> To be quite blunt, the sages' abilities are implemented absolutely horribly in this game
I agree 100%. I loved the game, but I don't understand how anyone at Nintendo thought that these mechanics were a good idea. To make matters even worse, the button is the same to pick up an item. I can't count how many times I was about to pick up an item, and a sage passed by, hijacking the button (especially disruptive when it's Mineru).
Don't forget that you use e.g. the lightning strike ability as a long range attack, yet the avatar you have to interact with tends to aggressively charge directly into close range. I gave up using the lightning ability because I just get hit if I run close enough while awkwardly fumbling around until I find the magic spot to press the A button.
The fact that you can dismiss the sages through a hastily bolted on menu interaction tells you that they knew it was annoying. If it worked well you'd never need to.
The worst part is that you get the only useful one first if you go where the game obviously prods you to (north west), setting the expectation that all the abilities would be useful. Unfortunately they are so bad it's actually comical.
Imo the game kind of feels thrown together in general. I think the worst part is that they traded the open feeling of adventure in the original game, which felt quite lean on mechanics and different things to do, for a much more common open world style of gameplay. Now it feels like any other checkbox open world game, a huge list of things to do and going through them one by one. BotW never felt like that
Naturally, I picked him up last, but I thought the boulder guy had his uses. Being able to break through walls without consuming hammers was definitely a plus. Then again, the cooldown was so long that it became quite irritating to use it for demolition purposes.
Well that's better than if you got his ability last. Imagine playing 100 hours and then being like WHAT, YOU CAN DO THAT? I COULD HAVE DONE THAT THE WHOLE TIME?
I phrase it like that because I'm about 160 hours in to ToTK right now and just last night I found something that would have made me fantastically wealthy the whole way through if I had known about it. Now it doesn't matter.
I've heard of quite a bunch of people who went quite far without realising you can get the paraglider. From the promo materials & the tutorial it definitely seemed like the game was meant to be played using skydiving and Zonai wings.
Jumping on the train. Companions in general are very annoying, and having four is next level annoying. I’ve run into the same issues, makes the game not fun when you go to pick items up and initiate their power. Especially when their powers have a tendency to kill the frame rate. I know you can dismiss them but since some parts of the gameplay center on their mechanics it’s very annoying. I could do without companions in an open world game.
Being hard to use and not very useful feels like a clear design choice to me. They were too good in the previous game, so they all got a big ol’ round of the nerf hammer.
And they moved them to interactions next to the sages because they sincerely overloaded the controls of that game.
The whole game would have been better without any sages’ power.
I agree 100%. I loved the game, but I don't understand how anyone at Nintendo thought that these mechanics were a good idea. To make matters even worse, the button is the same to pick up an item. I can't count how many times I was about to pick up an item, and a sage passed by, hijacking the button (especially disruptive when it's Mineru).