This is about the latest Zelda game on the Nintendo Switch, just in case there is any confusion as to what the heck the title actually means.
I have been playing this wonderful game for about 4 weeks now and I have put in I dunno, 50 hours or so. I am not a super-efficient gamer and I am a little thick when it comes to a lot of things but for the most part I feel as though this game is easy to pick up, but very difficult to master. There are a lot of things I haven't figured out yet, but for the most part I think I am progressing just swimmingly and am not going to put the game down just yet even though I have moved on to play other games on my PS4 at the same time.
There is one thing that really surprised me about it in later game stuff though and I want to talk about it briefly.
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Some of what is in here could be considered Spoilers!
So for the most part I have been sticking to the main story because I felt as though there was too many side quests, many of which produced crap results and just wasted your good weapons that you might not be able to reproduce right away. As you get to later stuff in the game this changes as "good" weapons are exceptionally easy to recreate in late game stuff. So I would say once you have completed two of the 5 "local phenomenon" things just whack away at everything. It's fine.
That's not what surprised me though, this became pretty evident rather early on when I was finding base weapons around every single corner. What surprised me is how I started to feel about the game's difficulty as time goes by.
I wouldn't say that I got particularly better - I still can't parry and dodge worth a damn - but I must have gotten somewhat better as far as my strategy is concerned because battles no longer posed much difficulty to me. Much of this has to do with the fact that you end up with 4 friends following you in later game content and if you run around a bunch and simply avoid enemies, they can actually finish off most of who you will encounter without you even getting directly involved. This isn't to say that you should do this because it will make the game kind of boring and since they don't really do much damage, it will take longer as well. It's just an option though, and that is nice.
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What surprised me is that the game itself isn't particularly difficult or at least that was what I was experiencing as I was wandering around. I have at this point completed all the temples, which is the key to opening up the endgame content. Other than the first one that was recommended that you go to first (you can go to them in any order), I didn't find any of the boss battles to be particularly difficult at all.
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I found this to be particularly true with Marbled Goma, which is the boss of the Fire Temple. Even though it is huge and often is difficult to even spot the location of in the fighting room, none of what this guy does poses any sort of actual threat to you. The attacks are extremely easy to dodge and the attack patters never change until the end where they don't so much as change as they do force you to adopt your strategy just a little bit. The fight was overly time-consuming since it has a really deep health bar, but I only took 1 hit the entire encounter and defeated it on my first try. I am not overpowered at this point either because I didn't really take any time to do a lot of side quests and again, there are a TON of them.
Now before anyone accuses me of not doing the game right or even worse, being really good at it (I'm not) I want to say that I only have like 10 hearts and up until recently I didn't really pay much attention to getting my weapons or armor up to a high level. I decided to play this game by dying a lot and learning because of that.
I'm here to say that if you took the time to progress through the game like I did you are in for one hell of a surprise when you head to what is perceived as being the final castle/temple of the game. In that temple the battles you encounter, some of which are probably considered to be sub-bosses, well, they are also really easy. I took a bit of damage in some of them but at this point you have so much food with you normally that none of this really matters.
Then, when you get to what you perceive as being the very end of the game - and I am not sure that it is but it appears to be - things change a lot
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I'm not going to spoil who or what this is but if you have played any Zelda games in the past you can probably guess. The thing that was so surprising about this encounter is that it is tremendously more difficult than any other part of the main story I have ever encountered. Just like a lot of fights, a hit from this boss is going to take a lot of your life away, so much so in fact that it makes you wonder why you ever bothered investing in heart containers in the first place. This wasn't so much of an issue with other enemies / bosses because their attacks are normally very predictable and easy to avoid while your invincible ghost friends do damage for you, but with this boss, dear lord does it get tough and fast. Not only does he do a ton of damage per hit, which is expected, but he is fast and comes at you from all angles. This was a real shock to me and I BS'd my way through half the health bar only to discover that that was only the first phase of the battle. I got absolutely thwacked in that battle, to the point where I don't really think there is much I could have done to get it over with faster and just decided to walk away and pay attention to some of the other things that I had been ignoring thus far in the rest of the game.
here is where something fun comes into play as well: Previously I had mentioned that I thought the game had too many side quests and that it was too big IMO, but this becomes something good later on. Since I am convinced I must just be missing something essential in this battle and need to go away and come back later, that is exactly what I did... and I discovered that all the side quests are very manageable now, even the ones I considered a bit annoying in the depths previously.
This might chase a few people away from the game when they get to this point thinking that the game has to be nearly over, which I did and honestly was kind of hoping for, but at least it is pretty evident that you need to be more powered up when you get to this battle and going around and doing other stuff is now significantly easier now that you are powered up a lot more than when you first encountered these things.
However, I will say this. That "final battle" which it might not even be, is so tough that I can see this being another game in my library that I almost defeated but never actually did. If that ends up being the case I am honestly ok with that because at least for now, I am kind of enjoying running around and kind of breezing through almost all the encounters that I come across.
Has your experience with this amazing title been the same? Did you even make it that far?