As I’ve gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn’t have any good games.
I’ve just fallen out of fashion with it because maybe it’s in part that nearly all of the video game-based content I watch and find, tend to orbit a little around 8-bit too much. Most of the time it’s because content creators were born in that era and no arguments can be made.
But I’ve grown exhausted from the oversaturation and sometimes over-glorified favoritism of 8-bit that I just have difficulty revisiting again. I’ve forgotten to mention how many indie games lean hard on the 8-bit aesthetic.
Another era of gaming that I am also finding myself falling out of favor for is 16 bit. This applies to consoles more than anything that was made in 16 bit. Having a hard time revisiting that era for some of the same reasons.
I’m more of a 6th Gen/Arcade player type.
Breath of the Wild’s equivalent to dungeons were the beasts, not the shrines. The activities in the overworld were only the same in that they ended in a shrine, but the things you did to unlock them were generally very different. Half of them aren’t even visible at first. The people who thought that world was empty just didn’t find what was hidden in the negative space.
Breath of the Wild doesn’t have an equivalent to dungeons. There are only four divine beasts, and just like the shrines they are extremely short, and identical in appearance. They were just slightly more complex shrines with an animal theme. And the overworld doesn’t realistically have a whole lot to find, by design. Since the game is entirely unstructured, you can’t put anything to find in the game, because you don’t know where the player will go and nothing to stop them from going anywhere. Thats why nothing amounts to anything more than a fractional stat boost or a temporary weapon. The outfits and the master sword are the only things worth actually finding in the game.
As a shit your brain off and run around a pretty overworld type of game, it excels. But it doesn’t delivery anything a typical Zelda game does.
The divine beasts are not identical, though they are shorter than traditionally Zelda dungeons. The overworld has a ton to find; you just didn’t find it.
The divine beasts are in fact visually identical. The only real difference between them is which animal they’re vaguely shaped like. As for the overworld, I found all of it. It’s just that “all of it” was for the most part just copied and pasted over and over with minor variation.