The first time I'd ever been disappointed by a mainline Zelda game. While I wasn't a fan of Breath of the Wild (I'm not big on open worlds), it was so fresh and novel that I could respect and love what it did differently despite its slew of flaws. This time, however, ToTK came through the door expanding only on what makes open worlds so incredibly lackluster and tedious. This game peaks at the Great Sky Island and then never picks up again afterwards.

In many ways, ToTK feels like the definitive version of BoTW, it's the game that BoTW should have been, in my opinion. I actually had fun with the shrines here unlike its predecessor, and while there were still too many repeats, most were actually interesting and head scratching while remaining open-ended. The abilities Link has are usable almost everywhere, feeling less limited and useless than BoTW's for most parts of the game. The temples appear unique again! Though, practically, they fall through worse than BoTW's and feel like one shrine stretched far too wide.

But where it takes steps forward, it takes 10 steps back. The world feels incredibly empty, most of the time you're just walking around without actually exploring. The worst offender of this is the Depths, which are essentially just an emptier inverted mirror of the surface world. It's cool for the first 30 minutes, then it just becomes Minecraft's Nether back in 2010: dark, open, with nothing to find but the occasional large enemy. Once you've seen one corner of the Depths, you've seen the entire thing. And the saddest part is that if you do explore the Depths out of a sunk cost fallacy, you're rewarded with zonaite and......... DLC armor from the first game.

The sky islands and the Zonai are the biggest tragedy of this game, and I don't say that lightly. As I said earlier, the Great Sky Island is the best designed area in the game, and is also the only well designed sky island overall. There are only maybe 3 or 4 "types" of sky islands to find which all repeat themselves over and over. Similar to the depths, once you've found a few islands you've found them all. A shame given how unique and underutilized the idea of "sky islands" are to fantasy and video games in general, but also how beautiful and fun actually getting to these lands are.

I grieve for how the Zonai were treated here, truly grieving. Zelda has always had such wonderful and fantastical races, and the Zonai are no exception. They are magnificently designed, and have such an incredibly enchanting lore basis... and yet they are essentially nonexistent in their own game. It'd be interesting if you learned more about the Zonai, how they lived, how they influenced Hyrule, and key actors of their society as you play, similar to the Nomai in Outer Wilds (a game that I think does what ToTK wanted to do but vastly better), but that doesn't happen. The Zonai only serve as a way to give link new toys to play with and a new ability wheel to interact with the world.

Even Rauru, a fantastic character concept, is absent after patting you on the back and saying "have fun!" in beginning of the game. If the next Zelda games move on from the BoTW world as interviews imply, we may never see the Zonai again similar to the Minish or the Twili, which feels terrible given how they didnt have any time to shine. Despite that, I don't want to spend another minute in this world and want to get out of this Hyrule as soon as possible.

And do I even have to mention how awful the story is here? While the series has never had the prose and depths of a good novel, "Zelda has never had story" mfers show their ass that they've never played a Zelda game before BoTW because the old games at least try to support the feeling of adventure that the games offer, but through dialogue and cutscenes. Scenes like the desperate ending of Twilight Princess, the heartbreak of leaving Outset Island, these scenes couldn't happen without a story to give them meaning and ToTK offers a "story" but doesn't understand why the old games had one. There's nothing to feel watching the Zonai memories here, and the singular twist of the game is absolved and neutered by its ending. This game tries to have its cake and eat it too, and it feels so undeserved.

I could go on and on about how many things this game brings up, giving me hope for fun, and then drops the ball immediately. This game was just everything I didn't want in a Zelda game. Interviews with Aonuma released after ToTK's launch where he stated he didn't know how people could enjoy the old games anymore, and that makes me understand why ToTK feels so nothing as a game, the developing studio doesn't know what makes things fun.

When I asked friends of friends IRL, what they all loved about this game is that they could build things and blow up enemies. They all said they didn't care about the characters or world, and just loved that they had "freedom." None of them had played Zelda, and none of them wanted to know more about the series, they just wanted to play in the sandbox. And really, I think that's why this game had so much success: it didn't blow up because it's Zelda, it's great to most people because it's not Zelda, because it's shed so much of its identity for a common denominator, and that hurts as a longtime fan.

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I teetered on the edge of being done with Zelda after BoTW, and now I'm fully convinced. I won't be returning to this series, and will be happier that way than being disappointed and edged for a good game for over a decade. There is so much wasted potential in ToTK, and Zelda as a series' corpse is ripe for indies to scavenge off, and I want to be there to see it. Now, if only anyone wanted to make a 3D Zelda or could even make a good 2D one, that's another topic on its own. But even if it's bad, I'd love to see people try.

i could tell you about all the shortcomings this remake has, from lack of difficulty compared to the original, to the prerendered cutscenes lacking bite in some areas, to the removal of femc, ect.

none of those really mattered to me by the time i finished. the original persona 3 is one of the most important games of my life, a game that ended up changing how i viewed life and my own existence in it. reload was never, ever going to be anything less than 5 stars from me if they managed to stick the landing.

well, i'm typing this through tears after spending the last 30 minutes sobbing after the ending played, so yeah they stuck the landing. every emotional beat from the original hit me just as hard as they did when i was 15, and that's all i ever wanted. everything else i got was just a bonus.

memento mori

My experience with this game has been weird. I wrote about my 3:00 AM ramblings from a launch party with a couple friends, heard some of the terrible plot points from my sister, and now have skipped past that pesky middle part where the game supposedly lives to beat Ganon for my friend who can’t flurry rush to save his life. Have I earned Completed status for this game? I technically had the controller in my hand both when I earned and completed the quests “Defeat Ganon” and “Save Zelda”, so… good enough for me!

These thoughts were written on that friend’s request and concern the last two hours of the game, so full spoilers and all that. Just like last time, no drafts, I’m only spending one evening thinking about this.

I feel like to give context to my thoughts, and to get this out of my system: I loved Breath of the Wild. I toyed with writing a review of that game before Tears of the Kingdom came out, because cultural osmosis was making me think about it again. My first playthrough, two weeks before the game’s official release, was as easy a 5/5 experience as I’ve ever had. But in trying to articulate what I liked about Breath of the Wild, I realized I didn’t want to talk about it. I had a real, human experience with that game that I don’t want to share with anyone, even if I knew how to describe it.

The problem with having a human experience with a piece of mainstream culture is how rivers erode. I never found the horse god in my 120 hours with Breath of the Wild, I never cooked a recipe more complicated than a hearty skewer, I never broke a horn off the flying dragons. But once the game came out, there were some people whose entire experience with Breath of the Wild was catching horses, cataloging recipes, and hunting everything that moved. Suddenly I had tons of knowledge regarding this world of Hyrule that I’d never gained myself. But because I loved that game and that world so much, I didn’t guard myself, because how often do you get to connect with others over something so personal and joyous? So the act of remembering “what is Breath of the Wild?” conjured a memory that was less pure, less mine.

Fun fact, I have not read a single game review written by a person paid to review new video games since Breath of the Wild! I did not read a single contribution to that near-perfect Meta Critic score that I respected! Even though at the moment, Breath of the Wild was my favorite game of all time!

I promise this is relevant for Tears of the Kingdom. Because for the last few years, I have been content to not think about Breath of the Wild as much as possible. I really wanted to preserve that feeling of mystery, that knowledge that I could still connect with something in an all-encompassing yet largely emotional way. (Tears of the Kingdom’s terrible cryptic marketing helped; I barely believed that game was real up until the year of its release.)

But the thing about Tears of the Kingdom, the bee that will not get out of my bonnet, is how much this game is so bone-headedly opposite in ethos from Breath of the Wild. I don’t think most people will notice because bones of Breath of the Wild are still under there, but all art is elevated by the connective tissue, the engineering that turns ideas from concepts into metaphysically tangible objects. To see Breath of the Wild taken apart and reassembled to be more but significantly lesser… sucks. Not just because I would have loved for another easy 5/5 experience, but because those touches of familiarity, those notes being played again but off-key, tear into my cherished memory of Breath of the Wild and force me to think mechanically about how it worked and how it worked for me. Which I really didn’t want to do!

Like, I know now that the combat’s borked, the weapons degradation system was a novel but ultimately flawed idea, the enemy variety was lame, the side quests were mostly pointless, the world was mostly empty. And the DLC was a complete joke compared to what people thought they would get out of it, (but probably because the meat of it probably went on to become this game instead!).

I know all of those things now, regarding Breath of the Wild as a piece of software, and I do not give a single flying shit. It’s not like those flaws didn’t exist in my playthrough. But during those two weeks of 2017, the fantastically unmatched trailer, the best tutorial level in 3D gaming, the art direction, the music, were all enough to more than make up for its flaws. Because what worked harmonized, and the harmony was fresh. It's exceedingly difficult to talk about one element of Breath of the Wild without talking about everything else, because the game was thought of from the ground up as a series of systems. Everything about the aesthetic, gameplay loop, level geometry, and story were designed to accommodate those systems.

In a way, playing the final gauntlet of Tears of the Kingdom was the perfect microcosm of articulating the vague, off-vibes I got from the beginning of the game, because it showed me how unaware and contemptuous Tears of the Kingdom was of the delicate balance of those systems at Breath of the Wild’s core.

(Setting the scene for game's end: we need to dive down a hole, run through a maze, fight through a few waves of enemies, then fight Ganon and his four phases.)

To begin with, why was there black goo that could permanently seal my hearts? That I couldn’t get back with healing items? For just, walking on the ground? What kind of experience is that trying to make me have? It doesn’t synergize with any other flavor of gameplay loop that Breath of the Wild is built on. At best, I could imagine drinking potions to counteract it like an environmental hazard, but if those existed my friend hadn’t made them. Regardless, it’s emblematic of the most artificial way to “increase difficulty” there is.

But why the need to increase difficulty? To make combat more thrilling or tense? Since when has Zelda been good at that? Since when has the Switch run the Breath of the Wild engine at 60 fps to justify trying to be Elden Ring for a moment?

The answer to those last two questions being “never” meant that getting to the final gauntlet to fight Ganon required just… running past rooms of enemies. It felt so lame, but it also felt like the only way to be playing the game correctly. What possible reward could there be to warrant engaging with combat in this scenario in any way? For new weapons? For new crafting materials? It’s the end of the freakin’ game! I’d only need those if I fought those enemies and broke my weapons and…

Oh. So that Fuse ability was multiple thousands of programmer man-hours spent making a new system that papered over the broken and un-fun weapon durability system, did nothing to stop the resultant hoarding and avoidant behavior of discerning players, but did add more resource juggling conveyed via terrible overworld fiddling in place of what should have been a crafting menu! Got it!

So I run past everyone in the awful maze to get to the awful gauntlet, and why hello, Link has a bunch of friends here to help! Great! Why is the button to use their abilities the same as trying to pick up the weapons and crafting materials? Why does the goat woman have a mech suit that takes one accidental button press to clamber inside, but two button presses to clamber out of? In what world could using her bullshit be better than my own, when being astride her mech suit makes me a target 5x bigger and still susceptible to permanently losing my hearts?

Because in this super fun end game, you can’t use any healing items from the moment you descend through to the first three phases of the Ganon fight! Like, why? Why is the game forcing me to not engage with the cooking system? When that was encouraged as a viable way to solve problems in the tutorial Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild? I never cared about cooking, but I knew it was an option!

So after getting through the gauntlet the first time and facing Ganon with four hearts, I cursed and reloaded and realized the best way through was to… continue running around the arena and wait for my friends to kill all the enemies. Because there was no incentive to engage. The cost was a permanent handicap, the reward was… weapons and crafting materials? When the game was going to force me into using the Master Sword as a default in the next room?

(I just want to take a moment to comment how lame all the Breath of the Wild monsters looked with goo on their face and extra crafting materials glued on their heads. Having all of that nonsense shoved into my face made me feel like I really hadn’t missed anything jumping from the tutorial sky island to down in the depths, and that made me sad.)

Fighting Ganon sucked in a way where I could tell the game really, really wanted me to be flurry rushing and parrying his blows. Bro, if your clones and my friends are dropping the frame rate this bad, in addition to getting in my way of being able to fucking see, you do not get the right to design your combat encounter around precision and timing. Again, I had not played either of these games much since 2017, but I was able to get him within an hour. So he was doable, but his fight so clearly demanded a specific play style, and that rigidity really bothered me. The whole initial appeal of Breath of the Wild was the absurdity of fighting him in your underwear with a stick on fire! Where was the option to be a complete dumbass instead of a self-serious “badass”?

I think that dichotomy and policing of tone is really at the core of my complaints. Because the wild possibility set contained within Breath of the Wild was broad and deep enough to get me invested. Did it warrant the emotional investment I gave it? Fuck, all video games are a waste of time, if you want to be an ass about things. Life’s pointless if you break it down to the time you spend commuting, sleeping, doing dishes and laundry. Humans are a tube, and it’s up to you to find the reason why you keep filling up to empty into the toilet. Art’s purpose is to suggest what that reason might be, to convince you that wasting your time engaging with that art instead of your reality can be the reason to live through that reality. Random chance plays a part - I’ve out of nowhere cried at YouTube comments I read on the wrong day - but I argue the quality of a piece of art is how intentional it is about convincing you of the lie, that you can find something of true value both within and within yourself if you give it your heart and time. Breath of the Wild was a cultural moment because it has proved through its staying power how good it was at drawing people in and getting them to invest.

And you know what? Tears of the Kingdom is straight-up coasting. I feel zero shame talking about Breath of the Wild for so much here instead of reviewing it on its own page, because Tears of the Kingdom absolutely failed to get me to invest.

Part of that is because what was fresh in 2017 is not fresh in 2023. The Breath of the Wild aesthetic has been so badly imitated from so many people that the color scheme alone can make something look cheap. Breath of the Wild was excused for its flaws in the context of its time. It was a Wii U port for christ sake, we had no idea if the Switch was capable of better! But now we have years of seeing the Switch fall behind while freakin’ Genshin Impact HD-ified them graphics for mobile phones. But trapped in its own legacy and forgetting the reason that aesthetic worked so well, Tears of the Kingdom tries to fudge it, to evoke that same spirit with different colors and the same brush. It doesn’t work! Yellow is not freedom! Green is not the sky! The colors you picked for Hyrule don’t work when we’re sky diving and deep cave spelunking, and the fixes you tried just broke the spell the original had on me!

And honestly, Sky Islands are a terrible game play idea! Stop trying to make it happen! Either you have grounded gameplay, where the sky island-ness is lost when you make the planetoid large enough to be a Super Mario Galaxy level, or you can freely fly around in 3D space. But if you can fly in 3D space, the sky island becomes an obstacle as much as a destination. (As someone who played Star Fox 64 as their first video game, flying in 3D space kinda sucks! If a game exists without an incredibly clunky grating transition between flight and ground, let me know!) So of course the sky gets sparsely populated, like it was in Skyward Sword, because humans just do not have enough thumbs for 3D movement and camera control and character action combat. Anything with more versatility than an arcade shooter is unlikely to rise above the status of a very niche gameplay character study.

The great irony of my going on that tangent is me remembering my sister showing me a hover bike, which she summoned out of nothing and seemingly could use anywhere, that let her fly past a giant chasm. My brain could not help calculating how long that would have taken to climb in Breath of the Wild, seeing all the design choices that were made for scaling from one side or the other, and then dying inside seeing how it was all pointless. Because how could I invest in this game world when the major mechanic of justifying the game world’s whole existence could be completely invalidated? I cannot overstate this. Hyrule existed in the way that it did so you could climb it. People idiotically complained about “where are the dungeons” in Breath of the Wild when the whole damn map was a dungeon more dungeon-y than their nostalgia-goggled memories. The gameplay loop of climbing, distraction, climbing, reward was so good at invoking investment because it was all completely divorced from traditional video-game-y systems. You did not get points for climbing walls. You were not timed. The rewards for clearing enemy camps or finding korok puzzles sucked. But they were proof of your own triumphs for your own goals. Does that exist in Tears of the Kingdom? It can’t, not in the same way. I can’t not think about how pointless something is if a game shows me a goblin way of doing things. I have to be really invested and subconsciously role-playing to not optimize the shit out of a good time.

So having not been invested in the world of Tears of the Kingdom, I could plainly see how bad the writing was at soliciting my emotional investment on its own merits. Let me be clear, Zelda games have always had bad writing. They have always been good games in spite of their writing. Breath of the Wild had the illusion of better writing by only having a setting, a pretense, but not a plot. An old man wishes for you to save his daughter, and you piddle around until you do. Since you can do this whenever, everything is optional. Since everything is optional, everything you do contributes to your goal. Since everything is tied to your goal, and accomplishing the actions of the gameplay loop is fun, everything feels like it is endued with meaning. So you can invest, in the game, in the world, in the "story."

Tears of the Kingdom foolishly listened to people who complained there wasn’t more story. Guys, the Zelda team don’t know how to do anything you think they should be capable of writing. Everything happens via magic. There are no rules. Lore, timelines, whatever - words, mist, piss in the wind. But worst of all, in this game’s case, their understanding of how to cater to whims is to somehow get more basic and less creative while trying to expand on what lives in this game’s world. Ganon getting horns and a club to look like a stereotypical oni is like… guys. Demise was a terrible character design! Get as far the fuck away from that as you can! You can go in any direction you want with the epithet The Demon King!

I just can not get over how goofy and stupid those dragon designs are. Also reeling that Zelda’s final contribution to the final fight was to be a glorified elevator to try to make diving combat work. It just kinda confirmed for me how much it sucked! It felt so lame to watch Ganon’s dragon googly eyes not watching me land on his patiently waiting head. If this becomes either of their Final Smashes in the next Smash Bros. I’m gonna scream.

(Is it even worth ripping apart the stupidity of Zelda’s time travel shenanigans in this one? Her dumbass decision to eat a rock to become a dragon to grow a sword over the course of 10,000 years, instead of, I dunno, spending a lifetime trying to find another way of doing things before sacrificing her humanity? Maybe eat the rock as a last resort when she’s about to die of old age as a final hail mary? Maybe ask the Great Deku Tree if he has any ideas, a cousin maybe? Ask for a seed to plant a new one on a remote island somewhere?)

I was so mad (again, commensurate with my investment of 7 hours total of this game) when the ghosts of her great-great-grand furry and some other magic lady were able to change her back? And give Link his arm back?? Implying they could have done that at any time??? Because I think Zelda would have been damn useful fighting Ganon earlier once we found her dragon form to get the sword stuck in her head!

When Purah showed up in the final cutscene to just, hang around while ghost furry goat dragon woman died, (and no one shed a single tear (guess no one cared?)), I saw exactly how much respect and care this game had for getting me to invest in it. Because the hundred year old loli from the first game had been upgraded to legal waifu status, granted main character status, and got to be here, at the end, relevant to nothing that was happening. Hoping to engage me because I thought she was hot or something. All as the soundtrack did the most embarrassing oscillations between Tears of the Kingdom’s nothing-burger of a main theme, Zelda’s lullaby, and the Legend of Zelda Main Theme in a desperate attempt to make me feel something. To claw out some meaning from emotional connections to games and worlds that weren’t this one.

No identity. No meaning. No point. $70, game of the year, in all the contempt that implies.

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.