I am fortunate enough to possess a [CENSORED TO AVOID NINTENDO HITMEN] and thus I had access to this game a little over a week early. Normally, this is something that will prompt me to dive deep into a game. When Pokemon Legends Arceus (not a good game! yet somehow the best Pokemon game) leaked about a week early, I was absolutely in love and I played about 100 hours of it before it officially released.
As of right now, I have played... maybe 7-10 hours of Tears of the Kingdom. I can already feel the reflexive "you haven't played enough to know if the game is good!!! it gets better!!! delete your review!!" comments coming in. Unfortunately, I'm already confident I've seen all I need to see to know that this game is just unspeakably uncompelling. One or two of the new guys in this game made me go "neat!" and I was impressed upon first seeing The Chasm. But, man, the beginning of this game just utterly fails to pull you in like Breath of the Wild did. It's such a failure that I'm questioning whether BotW was even good in the first place.
Going into this game, I was a massive fan of Breath of the Wild. As someone who has historically been skeptical of both Zelda games and open world games, it managed to thread the needle and be an absolute obsession for the better part of one summer in high school. The way it naturally pulled you in every which direction was so engaging that I could not stop exploring and appreciating the intrinsic joy of finding cool new bits of the world. (I maintain that BotW does this far better than any other open world, sans Genshin Impact, strangely enough. Somehow despite the utterly predatory monetization, shallow writing, and clunky mechanics of Genshin, the world design is absolutely beautiful and entrancing in a way that is hard to compete with.)
But Tears of the Kingdom has none of that. Is it just a DLC? No, not at all -- comments to such regard seem like absurdly hyperbolic contrarianism for the sake of Cool Gamer Cred On Backloggd Dot Com. The world feels completely unfamiliar with how completely it has been redesigned, and at times that is a weakness of the game. If you've ever played a randomizer of, say, Super Metroid, Hollow Knight, or even a Zelda game like Link to the Past, you will be familiar with the feeling of playing a game that distinctly feels like it was not designed to be played in the way you are experiencing it. That feeling of almost disorientation is largely why randomizers are so fun: they extend the lifespan of a game that you love but wouldn't want to play in the exact same way yet again. If only these randomizers could be hand designed by the original developers to allow you to experience the game in its full glory several times over!
In theory, that's something like what the TotK overworld should feel like. Yet the ways in which the world has been shuffled feels, well, random, like a generative AI was fed a list of structures and locations and ideas from BotW and spat them back out in a soulless jumble. It would have almost been better if the world was copy+pasted.
To TotK's credit, this is not true of the newer parts of the game. The Sky Islands and The Chasm are both very distinct from the overworld and feel far better designed, if a bit same-y within their own bounds. In fact, the new things about TotK tend to lean towards the "really good" side -- the handful of new boss enemies I encountered were quite fun to crack (but upon figuring out their tricks, they became trivial), and in particular the cave systems in the overworld do an actually good job of lending new life to a familiar land. My favorite moment out of my playtime so far was being ambushed by a mass of writhing shadow hands in one of these caves, getting up to higher ground, and bombing the shit out of the hands until they died. I jumped down, proud of myself for dealing with them safely, and then a fucking health bar appeared at the top of the screen and Shadow Ganon kicked my ass with his Dark Souls-lite-ass moveset. Fucking incredible moment that came out of nowhere, but I'm legitimately afraid that somewhere in the game there is a guy you are supposed to talk to who will loudly exclaim HEY DID YOU KNOW THIS IS A THING? HERE IS WHERE YOU GO TO FIND HIM AND THIS IS HOW YOU BEAT HIM because that has been my experience with most things in TotK thus far when it comes to natural exploration and the open world.
In a way, it's all too reminiscent of my experience with the similarly middling game Horizon: Forbidden West. That game has a million flaws which I won't go into too much here, but the distinctly best parts were tackling the hardest challenges in the game while incredibly underleveled and undergeared. (Cauldron KAPPA, anyone?) But after doing that, there was really nothing of interest left, and the world itself was just too big and too generic and too arbitrary. That describes my time with TotK to a T.
I dunno. Maybe I'm just missing something. Maybe the game does get better. The first dungeon has given me no hope at all that the game is going to be particularly good when it comes to the scripted content, the side quests are already unappealing and overwhelming, all the points of interest I give a shit about are locked behind invisible walls and story quests with no indication of how to get to that content Now. It feels like the core feedback loop that was so addictive about BotW has been both bloated and constrained to the point that it is lying swollen and dead on the ground, and occasionally when you kick it, it will posthumously cough up a rare nugget of interesting world design.
Or maybe BotW was never good and I just needed to play TotK to realize that. It's absolutely dire that the result of playing the sequel to a game I love is not being disappointed that it doesn't live up to the original, not even blown away with how much better it is than the original, but outright doubting whether the original was good in the first place. Is there any stronger condemnation of a sequel than that?
I'll likely pick the game up again and get further into it out of obligation at some point soon. Maybe I'll eat my words by the time the game is over. Maybe I'll permanently drop it halfway through. Stay tuned to find out!
As of right now, I have played... maybe 7-10 hours of Tears of the Kingdom. I can already feel the reflexive "you haven't played enough to know if the game is good!!! it gets better!!! delete your review!!" comments coming in. Unfortunately, I'm already confident I've seen all I need to see to know that this game is just unspeakably uncompelling. One or two of the new guys in this game made me go "neat!" and I was impressed upon first seeing The Chasm. But, man, the beginning of this game just utterly fails to pull you in like Breath of the Wild did. It's such a failure that I'm questioning whether BotW was even good in the first place.
Going into this game, I was a massive fan of Breath of the Wild. As someone who has historically been skeptical of both Zelda games and open world games, it managed to thread the needle and be an absolute obsession for the better part of one summer in high school. The way it naturally pulled you in every which direction was so engaging that I could not stop exploring and appreciating the intrinsic joy of finding cool new bits of the world. (I maintain that BotW does this far better than any other open world, sans Genshin Impact, strangely enough. Somehow despite the utterly predatory monetization, shallow writing, and clunky mechanics of Genshin, the world design is absolutely beautiful and entrancing in a way that is hard to compete with.)
But Tears of the Kingdom has none of that. Is it just a DLC? No, not at all -- comments to such regard seem like absurdly hyperbolic contrarianism for the sake of Cool Gamer Cred On Backloggd Dot Com. The world feels completely unfamiliar with how completely it has been redesigned, and at times that is a weakness of the game. If you've ever played a randomizer of, say, Super Metroid, Hollow Knight, or even a Zelda game like Link to the Past, you will be familiar with the feeling of playing a game that distinctly feels like it was not designed to be played in the way you are experiencing it. That feeling of almost disorientation is largely why randomizers are so fun: they extend the lifespan of a game that you love but wouldn't want to play in the exact same way yet again. If only these randomizers could be hand designed by the original developers to allow you to experience the game in its full glory several times over!
In theory, that's something like what the TotK overworld should feel like. Yet the ways in which the world has been shuffled feels, well, random, like a generative AI was fed a list of structures and locations and ideas from BotW and spat them back out in a soulless jumble. It would have almost been better if the world was copy+pasted.
To TotK's credit, this is not true of the newer parts of the game. The Sky Islands and The Chasm are both very distinct from the overworld and feel far better designed, if a bit same-y within their own bounds. In fact, the new things about TotK tend to lean towards the "really good" side -- the handful of new boss enemies I encountered were quite fun to crack (but upon figuring out their tricks, they became trivial), and in particular the cave systems in the overworld do an actually good job of lending new life to a familiar land. My favorite moment out of my playtime so far was being ambushed by a mass of writhing shadow hands in one of these caves, getting up to higher ground, and bombing the shit out of the hands until they died. I jumped down, proud of myself for dealing with them safely, and then a fucking health bar appeared at the top of the screen and Shadow Ganon kicked my ass with his Dark Souls-lite-ass moveset. Fucking incredible moment that came out of nowhere, but I'm legitimately afraid that somewhere in the game there is a guy you are supposed to talk to who will loudly exclaim HEY DID YOU KNOW THIS IS A THING? HERE IS WHERE YOU GO TO FIND HIM AND THIS IS HOW YOU BEAT HIM because that has been my experience with most things in TotK thus far when it comes to natural exploration and the open world.
In a way, it's all too reminiscent of my experience with the similarly middling game Horizon: Forbidden West. That game has a million flaws which I won't go into too much here, but the distinctly best parts were tackling the hardest challenges in the game while incredibly underleveled and undergeared. (Cauldron KAPPA, anyone?) But after doing that, there was really nothing of interest left, and the world itself was just too big and too generic and too arbitrary. That describes my time with TotK to a T.
I dunno. Maybe I'm just missing something. Maybe the game does get better. The first dungeon has given me no hope at all that the game is going to be particularly good when it comes to the scripted content, the side quests are already unappealing and overwhelming, all the points of interest I give a shit about are locked behind invisible walls and story quests with no indication of how to get to that content Now. It feels like the core feedback loop that was so addictive about BotW has been both bloated and constrained to the point that it is lying swollen and dead on the ground, and occasionally when you kick it, it will posthumously cough up a rare nugget of interesting world design.
Or maybe BotW was never good and I just needed to play TotK to realize that. It's absolutely dire that the result of playing the sequel to a game I love is not being disappointed that it doesn't live up to the original, not even blown away with how much better it is than the original, but outright doubting whether the original was good in the first place. Is there any stronger condemnation of a sequel than that?
I'll likely pick the game up again and get further into it out of obligation at some point soon. Maybe I'll eat my words by the time the game is over. Maybe I'll permanently drop it halfway through. Stay tuned to find out!