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Viewfinder
2023
Viewfinder is a yet another extremely disappointing puzzle game among the endless ranks of those that try to recapture the magic of Portal by copying the tenets of its design thoroughly, but don't manage to do it well.
Just like Portal, the game is extremely short (it took me about 3 hours to reach 100% completion) and extremely easy (not a single puzzle in the whole game gave me more than a minute pause, often I've spent more time finding the teleporter to the level in the hub zone than I've spent actually solving the puzzle), but where Portal compensates for that with genuinely well-written humorous monologue by the game's antagonist, Viewfinder has unbearable Marvel-esque exclamations by the protagonist's overseer, audio logs mumbling about nothing in particular and the anemic AI cat going "wasn't this clever" at the end of every other puzzle.
The fundamental concept of changing the level's geometry by turning photos into 3D scenes, as it's usually the case with such puzzle games, is amazing.
However, as it's usually the case with such puzzle games, Viewfinder lacks the puzzle design that would actually take advantage of the concept to the fullest, instead opting to bring a whole bunch of other gimmicks into the mix, that disappear as quickly as they appear, never getting a proper time to breathe either. Most of the mechanics the game introduces get two-three levels dedicated to them (and some are ever used once), all of which feel like theyre trying to teach you the concept instead of trying to test you on it. Even the final gauntlet of the game is a complete joke.
The writing in Viewfinder is frankly terrible. I want to keep this review spoiler-free, so I won't go into specifics, but the plot doesn't even begin to make sense and the ending is so bad it wraps around to being one of the funniest things I've seen the whole year. Not a single deliberate attempt to be funny actually lands.
The level design tries to express the personalities of the characters of the story, but they're all ridiculous hyperbolized stereotypes of a "science person", "artsy person", "tech person" et cetera, and this framing of the levels kind of clashes with them being, well, puzzles to begin with.
I can't say much about how the game looks or sounds. It's functional, though some of the visual filters are really hard on the eyes.
Overall, I'm very disappointed. I really love the fundamental concept of it, and I like the mechanics it introduces before immediately discarding them, but it doesn't even feel like the game tries particularly hard to be a puzzle game, it feels more like an obligation it's trying to get over with. I have to wonder if the game would've been better if the devs committed to making it a sort of an exploration walking sim instead? But then again, the writing is awful as well, so maybe not.
I don't know if there's anyone i can recommend this game to. You would need to really love what you see in the trailer, and to be ready to accept that the game won't do anything significantly beyond the scope of what you see there for the entirety of it's short runtime, and to not mind spending $20 on it.
Just like Portal, the game is extremely short (it took me about 3 hours to reach 100% completion) and extremely easy (not a single puzzle in the whole game gave me more than a minute pause, often I've spent more time finding the teleporter to the level in the hub zone than I've spent actually solving the puzzle), but where Portal compensates for that with genuinely well-written humorous monologue by the game's antagonist, Viewfinder has unbearable Marvel-esque exclamations by the protagonist's overseer, audio logs mumbling about nothing in particular and the anemic AI cat going "wasn't this clever" at the end of every other puzzle.
The fundamental concept of changing the level's geometry by turning photos into 3D scenes, as it's usually the case with such puzzle games, is amazing.
However, as it's usually the case with such puzzle games, Viewfinder lacks the puzzle design that would actually take advantage of the concept to the fullest, instead opting to bring a whole bunch of other gimmicks into the mix, that disappear as quickly as they appear, never getting a proper time to breathe either. Most of the mechanics the game introduces get two-three levels dedicated to them (and some are ever used once), all of which feel like theyre trying to teach you the concept instead of trying to test you on it. Even the final gauntlet of the game is a complete joke.
The writing in Viewfinder is frankly terrible. I want to keep this review spoiler-free, so I won't go into specifics, but the plot doesn't even begin to make sense and the ending is so bad it wraps around to being one of the funniest things I've seen the whole year. Not a single deliberate attempt to be funny actually lands.
The level design tries to express the personalities of the characters of the story, but they're all ridiculous hyperbolized stereotypes of a "science person", "artsy person", "tech person" et cetera, and this framing of the levels kind of clashes with them being, well, puzzles to begin with.
I can't say much about how the game looks or sounds. It's functional, though some of the visual filters are really hard on the eyes.
Overall, I'm very disappointed. I really love the fundamental concept of it, and I like the mechanics it introduces before immediately discarding them, but it doesn't even feel like the game tries particularly hard to be a puzzle game, it feels more like an obligation it's trying to get over with. I have to wonder if the game would've been better if the devs committed to making it a sort of an exploration walking sim instead? But then again, the writing is awful as well, so maybe not.
I don't know if there's anyone i can recommend this game to. You would need to really love what you see in the trailer, and to be ready to accept that the game won't do anything significantly beyond the scope of what you see there for the entirety of it's short runtime, and to not mind spending $20 on it.
In the first half of the game or so it's pretty clear that you are playing one of the best puzzle games ever created by being clearly presented with a fully transparent physical logic that will never play no cheap magic tricks and do what a lot, or all, puzzle games always seek and never reach, keep showing level after level defying your conception of what can even be done with very simple rules every single time.
Now, earlier for some, later for others, you're going to get stuck. That's fine. About that time, the game clearly reveals itself as a masterpiece.
It’s at those times that the background elements will come to the foreground. While standing still with a total lack of ideas, searching for anything to hold onto, you’ll start appreciating the colors of the day and night cycle, the flower leaves rising with your steps, the ever present synth that rarely makes a full melody, the fire crackling, the waves threatening your sausages... You’ll even give it a rest, go take a walk, go live. And you’ll return without expecting it. The map is static, you know the exact consequence of an action before the movement, with the game closed too. So you’ll go to sleep and replace the sheep to count with the level that’s been there for days, already burnt into you. Take advantage of the lack of logic to build the possibilities back.
I guess there is something about frustration and wisdom (or knowledge) here, but it’s related to a particular greater topic: inspiration. And the patience it needs. You cannot invoke it by stomping against the same wall again and again in the same way. You can only clear your head, give it time, distance and hope that when inspiration comes you will be ready to welcome it properly.
Keep dreaming those sausages.
Now, earlier for some, later for others, you're going to get stuck. That's fine. About that time, the game clearly reveals itself as a masterpiece.
It’s at those times that the background elements will come to the foreground. While standing still with a total lack of ideas, searching for anything to hold onto, you’ll start appreciating the colors of the day and night cycle, the flower leaves rising with your steps, the ever present synth that rarely makes a full melody, the fire crackling, the waves threatening your sausages... You’ll even give it a rest, go take a walk, go live. And you’ll return without expecting it. The map is static, you know the exact consequence of an action before the movement, with the game closed too. So you’ll go to sleep and replace the sheep to count with the level that’s been there for days, already burnt into you. Take advantage of the lack of logic to build the possibilities back.
I guess there is something about frustration and wisdom (or knowledge) here, but it’s related to a particular greater topic: inspiration. And the patience it needs. You cannot invoke it by stomping against the same wall again and again in the same way. You can only clear your head, give it time, distance and hope that when inspiration comes you will be ready to welcome it properly.
Keep dreaming those sausages.
An unassuming puzzle game that slowly reveals its masterful design and devious difficulty, culminating in an extraordinary fashion.
Tears of the Kingdom is an exercise in how much a game developer can get away with in recycling content. Potentially one of the most uninspired Zeldas ever made, TotK retreads everything Breath of the Wild did but worse in almost every way--save for the weapon fusion which is brilliant and I will miss in other titles. From the beginning, TotK kicks you off in a worse version of BotW's tutorial, but longer and less focused. Then it drops you in to the exact same map as the previous game with the only changes being sprinkles of copy-and-pasted content to keep you entertained. Unfortunately, several highlights from the previous game have been completely removed (such as the Guardians) to be replaced with... nothing. TotK as a game seems determined to pretend that it's a vastly more substantive experience than BotW, but fumbles the ball, especially in regards to the new ares: The Sky and The Depths.
The Sky and The Depths are emblematic of everything I dislike about this game (note that I still liked it, I'm just disappointed). The Sky, outside of the tutorial, is barely anything to write home about. A few scattered islands copied across the entire upper level of the map, so sparse as to make one think The Sky exists solely as marketing filler. And The Depths, a whole map the size of Hyrule but covered in absolutely nothing. The Depths, while very cool and frightening when you first discover them, are immediately undercut by how little there is to actually do there. And while TotK benefits from a better sidequest system than its predecessor, it completely fails on making exploration more interesting--or at all interesting.
And outside of the painfully mediocre and repetitive dungeons--all of which feature the exact same "open four locks and fight a boss" structure, lacking personality or any actual difficulty, become the most droll and dull parts of a game that cannot allow itself moderation. TotK is a good game, but not a great one; hampered by a need to reuse its ideas as much as possible, without introducing anything new or interesting, it becomes one of the most lackluster Zelda games I have ever played. I had a solid time, but I wish I had a great time instead.
The Sky and The Depths are emblematic of everything I dislike about this game (note that I still liked it, I'm just disappointed). The Sky, outside of the tutorial, is barely anything to write home about. A few scattered islands copied across the entire upper level of the map, so sparse as to make one think The Sky exists solely as marketing filler. And The Depths, a whole map the size of Hyrule but covered in absolutely nothing. The Depths, while very cool and frightening when you first discover them, are immediately undercut by how little there is to actually do there. And while TotK benefits from a better sidequest system than its predecessor, it completely fails on making exploration more interesting--or at all interesting.
And outside of the painfully mediocre and repetitive dungeons--all of which feature the exact same "open four locks and fight a boss" structure, lacking personality or any actual difficulty, become the most droll and dull parts of a game that cannot allow itself moderation. TotK is a good game, but not a great one; hampered by a need to reuse its ideas as much as possible, without introducing anything new or interesting, it becomes one of the most lackluster Zelda games I have ever played. I had a solid time, but I wish I had a great time instead.
Signalis
2022
Dripping in atmosphere and a narrative that manages to claw itself into your head hours and days after playing. There are a few design choices which could have been worked differently (I like limited inventory in games but the back and forth can get a touch laborious here) but the experience allowed me to pretty much completely overlook them.
Behold, a new contender for "my most poorly-constructed review"! Perhaps it's a commentary on how this game pulls your attention in all directions. Maybe it's a play on words, joking about Link's primary new ability in this game being about constructing things. Either way, this game is huge, and my thoughts have gotta come out somehow.
Nintendo of America has a real problem with hiring non-British voice actors, and then having them do really bad British accents anyways. The voice direction in this game is not very good at all, which definitely takes me out of the story at points. Not only that, but Breath of the Wild's "memories" system is still used to dole out a majority of the story, and this is a system that really doesn't benefit TotK. There's a definitive, chronological order that TotK's memories are meant to be viewed in, and if you're exploring the map to an unhealthy degree before doing any main quests, you might be like me and get some plot bombshells casually dropped on you before you witness the proper reveal of that information, which lessens the impact. It also just makes the story feel really disjointed in general. I can't say I was invested in it until a very late-game exposition dump, and while that did grab me real strong, I wish I had that sense of importance much earlier. What strikes me as odd is that the events of BotW are almost never mentioned in this game. Shiekah technology is all but gone, and characters from the previous title are rarely brought up in passing. It may be less noticeable if not for the fact that this game is The Sequel To "The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild". It also didn't help that Eiji Aonuma stated in interviews that "the sequel to BotW will be darker in tone, akin to going from OoT to MM." That set my expectations WAY too high.
The dungeons are still formatted like they're 5 shrine puzzles stapled together, but the design variation between them gives each one a more unique identity than the Divine Beasts. Some dungeons are better than others, but they all serve a purpose that was somewhat lacking in BotW: a buildup to a climactic finale for each area's story arc. They all end with unique bosses that give you a chance to use each sage's abilities before they get permanently added to your entourage. Having the sages' abilities on hand at any time in the field sounds useful, but in practice, they really just serve to be a ton of visual noise. To use their abilities, you gotta run up to them and press A, which is easier said than done in the heat of combat, as their AI causes them to actively run away from you, or get in the way of other sages. All they had to do was map their powers to button combos. Instead, I eventually made the active choice to only keep 1-2 of them out on the field at once.
This game has an ungodly amount of stuff to see and do, somehow more than BotW. I see a well, imma go down it. I see a cave, imma go in it. I see an unvisited island in the sky, imma fly to it. I see an unfinished shrine, imma drop everything else to finish it. The world is significantly more populated with NPCs than BotW as well. There's a new request around every corner, or maybe just some info on points of interest. Some of these are checklist tasks, which is a design choice that gradually diminishes my will to interact with them. Sorry signpost guy, but I'm not stopping to help you if it only rewards me with 20 rupees and a few food items each time. I ignored most "I need to reach my friend" Koroks simply because I didn't want to grind my exploration to a halt and attempt to make the physics work in my favor. I guess that puts me firmly in the camp of supporting Korok-and-ball torture.
Nintendo made a point to put a major focus on the sky islands for most of their promotional material, and I couldn't begin to tell you why. The sky is quite barren, and most of its optional islands are puny and copy-pasted around various regions of the map. The only full-sized island is the one that serves as the game's tutorial, oddly enough. The Big N should feel lucky that skydiving onto floating islands is a sensation that never gets old. The real action supposedly takes place in the depths, which is a location that I find to be tedious by design. The terrain necessitates vehicle usage, and the darkness means that you'll be constantly tossing lightbloom seeds just to see anything. There's still a lot to discover (rare equipment, coliseums, dungeon boss rematches), but it often feels more dull exploring down under due to the stagnant aesthetic. What made me feel the most fatigue was using the map. I sincerely wish there was a way to toggle certain icons on or off on the map, but in other cases, I wish the map was marked even more. Here's a tip from me to you: Outside of the Great Sky Island, keep your sensor set to treasure chests while exploring the sky. Nearly every single chest up there contains something of significant value.
Shrines are still good in this game, but the puzzles admittedly feel like they have rigid, intended solutions in mind. Usually you'll just have to create the contraption that's requested of you, with the very few puzzle pieces the game gives you. A puzzle with only a few pieces isn't necessarily difficult, as there's only so many ways you can arrange the pieces. Now, the other type of shrines are the "proving grounds", and when I see Link enter a shrine naked and afraid, I know I'm in for a good time. Stripped down to pretty much nothing but the bare essentials, the game's survival aspects shine the brightest in these trials, setting up scenarios where on-the-fly thinking is a necessity if you wanna emerge victorious.
Enemy variety still kinda sucks. it's more than BotW, but when you're exploring a map of this size for this long, these are the kind of things you begin to take note of. The new overworld bosses are fun though. Durability is much less of a problem, even if the solution is frequently "fuse a monster horn onto your weapon of choice". My problem comes with the fact that enemies are killing me in 2-3 hits when I have 30 of 40 heart containers. Part of that may be caused by how none of my equipment was upgraded, but that leads into the fact that I didn't unlock a single Great Fairy until over 100 hours into my playthrough), due to having significantly more involved unlock conditions compared to BotW. Combat's not really different at all, but the menu you select items from in the field REALLY sucks. You accumulate so many materials, scrolling through a horizontal list one-by-one is a chore that only gets worse as you get more stuff. Fusing items to your arrows in order to give them properties like fire and electricity is cool, and so are arrows being more of a universal commodity to modify. Not sure who on the dev team thought it would be a good idea to make you fuse a material to your arrow every single time you wanted to fire one. At that point, I would've liked them to keep the different arrow types, just let us fuse our own stockpiles to use at our leisure.
Link's new abilities in this game are provided through his arm, courtesy of Rauru. Ultrahand is basically a version of magnesis that can be used on damn near everything, along with the ability to glue any object to another object. Mix together the new Zonai technology, and you can build a contraption for any situation. The keyword is "can", because I truthfully only built when it was really necessary for progression. You can make some absolutely batshit insane contraptions in this game if you want to; I've seen this game described as a modern-day playable Looney Tune, which really isn't that far from the truth when I see what other people are doing. I also see people earning their engineering degree by playing this game (seriously, look at this shit). Your other abilities are a lot less versatile. I've already mentioned fuse, but that's just something you'll be doing passively all the time. Recall is extremely situational, but it's still useful in those niche situations (I used it to retrieve machines that ran off without me). Ascend might be the most amusingly simple-yet-effective ability of them all. You just...go up through whatever ceiling is above you. It works as an "escape rope" from caves, a way to bypass using tons of stamina climbing walls, and occasionally lets you solve some pretty clever puzzles.
So, a $70 game, huh? Listen, I can tell there was a fuckton of work put into making this game, and they would want to recoup development costs, but for a Zelda game? A sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time? It was gonna sell a triforzillion copies no matter what, and they knew it. Glad they brought back their "game voucher" program for this title, I got this and another game for $50, mostly because I wanted to keep my pride intact. An 8/10 might seem harsh to overly-defensive Zelda fans, but that's just how I feel. Now, if the game had a way to clean up gloom like using FLUDD in Super Mario Sunshine, we'd have an instant 10/10 on our hands, no matter what the rest of the game consisted of. I just wanna wash it all away, because clean is better than dirty, and dirty's meaner than clean. Let me hose down Ganondilf, damn it.
Nintendo of America has a real problem with hiring non-British voice actors, and then having them do really bad British accents anyways. The voice direction in this game is not very good at all, which definitely takes me out of the story at points. Not only that, but Breath of the Wild's "memories" system is still used to dole out a majority of the story, and this is a system that really doesn't benefit TotK. There's a definitive, chronological order that TotK's memories are meant to be viewed in, and if you're exploring the map to an unhealthy degree before doing any main quests, you might be like me and get some plot bombshells casually dropped on you before you witness the proper reveal of that information, which lessens the impact. It also just makes the story feel really disjointed in general. I can't say I was invested in it until a very late-game exposition dump, and while that did grab me real strong, I wish I had that sense of importance much earlier. What strikes me as odd is that the events of BotW are almost never mentioned in this game. Shiekah technology is all but gone, and characters from the previous title are rarely brought up in passing. It may be less noticeable if not for the fact that this game is The Sequel To "The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild". It also didn't help that Eiji Aonuma stated in interviews that "the sequel to BotW will be darker in tone, akin to going from OoT to MM." That set my expectations WAY too high.
The dungeons are still formatted like they're 5 shrine puzzles stapled together, but the design variation between them gives each one a more unique identity than the Divine Beasts. Some dungeons are better than others, but they all serve a purpose that was somewhat lacking in BotW: a buildup to a climactic finale for each area's story arc. They all end with unique bosses that give you a chance to use each sage's abilities before they get permanently added to your entourage. Having the sages' abilities on hand at any time in the field sounds useful, but in practice, they really just serve to be a ton of visual noise. To use their abilities, you gotta run up to them and press A, which is easier said than done in the heat of combat, as their AI causes them to actively run away from you, or get in the way of other sages. All they had to do was map their powers to button combos. Instead, I eventually made the active choice to only keep 1-2 of them out on the field at once.
This game has an ungodly amount of stuff to see and do, somehow more than BotW. I see a well, imma go down it. I see a cave, imma go in it. I see an unvisited island in the sky, imma fly to it. I see an unfinished shrine, imma drop everything else to finish it. The world is significantly more populated with NPCs than BotW as well. There's a new request around every corner, or maybe just some info on points of interest. Some of these are checklist tasks, which is a design choice that gradually diminishes my will to interact with them. Sorry signpost guy, but I'm not stopping to help you if it only rewards me with 20 rupees and a few food items each time. I ignored most "I need to reach my friend" Koroks simply because I didn't want to grind my exploration to a halt and attempt to make the physics work in my favor. I guess that puts me firmly in the camp of supporting Korok-and-ball torture.
Nintendo made a point to put a major focus on the sky islands for most of their promotional material, and I couldn't begin to tell you why. The sky is quite barren, and most of its optional islands are puny and copy-pasted around various regions of the map. The only full-sized island is the one that serves as the game's tutorial, oddly enough. The Big N should feel lucky that skydiving onto floating islands is a sensation that never gets old. The real action supposedly takes place in the depths, which is a location that I find to be tedious by design. The terrain necessitates vehicle usage, and the darkness means that you'll be constantly tossing lightbloom seeds just to see anything. There's still a lot to discover (rare equipment, coliseums, dungeon boss rematches), but it often feels more dull exploring down under due to the stagnant aesthetic. What made me feel the most fatigue was using the map. I sincerely wish there was a way to toggle certain icons on or off on the map, but in other cases, I wish the map was marked even more. Here's a tip from me to you: Outside of the Great Sky Island, keep your sensor set to treasure chests while exploring the sky. Nearly every single chest up there contains something of significant value.
Shrines are still good in this game, but the puzzles admittedly feel like they have rigid, intended solutions in mind. Usually you'll just have to create the contraption that's requested of you, with the very few puzzle pieces the game gives you. A puzzle with only a few pieces isn't necessarily difficult, as there's only so many ways you can arrange the pieces. Now, the other type of shrines are the "proving grounds", and when I see Link enter a shrine naked and afraid, I know I'm in for a good time. Stripped down to pretty much nothing but the bare essentials, the game's survival aspects shine the brightest in these trials, setting up scenarios where on-the-fly thinking is a necessity if you wanna emerge victorious.
Enemy variety still kinda sucks. it's more than BotW, but when you're exploring a map of this size for this long, these are the kind of things you begin to take note of. The new overworld bosses are fun though. Durability is much less of a problem, even if the solution is frequently "fuse a monster horn onto your weapon of choice". My problem comes with the fact that enemies are killing me in 2-3 hits when I have 30 of 40 heart containers. Part of that may be caused by how none of my equipment was upgraded, but that leads into the fact that I didn't unlock a single Great Fairy until over 100 hours into my playthrough), due to having significantly more involved unlock conditions compared to BotW. Combat's not really different at all, but the menu you select items from in the field REALLY sucks. You accumulate so many materials, scrolling through a horizontal list one-by-one is a chore that only gets worse as you get more stuff. Fusing items to your arrows in order to give them properties like fire and electricity is cool, and so are arrows being more of a universal commodity to modify. Not sure who on the dev team thought it would be a good idea to make you fuse a material to your arrow every single time you wanted to fire one. At that point, I would've liked them to keep the different arrow types, just let us fuse our own stockpiles to use at our leisure.
Link's new abilities in this game are provided through his arm, courtesy of Rauru. Ultrahand is basically a version of magnesis that can be used on damn near everything, along with the ability to glue any object to another object. Mix together the new Zonai technology, and you can build a contraption for any situation. The keyword is "can", because I truthfully only built when it was really necessary for progression. You can make some absolutely batshit insane contraptions in this game if you want to; I've seen this game described as a modern-day playable Looney Tune, which really isn't that far from the truth when I see what other people are doing. I also see people earning their engineering degree by playing this game (seriously, look at this shit). Your other abilities are a lot less versatile. I've already mentioned fuse, but that's just something you'll be doing passively all the time. Recall is extremely situational, but it's still useful in those niche situations (I used it to retrieve machines that ran off without me). Ascend might be the most amusingly simple-yet-effective ability of them all. You just...go up through whatever ceiling is above you. It works as an "escape rope" from caves, a way to bypass using tons of stamina climbing walls, and occasionally lets you solve some pretty clever puzzles.
So, a $70 game, huh? Listen, I can tell there was a fuckton of work put into making this game, and they would want to recoup development costs, but for a Zelda game? A sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time? It was gonna sell a triforzillion copies no matter what, and they knew it. Glad they brought back their "game voucher" program for this title, I got this and another game for $50, mostly because I wanted to keep my pride intact. An 8/10 might seem harsh to overly-defensive Zelda fans, but that's just how I feel. Now, if the game had a way to clean up gloom like using FLUDD in Super Mario Sunshine, we'd have an instant 10/10 on our hands, no matter what the rest of the game consisted of. I just wanna wash it all away, because clean is better than dirty, and dirty's meaner than clean. Let me hose down Ganondilf, damn it.
As I initially set off to finish the last of the remaining dungeons, I round a corner and a stray thought occurs: “Can I dogfight dragons in this game?” After an evening spent on that instead, it turns out that I can both do that and send it tumbling down a cliff in the process. Another thought follows: “This is probably the coolest game I’ve ever played.”
This reflects a strength that’s been carried forward from Breath of the Wild and part of what separated that game from standard open world fare: the “triangle rule.” It includes shaping environmental geometry in such a way that landmarks and other notable sights were deliberately obscured from angles players were most likely to view them from, creating a visual chain of interest as they orient themselves around it. It’s impressive that Tears of the Kingdom retains this considering just how much Hyrule has been reshuffled and expanded upon, but where it particularly excels in this regard is in terms of new additions, namely its tripling down on verticality.
Diving into a well or tree stump, winding up in a complex cave system, finding treasure behind a waterfall or at the top of a hidden shaft and using Ascend to pop out the other end in parts unknown is the exact kind of storybook-like experience that this new formula needed, like meat added to the bones of the sense of adventure BOTW was otherwise so successful at selling. Caves seem a deceptively simple inclusion on a conceptual level – goodness knows open world fantasy games’re no stranger to them – but one reason you couldn’t just plop TOTK’s into some other game is because of how their design’s informed by Link’s traversal options. Just finding them often resembles a scene out of Katsuya Terada’s art for the first few Zelda games, steep climbs into hidden entryways and all, often in a way that foreshadows the challenges inside. Slippery walls, boulders you have to smash your way through, confined spaces and other hazards combine to form the other reason, which is the contrast these environmentally constrained puzzle boxes create with the rest of the game’s freedom.
Shrines and temples alike exemplify this, as much as or more than the spectacle of diving from a sky island straight into the Depths in what’s a sensation I haven’t felt since Gravity Rush 2. Getting goofy with a combination of Ultrahand and Recall or whatever other powers you prefer to circumvent obstacles brings to mind an anecdote I have about a level in Thief 2 called Casing the Joint – years now after first playing that level, I still couldn’t tell you the “proper” way to beat it, because I’d always drag boxes from the opposite end of the level and use them to scramble onto titular joint’s roof before smashing a window that would leave every guard permanently alerted. Scuffed a method as it may sound, the important thing is that the game says “yes” to the player regardless, and the same’s largely true of TOTK; although, as with BOTW, some of its quest design shows that it isn’t fully designed in accordance with these sorts of open-ended solutions (Calip’s omniscient fence in Kakariko comes to mind), this isn’t necessarily so much a flaw as just an indicator that it’s not quite the same type of game. Where limitations like these do exist, they rarely feel so arbitrary as to outweigh the feeling of thinking like an adventurer that comes with nonlinear problem solving through Link’s new, more multifaceted powers.
Fuse is a favourite of mine not just for how it turns any item you come across into a potential tool, but also because this by extension encourages thinking about your equipment more than BOTW required. A bokoblin reaper may share the same animations as a horriblin hammer, but only one of them’s getting used for smashing enemies’ armour, clearing boulders out of caverns or searching for ore among other things. It’s understandable why some players may initially be upset at the apparent lack of any new weapon types compared to BOTW, but considering how many different functionalities are covered thanks to this one power, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs considered and rejected the idea based on potential new ones being redundant. It feels weird to say so about a game that isn’t by any means hurting for recognition, but this is just one example of how it (and its predecessor) probably deserves more credit for achieving more with less.
This extends to its enemy design. We have a tendency to think of “enemy variety” in terms of the quantity of different enemy types, but what gets lost in that sort of discourse is the mechanical variety between those types. Even in BOTW, bokoblins have more dynamic behaviours than the combined enemy rosters of some other games, and that was without boss bokoblins, aerocudas and Zonai constructs for them to interact with. While TOTK having a higher amount of different and region-specific enemy types is appreciated nonetheless, I’m glad that fleshing out these behaviours amongst a relatively condensed roster still seems to have been a priority.
Flux Constructs are a standout in both that respect and why we ought to also apply this sort of lateral thinking to TOTK’s combat as well – in a game in which you can remove a golem’s hands to prevent him from being able to punch you, shoot dragons out of the sky with a DIY plane or suspend yourself in air with a foot-mounted flamethrower, it seems myopic to judge it based on how many ways Link can swing a weapon. Between using Recall on a certain attack of theirs to fling myself to places I couldn’t otherwise reach, darkness that’s actually dark and which requires resources to dispel, plus summonable AI companions, it becomes apparent that the sceptics were wrong – this isn’t BOTW DLC, but rather a Dragon’s Dogma 2 closed beta.
I’m only being slightly facetious, because much of what makes Dragon’s Dogma and its mutual point of influence, i.e. Skyrim, special as adventure games is present here too. If those two games could each be distilled into one key characteristic, I’d say they’re respectively dynamism and player-directed experiences. TOTK takes both and melds them with a largely honoured commitment to unrestricted problem solving that – in my view – has always felt like the most natural direction for Zelda to go in, forming a superlative package which I think sits at the top of its franchise, its console and potentially open world games in general.
All this and somehow I still feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface of all there is to appreciate here. As many words could be written about the atmosphere invoked during a sunset with the Dragon Head Island theme playing, the extent to which Ganondorf’s phase 2 transition has been living in my head rent free or the fact that, if you think about it, Link himself has become the legend of Zelda. I might play another 100 hours and still be finding new things to wrap my head around. Such a game.
This reflects a strength that’s been carried forward from Breath of the Wild and part of what separated that game from standard open world fare: the “triangle rule.” It includes shaping environmental geometry in such a way that landmarks and other notable sights were deliberately obscured from angles players were most likely to view them from, creating a visual chain of interest as they orient themselves around it. It’s impressive that Tears of the Kingdom retains this considering just how much Hyrule has been reshuffled and expanded upon, but where it particularly excels in this regard is in terms of new additions, namely its tripling down on verticality.
Diving into a well or tree stump, winding up in a complex cave system, finding treasure behind a waterfall or at the top of a hidden shaft and using Ascend to pop out the other end in parts unknown is the exact kind of storybook-like experience that this new formula needed, like meat added to the bones of the sense of adventure BOTW was otherwise so successful at selling. Caves seem a deceptively simple inclusion on a conceptual level – goodness knows open world fantasy games’re no stranger to them – but one reason you couldn’t just plop TOTK’s into some other game is because of how their design’s informed by Link’s traversal options. Just finding them often resembles a scene out of Katsuya Terada’s art for the first few Zelda games, steep climbs into hidden entryways and all, often in a way that foreshadows the challenges inside. Slippery walls, boulders you have to smash your way through, confined spaces and other hazards combine to form the other reason, which is the contrast these environmentally constrained puzzle boxes create with the rest of the game’s freedom.
Shrines and temples alike exemplify this, as much as or more than the spectacle of diving from a sky island straight into the Depths in what’s a sensation I haven’t felt since Gravity Rush 2. Getting goofy with a combination of Ultrahand and Recall or whatever other powers you prefer to circumvent obstacles brings to mind an anecdote I have about a level in Thief 2 called Casing the Joint – years now after first playing that level, I still couldn’t tell you the “proper” way to beat it, because I’d always drag boxes from the opposite end of the level and use them to scramble onto titular joint’s roof before smashing a window that would leave every guard permanently alerted. Scuffed a method as it may sound, the important thing is that the game says “yes” to the player regardless, and the same’s largely true of TOTK; although, as with BOTW, some of its quest design shows that it isn’t fully designed in accordance with these sorts of open-ended solutions (Calip’s omniscient fence in Kakariko comes to mind), this isn’t necessarily so much a flaw as just an indicator that it’s not quite the same type of game. Where limitations like these do exist, they rarely feel so arbitrary as to outweigh the feeling of thinking like an adventurer that comes with nonlinear problem solving through Link’s new, more multifaceted powers.
Fuse is a favourite of mine not just for how it turns any item you come across into a potential tool, but also because this by extension encourages thinking about your equipment more than BOTW required. A bokoblin reaper may share the same animations as a horriblin hammer, but only one of them’s getting used for smashing enemies’ armour, clearing boulders out of caverns or searching for ore among other things. It’s understandable why some players may initially be upset at the apparent lack of any new weapon types compared to BOTW, but considering how many different functionalities are covered thanks to this one power, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs considered and rejected the idea based on potential new ones being redundant. It feels weird to say so about a game that isn’t by any means hurting for recognition, but this is just one example of how it (and its predecessor) probably deserves more credit for achieving more with less.
This extends to its enemy design. We have a tendency to think of “enemy variety” in terms of the quantity of different enemy types, but what gets lost in that sort of discourse is the mechanical variety between those types. Even in BOTW, bokoblins have more dynamic behaviours than the combined enemy rosters of some other games, and that was without boss bokoblins, aerocudas and Zonai constructs for them to interact with. While TOTK having a higher amount of different and region-specific enemy types is appreciated nonetheless, I’m glad that fleshing out these behaviours amongst a relatively condensed roster still seems to have been a priority.
Flux Constructs are a standout in both that respect and why we ought to also apply this sort of lateral thinking to TOTK’s combat as well – in a game in which you can remove a golem’s hands to prevent him from being able to punch you, shoot dragons out of the sky with a DIY plane or suspend yourself in air with a foot-mounted flamethrower, it seems myopic to judge it based on how many ways Link can swing a weapon. Between using Recall on a certain attack of theirs to fling myself to places I couldn’t otherwise reach, darkness that’s actually dark and which requires resources to dispel, plus summonable AI companions, it becomes apparent that the sceptics were wrong – this isn’t BOTW DLC, but rather a Dragon’s Dogma 2 closed beta.
I’m only being slightly facetious, because much of what makes Dragon’s Dogma and its mutual point of influence, i.e. Skyrim, special as adventure games is present here too. If those two games could each be distilled into one key characteristic, I’d say they’re respectively dynamism and player-directed experiences. TOTK takes both and melds them with a largely honoured commitment to unrestricted problem solving that – in my view – has always felt like the most natural direction for Zelda to go in, forming a superlative package which I think sits at the top of its franchise, its console and potentially open world games in general.
All this and somehow I still feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface of all there is to appreciate here. As many words could be written about the atmosphere invoked during a sunset with the Dragon Head Island theme playing, the extent to which Ganondorf’s phase 2 transition has been living in my head rent free or the fact that, if you think about it, Link himself has become the legend of Zelda. I might play another 100 hours and still be finding new things to wrap my head around. Such a game.
Celeste
2018
Inspiration comes from strange places.
For many, it's bred from obligation; the need to do something, anything, bringing with it the knowledge that there's work to be done and only one person who can do it. For many, it's spite; hatred and anger, boiling within us, screaming out that it won't be quelled unless action is taken now. For fewer, it's from a desire to grow; a willingness to open yourself and expose your weakness, to be hurt, to be vulnerable, in the name of coming out stronger. Sometimes you just see someone fucking up and being so purposefully ignorant about it that it inspires you to do things properly in their stead.
Celeste is one of the greatest games ever made.
If you asked me what drives me, I'd tell you that it's spite. This is probably not healthy for me, and I don't particularly care. If you asked Madeline what drives her, she’d tell you that she doesn’t know. This is definitely not healthy for her, and the game makes sure that both her and the player understand this. Madeline has a vague, oblique desire to be better. What this entails is climbing a mountain, and it’s left unclear how this is actually meant to help. Sure, the obvious metaphor of literally climbing a mountain is as central to the text of the game as it possibly can be, but lacking any further cause, it’s little more than an act of self-flagellation. It’s hard and punishing and maybe Madeline feels like she deserves that. Celeste is hard and punishing, and maybe you as the player feel like you deserve that. After all, if neither you nor Madeline can get good purely for its own sake, what’s the point? Why bother?
It becomes clearer to both the player and to Madeline as the game progresses that this is far more than just banging your head into a wall until you get it right. It’s the purpose of the literal moment-to-moment gameplay — walk in from the left, do some tough jumps, splat, repeat until you get it right — but the narrative undercurrent gradually erodes through the surface to reveal that this is all in service of an act of self-actualization. Madeline is desperate to prove herself, desperate to understand herself, desperate to not give in to darker desires, desperate to be able to look into a mirror and see her own face instead of a stranger’s. Her desperation carries with it the price of the ascent, and the ascent carries with it the price of her. Madeline suffers in her journey. She’s leveled, brought to all fours beneath the immovable weight of her depression, her panic attacks, her inability to understand who she is. The mountain exposes her, showcasing every part of her that she keeps hidden in every reflective surface, threatening the safety of the people she cares about, reminding her of long-dead relationships with the implication that everything happening is all her fault. It isn’t, of course, but Madeline’s struggles to reach self-actualization reflect how she believes herself to be a failure.
The gameplay and story integration here is masterful, far beyond the raw difficulty of the platforming mirroring the narrative struggles faced by our protagonist. One scene where Madeline suffers a panic attack sees Theo supporting her through it, giving her a little pop piece of meditation while she waits for it to pass; all she needs to do is imagine a feather floating up and down in time with her breathing, and you as the player are tasked with keeping the feather in focus. It isn’t too much further into the game when Madeline decides that she’s gotten over all of her fears and doubts and attempts to use the feather trick as a weapon; it fails, miserably, because she hasn’t come anywhere near achieving the self-actualization that she wants to have. She tries to rush things, to force her fears down instead of process them, to conquer herself rather than accept herself as she is. It’s only after she fails and falls that she realizes that she must accept all of the bad that comes when she understands who she is, merging every part of her into the cohesive whole that is Madeline. As a reward for the player, you get a triple jump. As silly as that might sound, given how heavy the narrative has been up to this point, it’s the evolution of gameplay and the swelling of the music that makes Madeline actually feel like she’s living up to her full potential. The climb has been a struggle for you and her, but now you both have all of the tools you need to reach the top of the mountain. Once you have that, you’re unstoppable.
The narrative of the game, for better and for worse, took on something of a new life with the later explanation that both Maddy Thorson (the lead developer and former name-provider of the studio) and Madeline are trans women. For better, Celeste has remained a tentpole of positive representation since the day it released and has provided many historically-excluded people a strong, important figure to relate to; for worse, it’s incited many of the most annoying posters to hem and haw and handwring over what they perceive to be revisionism for the sake of winning brownie points. Maddy herself has written quite openly about the subject and certainly has far more insight into the topic than any schmuck like myself can throw in, but I’ve seen first-hand the impact that this game has had on the people around me. For a lot of my friends, for a lot of people I care about and respect, Celeste is important because Celeste actually gets it. This shit is hard. It’s exhausting. It isn’t climbing a mountain or beating a hard video game, because those things have a defined end. There’s a clear beginning, and a clear conclusion, and that’s that. The struggle to live as oneself and to be open and honest with who we are is a path filled with unnecessary strife and struggle brought down upon our heads by people who don’t get it. People who refuse to get it. People who benefit from not getting it. I shouldn’t need to point at any of the many, many examples of this in the United States alone, simply because there’s gotten to be too many to keep track of. It’s everywhere, as a sickness.
“This memorial dedicated to those who perished on the climb" is one of the most powerful lines I’ve ever read, and it’s the context from outside of the game’s text that defines it. Unlike any mountain, and unlike any video game, the climb doesn’t stop. The climb started before we were born, and the climb will continue after we’ve gone. For how long we’ve all been fighting, been struggling, been warring against every push and backslide, there’s always more of a climb to take on. This shit won't stop. The obvious question, then, is why we should bother to climb at all.
Celeste’s answer is simple.
To be who you are makes it worth the climb.
For many, it's bred from obligation; the need to do something, anything, bringing with it the knowledge that there's work to be done and only one person who can do it. For many, it's spite; hatred and anger, boiling within us, screaming out that it won't be quelled unless action is taken now. For fewer, it's from a desire to grow; a willingness to open yourself and expose your weakness, to be hurt, to be vulnerable, in the name of coming out stronger. Sometimes you just see someone fucking up and being so purposefully ignorant about it that it inspires you to do things properly in their stead.
Celeste is one of the greatest games ever made.
If you asked me what drives me, I'd tell you that it's spite. This is probably not healthy for me, and I don't particularly care. If you asked Madeline what drives her, she’d tell you that she doesn’t know. This is definitely not healthy for her, and the game makes sure that both her and the player understand this. Madeline has a vague, oblique desire to be better. What this entails is climbing a mountain, and it’s left unclear how this is actually meant to help. Sure, the obvious metaphor of literally climbing a mountain is as central to the text of the game as it possibly can be, but lacking any further cause, it’s little more than an act of self-flagellation. It’s hard and punishing and maybe Madeline feels like she deserves that. Celeste is hard and punishing, and maybe you as the player feel like you deserve that. After all, if neither you nor Madeline can get good purely for its own sake, what’s the point? Why bother?
It becomes clearer to both the player and to Madeline as the game progresses that this is far more than just banging your head into a wall until you get it right. It’s the purpose of the literal moment-to-moment gameplay — walk in from the left, do some tough jumps, splat, repeat until you get it right — but the narrative undercurrent gradually erodes through the surface to reveal that this is all in service of an act of self-actualization. Madeline is desperate to prove herself, desperate to understand herself, desperate to not give in to darker desires, desperate to be able to look into a mirror and see her own face instead of a stranger’s. Her desperation carries with it the price of the ascent, and the ascent carries with it the price of her. Madeline suffers in her journey. She’s leveled, brought to all fours beneath the immovable weight of her depression, her panic attacks, her inability to understand who she is. The mountain exposes her, showcasing every part of her that she keeps hidden in every reflective surface, threatening the safety of the people she cares about, reminding her of long-dead relationships with the implication that everything happening is all her fault. It isn’t, of course, but Madeline’s struggles to reach self-actualization reflect how she believes herself to be a failure.
The gameplay and story integration here is masterful, far beyond the raw difficulty of the platforming mirroring the narrative struggles faced by our protagonist. One scene where Madeline suffers a panic attack sees Theo supporting her through it, giving her a little pop piece of meditation while she waits for it to pass; all she needs to do is imagine a feather floating up and down in time with her breathing, and you as the player are tasked with keeping the feather in focus. It isn’t too much further into the game when Madeline decides that she’s gotten over all of her fears and doubts and attempts to use the feather trick as a weapon; it fails, miserably, because she hasn’t come anywhere near achieving the self-actualization that she wants to have. She tries to rush things, to force her fears down instead of process them, to conquer herself rather than accept herself as she is. It’s only after she fails and falls that she realizes that she must accept all of the bad that comes when she understands who she is, merging every part of her into the cohesive whole that is Madeline. As a reward for the player, you get a triple jump. As silly as that might sound, given how heavy the narrative has been up to this point, it’s the evolution of gameplay and the swelling of the music that makes Madeline actually feel like she’s living up to her full potential. The climb has been a struggle for you and her, but now you both have all of the tools you need to reach the top of the mountain. Once you have that, you’re unstoppable.
The narrative of the game, for better and for worse, took on something of a new life with the later explanation that both Maddy Thorson (the lead developer and former name-provider of the studio) and Madeline are trans women. For better, Celeste has remained a tentpole of positive representation since the day it released and has provided many historically-excluded people a strong, important figure to relate to; for worse, it’s incited many of the most annoying posters to hem and haw and handwring over what they perceive to be revisionism for the sake of winning brownie points. Maddy herself has written quite openly about the subject and certainly has far more insight into the topic than any schmuck like myself can throw in, but I’ve seen first-hand the impact that this game has had on the people around me. For a lot of my friends, for a lot of people I care about and respect, Celeste is important because Celeste actually gets it. This shit is hard. It’s exhausting. It isn’t climbing a mountain or beating a hard video game, because those things have a defined end. There’s a clear beginning, and a clear conclusion, and that’s that. The struggle to live as oneself and to be open and honest with who we are is a path filled with unnecessary strife and struggle brought down upon our heads by people who don’t get it. People who refuse to get it. People who benefit from not getting it. I shouldn’t need to point at any of the many, many examples of this in the United States alone, simply because there’s gotten to be too many to keep track of. It’s everywhere, as a sickness.
“This memorial dedicated to those who perished on the climb" is one of the most powerful lines I’ve ever read, and it’s the context from outside of the game’s text that defines it. Unlike any mountain, and unlike any video game, the climb doesn’t stop. The climb started before we were born, and the climb will continue after we’ve gone. For how long we’ve all been fighting, been struggling, been warring against every push and backslide, there’s always more of a climb to take on. This shit won't stop. The obvious question, then, is why we should bother to climb at all.
Celeste’s answer is simple.
To be who you are makes it worth the climb.
What does it mean to be part of a series? Should a piece of media be viewed only on its own merits, or should it be compared to what came before? This debate has plagued many discussions in the past, but there is no correct answer. Both sides of this argument fail to see the nuance that comes with a series and how the status quo can progress while still paying respects to the legacy of a work of art. There is a dichotomy there that I want to touch on because I feel that Breath of the Wild does not uphold the legacy of the Legend of Zelda series very well and is too much of a departure from what I know, love, and expect of a game that comes with that series label.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom introduces some amazing new ideas and concepts to the series while also connecting itself to that larger scope and relating its ideas to ones from games in the past. It honors the Zelda series title while still being its own entity and making strides to be truly unique.
Ultimately, it's naive to look at a game in a vacuum because that's just not possible. You can't just ignore what came prior. Expectations and familiarity play roles in everything, and yes, things can't just remain stagnant, however, that legacy can still be upheld and respected while still differentiating enough from that norm. Breath of the Wild tries to detach itself in almost every way from the series to a point where it's practically unrecognizable. That hurts, as someone who's grown up with this franchise. Yes, there is a benefit to looking at just what a game does well on its own. There is a nuance to this argument in that neither side is completely the right answer. Breath of the Wild isn't trying to be a typical Zelda game. And for that, it does extremely well. ...But it's still a Zelda game. It's the legend of ZELDA: Breath of the Wild. It's still a part of this series and it can't shake that name away. I felt let down by how the series as a whole was treated in BOTW and it left an incredibly bitter taste in my mouth.
Tears of the Kingdom strays even further from the typical Zelda identity while, at the same time, somehow making itself more connected to the series than BOTW ever was. TOTK is a breathtaking, inspiring game that takes the foundation of BOTW and builds upon it by allowing you to have the ability to do literally anything in the world with any object. It explores the new race that BOTW introduced but never truly went in-depth about, and I love that. The Zonai are one of my favorite new races in the series, I’m glad they got the love they deserved. TOTK is a goofy and charming game that has me discovering something new and constantly laughing because of some insane finding or contraption I was able to create. The new areas and dungeon aesthetics are some of the most unique and intriguing in the entire franchise, and serve as something that makes this game really stand out amongst the crowd.
It's also moodier, with a tense conflict between past and present that is a lot more dire and unnerving at times, aided by some of the terrifying enemies, areas, and bosses that really make the whole experience a lot more unsettling and serious. The dark and overbearing depths contribute to that feeling, as well as the more involved and emotional story. The game walks a thin line between serious and silly and does it with such excellence that I can't help but adore it for that.
Finally, Tears of the Kingdom is also just more Zelda-y. There are more references and ties to the main series, such as gibdos, like-likes, bomb flowers, poes, the magic armor, and so, so much more. It reimagines and redefines the age-old tale of Ganondorf, the once-in-100-years Gerudo king, approaching and dethroning the Hyrule royalty. It has more enemies, items, and assorted references to the overarching series that made me light up every time they were shown. There's a more involved story that actually shows these characters fighting and struggling with the idea that they very well might fail. It just so perfectly ties everything together to make it ultimately feel like a real Zelda game.
As I said, it upholds the legacy of the Zelda franchise while still making itself unique and modern enough to not feel like it's being held in place. If Breath of the Wild took its identity a few steps too far, I can't even say TOTK took it a step back because it somehow went back and forward at the same time. It blends together what I want from a mainline game and a fresh new take on the series. But it somehow never feels like two separate games— everything is bonded together in a way that makes it one complete experience that never feels confused about what it wants to be.
It’s not without its flaws, though. The dungeons are still not quite what I want them to be. There aren’t enough of them, and they are far too short and simple for me to love them the way I love traditional dungeons. It’s certainly a step in the right direction, visually and storywise, but they need to be more fleshed out and more linear to feel really like Zelda dungeons. Another thing that frustrated me was the sage abilities. I don’t think they were used quite well enough in the dungeons they were introduced in, and the character AI was often not where I wanted it to be during intense moments of stress. They’re fine for what they are, but they rarely felt necessary. Shrines are fine, if still a bit too simple and easily broken with the game’s mechanics.
Speaking of the mechanics, they are a whole lot of fun in this game. They invite so much creativity and thought without sacrificing anything. Ultrahand was easily the standout for me, although the others made traversal and combat a lot more fun as well. I do still wish there was a progression of items as the game went on rather than getting everything at the start, I do miss defeating a miniboss in a dungeon and obtaining some special item that I’d be using all over the world.
As a whole though, Tears of the Kingdom kept me engaged in its world and story to the very end. There was always something new to find, whether it be a secret entrance to the depths, a new shrine, a Zonai item that I hadn’t seen yet, or countless other types of discoveries I made. Its story was really something special. It has easily the best iteration of Ganondorf so far in the series, and a tale that spanned thousands of years to all converge together at the end. I genuinely sobbed so much when this game concluded. Something about the music, characters, and direction just reminded me of what I adore about the Zelda series.
It all comes back to legacy. To answer the question posed at the beginning of this review, being part of a series means honoring what came before, and leaving a footprint that will become part of that history. There’s a legacy that Tears of the Kingdom embraces and honors, bringing in staples from the rest of the series that connect with fans who may not have loved BOTW’s departure from form. Tears of the Kingdom also leaves a legacy of its own, and will certainly shape the future of the franchise. Tears of the Kingdom is a game I can proudly say I love.
"Link. Remember this name."
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom introduces some amazing new ideas and concepts to the series while also connecting itself to that larger scope and relating its ideas to ones from games in the past. It honors the Zelda series title while still being its own entity and making strides to be truly unique.
Ultimately, it's naive to look at a game in a vacuum because that's just not possible. You can't just ignore what came prior. Expectations and familiarity play roles in everything, and yes, things can't just remain stagnant, however, that legacy can still be upheld and respected while still differentiating enough from that norm. Breath of the Wild tries to detach itself in almost every way from the series to a point where it's practically unrecognizable. That hurts, as someone who's grown up with this franchise. Yes, there is a benefit to looking at just what a game does well on its own. There is a nuance to this argument in that neither side is completely the right answer. Breath of the Wild isn't trying to be a typical Zelda game. And for that, it does extremely well. ...But it's still a Zelda game. It's the legend of ZELDA: Breath of the Wild. It's still a part of this series and it can't shake that name away. I felt let down by how the series as a whole was treated in BOTW and it left an incredibly bitter taste in my mouth.
Tears of the Kingdom strays even further from the typical Zelda identity while, at the same time, somehow making itself more connected to the series than BOTW ever was. TOTK is a breathtaking, inspiring game that takes the foundation of BOTW and builds upon it by allowing you to have the ability to do literally anything in the world with any object. It explores the new race that BOTW introduced but never truly went in-depth about, and I love that. The Zonai are one of my favorite new races in the series, I’m glad they got the love they deserved. TOTK is a goofy and charming game that has me discovering something new and constantly laughing because of some insane finding or contraption I was able to create. The new areas and dungeon aesthetics are some of the most unique and intriguing in the entire franchise, and serve as something that makes this game really stand out amongst the crowd.
It's also moodier, with a tense conflict between past and present that is a lot more dire and unnerving at times, aided by some of the terrifying enemies, areas, and bosses that really make the whole experience a lot more unsettling and serious. The dark and overbearing depths contribute to that feeling, as well as the more involved and emotional story. The game walks a thin line between serious and silly and does it with such excellence that I can't help but adore it for that.
Finally, Tears of the Kingdom is also just more Zelda-y. There are more references and ties to the main series, such as gibdos, like-likes, bomb flowers, poes, the magic armor, and so, so much more. It reimagines and redefines the age-old tale of Ganondorf, the once-in-100-years Gerudo king, approaching and dethroning the Hyrule royalty. It has more enemies, items, and assorted references to the overarching series that made me light up every time they were shown. There's a more involved story that actually shows these characters fighting and struggling with the idea that they very well might fail. It just so perfectly ties everything together to make it ultimately feel like a real Zelda game.
As I said, it upholds the legacy of the Zelda franchise while still making itself unique and modern enough to not feel like it's being held in place. If Breath of the Wild took its identity a few steps too far, I can't even say TOTK took it a step back because it somehow went back and forward at the same time. It blends together what I want from a mainline game and a fresh new take on the series. But it somehow never feels like two separate games— everything is bonded together in a way that makes it one complete experience that never feels confused about what it wants to be.
It’s not without its flaws, though. The dungeons are still not quite what I want them to be. There aren’t enough of them, and they are far too short and simple for me to love them the way I love traditional dungeons. It’s certainly a step in the right direction, visually and storywise, but they need to be more fleshed out and more linear to feel really like Zelda dungeons. Another thing that frustrated me was the sage abilities. I don’t think they were used quite well enough in the dungeons they were introduced in, and the character AI was often not where I wanted it to be during intense moments of stress. They’re fine for what they are, but they rarely felt necessary. Shrines are fine, if still a bit too simple and easily broken with the game’s mechanics.
Speaking of the mechanics, they are a whole lot of fun in this game. They invite so much creativity and thought without sacrificing anything. Ultrahand was easily the standout for me, although the others made traversal and combat a lot more fun as well. I do still wish there was a progression of items as the game went on rather than getting everything at the start, I do miss defeating a miniboss in a dungeon and obtaining some special item that I’d be using all over the world.
As a whole though, Tears of the Kingdom kept me engaged in its world and story to the very end. There was always something new to find, whether it be a secret entrance to the depths, a new shrine, a Zonai item that I hadn’t seen yet, or countless other types of discoveries I made. Its story was really something special. It has easily the best iteration of Ganondorf so far in the series, and a tale that spanned thousands of years to all converge together at the end. I genuinely sobbed so much when this game concluded. Something about the music, characters, and direction just reminded me of what I adore about the Zelda series.
It all comes back to legacy. To answer the question posed at the beginning of this review, being part of a series means honoring what came before, and leaving a footprint that will become part of that history. There’s a legacy that Tears of the Kingdom embraces and honors, bringing in staples from the rest of the series that connect with fans who may not have loved BOTW’s departure from form. Tears of the Kingdom also leaves a legacy of its own, and will certainly shape the future of the franchise. Tears of the Kingdom is a game I can proudly say I love.
"Link. Remember this name."
God of War Ragnarök
2022
Well, since we're all gonna die, there's one more secret I feel I have to share with you
I did not care for "God of War Ragnarok"
What?
Did not care for "God of War Ragnarok"
How can you even say that, Dad?
Didn't like- Didn't like it.
Zappa15, it's so good. It's like the perfect game.
I- This is what everyone always says. Whenever they say, it's like, "Oh my..." Everyone always says-
Richard Schiff, Ryan Hurst, I mean,
Listen-
You never see- CHRISTOPHER JUDGE?!
I know, l uh eh, FINE fine actor, did not like the game.
Why not?
Did not- couldn't get into it.
Explain yourself. What didn't you like about it?
It insists upon itself
What?
It insists upon itself.
What does that even mean?
'CAUSE IT HAS A VALID POINT TO MAKE, IT'S INSISTING!
It takes forever gettin' in. They spend nearly six and a half hours
It's a great game.
I love "Donkey Kong Jr" That is my answer to that statement.
Exactly.
Well there you go.
Whatever.
I like that game, too.
I did not care for "God of War Ragnarok"
What?
Did not care for "God of War Ragnarok"
How can you even say that, Dad?
Didn't like- Didn't like it.
Zappa15, it's so good. It's like the perfect game.
I- This is what everyone always says. Whenever they say, it's like, "Oh my..." Everyone always says-
Richard Schiff, Ryan Hurst, I mean,
Listen-
You never see- CHRISTOPHER JUDGE?!
I know, l uh eh, FINE fine actor, did not like the game.
Why not?
Did not- couldn't get into it.
Explain yourself. What didn't you like about it?
It insists upon itself
What?
It insists upon itself.
What does that even mean?
'CAUSE IT HAS A VALID POINT TO MAKE, IT'S INSISTING!
It takes forever gettin' in. They spend nearly six and a half hours
It's a great game.
I love "Donkey Kong Jr" That is my answer to that statement.
Exactly.
Well there you go.
Whatever.
I like that game, too.
The Far Cry Elden Ring-ification of Breath of the Wild with a smattering of end-of-chapter Fortnite and New Funky Mode.
While BotW was content to let players roam free in a sprawling world, Tears of the Kingdom reins in this freedom considerably and hides the guardrails from the player with horse blinders. Link is still welcome to run around Hyrule at will, but the primary storyline holds the keys which allow actual exploratory liberation. My first dozen hours completely ignored Lookout Landing, leaving me without critical tools like the paraglider and towers. That was the most challenging TotK ever got, and the most it (unintentionally) forced me to think outside the box. I dragged gliders to the tops of hills labouriously, I used a horse and cart, I made elaborate vehicles simply to get around. I scrounged for rockets, fans, batteries, and air balloons to ascend to sky islands, making it to a few of the lower ones with great accomplishment. I committed to putting off the towers as long as I could, not realising they were an outright necessity. Seeing how this additional layer of the map functioned demystified it severely, rendering a challenge into a stepping stone for parcels of content.
The depths, like the skies above, are filled with potential. Many of its spaces are similarly wide open to encourage blind exploration with vehicles. Only there is nearly no purpose to any of it. Lightroots are a checkbox which dismantle the most compelling part of the depths -- their darkness. The depths are a place you visit to grab zonaite or amiibo armour and leave. As the Fire Temple is within the depths, and it being the first I tackled, I falsely believed there would be more dungeons strewn about below, simply a part of the world rather than instanced away from it. Sadly, it is the exception.
The other temples are obfuscated and inaccessible without their related storylines, which is itself fine (the temples are impossible to progress through without their associated power anyways) but this leaves the world feeling more boxed in, a selection of rooms in an overly-long hallway. A spare few rooms complement each other, most of them do not. The walls of the rooms must be thick. Whether it is shrines, side quests, or temples, the developers yet again seemingly have no way of knowing what abilities the player might have, what puzzles they have encountered, what skills they remember. All that they know is that in the Fire Temple, you have a Goron. In the Water Temple, you have Zora armour. The positive is, of course, that these things can thus be tackled in any order without a fear of missing out on anything. The downside is that there is never anything more to a shrine, a temple, or anything than what the player encounters the first go around. There is no impetus to return to a location when you have a better tool, or a wider knowledge of how the game's mechanics work. You show up, experience the room, and leave. With 300 map pins at your disposal, and similar issues arising in BotW, there's a sense that the developers chickened out near the end, too afraid to let the player (gasp) backtrack or (gasp) miss out.
Ironically enough, the lack of FOMO is what I miss most. When I was towerlessly exploring with a hodgepodge of trash scavenged from around the world, I felt free. I felt clever! When I discovered the intended mode of play, however, I felt I was putting a square peg in a square hole. There's a crystal that needs to be moved to a far away island? Before, I might have made a horror of Octoballoons and Korok Fronds with Fans and Springs to get it where it needed to go. When the Fruit of Knowledge was consumed, I saw the parts for the prebuilt Fanplane were right next to the Crystal. There's a breakable wall in a dungeon? Bomb Flowers or a hammer are right there. It is incredibly safe. It is a pair of horse blinders that you can decorate as you please. Go ahead and make your mech, you are still on the straight and narrow path.
TotK tries to bring back the linearity of Zeldas past within the BotW framework, but it ignores that the linearity was speckled with a weave of areas which expanded alongside your arsenal, rather than shrinking. Everything here is incongruous, a smörgåsbord of cool set pieces that simply don't go together. There is too much content (Elden Ring) that is too self-contained (end of chapter Fortnite) and too afraid that you will not experience it (New Funky Mode).
Did I have fun? Yes. But I had to make it myself.
While BotW was content to let players roam free in a sprawling world, Tears of the Kingdom reins in this freedom considerably and hides the guardrails from the player with horse blinders. Link is still welcome to run around Hyrule at will, but the primary storyline holds the keys which allow actual exploratory liberation. My first dozen hours completely ignored Lookout Landing, leaving me without critical tools like the paraglider and towers. That was the most challenging TotK ever got, and the most it (unintentionally) forced me to think outside the box. I dragged gliders to the tops of hills labouriously, I used a horse and cart, I made elaborate vehicles simply to get around. I scrounged for rockets, fans, batteries, and air balloons to ascend to sky islands, making it to a few of the lower ones with great accomplishment. I committed to putting off the towers as long as I could, not realising they were an outright necessity. Seeing how this additional layer of the map functioned demystified it severely, rendering a challenge into a stepping stone for parcels of content.
The depths, like the skies above, are filled with potential. Many of its spaces are similarly wide open to encourage blind exploration with vehicles. Only there is nearly no purpose to any of it. Lightroots are a checkbox which dismantle the most compelling part of the depths -- their darkness. The depths are a place you visit to grab zonaite or amiibo armour and leave. As the Fire Temple is within the depths, and it being the first I tackled, I falsely believed there would be more dungeons strewn about below, simply a part of the world rather than instanced away from it. Sadly, it is the exception.
The other temples are obfuscated and inaccessible without their related storylines, which is itself fine (the temples are impossible to progress through without their associated power anyways) but this leaves the world feeling more boxed in, a selection of rooms in an overly-long hallway. A spare few rooms complement each other, most of them do not. The walls of the rooms must be thick. Whether it is shrines, side quests, or temples, the developers yet again seemingly have no way of knowing what abilities the player might have, what puzzles they have encountered, what skills they remember. All that they know is that in the Fire Temple, you have a Goron. In the Water Temple, you have Zora armour. The positive is, of course, that these things can thus be tackled in any order without a fear of missing out on anything. The downside is that there is never anything more to a shrine, a temple, or anything than what the player encounters the first go around. There is no impetus to return to a location when you have a better tool, or a wider knowledge of how the game's mechanics work. You show up, experience the room, and leave. With 300 map pins at your disposal, and similar issues arising in BotW, there's a sense that the developers chickened out near the end, too afraid to let the player (gasp) backtrack or (gasp) miss out.
Ironically enough, the lack of FOMO is what I miss most. When I was towerlessly exploring with a hodgepodge of trash scavenged from around the world, I felt free. I felt clever! When I discovered the intended mode of play, however, I felt I was putting a square peg in a square hole. There's a crystal that needs to be moved to a far away island? Before, I might have made a horror of Octoballoons and Korok Fronds with Fans and Springs to get it where it needed to go. When the Fruit of Knowledge was consumed, I saw the parts for the prebuilt Fanplane were right next to the Crystal. There's a breakable wall in a dungeon? Bomb Flowers or a hammer are right there. It is incredibly safe. It is a pair of horse blinders that you can decorate as you please. Go ahead and make your mech, you are still on the straight and narrow path.
TotK tries to bring back the linearity of Zeldas past within the BotW framework, but it ignores that the linearity was speckled with a weave of areas which expanded alongside your arsenal, rather than shrinking. Everything here is incongruous, a smörgåsbord of cool set pieces that simply don't go together. There is too much content (Elden Ring) that is too self-contained (end of chapter Fortnite) and too afraid that you will not experience it (New Funky Mode).
Did I have fun? Yes. But I had to make it myself.
I've played plenty of Metroid games prior to this. I never beat any of them prior to this one, though. Why? I'll blame it on my short attention span when I was younger. With the release of Metroid Dread looming over the horizon, I figured I should probably delve back into the series. I decided on diving back with this one, seeing as it's a remake of the original Metroid, which I have played. I'll admit, though, the original Metroid is not particularly great. Environments were very samey and the lack of a map system made it extremely confusing and often irritating to navigate. This remake basically fixes every issue I ever had with that game and creates something truly special.
Honestly, I'm hesitant to even continue calling this a simple remake. It's more like a beautiful re-imagining. Everything about this game is consistently wonderful, from the pretty sprite-work, to the fast and tight movement, and the fun exploration. Also, the "stealth" section near the end? Just epic. It's short length also works to its benefit, as even just a day after beating it, I already felt inclined to give it another go.
I feel kind of bummed that I didn't dedicate myself to this series much as a kid. Super Metroid felt grand, but the amount of one-way doors and my lack of inexperience with Metroidvanias left me quite stumped at times. Metroid Prime felt fresh with its gorgeous 3D environments, but its slow movement made backtracking and finding my way through its complex maps tedious. As it stands, this game has once again reinvigorated my hype for this franchise and I'm eager to go back and give those games and the rest of the series another go. Here's to hoping that Metroid Dread is worth the wait.
Honestly, I'm hesitant to even continue calling this a simple remake. It's more like a beautiful re-imagining. Everything about this game is consistently wonderful, from the pretty sprite-work, to the fast and tight movement, and the fun exploration. Also, the "stealth" section near the end? Just epic. It's short length also works to its benefit, as even just a day after beating it, I already felt inclined to give it another go.
I feel kind of bummed that I didn't dedicate myself to this series much as a kid. Super Metroid felt grand, but the amount of one-way doors and my lack of inexperience with Metroidvanias left me quite stumped at times. Metroid Prime felt fresh with its gorgeous 3D environments, but its slow movement made backtracking and finding my way through its complex maps tedious. As it stands, this game has once again reinvigorated my hype for this franchise and I'm eager to go back and give those games and the rest of the series another go. Here's to hoping that Metroid Dread is worth the wait.
This review contains spoilers
Breath of the Wild was a game I loved and I’m still very fond of. I think its weaknesses are pretty clear-cut and acknowledged by a lot of people, but the reason I still hold it in high regard is because of how cohesive it felt. Without sounding too corny or sycophantic, for a Nintendo who (especially at the time) were increasingly attached to an image of coddling and handholding, a Zelda game starting with the objective to “destroy Ganon” and declaring everything else to be optional felt like an important statement, it felt like a shift away from the streamlined, prescribed experiences of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword and toward a vision of natural discovery, which landed for me because of how much it felt like the game was constructed around it: A breathing, living world, the sound of nature and the swaying of trees, puzzles revolving around non-discrete physics and grounded temperatures, world design intended to accentuate the simple desire to climb on top of things and jump off them, looking at something in the distance and thinking “I want to go there”. They were so committed to this vision that they abandoned the heroic, melodic field themes of the past in favour of something restrained, which was guaranteed to piss some people off. I’m under no illusion that Breath of the Wild was a perfect game, in fact, its an extremely flawed one, but as my tastes in games have aged and (hopefully) matured I’ve come to value thematic completeness over "content" more and more, which Breath of the Wild achieved, despite its flaws.
Make no mistake, Breath of the Wild had a lot of flaws. Arguably outside of that core experience of free exploration, it was a game composed almost entirely of flaws. This seemed to be common knowledge for everyone but Nintendo, who saw the praise and thought it would be sufficient to replicate its core systems verbatim. I think if you asked someone what their wishlist for a BotW 2 would have been, practically nobody would have imagined what Tears of the Kingdom actually ended up actually being: More Koroks? Identical combat? More shrines? Cooking and healing unchanged? Clothing and inventory slots unchanged? Weapon durability? Still no traditional length dungeons? I don’t think many people would ask for that. This isn’t to say that Tears of the Kingdom has improved nothing: Enemy variety is significantly better here and the world in general is much denser and has more to discover - the Elden Ring influence being obvious in the depths and caves. Bosses are also much better and even have multiple ways to defeat them, bringing them in line with the freedom on offer in the rest of the puzzles. These things were “asked for” and they’re good, but they’re very much “more of the same”.
I think the most emphatic success of the game is the new powers. In BotW, powers were rarely useful outside of the shrines that required them, whereas here so much of the experience is curated for them. Caves and ascend create this beautiful continuous flow where exploration never comes to an arbitrary stopping point, and rewind feels like it perfectly accompanies ultrahand as well as being a general programming marvel. Fuse is the one I’m most sceptical of. Doubling down on weapon durability - a mechanic which was almost universally complained about in BotW - is a design decision I respect on paper, but I feel in practice it serves to make a lot of the weapons more interchangeable. If the majority of weapon attack power comes from fused monster parts, then the base weapon barely matters, meaning getting a weapon in a chest is just as shrug-worthy as it was in BotW. That this system hasn’t been fixed by fuse is evident in the late-game, which has the identical problem to BotW in that you have so many weapon slots and so many equally good weapons that each individual weapon becomes meaningless. Ultrahand, however, is easily the star of the show and feels like this inexhaustible source of hijinks which the whole game is constructed to support.
One of my favourite reviews on this website by nrmac, a review I think about frequently, talks about how a lot of great art wasn’t “asked for”. I don’t think this game in general fits that bill but ultrahand feels like it does; something great that nobody asked for. In concept, it feels like a perfect elaboration of the ideas in BotW - drawing attention to the environment as a source of problem-solving and furthering the theme of freedom, the new crystal-fetching shrines that were integrated into the world ended up being consistently my favourites for how they encouraged building hilariously dumb contraptions. At the same time, I do have a problem with ultrahand. It seems likely to me that ultrahand is a mechanic designed with the Twitter clip in mind, something aimed toward the potential limits of play rather than the average situation. I say this because throughout the entire game I only really needed to build about 3 different things to solve these problems: Fanplanes for long horizontal distances, hot air balloons for long vertical distances, “thing with rocket” for everything in-between. Granted, I had fun building these things, it didn’t get old, but it never felt like the game coaxed me into the complex depths of this mechanic, something which the shrines should have done. This is evident in the frequently ignored building materials that litter Hyrule’s roadsides, which might be fun to build with but never actually time-efficient, why build a car when you can just fast-travel?
This creeps into one of my biggest problems with TotK. Not the shrines alone but their connection to the new verticality offered by the floating islands. The paraglider in BotW was a tool that risked breaking a lot of the experience by allowing the player to traverse great distances with little effort, but it was rationed and balanced by high places being a goal. There was this flow to exploration where mountains would invite you to climb them, then once at the top you could paraglide to anywhere you could see, it was core to the exploratory loop. In TotK, however, verticality is cheap, not only because every tower catapults you so far into the sky, but by how you can just fast-travel to a floating island and paraglide wherever you please. This greatly exacerbates the problem that shrines pose. Shrines were disappointing in BotW not just because they offered lacklustre experiences, but because they were one of the only few things in the game which offered permanent rewards, as well as permanent progress in the form of fast-travel points, which put this awkward focus on them which they couldn’t live up to. It was a necessity imposed by this that shrines were obfuscated by the geometry. If it was possible to spot shrines easily, the whole game would just be about running from one shrine to the next, which would only further highlight their problems. In TotK, however, this essentially happened. I frequently found myself jumping off floating islands, paragliding to a shrine, then fast-travelling back to the floating island to jump off to another shrine. The majority of the shrines I completed were found this way. At the end of the game, my “Hero’s Path” was very frequently just straight lines toward shrines.
There’s this point in Matthewmatosis’ BotW video, (starting at 28:28, I recommend you watch these few minutes, it’s incredibly relevant to what I’m saying here.), about how free traversal isn’t actually what leads to memorable encounters. Personally, my most memorable moment from BotW was the path to Zora’s domain, which I did very early on and felt like something special. It’s telling that in TotK, a similar setup occurs with the path to the domain being blocked by mud, trying to encourage the player to find creative ways to clean up the path before them, but whereas in BotW I was forced down that path, in TotK I simply paraglided right into the domain from a nearby sky island, which I knew the location of anyway, and so its effect was completely nullified.
Here’s the moments in TotK which I loved the most and were memorable to me: The buildup to the Wind Temple, finding the entrance to the Korok forest, and the entire Mineru questline (the least spoiler-y way I can put it). I imagine the first of these will find general agreement as the best setpiece from either of these games, but the second, to me, was this amazing eureka moment where I finally figured out how to get there. But imagine for a second if you could just glide into the Korok forest from a sky island. Do this, and it illustrates my problem with the rest of the game.
A lot of this would be alleviated if shrines were better, but they are shockingly just as bad in the exact same way that BotW shrines were bad. The introductory shrines on the Great Sky Island are the same level of complexity as all the rest of the shrines, they mostly start off with an idea that’s “very simple” and iterate on it until it’s “simple”. Many solutions are just “use recall on a thing then jump on it”, or “build something incredibly rudimentary with parts that the game gives you anyway, making it obvious what the solution is”, or “use ascend on one (1) thing”. Practically every “combat training” shrine is insulting, even to the intelligence of young children, and every demeaning jingle that played when I did something incredibly easy had me questioning whether I was in Nintendo’s target age range anymore. While BotW’s premise of “freedom” seemed to be Nintendo letting go of their coddling tendencies, shrines were evidence that they couldn’t let go entirely. I was expecting the sequel, at the very least, to develop this part of the game, or at least skip the shrines dedicated to tutorialising basic mechanics, but it still has the problem that some tutorial shrines will be found dozens of hours into the game. Personally, I found a sneakstrike tutorial and bow-bullet-time tutorial over 30 hours into my game, which would not only be bad on its own, but considering the previous game made the same mistakes 6 years ago, it’s embarrassing. I’m sorry if you like these shrines but I fundamentally think they are a bad idea; a game about discovery and exploration is at odds with the aesthetic homogeneity they offer. It’s still possible to solve them in multiple ways, but when the solutions are this easy, why spend any time experimenting?
Intrinsic motivation was an important concept in BotW, but intrinsic motivation needs to work in conjunction with extrinsic motivation in order to be compelling. A player may wander in a certain direction out of the intrinsic desire to go towards something that looks interesting, and the game may reward them with a shrine, but if an extrinsic reward is easily accessible without doing anything intrinsically interesting, the only thing stopping the player from bypassing it is their own willpower and ability to curate their own experiences. I could build a big mecha car with laser beams on it and roll into a moblin camp to commit war crimes, but when I can jump from a sky island directly to four shrines in the same timeframe, it dramatically challenges the lengths I need to go to “find my own fun”; I could spend 30 minutes experimenting with the most hilarious way to break the solution to a shrine, but when the intended solutions take about 2 minutes, it gets to the point where only the most dedicated players can make the most of the experience (again, why I think this game is designed with the Twitter clip in mind). In short, the intrinsic and extrinsic parts of this game are out of sync with each-other, or to put it in another way, there’s too much freedom.
This is starting to sound incredibly negative, but to be clear, I do think this is a good game, but in many ways it has exacerbated the problems latent in BotW, when many many other problems it hasn’t iterated on at all. It’s easy to ask for “more stuff” in a sequel, but despite BotW’s relative lack of content, it still inspired a sense of wonder in me that lasted throughout the majority of the game, some of which is lost simply by knowing where things are. When I stumbled upon Zora’s domain in BotW, it was magical. When I paraglided my way there in TotK, it was expected. When I found my first dragon, or maze, or the blood moon rose for the first time in BotW, it was special. When I found these same things in TotK I was bitterly disappointed that they reused them.
The story makes this all even more disappointing. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Link and Zelda have a fatal encounter with Ganon/dorf and some amount of time passes, Link, far into the future, travels around Hyrule enlisting the help of four champions/sages, a Rito, Gerudo, Zora and Goron, he finds the master sword, which Zelda had prepared in advance for him, and collects memories of the past which inform him of what happened. Finally, he travels into the interior/depths of Hyrule castle to confront Ganon/dorf, who turns into a beast and is ultimately defeated by Zelda and Link together in a mechanically dull cinematic final boss. Beneath the Zonai stuff, it's the exact same story, set in the same world.
It’s a good game, how could it not be? but during the marketing cycle, I was hoping it would be to BotW what Majora’s Mask was to Ocarina. Something that, despite using the same assets, offered a different experience and used its direct sequel status as an opportunity to tell a radically different story to the typical Zelda fare. This isn't a Majora's Mask, it’s a Twilight Princess, something with a superficially edgy veneer that ultimately struggles to find an identity distinct from the game it models itself on, something that feels "asked for", despite its parts that definitely weren't. I think I’m self-aware enough to realise that pontificating about the reception of a game is a waste of time, but given the glowing feedback this has received, I think we’re likely going to see the next Zelda game also retread the same ground, here’s hoping that once the new formula becomes stagnant again, we can see another Breath of the Wild, not in its flawed superficial mechanics, but in essence.
Make no mistake, Breath of the Wild had a lot of flaws. Arguably outside of that core experience of free exploration, it was a game composed almost entirely of flaws. This seemed to be common knowledge for everyone but Nintendo, who saw the praise and thought it would be sufficient to replicate its core systems verbatim. I think if you asked someone what their wishlist for a BotW 2 would have been, practically nobody would have imagined what Tears of the Kingdom actually ended up actually being: More Koroks? Identical combat? More shrines? Cooking and healing unchanged? Clothing and inventory slots unchanged? Weapon durability? Still no traditional length dungeons? I don’t think many people would ask for that. This isn’t to say that Tears of the Kingdom has improved nothing: Enemy variety is significantly better here and the world in general is much denser and has more to discover - the Elden Ring influence being obvious in the depths and caves. Bosses are also much better and even have multiple ways to defeat them, bringing them in line with the freedom on offer in the rest of the puzzles. These things were “asked for” and they’re good, but they’re very much “more of the same”.
I think the most emphatic success of the game is the new powers. In BotW, powers were rarely useful outside of the shrines that required them, whereas here so much of the experience is curated for them. Caves and ascend create this beautiful continuous flow where exploration never comes to an arbitrary stopping point, and rewind feels like it perfectly accompanies ultrahand as well as being a general programming marvel. Fuse is the one I’m most sceptical of. Doubling down on weapon durability - a mechanic which was almost universally complained about in BotW - is a design decision I respect on paper, but I feel in practice it serves to make a lot of the weapons more interchangeable. If the majority of weapon attack power comes from fused monster parts, then the base weapon barely matters, meaning getting a weapon in a chest is just as shrug-worthy as it was in BotW. That this system hasn’t been fixed by fuse is evident in the late-game, which has the identical problem to BotW in that you have so many weapon slots and so many equally good weapons that each individual weapon becomes meaningless. Ultrahand, however, is easily the star of the show and feels like this inexhaustible source of hijinks which the whole game is constructed to support.
One of my favourite reviews on this website by nrmac, a review I think about frequently, talks about how a lot of great art wasn’t “asked for”. I don’t think this game in general fits that bill but ultrahand feels like it does; something great that nobody asked for. In concept, it feels like a perfect elaboration of the ideas in BotW - drawing attention to the environment as a source of problem-solving and furthering the theme of freedom, the new crystal-fetching shrines that were integrated into the world ended up being consistently my favourites for how they encouraged building hilariously dumb contraptions. At the same time, I do have a problem with ultrahand. It seems likely to me that ultrahand is a mechanic designed with the Twitter clip in mind, something aimed toward the potential limits of play rather than the average situation. I say this because throughout the entire game I only really needed to build about 3 different things to solve these problems: Fanplanes for long horizontal distances, hot air balloons for long vertical distances, “thing with rocket” for everything in-between. Granted, I had fun building these things, it didn’t get old, but it never felt like the game coaxed me into the complex depths of this mechanic, something which the shrines should have done. This is evident in the frequently ignored building materials that litter Hyrule’s roadsides, which might be fun to build with but never actually time-efficient, why build a car when you can just fast-travel?
This creeps into one of my biggest problems with TotK. Not the shrines alone but their connection to the new verticality offered by the floating islands. The paraglider in BotW was a tool that risked breaking a lot of the experience by allowing the player to traverse great distances with little effort, but it was rationed and balanced by high places being a goal. There was this flow to exploration where mountains would invite you to climb them, then once at the top you could paraglide to anywhere you could see, it was core to the exploratory loop. In TotK, however, verticality is cheap, not only because every tower catapults you so far into the sky, but by how you can just fast-travel to a floating island and paraglide wherever you please. This greatly exacerbates the problem that shrines pose. Shrines were disappointing in BotW not just because they offered lacklustre experiences, but because they were one of the only few things in the game which offered permanent rewards, as well as permanent progress in the form of fast-travel points, which put this awkward focus on them which they couldn’t live up to. It was a necessity imposed by this that shrines were obfuscated by the geometry. If it was possible to spot shrines easily, the whole game would just be about running from one shrine to the next, which would only further highlight their problems. In TotK, however, this essentially happened. I frequently found myself jumping off floating islands, paragliding to a shrine, then fast-travelling back to the floating island to jump off to another shrine. The majority of the shrines I completed were found this way. At the end of the game, my “Hero’s Path” was very frequently just straight lines toward shrines.
There’s this point in Matthewmatosis’ BotW video, (starting at 28:28, I recommend you watch these few minutes, it’s incredibly relevant to what I’m saying here.), about how free traversal isn’t actually what leads to memorable encounters. Personally, my most memorable moment from BotW was the path to Zora’s domain, which I did very early on and felt like something special. It’s telling that in TotK, a similar setup occurs with the path to the domain being blocked by mud, trying to encourage the player to find creative ways to clean up the path before them, but whereas in BotW I was forced down that path, in TotK I simply paraglided right into the domain from a nearby sky island, which I knew the location of anyway, and so its effect was completely nullified.
Here’s the moments in TotK which I loved the most and were memorable to me: The buildup to the Wind Temple, finding the entrance to the Korok forest, and the entire Mineru questline (the least spoiler-y way I can put it). I imagine the first of these will find general agreement as the best setpiece from either of these games, but the second, to me, was this amazing eureka moment where I finally figured out how to get there. But imagine for a second if you could just glide into the Korok forest from a sky island. Do this, and it illustrates my problem with the rest of the game.
A lot of this would be alleviated if shrines were better, but they are shockingly just as bad in the exact same way that BotW shrines were bad. The introductory shrines on the Great Sky Island are the same level of complexity as all the rest of the shrines, they mostly start off with an idea that’s “very simple” and iterate on it until it’s “simple”. Many solutions are just “use recall on a thing then jump on it”, or “build something incredibly rudimentary with parts that the game gives you anyway, making it obvious what the solution is”, or “use ascend on one (1) thing”. Practically every “combat training” shrine is insulting, even to the intelligence of young children, and every demeaning jingle that played when I did something incredibly easy had me questioning whether I was in Nintendo’s target age range anymore. While BotW’s premise of “freedom” seemed to be Nintendo letting go of their coddling tendencies, shrines were evidence that they couldn’t let go entirely. I was expecting the sequel, at the very least, to develop this part of the game, or at least skip the shrines dedicated to tutorialising basic mechanics, but it still has the problem that some tutorial shrines will be found dozens of hours into the game. Personally, I found a sneakstrike tutorial and bow-bullet-time tutorial over 30 hours into my game, which would not only be bad on its own, but considering the previous game made the same mistakes 6 years ago, it’s embarrassing. I’m sorry if you like these shrines but I fundamentally think they are a bad idea; a game about discovery and exploration is at odds with the aesthetic homogeneity they offer. It’s still possible to solve them in multiple ways, but when the solutions are this easy, why spend any time experimenting?
Intrinsic motivation was an important concept in BotW, but intrinsic motivation needs to work in conjunction with extrinsic motivation in order to be compelling. A player may wander in a certain direction out of the intrinsic desire to go towards something that looks interesting, and the game may reward them with a shrine, but if an extrinsic reward is easily accessible without doing anything intrinsically interesting, the only thing stopping the player from bypassing it is their own willpower and ability to curate their own experiences. I could build a big mecha car with laser beams on it and roll into a moblin camp to commit war crimes, but when I can jump from a sky island directly to four shrines in the same timeframe, it dramatically challenges the lengths I need to go to “find my own fun”; I could spend 30 minutes experimenting with the most hilarious way to break the solution to a shrine, but when the intended solutions take about 2 minutes, it gets to the point where only the most dedicated players can make the most of the experience (again, why I think this game is designed with the Twitter clip in mind). In short, the intrinsic and extrinsic parts of this game are out of sync with each-other, or to put it in another way, there’s too much freedom.
This is starting to sound incredibly negative, but to be clear, I do think this is a good game, but in many ways it has exacerbated the problems latent in BotW, when many many other problems it hasn’t iterated on at all. It’s easy to ask for “more stuff” in a sequel, but despite BotW’s relative lack of content, it still inspired a sense of wonder in me that lasted throughout the majority of the game, some of which is lost simply by knowing where things are. When I stumbled upon Zora’s domain in BotW, it was magical. When I paraglided my way there in TotK, it was expected. When I found my first dragon, or maze, or the blood moon rose for the first time in BotW, it was special. When I found these same things in TotK I was bitterly disappointed that they reused them.
The story makes this all even more disappointing. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Link and Zelda have a fatal encounter with Ganon/dorf and some amount of time passes, Link, far into the future, travels around Hyrule enlisting the help of four champions/sages, a Rito, Gerudo, Zora and Goron, he finds the master sword, which Zelda had prepared in advance for him, and collects memories of the past which inform him of what happened. Finally, he travels into the interior/depths of Hyrule castle to confront Ganon/dorf, who turns into a beast and is ultimately defeated by Zelda and Link together in a mechanically dull cinematic final boss. Beneath the Zonai stuff, it's the exact same story, set in the same world.
It’s a good game, how could it not be? but during the marketing cycle, I was hoping it would be to BotW what Majora’s Mask was to Ocarina. Something that, despite using the same assets, offered a different experience and used its direct sequel status as an opportunity to tell a radically different story to the typical Zelda fare. This isn't a Majora's Mask, it’s a Twilight Princess, something with a superficially edgy veneer that ultimately struggles to find an identity distinct from the game it models itself on, something that feels "asked for", despite its parts that definitely weren't. I think I’m self-aware enough to realise that pontificating about the reception of a game is a waste of time, but given the glowing feedback this has received, I think we’re likely going to see the next Zelda game also retread the same ground, here’s hoping that once the new formula becomes stagnant again, we can see another Breath of the Wild, not in its flawed superficial mechanics, but in essence.
Breath of the Wild Too.
Years ago I purchased a Nintendo Switch at Best Buy along with one game: Breath of the Wild. The game had been out for maybe a year, if even, but I'd heard from numerous friends and publications that it was one of, if not the greatest games of all time. I played it, enjoyed my first solo playthrough of a Zelda game, but largely dissented from enjoyment as a result of the game's lack of narrative focus, recycled dungeons/bosses, and weapon durability. I like to think of myself as malleable and approachable to change, so when Tears of the Kingdom was announced many moons ago, I got excited for a change to re-try the BotW formula. What I got in this go around was... an experience all too familiar.
Tears of the Kingdom begins on a high note... literally. You effectively start high above the fields of Hyrule in the sky aisles that had appeared after the events of the prequel title. This was a major focus of media marketing for the game and subject to a majority of promotional material, adding a whole new vertical element to an already expansive game. Here you go through a sort of proving grounds and tutorialization of Link's new "powers" which are completely different from BotW. No longer do you have the ability to magnet and slingshot items across the map as it is replaced with spells that let you freely attach materials together, fuse items to your weapons, and ascend through almost any vertical challenge. While these were really neat from a physics standpoint and added an invaluable amount to the already peak sandbox that was BotW, it removes a sense of integrity from the way the game is "meant" to be played, but more on that later. You have a few hours of messing around up here before you're thrown into the familiar world of Hyrule and tasked to track down the Princess of the land herself, Zelda. Stop me if you've heard that one before.
From here your gameplay loop remains largely the same, not only from the way you experience the sandbox itself, but who you interact with on your mission to stop the Upheavel and defeat the series' longstanding antagonist. I won't touch on story spoilers but I think most players of BotW have a sense of where this game is heading. Traversal across Hyrule is a bit of a hodgepodge of utilizing the shrine network, towers, Zonai contraptions, and new powers gifted to you by one of the four civilizations you visit. Horses as a method of movement are pretty much completely outclassed by the above. Shrines give you a place to fast travel to and for the love of all that is good in this world, are much more entertaining and enticing to complete in TotK than in BotW. Where the shrine monotony comes into play for me in the previous title was that a lot of the solutions relied upon combat endeavours against Guardians or pinball-esque flip games that relied on the Switch's faulty Gyro to complete. In Tears of the Kingdom, there was a great deal of thought put into making these unique from one another, relying heavily on the new powers link is given to complete. The unfortunate byproduct of this is that you can absolutely cheese and bypass the intended way of completion for these shrines with your fuse/ultrahand powers. I'm a strong proponent of cheesing certain mechanics in games to get solutions, but with the amount of it you can do in Tears to completely move aside from the way the game wants the player to solve puzzles... it just feels kinda dirty. I mean if you can do something faster, then for efficiency's sake, why wouldn't you? So the shrines are more innovative, but easier to break. Towers are a great way to move across the vast world, and give you a tremendous insight into what to attack next. You can see almost the whole world, and with the right amount of stamina it practically is all reachable. I thoroughly loved going into the sky in each region's tower, which also fills in the area on your map, and identifying all the shrines, villages, and general points of interest on my map that I could so that I could eventually tackle them. It was the first few days in TotK of playing that I felt my greatest joy, because the world felt so tangible and achievable, I could see it all and do it all.
I've played a lot of open world games at this point, most of us have, and it takes a great deal to set them apart and make them feel fun. In my opinion the games that never get me to stop and ask "why am I doing this?" are the good ones. One of my favorite games of all time came out last year, Elden Ring. I scoped what felt like the entire map from top to bottom, taking on each and every boss fight, sifting through each and every cave I could, just because it felt rewarding in and of itself. In the hallmark Bethesda titles I chased each guild/faction subquestline, did all the sidequests I could, just because it felt rewarding. I began to do that in Tears of the Kingdom, in fact I did it almost exclusively for the first few days of playing, but I hit a "why" and never really turned back. In my initial run of Tears of the Kingdom, I went shrine hunting, solved all of the glyphs, helped every villager I could in the game's major settlements. I had a great time personally with the silly little town of Hateno Village, with its exceptionally cozy soundtrack and perfect-for-Zelda quirky constituents as I tried to play mediator in a mayoral race between two polar opposites. It was here that I found I was at my greatest enjoyment of the world, I wasn't asking myself any questions, I was just basking in the game's moment to moment quirkyness and personality. After I unlocked more shrines and completed some more sidequests, I realized that I was at the same point I'd reached in Breath of the Wild. I had completed two of the four major questlines in the game, which utilized the same exact races from BotW, mostly including the same exact people. Despite having been across the entire map and decyphering the truth behind the numerous glyphs, I still had to help the same exact peoples I had done a few years ago. Stop me if you've heard this before: Link must approach the Rito, Gerudo, Goron, and Zora and obtain the help of their champion and embark on a short quest to bring you one step closer to defeating the great evil, which involves using their one gimmick power to complete a dungeon in which you must find four-five macguffins to reach a final boss, of which is a largely mechanically uninteresting fight. I was greatly let down, again with the way this game had approached dungeoneering, which was previously a staple of the franchise. I had my qualms with Skyward Sword being TOO much of a dungeon-dungeon-dungeon game, but at least they felt unique and different from another. In Tears, just as was the case in Breath of the Wild, they all kinda felt... the same. I had hoped Nintendo would put a greater focus into this after the first game, but I was gravely wrong. Doing these dungeons is almost completely futile too if you've already solved the mysteries behind the glyph's, it's completely pointless, but you still have to do it for the sake of the storry. I made the mistake of doing the Rito and Gerudo, doing all of the glyphs, and then doing the Zora and Goron, which helped me realize how futile this endeavour truly was. I said I wouldn't spoiler above, so I won't, but if you've beaten it, you'll know. To end the commentary on dungeons, the final two-three dungeons in this game are genuinely awful and as anticlimactic you can get for a game that was six years in the making and has as much lore implications as Tears of the Kingdom does. The game starts off with a bang in the sky, then gets you going into the four-race dungeons, and then ends on a few wet noodles... it was beyond disappointing.
Weapon durability was a bad idea in the first place, and it's one of the few points of contention that I will not back away from. In a game where exploration is as big of a focus as it is, why should the player be de-incentivized from engaging in combat if they know that their best weapons are going to be destroyed in just a few strikes, even with the assistance of the fuse power? Again to harken back to Elden Ring, other than wasting my time, there was no negative element to engaging in frivalous combat. If I saw something I wanted to kill, I could do it knowing that the worst that would happen would be a simple respawn. In Tears of the Kingdom, I still had to wager my the next major fight I was going to do against taking out a group of world enemies for a sidequest. It was here again where I'd ask myself the "why," of engaging in the open-world exploration of this game, why would I ruin my best gear if I don't know how beneficial the end result is going to be? Doing some of these sidequests reward you with powerful weapons too, but why would I even take or use those if I know a few hits against a moblin is going to tarnish them forever? I don't get it, I didn't get it beforehand either. The argument that it enforces the player to use their surroundings and take advantage of what the world offers is a weak one to me too, because this to me does the opposite of what a game like Zelda should do, it fights against the power fantasy. You play as the damn Hero of Hyrule, why shouldn't you be able to take on any group of bokoblins or moblins that you see without destroying your gear? I just genuinely don't understand the developer appreciation for this, nor why the "fuse" power was supposed to be the saving grace for this as a detriment, it just prolongs the inevitable. I don't mean to prop up Skyward Sword as the magnum opus of the series, as I still have yet to play a great deal (myself, not as a younger sibling watching,) but the combat was snappy, and I felt like I could and SHOULD engage with each of the enemies I came across.
Now I've spent a lot of time dunking on this game, and in my humble opinion (shocker,) it has been rightfully so, there is a lot of sauce in Tears of the Kingdom that made it a generally enjoyable experience. Despite what I would call a miserable way to end the game, Tears was full of that Zelda/Nintendo magic that's brought them to where they are now. Even if the game doesn't run very well and is bottlenecked by the Switch, the artstyle is beyond gorgeous. Hyrule in its moments of Link flying and running around holds a plethora of jaw dropping beauty within the unique biomes and meticulously crafted cities and environments. The characters are again intricately designed and filled with personality through their design. Link, Zelda, Purah, Riju, Impa, and everyone else have been brought to life in such an impressive way. This game is eye candy, and even if its not in a completely new engine, another great moment in Nintendo world/character design. Even if it soured on me eventually, my first few days of exploration were filled with memorable moments of interaction with the game's engine, as well as fun moments of discovery into the seemingly endless hidden nooks and cranny's that there is to offer. Zelda, much like Metroid to me, is an IP that has the advantage of having some really damn cool lore, and it's at great display in Tears of the Kingdom. One of the chief complaints I had with Breath of the Wild is that much of the story exposition, like almost all of it, was resigned to flashback cutscenes which is a pretty bad way to tell a story. Now, that's not entierly different with Tears of the Kingdom, but the amount of story they manage to tell through the glyphs and temples is far greater than it was in BotW. I found myself sitting up and revelling in the cutscenes that TotK had to offer, as there was so much to pack up and take away that I could use to solve the game's mystery. I enjoyed that, and it's almost exclusively because of that, that I rated this game higher than its predecessor. I felt like Nintendo and the Zelda team sucessfully navigated the complaints about narrative and made a rather positive change.
In all, most people that are reading this, if any have actually read this in its entirety, are probably already playing/played TotK or are going to. I had fun, but I highly doubt this will be my game of the year, and probably not a game I'll return to.
Years ago I purchased a Nintendo Switch at Best Buy along with one game: Breath of the Wild. The game had been out for maybe a year, if even, but I'd heard from numerous friends and publications that it was one of, if not the greatest games of all time. I played it, enjoyed my first solo playthrough of a Zelda game, but largely dissented from enjoyment as a result of the game's lack of narrative focus, recycled dungeons/bosses, and weapon durability. I like to think of myself as malleable and approachable to change, so when Tears of the Kingdom was announced many moons ago, I got excited for a change to re-try the BotW formula. What I got in this go around was... an experience all too familiar.
Tears of the Kingdom begins on a high note... literally. You effectively start high above the fields of Hyrule in the sky aisles that had appeared after the events of the prequel title. This was a major focus of media marketing for the game and subject to a majority of promotional material, adding a whole new vertical element to an already expansive game. Here you go through a sort of proving grounds and tutorialization of Link's new "powers" which are completely different from BotW. No longer do you have the ability to magnet and slingshot items across the map as it is replaced with spells that let you freely attach materials together, fuse items to your weapons, and ascend through almost any vertical challenge. While these were really neat from a physics standpoint and added an invaluable amount to the already peak sandbox that was BotW, it removes a sense of integrity from the way the game is "meant" to be played, but more on that later. You have a few hours of messing around up here before you're thrown into the familiar world of Hyrule and tasked to track down the Princess of the land herself, Zelda. Stop me if you've heard that one before.
From here your gameplay loop remains largely the same, not only from the way you experience the sandbox itself, but who you interact with on your mission to stop the Upheavel and defeat the series' longstanding antagonist. I won't touch on story spoilers but I think most players of BotW have a sense of where this game is heading. Traversal across Hyrule is a bit of a hodgepodge of utilizing the shrine network, towers, Zonai contraptions, and new powers gifted to you by one of the four civilizations you visit. Horses as a method of movement are pretty much completely outclassed by the above. Shrines give you a place to fast travel to and for the love of all that is good in this world, are much more entertaining and enticing to complete in TotK than in BotW. Where the shrine monotony comes into play for me in the previous title was that a lot of the solutions relied upon combat endeavours against Guardians or pinball-esque flip games that relied on the Switch's faulty Gyro to complete. In Tears of the Kingdom, there was a great deal of thought put into making these unique from one another, relying heavily on the new powers link is given to complete. The unfortunate byproduct of this is that you can absolutely cheese and bypass the intended way of completion for these shrines with your fuse/ultrahand powers. I'm a strong proponent of cheesing certain mechanics in games to get solutions, but with the amount of it you can do in Tears to completely move aside from the way the game wants the player to solve puzzles... it just feels kinda dirty. I mean if you can do something faster, then for efficiency's sake, why wouldn't you? So the shrines are more innovative, but easier to break. Towers are a great way to move across the vast world, and give you a tremendous insight into what to attack next. You can see almost the whole world, and with the right amount of stamina it practically is all reachable. I thoroughly loved going into the sky in each region's tower, which also fills in the area on your map, and identifying all the shrines, villages, and general points of interest on my map that I could so that I could eventually tackle them. It was the first few days in TotK of playing that I felt my greatest joy, because the world felt so tangible and achievable, I could see it all and do it all.
I've played a lot of open world games at this point, most of us have, and it takes a great deal to set them apart and make them feel fun. In my opinion the games that never get me to stop and ask "why am I doing this?" are the good ones. One of my favorite games of all time came out last year, Elden Ring. I scoped what felt like the entire map from top to bottom, taking on each and every boss fight, sifting through each and every cave I could, just because it felt rewarding in and of itself. In the hallmark Bethesda titles I chased each guild/faction subquestline, did all the sidequests I could, just because it felt rewarding. I began to do that in Tears of the Kingdom, in fact I did it almost exclusively for the first few days of playing, but I hit a "why" and never really turned back. In my initial run of Tears of the Kingdom, I went shrine hunting, solved all of the glyphs, helped every villager I could in the game's major settlements. I had a great time personally with the silly little town of Hateno Village, with its exceptionally cozy soundtrack and perfect-for-Zelda quirky constituents as I tried to play mediator in a mayoral race between two polar opposites. It was here that I found I was at my greatest enjoyment of the world, I wasn't asking myself any questions, I was just basking in the game's moment to moment quirkyness and personality. After I unlocked more shrines and completed some more sidequests, I realized that I was at the same point I'd reached in Breath of the Wild. I had completed two of the four major questlines in the game, which utilized the same exact races from BotW, mostly including the same exact people. Despite having been across the entire map and decyphering the truth behind the numerous glyphs, I still had to help the same exact peoples I had done a few years ago. Stop me if you've heard this before: Link must approach the Rito, Gerudo, Goron, and Zora and obtain the help of their champion and embark on a short quest to bring you one step closer to defeating the great evil, which involves using their one gimmick power to complete a dungeon in which you must find four-five macguffins to reach a final boss, of which is a largely mechanically uninteresting fight. I was greatly let down, again with the way this game had approached dungeoneering, which was previously a staple of the franchise. I had my qualms with Skyward Sword being TOO much of a dungeon-dungeon-dungeon game, but at least they felt unique and different from another. In Tears, just as was the case in Breath of the Wild, they all kinda felt... the same. I had hoped Nintendo would put a greater focus into this after the first game, but I was gravely wrong. Doing these dungeons is almost completely futile too if you've already solved the mysteries behind the glyph's, it's completely pointless, but you still have to do it for the sake of the storry. I made the mistake of doing the Rito and Gerudo, doing all of the glyphs, and then doing the Zora and Goron, which helped me realize how futile this endeavour truly was. I said I wouldn't spoiler above, so I won't, but if you've beaten it, you'll know. To end the commentary on dungeons, the final two-three dungeons in this game are genuinely awful and as anticlimactic you can get for a game that was six years in the making and has as much lore implications as Tears of the Kingdom does. The game starts off with a bang in the sky, then gets you going into the four-race dungeons, and then ends on a few wet noodles... it was beyond disappointing.
Weapon durability was a bad idea in the first place, and it's one of the few points of contention that I will not back away from. In a game where exploration is as big of a focus as it is, why should the player be de-incentivized from engaging in combat if they know that their best weapons are going to be destroyed in just a few strikes, even with the assistance of the fuse power? Again to harken back to Elden Ring, other than wasting my time, there was no negative element to engaging in frivalous combat. If I saw something I wanted to kill, I could do it knowing that the worst that would happen would be a simple respawn. In Tears of the Kingdom, I still had to wager my the next major fight I was going to do against taking out a group of world enemies for a sidequest. It was here again where I'd ask myself the "why," of engaging in the open-world exploration of this game, why would I ruin my best gear if I don't know how beneficial the end result is going to be? Doing some of these sidequests reward you with powerful weapons too, but why would I even take or use those if I know a few hits against a moblin is going to tarnish them forever? I don't get it, I didn't get it beforehand either. The argument that it enforces the player to use their surroundings and take advantage of what the world offers is a weak one to me too, because this to me does the opposite of what a game like Zelda should do, it fights against the power fantasy. You play as the damn Hero of Hyrule, why shouldn't you be able to take on any group of bokoblins or moblins that you see without destroying your gear? I just genuinely don't understand the developer appreciation for this, nor why the "fuse" power was supposed to be the saving grace for this as a detriment, it just prolongs the inevitable. I don't mean to prop up Skyward Sword as the magnum opus of the series, as I still have yet to play a great deal (myself, not as a younger sibling watching,) but the combat was snappy, and I felt like I could and SHOULD engage with each of the enemies I came across.
Now I've spent a lot of time dunking on this game, and in my humble opinion (shocker,) it has been rightfully so, there is a lot of sauce in Tears of the Kingdom that made it a generally enjoyable experience. Despite what I would call a miserable way to end the game, Tears was full of that Zelda/Nintendo magic that's brought them to where they are now. Even if the game doesn't run very well and is bottlenecked by the Switch, the artstyle is beyond gorgeous. Hyrule in its moments of Link flying and running around holds a plethora of jaw dropping beauty within the unique biomes and meticulously crafted cities and environments. The characters are again intricately designed and filled with personality through their design. Link, Zelda, Purah, Riju, Impa, and everyone else have been brought to life in such an impressive way. This game is eye candy, and even if its not in a completely new engine, another great moment in Nintendo world/character design. Even if it soured on me eventually, my first few days of exploration were filled with memorable moments of interaction with the game's engine, as well as fun moments of discovery into the seemingly endless hidden nooks and cranny's that there is to offer. Zelda, much like Metroid to me, is an IP that has the advantage of having some really damn cool lore, and it's at great display in Tears of the Kingdom. One of the chief complaints I had with Breath of the Wild is that much of the story exposition, like almost all of it, was resigned to flashback cutscenes which is a pretty bad way to tell a story. Now, that's not entierly different with Tears of the Kingdom, but the amount of story they manage to tell through the glyphs and temples is far greater than it was in BotW. I found myself sitting up and revelling in the cutscenes that TotK had to offer, as there was so much to pack up and take away that I could use to solve the game's mystery. I enjoyed that, and it's almost exclusively because of that, that I rated this game higher than its predecessor. I felt like Nintendo and the Zelda team sucessfully navigated the complaints about narrative and made a rather positive change.
In all, most people that are reading this, if any have actually read this in its entirety, are probably already playing/played TotK or are going to. I had fun, but I highly doubt this will be my game of the year, and probably not a game I'll return to.
definitely better than botw, i think most if not all of the additions made to this game are fantastic. i think the fact that this is essentially the only game i played for nearly 2 weeks straight going to bed late every night just because i was so into this game is a testament to my enjoyment. the new powers are cool, the map additions make exploration feel even more fulfilling, and they picked up some slack from botw's lame ass story. getting to run around in the new expansive areas and finding caves and wells and all that while you just make silly vehicles was a lot of fun.
that said there are still some fundamental problems botw had that carry over that are hard to overlook for me. dungeons are still wack as fuck and each take no longer than 30 minutes to beat, each one having really underwhelming and easy bosses with the exception of one. the stories attached to most of these temple quests were also just boring, i do not care that your town is covered in muck i just wanna learn more about what is going on in this game. shrines still just kinda suck and honestly may have been made even worse in this game with how easily you can cheese them with being able to smuggle in zonai devices or just abusing your powers extents so that you can beat most shrines in unintended ways. and even when the shrines cant be cheesed that easily theyre just basic puzzles that take no time or thought at all. on top of that it felt like there were a noticeable amount of shrines with no puzzle in them at all, something that i hated about botw. some of these shrines have puzzles attached to them outside of the shrines themselves and your reward is inside, but some shrines just exist out in the open and when you walk in you just get a chest and an orb for doing nothing. i dont really know how they can fix shrines but it does just feel like they really didnt make any improvements on them and theres even more to find in this game than there were in the last one. also without talking about anything that happens, after the buildup to the final fight i was left with a sour taste left after defeating the final boss in terms of both story and gameplay, it feels like things just kinda stumble and fall here at the end which really disappointed me.
there are probably more things i could talk about with this game that bugged me and more things i could talk about that i liked, especially in great detail, but this is all just the short of it since i dont like making super long reviews because i dont think people are gonna read all that. these are just my thoughts after having finished the main story last night and sitting on them for a little while. i still plan on going back and doing things like getting the rest of the shrines and lightroots, picking up more gear, and fighting some of the tougher enemies that i struggled with the first time around. i dont think any of this remaining content will really change my mind at all since it doesnt seem substantial enough to change how i feel, its just more of the same that i already enjoy/dislike. id say this game is definitely worth playing, especially if you enjoyed botw in any way. is it $70 worth?? not really it should just be $60 but this is just how video game pricing is probably gonna be for the foreseeable future since other companies started doing this a couple years ago before nintendo did. the only thing that really worries me about the zelda franchise as a whole after this is the direction it goes from this game. its obvious that open world zelda sells a bajillion copies and people really enjoy it because of how highly reviewed botw and this game are, but after reading twitter headlines from game journalism websites about how zelda devs wanna keep making zelda in this nonlinear format i hope that doesnt mean there wont be a return to the linear games. im sure that wont be the case, but no matter how many remasters and remakes come out for the older titles that people love, i just want some new shit in the traditional style and something just tells me new zelda titles like that are on the backburner for a long long time. even if a lot of my gripes with these nonlinear games are fixed i still hope theres a world where both nonlinear titles and the linear ones that i really love can both still be made without them thinking zelda just needs to move on from linearity.
that said there are still some fundamental problems botw had that carry over that are hard to overlook for me. dungeons are still wack as fuck and each take no longer than 30 minutes to beat, each one having really underwhelming and easy bosses with the exception of one. the stories attached to most of these temple quests were also just boring, i do not care that your town is covered in muck i just wanna learn more about what is going on in this game. shrines still just kinda suck and honestly may have been made even worse in this game with how easily you can cheese them with being able to smuggle in zonai devices or just abusing your powers extents so that you can beat most shrines in unintended ways. and even when the shrines cant be cheesed that easily theyre just basic puzzles that take no time or thought at all. on top of that it felt like there were a noticeable amount of shrines with no puzzle in them at all, something that i hated about botw. some of these shrines have puzzles attached to them outside of the shrines themselves and your reward is inside, but some shrines just exist out in the open and when you walk in you just get a chest and an orb for doing nothing. i dont really know how they can fix shrines but it does just feel like they really didnt make any improvements on them and theres even more to find in this game than there were in the last one. also without talking about anything that happens, after the buildup to the final fight i was left with a sour taste left after defeating the final boss in terms of both story and gameplay, it feels like things just kinda stumble and fall here at the end which really disappointed me.
there are probably more things i could talk about with this game that bugged me and more things i could talk about that i liked, especially in great detail, but this is all just the short of it since i dont like making super long reviews because i dont think people are gonna read all that. these are just my thoughts after having finished the main story last night and sitting on them for a little while. i still plan on going back and doing things like getting the rest of the shrines and lightroots, picking up more gear, and fighting some of the tougher enemies that i struggled with the first time around. i dont think any of this remaining content will really change my mind at all since it doesnt seem substantial enough to change how i feel, its just more of the same that i already enjoy/dislike. id say this game is definitely worth playing, especially if you enjoyed botw in any way. is it $70 worth?? not really it should just be $60 but this is just how video game pricing is probably gonna be for the foreseeable future since other companies started doing this a couple years ago before nintendo did. the only thing that really worries me about the zelda franchise as a whole after this is the direction it goes from this game. its obvious that open world zelda sells a bajillion copies and people really enjoy it because of how highly reviewed botw and this game are, but after reading twitter headlines from game journalism websites about how zelda devs wanna keep making zelda in this nonlinear format i hope that doesnt mean there wont be a return to the linear games. im sure that wont be the case, but no matter how many remasters and remakes come out for the older titles that people love, i just want some new shit in the traditional style and something just tells me new zelda titles like that are on the backburner for a long long time. even if a lot of my gripes with these nonlinear games are fixed i still hope theres a world where both nonlinear titles and the linear ones that i really love can both still be made without them thinking zelda just needs to move on from linearity.