This is the most worthless game Nintendo's ever put out. Straight up unacceptable. There's 3 map layers. Sky, surface, and the depths. Surface is ripped straight from BotW. What was once a land painstakingly crafted from the ground up to be inherently wondrous to explore...Is reduced to mindlessly checking off a barrage of F tier copy paste content. There's borderline NOTHING new or surprising to find. And you get NOTHING for wasting a hundred hours engaging with it. The caves and wells add nothing to the game. This was such a cool opportunity for them to really FILL the map. Expand towns, introduce new ones, flesh out the enemy variety, and fill the world with music. An exciting "rebuilt Hyrule" approach that links the old Zelda style with the new in a very natural way. I genuinely don't think that's a lot to ask of this series. But - they did nothing. Heck with the removal of a strong enemy concept like the guardians, and the artificially tripled size of the world, I'd argue enemy variety has been made worse.
The sky and depths fare even worse. The tutorial island is the only large sky island. The rest are tiny and filled to the brim with copy pasted content. The depths themselves are the biggest waste of time in the industry. You can get more engaging gameplay and sense of wonder out of heckin' Cookie Clicker than the depths. What you initially assume will be a dangerous, scary place with a lot to discover...Pretty much IMMEDIATELY reveals itself to be so devoid of meaningful content or even hazards, that you're not missing any information by leaving it pitch black. The classic Poes are reduced to mindless collectibles scattered across the floor. Woulda been sick to hunt down a variety of ghosts, like a fully realized version of hunting the 10 poes in Hyrule Field in OOT. But alas, you're merely fighting 99% enemies from BotW, or getting rewards that are merely costume pieces from BotW's DLC or Amiibos.
Dungeons have never been less interesting. They in no way resemble the classics and are just less creative divine beasts. Goodbye giant walking animal mechs you have some control of, hello random tiny floating island in the sky. Story sucks too. Cop out ending ruining the one and only cool moment. Rest is slow, meandering, and repetitive with dreadful writing. Ganondorf is wasted. No attempt was even feigned to tie this game into the series overall lore let alone timeline. Frustratingly the response to this issue is often "they never cared" which I disagree with strongly. This game's story is so lazy we have to rely on what is made up on the spot in interviews to even connect it to BotW properly and even then there's inconsistencies at every turn. The fuse gimmick adds very little to the overall experience. Not super useful or gracefully implemented. I can't pretend to care about how technically impressive it might be, it doesn't do combat, ui, puzzles, or traversal any favors. Genuinely just a sloppy, unfocused, actively lame version of Banjo Nuts and Bolts. There's even more shrines in this than botw, with a higher percentage of horrible filler or boring non-puzzles for good measure. Being either insultingly slow, redundant tutorials for basic mechanics, functional tutorials for car parts, or a bad reward for poking around the sky islands or sidequests for a few minutes.
I have no doubt in my mind if the Zelda team was forced to make a brand new game from the ground up in under 2 years with no delays, they could have put out something more deserving of the Zelda name. But alas, another series falls to the irresistible temptation to make objectively bad content and spend 6+ years spreading it as thin as possible. The kind of design that's just allowed to happen these days is upsetting. Imagine telling someone in the year 2000 that in 20 years they'll release a Zelda game where you do the same exact low effort mission over 88 times in a row and that it's one of the only new things they added - and while they were at it 85% of the enemy types have been removed.
P.S. Trying out making shorter versions of my obscenely long reviews. This is still getting rather long, but compared to my original review... 4 paragraphs vs 18's a pretty good TL;DR. I just like to really explain myself when having unpopular opinions. Prolly gonna make a List of all the reviews I do this with. Follow for the eventual TL;DR of my TL;DR. Also the more I dig into this game the more upset I get and I just wanna keep babbling about it.
The sky and depths fare even worse. The tutorial island is the only large sky island. The rest are tiny and filled to the brim with copy pasted content. The depths themselves are the biggest waste of time in the industry. You can get more engaging gameplay and sense of wonder out of heckin' Cookie Clicker than the depths. What you initially assume will be a dangerous, scary place with a lot to discover...Pretty much IMMEDIATELY reveals itself to be so devoid of meaningful content or even hazards, that you're not missing any information by leaving it pitch black. The classic Poes are reduced to mindless collectibles scattered across the floor. Woulda been sick to hunt down a variety of ghosts, like a fully realized version of hunting the 10 poes in Hyrule Field in OOT. But alas, you're merely fighting 99% enemies from BotW, or getting rewards that are merely costume pieces from BotW's DLC or Amiibos.
Dungeons have never been less interesting. They in no way resemble the classics and are just less creative divine beasts. Goodbye giant walking animal mechs you have some control of, hello random tiny floating island in the sky. Story sucks too. Cop out ending ruining the one and only cool moment. Rest is slow, meandering, and repetitive with dreadful writing. Ganondorf is wasted. No attempt was even feigned to tie this game into the series overall lore let alone timeline. Frustratingly the response to this issue is often "they never cared" which I disagree with strongly. This game's story is so lazy we have to rely on what is made up on the spot in interviews to even connect it to BotW properly and even then there's inconsistencies at every turn. The fuse gimmick adds very little to the overall experience. Not super useful or gracefully implemented. I can't pretend to care about how technically impressive it might be, it doesn't do combat, ui, puzzles, or traversal any favors. Genuinely just a sloppy, unfocused, actively lame version of Banjo Nuts and Bolts. There's even more shrines in this than botw, with a higher percentage of horrible filler or boring non-puzzles for good measure. Being either insultingly slow, redundant tutorials for basic mechanics, functional tutorials for car parts, or a bad reward for poking around the sky islands or sidequests for a few minutes.
I have no doubt in my mind if the Zelda team was forced to make a brand new game from the ground up in under 2 years with no delays, they could have put out something more deserving of the Zelda name. But alas, another series falls to the irresistible temptation to make objectively bad content and spend 6+ years spreading it as thin as possible. The kind of design that's just allowed to happen these days is upsetting. Imagine telling someone in the year 2000 that in 20 years they'll release a Zelda game where you do the same exact low effort mission over 88 times in a row and that it's one of the only new things they added - and while they were at it 85% of the enemy types have been removed.
P.S. Trying out making shorter versions of my obscenely long reviews. This is still getting rather long, but compared to my original review... 4 paragraphs vs 18's a pretty good TL;DR. I just like to really explain myself when having unpopular opinions. Prolly gonna make a List of all the reviews I do this with. Follow for the eventual TL;DR of my TL;DR. Also the more I dig into this game the more upset I get and I just wanna keep babbling about it.
11 Comments
Goshh I forget they charged 70$ for this too. Most of the time I say honestly, I get it, higher prices has been a long time coming in the industry. But this game feels like it had less effort put into it than Mario Strikers Battle League.
I consider myself a pretty charitable player of video games but I could not for the life of me soldier past the first 10 hours of this. Bored to tears, with the only things I liked at all being the sky islands (which I basically never saw again after the first one) and the sax in the score. I salute your resolve to keep going
@HenryVines I keep thinking about how people kept saying "The sax in the trailer did NOT need to go that hard!!!" like dog it's Zelda, an ounce of the music that's not even in-game going hard should NOT be the exception. It DID need to go hard! That should be the entire heckin' game let alone soundtrack.
But yeah around 10ish hours in I had the crushing realization that if this wasn't a Zelda game I'd drop it and never look back. It was me, I was the tears of the kingdom all a long. Bored to literal tears gang rise up.
But yeah around 10ish hours in I had the crushing realization that if this wasn't a Zelda game I'd drop it and never look back. It was me, I was the tears of the kingdom all a long. Bored to literal tears gang rise up.
nailed it. this game is jaw droppingly impressively bad
It may be unhealthy to discuss something so negatively at such lengths, but this review pulled me in somehow. I couldn't fundamentally disagree and my main issue with the game was lack of depths and sky stuff, I did live the dungeons though but that's one man's treasure or one man's stack of coal. What did you think about the new abilities outside of fuse? I'm guessing you liked them enough ir they didn't mark you if you didnt mention them.
@PitSolitayrh Funny enough even in my original obnoxiously long review, I still didn't bring up recall and ascend. Just never entered my brainspace I guess lol. I suppose just like ultrahand/fuse they're objectively pretty cool and have loads of potential. The issue then is that they're in a game world that wasn't designed with them in mind. They feel mostly designed around sky islands. The seemingly infinite range feels great if you drop something off an island and are able to call it back. Using ascend to jump into a sky island you undershot feels great. And actually I remember enjoying bits where you have to find the right spot underground to ascend into a locked building above you. Definitely the most interesting part of the caves, using ascend and wondering where you'll pop out. On paper they're neat, in practice they don't really have time to shine since they rely on NEW content to make use of them, which is exactly where this game flounders hard. I will say though while the shrine puzzles using it tend to be pretty repetitive and dull, recall is a super powerful move that allows a lot of creative solutions, definitely some fun to be had with it even if it's just in favor of delivering your 40th korok.
On the topic of dungeons I've been wondering how a playthrough where I do exclusively the main storyline would be. The open world has gone full content slop mode leaving it almost entirely joyless for me. But if I ignored that side of the game maybe it would be a somewhat better experience? Would certainly make the dungeons feel more substantial, being a bigger percentage of the game rather than ~5ish hours out of 100+. Though then you've got the issue of just how long this game takes to get going. BotW was made to get away from needlessly long tutorials and intros and here TotK comes taking hours to give you the glider. But also the idea of having to do a bunch of shrines for enough stamina to get the master sword and a decent amount of health fills me with existential dread. This game would be so much more fun if shrines were removed and permanent upgrades were hidden in caves, depths, and sky.
On the topic of dungeons I've been wondering how a playthrough where I do exclusively the main storyline would be. The open world has gone full content slop mode leaving it almost entirely joyless for me. But if I ignored that side of the game maybe it would be a somewhat better experience? Would certainly make the dungeons feel more substantial, being a bigger percentage of the game rather than ~5ish hours out of 100+. Though then you've got the issue of just how long this game takes to get going. BotW was made to get away from needlessly long tutorials and intros and here TotK comes taking hours to give you the glider. But also the idea of having to do a bunch of shrines for enough stamina to get the master sword and a decent amount of health fills me with existential dread. This game would be so much more fun if shrines were removed and permanent upgrades were hidden in caves, depths, and sky.
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I've skimmed through your longer reviews, and tbh, I really vibe with how much you write about these games, even if I don't always agree with what's being said sometimes. :)
@IndigoDrift666 Thanks fella :) Sonic fans who dramatically prefer the DS version of Colors to the Wii version unite
hey cookie clicker goes hard man
imshitting420
2 months ago