part to do it like that, and is my biggest criticism of the game.
Once you've gotten those is when it reaches its stride, which is probably why it flopped. You need to not be a completionist during the opening for a few hours, which is a bit antithetical to the genre.
Seems like they mixed in one thing too many, then. "I need to come back later when I can X" is a staple of Metroidvania games, and it doesn't really bother me in those.
Of course, putting things in a "shop" instead of making them rewards for completing challenges of one type or another is extra-retarded.
I only called it a shop because you use "coins" to unlock them. But the coins are gotten for completing random challenges around the world, and it functions as any other "levelup" mechanic in a game.
I don't even think the "need to come back later" mechanic is bad. Its just not well explained to you that you are missing a pretty crucial part of your kit you will unlock right after the tutorial is over. Nor that certain ones are just regular upgrades, while others are hugely important if not required for many challenges. Meaning you can accidentally buy a bunch of the "wrong" things and slow down your progression massively without knowing. Not helped by the tooltip not explaining well that the "spears from the ground" ability isn't just an AOE attack, but allows you to gain height in mid-air during glides which is its primary use.
So, its less of a mechanic issue with the game and more of a failure of communication/tutorial that makes the first couple hours sometimes fall flat for people who don't stick it out to realize what they missed. Especially as while the shrines will tell you "hey you lack the ability needed here" (though not which one), but the overworld challenges don't always.
It might be worth it then for me to pick that up! What system is that on?
Its included in psn+ and was in humble monthly a while back. It didn't actually have any freedom in the "shrines" compared to botw from what I recall of the few hours I spent with it.
Basically everything. Its Ubisoft, so I'd probably avoid the PC version due to their retarded software they attach to all their games.
Ultra-Progressive terminology in the English script? Freedom of building, and some people decide to make Nazi war tanks? Blacklisting of Kotaku? Not enough niggers? Who knows.
There’s almost no script for which to be progressive within, lol. It’s link solo for 99% of the game and I’ve seen no woke yet.
There's apparently an issue that after calling the various races of Hyrule "races" for so many years, now they're calling them "peoples." Because "race" is a slur apparently.
Despite the fact that they're actually species, not races, and certainly not "peoples".
The day they introduce a half-Zora, Japan has fallen.
They took something like 6 years to release what is mostly an expansion pack to BotW, and then had the gall to charge 70$ for it.
Like, if you are an obsessive fan of BotW in particular, this is the game tailor made for you. For every other type of Zelda fan, its pretty much a hard slap in the face of them saying:
Nothing major. I've been watching some streams of it and is more BOW but kind of boring. The more surprising is why do critics like it? White straight male protagonist game getting 90+ means they must have been payed.
Everyone who've I've seen buy it (or pirate it) on day 1 has enjoyed it. I don't think any of them found it massively ground breaking, but if you like BoW, you'll like this: basically.