The 2018 reTROview reTROspective!!!

Wow. My favorite post of the year has come, in which I recap all of my game completion accomplishments, complete with a self-serving set of charts to map small sample size statistics that have little to no bearing on reality.

The following are games I completed for the first time in the year 2018, and did so without using any emulation trickery that I couldn't do on real hardware. I set a goal for 50 games to be completed this year, and ended up finishing 54, so I crushed my goal by nearly 10%.

Beetle Adventure Racing
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Commander Keen: Keen Must Die!
Commander Keen: Marooned on Mars
Commander Keen: Secret of the Oracle
Commander Keen: The Armageddon Machine
Commander Keen: The Earth Explodes
Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong Jr.
Dr. Mario
Final Fantasy Explorers
Final Fantasy IV Interlude
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years
God of War (PS2)
Goldeneye 007
Gunbird 2
Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2
Kirby's Adventure
Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham
Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4
Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7
Lego Marvel's Avengers
LostMagic
Madden '17
Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
Mass Effect 3
Mega Man X4
New Super Luigi U
New Super Mario Bros.
New Super Mario Bros. U
Ninja Gaiden (NES)
Pokemon Alpha Sapphire
Project X Zone
Punch-Out!!
Skylanders: Swap Force
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
Super Mario 3D Land
Super Mario Odyssey
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Tekken Tag Tournament 2
Terra Battle
The Final Fantasy Legend
The Legend of Dragoon
The Legend of Zelda; Breath of the Wild
 The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
The Little Mermaid
Tony Hawk's American Wasteland
Ultimate NES Remix
Vectorman
Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds Tag Force 5

Averaging that out over the entire year means I completed a new game every 6.76 days, but the length obviously varied heavily by title. I beat LostMagic in one day, since I was just clearing out a game that I'd already gotten near the end, but I played Pokemon Alpha Sapphire, The Legend of Dragoon, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for well over a month each.

Below are some visualizations displaying how I spent my gaming time in the past year:

Figure 1: Games by Genre

As was the case with last year's list, platformers were again the plurality of games I played. However, last year over half of the games I played were platformers, and this year only a third were, so I significantly diversified! I was also able to clear out platformers quickly, meaning that my 8 RPGs almost certainly took 5 times as long to finish as my 16 platformers.

Figure 2: Rating by Genre

The top genre of the year for me was 3D platformers, as I enjoyed both Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario 3D Land a tremendous amount. The biggest losers were card games and strategy RPGs. The strategy RPGs were dragged down by the abysmal Project X Zone.

Figure 3: Games by System

This graph, by the way, refers to the system on which a game was originally released, unless it was significantly modified for the console. So, for example, I classified Gunbird 2 as an arcade game, despite playing it on my Switch. On the other hand, I classified the NES versions of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. as NES games, due to the large differences between the versions. 

I had really wanted to clear out a significant amount of old games I'd never really played before from my backlog, and my acquisition of the NES Classic gave me a great excuse to tackle several of them. I did, however, play several games on the NES hardware this year, including Punch-Out!! and The Little Mermaid. It really, really saddened me that I hadn't cleared out a single SNES game in 2018, largely due to the fact that I'd beaten almost all of the ones I wanted to, so I started off the new year beating one just to make myself feel better. In fairness, I did run through The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Mario World again last year, as I typically do, so I did spend some time with my favorite console despite not clearing out any new games on it. 

Figure 4: Game Rating by System

The Switch was the unquestioned king of quality in 2018, and that's not statistical fluke. I played two perfect ten games on my Switch this year, and it occupied a huge amount of my gaming time after acquiring one in September. Honorable mention definitely goes to the NES, however, which maintained an average rating above 9.0 despite 7 new completions! The worst console of the year, by far, was the PSP. I played only one game above a 7.0 on the console this year, and it also had the worst game of the year to grace it's tiny screen.

Figure 5: Games by Developer

 

Zoom in, boys and girls. I completed games from 27 developers this year, compared to a paltry 18 last year, so my experience was far more diverse. Nintendo was the number one developer by a mile, having more games on the list than the next 4 developers combined. I played a bunch of Mario games this year, accounting for the large number. 

Figure 6: Game Rating by Developer

Technically, the champ is Hal Laboratory, riding their exemplary champion, Kirby's Adventure, to the gold. The real champion, however, is Nintendo, managing to attain an average rating of over 9.0 over the span of 14 different titles. Rare, Santa Monica Studios, Bioware, Game Freak, and Mistwalker also had average scores of 9.0 or better, but each only had one game reviewed for the year. The worst developer of the year was Banpresto/Monolith Soft, whose epic stinker Project X Zone narrowly edged out the accumulation of garbage I played from Square Enix.  

Figure 7: Handheld or Home?

I played far more games at home than on handheld this year, despite spending far more time playing on handheld than on home. It's easier to manage longer RPGs when you can just put it in sleep mode than playing at home with a bunch of kids around. The split was exactly two to one, with 36 games completed at home and 18 completed on handhelds.

Figure 8: Handheld vs. Home Game Ratings

Home consoles dominated handhelds in quality this year, primarily due to the presence of some all-time bombs on handhelds, as well as some all-time classics on home consoles. If you exclude the three extremely poor handheld titles (Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, Final Fantasy IV Interlude, and Project X Zone), the averages are very similar.

Figure 9: Games by Company

This chart displays the console home that the game originally appeared on (Gunbird 2 was classified as a Sega game due to its original appearance on the Dreamcast following its arcade days, but it was the most slippery choice of all the games). Nintendo, again, reigns supreme, largely due to the large number of Nintendo handhelds and NES games I played. I guess Android isn't a company, but I'll allow it.

Figure 10: Game Rating by Company

Android technically reigns supreme thanks to the excellent Terra Battle, but Nintendo is the real king, with a rating near 9 across 29 games. Sony would have done much better without the two Final Fantasy IV spin-off games polluting their ratings.

Figure 11: Games by Decade

The 90s get dethroned this year by a strong showing by the 2010s. Not having a ton of SNES games to clear helped this time around, but the largest part of my backlog that I really want to play at this point is newer games, so my guess is that this trend will continue into 2019.

Figure 12: Game Rating by Decade

The 80s are the clear winner here, supported by several very strong NES games. The 2000s are the worst decade for gaming, as they were last year as well. 

And now, for the best part of the show, the awards!

Game of the (reTROview) Year: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Technically, Super Mario Odyssey tied with this gem, as both scored perfect 10s. The ironic thing is that I think that Super Mario Odyssey will be more fondly remembered as time goes on, while the flaws in the champ will be more defined and scrutinized as the years pass. But for now, Zelda completely blew me away and leapt forward into the future, so I have to say it's the champ.

Stinker of the (reTROview) Year: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years

There are precious few games that I will never play again, and this is absolutely one of them. Never play this.

Median Game of the (reTROview) Year: Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4

It's median for my list, but my list is top heavy with really good games. This one is really fun!

Newest Game reTROviewed: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

This is the only 2018 game I reviewed and played for this year, and also came out in December of 2018, so it's about as new as it can get.

Oldest Game reTROviewed: 

This is (checks mental backlog nervously) probably the oldest game I will ever be interested in playing/reviewing for this blog.

The reTROview 2018 Top 10:

10. Super Mario 3D Land (9.3)

9. New Super Mario Bros. U (9.4)

8. Goldeneye 007 (9.4)

7. Dr. Mario (9.4)

6. Kirby's Adventure (9.5)

5. Donkey Kong (9.5)

4. Punch-Out!! (9.6)

3. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (9.6)

2. Super Mario Odyssey (10)

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (10)

I'd probably bump Donkey Kong out of here, and put in God of War, but the reviews stand forever, even as they horrify me sometimes in reTROspect.

The reTROview 2018 Bottom 10:

10. Commander Keen: The Armageddon Machine (7.5)

9. LostMagic (7.5)

8. Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham (7.5)

7. Mega Man X4 (7.2)

6. Tony Hawk's American Wasteland (7)

5. Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds Tag Force 5 (7)

4. Lego Marvel's Avengers (7)

3. Final Fantasy IV Interlude (5)

2. Project X Zone (5)

1. Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (3)

To be clear, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is almost certainly the worst game I've ever beaten.

And that's the year in review! I completed my game completion goal, and want to have a more relaxed gaming environment for this year, meaning a far more modest completion goal. Below are my gaming resolutions for 2019:

1. Clear out 25 unbeaten games

2. Clear out more unbeaten games than I buy new games for my collection-not including Humble Bundles

3. Spend more time revisiting some old favorites just because I'm feeling like it (potential candidates include Donkey Kong Country 1-3, Super Mario RPG, and Punch-Out!!)

4. One of the 25 unbeaten games must include Bahamut Lagoon, and another must be Secret of Mana

5. Play more new (defined as being played on a system capable of outputting in HD without modifications) games

6. Spend some time playing Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn-whether I beat the main campaign or not 

7. Feel free to dump egregiously bad games and review them without finishing them if I feel like it

What I'm Playing (Volume 100): Tekken Tag Tournament 2

I'll be totally candid with you. I snuck this one in here because it was after Christmas, I wasn't sure exactly how many games I had beaten or if I had yet pushed over the 50 game mark, and I knew clearing out a Tekken game's arcade mode would be a quick and dirty way to add another number to the mix. I didn't give this one as much attention as it deserves, and I will definitely cycle back to it to earn more trophies and enjoy it more, as I dropped it for Smash as soon as I could. But I did finish the arcade mode, and also finished the extended story/tutorial mode for the game, so I can stand with my head held at moderate height and claim before God that I finished the game when he checks my spreadsheets at the judgment seat.

All silliness aside, this is Tekken. Tekken has been largely identical since the last big update (Tekken 4), and is just a great series of fighting games. I adore Tekken because, more so than any series other than Smash, Tekken is extremely fun for beginners, but also has a level of hidden technicality to it that far surpasses all but the most hyper-technical fighting games. My friend had Tekken 2 and Tekken 3 as a kid on the PS1, so we ended up playing a lot of Tekken 3 and spamming noob-friendly characters like Hwoarang, Eddie, Lee, Bryan, and Forrest. I loved the visuals, the goofy sense of humor, and the rewarding simplicity of those characters' control schemes, but as my fighting game skills improved, I moved up to slightly more technical fighters like Jin, Kazuya, Heihachi, and Raven. I dabbled in Tekken 4 and Tekken 5, but my favorite game in the series was Tekken Tag Tournament due to the huge number of playable characters and being able to play as two characters as a team.

So when I was feeling playing a new Tekken game, I decided to put Tekken Tag Tournament 2  on the list out of my love for the previous tag title, as well as for the fact that at the time I included it on my list, it was the newest Tekken game. It has now been surpassed by Tekken 7, which I haven't yet had the chance to play, but I tend to limp into these things as prices decline, so I'm sure I'll grab a discount copy for 15 bucks in some sale at some point. My sister-in-law got me the game for Christmas this year, so I figured it made a natural easy clear, and I always enjoy a quick run through Tekken.

The game is Tekken, so it has a fantastic combat system, simple controls, and a magnificently diverse set of characters to enjoy. The music is fine, the visuals are very good, and you get exactly what you think you're getting. It's a bit deeper than Tekken Tag Tournament as it includes a new system in which you can fight with both fighters at once, and also includes a few new features (apparently) introduced in Tekken 6, including bouncing people off the ground while continuing a combo going, and breaking through walls and floors with powerful attacks. The combo system using both fighters adds a new layer of sophistication to the game, making it more important than in the previous Tag game to select two characters who have some chemistry with each other. The new additions of the shattering walls and floors are a lot of style and a little substance, but are fun nonetheless. Stretching the combos out by hammering your opponent off the ground is also a very fun addition to the series.

If you like Tekken, this is a really fun game. All Tekken games kind of run together, which is one of their weaknesses (I don't know if there's a big enough difference between this and Tekken 7, for example, to recommend one over the other). But they all come from a place of fun and are really nicely executed technical fighting games, so I'd definitely recommend it. I'll give it an 8.8/10.

Up next on reTROview will be my 2018 reTROspective, which I know all of you have been waiting for with baited breath. I'll probably be working on that one for a few days, so check in later this week.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volumes 98 & 99): Super Smash Bros. for Wii U & Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Smash has been part of my life for a long time. It's the one fighting game that I think I'm legitimately good at, particularly at Melee (I won our college's Melee tournament more than a decade ago-Sheikh for life). I first played the game at a Toys 'R Us and was immediately captivated by the brashness of the concept. Pikachu fighting Star Fox? Count me in. There are plenty of games with great concepts that don't pan out in their execution, and I've reviewed some here that I though would be really excellent but ended up being trash (Project X Zone comes immediately to mind). Super Smash Bros., however, didn't just try to take Nintendo characters and shoehorn them into a game with traditional fighting mechanics, but instead was innovative at every step of the design process with speeding up player movement, making individual mistakes and successes mean less due to the large number of hits you need to take to die, to simplifying character move inputs to encourage introductory players, to a diverse number of stages with a vertical and horizontal play stage dwarfing that of other fighting games. The first Smash is brilliant. The sequel is perfect. I honestly don't care terribly much for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but that is much like my dislike of the worst Pokemon games (Diamond and Pearl)-even the worst Pokemon game is still better than 95% of the RPGs put out in the history of humanity. I hadn't spent too much time in Smash 4, also known by its more ponderous full title referenced in the title of this post, but I decided to dive in for two reasons. First, I just missed Smash. I'm honestly too good at Smash to play with my family or the friends who live near enough me to play. Everyone just gets tired of losing. Second, I knew Ultimate was coming out in a few weeks and wanted to dust off my (very dusty) skills to prepare for Online play. Smash 4 was very fun, although I admittedly didn't play it a ton. I beat All-Star Mode, Classic Mode a few times, unlocked a few characters, and tried out some of the new ones. It was my plan to buy Ultimate in January, after the shock of paying for all of the Christmas presents wore off. But then my brother-in-law won bro-in-law of the decade award and got me the game for Christmas, and I was off and running sooner than I thought. This review will focus on Ultimate, but I wanted to note that I finished Smash 4 for my 50 games in the year count.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is very fun. It's definitely significantly different from 4 in that there is a remarkable balancing out of the characters, where few of them felt like trash when I played them. There was a large effort to balance out the larger characters in particular, adding some additional tools to their toolbox while also normalizing some of the jumping between the smaller and larger characters. I struggle evaluating the game fairly because I am SO attached to Melee. Compared to Melee, a lot of the typical process I would follow in dismantling my opponents has been significantly nerfed. Running attacks now do the same damage, but send people farther at lower damage levels, making it difficult to follow up with quick mid-air attacks. This encourages a more iterative type of combat, in which you hit a move, send them flying, wait for them to return, and reengage. I prefer the Melee approach due to familiarity, but have to admit that it didn't feel terribly fun when you were completely locked up by unavoidable followup attacks by a skilled player, so I understand why they made this change. In addition to running attacks, they've also made the same changes to the throws, where automatic followups like Link's down throw into an Up + B simply doesn't ever work anymore. A lot of the "rust" I felt wasn't so much that I was bad at the game as much as it was unlearning some of the automatic habits I'd built up over years of playing Melee at a fairly high level. Given a few more months, I'm sure I could find some more fluid grace in the playstyle in Ultimate, but it did feel a bit stilted and lacking action in those moments where you are simply waiting for your opponent to return. They also nerfed the off-stage action significantly, with midair attacks launching your opponent a far more limited distance, and seemingly removing any sort of spikes through which you could land the perfect shot and send your opponent plummeting to his death. I always liked that high risk, high reward element of Melee, so I'm sad to see it gone. I'll have the keep playing to see if I can find the art in the game that delighted me so much in Melee.

The character roster is just tremendous. I think this is the most balanced Smash, ever, and it's not particularly close. I've played online matches against many characters, and never found any of their designs particularly unfair in the way that you would unavoidably struggle with some of the top tier characters in Melee, or even worse, in Smash 64. With such a huge roster, it's unavoidable that there are going to be characters that are disadvantaged, but online balancing should help that out, and the fact that it launched in such an excellent state, balance-wise, is great. They also included a few critical characters to Nintendo's history, most notably Simon Belmont, who represented big gaps in the roster. Ryu Hayabusa needs to be next, but it kind of stinks that they also have Ryu from Street Fighter! How are they going to name them? Other DLC characters that need to make it are Banjo & Kazooie, Mallow (forget Geno), and an actual Final Fantasy character from the Nintendo era (my vote is for Paladin Cecil, or perhaps Terra).

The controls and visuals are all fantastic, and I adore that they have given you the option to use the old Wii U adapter to connect your Gamecube controllers to your Switch for play. The music is, as always, excellent, with lots of tracks from your favorite games remixed in delightful ways. The Wii U version had an astounding 15 hours (!) of music, so I can't even fathom how long the soundtrack from the Switch version is.

The single most disappointing thing about Ultimate is the very spotty online server performance. Smash is a game that requires an extremely responsive server, and Smash ain't even close. One of the reasons why Street Fighter V and Mortal Kombat XL control so slowly is that the slow movements allow the servers to cheat and catch up a bit, if I understand the tech correctly. So I understand that making Smash online work is difficult, but it's legitimately reprehensible at the moment. I would hope that, given the fact that online is now paywalled, Nintendo is investing heavily in their online infrastructure to fix the issues, but as for now I completely stopped playing online.

This game is alive and thriving, very fun, and filled with promise. I think the structural things about the mechanics are real weaknesses, they're disappointing, but they're not going to be fixed because they're a feature, not a bug. They're reactions to a style of gameplay in Melee that many fans found off-putting, so I understand. I think you can make a game that has really quick and constant combat while also giving defensive options, but this game definitely went towards a quick skirmish 'n watch style of combat that I find significantly inferior to to my beloved Melee.

The online struggles, however, are something that can definitely be fixed, given enough time and money. I hope that they do, because I really feel like getting into competitive Smash has never been more accessible, and the huge balance character roster would make doing so really fun. I'll give the game a 8.8/10.

Up next is another fighting game I beat over the Christmas break, and it's definitely not because fighting games are quick to beat and I needed to wrap up a few to meet my annual goal ;)

 

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 97): Madden '17

One of my favorite every few year traditions is when my brother-in-law will text me and inform me that it's time to play Madden again. He's always right. Our ritual involves cooperatively playing through several years of a franchise, typically lifting some awful team to several consecutive Super Bowls along the way. I'm the quarterback and middle linebacker, while he rotates between a few offensive positions depending on if we're running or passing, and plays one of our cornerbacks. We set ludicrous records, invent fantastical backstories for our team and players, and generally have a blast. As I've stated before, Madden and other sports games are now D&D for sports fans.

In past years, we've just stuck with playing Madden NFL 25 (what a dumb name-what happens when they need to make a Madden game in 2024?) on XBox 360, because that was the newest one we had. This year, however, we had a copy of Madden NFL 17 that my wife had picked up for me in the bargain bin at Walmart on some Black Friday, so we moved our efforts over to this one. By the way, at any given point, there are still between 100 and 200 players still playing this game online :).

Like most Madden games, this one is remarkably similar to the older ones, which I don't much mind. I only get a new one every 3 years or so, and even then I get the last year's game to save on price. I don't play the game online, so I really don't mind if there's no user base left for the game. They've tweaked a few things since I last played-most notably getting rid of a my player mode and incorporating it into franchise mode, in which you can now play as a player, coach, or owner. They also significantly changed the way your players progress by now awarding experience points to your players for achieving in-game goals, and season and career milestones. The experience feels pretty worthless to me, to be honest. Despite having record setting seasons with young players, I haven't been able to see my players develop up more than 2 or 3 overall in 2 seasons, save for the temporary adjustments they get for having high confidence (these gains reset at the start of each season.

The gameplay is definitely significantly better and smoother in the new generation of consoles, as is the visual presentation. Running feels more intuitive, with rewards for timing your moves with the ball carrier. Your players will now slow down significantly when trying to "play the ball" on defense, however, making covering receivers significantly more challenging, particularly with linebackers.

One of the most welcome changes is the addition of new commentators Brandon Gaudin and Charles Davis. These two form a duo that is much more likeable than Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth, and they've done a pretty good job excising a lot of the stupid comments that the previous duo would make over and over. After roughly 30 games, I'm still hearing some new comments from them. Using a less famous duo certainly makes it easier to have them in to spend a few days recording a significant amount of dialogue for the game, while I'm sure that the previous had better things to do.

They also improved the trading system by making it actually possible to work mutually beneficial deals. Previous years made you trade gold to get silver, while this one feels like you'll get multiple offers for skilled players on the trade block.

Is it terribly different from the previous year? No. There are still tons of exploitable tactics you can use that will make losing to the AI nearly impossible. The commentary is still silly at times. Negotiating contracts can be downright nonsensical (I offered Aaron Donald a 5 year contract worth 140 million, and he declined based on length, and ending up signing a 6 year deal for 115. In what world does that make sense?). But the core of Madden is always fun, and playing it with my brother-in-law provides a rich experience that the programmers can never replicate. I'll give it a 9.0/10.

I already teased my next, already completed game, so stay tuned! I'll probably be back Friday.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 96): The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I finally got around to it. I had some flex in my gaming schedule due to the fact that I'd already cleared out so many game by November, so I went ahead and dove into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and spent so much time in it that I had to scramble a touch to clear out enough games to hit my annual goal of 50, which I ended up doing comfortably anyway.

My history with Zelda goes all the way back to the beginning. The gold cartridge was one of the original games I had with my NES, and frankly I didn't quite get it. I would have enjoyed it much more had I had a manual with the map, I think, but my 6 year old brain wasn't quite able to take in the scope and vision of what was going on, and ended up spending far more time playing Mario (good choice) and Bases Loaded (bad choice). I then got The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past along with the Super Nintendo I received for a birthday, and had finally attained the sophistication necessary to understand what was going on. The more linear game design certainly helped in that regard, too, and the game is still one of my favorite Super Nintendo games, and one of my favorite of all time. I had friends who had The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which was truly mindblowing in context, although I find it quite flawed today for a few reasons. I've beaten about half of the Zelda games in the series now, with a few more to check off (Zelda II, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, and Spirit Tracks). So when every gaming publication from here to Shanghai was promising an extraordinary Zelda experience, I was really rather dubious. I've seen most of it, and really loved almost all of it, so I wasn't sure quite where they were going to go with it. It also seemed like they were overblowing the open world, user choice nature of the game a bit. After all, isn't that almost exactly what they did in 1986 with The Legend of Zelda? And isn't that one of my least favorite games in the series? And didn't they really master that in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds?

My cynicism was somewhat grounded. The concept of an open Zelda world is not as earthshaking as the breathless critics would have us believe. If the NES game introduced that concept, the 3DS one really mastered it. But boy, did they ever just cram a ton of STUFF into this game! They took so many swings for the fences, and the vast majority of them were at least doubles in the game. There are really three great leaps forward for Zelda, with the first game being one, Ocarina of Time being the second, and this game being the third. And honestly, I think that 20 years from now, we'll remember this game even more fondly than those other two.

So what all did they do? First, they really mastered the open world concept here in terms of completely throwing open everything to the player, but also giving him clear and attainable objectives. From the beginning, you'll never really struggle with what the first game struggled, the great question of "what do I do"? There is a clear map for you, the basic concept and design of the game are clearly explained in the first half hour, and all of the tools in your toolkit are freely available within the first 3 hours. What's more, the world around you is so gorgeous, with so much to do, that it's very difficult to ever grow bored with it.

Second, the physics engine is completely brilliant, even if it's a little silly at times. Everything in Hyrule has properties, and behaves in a predictable and interesting way when you force items to interact with each other. The system is, however, so deep that you'll be discovering brand new things about how this world operates into the end of your game. For example, you'll learn that when you wear metal armor out in a thunderstorm, you get hit by lightning, necessitating you taking that armor. However, you may forget this relationship during an electricity themed boss fight, and get cooked. Then later, you'll realize that there aren't enough metal objects in a puzzle to complete an electric circuit, so you'll try to drop metal weapons on the ground to serve as conductors (it works!) Sometimes the world behaves in a goofy fashion, which is something Nintendo can work on in future games in this style. For example, when you kill an enemy on a slight slope, his items will slide down a hill in a manner that far exceeds what you would predict given the angle of that slope.

The combat is the most fun it's even been in a 3D Zelda, and really uses the dual sticks of the Switch to great effect for dodging and movement, and even uses motion controls well. I found myself exclusively aiming my bow and arrows with the motion controls, which I really never do. But it just felt incredibly precise, and makes me excited for what they can do with the technology going forward. The motion controls weren't always fantastic, however. When trying to aim with the sticks, the controller would also register tiny movements in the controller, which made using the sticks more futile than it would have needed to be. I wish they had made the motion controls so that they could be toggled on and off so that people could follow their own control scheme preference. The little motion controlled minigames were also not as precise as they could have been as well.

The music was honestly disappointing to me as well. I understand that Skyrim was a big influence for the developers, but I do wish there had been more grand operatic style themes, in keeping with Zelda tradition, as opposed to the more environmental and ambient musical stylings of a lot of modern games. There are still some times in which you'll hear snatches of familiar Zelda tunes, but I wish there had been more.

I also found the weapon durability to be prohibitively irritating. Eschewing a typical Zelda approach in which you get one indestructible sword near the beginning of the game, and replace it with more powerful versions along the way, you now can fight with a huge range of different weapons, including tree branches, Moblin arms, boomerangs, spears, and giant two handed greatswords. This allows you to pick a combat style that works for you, but dang it all if the things don't break. All. The. Time. This gets extremely irritating, and forces you to ration your most loved weapons for times in which you really need them, which means you'll spend most of your time fighting in a manner that irritates and annoys. The durability should have been roughly doubled, keeping the basic idea in place, but also allowing you to spend a little more time with your favorites before they shatter in half.

I think of Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as two sides of the same coin. Both took risks in design, but Super Mario Odyssey was the safer play. They polished up the formula, tweaked a couple of things, and let you play Mario the way it has been played for a long time. Breath of the Wild really took huge risks, and the vast majority of them paid off to produce my favorite 3D Zelda ever, and it's not particularly close. Both to me are perfect 10s for 2019's video game enthusiast, largely because Zelda takes massive risks to get bonus credit, while Super Mario Odyssey just does everything right. If forced to choose today, I'd probably pick Zelda, but I'd guess that will flip in 10 years when a polished child of Breath of the Wild comes out and shows off some of the flaws in its predecessor, while Super Mario Odyssey stays shiny and delightful.

Up next on the home version of What I'm Playing is a little jaunt I took down training lane recently...

-TRO