So. It had to be done. Who has it and how far are you in it?

I've completed it a couple times. Starting on Master Mode. Can't freaking beat the trial of the sword. Weapon durability is the devil, but I do see where it is a necessary evil in a truly nonlinear game like this. Only other way to do it would be a la Skyrim, and have the loot leveled, which I'm thinking I would have probably preferred. Other than that, I love this game. So much fun. Right at 300 hours and still has tons of entertainment value. Still haven't maxed out all of my gear, and I'm usually not into that, but this game makes me want to.

Your thoughts?

I've NEVER ONCE played a game in which weapon durability was anything but completely game-ruining. Fallout 3, Dead Rising...countless others have seen great combat systems completely crippled by the inane idea of weapon durability. Nintendo claims they wanted to force players to try different approaches, but all they really do is force me to be too conservative to try different approaches. I don't think it's anywhere near necessary. I think it's a s*** design decision that's reflective of the flawed mindset of modern Nintendo. Rather than giving the player a big open world and trusting them to enjoy themselves in it, Nintendo treats us like we're misbehaving, idiotic dimits who can't figure out the "right way" to have fun. This is what's wrong with BoW (and the reason I stopped playing it long before I finished it) and it's also what's wrong with Mario Odyssey.

I really like a lot of the game. Having to never use the weapons I have on-hand that actually work is completely intolerable and really undermined most of the fun I might have had in a great game.

I don't really understand where this idea of gear "durability" comes from in games. It's not an issue in the real world. When was the last time ANYTHING "wore out" on you in the real world? Real swords don't just break after a couple dozen (or hundred, or thousand) swings (and I'm not talking museum replicas). Guns don't rapidly and progressively get less accurate and damaging with each fired round. Sure, weapons require maintenance. The thing about games is that they're abstractions. We don't tie our shoes, or adjust our belt or stop to take a piss or drink a glass of water periodically in games and nobody thinks twice about it. But spot an area of life that's truly tedious, and some game developer will decide it's necessary for "realism" and "immersion." It is implied through abstraction that swords need sharpening and guns need cleaning and bows need restringing and all that s***. But none of that is FUN. And none of that adds any value to a freaking fantasy game where a giant pig monster is fought through magic robot animals. I don't want to count arrows, I don't want to watch my durability, I don't want to stress about whether this is the right fight to be worthy of wearing out the awesome weapon I just found but don't dare use because it's just going to wear out anyway. I just want to play the f@#$ng game.

Weapon durability has long been very near the top of my "stupidest ideas in the entire history of gaming" list and I cannot believe it keeps cropping up just when it's least welcome.

GTA V is one of my favorite games ever. Why? Because it doesn't tease me with a big open world and a million things to do, but then tell me how I can do those things. It just LETS ME HAVE FUN.

See that?
Something's different about the Switch.
Look at how much of that content is first-party Nintendo.

I love this console. But it's not Zelda and Mario that are making me love it.

I sure hope Metroid Prime 4 is built to higher standards than BoW and Odyssey were.

Well let me ask you this: what is your favorite game? (also why does odyssey suck? My friends love it)

Not gonna lie. The second DLC to breath of the wild was lackluster. They hyped it up a lot, but all it was was a go here, do this type thing. And the reward was meh. The boss battle was pretty cool though.

Both DLCs are lame. However, the 2nd one did get me playing again. And the One-Hit Obliterator challenge taught me to be way better at combat, which carried back into the main game. The horse fast-travel teleporter should have been in the game from the start (makes horses far more useful).
Oh, and the new armors are fantastic. The Ganondorf one lets you play with some fun new tactics and the Midna and Phantom hats let you take some risks you might not have been able to pull off before.

Odyssey had SO MUCH potential. The stuff all the reviews rave about: the dense, small, detailed open-world levels, the replayability, the freeform goalsetting, the huge diversity in level content and design...it's all there.

However, Mario strangles itself by building a lot of its goals upon its platforming elements, and there's a disconnect there. The controls are not suited to the things you're expected to do with them. There are games that have superb controls that are difficult because of what you're asked to do, but when you fail, you know it's because you did it wrong.
There are also games with crappy controls that are difficult because of what you're ALLOWED to do, and when you fail, it's because the controls let you down and didn't do what you asked of them.
Mario is the latter. His movement is weird and numb and lacks feedback. His initial acceleration is VERY slow, then ramps up steeply, and there's a weird threshold in between where you can execute compound moves like crouch jumps, long-jumps, rolls, etc. But because everything's so sloppy and numb and slow and there's no feedback, it's hard to know when you've got the timing right. I've many times accidentally jumped off a cliff when trying to roll, or rolled off a cliff when trying to jump a gap because both use the same button combo but with VERY slightly different timing. The game is awful at intuiting which you want and that narrow margin of "not stopped, just started moving, but not full speed" where some of those moves live is so hard to find that it's often just trial and error.
And therein lies the rub: there's a LOT of Mario that's trial and error, but not in way of good modern challenging games. It's oldschool "you failed, try all over again" and it's discouraging. Having to start all the way from the beginning again if I fail makes me just want to rush through a segment, not slow down and explore and enjoy. This is what Mario and Zelda both have in common. Zelda outgrows it (fight a Lynel early on and you get one-shotted at the slightest mis-step; not exactly a teaching pattern--but fight one later and you can make mistakes and learn from them). But Mario doesn't. There are so many instadeath scenarios that any good game following rules taught by modern games would follow up with an insta-respawn right where you failed. Death as punishment is something videogames outgrew a long time ago. We've evolved to death as instruction: that didn't work, try a different way. But instead, Mario teaches: that didn't work and this other thing might not either, and neither is worth the cost of failure so just don't bother.
That's the big flaw. That's the thing that kept me from surfing the wave of awe that everyone else managed to catch abreast all those gorgeous levels and creatures.

Nintendo needs to learn an important lesson if they're going to remain relevant as a first-party dev and not just a purveyor of quirky console homes for Indies.
That lesson is that experimentation in games is only enjoyable when not punished. By definition, experimentation includes failure, so punishing failure is dangerous if you want to encourage experimentation. Modern game design has realized that failure is its own punishment when needed but, far more importantly, games don't need punishment to be challenging. They just need to be challenging. Building a tough puzzle is the challenge, and punishing the player for not getting it right the first time with excessive consequences undermines the value of that challenge in exchange for something artificial and unrewarding.

I've gotten pretty far in Odyssey (unlocked both secret levels, gotten nearly all the stars, etc.) but the remaining stuff is just tedious, so I won't be bothering with it. Boss challenge modes have never made sense to me (hey, more in common with BotW) and generally feel like lazy additions (Binding of Isaac's Boss Rush and Greed Modes are a rare exception where rehashed serial boss fights have been turned into a rewarding experience) and dying 50+% of the way through one is yet another of those punishing-in-the-wrong-way things.