TheWinner

Be wary of people giving this game a high score. They just might be trying to sell you on something. Things it did right: + Huge world with lots of little details, probably where Nintendo spent most of their time in development + The go-anywhere-and-possibly-be-undergeared motif of LoZ1 was translated to a 3D game alright enough + Made the mastersword rely on heart containers to acquire it, much like the White Sword or Magical Sword from LoZ1. Probably the only specific callback to LoZ1 that translated "perfectly". Things it tried: • Redesigned many characters, going as far as never giving Link a hat in promotional art and changing his iconic color from green to blue, or Ganon who is now a demon spider instead of a pig, only a pig in spirit. Moblins were turned into weird long snouted lanky unicorn pigmonsters, Hinox were turned into somewhat-more-generic Giants losing their iconic(?) Bomb-throwing attacks. • Tried voice acting but traded player-freedom of naming their character so spoken lines could needlessly refer to you as "Link". • The go-anywhere-model of LoZ1 lost almost all likeness to most other Zelda games because of the way it was implemented. In order to go anywhere and do anything from the start of the game, the player unfortunately gets all their tools at the start of the game so no proper dungeons with proper treasures or item equipment that would otherwise lock one player from accessing things another player could gated via game progress- which also isn't necessarily even "true" to how LoZ1 accomplished it. Things it did wrong: - Traded the sweeping and catchy good music of traditional Zelda design even going as far back as the original LoZ1 for lighter, emptier, less-frequent ambient sounds to adapt to the world's environment of "musical" cues and reliance on things like stealth. As an original game this might have worked, but the tradeoff meaning no great "Zelda music" as many expect from the franchise doesn't work to a benefit. The weaker audio design fits their game design, but the weaker audio design of their game design doesn't fit "Zelda". - From a series known for streamlined access to health replenishment via bottles full of potions and frequent floating hearts, placing all healing behind food collection and menu access gets in the way of player intention within the world and only serves to distract the player or otherwise pad the adventure with unnecessary filler. Trivial for a series that virtually invented the concept behind the Estus Flask from the Souls games. Such an estus-flask-like method of healing would have more accurately emulated the streamlined healing of past Zelda games while still allowing them to get away from hearts in bushes and pots. - Related to food collection, the game design around killing simple non-zelda scenery animals unrelated to the variety of Zelda enemies for various Raw Meat items is woefully unnecessary and out-of-place for any Zelda game much less any Nintendo game. This concept was so poorly implemented to even include killing foxes and wolves for meat, in our modern society where both have been domesticated as pets or otherwise crossbred with domestic dogs to produce canines that look identical to their wild counterparts. Whether the player has the intent or not to harm them, they can be killed by enemies anyway. "Eating dog meat" is a gut-wrenching phrase I never imagined would describe an action in any videogame much less one from Nintendo, and has forever irreparably damaged my otherwise flawless opinion of the franchise and its creators. - No actual sprawling dungeons from a series known for it's sprawling dungeons is a weakpoint. The shrines, although numerous and fairly uniquely designed in terms of their puzzles, unfortunately still manage to all look identical and don't offer the same expected gameplay layout or scenic/regional design as cohesive interconnected hallways and rooms from traditional dungeons in other Zelda games. Even the four Divine Beasts operate more like "slightly larger shrines" than something remotely close to being considered a true "dungeon", with Hyrule Castle being the only "true" dungeon. - Enemy variety compared to past Zelda games and even many modern games is staggeringly low. All enemies and bosses counted, there are only 23 different monsters that are copied-pasted-and-recolored or given a slightly different weapon or elemental attribute to create the majority of Breath of the Wild's "variety". Even going back to Ocarina of Time, there were 46 unique enemies and bosses counted together, not including recolored or reskinned variations; and of course each mainline Zelda game since Ocarina and before Breath of the Wild has had virtually the same variety if not more. There are actually more background scenery animal species in this game than unique enemies, meaning the only true visual variety that exists is in the scenery itself - a negative only because enemy combat is a necessity.

Be wary of people giving this game a high score. They just might be trying to sell you on something. Things it did right: + Huge world with lots of little details, probably where Nintendo spent most of their time in development + The go-anywhere-and-possibly-be-undergeared motif of LoZ1 was translated to a 3D game alright enough + Made the mastersword rely on heart containers to acquire it, much like the White Sword or Magical Sword from LoZ1. Probably the only specific callback to LoZ1 that translated "perfectly". Things it tried: • Redesigned many characters, going as far as never giving Link a hat in promotional art and changing his iconic color from green to blue, or Ganon who is now a demon spider instead of a pig, only a pig in spirit. Moblins were turned into weird long snouted lanky unicorn pigmonsters, Hinox were turned into somewhat-more-generic Giants losing their iconic(?) Bomb-throwing attacks. • Tried voice acting but traded player-freedom of naming their character so spoken lines could needlessly refer to you as "Link". • The go-anywhere-model of LoZ1 lost almost all likeness to most other Zelda games because of the way it was implemented. In order to go anywhere and do anything from the start of the game, the player unfortunately gets all their tools at the start of the game so no proper dungeons with proper treasures or item equipment that would otherwise lock one player from accessing things another player could gated via game progress- which also isn't necessarily even "true" to how LoZ1 accomplished it. Things it did wrong: - Traded the sweeping and catchy good music of traditional Zelda design even going as far back as the original LoZ1 for lighter, emptier, less-frequent ambient sounds to adapt to the world's environment of "musical" cues and reliance on things like stealth. As an original game this might have worked, but the tradeoff meaning no great "Zelda music" as many expect from the franchise doesn't work to a benefit. The weaker audio design fits their game design, but the weaker audio design of their game design doesn't fit "Zelda". - From a series known for streamlined access to health replenishment via bottles full of potions and frequent floating hearts, placing all healing behind food collection and menu access gets in the way of player intention within the world and only serves to distract the player or otherwise pad the adventure with unnecessary filler. Trivial for a series that virtually invented the concept behind the Estus Flask from the Souls games. Such an estus-flask-like method of healing would have more accurately emulated the streamlined healing of past Zelda games while still allowing them to get away from hearts in bushes and pots. - Related to food collection, the game design around killing simple non-zelda scenery animals unrelated to the variety of Zelda enemies for various Raw Meat items is woefully unnecessary and out-of-place for any Zelda game much less any Nintendo game. This concept was so poorly implemented to even include killing foxes and wolves for meat, in our modern society where both have been domesticated as pets or otherwise crossbred with domestic dogs to produce canines that look identical to their wild counterparts. Whether the player has the intent or not to harm them, they can be killed by enemies anyway. "Eating dog meat" is a gut-wrenching phrase I never imagined would describe an action in any videogame much less one from Nintendo, and has forever irreparably damaged my otherwise flawless opinion of the franchise and its creators. - No actual sprawling dungeons from a series known for it's sprawling dungeons is a weakpoint. The shrines, although numerous and fairly uniquely designed in terms of their puzzles, unfortunately still manage to all look identical and don't offer the same expected gameplay layout or scenic/regional design as cohesive interconnected hallways and rooms from traditional dungeons in other Zelda games. Even the four Divine Beasts operate more like "slightly larger shrines" than something remotely close to being considered a true "dungeon", with Hyrule Castle being the only "true" dungeon. - Enemy variety compared to past Zelda games and even many modern games is staggeringly low. All enemies and bosses counted, there are only 23 different monsters that are copied-pasted-and-recolored or given a slightly different weapon or elemental attribute to create the majority of Breath of the Wild's "variety". Even going back to Ocarina of Time, there were 46 unique enemies and bosses counted together, not including recolored or reskinned variations; and of course each mainline Zelda game since Ocarina and before Breath of the Wild has had virtually the same variety if not more. There are actually more background scenery animal species in this game than unique enemies, meaning the only true visual variety that exists is in the scenery itself - a negative only because enemy combat is a necessity.

Missing characters, Missing any acknowledgement to the past 7 years of inventive ideas in Fighting Games, Missing any redeeming qualities as a fighter with dozens of bugs, issues, and missing features. Everything about this game defies the previous Dead or Alive games, never mind **** on what is widely regarded as the pinnacle of 3D fighting games, Dead or Alive 4. Dead or Alive 4 paved the way for almost every fighting game release in the past 7 years. Fighting games have adopted one thing or another from Dead or Alive 4 and incorporated them into their own design, be it the "bounce" combo mechanic, Online ranked lobbies and network inspiration, or even Motion Blur as a detail enhancing visual feature. In one way or another, nearly every fighting game made in the past 7 years has taken notes from Dead or Alive 4 in hopes to compete. Dead or Alive 5 doesn't aim to be better than, or even as good as Dead or Alive 4. It lacks features from previous DOA games, it lacks network capabilities from previous DOA games, it lacks balance from previous DOA games, it simplifies combat immensely by **** the **** out of Counter-Holds making them relatively useless, thereby ruining the "Triangle System" brand of combat that DOA is famous for. It's buggy, rushed, highly in favor to the over-sexualization of it's female characters (even more-so than previous DOA games) so much as to be called misandry. Dead or Alive 5 is the biggest fighting game scandal in the history of fighting video games. Please understand that the Team Ninja that made the previous four DOA games no longer exists. In 2008, Tomonobu Itagaki and over 36 key members of Team Ninja quit and sued Tecmo for business malpractice. leaving Tecmo's Team Ninja with a shell of what once was a development studio. The publicized departure of Itagaki and around 40 people caused a stir up that dissuaded prospective engineers, programmers, animators, artists, and designers from choosing to work for Tecmo/TeamNinja, and because of that - they could only end up hiring people who were not entirely capable. This game is as much of a **** to the Dead or Alive series and fighting games as a whole as Ninja Gaiden 3 was to the Ninja Gaiden series and action-adventure hack-n-slash games. Anyone who praises this game either doesn't play fighting games or is simply lying through their teeth. This is one of the cheapest Lie Detectors available, while still being the most expensive Fighting Game without content.

Missing characters, Missing any acknowledgement to the past 7 years of inventive ideas in Fighting Games, Missing any redeeming qualities as a fighter with dozens of bugs, issues, and missing features. Everything about this game defies the previous Dead or Alive games, never mind **** on what is widely regarded as the pinnacle of 3D fighting games, Dead or Alive 4. Dead or Alive 4 paved the way for almost every fighting game release in the past 7 years. Fighting games have adopted one thing or another from Dead or Alive 4 and incorporated them into their own design, be it the "bounce" combo mechanic, Online ranked lobbies and network inspiration, or even Motion Blur as a detail enhancing visual feature. In one way or another, nearly every fighting game made in the past 7 years has taken notes from Dead or Alive 4 in hopes to compete. Dead or Alive 5 doesn't aim to be better than, or even as good as Dead or Alive 4. It lacks features from previous DOA games, it lacks network capabilities from previous DOA games, it lacks balance from previous DOA games, it simplifies combat immensely by **** the **** out of Counter-Holds making them relatively useless, thereby ruining the "Triangle System" brand of combat that DOA is famous for. It's buggy, rushed, highly in favor to the over-sexualization of it's female characters (even more-so than previous DOA games) so much as to be called misandry. Dead or Alive 5 is the biggest fighting game scandal in the history of fighting video games. Please understand that the Team Ninja that made the previous four DOA games no longer exists. In 2008, Tomonobu Itagaki and over 36 key members of Team Ninja quit and sued Tecmo for business malpractice. leaving Tecmo's Team Ninja with a shell of what once was a development studio. The publicized departure of Itagaki and around 40 people caused a stir up that dissuaded prospective engineers, programmers, animators, artists, and designers from choosing to work for Tecmo/TeamNinja, and because of that - they could only end up hiring people who were not entirely capable. This game is as much of a **** to the Dead or Alive series and fighting games as a whole as Ninja Gaiden 3 was to the Ninja Gaiden series and action-adventure hack-n-slash games. Anyone who praises this game either doesn't play fighting games or is simply lying through their teeth. This is one of the cheapest Lie Detectors available, while still being the most expensive Fighting Game without content.

This is by far the worst game I have ever played, which comes at an extreme surprise considering how strong the Phantasy Star series of games has been since its inception. The story is nonsensical, the graphics are terrible, the animations are lazy, and overall the game feels as if Sega did not even attempt to create anything worthy of the Phantasy Star name. Sega has never made a game worse than this. If you couldn't tell from the trailers, this game is pretty much a "reboot" in that there really is nothing familiar for anyone who's been a fan of the series, sans names for character classes, consumable items, and magic techniques. There's also a surprising amount of dialogue between characters that plays out in fairly inanimate Character Portraits against a still background using 2-d art. Thankfully there is a "skip" feature where by holding down X, the text will fly away. The story is extremely uninteresting and can be actually unappealing altogether at times, making the skip feature a very nice thing to pass over the unimportant chatter to get back to the gameplay. Unfortunately, it seems the very large amount of character dialogue was added to simply give the player "something else to experience." The actual mechanics of the gameplay are extremely limited, with such undoings as poor hit detection, unbalanced difficulty with the advantage to the in-game enemies, and the complete lack of a "quick" menu that was available in Phantasy Star Online, which this game attempts to emulate but gets every aspect wrong by doing so. The quick menu from Phantasy Star Online (accessed with holding your "secondary action palette button" then pressing the top button) was completely forgotten for Phantasy Star Zero, and the bottom screen provides no logical use aside from displaying your action palette and telling you the name of an enemy or item targeted. Most of the menu screens available take place on the bottom screen, including changing equipment, using items not in your palette, and viewing the map. While accessing these menus, the ability to control your player is forfeit so the directional pad can be used to navigate, and face buttons used to confirm or deny. This is only worth noting because of the lack of a quick-menu, which means that if your teammates fall in battle or you need to use an item that you don't have assigned to your action-palettes (6 individual actions total), you must stop all character movement and be defenseless in the heat of battle so that you can bring up the menu, scroll to your items, then scroll through the item list to use a Moon Atomizer (Phantasy Star's "resurrection") or any other item. Furthermore, since the chat function of PSO (which used to occupy the top-face-button, in the case of the DS, the X button) is replaced with the picture message function accessible by a touch-screen button on the lower screen, the X button actually goes unused while exploring the world and fighting enemies. To say it's completely worthless since a function was not implemented with one of the four face buttons is to go too far however, considering the only thing the X button does is, when held and combined with either the left shoulder or right shoulder buttons, allows you to rotate the camera around your character. This feature, if it can really be called a "feature," is entirely moot considering the left shoulder button by itself is the "lock onto enemy" button (as well as "center camera directly behind your character" button), and all special Boss Battles automatically have the camera centered on the giant boss enemy at all times. There is literally no reason for this camera rotation feature to exist, especially when there is so little in the game to actually look at or observe as it's worthless function would imply. They removed the X button as a useful button which would have improved the action palette for a total of 8 individual actions instead of 6, which could have helped with the lack of a quick-menu by adding otherwise unimportant items like Moon Atomizers to your available one-touch actions rather than having to stand in the middle of a battlefield completely defenseless in a panic while navigating menus. There is also a surprising amount of white-space on the bottom screen during the missions which could have been filled with touch-activated shortcuts for actions. Overall, Phantasy Star Zero seems like it was made by someone who looked at a recorded video Phantasy Star Online for 5 minutes and that was the maximum amount of reference material they ever had. Phantasy Star Zero so vaguely represents anything that the Phantasy Star series has established that it may as well have been a fanfiction story written by a bored and lonely teenager. The game is horrendous and an abomination not only for the Nintendo DS, but also a detrimental stain on the name of Sonic Team, Sega, and the Phantasy Star brand. It's not worth money.