One of Breath of the Wild's most modest features is also one of its best
Breath of the Wild, which I'm finally starting to properly play at the moment, is a game that's filled with clever ideas and neat little bits of business. But as I zero in on my first 20 hours, one of the things that's standing out as being particularly ingenious is the manner in which you mark things down on the map screen. Breath of the Wild's pins are properly brilliant.
This is not the first Zelda game in which you can mess about with the map in interesting ways. I think I remember scribbling notes on the map with a stylus in one of the DS games. That was great, of course, but the stylus was not an enormously precise beast, and, coupled with my poor penmanship, the maps looked so ugly covered in my stupid notes that I generally wiped them off in shame as soon as I could. Breath of the Wild's solution is much simpler. You have five pins, each one a different colour, that you can sink into the map in points of interest. Then, when you're in first person mode and looking about, the pins will show up as huge shafts of colour right there in the landscape itself.
The magic here, I am increasingly inclined to think, is that there are only five pins. After you've used them up you can resort to stamps, of course, but stamps are not as colourful or as useful as pins - they do not show up in first-person mode, as far as I can tell. You can use up to 100 of them, and they strike me as being best used for spots that you come back to regularly: here is where I can cash in the orbs I get from shrines, for example, or here is a good spot for horses.
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