Some people think that THE LEGEND of Zelda Breath of the Wild, a game filled with environmental hazards and tough bosses is a challenge.
When I was playing the Nintendo Switch, I found a trick that made it nearly impossible for you to die. It almost destroyed the game.
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Not many players know this, but The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a hidden system called ‘One Hit Protection’.
This means, essentially, that any enemy hit will reduce the health of Link to one-quarter, not kill him.
No matter how strong the enemy, even if it’s a powerful Lynel, a terrifying Guardian, or even the final boss Calamity Ganon, there’s no way for it to kill Link in one attack.
As soon as you figure out this system, it’s easy to come up with ways to exploit it and make Link effectively invincible.
Link will always be able to survive big attacks if he takes stamina instead of health from the Goddess Statues.
Eating raw meat and apples you find out in the world helps to keep you at max health, and with a low max HP, it doesn’t take much to fill up.
But it’s when you stumble across a cooking pot that the whole game becomes trivial, and any challenge is effectively removed from the game.
The cooking of food will give you a variety of bonuses and benefits, including a boost in your damage as well as the ability for the player to endure different weather conditions such s snow or heat from lava.
Cooked food and One Hit Protection make every battle essentially the exact same. There is no danger of dying and there are few challenges.
I’d run in, get a few big hits in with my boosted stats, get hit myself, eat a new meal, and start the process all over again.
It was virtually impossible to kill enemies with the One Hit Protection, low HP and Food Boosts.
There are some situations where this strategy doesn’t work, such as when enemies hit you multiple times in quick succession.
Even the most dangerous enemy, Thunderblight Ganon (the dreaded Thunderblight Ganon), was defeated in just five tries, using this simple tactic.
This method is not without its drawbacks. After a few fights, things became a little tedious and frustrated.
While it doesn’t take much time to gather ingredients, since they’re scattered throughout the world, it’s easy to spend a lot of time cooking.
It is often a tedious and long process to cook. You have to select your menu and then manually add each ingredient.
This sets off a cooking animation that, while skippable, is annoying to have to put up with, and if you’re cooking in large batches, cooking can take up to 15 minutes at a time.
That’s not to say cooking is a flaw though, but if you’re like me and you spend a lot of time strategising, you might find that this method sucks the fun out of the game.
With the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom around the corner, it’s hard to know what could be changed about this system to make it fairer.
By removing the One Hit Protection, players are unfairly penalized for accidentally going too far into an area of high-level, discouraging exploration, which is a key theme in the game.
You can make the cooking process easier by making it faster. This will encourage people to use this system as I did.
Either way, there’s likely to be excitement and plenty of new things to discover in Tears of the Kingdom when it launches on Nintendo Switch on May 12, 2023.
Georgina Brandt and Oliver Young on behalf GLHF.