I consider Breath of the Wild to be one of my favorite games of all time, which is a rotating 3-5 game list. The experience I had playing through that game in 2017 was like almost nothing I had had in media up to that point. That feeling is something I can and will always look back fondly on. Even if I recognized some of Breath of the Wild's shortcomings, it still is one of the easiest '10s' I've ever given anything.
Tears of the Kingdom had the behemoth task of following up a game that many consider to be one of the greatest of all time, one that is a landmark in gaming history and left many lasting effects on the industry as a whole. While I'm not entirely surprised by the outcome, it still is impressive that it managed to do this successfully, albeit with some certainly noticeable missteps.
I looked at Tears through a much more critical lens throughout my playthrough than I did with Breath of the Wild six years ago, for the simple reason that I somewhat knew what to expect with the game, and since a lot of the foundation is the same, I was going to need quite a bit to blow me away in the same way Breath of the Wild did. I do think that Tears is absolutely a better game than its predecessor. The vast majority of the complaints from the first game—such as enemy variety, rewards for exploring, weapon durability, and dungeon design—were addressed, and the new mechanics blow many of the older ones out of the water. There are however, enough underlying issues that make this game very difficult to wholly evaluate for me.
On one hand, the vast majority of Tears is truly phenomenal. The weapon fuse mechanic is nearly perfect, adding a significant incentive to exploration and combat that makes the weapon durability system work as best as I think it could. You no longer have to hoard high power weapons, instead you can gather as many strong monster materials as possible and bring out the weapons' power, using them as desired. This mechanic might be my favorite overall addition to the game as compared to Breath of the Wild, and is a genius way to 'solve' the weapon durability 'problem' (I didn't really mind it in BotW but that's besides the point). The Depths are another excellent new part of the game, an entire parallel world to the above ground Hyrule we are familiar with that brings an extremely addicting gameplay loop that you can easily lose yourself in for hours upon hours at a time, something that happened to me in multiple play sessions. The Depths, in contrary to what we were expecting with the Sky Islands, are the best part of the game's exploration, as they are both extremely rewarding and full of surprises.
Each of the game's abilities are significantly more interesting than the runes of BotW, and open up the gameplay more than I think I have seen in any game—sandbox or not—before. Between Recall, Ascend, and of course the almighty, perplexingly impressive, all-encompassing abilities of Ultrahand, I've never felt so free to both solve puzzles however I like, but also traverse and explore the entirety of the game with so few limits. I highly doubt we'll see a game of this size with this much freedom for a long time again, and it is truly a spectacular feat what the Zelda team developers managed to pull off. It shows the potential of what a game can be that is built on top of an already existing one, to the fullest extent.
Despite the immaculate peaks of Tears, there were a number of shortcomings and question marks that bothered me to enough to question if I could really consider this game a 'masterpiece', a powerful word that gets thrown around a bit too much. Perhaps the most frustrating issue is the presentation of the game's story. The scattered memories structure of BotW is one of the few universal complaints that did not really see any changes in Tears. It is considerably more frustrating in this game due to the fact that, without spoiling anything, the big major plot twist can and will be revealed to people at completely different times, in random orders, completely changing the experience of the story from one person to the next. The game kind of expects you to do everything in a certain order that is only really clear near the end of the game, and it is an order that does not really make much sense if you just play the game by exploring in a normal manner. The story told through the memories is also much more important to understand in a linear sense, and so it is terribly frustrating that it is impossible to do just that. I enjoyed the concept for the story even if a lot of the writing and voice acting was not great (I particularly am not a fan of Matthew Mercer as Ganondorf at all), but they really shot themselves in the foot presenting it in the way they did.
I'm also not a big fan of most of the game's dungeons or bosses unfortunately. While the aesthetic differences are nice, I ultimately do still miss the more concentrated, linear format of older Zelda dungeons, and I can't really say that puzzle-wise the dungeons were all that much better than the Divine Beasts. I did enjoy the Thunder Temple in particular, as that felt the most like a more 'traditional' Zelda dungeon, but the rest were kind of whatever, and every one was the exact same format of 'do 4 or 5 things and fight boss' which was disappointing, especially when you are given the exact same cutscene and explanation after every single one of them. In general the dungeons felt like a bit of an afterthought that were thrown into the game because people wanted them. The parts leading up to the dungeons were often better than the dungeons themselves. Most of the boss fights were kind of lame or annoying, a couple of them I did like such as the Wind Temple boss, but many were forgettable. The soundtrack for the game overall, while not bad, was not much of an improvement from Breath of the Wild, and I feel both games in the series have the least memorable OSTs of any games in the series.
I find it very difficult to score this game, as I do think it is a better game than Breath of the Wild, yet it feels unfair even to compare them, as Breath of the Wild was built from scratch, while this was built on top of that, which has a different set of expectations attached to it. It's far from a perfect game, but there is so much that is genuinely so impressive, that I feel like it is unfair to expect everything to reach that level of quality in a game that is so massive. I'm not sure what is next for the Zelda franchise, and while it seems they will not be going back to the linear style of the older games, I think after Tears I would prefer a bit of a change of pace, perhaps an open game that is smaller and more concentrated, focusing on quality over quantity. Ultimately, I was not blown away by Tears in the same way I was when I played Breath of the Wild at launch back in March 2017, and I don't know if the game really could have done much to have changed that really. As much as the new additions to the game are genuinely phenomenal, I still somewhat knew what to expect going into the game, particularly going through the mainland of Hyrule for the second time, hearing much of the same music in the same areas and getting most of the same gear, and some of the new things I was really hoping to be blown away by such as the story and Sky Islands even were lackluster.
Regardless, both BotW and Tears will be, deservedly, looked upon as landmarks of the open-world genre that have brought about a number of memorable and spectacularly implemented mechanics that many developers would only dream of.
Tears of the Kingdom had the behemoth task of following up a game that many consider to be one of the greatest of all time, one that is a landmark in gaming history and left many lasting effects on the industry as a whole. While I'm not entirely surprised by the outcome, it still is impressive that it managed to do this successfully, albeit with some certainly noticeable missteps.
I looked at Tears through a much more critical lens throughout my playthrough than I did with Breath of the Wild six years ago, for the simple reason that I somewhat knew what to expect with the game, and since a lot of the foundation is the same, I was going to need quite a bit to blow me away in the same way Breath of the Wild did. I do think that Tears is absolutely a better game than its predecessor. The vast majority of the complaints from the first game—such as enemy variety, rewards for exploring, weapon durability, and dungeon design—were addressed, and the new mechanics blow many of the older ones out of the water. There are however, enough underlying issues that make this game very difficult to wholly evaluate for me.
On one hand, the vast majority of Tears is truly phenomenal. The weapon fuse mechanic is nearly perfect, adding a significant incentive to exploration and combat that makes the weapon durability system work as best as I think it could. You no longer have to hoard high power weapons, instead you can gather as many strong monster materials as possible and bring out the weapons' power, using them as desired. This mechanic might be my favorite overall addition to the game as compared to Breath of the Wild, and is a genius way to 'solve' the weapon durability 'problem' (I didn't really mind it in BotW but that's besides the point). The Depths are another excellent new part of the game, an entire parallel world to the above ground Hyrule we are familiar with that brings an extremely addicting gameplay loop that you can easily lose yourself in for hours upon hours at a time, something that happened to me in multiple play sessions. The Depths, in contrary to what we were expecting with the Sky Islands, are the best part of the game's exploration, as they are both extremely rewarding and full of surprises.
Each of the game's abilities are significantly more interesting than the runes of BotW, and open up the gameplay more than I think I have seen in any game—sandbox or not—before. Between Recall, Ascend, and of course the almighty, perplexingly impressive, all-encompassing abilities of Ultrahand, I've never felt so free to both solve puzzles however I like, but also traverse and explore the entirety of the game with so few limits. I highly doubt we'll see a game of this size with this much freedom for a long time again, and it is truly a spectacular feat what the Zelda team developers managed to pull off. It shows the potential of what a game can be that is built on top of an already existing one, to the fullest extent.
Despite the immaculate peaks of Tears, there were a number of shortcomings and question marks that bothered me to enough to question if I could really consider this game a 'masterpiece', a powerful word that gets thrown around a bit too much. Perhaps the most frustrating issue is the presentation of the game's story. The scattered memories structure of BotW is one of the few universal complaints that did not really see any changes in Tears. It is considerably more frustrating in this game due to the fact that, without spoiling anything, the big major plot twist can and will be revealed to people at completely different times, in random orders, completely changing the experience of the story from one person to the next. The game kind of expects you to do everything in a certain order that is only really clear near the end of the game, and it is an order that does not really make much sense if you just play the game by exploring in a normal manner. The story told through the memories is also much more important to understand in a linear sense, and so it is terribly frustrating that it is impossible to do just that. I enjoyed the concept for the story even if a lot of the writing and voice acting was not great (I particularly am not a fan of Matthew Mercer as Ganondorf at all), but they really shot themselves in the foot presenting it in the way they did.
I'm also not a big fan of most of the game's dungeons or bosses unfortunately. While the aesthetic differences are nice, I ultimately do still miss the more concentrated, linear format of older Zelda dungeons, and I can't really say that puzzle-wise the dungeons were all that much better than the Divine Beasts. I did enjoy the Thunder Temple in particular, as that felt the most like a more 'traditional' Zelda dungeon, but the rest were kind of whatever, and every one was the exact same format of 'do 4 or 5 things and fight boss' which was disappointing, especially when you are given the exact same cutscene and explanation after every single one of them. In general the dungeons felt like a bit of an afterthought that were thrown into the game because people wanted them. The parts leading up to the dungeons were often better than the dungeons themselves. Most of the boss fights were kind of lame or annoying, a couple of them I did like such as the Wind Temple boss, but many were forgettable. The soundtrack for the game overall, while not bad, was not much of an improvement from Breath of the Wild, and I feel both games in the series have the least memorable OSTs of any games in the series.
I find it very difficult to score this game, as I do think it is a better game than Breath of the Wild, yet it feels unfair even to compare them, as Breath of the Wild was built from scratch, while this was built on top of that, which has a different set of expectations attached to it. It's far from a perfect game, but there is so much that is genuinely so impressive, that I feel like it is unfair to expect everything to reach that level of quality in a game that is so massive. I'm not sure what is next for the Zelda franchise, and while it seems they will not be going back to the linear style of the older games, I think after Tears I would prefer a bit of a change of pace, perhaps an open game that is smaller and more concentrated, focusing on quality over quantity. Ultimately, I was not blown away by Tears in the same way I was when I played Breath of the Wild at launch back in March 2017, and I don't know if the game really could have done much to have changed that really. As much as the new additions to the game are genuinely phenomenal, I still somewhat knew what to expect going into the game, particularly going through the mainland of Hyrule for the second time, hearing much of the same music in the same areas and getting most of the same gear, and some of the new things I was really hoping to be blown away by such as the story and Sky Islands even were lackluster.
Regardless, both BotW and Tears will be, deservedly, looked upon as landmarks of the open-world genre that have brought about a number of memorable and spectacularly implemented mechanics that many developers would only dream of.
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Zamn agenda on the backloggd grind
theadhdagenda_
10 months ago