Unfinished & Unsatisfying
TLDR: Will you enjoy this game? If you're looking for a Zelda game you’ll be disappointed, and if you get invested in the story you’ll also be disappointed. If you just want to play a cheap game with a pretty world, slashing and some easy puzzles, maybe. Full review: I really wanted to like this game, and finished the main story after about 18 hours on my ipad pro. For the good, the different locations feel unique, and there’s some beautiful vistas. The in-game card game is actually great, and you can play against a lot of the npcs in towns. It’s easy to understand but harder to master. The story has some time and space-bending ideas, and some morally ambiguous characters. It has combat, a story and puzzles, which are all ingredients I usually like. However, I’ve played quite a lot of Zelda in my life and this is not it. In a Zelda game, each puzzle will leave enough for you to figure out so that you feel clever. Oceanhorn will spell the puzzle out for you the first time, and then you just repeat the same solution every time after. Some of it is pointlessly similar to Zelda - why make a fantasy race so close to the Zora? Why is the last sword literally the master sword but red? Why have pots give you hearts etc, when they endlessly respawn even when you haven’t left the area? At least make them something that makes sense like plants that regrow. You get to pilot a plane, a hovering motorbike and a tugboat. To me the most fun was the motorbike, but it only lets you ride it twice in the game. Having played Wind Waker with satisfying sailing mechanics, this simple boat & environment feels lacklustre. You can’t change altitude in the plane, and there’s no glider. Walking between areas is empty and boring. I wish they'd picked just one method of transport and given it deeper mechanics. And actually labelled the map. It feels like this game had some conflict between producers and developers, &/or ambitions and budget. There’s a whole third temple that just doesn't exist and most of the plot is loose ends. There’s huge amounts of areas that only reward exploration through money, when there's nothing worthwhile to spend the money on. There’s two big fetch quests but they don’t tell you what the reward is. A new sword and shield each have dungeons to obtain them, but they seem to function the same as the starter ones. The shield has lore around reflecting attacks, but when I did, the reflected attacks bounce off in another direction, or go straight through t
