32 reviews liked by Alcorion


Really meh, when you stop to think about the first and second games this one was really weird. You constantly fight against the same ghosts and a lot of missed opportunities on jump scares. The lore is good, it felt more like playing a novel game than a true fatal frame (which it's not a true complain I like reading lore). Not even gonna comment on the optional clothes for the female characteres and breast physics, both were unnecessary and could have been used the spare time on the game.

12 years ago, I LOVED this game.
12 years later, as I anxiously revisit this detective-adventure game, I struggle badly to pinpoint anything positive about the game, because story- and gameplaywise, it aged very, very poorly.

You play as Cole Phelps a Marine Corps lieutenant, just returning from the Second World War, so we are in the late 40s, a time-frame very rarely picked. Our goal is to climb up the career ladder at the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) starting at the patrol service. Even if this environment is already suggesting another Hero’s Journey, this premise COULD have led to an interesting story. But it just did not deliver.

L.A. Noire is a power fantasy through and through. You speak the language of violence and war, screaming at suspects, pointing a gun at them or even shooting them in the back as they are running away from you. The developers at Rockstar are not well known for very sensitive or self-reflexive characters or stories, but with L.A. Noire they reached their pinnacle of ignorance. This game is dripping of problematic tropes: It is full of antisemitism, racism, sexism and unconcealed patriotism. And it is not only the „bad“ guys, who embody this way of thinking, it is you and the structure of police, that is based on violence, discrimination and corruption. It hurts to the bone to get to a crime scene over and over again, to see another femicide, or a raped body or a beaten up immigrant. Most of the cases are build like that. Yes, I can imagine the streets of L.A. in the late 40s, were not the safest place for liberal women or people of color, but to use this „historical truth“, to rebuild and reenact this brutal way of interacting is just not my type.

The L.A. we drive through is a vivid place, atmospherical and you can really feel the will to „build something“, but besides the feel of it, the glimpse, you just can’t do anything in this world - besides a bit of sightseeing. You are limited to your duty, driving from crime scene to crime scene, cutting blocks and avoid another car crash, due to the whacky car controls. The intention is clear, that Rockstar did not want to create another open-world gangster-adventure but quite the opposite. And this would be understandable, IF the gameplay of being a cop thriving for justice and recognition would be interesting and thrilling. But it simply isn’t.

The gameplay loop is boring and hilariously linear. You arrive at a crime scene, investigating it, searching for clues or evidence, waiting for the fulfilling melody to signal you the completion of the scene. Sidenote: This melody is the only thing in the game, that led to a warm nostalgic feeling in my playthrough. After that, you interrogate a witness and this part was sold as the main attraction back in the day with ground-breaking facial motion capture, making it easy to immediately recognize a liar. But this gimmick is just dated and the expressions are not that clearly readable, leading to frustration or the feel of a multiple-choice test. Because the other two options besides accusing someone, are to play the „good cop“ or the the „bad cop“. This means either calmly assume someone is lying or openly yelling or threating them, how they will rod in jail, if they are not cooperating. Then you drive to the next location, either searching for clues, repeating the next inhuman interrogation or chasing a suspect either by foot or by car.

The investigation part is the „best“ as you just shut up and try to do your job for a moment, like you should. But this promising mechanic is just torn down, by the incomprehensible need for action, spectacle and heroism, which leads to a dumb, rail-roaded and tedious experience.

In some cases, you will find newspapers, reporting about the psychologist Dr. Harlan Fontaine, a shady man willing to cure all men from their post-war traumata, a story told in little cut-scenes. The same happens to the backstory of Cole, as we experience little flashbacks of his time in war. These parts are the most promising and intriguing, as we get a glimpse of this collective trauma a war can cause. But the result of this trauma is displayed exclusively in beating your wife, becoming a murderer, an alcoholic or being abused by a narcissistic psychologist.

After replaying eleven cases, I have heard and seen enough. A part of me is sad about the failed replay of one of my favorite games. As a teen, I played this with my sister and I remember, that we enjoyed it. But I grew up and the game did not. And that is why the other part of me is grateful to went through this again. To realize that this type of game and especially the content and values it transfers, does not represent my understanding of the world nor a compelling character, I want to embody. And that does not imply, I only want to play as successful, soft and sensitive characters, which try to „make the world a better place“. Take Disco Elysium as a great example of a game that did it just right: A struggling cop, unable to remember his own name, known as a loser, a tramp, an asshole, but someone who is trying, or to be more accurate: a character thrown into a game that gives you freedom of choice and a feel of consequences and not only the outdated repetition of the binary idea of good and evil.

more focus on combat compared to the first title with 3 diffrent weapons to fight with. movement feels really good and there are many new abilities that make it even better. the bossfights are great (except 1) and the world feels more varied then the first title. BUT...

the second to last boss almost made me dislike the game. it could have been a great fight. its pretty challenging and requires you to learn how to dodge the attacks and when its save to get some hits in. its one of those boss fights where you learn with each attempt and slowly get better over time until you mastered the fight. However the thing that absolutly ruins the fight for me, is the fact that you have to do the boring first phase every time! on top of that you cant even skip the pre battle and pre phasechange dialog and that old dude just talks soooooo slow. its really tedious and removed any fun i could have had with this boss. to ad insult to injury the boss right after, also has dialog befor the fight, but there you can skip it! It really soured my experience but its still a great game, i just had to get this of my chest


A few hours into my playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I made a comparison in my mind to another Nintendo sequel. Similarly to Tears of the Kingdom, it was the sequel to one of my favourite games. They both reuse the same basic game engine and mechanics, but set out to give players a new experience, without dismissing fans of the original. And both, while not entirely bad, missed the mark in ways. That's not to say that I think Super Mario Galaxy 2 is bad; far from it. I love Galaxy 2! I just had a few complaints with it that slightly lowered my opinion of it, and I still prefer the original. And for the first few hours, I expected Tears of the Kingdom to follow a similar path. I was hooked. While I was still in the first area of the game, it was setting up the new ideas perfectly. I was ready for the rest of the game to hit me with its best shot.

However, that shot never seemed to come. Where Galaxy 2 sought to soar higher than its predecessor, Tears of the Kingdom came crashing down.

I would like to note before going on with my long rambling that I haven't seen 100% of the content of this game, and it's likely that I got something wrong. But a lot of my opinions were inferred to me by the direction the game was going. Remember what I said earlier? How the game had perfectly set up its new ideas? Well, sadly, it set them up, but never aimed to go further.

To put it simply, every new idea introduced in Tears of the Kingdom feels undercooked. During my playthrough, I kept wondering and brainstorming ideas that could help flesh out each mechanic more, but the game feels like it was made in a way that undermines itself. My biggest issue with these comes from the creation mechanic. This is clearly the main thing Nintendo wants customers to take away from this game. It's all over the marketing: "You can use Link's fancy new arm to put together and build pretty much anything! There are endless possibilities!" And technically, the marketing isn't lying. You can build basically anything. Want to build a flying machine that can fly across Hyrule? You can! Want to build a car filled with explosives that can decimate enemies immediately? You can! Want to light a Korok on fire and crucify them? You can! In terms of options, this is an incredibly fleshed-out mechanic. However - and this feels extremely weird to say as someone who has been learning to work as a creative for the past three years - I just could not bring myself to care about the Ultra Hand.

My big issue comes from how the Ultra Hand is actually developed in the required quests for completing the story. And, well, it just isn't. The puzzles in Tears of the Kingdom are some of the most basic, uninteresting, and bland puzzles I've played in a while. Granted, I haven't actually cleared every shrine or every challenge in the game, but out of the 50 or so shrines I completed, I never once felt the difficulty rise at all since the very first tutorial. Most of them just boil down to "Stick this object onto this other object, activate it, and watch it play the game for you". Maybe you'll be putting a fan onto a minecart and watching it push you through a track. That's the whole shrine! It isn't like the game expects players to be purposefully experimental with clearing the shrines either, since each one happens to give you the exact amount of tools you need to go through the intended path, limiting the player more than encouraging them. You can still get away with some interesting stuff, but 30 shrines in I was already so checked out that I couldn't really be bothered. The dungeons do fare better than the shrines in this regard, seeing as how they take place in much more open areas and allow more exploration, but the puzzles in the dungeons actually made me miss the Divine Beasts from the first game. Say what you want about those, but I'd rather take a dungeon that actually requires me to think. The only dungeon that even comes close to the mechanical depth that I want is the one on Death Mountain, seeing as it requires you to use a flying machine in tandem with another (INSERT SPOILER ABILITY HERE) ability, but even then, you don't actually build the machine; it just happens to be lying around when you get there.

As for the shrines that don't utilise the Ultra Hand, those don't fare much better. The time reversal and ascension mechanics are cool ideas, but I can literally count the number of times I found them useful on two hands. In a way, you could argue that the shrines act more like miniature tutorials. Heck, some of them literally only exist to teach players about basic mechanics like shooting your bow and arrows or throwing your weapon - literally using text boxes to explain how each of them works. But I never really felt motivated to build anything in the overworld, either, not only because you can literally only collect the tools in your inventory by using a makeshift gacha mechanic. The Ultra Hand is perfect for players who want to spend hours creating cool vehicles or whatever, but for someone like me? I don't want to spend that much time on a game when I have so many more in my backlog to play. Whenever I walked by a pile of wooden planks and wheels left there by the developers, I just thought, "Why, though? I've already travelled around Hyrule perfectly fine on my own in Breath of the Wild. I could probably just walk to my destination faster than it takes me to build this shitty wooden car."

And therein lies my other huge issue; This game just feels too much like Breath of the Wild. Not enough is different. That might seem like a dumb statement. Like, of course it feels the same. It's a sequel using the same engine. But when this game kept getting delayed for four years straight, I kept thinking, "Woah, if this is taking just as much time to develop as the original game, they must be creating a huge new world for us to explore, alongside the updated Hyrule!". And while I was sort of correct, the new areas in the game are anything but interesting. Going back to what I said earlier, Tears of the Kingdom feels like it's undermining itself. I was so excited when I saw that the game would (supposedly) take place on these vast floating islands in the sky. That's one of my favourite types of settings ever! And the problem isn't that Tears of the Kingdom doesn't execute the idea of floating islands well; it's that it's barely utilised at all. I don't know the exact measurements for this, but from a quick glance at the map, the sky islands look like they take up literally around a 10th of the size of Hyrule. After the tutorial, that's pretty much it. I barely got to spend time on them outside of looking for the shrines they contained, which wasn't that fun either considering what I've already said about the shrines. Despite a gorgeous visual style, I unfortunately didn't get much out of the sky islands, which sucks considering it was probably the setting I was looking forward to most.

The other brand new area does fit into what I'd want a bit better, but also manages to miss the mark. I won't go on for too long about this since I don't actually think it was shown that much pre-release, but while it does have an amazing visual style and also gets to the type of size I'd want for a sequel (it's actually around the same size as Hyrule!), the game, once again, barely utilises it. Maybe I just missed something, but I never saw a reason to even go there after discovering it for the first time. It feels like it just exists to waste your resources by using them to light up the area, as the whole place is completely dark. (Don't you love it when games do that? Make it so you can't see anything and have to slowly make your way through an area? Definitely not aggravating at all.) It only felt necessary to go there close to the very end of the game, a point at which it is far too late for what could have been an amazing new setting.

I'm not entirely sure how to explain this last point. But despite how much I've talked on and on about the issues with gameplay, what killed it for me was the difference in atmosphere and tone. One of my favourite parts of Breath of the Wild was the feeling of solitude. At the start of the original game, when Link wakes up, he is completely alone with no memories in a devastated world. No one really knows him. Everyone from his previous life is either dead or close to it. The only human he sees for the first few hours of gameplay is a mysterious old man. He's thrown into a conflict of which he has no idea he was supposed to be a part of. This melancholy dread stirs all throughout Breath of the Wild, complimented by a minimal musical score as Link traverses through Hyrule. These moments in Breath of the Wild helped to completely sell me on the atmosphere, despite the slightly weak story the game plays out.

Meanwhile, how does Tears of the Kingdom start? With a 15-minute info dump as you slowly walk alongside Zelda as she gives you the exposition for the plot. Practically everyone in Hyrule knows about Link and his heroism, and the events of the first game are barely addressed from what I've seen. There isn't really a good frame for how much time has passed either, since characters like Purah have grown up a lot, while characters like Impa and Paya look the exact same. You revisit the same areas from the original, and the characters automatically agree to help you because you've already saved the world before. Link doesn't feel "alone" to me anymore. The developers have not changed Hyrule enough to accommodate this change in tone, which, in my eyes, ultimately undermines the moments when Link is exploring Hyrule.

This completely represents what Tears of the Kingdom is to me. It's clear the folks at Nintendo knew how successful Breath of the Wild was but didn't really realise why. So when it came time to make the sequel, they threw in ideas without wondering how they would change the original. The tightly designed mechanics from the original have been removed and replaced with what amounts to godmode tools that don't really mesh well with the puzzles they've designed. I haven't talked much about the overall plot, as I don't want to spoil a game that most people are enjoying much more than me. But it feels similarly weak to the original's, and this time, there's no masterfully crafted atmosphere to save it. Breath of the Wild wowed me. Dare I say, it was a breath of fresh air. But Tears of the Kingdom just leaves me feeling nothing. It's not awful; despite my ranting, there are still elements to appreciate. The visual style, as I've said, is phenomenal, Hyrule itself is still slightly fun to explore despite it's lack of a distinct tone, and the soundtrack can be incredible during the endgame. The creativity of the ideas and concepts shown here is fantastic, but that simply isn't enough when the rest of the game doesn't feel interested in expanding on them.

Sometime soon, I want to play through more Zelda games. Not only because I admittedly haven't played that many, but because I want to see what everyone else sees. I want to see how this series became one of the most iconic in history. When I started Tears of the Kingdom, I went in thinking I would get to see it. But when I look at this game, I unfortunately cannot give it the title of "Legend".

The good:
-The map is huge, and it's packed with content.
-Most of the new mechanics like fusing and recall are very fun to use.
-Exploring the islands was very fun and easy to do.
-Creating your own machines is fun, and it offers thousands of possible inventions. Despite the battery being a big problem, the huge amount of freedom the developers give you to create your machines is great, and I wish most of the game gave you this much freedom.
-It has a way better final boss and story than BOTW.
-The new abilities offer a lot more uses compared to BOTW.
-Obtaining extra parts to build machines is very quick and easy.
-You can fuse several solid objects and items with your shields like bombs, springs, mine carts and a miniature flamethrower which you can also use while shield surfing to give you several new ways to travel.

The bad:
-Combat wise, Link feels very stiff and hard to control. Several boss fights boil down to flurry rush spamming.
-Traversing on land takes way too long. Most of your time is going to be spent running with a stamina bar that depletes in 3 seconds with a character that runs and walks very slowly.
-The majority of the weapons break in 10 to 25 swings.
-Unlocking anything in this game takes way too much time and effort. It also requires you to do a lot of uninteresting side quests and grinding.
-There are a lot of unskippable cutscenes.
-It's so tedious to complete quests, mainly because it revolves around a lot of back and forth location wise.
-The hitboxes on most enemies are way bigger than they look.
-If your bond meter with your horse isn't maxed out, your horse is going to occasionally steer away from where you are moving. The horses can't teleport near you, they will only run towards you if you're very close to them, and they refuse to jump off any cliff that is 5 feet tall and higher.
-Link easily ragdolls from most enemies and bosses attacks, making fights very tedious. Ragdolling becomes an even bigger annoyance whenever you're trying to fight a dragon without a bow, since most of their attacks will knock you to the ground.
-Even though creating your own machines makes exploring easier, it still requires you to grind a lot to upgrade your battery capacity and to unlock most of the machines, since the first options they give you are too slow and inconsistent for traversal.
-Shrines were too easy most of the time.
-The camera is mostly awful when fighting a singular enemy, and it's even worse when fighting multiple enemies. The targeting system doesn't help much either because of how it constantly focuses on the wrong enemy and because of how it turns the camera to the side, making it difficult to backflip to avoid attacks.
-Despite the story being better, Ganondorf is still a very bland villain, since most of his character revolves around hatred and vengeance.
-The amount of weapons, shields, and bows you're able to hold is so little that it revolves around constantly fusing whatever weapon and item you can find, making it very repetitive. Upgrading your inventory is easy at first but becomes very long and tedious the more you upgrade since each inventory upgrade is divided into weapons, shields and bows, and each upgrade further increases the price by one korok seed. You can only obtain one extra inventory slot per upgrade.
-Exploring caves is such a drag because of the insane amount of boulders that cover most of the caves. You also need to use weapons that are fused with rocks to be able to destroy it, which revolves around breaking several of your weapons and constantly fusing the new ones that drop from inside the boulders with nearby rocks.
-Outside the main story, the characters are very bland and forgettable.

Even though I wrote a lot of criticism about this game, I honestly had fun when I wasn't being forced to grind for hours and hours. I just think that the developers should've given the player a more consistent way to travel near the beginning of the game. For example: In Elden Ring they give you a horse in the beginning of the game that doesn't get tired, runs quickly, can jump in the air, can teleport to you and follows anything you tell it to do. Another problem that even Elden Ring suffers is annoying upgrade systems that slow down the pacing of the game by a lot. Finally, I just think that the fun and tedium are constantly at odds with each other until you put in like 60+ hours to unlock most things.

First things first, I am an EXTREME Breath of the Wild hater. There was not a single thing about that game I liked other than its music. Unfortunately for me, this style is apparently what Zelda will be going forward so I will curse botw to my dying day. I'm gonna miss the traditional zelda formula. So why did I even play this one? My friend got sent two copies so he gave me one which means I didn't end up spending my money on this game thankfully.

With that out of the way, I did actually have some positives coming away from Tears of the Kingdom. At the end of the day I did have more fun with this game over its predecessor though thats not a hard thing to do. It kept my attention for easily double if not triple my playtime with botw. Link with his hair grown out and down is hot and it almost made me consider not wearing headgear like a massive idiot. I corrected that real quick. Stats > Fashion, Set Bonuses > Aesthetic, keep the hylian hood up at all times. Fashion first folks have no rights and don't talk to me if you are one of them.

When Link cooks he also hums music from the previous games which I think was a very nice touch. I could only place a couple since some are pretty hard to hear and real short and what I think I heard might not be correct but I'm certain I heard Saria's Song, the Main Theme and The Ballad of the Wind Fish.

The map seemed to have more going on this time and I enjoyed that cuz going around the first game's map was so goddamn boring. Make no mistake this one is still boring to traverse as its always the worst part of any game with a big map but it took like 10 hours for that boredom to come in instead of 1. Being able to make vehicles to speed up traversal, even if its limited by your batteries and they will disappear after a certain amount of time depending on how you built them, is generally a good thing. The increased enemy variety also helped with that but you're still fighting the bokoblins and moblins 75% of the time.

I still hate the weapon durability on a fundamental level and its not inherently better in this game compared to botw. The weapons are still made of wet tissue paper, however the fusion system makes it a bit more bearable. One of the largest issues with botw's durability was that fighting lower tiered enemies with anything but early game weapons was a net loss. They'd break after a couple swings and you'd get a stick or club in return. Now those awful weapons that they drop can be fused with their own monster parts or ones from your inventory, other weapons on the ground or assorted items. Now you can get something comparable to an unfused mid tier weapons with that stick. Breaking something like a silver lynel weapon on a red bokoblin is still a net loss however and I found myself not fusing weapons to each other past the early game. Just using monster parts and other materials seemed better all around.

There were a couple, what this game would call, dungeons. Keeping with the trend that the water temple is the worst of the bunch. In my opinion they are a large step up from the divine beasts of old but are still not as interesting as actual full length dungeons as they are quite short and are just "open x amount of locks". When you boil it down older zelda dungeon were "get keys to open doors to find the boss key to open the boss door" but there was a lot more stuff you had to do in between those as opposed to here where its one central gimmick in a handful of rooms/floors. A real shame that shrines are just dungeon rooms plopped on the map cuz these could have used a couple.

I thought its performance wasn't bad most of the time but when I activated the ultrahand in areas like the wetlands I had some pretty bad drops. There was also times where the game froze when I dove into the depths cuz it was loading it in. Like Link was just motionless in the air while all the effects from diving were still going. This was on a launch switch that never leaves the superior docked mode. Most of you are just a bunch of overreacting pc gaming babies who bleach your eyes when a game drops to 59.99 frames to justify your overpriced machines.

Music is still great but its a Zelda game and thats a requirement.

This is where my positives about the game end.

I don't know how anyone can spend 100+ hours on this game without being bored to tears of the kingdom. Once I got to 50 hours I was hoping my remaining main story quests were the last of it and thankfully they were. Its the definition of repetitive trying desperately to distract you with other repetitive tasks that by comparison to what you were just doing for the 30th time that hour as you go across this map, make it seem like its an oasis in the desert. At the end of the day I guess thats my fault for doing as much side stuff I did. The difference between a game like totk vs other games I like who also suffer from large map disease is the other aspects of them have main, progression related aspects I enjoy wholeheartedly and look forward to interacting with unlike here.

I still think you have way too many abilities out of the gate. I like unlocking things, I like the progression that comes with that. Theres like 4 or 5 unlockables (half of which are just your tablet features) here depending on if you count an upgrade of a specific other ability as a whole new thing. Don't know if some of those are technically missable or not as I just stumbled upon them as side quests and the game kind of pushes you in the direction to follow one. The main progression once again is just your hearts, stamina and the enemy scaling.

Exploration is still just as unrewarding. Chests are mostly just arrows or shields and weapons that will break during your next fight that most of the time I just left in the chests or rupees though I found those to be very rare by comparison. Once again nothing makes me want to spend that time getting to the top of a cliff instead of just ignoring it on my way to my objective. They game could also use more weapon variety. You have the one handed moveset, the two handed move set, the spear moveset, the magic scepter versions of the 3 above types where the largest difference is you don't throw the weapon but shoot magic, and boomerangs where its the one handed weapon unless you throw it. Fusing doesn't change its moveset but it does increase durability and changes its look, reach, elemental attribute and damage depending on what you use.

I am not a creative person when it comes to what a video game's systems allow you to do, as they are themselves limited by the developers code and its not feasible to program for every conceivable thing a player could want to do. Being plopped in a map and being told to "do whatever you want" doesn't do it for me. I like structure, I like linearity. When I play stuff like Minecraft, my house is a basic large square or rectangle with maybe a second floor or basement if I'm feeling adventurous and I've never fucked with redstone. The building in this game was not something I enjoyed but only did it for its convenience or necessity to progress. I do not play Zelda to get my Garry's mod fix. I found it rather cumbersome to get things lined up the way I want since stuff moves only in 45 degree angles. My auto build was only full of contraptions to help with traversal since I hate how the horses control in this duology even at full bond. I made vehicles for land, water, air, the desert and some stuff to help with climbing like hot air balloons. I've seen the Metal Gears people build but I don't care about doing cool things for the sake of it and I can't be bothered to put in that time when my sword and bow are more than enough.

The shrine and Korok problems persist. The shrines lack variety despite the garry's mod gimmick and somehow I kept getting repeat gimmicks back to back at times. I'll ignore that a lot of them can be outright skipped with rocket shields as you can't use zonai items from your inventory so its your deliberate choice to go that route. However when you have some that just are a treasure chest rooms without being tied to quests to get them open then I think you could have cut some out. As for Kokoks, most of their minigames I remember from botw were here and some new ones but they are still just as repetitive. There was also this rather frequent one (mostly cuz they are visible in the overworld) that is made to get you interact with the building system where you gotta move this stupid lazy korok who got separated from his friend. More than half the time I could just grab him with the ultrahand and walk him there instead of wasting my resources building something to get over there. The sheer amount of both of them makes me never want to get them all.

I find the action of upgrading your batteries, which powers your builds that use zonai parts, to be super tedious and gave off the feeling of padding. The ore itself is easy to get and it respawns like everything else, its getting the condensed charges that takes time. If you want charges outright you either convert the ore at forges and then wait for them to restock either by just doing something else or leaving the depths, going to sleep to get past midnight in game and coming back or go around the depths and fight the bosses down there that like everything else respawn during a blood moon. These bosses drop like 20-30 condensed charges except for special cases that I won't spoil here but are a one time reward. It takes 100 charges per individual charge of a battery so you need 300 for a full one.

The depths mentioned above I hated. I hate everything about its existence. Its dark as all sin down there until you activate lightroots. Its like those shitty horror games that think "you can't see" or "your light source is limited" is scary when its just annoying. I'm just firing arrows fused with my hundreds of stockpiled brightbloom seeds almost every 5 seconds to light it up so I don't step in "the gloom" which reduces your maximum hearts until you either get to a lightroot, get to the surface or eat a meal made with sundelions. Most of the the enemies down here also inflict you with gloom on hit. There is a set or armor that can give you some bonus hearts to take the gloom hits but its also inherently tedious due to it taking place in the depths which requires you to collect hundreds of poe souls to get it all (which are found in clumps of varying amounts with their values being 1, 10 or 20 and yes respawn).

I didn't care for the story just like in botw and I just really don't like this iteration of Zelda as a character. Then again I am comparing her to one with such a great relationship with Link as Skyward Sword's, nevermind the fact she is the best iteration of Zelda, then botw/totk zelda has no chance. I don't care what a diary says, I WANT TO SEE IT HAPPENING not read about it. The story is mostly told through flashbacks again. Can we stop doing this? Whats wrong with having it be done the normal way? The almost all post dungeon cutscenes are like 80-90% the same between them with some dialogue being outright repeated. Solving puzzles, I guess you could call the geoglyphs that, for these breadcrumbing flashbacks also aren't a worthwhile reward nor do they fill the void of an engaging story.

I almost forgot to write about the sky islands cuz they are just nothing. They are Tiny, tiny, tiny, chunks of land in the sky outside of the one large one thats tutorial island. Maybe there will be a shrine there or an enemy or its just a prebuild contraption to get you to the other islands. If you're lucky you'll find a minigame or a literal gacha machine (capsules and all) for zonai parts for your machines. I think that for two of the dungeons the act of getting around the sky islands is supposed to be considered as part of the dungeon cuz of how small it is (yes one of those is the water temple). If you removed the sky islands or just had a few larger ones as opposed to the splattering approach I don't think you'd be missing out on anything. More isn't always best but thats something this industry has forgotten, among so many other things.

TLDR: If I gave botw a 3/10 then this is a 5/10. I enjoyed the game more than the first one but thats not a hard thing to do. Link with long hair is great and the music is as always, beautiful. Unfortunately most of my problems were not fixed and and those that were are nothing more than band aids on broken arms. I found its new systems such as building jank machines and doubling down on the whole "player freedom" angle to be uninteresting. The weapon durability will never not be ass even with the fusion mechanics. Theres still too many shrines and koroks with too many repeats of gimmicks and too many abilities given on tutorial island. The story being told mostly though sometimes repetitive flashbacks is a narrative killer and the story wasn't good at all. Exploration was still unrewarding. This is not even a contender for my goty and I don't see what the "masterpiece" claims stand on.

A mediocre title that only rarely steps out from under the shadow of its predecessor. There isn't nearly enough depth to the new content for it to carry this absolute behemoth of a game, and I was bored to the point of not wanting to continue by the time I'd reached the halfway mark.

I remember playing BoTW and being shocked that someone had finally figured out the open world formula that Ubisoft had been trying to crack for over a decade. ToTK never had that moment for me. The opening few hours of the game range from interesting to absolutely awful - The new building system is at first intriguing, but also fiddly and painful to work with. Shrines are still here and still exactly the same, just with new puzzles and now there are more of them. The chasms lead to an exciting new area that held my interest for a very long time - Until I realized the resources you got there were only really useful there, and that you can easily clear the entire game without even noticing that area exists.

The story also deserves special mention. I was at first interested in this game having more of a story focus. It was obvious from the previews that there were more cutscenes, and it looked like some events might actually be happening as you played the game, rather than all the story having already happened. This is not the case. Once again you run around collecting memories of things that have already happened to learn what the story of the game is, and once again the final boss is content to sit in the middle of the map doing absolutely nothing until you go to fight it. The English voice cast is almost universally terrible. Ganondorf gets some room to have a character (His VA is actually doing a voice!) while everyone else badly fakes a British accent and just kind of talks at you conversationally no matter how dramatic their current circumstances might be. Much of the game's voiced dialogue also doesn't read well - It doesn't read naturally and the voiceover is frequently stilted. I'm not sure if this is the result of poor translation or if it's just being exacerbated by poor voice direction, but it's bizarre to see in a AAA title from a major studio.

Regarding the new mechanics: BoTW had a largely intuitive and quick-to-use set of abilities. It was easy to snap between whatever you might need, use it quickly, and get back to the game. ToTK has a couple abilities like this, but the main focus of the game is on Ultrahand, the ability that lets you pick up pieces of objects and glue them together. This power is basically the defining feature of the game - It's the only major change to Link's moveset from BoTW, its use is required to solve most of the game's puzzles, and nearly every shrine will somehow use Ultrahand.

Ultrahand is not quick and snappy to use. On its own that might be fine, I can understand wanting to slow the pace of the game down a little to make people really consider what they're doing. In practice, with the frequency Ultrahand needs to be used, it's a pace-murdering pain. Often I had figured out a puzzle, knew exactly what I needed to do, and then had to spend several minutes painstakingly assembling the solution one piece at a time. I think if the Ultrahand falls flat for you, there's very little in this game that will salvage your experience.

Regarding performance, the game being stuck on the Switch does it no favors. It's often hard to make out what an object is, with small objects turning into a smear of colored pixels you kind of just have to identify based off vibes. Panning your camera in a circle in almost any location will cause framerate drops. The game absolutely collapses when you have more than four or five enemies on-screen at once. Memories this time require you to find a small pool of water in a large area, something that would be manageable in any modern game, but which is made a challenge in ToTK due to the game's pitiful draw distance making the pool impossible to distinguish from the terrain if it's more than ten feet away. If I see a video of this game posted it's almost immediately obvious whether it's running on an emulator or if it's footage from the Switch, just because the PC can hold a stable framerate.

Overall, I would not recommend ToTK. It has a few standout moments, and I'm sure it's going to continue to top sales charts for many months, but to me the formula is now completely stale. It's a derivative experience that doesn't do enough to stand out from its predecessor.

Instead of doing what Zelda has always done and innovating with their structure and design concepts, for the first time in the 37 years of Zelda games, I feel like Zelda team bought into its own hype after BotW. Marrying a more classic structure to BotW's lush world and free systems could have yielded the best Zelda game ever made. Instead, the only major change made to BotW is the addition of more stuff TM, with no attempt to innovate or create something new like Zelda always has. And for me, this structure is infinitely less charming on the second go around. Probably the single most disapointing gaming experience of my adult life made worse by the fact that all anyone can do is call it the greatest game of all time, apparently.

Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most profoundly sad experiences I have had playing a game. It may seem to be a hyperbolic statement, but it is true; it is truly shocking just how much good this game squanders, wholly and absolutely. I am eighteen years old, nervous and afraid to graduate high school and go into the unfamiliar territory of adult life. It’s funny just how well the release of both games is timed. This is all to say, Breath of the Wild is an important game to me. It was my first game, the first game that truly captured me, my mind, body, and soul. The unparalleled freedom on display was wondrous for middle school me, and to me today.

The thing that made BotW so different, and so engaging, from every other open world I’ve played since, was the fact that it wasn’t scared to have lots of open space. Of course, there was still lots to do, but the main engine for exploration was not the fact that there was an external reward waiting for you on the other side of a hill, it was that you could go to that hill, even if it was difficult. And that maybe that hill had a good view, and there was something cool to see. To put it into succinct terms, BotW was allowed to leave things as they were. It was a world reeling from an apocalypse, a world of nature and sparse piano notes drifting through tree leaves and grassy fields. It was a world that was populated, not by people or checklists or things to do, but of places to see, of things to discover for no other reason than you could. To say it was magical feels like an understatement: it felt to me that there was a whole world imprinted onto that game cartridge. It was wondrous.

One of the key aspects holding this game back is the fact that the map is reused. This may not serve to be much of a problem at first, but once you realize just how wildly different the design philosophy and ethos are in Tears, things start to fall apart. Impressively, Tears of the Kingdom held this same wonder for me, initially. Upon realizing the breadth and scope of the Great Sky Island, I was incredibly excited. If we could expect this level of scope from the sky, this level of creativity and boundless ambition, then surely this would live up to its legendary predecessor. Truly, TotK is an incredibly bizarre game in this regard. On the surface, the two games look incredibly similar - and they are - but the design ethos of the sequel is so wildly different from the original that it’s so jarring when you’re reminded that this is, fundamentally, BotW but bigger and bolder. The game attempts to remind you of BotW only when it is convenient. The Great Sky Island is the Great Plateau, and clearly trying to emulate that idea, of a microcosm of the game serving as a tutorial. Unfortunately, with the scope of the game ballooning massively, it is impossible to do this in TotK. As a result, there are many mechanics - and in a truly baffling move, even an entire ability - that is simply left up to the player to find out on their own. This wouldn’t be an issue if these mechanics were not integral to the experience. Autobuild especially should have absolutely been given to you upon completing the tutorial area, and I really don’t know why it isn’t.

Comparing the Great Sky Island to the Great Plateau is a good way to see just how different - and more messy - TotK is as a game compared to BotW. The Great Sky Island has to introduce everything BotW did - climbing, sprinting, stamina, spirit orb / light of blessings, all four key abilities, temperature change, day/night cycle, cooking, story, and more, all while not overwhelming the player - in addition to Zonai devices, crystallized charges, energy wells, Zonaite, Ultrahand, a new story that is a direct sequel (so considerably more difficult), caves.. the list goes on. It is so massive, in fact, that there are entire swaths to the game not explained whatsoever, like different map layers, gloom, the entirety of the depths, Autobuild, Zonaite cost for building new structures via Autobuild, et cetera. Breath was already a massive game, and to add even more on top of that, while still accommodating new players who haven’t played Breath, means the game simply bites off more than it can chew.
There is a general sentiment that Tears is the true Breath, that the prequel was somehow just a test run. I don’t buy it. Truly, what is better in Tears that was in Breath? Combat remains wholly unchanged, with the exception of Fuse, which simply adds more busywork to the act of obtaining a strong weapon, and destroys weapon economy even more. Exploration is exactly the same, with the exception of Zonai devices, which only serve to make exploration easier, and areas gated off by story progression, like Thunderhead Isle, Construct Factory and Spirit Temple. Story is decidedly worse, a retread of the story of the prior game, but it has big anime beams and massive explosions and more cutscenes, so I guess that makes it better? Side quests are decidedly middle of the road, though I enjoyed the Lucky Clover Gazette quest chain.

So what is new? Mainly, story, traversal, and map. The main map of Hyrule, still by and large the most interesting place to explore, has been remixed with new environmental concerns, ruins falling from the sky, chasms splitting open the ground, and the general advancements of various settlements. Then there is the sky. It is truly, truly shocking to me that the tutorial area is the largest Sky Island in the game. These sky islands mostly serve as a distraction, and it’s really unfortunate, because they’re where the game is at its best: building Zonai contraptions to traverse the sky and visit far off locales. These are so small, however, that the non-dungeon sky islands were only around 10% of my total playtime. I don’t understand why they were so widely advertised when there are so little of them within the game.

If having too little space is the problem of the sky, then the depths have the same problem. The most memorable part of the game was falling down that first chasm, falling for what felt like forever, into the depths of the land. A whole new map, the size of all of Hyrule, is truly an exciting prospect. It is grand, like Hyrule, but that is where the similarities end, because there is simply no diversity in the depths. Spend a few hours down there and that’s it. There’s only two biomes - the main biome and lava falls - and only two main POI, being mines and Yiga hideouts. Everything else is just materials farming. Better weapons, the game’s only source of Zonaite, and the only source of crystallized charges. On paper, sure, it sounds like a lot. But without the visual variety that Hyrule offers, it’s simply unfun to explore, becoming a chore entirely by midgame, when you’re just going lightroot to lightroot, surprised by nothing and disappointed by everything.

The main map is BotW’s map, but with more things to do. it’s the best part of the game, but that’s because it’s from the better game: everything here, you’ve seen before. Shrines are the same, almost entirely a joke (although combat shrines are improved), there are towers, stables, villages, and now with caves and chasms dotting the map. The caves and wells are cool, but they’re not enough. There’s simply not enough here for it to be its own game.

Tears of the Kingdom is Breath of the Wild but louder, bolder, bigger. It's a worse game for it.


## what i played

i spent 75 hours doing maaaybe half the shrines, a handful of side quests, upgrading my armor most of the way, and beating the final boss

### stuff i liked

- the art direction
- the music near the end of the game is incredible
- lots of cool shrine puzzles
- link is once again a hot little elf twink on display for us
- the sky islands were pretty cool
- the enemy design is so cool looking
- i just want to play a game about bokoblins thanks

### stuff i was meh about

- the framerate got really choppy whenever you do physics stuff, but was playable for most things
- the overall soundtrack direction is too subdued and ambient for my tastes
- frankly i'm not huge on the combat in BOTW/TOTK. the side dodge vs back dodge vs parry mechanics is way too much for me. dark souls doesn't even need this many types of parries. i never bothered mastering or even getting half good at this.
- only 5 full dungeons
- none of the boss fights were very fun to me
- why are horses still so useless?
- zelda has always had side quests but i think the structure of putting map markers everywhere and making lists of side quests and all that makes the game commodified in a way that feels uncomfy to me, and pressures me into doing more tedious shit than i would naturally
- the structure of the whole game is basically 100% flat, like BOTW
- everything is approximately the same difficulty with only minimal scaling
- because of this, dungeons can't really build on previous ones
- and you don't collect new and interesting upgrades over the course of the game
- i didnt really find building stuff as compelling as they must've expected
- on occasion i was like "oh shit!" but it was rare
- usually it was just tedious and boring
- due to the finicky physics and weird abilities, lots of puzzles can be cheesed, and it may not even be remotely clear what the intended solution is... leading to a dissatisfied feeling of cheating the game and/or yourself
- i feel like older zelda games had more unique types of enemies?
- most enemies here are just recolors
- it was tough to manage all 5 companions since they're 100% context sensitive actions :(

### stuff i didnt like

- feels too "epic" for zelda imo, which i associate with being a bit more cutesy and subdued
- too many cutscenes
- dialogue for almost every character is far too long
- shonen anime tropes really undercut the zelda mood for me
- the underground area was a huge bummer for me, and i chose not to fully explore it
- dungeon design is once again lacking. the dungeons are basically completely flat in structure: just do 4-5 puzzles in any order. also it's possible to cheese some of the puzzles via environment traversal. eek.
- the pacing of the final stretch of the game is all out of wack
- mech combat is a huge bummer
- "gloom" sucked because it punishes you for exploring and for not stockpiling certain types of cures
- and it makes you want to just run away from every battle involving it

## verdict

i would've had a lot more fun just loading up a classic 2d zelda and replaying it