I don't think I'm ever going to get around to finishing this game, so now's as good a time as any to do a write-up.

Breath of the Wild is my favorite game. It got me back into gaming after putting it down after a few years, and back into Nintendo games after not caring for nearly a decade. I was excited as anyone for Tears of the Kingdom. The early marketing was excellent, presenting an ominous, Majora-esque asset flip of the more melancholic BotW. I imagined deep crevices carved into the ground, exhuming all sorts of long-dormant horrors, forever altering the Hyrule with which I was familiar. I had faith that the long development time would be used to add all sorts of interesting content and well-designed dungeons.

My initial impression of the game was good. I enjoyed the tutorial island. Helping the overpacked Korok get to his friend was cute. On the surface, one of the first caves I found was the Majora tree stump cave. I remember feeling excited by the Japanese aesthetic for the shrine housing the piece of Fierce Deity armor, and wondered what other kinds of ancient architecture I'd find. Diving into The Depths for the first time was thrilling.

Disappointments, however, quickly crept in. The oddly specific over-packed Korok scenario quickly became contrived as I found dozens more. The tutorial island turned out to be the most interesting sky island by far, as the others were sparse and often copied multiple times. The tree stump cave turned out to be one of the few interesting caves, with most of the others largely using the same mossy aesthetic, with the same Horriblins and the same Japanese architecture housing the same BotW DLC armor. The Depths turned out to have a dearth of interesting content, my time largely spent stumbling around in the dark, avoiding the same enemy camps that absolutely litter the surface.

My biggest problem with TotK is how much it mindlessly copies from BotW. For BotW, the developers went back to the drawing board, and thoughtfully reconsidered all of the rote Zelda tropes that had accumulated in the series since Majora's Mask, like so many fleas. All of the pieces fit together. Take the memory system, for example. For BotW, the developers smartly crafted a smattering of nonessential vignettes, where the order in which you found them was not important, because it suited the open world structure of the game. Anyone with a brain can see that this structure does not fit the essential, linear story that TotK wants to tell. It felt like watching a movie with its scenes out of order. It also leads to big problems like Link spending all his time "trying to find Zelda," when he already knows exactly where she is, but doesn't bother letting anyone else know.

No one held a gun to Aonuma's head and said he had to use the same damn Korok seed inventory system, or shrine health and stamina system, or combat durability system, or memory-based narrative, or music. BotW was great in part because of how new everything felt. But Aonuma's team is already resting on its laurels, and I fear BotW's revolutionary template is already ossified convention.

The worst is how TotK handles BotW's map. Many previous points of interest are utterly devoid of content, including Thundra Plateau, Gut Check Rock, Hyrule Castle Ruins, and The Forgotten Temple. Areas with affecting environmental storytelling in BotW like Fort Hateno are downgraded to dumps littered with ugly brown-gray sky island slabs. I was baffled and offended when I made my way to Akkala Citadel, only to find an inexplicably generic monster cave where the citadel entrance should have been exposed. They really should have made sure there was enough to do on the surface before bothering with the dull-as-dishwater Depths.

Speaking of environmental storytelling, how bad is TotK's? What's the point of introducing another heretofore unmentioned technologically advanced ancient civilization? What happened to the Shiekah tech from BotW, including the army of laser-spewing spider robots and Divine Beasts that devastated the countryside for 100 years? I don't think they're even mentioned once. It almost feels like The Calamity didn't even happen. This created a huge disconnect from the world for me. All the ruins that felt so meaningful to explore in BotW felt like they belonged in a different game in TotK.

I haven't mentioned Ultrahand until now, because it felt largely superfluous to my experience with the game. On the tutorial island, I learned to my great disappointment that walking more than 50 yards from a boat I'd built to cross the first lake caused it to despawn. I was further let down after my first exhilarating flight on a wing part was cut short by the extremely stingy 30-second use time limit.

Ultrahand is barely integrated into the game. It feels like someone took the building mechanic from Garry's Mod, shoved it into BotW, and dumped a bunch of Lego parts everywhere. The game almost never requires its use outside of scripted events like the Death Mountain approach or boring green crystal sky island shrines; it's often faster and more effective to deal with the game's many enemies using the vanilla BotW combat.

So many elements of the game disincentivize its use. The building mechanic itself is finicky and time-consuming, and the distance and time limits are even more demoralizing. I was lucky to find auto-build early in the game, but the heavy Zonaite cost kept me from using it much. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if going in to The Depths was fun, but mindlessly mining Zonaite felt like the worst kind of grindy MMO filler. I think the biggest tell is how many people complained when Nintendo removed the duplication glitch from the first build of the game. I normally side with Nintendo in these instances, but here, I think it exposes just how unfun and stingy the game is with resources.

I'm just scratching the surface of TotK's serious flaws. The "dungeons" are lackluster, and their "press these 5 or so buttons in any order" design uninspired. The repetitive sage cutscenes after the fairly enjoyable but too-easy boss fights are pathetic. Shrines are often just tutorials for Zonai parts, and can often be cheesed in unsatisfying ways. Sage powers are horribly implemented.

I'll balance all the negativity I just wrote by saying that I recognize that TotK isn't a bad game. If I hadn't played BotW, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more. Maybe my expectations for the sequel of my favorite game were too high. And there are truly excellent moments that incentivized me to push through all the middling content, like launching off the roofs of sky ships into the eye of a snow storm, or exploring the super interesting Gerudo underground shelter, or fighting a Boss Bokoblin squad for the first time. But I can't deny that I resented most of the 100+ hour grind I put into this game, and I regret ever buying it.

Plants vs. Zombies is so fun at it’s core that I kinda had a teeny tiny bit of fun for the first few levels of PVZ3 but I kept being told about my ‘task list’ and how cool my daily login rewards are. Plus the new cartoon art style tries to bring more personality to the series but it ironically just makes it more generic.

Anyone can tell just by looking at Plants vs. Zombies 3: Welcome to Zomburbia that it’s a soulless way of milking a franchise that essentially died years ago and every second I played it just made me more and more depressed.

there is a very unique feeling of dread that accompanies failure in this game. if haruka is sad it's a result of my own incompetence as her producer. when i detect even the slightest of frowns on her face i punch a hole or two through my wall out of frustration. every inconvenience i run into only proves to strengthen my resolve to always look forward and bear with the ever increasing number of holes in my wall until i can give haruka (and the other idols i guess) the happy ending she deserves. this level of emotional investment tying directly to gameplay makes each win or loss hit so much harder. it's genius. peak. kino

"Ryukishi07 wrote such a long story just to tell you this. He must be a pretty poor writer."

mr. dragoon zero seven you are truly the best of us. i love you man. I actually cried during the Staff Message...

God this was such a wild fucking ride. We start with delightful shounen bullshit, we go to Rena Ryuugu Does Nothing Wrong, we get into ALIENS, and then we get back to the delightful shounen bullshit. And then there's the final punch to the gut in the tips! I thought it was gonna be alright, man!!!

Anyway, I really did love getting to see the different perspectives of the different characters, especially Rena. I don't know, man, I haven't gone through the same shit as her, but I definitely felt the descriptions of her anxiety and depression early on, you know? It was nice to have an actually empathetic look at a character like her once things got extremely bad, too. She was just Going Through It, man.

It's also great to watch the presentation evolve as the series progresses, too. The sound design has always been great, even before getting a fantastic composer on board for Kai, but it's nice to see the cinematic qualities being polished as well. I'm playing through vanilla with original sprites, and I'm sure mods with voice acting and less amateurish art add a lot, but it's fun to see an artist's craft evolve, you know?

(I did find it funny that last chapter Ryukishi was like "I was interested in the responses to Keiichi murdering Teppei. What if he'd decided to turn his life around?" and then he does this chapter and proves that actually lmao Teppei did deserve it, lmao)

Anyway I've been having a fantastic time with this series. I'm not really sure how I'm going to rank these chapters at the end, because this was a pretty wild swerve from Meakashi, lmao. I thought the intro description about this being a less serious chapter was ironic when the murders started, but it was actually an accurate description...

The only thing I can complain about... is Angel Mort. when will we move past the need for weird otaku bullshit....