The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild: 12 Critical Reactions You Need To Know

10. It's Technically Stunning, But Not Without Issues

"Breath of the Wild also has issues on the technical end. Its art style and character design are among the best I’ve seen in the series, but there’s no denying that the framerate takes a big hit from time to time. This is most evident in areas like dense forests and populated towns...That said, I never felt like it interfered with combat or platforming scenarios at any point." - Giant Bomb

"From a technical perspective, while Breath of the Wild is beautiful, playing the game docked on my TV often resulted in severe frame rate drops. It was never unplayable, but it was distracting...These problems never manifested while playing Breath of the Wild on the Switch undocked as a handheld." - Polygon

As some members of the press made clear in their reviews of the Switch hardware itself, Zelda performs better in handheld mode than TV mode, due to the former outputting at 720p while on your TV it goes up to 900p.

Frame drops have been reported consistently in TV mode, and though impressions of the Wii U version of the game are very limited, they appear to mostly replicate the frame rate hitches from the Switch counterpart.

The broad consensus is that it's frustrating, but in no way impacts the moment-to-moment gameplay, and didn't stop even many outlets who complained about it giving the game a 10/10 score regardless.