I played Breath of the Wild again for maybe an hour. I found the first shrine, and passed the test. It was very easy, and I felt like it wasn’t challenging or long enough to feel like I accomplished something significant.
After that, the old man told me to meet him at the tower thing that I caused to appear. There, he told me that there were four such shrines on the plateau, which I needed to find, bring him their treasures, and then I could get his glider so I could leave the shrine.
He told me how to use my magic tablet to find them, but I didn’t understand, and now he won’t repeat the instructions, so I’m stuck.
I tried looking from the tower and spotted a column of smoke not far away, so I decided to check it out. I ran into the same old man there, he was hunting. I saw a boar and tried to kill it with my bow, but I only wounded it, and it ran away.
I tried to follow it, but I lost sight of it trying to sneak, but then I encountered a bokoblin camp. So I decided to raid it, and got killed about 4-5 times before I succeeded in defeating the three of them. I got some loot, but all it does is make me wonder what to do with it.
I found another two bokoblins nearby and killed them at long distance with my bow, but used up most of my arrows. I am not good at aiming because the R-stick is too sensitive. But I learned at distance you have to account for drop, by holding over the target, which is really cool. I also scored a few head shots for extra damage, which is also cool.
Since I can’t figure out how to use my tablet to find the shrines on the plateau, if I’m going to get anywhere in the game I’m going to need to read cheat guides, which feels like giving up, and I am not ready for that yet. But I already feel like there’s a lot of controls to remember, like how to quickly switch shields and stuff, and it’s hard to remember it all. “Back in my day, all we had was an A button, a B button, Select, Start, and a D-bad, and we liked it!”
Also, I find the camera to be very awkward, and it almost never does what I want it to. Changing camera angles is a little slow for when I’m in an urgent situation, like in a combat. A very slight speed increase, maybe just 10% could make a big difference here. Left trigger is supposed to cause Link to focus on his enemy, but if there’s multiple enemies nearby, how it selects the one to focus on is unclear, and often not the one I wanted. Left-trigger also brings up your shield, if you’re using a shield, so it seems more important to focus on the right enemy so that you can bring the shield up to block incoming attacks from it.
Beyond that, if I’m next to a wall or other object, the camera zooms in to show me what the view through Link’s eyes would be, rather than a 3rd-person view, which is a good idea, but then it seems to get confused. If I’m up in a treetop, I get a nice close up view of the leaves blocking my view of Link and whatever he might be looking at, which makes climbing trees for a better view pretty much useless. I feel the game engine should make non-solid objects between Link and the camera semi-transparent, or even not draw them, so that you can get a clear view of what’s going on.
So far I’m not really as impressed as I thought I was going to be.