Genuinely the most exhausted I've felt after beating a fantasy adventure game, taking the crown from Dark Souls III.
If I were meaner I'd drop 1 star but I'd be remiss not to acknowledge the technical and presentation aspects of this. As fun as it is to compare it to Gmod, it far exceeds it in many practical ways, though of course not being nearly as deep.
I don't have the energy to list out everything detail by detail but I think what killed a lot of my enthusiasm which peaked in the 10-20 hour mark (thus, spent close to 40-60 with a sense of "is it over yet?") was just the sheer lack of ambition in shrines and general quest design. For a game so heavily built around its lego pieces it sure is scared to make the player put more than 2 pieces together (and if it does, it leaves out a preassembled example 9/10 times.). There's little way to tell whether or not the shrine you're entering is worth your time, an easy "avoid" is if it's right alongside the main roads of the map, but even near the edge of the map or more far away regions I found the game reminding me for the 3rd time post-tutorial how to throw an item or how to stack objects. Late into the game I just started skipping shrines wholesale, unless they were convenient for fast travel i.e. in the sky islands or mazes or I just had a REALLY good feeling they'd be at least decent.
In many ways the Zonai stuff was the most consistently disappointing to me, with much of the slog of the game wrapping around to it. I scraped by with only 5 notches of battery(!!!) for 90% of my playthrough and felt like I had more than enough breathing room for any puzzles, bordering on bypassing many outright due to headroom. I said this shortly after leaving the great sky island, that they should have doubled charge capacity as a baseline; and I think they agree because any zonai task that looks like it'd ask for more also has batteries lying around to offset anyone who has an unupgraded charge.
By the time I wanted the game to be over it just kept sending me on absurdly long fetch quests. It might sound silly but do you know how often I completed a temple or major questline and thought "man I could've replayed Ico"? A lot more than just once lol. That's a new feeling for me really, in regards to singleplayer games; I may joke about it but I'm almost never serious if it's anything legitimate, but I really felt that here. In many ways I just don't think the game respects the players time, and I don't mean in an endearing / engaging way like you'd see in Demon's Souls or Faster Than Light. It doesn't help by this point it repeats the shit out of bosses in a way that would make Elden Ring blush, and unlike Elden Ring there's no easy way to tell if what you're doing is underpowered vs you based on map location; it feels arbitrary,
Really where this game shines is.. where most 3D Zeldas shine, which is the world and characters. and to that end it's very good imo. The music is also mostly lovely. I'm now too tired to write more, kind of like the average shrine quality walking from the outer tenth of the map inwards.
If I were meaner I'd drop 1 star but I'd be remiss not to acknowledge the technical and presentation aspects of this. As fun as it is to compare it to Gmod, it far exceeds it in many practical ways, though of course not being nearly as deep.
I don't have the energy to list out everything detail by detail but I think what killed a lot of my enthusiasm which peaked in the 10-20 hour mark (thus, spent close to 40-60 with a sense of "is it over yet?") was just the sheer lack of ambition in shrines and general quest design. For a game so heavily built around its lego pieces it sure is scared to make the player put more than 2 pieces together (and if it does, it leaves out a preassembled example 9/10 times.). There's little way to tell whether or not the shrine you're entering is worth your time, an easy "avoid" is if it's right alongside the main roads of the map, but even near the edge of the map or more far away regions I found the game reminding me for the 3rd time post-tutorial how to throw an item or how to stack objects. Late into the game I just started skipping shrines wholesale, unless they were convenient for fast travel i.e. in the sky islands or mazes or I just had a REALLY good feeling they'd be at least decent.
In many ways the Zonai stuff was the most consistently disappointing to me, with much of the slog of the game wrapping around to it. I scraped by with only 5 notches of battery(!!!) for 90% of my playthrough and felt like I had more than enough breathing room for any puzzles, bordering on bypassing many outright due to headroom. I said this shortly after leaving the great sky island, that they should have doubled charge capacity as a baseline; and I think they agree because any zonai task that looks like it'd ask for more also has batteries lying around to offset anyone who has an unupgraded charge.
By the time I wanted the game to be over it just kept sending me on absurdly long fetch quests. It might sound silly but do you know how often I completed a temple or major questline and thought "man I could've replayed Ico"? A lot more than just once lol. That's a new feeling for me really, in regards to singleplayer games; I may joke about it but I'm almost never serious if it's anything legitimate, but I really felt that here. In many ways I just don't think the game respects the players time, and I don't mean in an endearing / engaging way like you'd see in Demon's Souls or Faster Than Light. It doesn't help by this point it repeats the shit out of bosses in a way that would make Elden Ring blush, and unlike Elden Ring there's no easy way to tell if what you're doing is underpowered vs you based on map location; it feels arbitrary,
Really where this game shines is.. where most 3D Zeldas shine, which is the world and characters. and to that end it's very good imo. The music is also mostly lovely. I'm now too tired to write more, kind of like the average shrine quality walking from the outer tenth of the map inwards.
LordDarias
10 months ago