First things first, I am an EXTREME Breath of the Wild hater. There was not a single thing about that game I liked other than its music. Unfortunately for me, this style is apparently what Zelda will be going forward so I will curse botw to my dying day. I'm gonna miss the traditional zelda formula. So why did I even play this one? My friend got sent two copies so he gave me one which means I didn't end up spending my money on this game thankfully.
With that out of the way, I did actually have some positives coming away from Tears of the Kingdom. At the end of the day I did have more fun with this game over its predecessor though thats not a hard thing to do. It kept my attention for easily double if not triple my playtime with botw. Link with his hair grown out and down is hot and it almost made me consider not wearing headgear like a massive idiot. I corrected that real quick. Stats > Fashion, Set Bonuses > Aesthetic, keep the hylian hood up at all times. Fashion first folks have no rights and don't talk to me if you are one of them.
When Link cooks he also hums music from the previous games which I think was a very nice touch. I could only place a couple since some are pretty hard to hear and real short and what I think I heard might not be correct but I'm certain I heard Saria's Song, the Main Theme and The Ballad of the Wind Fish.
The map seemed to have more going on this time and I enjoyed that cuz going around the first game's map was so goddamn boring. Make no mistake this one is still boring to traverse as its always the worst part of any game with a big map but it took like 10 hours for that boredom to come in instead of 1. Being able to make vehicles to speed up traversal, even if its limited by your batteries and they will disappear after a certain amount of time depending on how you built them, is generally a good thing. The increased enemy variety also helped with that but you're still fighting the bokoblins and moblins 75% of the time.
I still hate the weapon durability on a fundamental level and its not inherently better in this game compared to botw. The weapons are still made of wet tissue paper, however the fusion system makes it a bit more bearable. One of the largest issues with botw's durability was that fighting lower tiered enemies with anything but early game weapons was a net loss. They'd break after a couple swings and you'd get a stick or club in return. Now those awful weapons that they drop can be fused with their own monster parts or ones from your inventory, other weapons on the ground or assorted items. Now you can get something comparable to an unfused mid tier weapons with that stick. Breaking something like a silver lynel weapon on a red bokoblin is still a net loss however and I found myself not fusing weapons to each other past the early game. Just using monster parts and other materials seemed better all around.
There were a couple, what this game would call, dungeons. Keeping with the trend that the water temple is the worst of the bunch. In my opinion they are a large step up from the divine beasts of old but are still not as interesting as actual full length dungeons as they are quite short and are just "open x amount of locks". When you boil it down older zelda dungeon were "get keys to open doors to find the boss key to open the boss door" but there was a lot more stuff you had to do in between those as opposed to here where its one central gimmick in a handful of rooms/floors. A real shame that shrines are just dungeon rooms plopped on the map cuz these could have used a couple.
I thought its performance wasn't bad most of the time but when I activated the ultrahand in areas like the wetlands I had some pretty bad drops. There was also times where the game froze when I dove into the depths cuz it was loading it in. Like Link was just motionless in the air while all the effects from diving were still going. This was on a launch switch that never leaves the superior docked mode. Most of you are just a bunch of overreacting pc gaming babies who bleach your eyes when a game drops to 59.99 frames to justify your overpriced machines.
Music is still great but its a Zelda game and thats a requirement.
This is where my positives about the game end.
I don't know how anyone can spend 100+ hours on this game without being bored to tearsof the kingdom. Once I got to 50 hours I was hoping my remaining main story quests were the last of it and thankfully they were. Its the definition of repetitive trying desperately to distract you with other repetitive tasks that by comparison to what you were just doing for the 30th time that hour as you go across this map, make it seem like its an oasis in the desert. At the end of the day I guess thats my fault for doing as much side stuff I did. The difference between a game like totk vs other games I like who also suffer from large map disease is the other aspects of them have main, progression related aspects I enjoy wholeheartedly and look forward to interacting with unlike here.
I still think you have way too many abilities out of the gate. I like unlocking things, I like the progression that comes with that. Theres like 4 or 5 unlockables (half of which are just your tablet features) here depending on if you count an upgrade of a specific other ability as a whole new thing. Don't know if some of those are technically missable or not as I just stumbled upon them as side quests and the game kind of pushes you in the direction to follow one. The main progression once again is just your hearts, stamina and the enemy scaling.
Exploration is still just as unrewarding. Chests are mostly just arrows or shields and weapons that will break during your next fight that most of the time I just left in the chests or rupees though I found those to be very rare by comparison. Once again nothing makes me want to spend that time getting to the top of a cliff instead of just ignoring it on my way to my objective. They game could also use more weapon variety. You have the one handed moveset, the two handed move set, the spear moveset, the magic scepter versions of the 3 above types where the largest difference is you don't throw the weapon but shoot magic, and boomerangs where its the one handed weapon unless you throw it. Fusing doesn't change its moveset but it does increase durability and changes its look, reach, elemental attribute and damage depending on what you use.
I am not a creative person when it comes to what a video game's systems allow you to do, as they are themselves limited by the developers code and its not feasible to program for every conceivable thing a player could want to do. Being plopped in a map and being told to "do whatever you want" doesn't do it for me. I like structure, I like linearity. When I play stuff like Minecraft, my house is a basic large square or rectangle with maybe a second floor or basement if I'm feeling adventurous and I've never fucked with redstone. The building in this game was not something I enjoyed but only did it for its convenience or necessity to progress. I do not play Zelda to get my Garry's mod fix. I found it rather cumbersome to get things lined up the way I want since stuff moves only in 45 degree angles. My auto build was only full of contraptions to help with traversal since I hate how the horses control in this duology even at full bond. I made vehicles for land, water, air, the desert and some stuff to help with climbing like hot air balloons. I've seen the Metal Gears people build but I don't care about doing cool things for the sake of it and I can't be bothered to put in that time when my sword and bow are more than enough.
The shrine and Korok problems persist. The shrines lack variety despite the garry's mod gimmick and somehow I kept getting repeat gimmicks back to back at times. I'll ignore that a lot of them can be outright skipped with rocket shields as you can't use zonai items from your inventory so its your deliberate choice to go that route. However when you have some that just are a treasure chest rooms without being tied to quests to get them open then I think you could have cut some out. As for Kokoks, most of their minigames I remember from botw were here and some new ones but they are still just as repetitive. There was also this rather frequent one (mostly cuz they are visible in the overworld) that is made to get you interact with the building system where you gotta move this stupid lazy korok who got separated from his friend. More than half the time I could just grab him with the ultrahand and walk him there instead of wasting my resources building something to get over there. The sheer amount of both of them makes me never want to get them all.
I find the action of upgrading your batteries, which powers your builds that use zonai parts, to be super tedious and gave off the feeling of padding. The ore itself is easy to get and it respawns like everything else, its getting the condensed charges that takes time. If you want charges outright you either convert the ore at forges and then wait for them to restock either by just doing something else or leaving the depths, going to sleep to get past midnight in game and coming back or go around the depths and fight the bosses down there that like everything else respawn during a blood moon. These bosses drop like 20-30 condensed charges except for special cases that I won't spoil here but are a one time reward. It takes 100 charges per individual charge of a battery so you need 300 for a full one.
The depths mentioned above I hated. I hate everything about its existence. Its dark as all sin down there until you activate lightroots. Its like those shitty horror games that think "you can't see" or "your light source is limited" is scary when its just annoying. I'm just firing arrows fused with my hundreds of stockpiled brightbloom seeds almost every 5 seconds to light it up so I don't step in "the gloom" which reduces your maximum hearts until you either get to a lightroot, get to the surface or eat a meal made with sundelions. Most of the the enemies down here also inflict you with gloom on hit. There is a set or armor that can give you some bonus hearts to take the gloom hits but its also inherently tedious due to it taking place in the depths which requires you to collect hundreds of poe souls to get it all (which are found in clumps of varying amounts with their values being 1, 10 or 20 and yes respawn).
I didn't care for the story just like in botw and I just really don't like this iteration of Zelda as a character. Then again I am comparing her to one with such a great relationship with Link as Skyward Sword's, nevermind the fact she is the best iteration of Zelda, then botw/totk zelda has no chance. I don't care what a diary says, I WANT TO SEE IT HAPPENING not read about it. The story is mostly told through flashbacks again. Can we stop doing this? Whats wrong with having it be done the normal way? The almost all post dungeon cutscenes are like 80-90% the same between them with some dialogue being outright repeated. Solving puzzles, I guess you could call the geoglyphs that, for these breadcrumbing flashbacks also aren't a worthwhile reward nor do they fill the void of an engaging story.
I almost forgot to write about the sky islands cuz they are just nothing. They are Tiny, tiny, tiny, chunks of land in the sky outside of the one large one thats tutorial island. Maybe there will be a shrine there or an enemy or its just a prebuild contraption to get you to the other islands. If you're lucky you'll find a minigame or a literal gacha machine (capsules and all) for zonai parts for your machines. I think that for two of the dungeons the act of getting around the sky islands is supposed to be considered as part of the dungeon cuz of how small it is (yes one of those is the water temple). If you removed the sky islands or just had a few larger ones as opposed to the splattering approach I don't think you'd be missing out on anything. More isn't always best but thats something this industry has forgotten, among so many other things.
TLDR: If I gave botw a 3/10 then this is a 5/10. I enjoyed the game more than the first one but thats not a hard thing to do. Link with long hair is great and the music is as always, beautiful. Unfortunately most of my problems were not fixed and and those that were are nothing more than band aids on broken arms. I found its new systems such as building jank machines and doubling down on the whole "player freedom" angle to be uninteresting. The weapon durability will never not be ass even with the fusion mechanics. Theres still too many shrines and koroks with too many repeats of gimmicks and too many abilities given on tutorial island. The story being told mostly though sometimes repetitive flashbacks is a narrative killer and the story wasn't good at all. Exploration was still unrewarding. This is not even a contender for my goty and I don't see what the "masterpiece" claims stand on.
With that out of the way, I did actually have some positives coming away from Tears of the Kingdom. At the end of the day I did have more fun with this game over its predecessor though thats not a hard thing to do. It kept my attention for easily double if not triple my playtime with botw. Link with his hair grown out and down is hot and it almost made me consider not wearing headgear like a massive idiot. I corrected that real quick. Stats > Fashion, Set Bonuses > Aesthetic, keep the hylian hood up at all times. Fashion first folks have no rights and don't talk to me if you are one of them.
When Link cooks he also hums music from the previous games which I think was a very nice touch. I could only place a couple since some are pretty hard to hear and real short and what I think I heard might not be correct but I'm certain I heard Saria's Song, the Main Theme and The Ballad of the Wind Fish.
The map seemed to have more going on this time and I enjoyed that cuz going around the first game's map was so goddamn boring. Make no mistake this one is still boring to traverse as its always the worst part of any game with a big map but it took like 10 hours for that boredom to come in instead of 1. Being able to make vehicles to speed up traversal, even if its limited by your batteries and they will disappear after a certain amount of time depending on how you built them, is generally a good thing. The increased enemy variety also helped with that but you're still fighting the bokoblins and moblins 75% of the time.
I still hate the weapon durability on a fundamental level and its not inherently better in this game compared to botw. The weapons are still made of wet tissue paper, however the fusion system makes it a bit more bearable. One of the largest issues with botw's durability was that fighting lower tiered enemies with anything but early game weapons was a net loss. They'd break after a couple swings and you'd get a stick or club in return. Now those awful weapons that they drop can be fused with their own monster parts or ones from your inventory, other weapons on the ground or assorted items. Now you can get something comparable to an unfused mid tier weapons with that stick. Breaking something like a silver lynel weapon on a red bokoblin is still a net loss however and I found myself not fusing weapons to each other past the early game. Just using monster parts and other materials seemed better all around.
There were a couple, what this game would call, dungeons. Keeping with the trend that the water temple is the worst of the bunch. In my opinion they are a large step up from the divine beasts of old but are still not as interesting as actual full length dungeons as they are quite short and are just "open x amount of locks". When you boil it down older zelda dungeon were "get keys to open doors to find the boss key to open the boss door" but there was a lot more stuff you had to do in between those as opposed to here where its one central gimmick in a handful of rooms/floors. A real shame that shrines are just dungeon rooms plopped on the map cuz these could have used a couple.
I thought its performance wasn't bad most of the time but when I activated the ultrahand in areas like the wetlands I had some pretty bad drops. There was also times where the game froze when I dove into the depths cuz it was loading it in. Like Link was just motionless in the air while all the effects from diving were still going. This was on a launch switch that never leaves the superior docked mode. Most of you are just a bunch of overreacting pc gaming babies who bleach your eyes when a game drops to 59.99 frames to justify your overpriced machines.
Music is still great but its a Zelda game and thats a requirement.
This is where my positives about the game end.
I don't know how anyone can spend 100+ hours on this game without being bored to tears
I still think you have way too many abilities out of the gate. I like unlocking things, I like the progression that comes with that. Theres like 4 or 5 unlockables (half of which are just your tablet features) here depending on if you count an upgrade of a specific other ability as a whole new thing. Don't know if some of those are technically missable or not as I just stumbled upon them as side quests and the game kind of pushes you in the direction to follow one. The main progression once again is just your hearts, stamina and the enemy scaling.
Exploration is still just as unrewarding. Chests are mostly just arrows or shields and weapons that will break during your next fight that most of the time I just left in the chests or rupees though I found those to be very rare by comparison. Once again nothing makes me want to spend that time getting to the top of a cliff instead of just ignoring it on my way to my objective. They game could also use more weapon variety. You have the one handed moveset, the two handed move set, the spear moveset, the magic scepter versions of the 3 above types where the largest difference is you don't throw the weapon but shoot magic, and boomerangs where its the one handed weapon unless you throw it. Fusing doesn't change its moveset but it does increase durability and changes its look, reach, elemental attribute and damage depending on what you use.
I am not a creative person when it comes to what a video game's systems allow you to do, as they are themselves limited by the developers code and its not feasible to program for every conceivable thing a player could want to do. Being plopped in a map and being told to "do whatever you want" doesn't do it for me. I like structure, I like linearity. When I play stuff like Minecraft, my house is a basic large square or rectangle with maybe a second floor or basement if I'm feeling adventurous and I've never fucked with redstone. The building in this game was not something I enjoyed but only did it for its convenience or necessity to progress. I do not play Zelda to get my Garry's mod fix. I found it rather cumbersome to get things lined up the way I want since stuff moves only in 45 degree angles. My auto build was only full of contraptions to help with traversal since I hate how the horses control in this duology even at full bond. I made vehicles for land, water, air, the desert and some stuff to help with climbing like hot air balloons. I've seen the Metal Gears people build but I don't care about doing cool things for the sake of it and I can't be bothered to put in that time when my sword and bow are more than enough.
The shrine and Korok problems persist. The shrines lack variety despite the garry's mod gimmick and somehow I kept getting repeat gimmicks back to back at times. I'll ignore that a lot of them can be outright skipped with rocket shields as you can't use zonai items from your inventory so its your deliberate choice to go that route. However when you have some that just are a treasure chest rooms without being tied to quests to get them open then I think you could have cut some out. As for Kokoks, most of their minigames I remember from botw were here and some new ones but they are still just as repetitive. There was also this rather frequent one (mostly cuz they are visible in the overworld) that is made to get you interact with the building system where you gotta move this stupid lazy korok who got separated from his friend. More than half the time I could just grab him with the ultrahand and walk him there instead of wasting my resources building something to get over there. The sheer amount of both of them makes me never want to get them all.
I find the action of upgrading your batteries, which powers your builds that use zonai parts, to be super tedious and gave off the feeling of padding. The ore itself is easy to get and it respawns like everything else, its getting the condensed charges that takes time. If you want charges outright you either convert the ore at forges and then wait for them to restock either by just doing something else or leaving the depths, going to sleep to get past midnight in game and coming back or go around the depths and fight the bosses down there that like everything else respawn during a blood moon. These bosses drop like 20-30 condensed charges except for special cases that I won't spoil here but are a one time reward. It takes 100 charges per individual charge of a battery so you need 300 for a full one.
The depths mentioned above I hated. I hate everything about its existence. Its dark as all sin down there until you activate lightroots. Its like those shitty horror games that think "you can't see" or "your light source is limited" is scary when its just annoying. I'm just firing arrows fused with my hundreds of stockpiled brightbloom seeds almost every 5 seconds to light it up so I don't step in "the gloom" which reduces your maximum hearts until you either get to a lightroot, get to the surface or eat a meal made with sundelions. Most of the the enemies down here also inflict you with gloom on hit. There is a set or armor that can give you some bonus hearts to take the gloom hits but its also inherently tedious due to it taking place in the depths which requires you to collect hundreds of poe souls to get it all (which are found in clumps of varying amounts with their values being 1, 10 or 20 and yes respawn).
I didn't care for the story just like in botw and I just really don't like this iteration of Zelda as a character. Then again I am comparing her to one with such a great relationship with Link as Skyward Sword's, nevermind the fact she is the best iteration of Zelda, then botw/totk zelda has no chance. I don't care what a diary says, I WANT TO SEE IT HAPPENING not read about it. The story is mostly told through flashbacks again. Can we stop doing this? Whats wrong with having it be done the normal way? The almost all post dungeon cutscenes are like 80-90% the same between them with some dialogue being outright repeated. Solving puzzles, I guess you could call the geoglyphs that, for these breadcrumbing flashbacks also aren't a worthwhile reward nor do they fill the void of an engaging story.
I almost forgot to write about the sky islands cuz they are just nothing. They are Tiny, tiny, tiny, chunks of land in the sky outside of the one large one thats tutorial island. Maybe there will be a shrine there or an enemy or its just a prebuild contraption to get you to the other islands. If you're lucky you'll find a minigame or a literal gacha machine (capsules and all) for zonai parts for your machines. I think that for two of the dungeons the act of getting around the sky islands is supposed to be considered as part of the dungeon cuz of how small it is (yes one of those is the water temple). If you removed the sky islands or just had a few larger ones as opposed to the splattering approach I don't think you'd be missing out on anything. More isn't always best but thats something this industry has forgotten, among so many other things.
TLDR: If I gave botw a 3/10 then this is a 5/10. I enjoyed the game more than the first one but thats not a hard thing to do. Link with long hair is great and the music is as always, beautiful. Unfortunately most of my problems were not fixed and and those that were are nothing more than band aids on broken arms. I found its new systems such as building jank machines and doubling down on the whole "player freedom" angle to be uninteresting. The weapon durability will never not be ass even with the fusion mechanics. Theres still too many shrines and koroks with too many repeats of gimmicks and too many abilities given on tutorial island. The story being told mostly though sometimes repetitive flashbacks is a narrative killer and the story wasn't good at all. Exploration was still unrewarding. This is not even a contender for my goty and I don't see what the "masterpiece" claims stand on.
5 Comments
@archstanton I love cowboy bebop but very much did not like the flashback storytelling in botw. So idk about that
@ArchStanton173
I like Cowboy Bebop, but its more for character, tone and music than story I will admit. Flashback storytelling can be done well but I think it needs to be built up to and not be told as the main vehicle for the story where at most the use is infrequent. If we remove the lazy copy paste dungeon clear flashback scenes, the remaining ones I had a hard time being interested in. I guess the devs assumed the player would have lots of questions about who the new characters are, what happened back then and whats going on with Zelda but I ever did. In botw, I wanted to know more about the champions and hyrule before the fall to see how far they would go with it so I got those memories by choice. Nothing here made me want to know more about the subjects of them and if they weren't used as the main driving force of an entire main questline, which btw you can get out of order, but instead those were playable sections where I got to spend time with those characters and in that place then I might have received it better. I also figured out the "reveals" well before I got to there moments cuz it seemed rather obvious so that took away from them as well.
I like Cowboy Bebop, but its more for character, tone and music than story I will admit. Flashback storytelling can be done well but I think it needs to be built up to and not be told as the main vehicle for the story where at most the use is infrequent. If we remove the lazy copy paste dungeon clear flashback scenes, the remaining ones I had a hard time being interested in. I guess the devs assumed the player would have lots of questions about who the new characters are, what happened back then and whats going on with Zelda but I ever did. In botw, I wanted to know more about the champions and hyrule before the fall to see how far they would go with it so I got those memories by choice. Nothing here made me want to know more about the subjects of them and if they weren't used as the main driving force of an entire main questline, which btw you can get out of order, but instead those were playable sections where I got to spend time with those characters and in that place then I might have received it better. I also figured out the "reveals" well before I got to there moments cuz it seemed rather obvious so that took away from them as well.
true stovetop
That's honestly fair.
ArchStanton173
11 months ago