Tears of Iwata’s Kingdom

frog

treefroggy But I also don’t feel like I’m getting anything cool or consequential from it. It’s all ephemeral and expendable and not entirely necessary.

This is my biggest issue so far! There’s nothing more disappointing than going through an encounter only to be rewarded with a rusty halberd for the 20th time. It dimishes my excitement about exploring the world, I tend to skip over anything that doesn’t look substantial, which then makes me feel like I’m missing out. I’d probably be more motivated if I didn’t know I could just make better versions of those rewards on my own.

treefroggy

frog There’s nothing more disappointing than going through an encounter only to be rewarded with a rusty halberd for the 20th time.

or digging through a cave, making 10 rock hammers in a row to dig through black rocks, to get like, a royal shield lol

I think we’re getting to the point. I’m spending hours just trudging through, getting expendables, and not finding anything of any consequence or really becoming more powerful in any permanent way (which was always the balance they struck with zelda in the past, becoming more powerful), knowing that this game is one where I could just hop right through the gate to the big bad. I got all the memories in the first week, and I could go to all the dungeons now, but I know I’ll regret not having the clothes I want. so then I need to look at a guide to find my garb?? lame… In botw I pretty much always knew what I was aiming for…. and then there’s the main way of becoming more powerful: shrines, which, is literally a whole different dimension to the main game.

tomjonjon The opening area is a terrible tutorial, especially if one has played BotW.

it’s also really sad that they squandered the most sky real estate, the biggest sky island, on the tutorial. It set me up to expect more like that, but then the sky islands turn out to be spartan AF by comparison.

tomjonjon Link’s horrid “jump” and inability to grab ledges. This is also an issue I have with BotW. Link will grab onto surfaces, but not edges of things.

lol, this is the OoT reference they should have made amirite:

tomjonjon I was getting real down on the game so I put it away for over a week and came back to it this weekend. I have been having a much better time with it since.

same, sort of. taking breaks is good. part of me is wondering if I’m just being an idiot and ruining the game for myself. probably true. But it’s not like other games I’ve played where I don’t have this problem at all. I tend to pace myself well and enjoy the whole time. The worst it gets is with Elden Ring or Dragon Quest Builders where I do the classic obsessive gamer binges, but that’s because I’m enjoying it. With totk I kind of can’t wait to put it down again. It’s not rewarding. Maybe my dopeamine transmitters are fried.

EDIT:
Ok, here’s the next thought,
I am going to re-asses what I actually want to do at this point in the game: get more of the clothes I want.
Then I’m just going to do it. Even if it means using a guide.
I’m going to stop whining that I can’t do what I want to do, and I’m just going to do it.
capicse ? capicse.

I’m usually really irritated by the type of game reviewer who nitpicks every little bit of friction they feel with a game _{lagjkfgkjpolygonbestiespodcasthasgdfkl}, and yet here I am agreeing with them about totk and becoming that way. so it’s time to fix that.

(on the other hand, the whole point of our discourse is that this is easier said than done…)

basically don’t fucking know and this game is making me question my life choices 😂

tomjonjon

When I first started playing I was pretty frustrated with the game for a few reasons:

The opening area is a terrible tutorial, especially if one has played BotW.
The overall similarity to BotW had me thinking I could just charge my way through combat encounters; only to be continually one-shotted by larger enemies, ice and fire chu-chus, and being swarmed by weak enemies with long weapons or things that explode.
Link’s horrid “jump” and inability to grab ledges. This is also an issue I have with BotW. Link will grab onto surfaces, but not edges of things.

I was getting real down on the game so I put it away for over a week and came back to it this weekend. I have been having a much better time with it since. I decided to just bum around and explore - following my whims. I don’t care about “finishing” the game because the story is pretty much nothing. Like every other Zelda game, I’m guessing Link saves Hyrule and makes some friends along the way. Ho-hum. I also have the PRO-HUD enabled. That means no mini-map, no numbers/lists on screen and no distractions. I also played BotW like this and found I had a much different experience than my friends. I am also not really checking the quest log. If I see a well, I’m going down there to explore, not because an NPC told me to check out all 50+ wells and report back. If I find them all, cool, if not, also cool. I am going to be picking up everything I can because the game makes it easy to do so (think of how cumbersome it is to pick up items in Skyrim. It sucks.) and I usually have things for sidequests that I come across. There are some really great and fun sidequests with funny and memorable characters, that’s more than I can say for the boring “main” cast, who are pretty much carbon copies of, if not exactly the same as BotW’s cast.

My advice would be to just hang out in the world and not let the game pressure you into finishing it. Play it your way and avoid the check boxes and make-numbers-go-up mentality. Turn off the HUD and map markers and get lost in Hyrule.

ColdyBags

tomjonjon

Ya know, that’s a great point. I played the vast majority of my 100+ hours in BotW with the PRO-HUD and have been using the default HUD in this one. I’m going to switch it up and see how it goes.

treefroggy

not sure what this says but may sum it up:

saddleblasters

treefroggy I haven’t played either botw or totk, so i might be misunderstanding some of what’s going on, but roughly it says

BOTW

cute but reliable
sometimes has a hard time
goal: battle against ganon (~~or maybe cannon = ganon? but i looked up the official transliteration of ganon into chinese, and it’s different than what they use here.)~~ ok, they used the Taiwanese transliteration of Ganon, which is the same transliteration as cannon.
stupidly follow zelda around

TOTK

still cute, but with the grandeur of overwhelming power
hard times everyday, eyes have become red
goal: find zelda
no wife, will quickly die

PS
Clearly in TotK you can put down the hood, but I feel it’s only in TotK that Link started wearing a hood?

PPS
The difference in these two games’ goals lies in their final task.

the rocky connrrr picture show

Happy to finally be done with this pos lol.

The story did not get better. I feel pretty much the way I did the last time I checked in. It’s a playground for the game’s action figures.

It’s also a technical marvel with very strong art direction and music, that feels incredibly responsive to play even at 30fps. It rarely struggles to maintain that framerate. All the other problems return intact from the first game, only with worse characterization. Also there’s too much stuff.

I feel especially let down by the tiny role Ganondorf had, and that the Sheikah tribe fades almost completely into the background to make room for the Zonai (and the Yiga ughh). If they really didn’t want a meaty plot that made any sense to get in the way of the player zipping through the main questline they could have fleshed it out in optional story beats. I’m watching the stinger where Mineru disintegrates as I write this. Who cares! What I hate most about this game’s cutscenes is they’re directed with so much implied gravity that is never earned and doesn’t land, because they spent zero time developing anyone. This game dives all the way up its own ass when the story shows up, which is ludicrous. It’s such mechanical, surgically delivered epicness with nothing ever justifying it.

Like, I’m aghast. Yeah yeah, plots in the Zelda series rofl. But plenty of entries have tried to tell something weighty or cute, or have tried to focus on a specific character or a dynamic between characters. This one just doesn’t. Everyone’s role is strictly utilitarian, and in the end there aren’t any consequences for any of them. Link gets his arm back. Zelda turns back into a human (1/137th part goat), and I definitely saw it coming. I always thought it was a bit cowardly that at the end of the last game we don’t meet a 117 year old woman. There was no reason Zelda would have been preserved in stasis for a whole century as Link was. She spent all that time fighting, she should be near extinguished by the time Link shows up. As for Link treefroggy he really does just do what he’s told and follow Zelda around like a puppy.

I feel like the only hope for this series to get interesting ever again is if Nintendo added a secondary console to their lineup again, where weird silly stuff like Link’s Awakening and Minish Cap and Link Between Worlds and the WW sequels can go to live.

treefroggy

from discussion with my buddy where I am saying how I carry around un-glued swords for aesthetics so I don’t have to look at disembodied animal parts hanging from link’s back for 70 hours straight.
(content warning: NSFW foul language)

[redacted] was like, fuse that thing to the helix sword? and I went “no it will look stupid”
like i will literally forego the atk boost if my sword looks like ass

how does this Moblin sex organ glued to my sword
turn my beautiful
ancient
master blacksmith
sword forged to killa god
go from 45 attack
to 100 attack
literally double the attack
because I GLUED a fucking scrotum to it
the fuck is wrong with you nintendo
this is a kids game

So much for my “vegan” run, like I do in botw

thebryanjzx90

That’s hilarious do any of the jiggly bits actually outperform the various enemy horns?

treefroggy

thebryanjzx90 yes, the ultimate weapon—
No, I was joking!

LeFish

I’ve hit 80 hours after a few days of dog-sitting and being unwell and I’m beginning to feel fatigue from this game, a sensation that I typically experience increasingly tangentially after the ice cracks.

I’ve had very little inclination to make stuff for the purposes of travel, and typically fast travel to high points and jump off stuff like I did in BotW. Some basic construction has been helpful at times, like putting fans and a rocket on a glider, but by and large the malaise that I have for the turgid tutorial construction that you’re required to do on the first island has carried through my experience of the game.

I agree with others have said about finding armour sets and the amount of effort required to upgrade them. I accidentally stumbled upon a piece of the Fierce Deity set and looked up a guide to the other pieces, and then it turns out that upgrading them requires beating tonnes of Hinox and getting drops from those huge flying dragons.

I’m also feeling the sense of being pulled in too many directions and not actually accomplishing anything, and I only really felt this after beginning to properly explore the underground. It’s a bit much.

I will give credit to where it’s due though because I have no doubt that Nintendo could make a pretty sick horror game given what they’ve done with the underground sections. They’ve nailed the atmosphere and the sound design and have made me physically tense up going through a narrow underground cave before playing some deafening and foreboding boom sound as I go further and further in. I’m throwing brightbloom seeds like confetti so that I can see where I’m going, and on countless occasions I’ve audibly said, “what the fuck is that?” at a solitary glowing eye in the near distance or when I first saw one of those weapon-holding statues. Or how many times have I felt a sense of dread as I creep along a path somewhere hoping that nothing sees me after my max health has been depleted. Or that one time I went down a hole and ended up trapped in a small arena with a Stalfos Hinox. Yeah, pants have been pooped.

GigaSlime

LeFish I was randomly exploring the depths the other day and saw in the distance a HUGE flying centipede monster and I was way too spooked to go after it until I realized it was just the boss from the Wind Temple again. But for a second it reminded me of accidentally stumbling upon one of the huge leviathans in Subnautica

treefroggy

GigaSlime I saw one of the flying dragons down there too

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts

I fell into an underground chasm and something feels different… can a nintendo expert tell me whats going on? Why is Ganon named Garon?

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxqHZqPdaXnNiFhvr4nUdJmDjMF732byfR

I’m not saying Zelda ripped off Intelligent Systems…. but man some parts of the underground look a lot like Nohr from FE Fates

treefroggy

rejj treefroggy something objectively good

It may help you with your mental struggles to first accept that this is in itself a falsehood.

the struggle is over. I bit the bullet and played video games. Playing SEGA Mega Drive snapped me out of it, and I can see clearly now. The issue was completely a personal motivation and instant-gratification monkey brain issue, that may have resulted from playing only modern games like botw for the past 6 months or so. Now I can separate what was just my weird feelings from the experience of playing the game.

I do think totk is as close as you can get to an objectively great technical achievement and good game, the things that pester me about it are still just as real, specifically lore stuff. But the gameplay loop is good. The motivation issues I was having were the same as one would have with any other game. Just to be clear.

My dominant trait is I’m all about the mood in games like this. BotW had great atmosphere. I came to TotK expecting a more trippy Majora’s Mask like experience, and what I actually got tripped me out from how unassuming it appeared on the surface. The mood of this game is slightly weird, in a way that just wasn’t clicking for me.

But I think I can definitively say now, that it is the Oracle of Ages/Seasons of BotW.

Those games are great, but have a lot of issues as a result of how awesomely experimental they were! The lore makes very little sense and doesn’t care, and I kind of respect that. It gets the job done.

To say the very least, the experience I’ve been having with Tears of the Kingdom is quite a journey, both in the game and out.

I refuse to be the type of person who doesn’t take responsibility and paints themselves as helpless in the face of enjoying video games.

tomjonjon

treefroggy I usually try to mix it up when playing games to avoid burnout situations like that. I took a week long break from TotK to play older Street Fighter games. Always good to mix new and old. Arcade games are great for a retro bite-sized break.

safety_lite

treefroggy Felt the same way, regarding the tone. One of my biggest hopes for this one was that they’d add some more of the supernatural / scary creatures I missed so much in BOTW. Gibdos were a nice surprise, but I was pretty bummed when Poes were just another collectible.

treefroggy

Making the thread for TotK is something I did 100% because I had a great emotional experience finishing Breath of the Wild’s story and DLC.

I have regrets making this thread. Like making the title an Iwata memorial instead of something clever. Probably should have left it up to someone else!

The game is great! I think various factors just led to a dopeamine malfunction in my brain last month that had me confused wether I even enjoy video games anymore.

wickedcestus

treefroggy I don’t think your concerns were completely off. The game isn’t perfect, and it’s totally reasonable to be disappointed when it doesn’t fulfill what you were expecting. Personally, I’ve started to enjoy it more bit by bit, but I still have a lot of problems with the game philosophically, and also just personally wish they had gone in a different direction in certain aspects.

I think this thread was mostly critical because the overwhelming expectation / initial reception was so positive, and also because, honestly, threads on this forum about new games tend to go that way as a result of the way people here tend to play games. To me, TotK feels incoherent in some pretty key ways, to the point where it’s more fun when you ignore certain mechanics, and that’s a pretty major flaw in my mind!

At the same time, the game maintains a lot of the beauty of Breath of the Wild, which I also loved and affected me greatly, so yeah, there’s gonna be confused emotions.

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts

I have a lot more free time on my hands at the moment, so I picked this game back up and am making a lot of progress! The thing that turned everything around was finally meeting Hetsu and spending the 60 or so koroks I found. Now I have plenty of space to hold swords and bows and I have stopped having to sidetrack myself constantly while grinding for gear, and halting my making progress. Almost immediately after doing that, I wrapped the water temple, powered through ʙɪʀᴅ ᴢᴏɴᴇ, and I’m about halfway through Volcano City.

At this point, I feel like I have enough critical mass that I’m able to just focus on the divine beasts and beating the game, and if I want to do any side quests/shrines/etc I’ll do them, or more likely I’ll just run by. Still, there are times where there is a tower, 2 shrines, a korok, and a sidequest objective all in sight, and I hate that! It’s just too much to juggle and makes the “content” feel trivial. So instead I have just been leaving and doing my own thing. I have stopped caring about the underground and the sky until I get my powerups and master sword if I decide to get it. I don’t know that there’s anything cool enough in those zones to spend time there before the post-game.

By the way, it’s a really interesting choice to have the Marbled Rock Roast be an allegory for the fentanyl crisis in America. Very timely, nintendo.

treefroggy

I spent hours and days just messing around in oracle of seasons, farming Gasha Seeds to try and collect every Ring in the game. There are rings and stuff that turn link into a green Octorok, Moblin, etc. I remind myself to look at totk the same as the Oracle games, and it puts it into context.

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