An update. I recently read my initial review of this game and didn’t find myself fully agreeing with it anymore. Not to a drastic degree - I still really love this game and adore my experience with it, but quicker than any other game I’ve played, I’m finding the recency bias has dissipated to an alarming degree.
I still stand by a lot of my initial thoughts, but having time away from the game has made its issues red hot. I believe it is still a big improvement over BOTW in most ways, but I think I’m seeing through the cracks a lot faster now than with BOTW.
Last week I went back to do more post-game stuff - side quests, filling out the depths map, shrine completion etc, and I found myself hitting a wall with some of the redundancy. This game is carried by its first playthrough. The Depths blew my mind when I first discovered them. What once was exciting and mysterious is now shockingly redundant and predictable. The Depths don’t offer much once you know the pattern of their design. The excitement of having an entire 2nd map lasts most of the game, but going back to it after beating the campaign made me realize I wasn’t motivated or excited to fill it out any further. I was motivated in a check list kind of way. The sky islands are a gorgeous diversion with occasional surprises - but just like the depths, they cease to offer more excitement once you discover the pattern. They’re horribly similar half the time. Getting the gliding suit was a wonderful experience, but so many islands are obsolete and lose purpose once completed. At least with Hyrule you never feel like returning to certain locations is totally pointless. Sadly the sky islands dwindled down to the point where I only went to them when prompted by a quest.
I still stand by the base Hyrule map being amazing. I replayed BOTW before TOTK and never found Hyrule to feel redundant with its main areas. Seeing the world develop is organic and wonderful. Catching up with characters from BOTW was nostalgic and charming. This is clearly where most of the development time went. That and the general narrative which I love. There are some story moments that are so brilliantly and subtly done. Nothing about the story felt lacking to me and there are several highlights that resonate as being some of the series’ best.
Overall, I can’t stand by my previous statement that this could be up there for my favorite zelda game or one of my favorite games in general. I still love it and my first time with TOTK will go down as one of my favorite video game experiences, but I don’t think I could replay it and enjoy it nearly as much. The abilities are still a game design achievement though. I completely get why this would be someone’s favorite zelda game and I’m certainly taking a strange stance atm, but I’ve fallen out of love with it at an alarming rate. My time trying to return to it rattled me with how rigid and unmotivated I felt to do anything else outside of walking around and enjoying the visuals (when it’s not cloudy and grey). I really expected to dive head first into completing all the shrines, side quests, and light roots etc. Even content like the koroks and holding the signs up were blatantly tired to me halfway through my first playthrough - to the point where once I had enough inventory slots I started ignoring koroks. I did maybe 25 of the signs before I began to skip them.
The lead up to the dungeons are superb and possibly better than the dungeons themselves to a degree. There’s so much room to improve for future games. I don’t wish for Nintendo to drop this formula (I mean they confirmed they won’t), but I hope they tone it down for the next one. We don’t need each game to get bigger and have more busy work. The side quests were mostly great in TOTK, but I do think there’s more padding than good well designed content upon reflection. It’s not bad padding though, but padding shouldn’t also be compensating for something.
Also a random tangent: I love the fuse mechanic, but I can’t be the only one who HATED walking around with certain fused weapons and shields. I never fused a shield unless it was circumstantial because I didn’t want a giant rock on my back. I always wanted to walk around with the master sword when I had it because it bugged me how dumb link would look half the time with a bunch of garbage glued to his weapons.
It’s just a nitpick - I love the mechanic - but I just wanted to have normal looking gear sometimes. There’s some cool looking fused weapons for sure, but most are really goofy. I want to look cool when exploring, and despite how fun fusing is, you quickly end up only fusing the same few monster parts over and over. I likely had less than a dozen monster parts I’d rely on for arrows and weapons by the end.
TOTK blows my mind in a lot of ways, and my adoration for it hasn’t exactly gone away. I’ll always love how in love with it I was, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was released from some kind of spell upon beating it. I’d love for the next zelda game to have a smaller focused open world, and perhaps a more linear approach to progression. The do anything anywhere idea has been great for two entries, but I’m pretty confident the magic of that is totally drained after TOTK. We don’t need another shake up or brain melting revolution of game design, just a tighter version of what exists. Getting items in a certain order during the story and having an actual difficulty curve would be very welcome. I’m more excited than worried for the future of zelda. I still believe they put their all into this one. It’s not likely they’ll use this specific hyrule and its characters again, so a fresh slate with these ideas as a blueprint will undoubtedly lead to something even better.
I still stand by a lot of my initial thoughts, but having time away from the game has made its issues red hot. I believe it is still a big improvement over BOTW in most ways, but I think I’m seeing through the cracks a lot faster now than with BOTW.
Last week I went back to do more post-game stuff - side quests, filling out the depths map, shrine completion etc, and I found myself hitting a wall with some of the redundancy. This game is carried by its first playthrough. The Depths blew my mind when I first discovered them. What once was exciting and mysterious is now shockingly redundant and predictable. The Depths don’t offer much once you know the pattern of their design. The excitement of having an entire 2nd map lasts most of the game, but going back to it after beating the campaign made me realize I wasn’t motivated or excited to fill it out any further. I was motivated in a check list kind of way. The sky islands are a gorgeous diversion with occasional surprises - but just like the depths, they cease to offer more excitement once you discover the pattern. They’re horribly similar half the time. Getting the gliding suit was a wonderful experience, but so many islands are obsolete and lose purpose once completed. At least with Hyrule you never feel like returning to certain locations is totally pointless. Sadly the sky islands dwindled down to the point where I only went to them when prompted by a quest.
I still stand by the base Hyrule map being amazing. I replayed BOTW before TOTK and never found Hyrule to feel redundant with its main areas. Seeing the world develop is organic and wonderful. Catching up with characters from BOTW was nostalgic and charming. This is clearly where most of the development time went. That and the general narrative which I love. There are some story moments that are so brilliantly and subtly done. Nothing about the story felt lacking to me and there are several highlights that resonate as being some of the series’ best.
Overall, I can’t stand by my previous statement that this could be up there for my favorite zelda game or one of my favorite games in general. I still love it and my first time with TOTK will go down as one of my favorite video game experiences, but I don’t think I could replay it and enjoy it nearly as much. The abilities are still a game design achievement though. I completely get why this would be someone’s favorite zelda game and I’m certainly taking a strange stance atm, but I’ve fallen out of love with it at an alarming rate. My time trying to return to it rattled me with how rigid and unmotivated I felt to do anything else outside of walking around and enjoying the visuals (when it’s not cloudy and grey). I really expected to dive head first into completing all the shrines, side quests, and light roots etc. Even content like the koroks and holding the signs up were blatantly tired to me halfway through my first playthrough - to the point where once I had enough inventory slots I started ignoring koroks. I did maybe 25 of the signs before I began to skip them.
The lead up to the dungeons are superb and possibly better than the dungeons themselves to a degree. There’s so much room to improve for future games. I don’t wish for Nintendo to drop this formula (I mean they confirmed they won’t), but I hope they tone it down for the next one. We don’t need each game to get bigger and have more busy work. The side quests were mostly great in TOTK, but I do think there’s more padding than good well designed content upon reflection. It’s not bad padding though, but padding shouldn’t also be compensating for something.
Also a random tangent: I love the fuse mechanic, but I can’t be the only one who HATED walking around with certain fused weapons and shields. I never fused a shield unless it was circumstantial because I didn’t want a giant rock on my back. I always wanted to walk around with the master sword when I had it because it bugged me how dumb link would look half the time with a bunch of garbage glued to his weapons.
It’s just a nitpick - I love the mechanic - but I just wanted to have normal looking gear sometimes. There’s some cool looking fused weapons for sure, but most are really goofy. I want to look cool when exploring, and despite how fun fusing is, you quickly end up only fusing the same few monster parts over and over. I likely had less than a dozen monster parts I’d rely on for arrows and weapons by the end.
TOTK blows my mind in a lot of ways, and my adoration for it hasn’t exactly gone away. I’ll always love how in love with it I was, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was released from some kind of spell upon beating it. I’d love for the next zelda game to have a smaller focused open world, and perhaps a more linear approach to progression. The do anything anywhere idea has been great for two entries, but I’m pretty confident the magic of that is totally drained after TOTK. We don’t need another shake up or brain melting revolution of game design, just a tighter version of what exists. Getting items in a certain order during the story and having an actual difficulty curve would be very welcome. I’m more excited than worried for the future of zelda. I still believe they put their all into this one. It’s not likely they’ll use this specific hyrule and its characters again, so a fresh slate with these ideas as a blueprint will undoubtedly lead to something even better.