Waiting for Breath of the Wild

Sooooo... the Switch presentation yesterday. That was a thing. I ended up watching it with a couple friends on voice chat on Discord. Sadly, voice chat means I didn't get a real chat log of it, but... it doesn't really matter. I was honestly... silent, for all the parts that really mattered to me.

I spent the majority of the presentation making fun of the Switch. Don't get me wrong: I'm SO hyped for this console. And guys... PORTABLE SKYRIM. PORTABLE FREAKING SKYRIM. You have NO IDEA how much I freaking love Skyrim. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Skyrim is easily my favorite non-Zelda game. And with my recent love of Oblivion (CAN WE JUST TALK ABOUT HOW GOOD SHIVERING ISLES IS I CAN'T STOP PLAYING IT), Elder Scrolls is probably easily my favorite non-Zelda series. (Past Sierra: "I'VE NEVER PLAYED SKYRIM AND I LIKELY NEVER WILL...") So you can imagine how hyped I am to play it on the Switch. Although I'll miss my... poorly named level 83 High Elf. (Zeruda... a perfect combination of weaboo and fangirl. Lovely.)

But yeah. I spent a lot of time making fun of the Switch, because they made it really easy. But when freaking Breath of the Wild showed up, I just fell... completely silent. With this dumb, stupid grin on my face.

I feel so dangerously optimistic about this game. I'm honestly really scared. The problem is, while Breath of the Wild is a full reboot (more or less), I'm being promised so many things that I was promised before and never received. And it's scaring me. But I'm excited at the prospect of those things coming true, too... does that make sense?

First of all, let me say why I love this game. It's beautiful. It's different. It's... okay, it's basically SKYRIM ZELDA. I literally just went on and on about how much I love Skyrim. AND THIS IS ZELDA WITH A SKYRIM WORLD. I probably can't, you know, murder everyone in town with a fireball when they group up on a Christmas-themed mod-initiated holiday and cause my daughter to run from me in terror while my husband fights my dog and my housecarl cheers them on, but... it's an open world Zelda!!! And it's absolutely GORGEOUS man. And the voice acting is so amazing! And... And Zelda... she seems like she might actually have a personality? Will we get Skyward Sword's type of Zelda, where she has her own tale to tell? Will she even accompany Link on his quest? What about Link? Can he get more emotions (again like Skyward Sword, which was an excellent step in the right direction for storytelling if not so much for other things)? Can Link be more customizable? There are horses and sand walruses and adorable yawning white foxes and Gorons and Zoras and Koroks and FREAKING SHEIKAH and FREAKING GERUDO... and... and...

GUYS WILL WE GET MEDLI BECAUSE THERE ARE BIRD PEOPLE AND OMG CAN YOU IMAGINE FREAKING MEDLI IN BOTW PLEASE MAKE IT HAPPEN NINTENDO PLEASE!!!

...

Ahem...

So, yes. I'm freaking hyped as heck. I honestly didn't even realize how hyped I was until I started typing and the caps lock came out.

I would, however, like to throw out a few points of caution, however. I have a lot of faith in Breath of the Wild, but I do think it's hilarious -- if nothing else -- that Nintendo has promised the things it is promising with BotW before and they did not deliver.

I spent a lot of time hyping Skyward Sword. In fact, I would venture to say that the MAJORITY of this blog is, in fact, Skyward Sword hype. This blog was in its prime in 2011, the year of SS's release, and most of my posts were just my excitement over how great of a game it was going to be. I was near desperate for SS to be the flagship Zelda game, the game that put a dent in Ocarina of Time's infallible reputation as the groundbreaking, amazing, best-game-of-all-time representative for the series. After all, it was Zelda's 25th anniversary; surely they could make a good game for it?

Skyward Sword was nothing like it was promised. We were told we would get a non-linear, personal Zelda experience. We were told it would be groundbreaking and unique and unlike anything the Zelda series has done before. But no... it was another Zelda game. Without block puzzles -- except, you know, for the few block puzzles in the game. With a brand new stamina meter, and a brand new Zelda design, and a fantastic open sky world! -- that has virtually nothing in it. With immersive 1 to 1 motion controls! Which, yes, they worked, but... you had no option but to use them, even if for whatever reason, your controls weren't working as expected, or you had a hard time moving the controller around. It was... not what fans had hoped for, and many people wound up disappointed.

Obviously, we're being promised many of the same things here. Now, I don't really doubt that BotW will deliver on most of what they promised, as far as switching up the formula (pun not intended). Obviously we've been shown the open world, we've been shown the new races and gameplay features... it looks amazing. But I've been burned before. I approached Skyward Sword with so much fangirl loyalty that I was completely blinded and wanted so badly to love it. I... do love it still. I do. I love the story of it, I love love LOVE Zelda and Groose, the cutscenes are gorgeous, and the motion controls, for me personally, made the game so much more fun. But it's not what I thought it was. It has its problems. The sky was barren. The game was linear, with very little to do on the Surface aside from follow the main story progression. There was pointless backtracking. And for the love of nyan why did they switch the item controls from TP? How can I play both games if in one game B uses the item and in the other B cancels it?!?!

Speaking of Twilight Princess, it's also very much worth mentioning that this is more or less a port. Just like TP, the game was originally made for the previous gen, but it was brought to the next gen console due to numerous delays. For Twilight Princess, that didn't work so well. Most still consider the GameCube version to be the "real version" more or less. Again, I think they've handled it better with this game release. I wasn't around for TP's release, so I can't say much about fan reactions at the time, but it seems like BotW is really taking advantage of the Switch's enhanced power. Not to mention that the fact that the Switch makes it portable is worth it. (Trying not to make comparisons to people who might have said "but the fact that you can play with MOTION CONTROLS makes the Wii version worth it!")

Also, a note about the delays. It only just now hit me exactly how many delays we've had. I wanted to reread my original reaction to the first ever reveal of Zelda Wii U, and I found it in my unpublished E3 2014 post (which I finally published, in case you're curious for some reason). I then realized that... we got this trailer in 2014. Three years ago! Not to mention that, as I say in that 2014 post, that trailer was supposed to be unveiled in 2013. My goodness. And Skyward Sword came out in 2011, for goodness's sake. And then, that 2014 trailer tells us it'll be out in 2015. But noooope, it'll have to be 2016! But wait, Nintendo's new console comes out in 2017... guess we'll just wait until then!

I'm just... I'm scared. I have such, SUCH high hopes for Breath of the Wild. I really really don't want to be disappointed.

I've been playing Skyrim and Oblivion nonstop these past few weeks (okay, well, I've honestly been downloading mods probably more than I've been playing, but whatever). I've got over 600 hours in Skyrim and 100 in Oblivion, so I LOVE some good open world fantasy games. I really, really pray that Breath of the Wild can capture that same magic, that sense of freedom, that feeling that you're part of a world that's truly ALIVE and you can do whatever you want in it. And I hope they still bring back what I love about Zelda: touching, classic tales and characters, a huge arsenal of unique items, fun and challenging puzzles, and of course memorable dungeon design. The fact that so many races are coming back is a great sign to me -- I just hope they don't screw them up. I also hope they attempt to be at least somewhat lore-friendly with the rest of the series, although I kinda doubt it considering Nintendo's track record.

And for the love of Hylia, I really honest to goodness hope that the world isn't boring to explore. I'm so scared about that. Skyrim's world is fun to explore because of random encounters throughout it, the beautiful scenery, and the fact that you can find caves, crypts, camps, villages, and tiny stories everywhere. Breath of the Wild has shown a lot of... enemies in the fields. I hope it's not just enemy after enemy, with the occasional award or village or dungeon. I hope the Sheikah caves or whatever you call them don't get repetitive, because if that's the only thing I'm able to find out there and there are like a hundred of them... That sounds like it could get old fast.

tl;dr I am extremely hyped for Breath of the Wild, but I'm also worried that my faith will be misplaced. All we can do now really is wait and see what Nintendo has in store for us, and hope that they can really pull through with a game that not only meets my expectations, but exceeds them.

So, Breath of the Wild's Japanese Logo...

What the nyan is with this Japanese logo?

I mean, okay, I don't live in Japan obviously. I spent a month there but I didn't spend much time in game stores (because I was so busy playing Maimai at the arcades and buying Magic Kaito merchandise COUGH COUGH). But... I'm preeetty sure the few copies of Zelda games I saw there used the English Zelda logo for the "Legend of Zelda" part with a Japanese subtitle. A quick Google search kinda confirms that, with all of the Zelda logos showing Japanese subtitles except for the first few games.

(Stolen from Pintrest.)

Now, of course, most of them have the classic "ゼルダの伝説 (Zeruda no densetsu)" written below so that Japanse people can understand too. But... let's take a look at Breath of the Wild's logo.

I saw the Breath of the Wild logo and I was... immensely confused for a second. I mean, why was there giant Japanese text at the top? Why was the English at the bottom? WHY ARE THE WORDS "THE LEGEND OF ZELDA" SO SMALL?

Of course, once I figured out that the kanji there means LEGEND, I was blown away. They're using the Japanese "Zeruda no densetsu" as the main portion of the logo this time? Look, the English title is so small in comparison, and doesn't even use the typical word layout that we've seen since Ocarina of Time!

I mean, I probably only find this interesting because I'm a linguistics major who is currently learning Japanse, haha. But I find it so fascinating that... even in their Japanese logo, Nintendo is really sticking to their promise of "returning to Zelda's roots". Compare it to the original Zelda logo. Isn't it fascinating how they're even going back to that original Japanese dominance? I think it's so cool!

E3 2014 - Super Smash Bros., Zelda Wii U, Hyrule Warriors, and more!

January 14th, 2016: This post was written back in 2014 in response to E3 at the time. However, I never ended up publishing it simply because I never finished the Hyrule Warriors section of the post. With the new Breath of the Wild trailer from the Nintendo Switch presentation, I wanted to revist what I thought about the original trailer, which led me back to this post. I figured that despite the title not matching the content of the post, I might as well publish this, since it has some fun reactions to Palutena and BotW's first reveals. Everything below is exactly as it was written back then; I didn't bother editing anything.

---
Here I am, as promised! I expect that you're here because you either clicked on this page by accident, thought you stumbled upon something useful, or you are interested in hearing my opinion! If you are in one of the first two groups, you are sorely mistaken, and you might as well leave now. (But... but you can stay if you want! That'd be awesome!)

So, as you know from my earlier post, I was very, very hyped up for E3. I was expecting great things from Nintendo. Great things! The best since E3 2011, I proudly proclaimed! But did they deliver?

Short answer: not really. I was kind of disappointed.

BUT... I highly suggest you still read the long answer. Because my gosh, this WAS one of the better E3 years, in my opinion. Not as good as 2011. But I think second place suits it well out of the E3 years I've bothered to watch (which are 2010 to present). So it's not bad at all, but I was definitely over-hyped.

Let's start with Smash Bros.! I was strongly hoping for some cool new villain reveals... like, maybe a Zelda villain reveal? Ganondorf hasn't been announced, so all we have are Sheik, Zelda, Toon Link, and Link. And that's kind of like only two characters if you really think about it. (Even if none of them really play the same...) I really would have loved to see something new for everyone's favorite franchise.

Alas, it was not to be... BUT WE GOT PALUTENA WOOOOO! ...Yes. I was so happy when Palutena showed up. To give you an idea, here's how Skype was just after Reggie said they were wrapping up their digital event (with only a few minor typo corrections -- such as changing "It" to "Pit" -- and removals of irrelevant comments):

[9:41:34 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: We still didn't get all the info I wanted. ;(

[9:41:45 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: I wanted new Smash Bros. characters

[9:41:56 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: Real characters that aren't a freaking Mii

[9:42:16 AM] ♑odd300♑: One more little teaser........

[9:42:20 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: Metroid or StarFox

[9:42:24 AM] ♑odd300♑: Nopeee

*Palutena appears on screen*

[9:42:27 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: PALUTENA

[9:42:29 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: PALUTENA

[9:42:34 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: YES PLEASE!

[9:42:37 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: YES YES YES!

[9:42:41 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: YEAH!

[9:42:45 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: PALUTENA!

[9:42:55 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: PLEASE PALUTENA I LOVE YOU

[9:43:12 AM] ♑odd300♑: Pit, you suck.

[9:43:14 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: OMG PIT AND LINK FIGHTING AND PALUTENA

[9:43:22 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: ALL MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS

[9:43:43 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: YESSSSSS

[9:43:47 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: SH

[9:43:53 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: Sh?

[9:44:10 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: YOUR FACE SUCKS

[9:44:26 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: Auto-reticle. XD

[9:44:40 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: Dude Mega Laser is my thing bro

[9:45:04 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: Dark Pit?

[9:45:08 AM] ♑odd300♑: Well then.

[9:45:10 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: Lol okay

[9:46:28 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: I'm so happy

[9:46:34 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: I'm sooooo happy I love Palutenaaaaaa

Yeah. Heroine of Time (with the odd symbols) is obviously me.

I was hoping for Palutena to appear in Super Smash Bros. after all of this time! I'm not surprised in the slightest -- I thought we had pretty good chances, especially considering the very realistic supposed leak of her as a character back in January, and the other small indications, like the Pseudo-Palutena trophy, or the removal of Palutena from Pit's final smash. Also, Pac Man and Miis are characters, but I don't care. Aside from Zelda characters, I just wanted Palutena, and I got Palutena. I'm content as far as Smash Bros. goes.

I still would have liked more, though... the figurines were cool, but I wanted some info about what they're planning on doing specially for the Wii U version. The 3DS has... Smash Run? Is that what it's called? And that's an exclusive to that console. But the Wii U, so far, has not really been announced to have anything.

I also watched the whole Smash Invitational. I was rooting for Wii Fit Trainer but she didn't win. D: Ah, well, Zero Suit Samus won, and I was kind of cheering for her, too, but I liked the guy playing Kirby more than the guy playing Samus...

Anyway. How about we move on to Zelda Wii U?

Now, I wanted a trailer. A full trailer. Something gorgeous. I was expecting something mind-blowing, something beautiful... something I could rewatch a thousand times over and enjoy it every time, spot something new every time. Like the Skyward Sword trailers, or even the Hyrule Warriors trailers.

The Zelda Wii U presentation started off beautifully. They showed us a still image of the background -- and my breath almost left me. It was... so, so, SO incredible.

My first thought was immediately Skyrim. Skyrim has the large, swooping open fantasy world. The hut behind Link (or whoever that is -- we'll get to that) definitely gave me a Skyrim feel, as well as the mountains behind him. For anyone who plays Skyrim, they know JUST how often mountains get in your way. This is what I wanted. This is exactly what EVERYONE wanted! An open-world Zelda game! As long as they don't sacrifice story for this... this could be the best Zelda yet!

And then the actual footage they had planned began playing... and I think everyone had a rather similar reaction to me. But I'll let my Skype conversation give you an idea of everything once again:

[9:22:06 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: :D

[9:22:15 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: What

[9:22:19 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: Why is there a robot

[9:22:34 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: OKAY WHO IS THAT

[9:22:41 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: IS HE WEARING BLUE

[9:22:44 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: WHY

[9:22:45 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: WHAT

[9:22:51 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: HE LOOKS LIKE A GIRL

[9:23:10 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: He looks like older TWW Link in his freaking pajamas

[9:23:28 AM] Her◎ine ◎f Time: Dangit that was nothing Nintendo. XD

Yes, these comments could pretty much sum up the entirety of the reactions of the Zelda fandom.

I'll address each comment separately. The robot was really, really strange. We haven't seen very many things like it in The Legend of Zelda. I don't necessarily mind adding in some giant robots or anything, but it was still kind of surprising. And then... the character on the horse showed up. Of course, up until now, we were expecting our typical green-garbed hero... but instead he pulls back the cloak to reveal a head completely devoid of a hat, with hair much longer than Link's normally is (except in the Ocarina of Time manga -- that's actually EXACTLY what it looked like from behind in the Ocarina of Time manga), and wearing completely unfamiliar clothes. And Link... he looked different, too! He was wielding some kind of peculiar bow as well. It looked like the Hero's Bow, but then it did some... weird mechanical thing that caused an explosion. And his clothes were BLUE. As I pointed out, he strongly resembled The Wind Waker Link and his clothes, and, upon reviewing the footage, I think I'm reminded of Skyward Sword Link's outfit as well. Never mind that, all in all he looked NOTHING like our favorite hero. It was very odd.

Let me also point out that that horse does NOT look like Epona up close. I've rewatched this footage several times and I'm relatively sure that's not Epona.

I'm all open to change, of course. I do consider myself somewhat traditional, but hey, if Nintendo wants to try something new, I'll probably buy it anyway if it has Zelda on the cover. But I'm looking for a Zelda experience when I buy a Zelda game. And allowing you to play as customized characters... doesn't sound very Zelda.

Then again, neither does an open-world anymore, but oh my goodness am I excited to see where that goes!

Also they didn't give me a good picture of Link to put as my header on my blog or use for a signature/avatar on Zelda Dungeon, dangit. I don't even know if that's Link. I can't use his/her picture anywhere.

And this "trailer"'s biggest flaw is that it's so short. Shame on you, Nintendo. You supposedly had this ready last year. You could have shown us more! It was majorly disappointing.

Next... Hyrule Warriors!