-
combat is kind of secondary (and in my opinion not very good, it's just way too easy)
I think this is my main criticism, once you've got a few sages it just becomes a bit too passive. I'm sure the game does the same tracking of stats that BotW does so it will increase the power of the enemies over time. So I imagine it's designed with the sages in mind, so switching them off will likely not do too much to fix that.
mmccarthy-
Yeah, I have played sections without the sages and apart from when there's a massive amount of enemies, I don't really think they make a huge difference.
I think the worst thing about the game is being able to pause and heal. It just makes everything arbitrary. Your health in combat is effectively "how many times can I fuck up". Once you are not getting one shot by anything, you can just have so many health items, that you can use with no penalty, that you will eventually just win.
Your attacks also just do too much hitstun. It's too easy to quickly combo, knockback, back up, face someone else.
I'm being overly critical here. I enjoyed it a lot, but I feel like it was just shy of being truly great and I think that's a shame.
zooeyzooey
I was saying to a friend that in a game like ToTK it's difficult, cause the core of the game is exploration and discovery, and some puzzle solving, combat is kind of secondary (and in my opinion not very good, it's just way too easy), but you can't really create a climax to a game with exploration and discovery, so it uses combat, and it's just disappointing.
The only specific prep I did for the final fight was make sure I had a decent amount of gloom heart loss restoring items, and I found it just disappointingly easy. I am a really big fan of games without difficulty settings cause I think it allows the developers to dictate the experience they want a bit more, but I kind of wish this game had one.
Maybe if there is a 3rd game in this sort of BoTW series I'll just wait for master mode to release before I play it. I got the DLC for the first game but I already had 100+ hours in it so I got bored quite quickly. I just don't feel like these kind of games have that much replayability when you already know where most stuff is.