The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

[Vampyr]

Anyone else have it yet?

It's hard to say very much about the game without spoiling something, but so far it's fantastic.

It's crazy to me how quickly the game is giving me new abilities and items to use. I'm just a handful of hours in and I already have about five different abilities that normally you would get by beating the first five dungeons or something.

The other thing I love about the game is it really respects your intelligence. There is no hand holding. When you pick up a new ability it explains what it is and what the controls are, in one dialogue box, and that's it. There's no hand holding tutorial. There's no pausing every few seconds to make sure you haven't started drooling on the controller out of confusion.

This really feels like a classic Nintendo game where you learn by doing and experimenting. At one point I read a guys diary, and I knew I needed to do something in order to get an item from him, but it wasn't exactly spelled out how to do it. There were no quest markers or log entries, it was just a puzzle I had to figure out. And actually, when I think about it, I don't even believe I -had- to do it. There were alternative ways to do what I needed without acquiring that item.

The story so far is also pretty interesting. It's vague in that classic Zelda way, but I still understand my goal. You feel an emotional connection to characters even though they don't have many lines.

Speaking of lines, voice acting! Not every line is voice acted, which I kind of prefer for nostalgia's sake, but all the bigger, more important scenes have voice acting. Not from Link, of course, he's still a silent protagonist, as has been and always should be.