When comparing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild vs Mario Tennis Aces, the Slant community recommends The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for most people. In the question“What are the best single-player games for the Nintendo Switch?” The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is ranked 1st while Mario Tennis Aces is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is:
Most open world games follow the same pattern - they give you a map that's full of blips, forcefully guiding you to marked locations, causing you to ignore everything along the way. Breath of the Wild steps away from this design choice by having a map where only you can mark points of interest. It's up to you to survey the land from high vantage points, choose a direction of heading, and find interesting locations. As a result, exploring and paying attention to the world actually matters, making it a really enjoyable and refreshing experience.
Specs
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Pros
Pro An open world game where exploration feels exciting
Most open world games follow the same pattern - they give you a map that's full of blips, forcefully guiding you to marked locations, causing you to ignore everything along the way. Breath of the Wild steps away from this design choice by having a map where only you can mark points of interest. It's up to you to survey the land from high vantage points, choose a direction of heading, and find interesting locations. As a result, exploring and paying attention to the world actually matters, making it a really enjoyable and refreshing experience.
Pro An engaging cooking skill
Breath of the Wild features a very interesting cooking skill, allowing you to combine up to 5 different ingredients to create useful dishes or elixirs that can aid you on your journey.
While the cooking process itself is really simple, only requiring you to light a fire and use a pot, experimentation is what makes it truly interesting. There is no in-game recipe log to give you hints, so most of the time you're experimenting with ingredient combinations, which can make finding a good recipe feel like winning the lottery. Some guesswork is eliminated because most areas are saturated with ingredients that can be used to create dishes useful to that specific area.
For example, the cold area has ingredients that can be used to create dishes that boost your resistance to cold, so your character won't be shivering and dragging his feet as you explore.
Because most of the dishes you make are useful, it can also motivate you to explore just a bit more, since there might just be a useful ingredient on top of that next mountain.
As a result, Breath of the Wild has a surprisingly engaging cooking skill that blends well into the core of the game, making the experience more fun as a whole.
Pro Wonderfully crafted puzzles
There's a vast array of puzzles found in Breath of the Wild where you use your abilities to move, manipulate or destroy the environment. It can be very simple like destroying rocks with a bomb to unblock a cave entrance. Or it can be fairly complex, requiring you to rotate and connect massive platforms, move stone orbs through an area filled with obstacles, and create pillars of ice on a waterfall to cross a bottomless pit. Regardless of the type of puzzle you encounter, they motivate you to think creatively, making it a delight when you arrive at the solution, especially because there's always a treasure waiting at the end.
Pro A variety of fighting methods keep the combat fun
There are many ways you can fight the monsters in Breath of the Wild.
You can go for close combat, using swords, spears, clubs and many other weapons, besting your goblin-like enemies with well-timed parries, dodges, slashes, and strikes.
Or you can fight enemies from afar by shooting your bow, throwing your boomerang, or lobbing an infinite supply of bombs while maintaining the distance as the monsters try to helplessly get near you.
You can even be stealthy, sneaking up on unsuspecting lizard-folk and stabbing them from behind.
If none of the above works, you can also use the environment to your advantage. This usually involves things like pushing boulders off cliff edges, dropping them on top of oblivious casualties.
All of these provide a great amount of variety that keeps the combat from going stale for the whole playthrough.
Pro Couch co-op with a friend is tons of fun
Playing with a friend right beside you makes the game much more enjoyable. Reacting to each other in real-time is just better than playing against a computer opponent. There's no online co-op -- only multiplayer matches against random people -- meaning you'll have to be in the same room together to play.
Pro Solid roster of Nintendo characters to play as
There's a good variety of characters you can play as. If you're familiar with first party Nintendo games, then you'll see a lot of familiar faces here, like Yoshi, Bowser, Donkey Kong, Luigi, Peach, and of course Mario. Everyone has their own playing styles, with bigger characters like Bowser and Donkey Kong favoring hard-hitting power shots, and others like Yoshi and Mario that have a more balanced approach. You can go with whichever style or character you prefer, practicing with them until you master everything. Getting to see all of these characters together in one game is great for fanservice as well.
Pro You can compete against others online in multiplayer
When you run out of single-player content to enjoy, you can hop online to play against random opponents. The main game mode is the tournaments you can play, which rewards you with special characters if you score well. Online connectivity is good too, especially with the choice to drop out of matches beforehand against players who have bad connections. Playing online is a really great way to test your skills and improve your play, since anyone you get matched with is an actual player who has their own strengths and weaknesses.
Pro Intense and engaging tennis matches
Mario Tennis Aces is incredibly addicting to play. Matches are fast-paced and exciting, with one particular mechanic that keeps things unpredictable. Every time you successfully hit the tennis ball to your opponent's end of the court, you build up a power meter that you can use in a couple of different ways.
When you want to quickly finish off a match, you can slow down time and take aim at a vulnerable corner of your opponent's court for an instant win. Or, if they try to do that to you, you can instead expend some of your power meter to quickly reach the ball and hit it back. Things can get pretty tricky when you both use up your power meters at the same time, leading to some satisfying wins.
Cons
Con Cooking can feel inconvenient
There's no in-game log or cookbook to record cooking recipes you discover. The only method of checking a recipe is by examining a cooked item in your inventory, which isn't very reliable since you can only check it as long as you have the item. As a result, you have to memorize and/or write down any and all cooking recipes you discover, which can feel cumbersome to some players.
Con Weapon durability system can feel tedious to some
When you attack enemies, your equipped weapon quickly loses its durability, breaking when it reaches zero. This can force you to switch to new weapons multiple times during a battle, adding a micromanagement aspect that can disrupt the flow of combat. You're not just fighting enemies, you're also fighting the flimsiness of your arsenal.
On top of that, most weapons can't be repaired either. This can diminish the joy of finding new weapons, since that cool sword you just found will be gone thirty minutes of gameplay later.
Con Very wide skill gap between experienced and inexperienced players
Mario Tennis Aces can be unwelcoming to new players. While playing co-op or online, it's tough to catch up with everyone else who knows how to time their power shots with the meter. If you don't pick up on this mechanic fairly quickly, you may feel like you're getting left behind. You don't necessarily have to use the mechanic if you and a friend agree not to, but this sadly makes matches pretty dull. Running against computer opponents is a good way to get your feet wet before moving up to other levels of play.
Con Limited gameplay options for solo players
If you're the type who prefers to game alone, then Mario Tennis Aces might not be for you. There's only one single-player mode, while the rest of the game is mostly dedicated to co-op and online play. The solo mode is also extremely short, clocking in at around four hours. Aside from that, there really isn't much else for you to do.
Con Certain characters are locked behind online tournaments
The primary way to unlock new characters is to win tournaments, but this isn't entirely fair. They're only available for a limited amount of time, with the rewards changing from tournament to tournament. Even though some of these characters are in the actual game as opponents in the single-player adventure mode, you can't get access to them unless you unlock them through these tournaments. If you don't like playing online, or if you don't have the means to pay for Nintendo's online service once it's implemented later on in 2018, then you're basically out of luck.
Con Single-player adventure mode is pretty difficult
The game's adventure mode makes up for its short length with some real difficulty. It's a rough introduction to the gameplay, as some of the matches and bosses are really hard. There's plenty of variety to things, like courts that have certain hazards in your way and uneven terrain such as tall grass, as well as inventive boss designs like a giant squid that shoots out tennis ball-shaped blobs of ink. But all of these things can get quite overwhelming, especially if you're using the single-player mode to get better at the game.