@“connrrr”#p132141 For real, they felt like trailers for something cool that was supposed to happen. They didn’t build up anything besides my expectations. The Ganondorf fight in retrospect had a kind of cool Dark Link vibe to it and in a sense his complete lack of depth as a mirror held up to the series’ blandest Link is thematically appropriate.
Agreed with both you and treefroggy hell of a game in those cutscenes. Even the start of the tears quest felt like something grand.
@“connrrr”#p132141 my favourite was taking one-note characters like the cucco lady and spinning them into characters like Anju with engrossing emotional multi-day arcs.
Kafei & Anju, as the most involved and deep quest in the game, stand as the thesis statement for the entire game imo. Extremely deep and emotive. There may be somewhat similar things, but imho it is unlike anything else in gaming. Those N64 polygons are real people.
https://youtu.be/GyUcwsjyd8Q?si=MRkztqaBM0elbSLx
this is one of my favorites, this video is really good. Great understanding of shinto, great sound design. The deepest understanding of Ocarina of Time that I've seen. This is the perspective I try to take with games-- the *spiritual values* behind them. I would be interested in this same person's opinion on BotW and TotK, but probably it would be similar to what I've said above: BotW was, literally the Breath of the Wild: nature's beauty. It has the same Nature Kami as Princess Mononoke. TotK's whole deal was corruption and corrupting that which came before...
This channel went on a 2 year hiatus shortly after, and two weeks ago announced new videos coming.
Time has passed, deeper opinions have been given time to condense.
My thoughts are pretty much the same. I think I can be conclusive though and say people who didn‘t play much zelda or obsess over OoT/Wind Waker back in the day are probably just fine playing this one like it’s a yakuza game, haha!
In my opinion: They teased and set up something amazing and mind blowing, then like a bait-n-switch, yanked the rug and made it all meaningless every time. I feel betrayed by the trailers and art design that got me excited for a trippy sequel experience. Stuff like the ganon body seemed like they would be much more interesting than they turned out to be.
These videos meander and get somewhat annoying at times but when they get to the point they do also cover a lot. Of course there's some I disagree with, mainly their conjectures of how it "should" or could or will be.
Something that gets to the core of it that I felt too is the first few hours and the Great Sky Island is mainly the only part that feels like a sequel to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdUXa6lV8A8&t=9s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbpxNuXoOkc&t=4778s
Overall it feels like there was a lack of communication between parts of the team or company.
I don't even agree that it's just a "lore / story" thing. I think that bleeds out into the overall world design and progression choices being lopsided too.
so it is just kind of a dumb nintendo game, but in my opinion that's a pretty big step down from prior games in the series. the art design is dope but when there's little substance or meaning behind it, feels even more like it was just designed to sell limited release hardware and plastic.
BotW set up some interesting things for a would-be sequel. Turns out the sequel just lame-ified everything and made it all amount to nothing and go nowhere.
I think I can finally put a very fine point on some of my issues:
- building is very tedious
- majority of puzzles become meaningless
- the others require tedious building. The solution to the puzzle could be very apparent, then the hurdle becomes grappling with physics.
- these menus are stylish, but they were designed around a Wii U touch screen, then retooled for switch. Adds to the tedium.
- this Zelda became even more of a physics sandbox game than a Zelda game. I feel that basically they just needed to make use of the engine created for botw, squeeze some more juice from it. I feel foolish for expecting anything but this from the sequel. Maybe the next game will be fresh again.
Coming to TotK a little late and playing it at a slow pace since I‘m (mostly) not gaming during Lent, but I’m mostly enjoying it so far. Currently, I've beaten one of the main temples and am partway through another. My 2 biggest frustrations:
1.
Enemies do sooo much damage. Most enemies other than the red goblins either one- or two-shot me (or occasionally, they get two shots on me and I have like a quarter of a heart left). I‘ve gained some hearts and bought some new armor, but it hasn’t helped at all. Maybe I'm just “doing it wrong”…probably!…but man, I feel so behind DEF-wise.
2.
The "paths" to the temples are taking me longer than the temples themselves. Not inherently a bad thing, but it feels unusual that I have to do so much busywork just to get to the most important areas of the game. The open world design is supposed to give you freedom, but once it comes to getting into the temples, you have to do it their way in whatever slow, specific, predetermined path they have for you. It's not the worst thing by any means, but it would have been much nicer if (for example) the temples were just sitting on the map and there were, say, 3-5 relatively tricky ways inside each one and you just get to figure it out and get yourself in. Or even: the temples are just open to you and if you want to do more tricky extra stuff, that's what the shrines, side quests, and open world exploring bits are for.
Overall, I feel like TotK is a bit overhyped- most of what it does well BotW already did cleaner- but it's still pretty fun and in certain ways I like seeing Nintendo lean into the jank just a little bit more with this one.
@“rearnakedwindow”#p154994 Funny timing on this, because I dipped back into TotK last night after a lot of time spent away from it, and…
I feel you on number 1! I'm on the second temple, and everything seems capable of one-shotting me! It's really frustrating. I've also got what I consider to be a goodly number of hearts and strong gear, and I'm a **_Z E L D A P R O_**. Had a similar issue with BotW, but at least this time the weapons aren't all made of papier-mâché.
I’ve been playing Tears of the Kingdom with my kids for a few months now, no idea what our playtime is but we’ve done three of the sages and have revealed about half of the map. Have had some conflicts between my usual methodically explore everywhere playstyle (which I will admit is a dumb way to play especially this sort of game) versus my older daughter wanting to fight every enemy we see versus my younger daughter wanting to put on the relevant enemy mask and make friends every time we see an enemy, plus both kids wanting me to drop whatever thing I’m trying to figure out and just move on.
[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/XAQn6nL.jpeg[/IMG]
Anyway, this afternoon my younger one started playing Zelda on cut up bits of post it note. We’ve been trying to get a dragon claw, so she made a toy snake into a sky dragon and then drew Link, his bow and an arrow and had me fly the dragon around while Link shot at it. She’s also drawn a horse, one of the three headed dragons, a chocolate cake for some reason and then a picture of Link with the remaining crumb of the cake after he ate it and the chocolate sword he found inside it (?). There’s Link gliding, and the little piece with a square on it is a sky island which she had me hold up as Link glided towards it and then passed just underneath as has happened so often in the game. The three pictures closest to gliding Link are a giant fossil and the two bones that had fallen off it that we reattached, making the woman who appears to be saying “yum” very happy (the yum is supposed to be with chocolate cake Link, obviously). The guy at the bottom centre left I thought was maybe a korok but I asked her and “he’s the guy with the whistle and the headphones”. I told her I don’t remember that character, and she told me “I made him up”. Above that guy is one of the “I need to find my friend” koroks. And, on the opposite corner of the table:
I last saved down in the depths, and thought ugh what a miserable place. But I chose to go topside instead and actually had a pretty decent time. First I determined it was finally time, after 60-odd hours of playing the game, to get the Sensor and the Hero’s Journey so I knew I wasn’t backtracking. It was my first time talking to Robbie, but I unlocked everything he had to give. The non-linearity of this game is weird sometimes!
Then I was walking around and saw the ice dragon and decided I’d go say hi. He was going underground, so I did what any normal person would do and jumped on for the ride. It was actually cool to see the underground from that perspective. Doesn’t make me like the place, but it was nice to go for a ride. Then I fell off the dragon and died, and lost all of my progress and the dragon’s scales that I harvested. oops.
I decided to go do something completely different and went to Eventide Island. It was definitely a highlight of the original game for me,but this time around it was kinda underwhelming. It committed the sin of having a storylocked area that I went and explored first so I wasted nearly an hour looking for a way in. The linearity of this game is weird sometimes!
So I beat up the monster forces for the quest in order to open the gate, and TWICE I had this shit happen to me. The Bokoblin forts are designed in a really annoying way where I always end up with a millimeter of health bar, and I have to walk around several times to find the bokoblin that fell into an unreachable area outside of the fort. It’s just a weird annoying thing that doesn’t feel playtested.
After killing these goblins I went into the Lone Island Coliseum and that was nice. There’s also a Pilotwings course on the island. I think this area did the best job of having ‘just enough to do’ that it didn’t feel bloated and overwhelming. But I came back to shore and encountered some nerds talking about a white horse that’s supposed to be special. So I walked 100 feet away from them and caught the white horse. No patience or space for this to be an important or interesting task, you just immediately complete it. This game’s just like that.
For the type of hardcore video game emjoyer I am, I think that when I let go of. Shame like TotK, it’s better enjoyed when I casually noncomittaly return to it like this. But still I don’t like it haha.
Now imagine how much more cohesive and satisfying Tears could have been had they released it only for Switch 2 rather than blowing the load two years earlier and releasing something that feels half-baked. All these new features they’re adding for the Switch 2 re-release are a window into what could have been. But nowadays, when Nintendo does these updates, they of course will not improve the artistic cohesion of the game, lore, writing, flow gameplay at large, which is sad. Similar to Wind Waker HD, there’s nothing substantial, just little features.
