YMMV / Horizon Zero Dawn

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Ted Faro's motivation for deleting APOLLO. Did he really believe he was doing the best thing for the reborn human race by erasing every trace of humanity's accumulated knowledge and that such information is what laid the groundwork for humanity's self-destruction, or was he a self-absorbed Dirty Coward who was merely using a convenient excuse to remove any chance of being remembered as the man responsible for ending all organic life on the planet? Was he suffering from a case of Never My Fault and had convinced himself that it wasn't his fault that the world was ending, but rather the knowledge that allowed him to do it in the first place, or did he truly hit the Despair Event Horizon and broke down from the weight of the guilt he felt for being responsible for the mess that destroyed civilization and doomed his species? Or even a mixture of all of these?
  • On a lesser extent, Ted and Elisabet's relationship can also be subjected to this. Were they simply friends and colleagues who had a falling out over opposing philosophies, or was there something more going on before it all went south?
  • Whether Sylens' cynical worldview is justifiable or not. He believes that humanity is a feeble thing, as proven repeatedly in and out of main quests, and only through mutual gain and the chase of absolute truth do we better ourselves. While his actions helped shed light on the misunderstandings the new generation has regarding the Old Ones, Sylens' history with HADES, what he did to the Banuk and Aloy's opinion of him seem to suggest that he isn't as good as he thinks he is.
  • Elisabet Sobeck's Heroic Sacrifice — did she refuse to re-enter the bunker purely out of a desire to protect her friends from harm, or was she so disgusted by the atrocities she committed in the name of the Zero Dawn project that she decided she had no right to live? Remember, the project involved abductions, forced euthanasia, a form of enslavement (with benefits, mind you, but still), and using all of humanity as a shield to protect the project, while lying to them about its true purpose. In spite of — perhaps, because of — her level of love for her fellow humans, Elisabet believed that her actions were too terrible to redeem herself from, necessary or not.
  • Given the context of the overall Operation: Enduring Victory, exactly how heroic were the staff of the Zero Dawn project? While their work was undeniably important in continuing the human race, the Alpha's themselves were the people chosen to ride out the apocalypse in heavily defended bunkers while the rest of humanity were sent as cannon fodder into disturbingly literal meat grinders. And that's before considering that some Alphas had a personal stake in that project, such as Samina Ebadji calling her work on APOLLO a "lifelong dream." In particular, Elisabet's Heroic Sacrifice comes off as less heroic when you consider that she was only doing what most of humanity had already done, give her life for Zero Dawn. Instead, the Alphas who weren't willing to pay the same price as everyone else seem cowardly.
    • There is a lot of Moral Ambiguity in the whole premise of the plan. Is it more or less cruel to lie to everyone left alive on Earth that Zero Dawn is a superweapon that will solve everything? You can explain to the staff that you're creating a new human race that won't have to deal with any of this but how is that a comfort to the scientists and workers who are going to lose everything? The prevailing argument appears to be "ignorance is bliss"
  • How good is Avad exactly as Sun King, and what exactly are we to make of the Carja Sundom and Aloy's uncritical support of it? At the end of the day her actions as "Seeker" end up cementing, reinforcing, and strengthening the hegemony of the Carja Empire, and while it does seem more positive as a force compared to the Carja-in-Shadow, the Oseram, and more accepting of outsiders than the Nora, as well as open to collaboration and cooperation (Meridan was built with the Oseram's help), it's still an Empire and an imperial force, and Avad for all his humble Modest Royalty affect, does seek to ensure their dominion. Whether the tribes have enough grasp of political theory to even conceptualize something like a hegemony or imperialism is also an open question.
  • Dod Blevins from the DLC installed unmanned drones in a national park to be used as a defense against terrorists. Was he genuinly concerned about that, which may have been justified by the extreme terrorism we know was occurring around the time of the Clawback decade, or did he have a huge messiah complex and was hoping he'd get the chance to heroically save Firebreak from terrorists, and let that power fantasy cloud his judgement of the real world?
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Redmaw is hyped up as an especially dangerous Thunderjaw that has survived countless hunters gunning for it. In practice, it's actually slightly weaker than a standard one since it's already missing quite a bit of its armor and one of its disc launchers. It does have more health, but this is a triviality to anyone capable of killing a normal Thunderjaw.
  • While the Final Boss isn't easy per se, it is a bit of a drag that it's just a souped-up Deathbringer, empowered with Corruption and equipped with bigger and more numerous guns. The ten-minute timer is pretty generous and the occasional minions HADES summons are more of a problem than it is by itself.
• Award Snub: Suffered this fate during The Game Awards 2017. To be fair that year was very competitive in terms of game quality, (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Cuphead, Super Mario Odyssey, etc.) but the fact that the game was nominated for numerous categories and didn't win a single one is a shocker.
• Awesome Music: Many songs on the OST count, but these, in particular, stand out.
  • The theme which plays over the menu screen is one of the most calming, uplifting pieces of music you will ever hear.
  • The Prologue, which sets the tone perfectly for the rest of the game, seamlessly weaving between melancholy and optimism, down-to-earth and epic.
  • Aloy's Theme, which perfectly captures the scope of her emotional journey.
  • The Bad News and The Good News. The former is a somber tune that perfectly captures the tearjerking Player Punch of the scene it plays over, the latter is a Triumphant Reprise the encapsulates the ambition of Elisabet Sobeck's plan to save the world.
  • The Calvary Breaks Through which starts with expressing the shock of Aloy taking down Helis's corrupted Behemoth and transitions halfway through to Sylens's Big Damn Heroes.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The way in which you deal with the Machines effectively turns the entire game into this. While some like the Thunderjaw or especially the Stormbird can be downright difficult at first, once you have the proper gear and are levels above these machines you'll quickly be swimming in Shards and other resources before you even realize it.
  • In particular, taking down your first Thunderjaw. Considering how Guerrilla intended on making the Thunderjaw one of the most memorable enemy encounters in the game (it's even on the cover of the game, mind you), it's more than worth it as it puts up a really good fight for equally good rewards.
  • Using the Tearblast arrows or Tearblaster to strip a Machine of its mounted weapon and then using it against them? Yes, please.
• Common Knowledge: Despite the game being widely known as "The one about robot dinosaurs", the vast majority of the machines are just giant versions of modern animals. Of the 24 species of wild machines, exactly four are based on dinosaurs (the Watcher, the Tallneck, the Thunderjaw, and the Bellowback), putting them squarely in the minority.
• Complete Monster:
  • Theodor "Ted" Faro, the world's first trillionaire, deliberately inflamed tensions between his clients to sell his war machines. A short-sighted, petty fool whose robotic "Faro Plague" caused the annihilation of mankind, Ted began to fret how the world would view him in its new incarnation. To this end, he erases APOLLO, the repository of knowledge, and murders the other leading members of Zero Dawn before they can intervene. Filling his bunkers' survivors with kill switches, Ted murdered them for petty reasons, bemoaning only what they made him do until he was left alone, waiting for the day he hoped he would emerge as a god for the reborn mankind. A selfish megalomaniac, Ted condemned humanity to suffer for centuries all so he wouldn’t go down as the man who destroyed the world.
  • The Lucent Bahavas, the great priest of the Shadow Carja and Eclipse, is the partner of Helis who gave sanction to Sun King Jiran's monstrous Red Raids and sanctions Human Sacrifice along with Helis. After fleeing with the Shadow Carja, Bahavas uses the young prince Itamen as a puppet, "purging" the weak with poison, including the old, infirm, and the young, to start a war with the Carja under King Ahad. When an officer named Uthid learned the truth, Bahavas had his men killed and attempts to have Uthid hunted down and "silenced" forever.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Many of the machine enemies are forces to be reckoned with, but the Frostclaws and Fireclaws from the Frozen Wilds DLC are just ridiculous. They're immune to any effects other than fire and freeze respectively (and even then said effects take several minutes to inflict and cause barely any additional damage), can swipe at Aloy to cause massive physical damage up to a half-dozen times in a row (which might just kill her outright, given the game lacks Mercy Invincibility), and have more health than any non-boss enemy in the game. Oh, and for good measure, the Ropecaster and Tearblaster, the two most effective ways of quickly bringing down larger machines in previous missions, are basically useless. Add all this to the fact that the DLC loves throwing three or four of them at you at once at the end of long missions where you're likely to be low on supplies, and you might well find yourself in the position of either having to reduce the game to minimum difficulty in order to proceed, or trying again from an earlier save.
  • Scorchers come in a close second. Mix the arsenal of a Longleg with the size and mounted gun of a Ravager, then throw in the aggressiveness of a Scrapper for good measure. They attack constantly with fire attacks, can rocket across the battlefield to tackle you, and can lay down a minefield in seconds. Fighting just one is a slog because of how tough they are. Fighting two or more is close to insanity.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Rost, Erend, Petra, Sylens, Nil, Vanasha and Travis Tate have been particularly popular with the fans.
  • Gildun in The Frozen Wilds thanks to being goofy crackpot who's involved in a pretty in-depth side quest.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Until any sequels or other DLCs come out, many speculate just what became of GAIA's other subroutines (MINERVA, AETHER, POSEIDON, DEMETER, ARTEMIS, ELEUTHIA, APOLLO if it still exists to some capacity) after she severed her connection to them. If something as harmless as a manufacturing A.I. like HEPHAESTUS could turn into a Crapshoot A.I. that could be a potentially bigger threat than HADES - an A.I. literally designed to be an Omnicidal Maniac - just imagine what the rest are like!
  • The humans (who were never really allowed to grow up or learn due to APOLLO's mysterious absence) went from living in a closed environment and raised by low-grade AI to being thrust into a harsh world of machine lifeforms, treacherous terrains and the ruins of their ancestors like zoo animals sent out to fend for themselves in the wild. Lots of stories can be written to just how they learned to survive and just what everything looked like through their limited view of the world.
  • The game is set primarily in the general West of the US territories. What is it like in Europe or Asia or Africa? Is GAIA's influence operational there or it all just lifeless rock? What are the humans like? What forms do the machines take?
  • With the imagination that comes from the introduction of the likes of ELEUTHIA being All-Mother, HADES being "the Buried Shadow" and CYAN being a spirit (and the ways that the A.I. can evolve and influence the world in its current state), it is very likely that this can apply to the spiritual beliefs of all of the tribes. Could the Carja's worship of the sun be the worship of the allegedly-destroyed APOLLO? CYAN is just a spirit to the Banuk, so what is their idea of "the Blue Light" that they worship? Is that just how they conceptualise electricity or is that an A.I. too?
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Ropecaster, particularly with a couple of handling mods. Using it trivializes larger machines like Thunderjaws, drags Stormbirds to the ground where they're not nearly as deadly, and robs Stalkers of their famed mobility. Better still, a bound machine can be hit with the Critical Strike skill twice before breaking free. It's such a useful tool that, in response, the Frost and Fireclaws in the DLC can specifically stop and brush off tie ropes if not bound to immobility very quickly, making Ropecaster use that much harder.
  • The Tearblaster is a short-range version of the Tearblast Arrows, but far more effective at its job. One blast, as long as you're close enough, instantly knocks off any detachable armor/components in its area of effect, regardless of difficulty setting. If you're willing to risk a bit of close combat, you can very quickly tear the weapons and armor off the larger non-boss machines (along with a good chunk of their health), leaving them with just physical attacks. Equip some armor with strong melee defence and dodge effectively, and you can turn theoretically difficult fights into a cakewalk. Best of all, it's incredibly cheap to operate, costing a single Echo Shell and Metal Vessel per ammo pack, compared to four Echo Shells for the Tearblast Arrows. It's telling that it's the only weapon in the game that can't be modified and never gets an upgraded version.
  • If you need a weapon that trivializes most endgame encounters, you can't go wrong with the Shadow/Lodge Blast Sling. Not only does it become absurdly powerful with Damage Coils, but its ease of use and versatile ammo types (ranging from the standard Blast Bomb, to the self-explanatory Sticky Bomb, and finally the Proximity Bomb) lends itself to being the go-to for any player that has reached the game's level Cap. While the ammo isn't precisely cheap to craft, it's relatively easy to farm (Metal Vessels and Blaze, which are readily available on mid-tier machines like Bellowbacks or Shellwalkers), making it a staple in any encounter. Its only drawback is that it doesn't get a damage bonus against weakpoints like bows do, but its ease of use and consistent damage more than compensate for that.
  • The Shield Weaver, the best armor in the game. It requires a lengthy side quest that spans practically the entire main quest to get, but it is by far the best and it doesn't even have weave slots. It generates a personal shield that, even on the highest difficulty, is guaranteed to nullify at least one solid hit. The shield regenerates when damaged, so all you have to do is run away for a bit and then go back to fighting, making combat much easier. In fact, the Shield Weaver is so good that the Frozen Wilds DLC adds an entire gameplay mechanic around shutting it down in certain areas.
  • The Frozen Wilds DLC adds Banuk versions of the Hunter Bow, Sharpshot Bow and War Bow. While these weapons are statistically similar to their Shadow/Lodge counterparts, they have a unique mechanic which allows the player to draw the bowstring longer for a charged shot. If shot prior to being fully drawn, they do slightly less damage than an equivalent bow. A fully-charged arrow, on the other hand, does nearly double the damage. This even applies to elemental effects (but not tearblast arrows). This charge mechanic changes the ability to nock additional arrows from Awesome, but Impractical into outright Game-Breaker, as three fully charged Hardpoint or Precision Arrows will put a big hurt on just about everything.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Or Basic Genetics Knowledge Bonus. One can guess Aloy's secret when you realize that having DNA nearly 100% the same as another person is too much to be their biological child.
  • HEPHAESTUS being called a Daemon comes from CYAN casually referring to it as a "malware Daemon". In programming, a "daemon" (always spelled with an "ae") is a constantly running program which is not under the direct control of a user.
  • Aloy's tribe is called the Nora, and their most sacred site is the bunker beneath the All-Mother Mountain, which according to the coordinates displayed at one point is clearly meant to be the Cheyenne Mountain Complex housing the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Glinthawks. They fly, they move erratically, they have a large detection range, they can easily spot Aloy when she's hidden by flying over her, they shoot frost blasts at you that not only cause damage but knock Aloy around which causes you to drop out of aim view, and they always come in packs of at least three. While they're not too difficult to kill and are exceptionally vulnerable to fire, prepare to waste some healing items and your valuable arrows trying to hit them before the pack is dead. Not to mention: whenever a village is under attack by machines and you are asked to help, it's usually at least a dozen Glinthawks. Oh joy...
  • The Longlegs. On their own, they're mid-level threats at best—but they have a frustrating habit of hanging around the truly dangerous machines (Stormbirds, Thunderjaws, Behemoths, etc.) and harassing Aloy during battles where a moment's distraction can lead to instant death. As if that weren't enough, they can take Aloy by surprise by jumping long distances, and they have a sonic attack that can temporarily leave her unable to fight. They're even irritating in death: destroying a Longleg's "concussion sac" (one of their primary weak points) causes an explosion powerful enough to send Aloy flying through the air, and it can leave her stunned long enough to get curb-stomped by a more formidable machine.
• Goddamned Boss: Dervahl isn't very hard to kill, being a human enemy, but the one advantage he has that all others don't is a tearblaster. It's all too easy to get stunlocked to death by a weapon that basically can't miss on the cramped pathways you fight him on.
• He's Just Hiding: A natural side effect of Never Found the Body.
  • A significant part of the fandom hopes that Rost is still alive somehow, as his body is never shown (it's stated there was not much left), and he promised that he'd go somewhere that Aloy couldn't find him.
  • In more the fashion of a Sequel Hook, Ted Faro. The man who was directly responsible for the end of civilization with his self-replicating, biomass-consuming and unhackable killer robot soldiers and whose deletion of the information within APOLLO forced the reborn humans to start over from scratch had his own bunker (with the oh-so-megalomaniacal name of "Thebes") and wasn't seen dead in the final record of GAIA Prime, and Sylens mentions the possibility of cryogenics when questioned if any of the Old Ones might still be alive (right after seeing Ted's image for the first time no less, setting up some possible foreshadowing). A significant percentage of the fandom insists that he must be alive, if only so Aloy can do to him what she did to Helis, or, to a much smaller subset, find redemption.
  • Similar to the above, there is a sizable portion of fans who believe the Far Zenith/Odyssey crew is still alive and actually may be behind the glitch that caused the Faro Plague and/or the signal that awakened HADES.
  • When it is revealed what became of the Alpha Team, Ted Faro claims he deleted APOLLO to destroy all of the knowledge he was tasked with preserving. Earlier however, GAIA's dying video message that Aloy finds shows a visual representation of her connection to all of the A.I. programs, including the symbol for APOLLO. It is established that Aloy was created right as HADES became independent and the Derangement started, meaning that APOLLO (while maybe not necessarily intact) still exists to some capacity, meaning that all of the knowledge he held (and GAIA's potential revival be requiring him) can be recovered. Indeed: the actual encoded information to be taught by APOLLO is cryo-stored fossilized DNA what may have been deleted was basically the code reader and interface.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Just two years later, JB Blanc would voice another lovable father figure to a young red-haired hero who dies early in the game.
  • Hannah Hoekstra, the face model for Aloy, would once again square off against a villainous ursine in Cocaine Bear... playing the opening victim Elsa. Cue the jokes about how the "Powderclaw" finally succeeded where the Frostclaw and Fireclaw failed.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Aloy is shipped with Teb, Vala, Varl, Erend, Talanah, Vanasha, Petra, Nil, Avad, Sylens, with Ikrie from the DLC... so on and so forth. It's helped along by the sheer number of people that flirt with her, be it subtly or not, during her journey.
• Les Yay: Aside from the women flirting with Aloy listed under Launcher of a Thousand Ships (which now reads more like legitimate Ship Tease than Les Yay, Shelly and Laura (aka Concrete Beach Party) who wrote a series of datalogs in the DLC are, shall we say, very close. Their datalogs are written in their final weeks at work after being replaced by Faro servitors, and consists almost entirely of them talking about how much they consider each other family, venting their frustrations to each other, forming a band, etc.
• LGBT Fanbase: As you can see above, a lot of people flirt with Aloy, and LGBT fans haven't failed to notice that includes a lot of women flirting with Aloy. Further though, some like to read Aloy consistently turning down all of said flirting as her being asexual instead of, or in addition to, being more focused on her journey. This following would only increase by tenfold come Forbidden West's DLC expansion, Burning Shores, which has Aloy develop romantic feelings for her female ally Seyka, which could culminate in a Big Damn Kiss between the two in the ending if the option was chosen by the player.
• Magnificent Bastard: The brilliant, manipulative Sylens discovered the rogue AI HADES, repairing it and assisting it in exchange for HADES' knowledge on the Old World, even helping to form the Cult of the Eclipse. Growing wary of the increasingly vicious HADES, Sylens revealed he had not been foolish enough to ever trust the AI and managed to escape. Upon later making contact with the young scavenger Aloy, Sylens feeds her information while leading into her fighting Eclipse and HADES, leading to her eliminating Sylens' enemies for him, eventually even saving Aloy before she can be executed by the ruthless Eclipse leader Helis. Guiding Aloy to HADES' defeat, Sylens ends the game by trapping HADES' essence, intending on taking all of HADES' secrets for himself.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Fuck Ted Faro" is the default response of everyone once they learn just how badly he screwed over the old world with his machines and then destroyed APOLLO, depriving the new generation of humans of all their forebearers' knowledge.
  • This line of dialogue from Kung Fury has been memetically used to describe the plot of the game:
    "What time is this?"
    "It's the viking age."
    "That explains the laser raptors."
• Memetic Psychopath: Because of an audio log in which Elisabet Sobeck recounts how she accidentally set a tree on fire as a child, some fans have jokingly taken this to mean Sobeck is a pyromaniac and arsonist who can't be left alone for five minutes without setting something on fire.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Ted Faro causing the extinction of all life on Earth via the Faro Plague was due to profound Genre Blindness and idiocy rather than malice. However purging APOLLO, destroying most human knowledge with it, and killing the Alpha team members on Project: Zero Dawn to keep future generations from finding out that he was the one who destroyed the old world shows that he was a monstrous person regardless.
  • While the death of Dervahl's family is tragic and his hatred for the Carja for the Red Raids committed under the Mad Sun King is understandable, the gleeful way he embraces being a murderous, genocidal lunatic who is willing to torture Ersa to death just for rejecting his advances puts him well past the point of no return. The real kicker is that the reason he does all this is because Avad and Ersa were the ones who killed the Mad Sun-King and he didn't. Talk about petty.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The tubular spark-fizzle sound when hitting a vulnerable spot.
  • The electrical squeal of a damaged power cell on a machine right before it explodes when you peg it with a shock arrow.
  • The glorious swashbuckling swoosh when Aloy rappels down a ledge like a boss.
• Narm:
  • This scene has been hailed as hilariously So Bad, It's Good for Brom's voice actor's astonishingly stilted and bizarre performance, which has been compared to that of Goldman's "Loyfe cycle" or Johnny's "I did not hit her" scenes.
  • HADES' reaction to the fact that Aloy remained alive expressed such an overkill amount of rage, that for some it was rather funny than scary.
  • Aloy speaking at Rost's gravesite. The writing and voice acting are good. The problem is the camera. For some reason the entire scene of Aloy talking by herself for several minutes is only shown from behind her. On top of that, the camera keeps cutting to slightly different angles and levels of zoom of the exact same scene, which completely ruins the mood of the scene.
• Narm Charm: The opening cinematic where Rost stands at a cliff to lift baby Aloy into the sky and declare her name can result in some chuckles with its The Lion King (1994)-vibe, but it doesn't detract from how beautiful and emotional of a scene it is.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Ted Faro seems to embody not a particular person but an archetypical "self-made billionaire genius Tech Bro." The fact that in 2022 so many real-world tech bros have been revealed to be incompetent buffoons or outright fraudsters at best makes it pretty easy to pick someone and go, "oh, Ted Faro was based off that guy." However, he's just distinct enough from Real Life people that it's hard to pin him on a particular person. It also helps that Horizon: Zero Dawn was released in 2017, before all this really blew up.
• Player Punch:
  • The player might be anticipating it since he's practically a walking, talking death flag parade, but the death of Rost is still a gut punch after seeing how heartwarming the relationship between him and Aloy is.
  • What almost no player will expect is the extent of the robot apocalypse: total. Class 6 Apocalypse. Every living thing Aloy sees is the result of a desperate project to re-terraform the Earth after the world was reduced to a lifeless, toxic rock.
  • On a related note, while we knew from the beginning that the Old Ones' technology and culture have been lost, in the way you might expect of a Future Primitive After the End setting, learning that it wasn't just lost to time, it was deliberately erased by one man, despite many people having worked impossibly hard to preserve that culture so future humans could rebuild. And he may have done it just to cover up the fact that he was largely responsible for the plague that destroyed the Earth.
• Presumed Flop: The series as a whole has developed a reputation for being constantly overshadowed by hotly anticipated rival fantasy adventure games, Zero Dawn by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Forbidden West by Elden Ring. By any standard that doesn't involve comparisons to Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring, however, they have still been massively successful games, with both even outselling their rivals in terms of initial sales in the UK. Zero Dawn in particular was the best-selling new IP on the PlayStation 4 at the time of release, and as of 2022 has managed to move over 20 million copies worldwide.
• Retroactive Recognition: Yes, that is none other than Lady Danbury as Varl and Vala's mother Sona.
• Robo Ship: Going by fanfic and Tumblr blogs, Elisabet/GAIA is one of the most popular pairings in the fandom.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Inventory upgrades. Taking a page from Far Cry, you must hunt wildlife for their bones and hides to upgrade the carry-weight of your satchels. Thing is, animals are the only source of said materials (aside from treasure boxes, rarely) and they're not guaranteed to spawn on the corpse. Another problem is that there are (including the DLC) sixteen satchels to upgrade, each with four tiers. This leads to lot of redundancy like each bow type having their own separate quiver, and being able to carry nearly three-dozen outfits when there is only half that amount in the game.
  • Tutorial quests. On paper, almost all of them are pretty simple tasks to attack/kill enemies with different ammo types. The main problem is that, unlike every other quest in the game, they have to be marked as the active quest in order for any requisite actions to count towards progress. So no matter how many times you trip a machine or shoot off their plates, the quest won't complete unless you go out of your way to set it as active before actually accomplishing the tasks, which you'll usually end up doing while in the middle of another more important quest.
  • All enemies attack on sight. While this makes sense from a story perspective, it can make exploring for collectables a pain since enemies are more time consuming and difficult to take down in this game than in most games. Just running past them is a dicey proposition, especially for machines that can fly or have ranged attacks. There's a stealth armor that alleviates this considerably, but it takes a while to get.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Although not strictly a sequel, The Frozen Wilds was the last part of the HZD 'verse to be released and is significantly more difficult than anything in the base game. Its introduction quest already has a level recommendation on par with the very final main story quest, and it only gets worse from there.
• She Really Can Act: Ashly Burch was already a brilliant voice actress, but her performance of Aloy, from her mature, natural voice and great range of emotions playing as her, it's nothing short of amazing. On top of this, Burch also plays Elizabet Sobek, an older and genetically identical individual who is her own distinct person, which continues in Forbidden West where she also plays Beta, an Elizabet clone around the same age as Aloy but is a third distinct character, calling to mind how Masako Nozawa plays four members of the Son family. No wonder she won a Best Gaming Performance for her performance.
• Special Effect Failure: The ash plume coming from Thunder's Drum doesn't look convincing at all. It keeps curling back in on itself, and doesn't fade as it rises.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • Being built on a premise about tribal people fighting off biomechanical creatures controlled/corrupted/created by a swirling mass of red and black in a setting taking place After the End, it's commonplace for people to declare this the best BIONICLE game ever. Special mention goes to their precursor civilization being responsible for the destruction of their world, a Big Good benevolent AI who was in a way put to sleep by the Big Bad, people dormant in canisters and a guy named Thok.
  • Comparison has been made between this game and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, especially the manga version, which both of them revolved around an adventurous young girl in a world littered with ruins made by predecessors. Also including elements from the manga such as a malevolent AI inside a bunker complex, the world being ended by giant combat robots who still litter the landscape, and the current humanity being artificially created to thrive after the apocalypse.
  • Some like to think the backstory of Horizon Zero Dawn makes it a sequel to 9; a Robot War where Mechanical Monsters unexpectedly Turned Against Their Masters and not only led humanity to extinction, but rendered the planet incapable of supporting life, only for the ending to imply that life will eventually return. Even the Big Bad of the film - an insane AI that mindlessly builds killer robots because people are destroying its precious creations - sounds an awful lot like the Big Bad of The Frozen Wilds DLC, HEPHAESTUS.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The first Blast Sling tutorial quest is unique in that it requires you to kill multiple enemies (two or more) with a single shot three times. Paradoxically, you'll likely finish most if not all of the tutorial quests before this one, because it takes decent damage upgrades to make a sling that will reliably kill weak machines and/or groups of humans with one shot.
  • The level 32 corruption zone requires you to fight two Corrupted Rockbreakers at the same time. Even one of these things is a nightmare to fight due their ability to burrow, and the corrupted variant is that much harder to hobble. The only saving grace is that nearby bodies of water and elevated rock formations provide avenues to mitigate some of the risks of fighting them.
  • The "Sleight Of Crate Trial" in the Spurflints Hunting Grounds is practically guaranteed to make you rage. It gives you one minute (for Blazing Sun) to loot four Shell-Walker crates, which means you have to find the Shell-Walkers, get their crates off, loot them, and do all of this without the Shell-Walkers and Stalkers murdering you. To do this in one minute, you have to forgo any pretense of stealth (completely contrary to the whole point of this Hunting Grounds) and just run through, blasting off the canisters and hoping to loot them before the Shell-Walkers strike back. It's a tight timer even if everything goes right, and it was actually patched to be even more difficult. A more reliable strategy is to deliberately fail the trial after knocking off the crates, then immediately restart the trial before the Shell-Walkers can recover, removing the time sink of having to detach the crates first.
  • The Frozen Wild DLC pits you against Daemonic machines, a local variant of Corrupted machines that are much stronger than the basic versions and don't come with a weakness to fire... so of course The Claws Beneath quest pits you against a Daemonic Rockbreaker. As if that's not enough, if you failed to swing by the area previously, it's supported by a Control Tower, a type of machine that periodically heals and buffs other machines in the vicinity — and, if you're using the Shield-Weaver armor, completely drains your forcefield when it does.
  • Tutorial: Improved Icerail in the DLC requires you to hit Scorchers three times with the Ice Cannon projectiles after freezing them. In other words, hunt down the fastest, most aggressive large machine in the game short of the mecha-bears, freeze it, and then manage to hit it three times with a gun that takes up to five seconds to charge a single shot, during which time you cannot dodge without canceling the charge. Even with handling mods to bring the charge time down, you'll at best get two shots off before the freeze effect fails. Oh, and a fair portion of the specimens hanging around are Daemonic variants, for that added bit of frustration of hunting down one slightly easier to freeze.
  • Ikrie's Challenge is a wave battle that requires you to beat four Scrappers, three Grazers, two Tramplers, and finally a Fire Bellowback with only a basic Shadow Hunter Bow and a limited amount of arrows (even your spear is disabled). This quest is tolerable on normal difficulties, but rage-inducing on Ultra Hard. With Mook Chivalry disabled, the Scrappers attack constantly, making it very difficult to get a shot off after Ikrie manages to freeze them. Lowered damage means that every arrow counts and the log traps scattered around the arena are required to save ammunition, assuming you can get the bigger enemies to walk into position and stay there long enough for the full batch to hit them.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Ersa is played up to be hyper-competent and highly charismatic like Aloy is, and the player will hear no shortage of praise about her offscreen deeds. However, she's hardly seen in the game and she dies moments after Aloy finally meets her.
• Ugly Cute:
  • Some of the smaller machines, like the Watcher, Grazer, and Strider, are more adorable than anything thanks to looking like animals and even having some animal-like mannerisms. It helps that they tend to be some of the more timid machines, prone to running away rather than fighting.
  • Frostclaws, one of The Frozen Wilds' resident Demonic Spiders, go from "ursine nightmare" to "D'awwww!" in an instant when they perform their flying tackle wrestling move, miss you, land on their back and take a moment to get back on their feet. It just looks so cuddly that it can make you forget how lethal they are, at least for a few seconds before they continue trying to rip you to shreds.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Overriding machines is a cool idea. It turns machines over to your side and gets you a speedy mount to explore the world with. Unfortunately, despite having a whole skill tree and a number of dungeons devoted to it, it can feel tacked on compared to most everything else you can do. You don't have any real control over the machines you hack and you can't make them follow you. You can only ride a handful of machines, which all play exactly the same. Taking control of the most powerful machines like the Thunderjaw and Stormbird is Awesome, but Impractical because their stalking grounds are often devoid of anything else to kill. In various quests which require you to fight machines in order to get to the next quest point, overriding one just means you'll have to start firing arrows at it again until it snaps back into hostility. You can't hack corrupted or daemonic machines, which are the things you'll be fighting for the majority of the main quest. Finally, getting the Call Mount skill renders overriding mounts obsolete since it means you'll literally always have a ride at your beck and call.
  • By extension, there is the "Repair Machine/Mount" skills. Using these skills spends your main resource, metal shards, and can be quite costly based on the damage and type of machine. As noted, machines don't follow the player, so any overriden combat machine is just there to soften up/kill the opponent; either they succeed and their usefulness is expended, or they don't and it's a moot point. Similarly, mounts are everywhere, so a damaged mount can simply be replaced rather than wasting funds to keep the same one, which will inevitably be abandoned out of necessity at some point.
• The Woobie:
  • Aloy herself. Her entire life is one massive Tear Jerker. She had no father (and her "mothers" were both long gone by the time she was born), her childhood was spent as an outcast, then the moment she gained acceptance into the Nora, they were butchered in front of her (culminating in the death of her mentor), then she was sent on a long quest into unknown lands, whereupon she was beset by unknown dangers at every turn, then she learned that all life on the planet had been destroyed, and her genetic mother had died in order to preserve what little remained, then when she returned to the Nora homeland, it was under siege. She really needs a hug.
  • Ourea in The Frozen Wilds. Develops a friendship with CYAN, then is captured during a Red Raid and enslaved for several years by the Carja, where she was forced to maintain the machines that were used in the Sun Ring sacrifices. When she finally makes it back home she finds CYAN taken over by HEPHAESTUS and is helpless to aid her. She has to trick and humiliate her brother to try and get help for CYAN, and then finally dies freeing CYAN from HEPHAESTUS.
  • For that matter, CYAN from the same DLC. She's limited in a way GAIA isn't, but still made to be complex enough to care about her purpose keeping the Yellowstone Caldera stable. Her capacity for emotion is explicitly compared to that of a child, which had to be concealed from the public. And to stay hidden from the Faro Plague she has to go into something like a coma for years, missing the extinction of humanity and waking alone. She keeps the record of Kenny Chau telling her that she has to go into hibernation and wake alone, of her admitting fear at the prospect, and Chau telling her how strong she is. And then she's alone for a long, long time, unable to communicate even with the Banuk who show up centuries later, until Ourea. But Ourea is taken by the Carja, and CYAN can't protect her. When CYAN gets a sudden network connection request she assumes it's from technologically advanced humans and eagerly accepts, which gets her enslaved by HEPHAESTUS. Freedom comes at the cost of Ourea's life.
  • Ikrie in The Frozen Wilds. She sticks with the one friend she has from childhood, Mailen, even when Mailen makes it clear she wants to join a werak with the most stringent possible test for entrance: survive for four days without any help up in a barren, icy mountain range. So Ikrie goes along with Mailen because she feels like she has to support her friend, only to be rejected when Mailen falls ill and won't accept help. Aloy comes along, and being a Nora, Mailen grudgingly agrees to accept the barest of help to patch her up so she can last out the test and make it back to Keener's Rock. But because Ikrie is fed up with conforming to Banuk customs, while Mailen is determined to adhere to them even more strongly, this event separates the two permanently. Ikrie asks Aloy to claim she died so that she can finally be free to do what she wants - but she is also truly alone for the first time.
• Woobie Species: The entire human race became this — twice!
  • Billions upon billions of people were condemned to certain extinction, fighting a Hopeless War against an unstoppable army of robots that consumed all life on the planet. Even the select few who were selected to hide in bunkers weren't very well off; if they weren't wracked with Survivor's Guilt, they were betrayed by the very one who got them in trouble in the first place.
  • And when humanity was resurrected by ELEUTHIA, they became one again because Faro deleted APOLLO; they had to learn how to survive in a world with no education beyond kindergarten. Only GAIA knows how many "blameless men and women" died of starvation and cold before they re-discovered flintknapping and firestarting.

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