The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - The Expose: A Surgical Summer

By Elkmane

ok everyone it's been a while since i've done a proper review. But i'm addy'd up and ready to deconstruct the very notion of what a videogame review can be to show you guys what i like to call my expose. (e with an accent) because after this review you will all see this game is not good. This isn't a matter of opinions, or tastes, or any of that. I don't think that comes into play with my opinions. I will deliver facts so devastating that the most adoring fanboy will become a vengeful hater. I don't do this out of anger or disappointment, This game improves on the first zelda in a few ways. I'll get to it. That's part of the review deconstruction i've talked about. I’m inventing something called “post structuralism.” I may be on a new frontier for criticism but I'll stay humble about it for now. This was the intro paragraph. Yes i'm doing paragraphs. This is gonna be a longy. You’re gonna think this is the harshest 3.5/5 review you ever heard. But I’ve been reviewing games for YEARS now. Probably longer than you, rookie, so step out of the way and let me do my job. Capisce? okay.

Now every good review starts with a beginning.

First Chapter: personal stuff, AKA origin story

Zelda breath of the wild was given to me as a gift as I recovered from a botched surgery. The only thing I did all day every day was stay home, eat crappy self cooked steak and play breath of the wild. I had a lot of fun. But I'm not here for your tears, please don’t feel bad for me because I had a botched surgery. It really wasn’t that bad. I’m strong and I was ok. Good thing it won’t happen again. [Pause] The thing is, I decided to replay it and found my appreciation really dropped off a cliff when A. the novelty wears off and B. when you’ve done everything there is to do, just getting on and fighting monsters wasn’t fun. Combat was boring because there was no enemy variety and the base mechanics were extremely simple and there was one overwhelmingly powerful stratagem that you could use no matter what on every single encounter and it’d be the most efficient thing to do (its flurry rush.) Yeah, I guess you could use balloons and stasis and trees and rocks to make a super high iq trap to do a quarter of the damage in one very situational situation, but really there’s no point. Everything else about the game was good though. There were a lot of fun things to find, the structure meant you could skip every main checkpoint, do whatever you feel like you want, and go to the final boss. Well, the dungeons in botw sucked but this isn’t a botw review. What I mean is once you were off the plateau that was it. There’s nothing else for you to get. That was good. Because I hate games where I'm 6 hours in and I'm still getting tutorials (like this game I'm playing called Shadow of Rome) and I liked that they knew their strengths and weaknesses. They didn’t have a good story so they were like fuck it we made a little skeleton story and u can go find it if u want. The actual finding of those memory cutscenes was more rewarding than the actual cutscene, but even then you were so starved for info on the main plot that it was kind of intriguing despite the diabetes writing. The way they built it, the world revolved around me (Link) and I was the hero. I didn’t follow anyone, and the simplicity was simple! That takes care of my origin story. Off to the next chapter.

Second Chapter: Dawn of The Day of Defeat

I was so sodding excited! I went all the way to the mall, I waited in line and bought the game along with a pair of joy cons cus my left one had drift. I spent hundreds of dollars on all that purchase. Can you believe that? I ended up using those joycons TWICE! TWICE! I had a knockoff pro controller and I never undocked it cause I don't wanna go outside with my switch! I’m not trying to get robbed. Anyways, I went home, I started playing and BLAM giant wall of disappointment right off the bat! (this ones a shorter chapter. Sry yaul.)

Third Chapter: The Day of Defeat

I told myself in the bathroom mirror before I started writing this review that I’d try to refer to breath of the wild as little as possible. So I'll compare it to another member of the “of the” series. The opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark was the perfect tutorial, I mean opening scene, to the point many would consider it the best part of the game. I mean movie. It was perfect and showing the tone for the rest of the … product. You can ignore everything and rush the objectives to get off the area, and it’s the only place where you ever feel railroaded into a hallway. But at the end of the day it’s done and over before it begins. There’s minimal contact with the other character, and when his true allegiance is revealed , it’s interesting, and after that you’re already out of there. Meanwhile the intro for tears of the kingdom is some draggy ass shit. It’s three times as long and half of it is robots slowly and boringly explaining zonaite and whatever energy thingies, and I can honestly say I did not really think about zonaite for most of my playthrough. This is indicative of a larger problem I’ll touch on later. I’ll come back to it. I will. And once you’re finished with the original island, you’re still not done with your tutorial. You don’t get the glider before you leave. You’re SUPPOSED to go to the main town place, but I didn’t go there. So I played the first 5 hours and did the zora part without a glider. Yes, it’s awesome and a little stupid of me, but I can’t be the only one. The world is open and I’m immediately supposed to go from 8 hours of monologuing robots to more story shit? No I just wanna fuck around in the open world!!! God!! I guess it’s about time we talk about the meat of the game.

Fourth Chapter: Lot of Meat

Firstly, the rune powers are changed. RIP Stasis, RIP bombs, this new array of powers is pretty good though. Rewind and ascend are lame, rewind especially, and ascend always just feels cheesy to use, but the combiner and the telekinesis are cool. Telekinesis just fixed my issue with magnetism, which was that there weren't enough metal objects in the game. And the fuser was this game’s most remarkable attempt at fixing the combat. Maybe second most, because this game actually has a lot more kinds of monsters to fight. And that’s a perfect segue for my giant spine in this review skeleton I'm making. I hereby argue that this game tries to fix the issues of its predecessor by adding and piling on more mechanics, instead of restructuring the foundation, but said new things often don’t mesh together or cooperate with other mechanics to create that organic seamless physics and combat system that everyone likes. Basically, it’s clunky! Add more and more on top of the egg noodles and ketchup , but at the end of the day it’s still waiting for an attack and jumping and flurry rushing, there’s just more stuff on top to navigate around or add onto your fork. Sorry for the food analogy. I read somewhere that food analogies are for bad writers but I wanted to make a goodfellas reference. Plus the chapter name… duh… anyways… yes, the fuse mechanic was the most amazing addition to the game if you ask me. In the last game you’d inevitably have a shitton of random herbs and fruits and crap you’d never cook because no one ever needs “electric resistance” potions. Now you can stick that waste onto your arrows or your sword or shield and it’s AWESOME. Ice attachments break the game a little but it’s fine, breaking the game is ok as long as I’m ok with it. This really made enemy encounters more dynamic. You could do more shit, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, that shit was as effective, if not MORE effective than the egg noodles and ketchup! The other big thing, which was heavily marketed (i dont know, I didnt watch any trailers) was the ability to make machines and contraptions and stuff. I felt this was kind of cool. Making a car or a flying machine like da vinci will be cool forever. But you can only really do it where the developer intends. Yea, you can get the little balls that make them portable, but I didn’t use them much so did it really count? If machines are needed for a puzzle solution, there will be 8 of each part scattered around the area. You walk into a room and there’s a rat shaped hole in the wall. Sure, you could use a stick of play-do to make a clay rat and put it in there, but why not pick up one of the actual rats in the corner of that room? Don’t get me wrong. There are cool puzzle solutions the devs didn’t account for. In the lava dungeon i got into one room by throwing a freeze bomb at the lava (somehow it freezes) and floating on the ice platform until I got underneath the room and then ascending up into it. Cool eh? Yeah, it’s cool. But don’t you show me some twitter clip of a japanese dude making a tank and beating a boss in 30 seconds. Don’t. I won’t look at it and it doesn’t count. Quick topic change, do you remember the ghost warrior guy abilities you got in BOTW? The shield, Revali’s gale, the lightning circle, and the full health revive? Yeah they made you OP as shit, but didn’t you like how unobtrusive and convenient they were? What if, instead of the abilities being expertly woven into the control scheme, you had ghosts of these characters follow you around sometimes, they’d appear whenever they thought they wanted to be let out of your finger pokeball, and walk around willy nilly. To use their power you’d have to walk up to them, tap them, and tap them again. They usually clump around, so try not to activate the three others in the 17 and a half button presses it takes to use one of them. This was such a huge point of frustration for me, and I had all the sages off except for Tulin for the whole game and I only used him for gliding. The game’s giant pile of new mechanics means every button press has 7 actions it could possibly cause depending on what’s near you, what you’re wearing, the phase of the moon, and if your lockon wants to target the dude in front of you or the random bat 6 nautical meters away. Actions like trying to fuse something onto your shield or sword in the middle of a fight can be tough, because if you press it wrong now you have a +40 damage thing on your shield that’s completely useless and irreversible. Am I gonna blame it all on being built around controller usage instead of keyboard and mouse? …………………… no, I won’t. Some games actually play fine on the controller. And considering some people are calling this the game of the year then yeah I say it’s fair I ask it to have decent controller controls. Overall consensus on the meat? Some good, some bad. Unlike chapter five. Spoiler alert: Some bad, some… worse…. What’s worse than bad you may ask… hehehehehehhehee…. EVIL!


Chapter Five: Bad And Evil

The story, the cutscenes, the quests, and some such of the sort. What do I have to say about them? Well, quite frankly, it’s not good at all. The story is very bad. The last game's story was also bad, but they knew that and they kept it minimal. They kept it to the side. They had to serve you a meal of human meat and they presented it like a trail of blood, a manageable cool murder mystery. This game has an ice bucket challenge filled with gore and guts and giblets. Sorry for the food analogy again. The cutscenes were unbearably boring, and every time there was some scene of the story that was happening without you and which did not affect you in any way I would really really contemplate skipping. And what’s worse, these cutscenes were rewards for finding them out in the world. Not in the cool way of finding a location where an image was taken, but by going to these giant eyesore nazca lines and walking around it until you find a puddle. They took out the fun of finding it and the fun of the reward from this whole process. And the boss fights are all mostly pretty big improvements, if just the spectacle. The only boss fight I’d consider good mechanically is the human demon king ganondorf, whose third phase has just about the only new idea for combat in like, the whole game. Yeah, you flurry rush him, but he dodges your first flurry rush and you have to dodge again and NOW you can flurry rush. It’s not artorias or anything but it was probably the best boss fight. And then after that it’s oooh giant dragons, and a reskin of the wind temple boss where it’s all a huge spectacle but all you do is go to the glowing hole and hit the balls three times.

Chapter Six: Outro

Yeah, I think this game and the last both work better when your character is barely scraping by. It really lends itself to self induced challenges. My most memorable moment in this game was doing the lurelin village freedom quest, which I remember forcing myself to use no armour and no healing at all for the whole thing. It took so many tries, but in the end i remember finishing them off and feeling such a thrill and pride that was so alien in my 100+ hours on this game. You have to make yourself have fun in this game, which yeah every game is like that, but usually the game is the one helping you have fun, not holding you back. Well, about now i’m feeling bad for writing such a mean review. And if you have nothing nice to say then say nothing at all. So i’m going to chatgpt this and ask it to make the review worded more politely and more kindly. Brb.

Ok I'm back and I didn’t like it. It was really boring and it cut out the whole Indiana Jones part. I’ll just try and be a little gentler going forward. I don’t hate this game. I don’t like hating things. I gave this a positive score! Just try and understand, I really really really wanted to like this game. I never want to hate anything. I always wanna like stuff. That’s the dream, liking everything. But I just can’t help my patrician tastes. Yknow guys this has been my most personal review to date. It’s like my autobiography or something. Do you remember when I said I had a botched surgery in 2017 before I played zelda? Well I had a botched surgery in august of this year, yeah I know my SECOND ONE!! And I was excited for history to loop around again and I’d get on zelda and start enjoying it like the olden days!! But instead I found that my motivation to do anything had stopped. I got on, walked around, tried to explore but there was nothing fun to do, really. Every puzzle basically solved itself and while the combat was fun, I was so drained from doing the crappy dungeons (except for the desert one, that dungeon was fun) and not finding anything substantial in the overworld that I just kind of stopped playing. Instead, my recovery was assisted by seasons 5-11 of AMC’s The Walking Dead. Maybe that’s why I hated the story of the game so much, because I was experiencing peak writing at the same time. No, I don’t hate games and I haven’t grown out of it. I just played House of the Dead, another entry of the “of the” series and it was cool. So I guess this one just didn’t really work for me. Sorry, everyone. I told you this would be rough.. But thanks for sticking with me to the end of my review. Thanks to my patrons who keep the lights on and thanks to my surgeons for never getting it right with me. Goodbye for now guys. Off to game some more.