Superkenon

Can't promise this is entirely accurate, but Zelda's telepathic words about it seem to imply that's when the enemies respawn. Though I haven't checked to see for sure if camps remain unpopulated only until a blood moon.

I forget how big of a point they make of it, but those photos in your album are where you can find the memories. So far, most have either been fairly conspicuous locations, or an NPC from a town has said "hey, I've seen that place before. Go this way!"

Breath of the Wild is a game that very much seems to be what you make of it. I broke into Hyrule Castle early on just to see if I could, and I found that I was able to go surprisingly far before I decided "y'know, I don't actually want to beat this game yet." So I left, but not without a mountain of ridiculous equipment.

Which leads me to this suggestion: no matter how strong something is, you can kill it. It might be a struggle, you might need to take a few tries at it before you figure out what you need to do, but once you kill that strong enemy, you'll almost certainly be rewarded with a strong weapon (because most strong enemies wield appropriately strong weapons). And once you get one strong weapon, you'll be able to use it to more effortlessly take down other enemies of that tier and amass an arsenal. So if you're feeling weak, search out a moblin or something in an advanced area and see if you can juke his stuff. You'll be golden.

But maybe avoid the centaurs. Those guys are fucked.

If it's less a problem of weapons and more a problem of wanting to feel beefier, then yeah, hunting down Shrines will help. But moreover, armor will help. The village Hateno (in the eastmost region, if you haven't been there yet) has an armor shop that can hook you up pretty good and make you hella more survivable. There's a great fairy in the woods right outside Kakariko that can upgrade any armor substantially too, and I've found I'm almost never lacking the materials she needs so far.

I'm not terribly far in the game yet myself, but those are my simple tips so far.

The "a lot of people agree with me" argument is weird when you've already gone out of your way to dismiss the opinions of the people who disagree with you (reducing them to sheep, or fanboys as you put it), even calling favorable impressions "completely wrong." I totally respect your opinion, way fair to not enjoy this game, but you gotta know them's fightin' words when you essentially walk into the room and shout "YOU'RE ALL WRONG FOR HAVING FUN."

I wasn't sure how I'd feel about it at first, but I've come to enjoy the "flow" that comes from constantly having your arsenal change. I think it goes a long way to keep the combat from growing stale, like it would if you could just pick your favorite weapon and use nothing but that. With an ever-changing set of equipment, the way you approach combat situations keeps changing from one to the next. I've clocked a lot of hours into the game and I've felt like every skirmish I've gotten myself into has been drastically different from the last.

In that way, I think this game avoids the problems that other big open world games, like Skyrim, suffer, where at some point you reach a point (or perhaps even reach this point early on) where you hit upon your optimal/favorite strategy and then never have to think about combat again.

You definitely have to learn to "let go" though -- kinda goes against my typical gamer instincts, because yeah, when I find a shiny weapon the last thing I want is to lose it. But I quickly found out that there's just so much cool shit in this game, that it tends to work out that I find new awesome weapons by the time my last ones break. There's a good momentum to it, too. If you happen to find yourself against really hard enemies with nothing but cruddy weapons to your name, all it takes is struggling against one enemy, who will almost certainly drop an awesome weapon, and suddenly you're back up to speed and use that weapon to crush a bunch of other enemies. And bam, you're chock-full of sweet-ass weapons again.

I like the neon because I like fun.

But it's practical besides. At-a-glance indistinguishably between left and right! Colors that will never be mistaken within one's morass of gray electronics! They will light your way in the darkness!

I have to imagine the Wii U version will run fine in most instances, while normal stuff's going on. The game was largely developed for that console after all. If it suffers from framerate dips, it's probably when there's lots of stuff going on (like lots of enemies on screen or what-have-you).

Seeing as how the Switch suffers from this too, it won't be any surprise that the Wii U does as well -- I just hope it isn't egregious.

Things didn't quite line up for me to get a Switch, so I pre-ordered Zelda for the Wii U. I'm puuumped. Definitely tempering my expectations as far as performance goes, but hopefully it's fine beyond some framerate dips.

This is going down a dark path

What have you done, Jeff

You'll only perpetuate and endless cycle of hat-eating!!

THERE WILL BE NO HATS LEFT IN THE END

Actually, I guess it's not endless then. Never mind.

My parents were originally a little wary of the whole video games thing back in the day, hesitant even to have a NES in the house. (And considering a lot of the reaaal cringey portrayals of how "COOL AND EXTREME GAMES ARE!!" back then, I almost can't blame them) But they were open-minded, and quickly saw that the vidja games didn't turn us siblings into slack-jawed idiots.

Over the years my parents inevitably played games with us, both in passing and occasionally getting more into certain ones. Today my mom has a 3DS almost solely to play Animal Crossing on. She also has a soft spot for the 3D Mario games, having played all of them since Super Mario 64 at this point.

My dad's been a bit more prevalent in this sphere. Has played a lot of the Mario Kart series, a handful of Zelda games (I think Wind Waker was his first), a couple of Fire Emblems, Civilization (mostly II and III), Resident Evil 4 and 5, Mass Effect, Skyrim, and more. Definitely some common themes there, but it's also a bit all over the place. I can never guess which games'll grab him.