I don't know, man. There's plenty to like here—charming characters, a cute story, semi-compelling political drama, good (enough) maps, gorgeous GBA aesthetic, whatever. But I've been frustrated and dragging my feet playing this. There is a tiny little fence between me and having fun, and no matter what I do, I cannot hop over it and be compelled to finish this game. That fence is named Seth.

Let me be clear. Lovely guy. Seems really sweet. But he is a sponge on the hypothalamus of my brain. He sucks up every drop of serotonin produced while playing this game. Instead of pumping my fist and shaking hands with another comically muscular man before we ride in a helicopter and are tricked into a death battle with a technologically superior alien species that only one of us escapes alive, I'm sucking my thumb and honk-shooing in my nightcap and gown beside a brick-and-mortar fireplace. Seth is the single most overpowered character I have ever seen in any video game. Still, with like 5 or 6 chapters left in the entire game, he one-shots every normal enemy and two-shots every boss. What are we doing here? Seth bends the very map design around him. Choke-points are no longer threatening. I stand slack-jawed as I drop the red-haired menace in front of 300 enemy goons, praying they will be enough to end his reign. Yet he stands steadfast as they all line up and take turns missing every attack and dying instantly. The Australian government cannot produce enough iron lances to feed into the Seth-powered enemy chipper. He is less a man and more an industrial machine.

Seth has ruined the thrill of permadeath. He has ruined my investment in the combat. He has stolen my crops, and he has pillaged my coffers. I never want to see this man again!

There is a lot to be said about how novel the pacing of this game is and how much I enjoy saving only at the end of chapters (and the chapter structure itself), but I'll save it for when I actually finish one of these things.

I don't think I'm ever going to get around to finishing this game, so now's as good a time as any to do a write-up.

Breath of the Wild is my favorite game. It got me back into gaming after putting it down after a few years, and back into Nintendo games after not caring for nearly a decade. I was excited as anyone for Tears of the Kingdom. The early marketing was excellent, presenting an ominous, Majora-esque asset flip of the more melancholic BotW. I imagined deep crevices carved into the ground, exhuming all sorts of long-dormant horrors, forever altering the Hyrule with which I was familiar. I had faith that the long development time would be used to add all sorts of interesting content and well-designed dungeons.

My initial impression of the game was good. I enjoyed the tutorial island. Helping the overpacked Korok get to his friend was cute. On the surface, one of the first caves I found was the Majora tree stump cave. I remember feeling excited by the Japanese aesthetic for the shrine housing the piece of Fierce Deity armor, and wondered what other kinds of ancient architecture I'd find. Diving into The Depths for the first time was thrilling.

Disappointments, however, quickly crept in. The oddly specific over-packed Korok scenario quickly became contrived as I found dozens more. The tutorial island turned out to be the most interesting sky island by far, as the others were sparse and often copied multiple times. The tree stump cave turned out to be one of the few interesting caves, with most of the others largely using the same mossy aesthetic, with the same Horriblins and the same Japanese architecture housing the same BotW DLC armor. The Depths turned out to have a dearth of interesting content, my time largely spent stumbling around in the dark, avoiding the same enemy camps that absolutely litter the surface.

My biggest problem with TotK is how much it mindlessly copies from BotW. For BotW, the developers went back to the drawing board, and thoughtfully reconsidered all of the rote Zelda tropes that had accumulated in the series since Majora's Mask, like so many fleas. All of the pieces fit together. Take the memory system, for example. For BotW, the developers smartly crafted a smattering of nonessential vignettes, where the order in which you found them was not important, because it suited the open world structure of the game. Anyone with a brain can see that this structure does not fit the essential, linear story that TotK wants to tell. It felt like watching a movie with its scenes out of order. It also leads to big problems like Link spending all his time "trying to find Zelda," when he already knows exactly where she is, but doesn't bother letting anyone else know.

No one held a gun to Aonuma's head and said he had to use the same damn Korok seed inventory system, or shrine health and stamina system, or combat durability system, or memory-based narrative, or music. BotW was great in part because of how new everything felt. But Aonuma's team is already resting on its laurels, and I fear BotW's revolutionary template is already ossified convention.

The worst is how TotK handles BotW's map. Many previous points of interest are utterly devoid of content, including Thundra Plateau, Gut Check Rock, Hyrule Castle Ruins, and The Forgotten Temple. Areas with affecting environmental storytelling in BotW like Fort Hateno are downgraded to dumps littered with ugly brown-gray sky island slabs. I was baffled and offended when I made my way to Akkala Citadel, only to find an inexplicably generic monster cave where the citadel entrance should have been exposed. They really should have made sure there was enough to do on the surface before bothering with the dull-as-dishwater Depths.

Speaking of environmental storytelling, how bad is TotK's? What's the point of introducing another heretofore unmentioned technologically advanced ancient civilization? What happened to the Shiekah tech from BotW, including the army of laser-spewing spider robots and Divine Beasts that devastated the countryside for 100 years? I don't think they're even mentioned once. It almost feels like The Calamity didn't even happen. This created a huge disconnect from the world for me. All the ruins that felt so meaningful to explore in BotW felt like they belonged in a different game in TotK.

I haven't mentioned Ultrahand until now, because it felt largely superfluous to my experience with the game. On the tutorial island, I learned to my great disappointment that walking more than 50 yards from a boat I'd built to cross the first lake caused it to despawn. I was further let down after my first exhilarating flight on a wing part was cut short by the extremely stingy 30-second use time limit.

Ultrahand is barely integrated into the game. It feels like someone took the building mechanic from Garry's Mod, shoved it into BotW, and dumped a bunch of Lego parts everywhere. The game almost never requires its use outside of scripted events like the Death Mountain approach or boring green crystal sky island shrines; it's often faster and more effective to deal with the game's many enemies using the vanilla BotW combat.

So many elements of the game disincentivize its use. The building mechanic itself is finicky and time-consuming, and the distance and time limits are even more demoralizing. I was lucky to find auto-build early in the game, but the heavy Zonaite cost kept me from using it much. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if going in to The Depths was fun, but mindlessly mining Zonaite felt like the worst kind of grindy MMO filler. I think the biggest tell is how many people complained when Nintendo removed the duplication glitch from the first build of the game. I normally side with Nintendo in these instances, but here, I think it exposes just how unfun and stingy the game is with resources.

I'm just scratching the surface of TotK's serious flaws. The "dungeons" are lackluster, and their "press these 5 or so buttons in any order" design uninspired. The repetitive sage cutscenes after the fairly enjoyable but too-easy boss fights are pathetic. Shrines are often just tutorials for Zonai parts, and can often be cheesed in unsatisfying ways. Sage powers are horribly implemented.

I'll balance all the negativity I just wrote by saying that I recognize that TotK isn't a bad game. If I hadn't played BotW, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more. Maybe my expectations for the sequel of my favorite game were too high. And there are truly excellent moments that incentivized me to push through all the middling content, like launching off the roofs of sky ships into the eye of a snow storm, or exploring the super interesting Gerudo underground shelter, or fighting a Boss Bokoblin squad for the first time. But I can't deny that I resented most of the 100+ hour grind I put into this game, and I regret ever buying it.

Sat thinking for a minute like "what could i say about Celeste that hasnt been done already" "what would i say that's New to the site thatd offer some perspective" and then I stopped thinking like that, because why should *i give up just because other people were able to do some shit? why should i* go without a word?
Yea in 2018 I played half the areas of the 1st site of the mountain and iiiiiiiiiiii.. couldnt do it, i thought to myself "oh wow another meatboy inspired game, yeah nah i cant go through that bullshit again"
I wasnt ready for all that, not ready for a whole nother mountain in my life

But fastfoward to NOW, and ive scaled so many in my life now that this point I feel nostalgic
I feel this fond tinge of pain and sadness but also happiness because I know where im headed in life. I love the music, the pico8 version of this game, I like the cast and I like pretty much every level theming bracket thats thrown at you

My favorite in particular was DEFFF when feather stuff was being introduced, so fun. The final stretch of this game is some of the most uplifting shit you could ever take in too, and i STILL have content after the fact to indulge in with 64 and etc
TO DOOO

which is good because i love the gameplay so much, to the point where i even had assist mode at the ready for if i felt like id need it.. but something happened! id die so many times on the same part and not even toggle assist mode, i think because i wanted to prove it to myself that i could do it
but also with a couple things id be easier on myself if i needed a little help along the way with making a jump on something I didnt understand

And then that led to somethin FUNNY happening where I cheesed through 1 section and then i felt insane guilt, and looked up how someone did it on youtube, then i saw how it was simple and i was overcomplicating it! and then i went to see if the game would let me organically head backwards AND IT SO DID!! so then I beat it, not to get to a marker or a strawberry but just For Me

and I picked this game back up For Me, and I think its a beautiful and everlasting testament to personal growth for me and been an unsung favorite that I didn't even realize clicked with me in a way I wasn't ready to stare in the face yet 6 years ago. Seeing that flag was one of the most cathartic things ive felt this year because it felt like I just recapped the emotional run-around ive been having all that time ago. To everyone that may suck at platformers, or maybe you just genuinely cant stare down the mountains in your own life, or to those that died on the climb that cant even continue if they wanted to.. i feel for all of yall, much love <3

Uncanny Valley Super Metroid. Auto-run being on by default threw off my platforming muscle memory until I disabled it. I'm not fond of the jacked up fire rate for the beams without charge beam. Thankfully there's a patch to disable this intrusive change. Door and elevator transitions are sped up, but sometimes the door transition would hang on a black screen. Redux implements the circle-dot maps from the GBA titles, but only on the main map screen. The mini-map can't display the item-circles. The Norfair false-wall still defies the x-ray visor logic established by earlier false-block "puzzles".

I'm ambivalent to the control alterations. Aiming at a downward angle is now finicky as in the GBA titles. The one draw is being able to toggle between Beams and Super Missiles with only one button press instead of two. You still have to cycle with Select to choose Missiles, Super Missiles, or the Grapple-beam. Except now Select skips over Powerbombs. X-ray visor activation has replaced the alternate-fire-cancel button.

In the end it came off as "modded Super Metroid" instead of being a perfect revision.

I don't get the praise for this game, the high ratings are completely out of proportion. While it might be a great game for new players, it is a super boring and tedious "sequel" for someone who already finished BOTW (multiple times). Note that I put "sequel" in quotes, because in reality TOTK is more of a cheap copy of BOTW with a few new gimmicks.

After the first half hour, which you actually get to spend on a new "map", it quickly becomes clear that the creators of the game want you to explore the entire old map again and solve boring shrine puzzles again. Sorry, but it ain't no fun to do it a second time. By the time I returned to the ground from the Sky Islands, I was pretty much burnt out on the game. I really have zero interest in unlocking the entire map again, it's just tedious and no fun at all.

I couldn't bring myself to finish the game and watched the rest of it in a YouTube video on fast-forward for the sake of completeness. What can I say? I'm very glad I did, because I would have been bored to death with the rest of the game. I'm so relieved that Baldur's Gate won all the major awards last year, TOTK didn't deserve any of them. A classic case of this could have been a DLC. At least I didn't have to spend any money on my copy, as the game was given to me as a gift.