3 reviews liked by Connorgale


FFXVI is hands down the worst of the 16 mainline FF titles, though we take no delight in this game being such a disappointment.

FF is our favourite video game franchise. We wanted nothing but to love this. There are glimpses of a game we love in FFXVI. Sadly it's maybe a grand total of 15 minutes out of the 55+ hour runtime. It has solid combat, but even that isn't as good as other action games out there and by the time you're on your 30th hour of the game it's gotten dull.

The game is a bafflingly poorly executed mess of bad writing. From its superficial understanding of oppression politics to its far too large cast of one-dimensional characters to the way the main scenario is effectively split into six mini-stories that don't flow together in either tone or narrative.

It's almost impressive that throughout the 8 years it took for FFXVI to develop, virtually every core concept within the story was done better in other FF games. Seriously, there are shards of FFXV, FFXIV Stormblood, FFXIV Shadowbringers, FFXIV Endwalker, Stranger of Paradise and more in here... all of them outclassing FFXVI on their shared themes and plot points.

FFXVI is basically a game that sums up what we dislike about AAA game design, dark fantasy writing tropes and more. Bad game.

Tears of the Kingdom is more Breath of the Wild. I loved Breath of the Wild, So I was very happy to fall in step alongside its successor, and launching the game and advancing through the Great Sky Islands was among some of my happiest gaming moments. I was over the moon to be able to experience the joy that was exploring Hyrule all over again. Everything has been made bigger, flashier, louder, crazier than you could ever ask for.

Which is why I feel so conflicted. Initially I was certain that I might be playing the greatest game ever made. But as the game moved on, I slowly and sadly realized that much of what I didn’t like about Breath of the Wild survived the transition just as handily as what I loved. Breath of the Wild was a deeply flawed experience held up by its masterful world and exploration, and now Tears of the Kingdom turns everything to eleven. Everything. The world and exploration are even better, which only makes the flaws even more glaring and confusing, considering Nintendo had six years to innovate and smooth out the edges. It almost feels unfair to criticize the game like this. I got everything I loved and more, but not the jaw dropping wonder I got the first time around. I’ve given the game a 9/10, and yet I'm frustrated that it's not a 10/10. Many of the deep flaws of Breath of the Wild are either still present or somehow even worse, which absolutely astonishes me. But it feels incredibly childish to complain that the game was only a measly 9/10 that I sunk 110 hours into. I’m torn between really liking the game that I got, and feeling disappointed in its missed potential.

Make no mistake, Tears of the Kingdom does a lot right. The new abilities make exploring and interacting with the worlds completely different experiences from Breath of the Wild, despite the overworld map being largely the same. Ascend and Recall are both very convenient and allow you to move very creatively if you can find a ceiling or moving object respectively, but the real game changers are Fuse and Ultrahand.

Fuse automatically makes every collectable item more valuable and, critically, more interesting. You have access to many more options for combat and traversal. Attaching two spears and keeping every enemy out of range, shooting a muddle bud and just having the enemies fight each other, putting a glider on your shield and doing a super jump straight over their head, putting a puffshroom on your shield to slip away in a cloud of smoke should you take a hit. The durability system in Breath of the Wild both made weapons unexciting rewards and limited resources that you were reluctant to use, but Fuse neatly fixes both of these issues. Weapons are now as exciting as you make them. And because weapons are all more common and can be fused in any number of ways, most fights are a net positive, gaining more items than you used.

So It’s heartbreaking how tedious digging through the inventory to find fusion items actually is. You will only ever use a handful of staple items because trying to find anything that isn’t at the top of the menu when sorted by either ‘fuse strength’ or ‘most used’ is a massive time sink. Trying to experiment is unnecessarily time consuming, to the point where I just didn’t bother. And this is compounded by some fusions just towering over others. Muddle buds and puffshrooms can let you clear out entire crowds with no risk to yourself, rocket shields can completely break many of the shrines, Gibdo bones on a strong bow eviscerate every single boss and miniboss that the game has. And all of this is really highlighted by the frankly unimpressive combat that has been ported, untouched, straight from Breath of the Wild. I tried to find clever ways to deal with enemies whenever I could in order to avoid having to deal with the frustrating combat, and as a result, I spent quite a lot of time scrolling through menus just looking for items to fuse.

One noteworthy change is the rework of one of the most important combat tools, abilities. And they are easily the most glaring step back made by Nintendo. Breath of the Wild’s champion abilities were simple and elegant, you hold down a button and activate the ability. Using the sage’s abilities in Tears of the Kingdom is downright painful. You are followed by an AI companion that you must run up to, press A to prime the ability, aim the ability, and finally be able to actually use it. To make this even worse, there are five sages who will be running around you, getting in the way of the one you actually want to use. You can disable them, but that means you will need to dig around in the inventory even more when you actually do need them, which is quite common. You’ll want Tulin, as he gets used every time you glide. Yunobo is mostly used to break rocks, which is pretty frequently. Sidon was useless. Riju was the only one who was actually worth finding and activating, her lightning was actually quite powerful. I loathed having to physically find the sages in order to use the abilities, so much so that I never bothered. Letting the sages run wild was always preferable as they helped out passively by attacking enemies. Sometimes. They were extremely inconsistent, sometimes they would lock down an enemy by themselves, other times they would do absolutely nothing. I almost wonder if they began developing a companion AI system for a separate idea that they ultimately scrapped, and then recycled into the sages in order to justify the developer time spent. Because I struggle to stomach that developers and designers as talented as the team behind this game could make such an awful design choice when they had it just fine the first time around.

To top it all off, the enemy variety still is not very impressive. While there are several new enemies to encounter, Breath of the Wild’s enemy variety was miniscule, so a handful of new monsters only raises the count from ‘way too small’, to just ‘too small’. The bulk of fights will still be with the core trio of bokoblins, lizalfos, and moblins, and the interest in fighting them left me long before the credits rolled. Food and Armor upgrades are just as abusable here as in Breath of the Wild as well, you can heal at any time and at no risk, and a few upgrades to your armor makes you take almost no damage. The many types of armor to juggle between adds even more tedious digging through menus. Combat starts out incredibly fun and experimental, but is still too easily broken with food and armor upgrades, and monotonous in enemy types to remain interesting for a 100+ hour game. By the end you will be functionally invincible, fighting with the same handful of fusions and Ultrahand constructs.

Ultrahand is the true star of the show. The suite of Zonai tools and the ability to combine them however you want really cannot be overstated. You’ve seen the clips; people have built everything from fully automated mechs to log towers that reach higher than the sky islands. The ability to auto craft using zonaite also directly ties Ultrahand to exploring the depths, rewarding you for filling out the map and gathering resources. The ability to create vehicles fixes another issue I had with Breath of the Wild, which is that the actual, physical act of running around is very dull. Running is almost always just downtime between points of interest, and over a 100-hour playthrough that adds up to be a lot. Not a problem here, just build a motorcycle or hoverbike. The hoverbike especially received heavy use throughout all of my playthrough. For the low cost of either two fans and a steering stick, or just nine zonaite, you can fly away from all your navigational issues. Plus, the Autobuild helps to offset Ultrahand's clunkiness, while still requiring you to build what you want at least once. The controls are not great and the framerate can really drop while using Ultrahand so this is a fantastic addition.

Both titles heavily reward intrinsic motivation, the idea that the act of doing something is inherently satisfying to do, and that satisfaction is a fitting reward. Nothing showcases this better than Ultrahand. If you are not intrinsically motivated enough to just goof off with Link’s greatest toy, you will just make a handful of creations over and over again because they are all you really need. But if you find a lot of satisfaction in simply making stuff Ultrahand could keep you entertained for the entirety of your playthrough. I think I am more intrinsically motivated than not, and I loved creating solutions to the various problems Link will face. I built automatons during the “saving Hyrule” questline, to help out the soldiers who seemed shorthanded. Even though mechanically this obviously did not work, and the automatons despawned long before I encountered the soldiers again to clear out the next monster camp. If you are not so intrinsically inclined, you probably won’t be impressed with how open ended so much of Tears of the Kingdom is. There’s a well-known quote by Soren Johnson that you’ve probably heard, “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” Tears of the Kingdom can be very optimized, and I suspect that many players won’t force themselves to experiment and will instead just optimize as quickly as possible. And in doing so, they are missing out on the intrinsic value of doing something your own way. While many puzzles have open ended solutions, most have one clear ‘correct’ solution. If you really enjoy the intrinsic value of finding a new way to solve something, this is great. If you don’t, then it probably comes across as rather lazy. Why build a new solution when you can just rocket shield over the puzzle again? These scenarios are scattered all over Hyrule, but are especially prevalent in the shrines.

The shrines of Breath of the Wild were one of its most criticized aspects, and for good reason. The vast majority of them were too simple and unrewarding. I desperately hoped that Tears of the Kingdom would improve on them but it did not. The puzzles are all still undeveloped and mostly just a chore to do, and the new type of shrine, where you bring a crystal to the shrine pedestal, are never more complex or challenging. And this may be recency bias, but I think the puzzles in these new shrines are even worse. To its credit, the only real change made is an excellent one. The ‘test of strength’ format has been replaced with Eventide Island-esque combat challenges, where you are stripped of your loot and forced to navigate various combat arenas. These are a huge improvement, and also allow you to gauge just how far you’ve come. In the beginning, these are very difficult. You are forced to learn the combat, along with whatever particular technique the shrine focuses on. These get easier and easier as your stamina and hearts grow, and by the end you can just brute force your way through if that’s how you prefer to take these challenges. Many dislike how every shrine looks the same, but I personally actually quite like this. I like how it takes me from the mindset of exploration to the mindset of puzzle solving, even if the puzzles are never worth it.

There are also two brand new maps to explore, the Sky Islands and the Depths. The Sky Islands are excellent, the act of actually getting to them was always an enjoyable challenge, and once you make it up you are greeted with some of the more satisfying puzzles in the game. The visual style is excellent, and it’s no wonder this is what Nintendo focused on in the trailers. I only wish there were more islands, as the Sky is by far the smallest of the three explorable areas. The Depths I'm not so in love with. In the early and mid-game, these are genuinely excellent. Fighting your way through the darkness and trying to find lightroots to give you a little sanctuary to heal from the gloom was challenging and rewarding. I’m truly sad to say that once i had a decent amount of lightroots found, my enjoyment of the Depths dropped significantly. You no longer have to light your way and visually the Depths are barren, not nearly as pleasant as Hyrule or the Sky Islands, and it basically just becomes a giant zonaite mine. At some point I noticed that the overworld shrines and the Depths lightroots aligned. Later on, I noticed that the entire topography of the Depths was just the overworld inverted, and this is where my enjoyment of this area died. I had enough lightroots that I was no longer fighting the overwhelming darkness, and I knew what the entire map had to offer because I could just look at the overworld map. This really feels like forbidden knowledge, and any future playthroughs are going to be forever negatively affected because I can never un-learn this. Even when I have zero lightroots discovered, I will always be able to tell what the land around me looks like. And this really sucks, because not enjoying the Depths means that I don’t enjoy nearly half of all the explorable world.

Tears of the Kingdom is generally much more streamlined than Breath of the Wild, and it’s not great at communicating what you need to do in order to advance the various systems it offers. I didn’t unlock Autobuild until over 40 hours in, and I had no idea what I was missing that whole time because I was playing how I played Breath of the Wild. Who cares about the story? I just want to explore. As I advanced, enemies progressively got tougher until silver enemies were common, and seemingly out of nowhere my gear had become very under leveled. I had already found The Great Fairys, but now they are locked behind a quest that has you assemble an orchestra to coax them out of the flowers, instead of just paying them like before. I spent some time actually finding the quest I needed, before rushing through it just so I could upgrade my armor and not die instantly any time a silver bokoblin landed a stray hit on me. I found the construct factory in the Depths, and spent well over an hour trying to figure what it was and how it worked. It was not until 70 hours later when I was actually doing the story quests that I finally got to figure out what it was for. Tears of the Kingdom feels as though there’s a correct way to play, or at least a correct path to take, far more than I ever felt with Breath of the Wild.

I’m very hesitant to even give this a score. The 9/10 I've given seems too forgiving of its deep flaws, but a lower score wouldn’t accurately show how much I loved its strengths. I believe that, like Breath of the Wild, my score is set to only go down over the years as the honeymoon phase wears off. Over the years I've realized that I'm the kind of person who values the highs of something much more than the lows it sinks to, I’m more than happy to accept and overlook flaws if the game has something else to offer if it's really that good. I think exploring the world of Tears of the Kingdom is that good, but as the genre and industry advance this may no longer be the case. Tears of the Kingdom carries the unfortunate, crushing weight of being a sequel. Nintendo had six years to learn from Breath of the Wild, so many of the flaws were left in or even doubled down on as a conscious choice by the developers which not only frustrates me from how much could have been changed from the first game. Breath of the Wild gets away with a lot due to its importance and innovation, but that does not apply to Tears of the Kingdom. Pushing the idea of an open world to its logical extreme is no longer novel, and I'm left with a bitter taste by thinking of what Tears of the Kingdom could have been. And then that bitter taste is washed away with the savory world, and I'm back to feeling conflicted.


Honestly, the game was extremely disappointing, but I can't reasonably give it less than a 3.5. It is inferior to its predecessor in almost every way. Felt like just a large dlc to BOTW. I would have been significantly happier if the game was not set in Hyrule.