After six years since the last console version of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, the new adventure is finally here and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is well worth the wait. It’s taking all of my will power right now to write this instead of playing more of it. I’m helplessly addicted! That’s not to say the game doesn’t have any downfalls. Frequently I’m torn between really loving the game and cursing its name. Breath of the Wild is like an amalgamation of everything Nintendo has learned from the past thirty years of making the series combined with some of the biggest franchises that came out on the first wave of HD consoles aka the PS3 an🐬d Xbox 360.

It has towers and stealth elements like in Assassin’s Creed, tough enemies and an emphasis on precise combat like in Dark Souls, a vast open world akin to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and the list goes on. That said, parts of it feel like half steps like Nintendo heard what these games were doing and took elements from them without knowing if these things were well loved, or detested mechanics. I’m being rather vague at the moment here, so I guess we should just get this list started. To those worried about spoilers fear not. I think I did a rather thorough job without bringing up specifics, especially regarding the story. These are just some general reactions in my thirty plus hours with Breath of the Wild so far. Let’s get to it!

15 Best: No Lengthy Tutorials

Even though I knew Nintendo was emphasizing an open world without any hand holding, I didn’t believe them until I turned the game on. I couldn’t believe it. Link wakes up, is instructed how to use his tablet device, or Sheikah Slate, and then that’s it. The Sheikah Slate is kind of like a companion, but doesn’t constantly squawk at you like Navi, or any of the other constant companions that have plagued the console games since The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It’s just a tool, but a cool one at that. Yes, there are guiding elements to point you toward the next story beat and even with the open environment, the beginning plateau area is sort of tutorial-like, but again it’s nothing compared to the other console games especially The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. That tutorial can go straight to whatever the underworld i𒀰n Zelda is called.

14 Worst: The Difficulty

While having a vastly open world to explore with little direction is great, there are some boundaries to scare you away due to strong monsters, but they appear in a confusing method. It’s weird because most open worlds either don’t have that or RPGs like Skyrim have levels. In order to make it through some of the rougher areas, you need to level up, which is an easy enough thing to wrap your mind around. However, Breath of the Wild doesn’t have levels. Instead weapons have attack power and the weapons you use are the same as an opponents, so a weak monster, which you may have killed dozens of before, could suddenly become death incarnate as a single strike could end Link’s life and there’s no real way of knowing that due to a lack of communication in the design. They took the wrong idea away from Dark Souls here. It’s baffling and frust൲🍒rating quite honestly.

13 Best: Weapon Variety

Speaking of weapons, there’s a lot to collect in the game. By my account, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was the first game to introduce disposable weapons dropped from enemies. You couldn’t add them to your inventory, but they made combat moreꦡ interesting at times. This game takes it to a whole new level. There are one-handed and two-handed weapons that come in the form of swords, axes, clubs, spears, boomerangs, and more. One of my favorite weapons is using the discarded ꦛhand of a skeleton. They may not be strong, but beating enemies senseless with a bone that is still moving its hand is priceless. Not only that, but certain weapon types have different charged special moves. Normal swords perform the standard spin attack, while a spear jabs rapidly at an opponent. There’s a lot to love, but…

12 Worst: Weapon Durability

Weapon and armor durability is one of the worst ideas ever implemented in videos games. However, most games have a good balance to them and gear usually doesn’t break in a matter of seconds. It takes time and can usually be repaired like in Fallout 3, and doesn’t just shatter like it was made out of glass. Unfortunately, Breath of the Wild is nothing like that. Melee weapons, shields, and bows can break in a single confrontation. Equipment doesn’t even have a meter to indicate how durable it is other than vague descriptive text until it’s on the verge of breaking when it turns red. It’s like if your car only told you it’s about to run out of gas with a mile left. Not really helpful there. Some weapons are more durable than others, but even the strongest equipment seems to only last a matter of a few scraps. Constantly juggling between weapons not because I wanted to, but because I had to defeated any sort of enjoyment I got from combat. It’s the worst part of Breath of the Wild and mak💙es those tough encounters infinitely more irritati💖ng. Seriously, what were you thinking Nintendo?

11 Best: Diverse Environments

Let’s talk about exploring Hyrule itself. It’s simply fantastic and there are so many different places and styles found within the world. Traversi𝓰ng through lush forests and open fields sprinkled with ruins are all well and good, and fit with Zelda’s fantasy motif, but on some of the outer edges, there are actual tropical regions as well with different colored water and temperatures. Plus, there is dynamic weather. It’s a world that feels alive and actually inhabited by a good group of survivors. Even though it takes place in a ruined Hyrule, it’s still beautiful and everyone isn’t overly dark about it. Every turn you take will have something worth investigating and I often found myself way off course from my intended destination. It rewards curiosity and that’s always good in my book.

10 Worst: Limited Inventory

Now, it’d be one thing if I had a near limitless amount of weapons I could store and pick up at my leisure, but at the start you have less than ten slots. A single fight alone could dwindle that number down considerably, especially in monster camps or during boss fights. Plus, there are certain tool like weapons you can acquire throughout the game like axes, or sledgehammers that are not necessary to keep, but make the game easier in acquiring useful materials, but that takes up valuable weapon spot though. See the dilemma? The worst part of all this is treasure chests, which used to be one of the most magical things that happened in a Zelda game, have lost their allure. Sometimes useful items can be a🍰cquired like money, or materials, but I usually got gear. Some cool equipment yes, but w🦂hen those items break, it just made those acquisitions feel meaningless. Admittedly inventory can be upgraded, but it’s one slot at a time and it’s an arduous process.

9 Best: Cooking

While weapon space is critically limited, your food supply is not. Yes, there is a finite space for ingredients and dishes you prepare, but they’re within reasonable limits. Space aside, there are many dishes to prepare and a good reason to do so. First of all almost any kind of food or herb source can restore life, so even though the game is hard, at lea🐻st you can heal🍃 easily enough. Not only that, but you can boost your stats with a variety of tonics and recipes. Stuff like cold resistance to warm you up as your trudge through snowy areas or something that can boost armor when you need a good defense for a boss. These effects only last for a limited time, but they’re necessary in surviving the wilds and there’s nothing complicated about the process. Simply grab what you want, throw it in a pot, and bam! You can even sell dishes, which is a cheap and fast way to gain Rupees. Hot tip!

8 Worst: Horseback Riding

In open world games, traveling can become tedious if you have to go everywhere on foot. Thankfully cars, or in this case horses, are there to make your trips quicker. That’s the idea anyway, but horses are more cumbersome than they are helpful. Not only are they difficult to control, but also taking them on trips gets in the way of exploring. Yes you can reach destinations faster if you’re actually trying to just follow a road, but in that process you’re missing little adventures out there or you’re stopping the momentum of your horseback riding every few yards to hop off, check something out, get back on your horse again and repeat. For the first time in Zelda since Ocarina of Time, horses are practically useless, which is♎ surprising, again, for an open world game.

7 Best: Portal-like Puzzles

Most Zelda puzzles are logic based in nature, but a lot of the tricks in Breath of the Wild are more akin to Portal, which uses both logic and physics based mind teasers. As a drawback, there are only f𓆉our main dungeons, but the one hundred mini dungeons all have unique puzzles to them that test the brain in one way or another, whether it's finding out how to raise a beam with ice or tilting your pad in order to guide a ball through a maze via the controller’s gyroscope. They’re never that hard either and good ways to recharge the brain after long bouts of exploring and/or fighting monsters. In this way, I find them a lot like going through a Sudoku.

6 Worst: Lack of Proper Dungeons

While these puzzles are fun to tinker around with, 🔥it diminishes what dungeons mean in the Zelda franchise. Putting a hundred mini dungeons in the game feels like an attempt to pad things out, which is how I view the inventory expansion quests too and, like those, finding these minis dungeons are a must in order to increase stamina and health. Look, I’m not against how dungeons are placed in the Zelda world, or how you level up as it were, but a hundred feels like too many and while good a lot of them are, many feel the same. They’re clever puzzles, but that’s all they are. I never felt engrossed in a dungeon’s design. No, these are just puzzles for the sake of being puzzles.