Tears of the Kingdom Review: The Legend of Sloppy Seconds
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 พ.ค. 2024
- Immaculate Nintendo has released another flawless entry in the infallible Zelda series. Hark! Come celebrate by watching your new favorite video
Discord: / discord
Support on Patreon: / nerrel
0:00 The new world
2:05 The old world
8:34 Improved abilites
11:03 Control and UI blunders
13:32 SKILL ISSUES
17:57 Dungeons and shrines
22:01 Conclusion
25:03 Special Contest
25:19 The King's Plea - เกม
![ถ้าเธอไม่รักทำไมไม่บอกฉัน - PAPER [ Musicvideo ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/pfeBhDda7m4/mqdefault.jpg)
The winner of the smooch-machine contest: th-cam.com/video/PWtzPpH0t0Y/w-d-xo.html (Exposeed)
Tied for 2nd: th-cam.com/video/pFaDVL4-k64/w-d-xo.html (nuhnick) and twitter.com/2Conker2geat/status/1672072874008428545 (ConkertheGeat)
Honorable mention: twitter.com/TNB_12/status/1670539478262497280 (TNB)
Disqualified for using steroids: th-cam.com/video/U0JxsvTVYbM/w-d-xo.html (Kurt Cocaine)
kiss me nerrel
Make texture pack for oot but for android emulator as well
Totk is an amazing game, but GOD is if finicky. Actually, if there was one word I'd use to sum it up; it would be that.
Big if true
@@kohakkanuva3224 👍 I know right? I can understand some so called left-field opinions - but ''sloppy seconds''?! What is this guy thinking?? Labelling Tears as 'DLC' or this is just trolling about now, no one sensible could even call those 'opinions'. 😂
The entire time I played this game I thought: “this would be awesome if I hadn’t already played it”
ikr same lol, i'm concinxed that the people who give this game 10/10 have either not played botw, or they've played it a little 6 years ago and forgit everything about it. anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in this world should not be impressed by totk imo lol
@@highdefinition450bro just shut up and play your game
@@highdefinition450I played over 1000 of breath of the Wild and did a play through right before tears of the kingdom came out. While I admit there are some small things I’d change there was so many things that I thought were improved. I get that the over world being the same can be a turnoff but when you have significant changes to all the towns, new enemies, traversal options, it’s so exciting to see what has changed since your previous play through
@highdefinition450 I liked the distant past story, the Ganondorf fight, the depths, and the fuse mechanic. Other than that a lot could have been done. Just like in the video I would have loved to see more done with the land. Newly built villages or pre calamity areas rebuilt idk something both visually different but engaging from the last world. A lot of the sky islands could have been bigger maybe some of those bigger islands could have held stories about the Zonai living and battle culture.
Me exploring the same copy and pasted yiga camp / shrine sky island for the 10th time.
I think that the Zelda team has forgotten the power of limitation. Locked doors with corresponding keys, and enclosed linear dungeons allow you to overcome obstructions and limitation. A balance of open world and linear dungeons would be great
Yup!
I tried to play the fire temple like a "traditional" temple... ei play it "as intended" with the rail carts only (no ascending, etc.). It was my favorite temple for that reason I think, and even then it was pretty skin deep compared to temples of old (on top of being very short). And I basically had to MAKE my "fun" there, which is not as fun as well designed old school temples.
None or these temples make the top 30 in the franchise.
Man, we were so excited to break the boundaries, now we gotta figure where to put them back up.
They only made TWO games in this formula, not TEN. Talking like you are aware of what the developers think and know.
There are 20+ games to pick from. Lmao.
Exactly this. Linear dungeons are fine and in fact when dungeons shine the best. I'd love to see a return of unique dungeons items but also would be just fine with dungeons that prevent usage of runes to allow for traditional dungeon crawling. Being able to cheese the Fire temple in this game made me feel like I was cheating. That feeling is fine with Shrines because it's a micro-puzzle but an entire dungeon being cheesed is...problematic
@@saxoman1Yeah, a game should provide fun. Players shouldn't have to make their own. People can do that with a wooden stick.
Nothing will ever be more deflating than when I built a contraption to break into the water temple early, just to be told “sorry you need to go back down and get the quest mandatory npc to solve any of these puzzles”
Why did you let me sequence break if Im not allowed to sequence break…
it’s not a sequence break
the game just lets you go up there
there is a sequence break though and it’s where you can get mineru early
@@paulrance5445 I didn’t even think I was getting Mineru “early” I was curious about what was over in that big storm cloud and I found her. And when the Phantom Zelda thing happened, I figured that trap was going to cycle forever, so I just went to fight Ganon in the Depths. It wasn’t until I saw on TH-cam weeks later that the story will actually direct you to find Mineru
@@paulrance5445 that's not a sequence break either. In that case, the entire game is a sequence break. The game doesn't have many sequences. Like, there are at least five different points where the game basically tells you to fight ganondorf without saying it, but if you ignore all the nudges and continue on the main questline, at some point the game literally tells you "go kill him we know he's under the castle in the depths, just go do it already." Same goes for finding the master sword, there are multiple ways to do it so there really isn't a set sequence to even break, the game is designed to be played without a sequence.
@@Goosewitdajuice317 nah, that's not true. That's like saying subnautica is set up so that everything is the potential first thing you do. It's a false statement for both games.
You know theres a shrine at the top u can just warp back to right?
It was fun but I wish we got more traditional dungeons instead of "go activate these four things and fight the boss".
also shrines are fun but half the shrines I've found so far are just blessing shrines
@@kalsizzle If you're doing a lot of sky shrines, most of them are blessings because the challenge is activating the shrine. Most surface shrines are shrines with puzzles
I'd prefer a mix of both. Open world overworld with shrines work as nice alternatives to gaining stamina and heart containers, but let the special locations be traditional dungeons.
@@Fayt540 Absolutely. I wasn't thinking of shrines as being dungeons. They're great as is, though maybe having like half the amount and 50-50 shrine challenge vs overworld shrine puzzle
@@kalsizzle I feel like the other irritating thing about the shrines is that a bunch of them had to be put in different locations for the sake of change, but that lead to a bunch of them being placed in really inconvenient locations for fast travel points.
A easy trick to make the overworld fresh is to have a terrible memory and forgot 90% of it!
Honestly, the overworld being the same isn't too big of an issue even if you have it completely memorized. The idea of revisiting the world you've got to know and see what's changed since the last time is very cool and interesting.
The bigger issue, for me, is the fact that the new regions (the sky islands and the underground) are pretty barren. The tutorial island is literally the only "explorable" sky island. The depths look the same wherever you go, only having some interesting sections. Considering the huge marketing that went into the whole sky-region, it is pretty lackluster. I at least expected a new town somewhere up in the sky where you might meet a few living Zonai. None of that.
Apart from the new mechanics, the world is pretty disappointing and is seemingly only meant as a playground to experiment on, not as a world so interesting on its own that it is worth exploring.
I feel like having an option to mirror the world at creation would have also helped.
Anyone I knew who said they were playing botw before totk I called idiot's and now they know why
It's forgettable so your memory doesn't have to be so bad
@@pyrodontcutoffsoldiershand2746 Definitely not forgettable.
this is the best game I’ve ever been bored of
good way to put it
1000% accurate
Based comment!
Yep, put beautifully
So true
In the end, I've come away from it going 'you took the longest time for a Zelda game EVER to make....this?'
100%
It may be even worse.
"You had an engine/map/design/characters all for reuse, while taking the longest time to make it... and you didn't pull a Majora? Instead... this?!"
@@saxoman1"this" is pretty good, I like it if you do not, excuse me.
@@lucascamelo3079 By all means enjoy it!
Its a good game and definitely worthy as a GOTY contender! Wouldn't deny that for a sec!
We're just talking personal preference right now and the Zelda pedigree is HIGH. I'm not disappointed because it was bad (it wasn't, it was good!), just that it could have been SO MUCH GREATER, but IMO got stuck in the shadow of its predecessor! It disappointed me for that reason.
But I know I'm in the minority (for now haha!). And I'm very happy that most loved it! 👍🏿
It’s literally all reused. The only new things are single dev mod type stuff
Yeah no one is saying it's *bad*, just that it's not as good as it should have been.
For reference, all of BotW took 6 years, was developed across 3 platforms, during the Wii U bad sales, with all new assets.
As good as BotW was, TotK had just as long to work with, way more resources, and a consistent platform, and most people came away from it feeling like it was little more than $70 DLC. Which is what it started out as.
I think the shittiest trick this game pulls is the “forbidden act of draconification” and says it’s completely unreversibile, and then decide to just throw that rule out of the window and do some bullshit deus ex machina stuff and reverse it. Who the fuck came up with that?
Yeah playing through the game I remember when I learned about Zelda's "sacrifice" thinking "Are they actually giving us a semi-tragic ending in a Zelda game?" only for it to be thrown out the window at the end for a safe, convenient finale. It also lessens the impact of the reveal that the Light Dragon very likely still had some of Zelda's memories.
Draconification is just a complete joke. Not even that part about its permanence being totally farted out, the part about losing oneself too. Zelda clearly remembers and dives to protect Link in the final battle, and Ganondorf clearly remembers and wants to eat and kill Link. Neither lining up with the part about draconification erasing the individual's identity and memories.
@@atkvin The bit about Zelda remembering and helping Link doesn't make sense, sure, but Dragondorf attacking Link is fine. Can be pretty easily explained away by being a malicious, evil creature that would attack pretty much anything put in front of it lol
When they literally could have just had a relatively quick "get the triforce" (remember that thing?) quest and solved it that way
@@atkvinganondorf wanted to kill link? because in my playthrough, the demon dragon just sat there and let me kill it. it didn’t put up a fight at all.
I cannot believe Nintendo had the audacity to make Sage abilities activate when I walk up to them and interact with them instead of some kind of hot key system
Fuggin' this.
Having to chase the gerudo woman around to activate lighting and she just keeps running away... Goron always seems to be facing away so I have to slowly turn him around. Bird has shit battle capability. Crits some times tho. Zora is ass. Water does nothing unless you use an electric wand for the combo.
@@blburri or hell use the whistle button for more shit
like literally its the most useless fking button in the entire game,
imagine holding it long enough will open option to activate any ability, shit wouldve been much smoother
@@1423big The optional one is great for combat but is a resource hog.
Yeah genuinely just an unforgivably bad design choice, I'm still baffled that they messed it up THAT bad
@@1423big The way Riju would SPRINT to get away from me, good god. And then I'd just end up shooting the rock fool constantly because he was always in the way. Tulin was the only one who was ever remotely useful outside the respective dungeon.
the thing about the sky islands is that they’re really impressive and fun to seamlessly go up to but once you get up there it’s so disappointing. most sky islands feel like they share the same or similar layouts and are tiny. once you realize the tutorial is the most varied and interesting one, it becomes so much less enticing to explore them
Agreed, it's neat to learn organically that you can know what a sky island has before visiting it with our map, but that big thrill only happens once for about a minute followed by mindlessly grabbing all the wills and shrines. I guess it makes it easier to learn you can do that for the other two maps, but I don't think it was worth it. On the other hand, It's better than more empty land and fetch quests.
You would think they would put more content in the Sky as it free space and nothing tying them down but n o p e.
I agree. In contrast to Nerrel, I found the depths much more interesting to explore. The mood is always tense, it feels like anything can happen or jump out at you before the light roots are activated, and finding different ways to scale the giant walls was fun. Also, zero chance of rain or lightning.
@@josephshin9297 I really love the depths.
It really throws typical exploration on its head.
No more "you can go to any mountain in the distance" as you can't even see if you're standing in front of a wall or a hole.
Just like Skyward Swords skylands!… Nintendo never really learned from their mistake did they?
The fact that so many interactions were stacked onto 1 button but they still left a button dedicated exclusively to calling a horse that can only hear you if you're 5 feet from it is astonishingly bad design.
in theory you can also whistle to lure enemies in stealth situations but their ai usually refuses to let them stray too far so it rarely ever works out
Whistle is also used for a single misko treasure
It also used to call the sages to you (with varying levels of effectiveness)
I miss going to graveyards and creepy wells. Really wish they included a dead temple like in Ocarina of Time.
And Gibdos are bug men now :/
@@glitchy000dude, I remember when Gibdos were this creepy ominous force with some of the scariest screams! Now they are an absolute joke that you can cheese with electricity like 🤦♂️
@@angelgarcia4641tbf even in the older games gibdos were susceptible to elemental attacks, specifically stuff like the fire rod and Din’s Fire would obliterate them
@@loooongneck True, but they were more interesting design-wise, while these “gibdos” are laughable with an even more laughable boss
@@angelgarcia4641 yeah I agree gibdos we’re better as weird creepy undead looking things instead of weird desert moth guys
Tbh I wish we'd have more smaller open worlds that are filled with diverse and unique content than all these huge worlds with a lot of empty space and repetitive content.
Final Fantasy 16 is going for the former
I think they’d make the perfect open world Zelda if they did the former
If "huge world with repetitive content" really is the format they're going to use for the next several games, then I'm quite sad, because this format is much more akin to a "content treadmill/dopamine drip/play and forget it" style of game than anything truly long-lasting, which I'd strongly argue is what Zelda should strive to be.
That sounds like you are describing something more like an immersive sim game which I think would be vastly preferred over open worlds in general.
That's more expensive, slower and harder to market than big copy pasta though.
The big issue with TOTK is that once you've seen the depths and sky islands in one region, you've essentially seen them all.
I wouldnt go that far. The sky islands and depths do have a bit of variety..just maybe not quite enough
@@matthewsalmon8194I wouldn’t call floating generic terrains to be variety.
I’ve already seen enough of that in the overworld in both this game and botw
@@matthewsalmon8194 lol no they don't. There's barely anything to do in the sky Islands besides finding the zonaite armor. After that, they're completely dead with lackluster rewards. They suck.
@@matthewsalmon8194 Ikr? What are these clueless wafflers going on about lol?! Proves that they're just mindless sheep nodding 24/7 to this video author, including his toilet breaks. They haven't even played a tenth of the map, if even owning the game! [Spoilers ? (lol imagine needing to say this here)] _Two_ of the actual Temples _are_ Sky Islands, lol! Then, there's a whole Temple/dungeon in the Depths. Abandoned Factories, strange Statues etc.
@@nsamadhi33 There's also the three diving trial minigames for obtaining the Glide armour; I wouldn't call armour that vastly improves gliding and removes fall damage a "lackluster" reward.
I got every heart, ever weapon and shield, every set of armor, all "secrets", and did all the shrines and roots, killed every boss, only to realise it is like doomscrolling instagram out of boredom. The game is just such a chore and most people don't even realise. I miss older Zelda games, when I was excited to get different tools in each dungeon and every dungeon had its unique atmosphere and music. This game has no real equipment like the boomerang, hookshot, pegasus boots, mirror shield, etc. There is no real variation in what you do. It's essentially the "Banjo Kazooie: Nuts 'n' Bolts" of the Zelda series.
'the doomscrolling of games'
Holy crap. Do you know how long I've been trying to think of an analogy for these kind of games? (Farcry-likes)
You nailed it perfectly.
@@novelezra Agreed 100%!
Sometimes, less really is more (BOTW)
Doomscrolling through Instagram is a perfect analogy. It's not necessarily fun, but it's easy to digest and slightly better than doing nothing. BOTW is my wife's favorite game (and one of my faves too) and yet she had to force herself to finish TOTK because she was even more disappointed than I was. The fact that they're apparently not even patching in a Master Mode makes me wonder if I'll ever replay TOTK again.
I started replaying BOTW after finishing TOTK and the elegant simplicity floored me. TOTK feels like a mobile F2P MMO by comparison because it's so bloated with currencies and padding and pausing. Being able to pick up a weapon in BOTW and start swinging without having to pause and duct tape something to the hilt first is pure bliss lol
Never played the Banjo & Kazooie games, but I agree with everything you said, except the part about 100%ing the game. So damn much repetitive nonsense. Someone in the dev team came up with a way to "make" custom contraptions, and the bosses said "YES! That will be this entire game!" Going back and playing Twilight Princess, it became so clear that practically nothing in that game is recycled or even repeated, except for the titular "opening a chest" animation and jingle, which is pretty standard in the series.
But have you tried spending 5 hours fiddling with the building system to make a laser machine to kill a boss? No? Me neither.
I’m getting extremely burnt out on large games. I love open world games but there are so many of them coming out now it just makes me want a game on a smaller scale with a lot to do like Majora’s Mask.
The indie scene has your back
yakuza games got your back
@@lacrimaeetpluvia gotta second this, Yakuza is pretty good
Getting real tired of 80/200 hour experiences.
Played SpongeBob Battle of Bikini Bottom, the other day, and it was breathe of fresh air beating a game after a few sit downs, and then moving on.
Majora's Mask's world still was ruined by the fact that the game is a convoluted mess.
Half of the sidequests are irrelevant by the useless masks as rewards, weird pacing for the main quest and i had to use strategy guides by how cryptic some things are and ended up like a checklist or busy work, not entertaining.
Twilight Princess's world is FAR better, in general, i love the pacing of that game and i loved the Fortune Teller and Midna as in-game strategy guides., far more rewarding in general, not like getting a useless mask in Majora, then a giant slap in the face when you loose all masks at the moon quest.
Another game that people forget about and also does exploration and has godlike world design is A Link To The Past.
Ocarina of Time is a freaking Twilight Princess tech demo by how lackluster that overworld is, at least it has a better plot and dungeon design than A Link To The Past but the entire game is worse overall. Not enough rewards and i hated the biggoron sword quest, so illogical and padded.
The Master Sword quest upgrades on A Link To The Past are lightyears better, heck, everything about that games rewards are better than both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask combined.
Twilight Princess needed item or weapon upgrades to really beat A Link To The Past and also use item locks for the mainquest, not only story locks.
The armors was the biggest disappointment for me. Too many of the old ones, half of them had no effects attached, while the other half had only ATK UP. There were tooo many armors with that effect and I was like c’mon guys, stretch your imagination a little. The weather armors were useless too. Attack boost in severe weather but DOESNT protect you from said weather- pointless!
Why would I use cold weather Atk up armor when IM DYING FROM COLD WEATHER. Such awesome designs but because of a dumb mistake it ruins MANY armor sets
@@phoenixthewolf9382 I guess the idea was to use an elixir to get cold resistance and _then_ use the armor. But in that case... why not just use the cold-proof armor and drink an attack up elixir?
In conclusion: yes, it's dumb.
@@vvcqattack up elixir doesn't make your charge attacks elemental, but there is weather boosting food too with the same effect. The sets are pretty pointless
elemental armour is kinda pointless when I 1,500 different methods of attacking an enemy with an elemental item, enemy part, or zonai device, you know the things that are there forever, and only stop being useful once enough run out of battery
Guys, those armor sets effects are horribly communicated, They dont boost base attack, instead, when in that environment, the final hit of a combo, or a charge attack gets a elemental burst around it, you can do a huge aoe lightning attack if you charge up with the charged armor.
One of my biggest problems with the game was how much freedom the player has to create their own solutions without any need to. It feels like there's so many options for taking on each challenge, I could approach a Bokoblin camp by building a machine that nukes them, or by attaching a beehive to a sword to scare them off, or using muddlebuds to get them to fight each other. But in the end, it's the exact same Bokoblin camp and the best way to take care of them is still powerful monster horns fused to powerful swords. So many solutions, and yet each problem can be best solved with the same solution.
Idk, even if powerful weapons are the best way I still experimented constantly, just because it was fun, it's not like I was speedrunning the game and I never grinded enemies once for items.
This is one of my main criticisms of the game. They spend all this time and effort on the ultrahand system, and then barely integrate it into the game outside of shrines.
Building contraptions is too finicky to be fun except for hardcore gearheads, and the game never really requires it outside of simple vehicles for traversal.
Barely integrate? The entire game revolves around it wut
@@thelegendarytrim8514 Outside of attaching handles to broken levers in a few of the main quest missions, you can almost completely ignore Ultrahand and still beat the game. Most of the things you can do with the building mechanic, you can do much more quickly and effectively without it. I'd have much preferred it if more fun activities were built around the mechanic, that required or at least rewarded its use, like the awesome aerial attack on the monster heads coming out of Death Mountain. As it is, it feels like the developers dumped a bunch of Legos onto BotW's open world, which are completely optional to use.
@@quibquiberton4184 not entirely sure thats true. I dont even think youd grt off the starting islamd without it. Could be wrong but im doubtful. Also almost all shrines revolve around its use and at least 2 temples. Fire/mineru. Yes u can skip shrines and never get the master sword and other things but thats akin to just running straight to Gannon in botw. There are several things in the depths im pretty certain you need it for as well. Finding some of the bargainer statues n such.
"Link, they MUST be BLUE Bokoblin Horns."
In five years, the enemies all did what they hadn't done in 10,000 years and suddenly evolved to all not only have bigger horns but each color has uniquely (often comically) shaped horns from one another. 😂 Because... reasons. Malice is gone, but now we have Glooooom. Same color, though. Oh, and the Master Sword is no longer the blade of evil's bane that disperses darkness and that no evil can touch, tempered by sacred flames and empowered by the prayers of Sages - no, now its rusted and gets sleepy, and then it shatters against the Glooooom, then it sits for millenia _somewhere_ bathing in sacred light and STILL gets sleepy 😴 😂
I'm laughing at the thought of Link seeking out a sage who's sole instruction is to tell him to go back to the king 😂
@@hanburgundy4317can't have you using the most iconic weapon in the series for too long. Gotta make sure the stick with a boss rock stuck on it gets its time in the sun. For variety, you understand.
"Breath of the Wild will be the template for years to come."
I weep for the future...
Well, you better get used to it since that waht the new zelda will be and for worse, if the open world game takes from these two game, I won't bother playing them.
Real Zelda games are dead now
still better then shitty ass skyward sword...
@@stnrodriguezand yet so many things are taken from that game into these.
You week because the future of gaming has no dlcs or microtransactions and support player freedom.
Maybe go stick to a movie game like last of us. Nice and scripted. no real exploration or creativity needed
I still remember how blown away I was stepping foot onto the Great Sky Island thinking most of the islands would be as significant. As each tower revealed how tiny all the islands are, I could feel my excitement slipping away. Another huge blow to my enjoyment was realizing how every time I built a fragile contraption for 5 minutes, in another Zelda it would've been a simple press of a button to use a permanent piece of equipment.
Totally agree, other than the dive mini-game and random "collect crystal and move to pedestal" shrine quests, I can't really think of anything that the sky islands had on them.
Boo-hoo you make your own stuff and don’t have it all handed to you by the devs so sad :(
You haven't gotten auto build yet have you
@@SkorpleSlop It's really annoying when you make a super cool contraption that blows up not long after you use it. You spend far more time making the thing than using it. It's annoying as hell. No need to be an ass.
@@darkvioletcloud I mean, look, to SOME that might be annoying, but you must understand that not all people think like that. Some of us are more about the experience than the outcome
I'm surprised you didn't go over how frustrating it is to have your items, vehicles, and various creations just disappear from the aether after you walk like, 20 feet away. Tons of parts, useful equipment, and possibly zonaite if you rely on autobuild being wasted simply because you walked just a bit too far from what the aging switch could handle. It's such a seemingly small issue that caused me so much grief.
There's a bandaid solution and is attaching a dragon scale to your build (or rather, any dragon part really)
The entire contraption "inherits" the despawn radius of the material with the longest range, with dragon parts having around 2 kilometers before they despawn. Replicas made of zonaite with autobuild also conserve the same despawn radius, so if it's a machine that you intend to park somewhere and do something else, it's worth thinking if you can stick a dragon scale somewhere.
Just don't forget to be careful with loading zones i.e entering a shrine, especially if you're using real dragon scales instead of zonaite copies. Make sure to pick your scale back up before entering a shrine lol
Reminds me of when I was carrying that bargainer statue’s eye to him, and I took a slight detour to grab some poes.
I had to load an earlier save just to get it back(well not really but I wasn’t about to walk all that way back).
@@familiarnamemissing3382THIS HAPPENED TO ME I WAS SO ANNOYED
Skill issue
The heros path bit is exactly what happened to me. My map in totk looks exactly like yours, no lies in this video
this was the only $70 game that ive ever bought, as i usually wait for sales, but i can safely say that i wont ever do that again as it didnt warrant the price at all
Agreed…
I miss old zelda😢
I feel kind of scammed for paying $70.
@@quibquiberton4184it’s a great game. Calm down
No single game on earth is worth 70 dollars
@@PhenomenalJec amen
This breaks my heart to say it. My wife is not a gamer. She played a game once, when she was 13, and hadn't touched another one until she saw me play this. But as she watched me play it, she grew more and more enamoured, and the fact that Zelda is my favorite franchise only helped. She jumped in and played it obsessively for three months. I would wake up at night to find her playing. I thought I had introduced her to something amazing. A month later, she beat the water temple, and now doesn't even glance at it anymore. She's bored, as am I. This game is the SPIRIT of what BotW was, with too much filler, too much busy work, too much junk, and it turned an aspiring gamer off due to pure repetitive bore, and that kinda sucks. That's my review of the game. It's fun for a second, and then it kind of sucks.
3 months is a long time to spend, it was probably a good experience and if she realizes she can get another then maybe she will
Feel like this encapsulates the feeling of ubisoft games perfectly. Lure you into a trance of a game of busywork not of actually memorable or substantial moments. Thank you for making me aware of this Strat Edgy production.
@@concreteman03 3 months is statistically way more than most people have spent on this, I was surprised at that number
I feel you bro, I have a triforcw tattoo on my chest I’m a hardcore Zelda fan, and I left the game unfinished after beating the five doungeons, to this day I don’t know how the game ends. I thought I got depression or something for not caring about the game but the truth it’s that the game is boring
@@jonathanwilliams4778yea, I played TOTK for a month at most when it first came out. Didn't play it for months after that---until last week where I tried to see if I could force myself to have motivation to play it again; but couldn't do it, because I already knew the experience wouldn't be rewarding at all.
I imagine the only reason his wife played it so long is, like OP mentioned, his wife isn't a gamer, so she isn't as jaded by the conventions of modern gaming as we are. It was a fresher experience for her, so there was more for her to discover; not just about the game specifically, but about **gaming** in general.
very brave but i dont disagree
This is how I felt after I played it finally someone agreed!!!
Someone needs to tell Nintendo that bigger does NOT mean better.
I love your stuff dude. Awesome to see you here
in other words: he's not afraid to speak the truth.
@@nsamadhi33 The Truth of the Last Yedi being the best Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Back, you mean? Lmao.
It's weird how much I agree with pretty much everything in this video, but also playing the game for ~150 hours was pure bliss
idk I guess nuance really does exist
I logged the same time in totk, but when I was finished I didn’t get like that “man what an experience!”, I was like, meh, I’m done with this game. It was really fun in mid game but the last third of the game felt more like work than a challenge.
I think I'm shocked at how little I agree with this particular review despite having my own criticisms of the game.
I don't think this game will be as divisive as SS but over time I'd be surprised if it isn't a close second
@@ronthorn3 Same here. The only reason i played for hours was to see what exactly was new this time. i was motivated purely by wanting **something** truly fresh to jump at me & wanting to see what the hype was all about. And while certain things were a interesting, i ultimately traversed the map, made it to the end, and said: "...that was it? well, i wasted my $70."
Literally the only significant differences in TOTK are the Zonai-related elements (this includes Ultrahand) and the Depths, but they're really not that interesting to make up for the rest of the game being copy & pasted. The sky islands and the "temples" suck too
Everyone has different tastes and priorities, and nerrel has tastes around novelty and base movemeny and story
Constructing and creating does not seem to be big things for nerrel
"The classic dungeon feel depends on a linear series of challenges that build on one another"
Yeah.
Don't know why people are so averse to it these days, but linear presentation comes with a lot of perks, and proper utilization of those perks by the developers might be the difference between something fantastic and something mediocre.
"Aonuma says this is the template going forward"
*groan*
I guess if you aren't pulling off uncharted level narratives people don't think linear game design is worth it. Which is sad because from a purely gameplay stand point it can still work. Sure maybe it had a few problems in previous Zelda's but I among a great amount of Zelda fans don't think they should have thrown the baby out with the bath water.
Somehow "linear bad" became the majority opinion and nu-Zelda is focus tested slop designed for mass appeal.
agreed and let me tell you - right before ToTK I played Skyward Sword (Switch) and Ocarina (3DS) for the first time. and I enjoyed both MUCH more than ToTK! their linearity (resulting in carefully structured areas, puzzles and storytelling) made them SO much more fun than ToTK. and I loved BoTW! but did I wanna play BoTW 1.5 after spending 150+ hours in BoTW 1.0? Hell no!
people are lazy
@@pitshoster401 big trues on this one
The fuse shrine tricked me into thinking that there’d be small keys in more places than just 2 or 3 other shrines and I’m still mad about it.
"Haha, oh, you're serious, you thought there would be actual, like, PUZZLES with these key things? Like lock-and-key stuff? What, did you think you were gonna, like, find a big expansive system of interconnected rooms and puzzles with nifty new items, and locked doors you need to keep track of and unlock with small keys? What do you think this is, a Zelda game or something???"
Yeah what the fuck with the first small key on the surface showing up 40 hours in
Keys are required to have fun I agree
@@nullset2fuck fun
@@LaserFace23giga based comment
“I could tell YOU the story by now”
Almost had my drink shoot out my nose, lol.
That ending plea had me on the ground dying, never change Nerrel… never change.
Another insane video ! 😄
Nerrel skits are always masterclass.
The sheer desperation with which he adds, 'an ELECTRIC dhana' kills me.
you know someone is gonna come up with some murder machine that requires those exact materials and take it to ganon and somehow make it work
So fricken good.
that was not a fake laugh either, there were tears and gasps
The weirdest thing about TOTK is the that they seem to try to trick you into thinking its not a sequel or something.
There are many instances that characters, places and events feel near never happened.
And I get they prob did this so any one who didnt play BOTW. Maybe so new players wouldnt be confused, feel left out of the story, Maybe even the devs just wanted TOTK to stand on its own merits as a own title.
but then why even make a sequel then?
Really poor choice in my opinion, I honestly hated this about the game and I stopped playing it
@@mihailcirlig8187 I hated everything about it and that's why I stopped playing after the intro part
@@kingkrysen So...how much do you even know about the game?
They really don't do that at all.
There aren't any instances of that at all.
Nah that isn't exactly true, it's still a full on sequel and it feels like it too.
I feel like they retroactively invented the Zonai and pretended they were always a thing in botw. Like, what the Hell? Where were these guys during the age of calamity? 100 years passed and nobody thought about following up on that?
I feel like people are focusing too much on the type of game totk is and not the fact it just copies everything from the first game. 6 years in development (longer than botw somehow) and all it has that is new to show for itself is one broken mechanic, a few floating plateaus and a dark pit.
My thoughts exactly. I can’t imagine what took so long considering almost everything is the same. They hung the entire game on building pointless crafts.
@@7milesdavis bug fixing
@@BrandonDenny-we1rw yeah but that's just sad considering how buggy the game is...
@@7milesdavis
The Legend of Zelda: Popsicle Sticks and Elmer's Glue
And it’s 70 bucks Lmao and still sold amazing. Nintendo is the king of lazy cashgrabs.
I know you said your reviews don't matter, but it really is cathartic to know I'm not the only one who was underwhelmed by this game and had the same issues. I'm glad to hear that open design will be the direction for the series going forward, but Tears of the Kingdom made me realize just how much I missed the more structured sequences of older Zelda games. I'd like to think some of these fumbles are just part of the growing pains that come with making such a radical shift in design philosophy, but Nintendo will never move past them if all they receive is unanimous praise.
I liked Yhatzee's take on gamers seeming to demand that TotK be treated as the second comming of christ.
everyone said BotW was a 10/10 perfect game, but then they went and made a version with a bunch of improvements. so now that everyone is demanding TotK be treated as a 10/10 perfect game, and won't everyone feel silly in a few years when they release another version of the game that is even better?
As someone who hated TOTK and Hollow Knight, narrel is cathartic
@@Jack-zd3vr I hated hollow knights map, liked the gameplay but can't exactly enjoy a metroidvania if I can't even find progress and keep getting lost. I'm not even asking for direction just a classic map style of fill out where ive been would have made a world of difference instead of that stupid fucking buy the map system that I kept missing the shopkeeper for in every area
I feel the same way about this game. I confident that many of the people praising this game has only play botw and none of the other 3d zelda games to have a reference.
I think totk did well in the gameplay aspects but struggles with everything else, its just hard to justify a $70 price tag and knowing this was the result of a 6 year development time
@@kazmark_gl8652 People considering Dark Souls to be a hard game and to be true dodge masters by abusing I frames and they still dont think it silly
I'm not even gonna lie, as much fun as I'm having with TOTK I think you perfectly verbalized some things about the game that were really meh to me that I couldn't put into words
Fun game ≠ Good game
@@lalter_ In this case, ToTK is both good and fun. But it has many problems worth pointing out.
It's a good romhack yeah
@@lalter_ I don't understand with ppl calling Totk a romhack or like DLC. It uses the same engine because it works for open world Zelda, there's a shit tone more of content plus an entirely new story to the game itself (No matter how you feel on the story it self it's still new and different from BotWs story), even improved visual a little (They did what they could for the switch). Totk is the better BotW and is NOT DLC but a new game worth getting. Enman put it perfectly honestly, good fun game but has some flaws that need addressing.
Then you completely missed the point of 2:05 or you're far too gone into consuming Nintendo's garbage. You once again wake up naked and have to complete the exact same tutorial of visiting 4 shrines, using the exact same 3 weapon types to obtain your abilities with even the same snowy cold weather mountain. Once done, you once again drop from the tutorial area to the exact same map where you can once again go straight to Ganon if you wish, with the exact same "you have to fight the bosses from the dungeons you skipped" system and finish with the same cinematic final boss and the same empty emotionless ending. You can also choose to play the game instead, where you can instead be instructed to visit the exact same 4 areas to complete the 4 story quests locked behind the exact same 4 characters, collecting the exact same armor sets along the way with the exact same 4 upgrade levels, farming the same materials, visiting the exact same stables, the exact same towns, going to the same towers in exchange for unlocking a chunk of the map, fighting the exact same world bosses, solving the same 120+ repetitive shrines, collecting the same 1000 koroks for the exact same inventory expansion system, collect the master sword by visiting the exact same location, altough with an additional delay, then proceed to pull it out using the exact same "upgrade your stats enough with shrines to be able to pull it out" system, obtaining the same 4 champion abilities but nerfed and with worsened controls. Obviously the majority of players don't mind this thought, seeing how developers like Nintendo and Fromsoft and some other IPs can easily succeed in the gaming industry by releasing sometimes literally the exact same game with barely any innovation. Players don't want new games and are content with playing the same game over and over.
For me the entire game was “Do I have to?”
in all fairness the whole point of the game is, no. No you do not have to. Literally you can walk away and just do what you find fun. I found that I had a much better time when I stopped doing every quest given to me and just started wandering the woods collecting whatever I wanted free of busy work.
Yeah, I walked away in May of 2023 and every time I’ve walked back, I get this overwhelming feeling of tedium, repetition, and forcing myself to make progress.
So I fire up my RG35XX and play games that are actually fun.
@@gr4n737That's the funniest part of all these complaints, the game is only as tedious as you want it to be
@@ghostsballzYeah, just ignore 90% of the repetitive, tedium-inducing content of this open world game and focus on the 10% that's actually a little creative. That proves the game is good and the players are at fault!
What a genius fucking argument you got there, chief. Feeling pretty smart after that, huh?
A game shouldnt be tedious at all. If you have bad content - optional or no - then cut it from the game. Not every dumb idea for a shrine or korok seed needs to be put into the game.
@@basementreviewer788 you sound angry :(
I was very disappointed at how samey the world felt.
The reveal trailer showed a big earthquake, I was hoping that the landmass would have been heavily modified, with Hyrule Castle as the epicenter.
The world felt completely new though? What the fuck are you even talking about?
(TOTK STORY SPOILERS)
Another problem I had with the game is how the core story arc is told to the player. In BOTW, tracking down the memories from photos was a pain in the ass, but the fact that it gave you bits and pieces of backstory didn't matter much because it was mostly just for the sake of Link and the player and didn't change the overall goal of the game. Also, them being tied to locations in photos made you need to be more intimately familiar with the map to unlock that content, pacing it over the playthrough a lot better. Having them be encircled in mile-wide glowing crop circles you can fly to in this game makes it trivial to knock them out as fast as you want to, which isn't inherently bad, but the problem is how the entire modern storyline of the game is broken once you piece together the "secret", which can happen almost immediately after hitting the surface if you stumble upon the right one.
The modern-day Zelda being a Ganon apparition and the real one being a dragon isn't a mind-blowing twist, but having definitive proof of that breaks the entire plotline of the game since almost every NPC quest, from the main quest to side quests, involves fake-Zelda fucking around and Link can't just explain what's going on. I actually liked the geoglyph cutscenes (mostly because I like Ganondorf), and that drove me to finish the geoglyph quest up before much of the later main quest, but unlike in BOTW where these story elements just added more flavor and context to your current situation, in TOTK it lead to a number of awkward moments that felt like sequence breaking.
100% agreed, and while I loved the twist itself, you'd have to be a complete donkey to not have seen it coming from miles away. Tons of story elements are extremely repetitive and hammer the same point again and again, with barely any subtlety, to a level where you almost think it must be a red-herring... but no, it's just exactly what you thought, what's already too obvious. I feel it's more cohesive than what BOTW was telling, but there's an argument to be made (like you did) that the memories ADDING to the story rather than being the story itself was a better approach in such an open world format.
If you do the impa sidequest game heavily nudges you to do it tell you order to find the geoglyphs in. I still has a weird experience where I found the second to last memory near the start and was just sort like ok that's zelda ig weird. I felt robbed of the emotional moment without the story context
I agree and disagree, the twist doesn't make the story, the execution of its reveal is what's important. Zelda's sacrifice to become a dragon was one of my favorite scenes in the series, and while it's easy to figure out, the emotion behind it's reveal makes it great. Same goes for the fake Zelda reveal, it's a cool moment. I do agree though that they should've handled it better if you complete the geoglyph first, because there's a dissonance in the story there, and like you said, feels like an unintentional sequence break. Memories were improved in totk, but I DO NOT want them in the next game. It should not be this hard for Zelda team to make a linear story, especially when numerous other mediocre open world games were able to tell a less broken, more cohesive story. Also just my own critique but why couldn't fake Zelda have been someone better than just another phantom Ganon? Like maybe Twinrova or an older version of Astor? The build up was perfect, and it is still a fun fight, but it just being a suped up version of an overworld boss was a huge let down.
I thought similar to you but putting myself in Link's POV, would anyone believe me apart from the Sheikah if I tell them about Zelda's fate? Especially because my only proof is basically "I saw it in a dream"
@AfutureV Nah, it's not like you're some random nobody, you're LINK, everyone knows who you are (well, actually, given how poor the continuity is in terms of many NPCs remembering you between games, that's debatable lmao), you have the MASTER SWORD, you can even explain where you got it from, there's really no reason people shouldn't take you at your word when you say "hey, Zelda is a dragon now, I dunno who this 'Zelda' is that we've been seeing mess everything up wherever she goes, but it's not her."
it's nice to see someone have the guts to say something honest about a new zelda game in this day and age where everyone calls it goty before it's even out
Unfortunately, lots of people make their minds up before something is even shown that much. Just look at the hype for spiderman 2(not saying it will be bad, but it is the only current example that I can think of). Right now it is my goty, but there are still another 6 months. It will probably sweep goty though as while I think spiderman 2 will be good, people will consider TOTK more revolutionary.
@@user-lc3xb3wo2l i was shocked it got a 10/10, feels like critics were paid
it was and is obviously going to be GOTY
Word, The “Nintendo bump” from critics needs to be recognized as a real phenomenon already.
@@user-lc3xb3wo2l If Starfield isn't buggy to hell, and its story isn't terrible, it could be a dark horse GOTY contender. We'll see I guess.
My biggest issue with the depths are the rewards. It's 90% amiibo costumes we have already seen in the previous game, just as expensive to upgrade with stars.
Finding Waker Link's hat + scalp, Oot Ganon's trousers, and Majoras Mask with zero rhyme or reason is just tacky as hell.
Doesn't help there's so few new outfits anyways. It ended my motivation for exploring down there.
Only Nintendo fans can call this GOTY
I will say that if I see zelda totk winning over a great game like baldur gate 3
Pardon, not all Nintendo fans are this delulu
I’ve been loving this game, but omg man he has a point… there’s nothing worse than when you’re looting items off the ground after a battle and you accidentally hit A and it activates the wind guy and it blows all of your items off a fucking cliff 😂
My most depressing one is I was fighting a White Lizalfos holding a royal bow. Right as I was about to kill him Yunobo ran up and knocked him off a cliff into the water, and the royal bow sank to the bottom. Thanks dude, super helpful
Or when you're being stealthy while trying to collect bugs, only for Yunobo to roll over and incinerate every bug and flower in the area.
@@adrianpadin1840use recall on the bow
I never had Tulin blast the loot off but Yunobo kept making me think my hoverbike was broken lol.
You do know you can turn the sages off in the menu right..?
They could have fixed the Avatar skills so easily by just assigning them their own button (like left bumper) + d-pad. It would've been so easy. I can't believe they didn't figure that out. For the arrows, even just the normal grid inventory would have been an infinitely better option.
I mean, for the arrows it should have been possible to craft them in advance to stay in the inventory like in BOTW. The answer was right there.
Much more intuitive and easy than having to select a lemon *every time* I shoot an arrow to make it electric -_-
One more example of TOTK somehow going back on some quality of life stuff that BOTW had.
@@thisisfyne That's actually also very fair, although I suppose in a way that does mean it's harder to experiment mid-combat, so perhaps it's just a separate category when selecting an arrow to fuse? One for completed arrows? Definitely a major improvement over what they went with, for sure.
Given how well the physics and chemistry systems work, I can 100% buy that they spent a year testing them to make sure performance was as it should be. But good God, you CANNOT tell me they put the same amount of care into the interfaces, I refuse to believe this is the best system they could come up with to use your abilities gained throughout the game.
@@Arcessitor Oh I wasn't suggesting removing the live fusing during combat, just allowing to craft out of combat for more convenient use later! I was trying to add to your point, certainly not contradict it :P Because I agree!
@@thisisfyne BotW had the exact same system for selecting arrows, they were just very few of them.
I think one of the biggest problems this new format has struggled with is letting the player experience stuff; you're thrown into a world that has already had bad things happen to it, but you yourself can't play through those bad things, so it's harder to get motivated than in other titles
This is kind of true for most Zelda games tho. Even id there is a time skip in the middle of the game or you travel to the dark world you don’t really get to experience when it got like that. Pretty much the same as playing through the intro of totk waking ganon etc and then waking up in the sky.
@@donkeypong1847the thing is with those other games is they’re more linear.
People trash on linear games but the thing is that a good designer realizes that the linear nature is their best tool.
A linear game can control what you see. That’s why the best linear games (we’ll use half life for an example) are full of cool scripting and set pieces. Half life has something crazy happen in each chapter.
Now to use a Zelda example. Twighlight princess is fantastic because there’s something that happens in between each temple. There’s 9 temples so it never feels like you’re just wandering around the woods and even when you are it’s typically in service to a plot beat that has you engage with a set piece that progresses the plot and gets you to the temple.
Twighlight princess is you doing damage control but I feel engaged all the way through.
Botw has plot points yes but it rarely has big one off set pieces and is usually just “go here/fetch this” quests and what’s worse is that if you aren’t doing that then you’re doing shrines. Shrines are boring so ideally the main quest stuff makes up for that. But when everything feels the same because everything is so dull!
All work and no play makes Jack regret spending 70 dollars on a “triple AAA” title when I could just download dolphin and play a good game for free!!!”
Point is sometimes less is more you know?
I just don't understand where the SIX YEARS went... this is the biggest gap between titles in Zelda history and I just cannot understand what they did with all that time, especially with their handheld and home console teams merged... it just doesn't make any sense.
@@WinterOnYT I would agree with that, but for what we got with all the recycled assets, I feel like 2017-2020 should have been more than enough time to develop this title, even if production stopped entirely for 2020, which it almost certainly didn't.
I haven't played TotK, just witnessed discussion of it and have little interest in playing it - but I feel that Nintendo can justify the lengthy development time with most of the new mechanics, which are legitimately demanding of dev time due to the absurd amount of testing and optimisation work needed. Implementing a rewind mechanic in a fully 3D, physics-heavy, enormous open world game is a momumentous task on its own - and that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of technical complexity and necessary testing.
If you're not a developer, then you're in no place to determine how long a game should or shouldn't take. Literally all actual developers were talking about how they are shocked that TOTK was made in 6 years due to how the Ultrahand works extremely well and doesn't break the game almost at all, it's a work of developing engineering miracle. The game took 6 years, you can't change that, it is what it is. Either wait for the next game or don't, they're not a charity trying to appeal specifically to you.
@@davemarquez770 I've mentioned this in a separate comment, but I actually am a software engineer. I'm not a programmer who commonly uses 3D environments, but I've absolutely taken courses on 3D and game engine design so I do have some experience in this. I doubt "literally all" developers mentioned your statement by the way, and I do know of many others besides me who share the criticism in this video. I'm not saying that what they did is unimpressive, nor am I calling it a charity (bizarre statement btw, the defining feature of a charity is not its ability to personalize a product), I'm just saying as consumers we need to ask for more.
Nintendo usually builds great software, much of my childhood was shaped by them, but games simply will not get better if we slurp up anything spat out by this company. And saying "it is what it is" is one of the least helpful pieces of criticism that can be communicated. Either it should have taken that long or it should not have, and the way we react will determine if the next one takes this long. If you liked it, great, I'm happy for you, but there are legitimate complaints and we don't need to run cover for a multi-billion dollar company that can take care of itself.
@jonathanwilliams1271 the next game is gonna be made from the ground up, so it taking as long as TOTK, if not longer, is inevitable. Since there's no covid anymore, it shouldn't take more than 6 years. Covid is a massive reason why we waited 6 years in the first place, plus they said they delayed the game by an entire year JUST so they could polish things up. Without COVID, TOTK would have came out around holiday 2021 to early 2022. I think considering the circumstances and how polished the game came out, I'd say TOTK came out in a fair amount of time, and thankfully the majority of people agree with me.
That bit with the imprisoning war cutscenes was the most relatable thing in this video tbh. I was half tempted to skip those cutscenes because if I had to look at Rauru's face one more time as they explained "That was the imprisoning war" I was going to go insane. But alas, I let it happen. Also I refuse to believe there was not at least a single time that any of the play testers for the game accidentally blew away their pickups with Tulin's ability, it had to have happened at least once and they probably thought nothing of it which is infuriating lol. I also hard agree on material attachment in the arrow menu, there should be a list of favorites to select from, even if it's not a seperate list, just being able to toggle to it with Y would be a lot better than the cluttered mess that we have right now. That ending skit was great btw!
I also have to admit, it made me just scream internally. How the fuck are you going to, with a single sentence, attempt to retcon LttP, OoT, AND offscreen canon?
I thought the new era was meant to break away from it, not replace it.
@@TheDapperDragon It doesn't retcon the events of those games. The Imprisoning War in TotK is a case of the same name being used for more than one event. This is a new Hyrule and a new Ganondorf.
Matthew Muir with the exact same cutscene recreated
@@TheDapperDragon They didn't try to retcon it. Tears of the Kingdom just relies on using names from old Zelda games in a cheap attempt to evoke nostalgia and make people think the game is better than it is
@@Sina-dv1eg Both are just as likely, considering Aonuma.
Remember, this is the man who hates Zelda, and decided that the HYLIAN goddess named HYLIA was better and more important, and proceeded not only remove all mention of them, but also the triforce. Ya know the thing the series has been based around since day one?
Instead, he decided to put in a demon from hell, so powerful and evil, he removed all uniqueness from the entire franchise by making it just another basic bitch chosen one narrative.
This is why I love Nerrel’s reviews. He’s not afraid to criticize a game that everyone else (including myself) seems to love. I can’t even say I disagree with his criticisms, they just don’t ruin the game for me.
It's really intersting because I'm not the biggest fans of videos like his TLJ vid, but he regularly gets it right when it comes to how I feel about certain games.
Agreed
Yeah it's important to have critics who go against the mainstream, as long as they have good arguments.
Yeah, it's okay to like the game while still being aware of its flaws, to pretend it's perfect it's just not true
@TheQuashingoftheTub Thankfully your opinion is s minority one.
Im only 7 minutes in and the amount of relief I feel in not being alone of my annoyances at this game and it's shortcomings rivals the morning after Taco Bell. This video seems like a perfevt encapsulation of all my gripes and grievances with ToTK, especially since BotW was my favorite Zelda after Majora's Mask. I felt so extremely lucky to have found autobuild as soon as I did because I knew if I hadn't found it then, I might've never found it
I mean, the game does signpost what you should do to get auto-build, it just doesn't make it obvious at all that it is a task you should prioritize.
I'm also lucky I remembered that I was supposed to follow the direction of the statues in the underground before getting too sidetracked.
"For every Ocarina Of Time, there is a Wind Waker" that was savage. LMAO
For how incredible the concept of the sky seemed in the trailers, they really made it super boring. The starting area made it seem so interesting, with tech from a different generation, the Constructs, running freely up there. You get so many powerful abilities from one island! It was so cool to see Link interact with this ancient technology for the first time.
When I got the Paraglider and could explore freely, I thought "What are they going to do with the sky? More expansive sky islands that are even better than the starting one? Some interesting (non-story) dungeons and puzzles? Maybe even some new abilities?"
Nope. Every third sky island is the same shrine with the gumball machine and the launchpad and the Korok and sometimes the Flux Construct and ughhhhhh... It really could have been so much better. It was hyped like it was a big thing and they barely did anything with it.
Dragon Head Island is the only island I've revisited multiple times, only because I don't know what to do there yet. It's the most interesting sky island to me because it's covered in fog, even though I can walk around on it instead of it being completely inaccessible! There's actual mystery to it right now. The only times I go to the other islands is if I'm looking for a Korok I missed, or if I'm using it as a launch point to access another small island. Which probably has a chest with a Large Zonai Charge or a bundle of arrows.
The Depths was kinda of a fun distraction for the first several hours but then it starts feeling meh later. Once you seen the Depths and the sky islands, you pretty much seen everything.
As much as I like much of the other stuff in the game: the expansive combat, the easy exploration with Zonai builds, the fun and charming characters, I feel like it dropped the ball on what BotW did good. I wish the sky was more than a giant copy-pasted waste of time.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall at Nintendo's "What did we learn from Skyward Sword" meetings. Because I'd love to know what reasoning they managed to find to make the _same exact mistakes._
no as boring compared to the empty ocean of wond waker. The empty fields of oot and mm
@@frogglen6350 yep, games that released 2 decades ago which were also hold back by the technology of the time, whats the excuse for totk that this switch tablet thing is also too weak?
dawggg i agree with you holy shit totk just gets more boring later on, i just start to care less and less about exploring the world. there’s like barely any interesting places to go outside of towns and the depths is alsoo boring there’s just “oh dark place with boring ruins n shit” there also filling out the depth map sucks, it’s such a chore compared to filling the surface map
@@moonnis4608 Nah TOTK is way way better then WW's open sea.
Zelda plot and atmosphere is something that desparately needs fixing. This games plot seemed to rely entirely on the 'imprisoning war' (despite the OG lttp imprisoning war being completely different).
Once again, the events of the past are treated as more important than the present. This issue started with skyward sword when they retconned the perfectly fine goddesses with hylia and had to link the heroes directly to the creation of the world and its gods, making zelda a demigod. Before this time they were gifted people tasked with an enormous (but human) undertaking. Afterwards it feels like each subsequent game is crushed by the overwhelming weight of the 'legend' of Zelda.
The good zelda plots stand on their own. Ocarina of time is a story about a theif stealing great power and a boy who has to grow up to stop him. Wind waker has the most dramatically human plot as he starts out just as a protective brother, who quickly tumbles into a bad situation with bigger consequences than expected. Twilight princess is a farmer who has to save his village from bandits grouped with a shifty character dragging him around for her own whims.
Skyward sword introduces so many mythical things before the second dungeon that you arent playing a game with humans anymore. Its like a retelling of a legend with all the realism and humanity drained, rather than the story of -how- the hylian became a legend.
Botw is this on steroids.
Not only is zelda the heiress to some great mystic hylia power (like every female in a stereotypical jrpg), link is also the chosen knight with the blade of evils bane before the story even starts. His most important defining moments and events have already happened.
You are not playing as link: the boy, man, or hero. You are already playing as the combined weight of his mythological figure from day 1. With a twig and a boko shield.
Totk tries to play it off like everyone knows his exploits and he can now focus on building a new legend with a greater challenge, but his arc as a character was complete at the beginning of the preceeding game. So they try again and fail again at the imprisoning war. Once again told through flashbacks and legends.
For fucks sake the amount of time the games devote to dodging and retconning the imprisoning war could be spent making one game entirely about it, and if they used the link to the past formula it would be great. A story where a great evil arises and nothing can stop it so the seven sages from every land and race of hyrule banding together to forge (yes, forge not whatever the fuck skyward sword was trying to pull) the ultimate sword for the hero to try to stop their civilization from collapsing would be great.
The game plan from nintendo ever since twilight princess has been; 'look at the shiny new mechanics, forget about the plot and let us try out a new thing, look the imprisoning war is mentioned, isnt that cool?'
I dont want to be chosen by the gods in the first five fucking minutes of the game and have that beaten over my head for the rest of an 80 hour runthrough. I want to earn that responsibility over the course of the game. I dont want to jump right in and be tasked with destroying the fucking 'world eater ganon'. Give link a reason to become courageous, the goddesses' avatar of courage on earth needs to earn it.
HOLY SHIT YOU’VE SAID ALOT 😂😂
But he has a point
Fucking thank you
GyotDAYUM, comment of the century. Seriously, I genuinely appreciate how much thought and passion you put into that. This sentiment will stick with me for a long time.
BotW had that issue in spades. “Here’s your cast” the game said. “They are all dead and worthless and cannot further impact the plot, now here’s one cutscene each to show their character archetype, now fuck off.” The entire plot happened off screen, and I don’t know or care about any of these fucking cardboard cutouts that Link is supposed to have bonds with.
The Legend of Zelda: Nuts N' Bolts
Basically it borrowed at lot from there but it have it own gist. However, that ability really does not impress me xd
It’s the worst game in the franchise like nuts and bolts so they have that in common
Saying that tears of the kingdom feels like a new game plus is the best way to possibly describe it
Yeah it is, I don’t think that’s a bad thing though, it’s a sequel, to an extent it’s meant to be more breath of the wild, not exactly sure what people wanted curios where they go from here tho
It’s because Nintendo was too lazy / didn’t wanna make a whole new Zelda game with new assets and map until their next console that’s why we got this garbage.
It started out as DLC before the devs decided there were "too many" new ideas to add to the game and decided to just make another title. I don't feel like they really accomplished anything more than heavy DLC, and it took six years and $70.
@@getpape4126 I'm sorry, why the f would you want new assets? and did you just call game devs lazy, we're the ones sitting around with drool on our faces begging for knew games, some devs work sweatshop hours trying to make a game, also not making new assets for a game like this is a good thing, it saves time and lets them do more things that are new. MM did this to a higher extent and its a great game, their not being lazy their just using their brain, Something we sourly need to learn from.
@@thewoofalo631 it is a lazy cashgrab bruh it released 6 years after breath of the wild and it’s glorified dlc. Only Nintendo fanboys will defend that garbage. Nintendo ain’t dumb it still sold really damn good at 70 bucks despite being a garbage cashgrab because it’s Zelda.
What you talk about in the ultrahand section about just giving up in the later half & just doing puzzles in your own half-assed way is honestly my biggest pet peeve in any game. I loves games that give you multiple solutions to solve puzzles, but i personally think there should always be an "ah-ha" moment where you feel that your in sync with the way the developer intended you to do it. TOTK constantly left me with a feeling of "oh i guess that works" which is just the worst feeling. I overall enjoyed the game in 60ish hours i played but it's honestly a little too open ended for its own good.
Yeah, I genuinely wonder if some TOTK puzzles were designed without "intended" solutions, and the devs just placed random obstacles in a room with the expectation that the player could bullshit their way to a solution with Zonai devices. It never feels good solving those kinds of puzzles.
Yeah, the lack of AH HA! moments felt like condescending pats on the head more than an accomplishment.
And when EVERY solution can work, its hardly a puzzle- you're just doing, roughly, the same thing to solve the same 50 "challenges"
@@QuintessentialWalrusit is because they saw the shenenegins pulled off in BoTW clips and thought "oh they do that? Let's enable that"
@@TechBlade9000 Bethesda attitude, it's gonna ruin Zelda as a franchise.
Yes, we like messing with the physics engines and playing with glitches that don't ruin the game...
No we do not want that to be the intended method of play.
@@Jane-oz7pp The rest of the industry better stop teething on Ultra HD's breasts and rival Nintendo in physics centered gameplay in 202X and beyond
I've always been a huge advocate for smaller, more dense open worlds and this is definitely a game that could've benefitted from a smaller scope. Better traversal is nice but I'd rather not have to put up with large empty sections of the world. It's something that's kind of hard to do when using the same map as the last game, but I hope it's something they think about when developing the next open world Zelda.
WHAT??? there ARE no empty parts of the world. That's not even opinion. There is always something of value without 25 yards. Always.
I love all these pretentious takes that are just wrong.
I just flat out don't want an "open world" Zelda like BoTW/ToTK. I much prefer a world like the one in Majora's Mask - it feels lived in, it feels like the NPCs actually take part in the world. The fact they have a schedule is super cute to me.
@@ImTheMan0fSteel That's just a flat out lie. Just because there's a single Hyrule herb or a reused Korok puzzle doesn't mean it's not an empty space. Walk from Kakariko to Hateno and count the number of worthwhile things you run into on that walk.
@@Alberich_Prince_of_Dwarves I think doing an open world the size of Termina would be perfect. It's big enough that you can appreciate the scale but small enough that it doesn't feel like there's any useless space.
@@ImTheMan0fSteel Tears of the kingdom is objectively even MORE empty than BotW was, given they had 7 years and the same botw map... The depths is empty, you have the fire temple which is emptier than my wallet. The spirit temple isnt a temple, more like a factory with 4 houses. The yiga hideouts are boring, and the master yiga quest is fun but finishes too quickly. Don't get me started on the sky, there is NO content on the sky apart from 10 by 10 metre sky dungeon
When I first played the game, the idea that this is "just a better BotW" was something I felt at first, and to a certain extent, if you never touched BotW in your life, that may be true, but...
The more I play through the game and think on it, the more I end up agreeing with what you've said here. A lot less surprises, all of the new areas feels way too redundant, feels like there's more redundancy in general, and despite already having the same world and hardware (and so much development time), it feels like so little was improved or changed about the core of the last game. Even though I've got like 60 hours in the game, this time around I seriously have no motivation to find and do all the shrines, let alone all the light roots and everything else. A damn shame since I want to like it, but at this point I really can't be bothered to pick it back up outside of opportunities to use it to study more Japanese
I still think it's a great game, but I also always thought the main issue of BotW was the world being too large relative to the amount of content they could fit in it, and this time around, they went the route of making the world... thrice as big, which meant even doubling enemy variety and repetitive tasks would still leave things feeling much more monotonous
If you haven't played botw I don't see why you would choose it over totk. If you have then I can get behind this.
@@kaydenyeeter801I don’t know. After the disappointment that was TotK, I went back to play BotW for the fourth time, and already I’m having much more fun than I was playing TotK. I think it’s a better designed game. One of the main things is that you can’t just fly over the overworld, but are forced to actually traverse it
I feel like once the hype dies down there will be alot more videos like this one, I've already seen a few pop up. This game is so flawed there's no way the idea that's its this flawless masterpiece can continue to be spread unchallenged
I hate comments like this. Not necessarily because you're wrong, but because it comes across as though you just don't like when people enjoy a game. There's always someone who calls something a "flawless masterpiece", but it sounds more like you want to rub it in their face that "no, it's actually not that good". Most games are pretty flawed in general. It's rare to get a game that isn't and that's usually just because they are extremely simple. Guess what, though. Games don't need to be perfect to be fun. I'd tell you what my top 10 games of all time are, but I don't want to listen to you list out why I shouldn't like them. Hating things is somehow more justifiable than liking them to you people.
@@lethauntic As much as I hate the term "overrated", it's deserving in this scenario. There is something about Nintendo games that people think they don't deserve criticism. The Pokemon series showed this. It's dive-bombing in quality but people are freaking out when others criticize it. Same with the new Zelda's. Everytime someone criticizes them, people freak out and act like they're just haters without a valid opinion.
So yeah, it's great to get this video from someone as sophisticated with their opinion as Nerrell.
@@BreadCatMarcusYou’re just wrong, litteraly everyone criticized the last 5-6 Pokémon games lol what are you talking about
@@lethauntic There are some things I feel are naturally more intuitive, and I think well thought out systems should be the goal. When a game or any form of media has seriously high highs tho, the hype tends to overshadow any further improvement. Its important for more vids like these to come out because if they don't we'll never improve collectively. A well made game with some serious flaws is what Totk is. For every person to call it flawless there will be someone to say that's not true. The more hype, the more hate. Its not always enjoyable to see it play out, but its a fair social system imo.
@@angelx350 He never said the Pokemon games weren't being criticized, he said that fans freak out every time someone criticize them, which they do.
For about the first 20 hours of the game, I felt what Nerrel felt for the entire game--middling openworld with intermittent moments of great gameplay. But somewhere after that 20 hour mark, I started to lean on the experimenting with items and building stuff. Mainly, I got less frugal with all the resources I was gathering and started spending them all the time. Something about that unlocked the game for me, and while it still gets intermittently dull, the possibilities of the game became evident.
When the game's systems and the world design come together just right, it's brilliant and every little thing Nerrel called filler and busywork became, in sum, an absorbing sequence of non-stop problem solving.
most underrated comment here
I agree. My first few play sessions were short but after the first dungeon my sessions would go on for hours and hours. Great comment. Certainly much more concise than my pedantic wall of text.
No, it's still all just busywork and it all still has weak rewards at the end of every path and quest.
@@FirstLast-yc9lq Hear me out. What if maybe you actually just enjoy that so-called busy work and despite the repetition can see value its subtle variations?
@@RickyG93 Everybody will derive enjoyment differently and for some they cant see that busy work as anything else. I agree with Nerrel to a degree but I did end up finding enjoyment in some of it when I pushed what I could do with some of these lucrative rewards.
But a lot of the side content is padding and not worth wasting time on. Like collectathons and monster hunting. You can only kill so many Hinox or Gleeoks before that shit gets boring. You can only be interested in propping up sign guys shit in so many ways before you just say fuck it and use a floating stone. Dont get me started on any other form of tddious activity in the game, its like they expanded that mind numbing aspect of botw x1000
I'm flabbergasted at how much of a good idea setting your own arrow types are. It would truly make the game feel 100% customizable. Imagine going into your menu, and seeing all these wacky arrows you could use, like confusion arrows, water arrows, homing arrows, etc. It would make the player feel so much more in control of their experience, while not affecting the core gameplay at all.
Just have the arrow type and the material cost listed.
Funny how it's always the individual that innovates while the group just fumbles about getting everything organized...Only to find that, no, that one guy had a point!
I’m so glad I wasn’t the only person who felt this way. After buying this game and going at least 3 hours into it I was bored out of my mind. When I told my friends about my experience they were so confused as to why I felt that way.
A lot of my reasons were discussed in this video, but a lot of my “friends” responded with “oh just play for like X amount of hours and you’ll unlock something that helps with that.”
And you know when something might not be for you when your initial first impressions are negative or neutral at best and the community’s response is “oh just sink dozens of hours of time of your life into this and then you’ll love it”.
Because the game should have clicked with me after beating the tutorial or finishing the first area. Which I had no problems with getting attached with BOTW in the first few hours.
TOTK is a game that does not respect your time. Very tedious. Shameful it took so long before people accepted the game is a rehash that failed to refine BOTW and lacked all the novelty and immersion of the original.
For me, the game ran into the exact same issue B&K Nuts & Bolts did. The building and mechanics are fun initially, but having to use them constantly when you're not an engineer isn't a fun time. On paper it seems like that level of player interaction should result in a better game, but for me it resulted in "do i really want to spend half an hour trying to build something and have it fall apart in two seconds, or do i want to do something productive." and when a game starts making you worry about wasting your time, something is wrong. Eventually you just start resorting to simpler and simpler things. For the sign quests I just made endless A frames, and it worked every time.
Even funnier when you realize that the sign quests are entirely bypassed by the use of a float stone. Smack it, put it in place, and you've solved every last one of them.
The only times your really forced to use it is for exploring sky islands and shrines, and even then there are exceptions.
"when you're not an engineer"
Or when you are. The toolset is really limiting and sooner than later you find an optimal build, like the hoverbike, that makes further experimentation way less compelling.
I think Autobuild is supposed to solve this problem - once you’ve run through the fun of experimentation and you just want a useful vehicle, you can Autobuild something you’ve already made.
@@adrianpadin1840in a game so vast, unless you have a guide online you may just not get autobuild for a while.
I agree with all these takes, i’m glad to see someone give voice to some of the problems i personally had with the game. But the story was an entirely different beast for me. I think it says alot that after this game dropped so many of the die hard lore theorists that had been in the community for years just threw up their hands and said “Fuck it” giving up entirely. It feels like they genuinely didn’t care about the overarching story of the franchise and how much contradictory bullshit they’ll shove into a game, even stuff that directly conflicts with the game its supposed to be a DIRECT sequel to. I get nintendo is always “Gameplay over story” but in a series where a huge draw for many people IS the complex narrative interwoven with gameplay and the unique style of worldbuilding having what feels like just a rehash of what happened last game with a different coat of paint and a different ancient civilization, implemented with zero consideration for the worldbuilding or forethought just feels like a slap in the face.
This game has better lore than the previous zelda titles
Wait? Did you say zelda has a complex narrative? Oof. Thats definitely your nostalgia talking. Every Zelda game is save the princess Beat ganon. An actually complex story is red dead redemption or final fantasy 6, normie
ToTK isn’t a bigger Zelda game, it’s a thinner Zelda game. They took a Zelda game chopped it into price to drip feed it across a big empty world, then added boring homogeneous content to hid the emptiness, and a Destiny patrol knock off material loop to hid the lack of justification for mob camp/resource node number 3.7 billion.
Tears would be better if they scrapped the depths and focused on the sky islands. What actual value does the depths provide besides just being a huge barren wasteland for vehicles? Sure it’s creepy at first but that wears off fast when all you come across is reskinned enemies. It has nothing but repeated yiga camps, mines, enemy camps. Only two new enemies. Nothing would be lost.
Theres multiple questlines in the depths that are pretty massive. Also the exploration for armor unlocks and more massive things like autobuild i found motivating enough. Did the sky islands need more? Yes but the depths dont meed to be cut for that
They could add some civilization in the depths and different mechanics there , but guess they focused more in vehicles .
@@thelegendarytrim8514you just explained why the depths should’ve been cut. They’re like 40% of the map and only involve two side quests and two main quest missions limited to a small area. The depths don’t justify their existence. So much space with so little content.
Did you ever play Oracle of Seasons? It had Subrosia, which is what the Depths should've been.
@@Moonboogiethat would have been too much work, it’s not like they had six years.
The amount of piss-poor shrines or "Rauru's Blessing" shrines with sub-par puzzles to get to them was astounding. Scaling the game down by at least a 3rd would do so much for content. Who the fuck wants 130 awful shrines instead of 60-70 good ones?
They aren't piss poor at all though and the puzzles are mostly good. Not really. They are at least better then what was in BOTW and they are most good not awful.
"Proving Grounds: Who Cares, You're Just Gonna Run In and Fuse Whatever to Whatever and Bash Everything Because that's the Most Effective Strategy in All of These"
I want 7 temples and no shrines at all. I hate pointless padding, and no part of me thinks "yay koroks" any time I see one. But I loved finding secret heart containers on OOT, so how does it feel so much like a chore now?
Not enough people called out botw for being shit in this exact same way and it still sold like hot cakes so here we are. I was part of the problem and actually bought botw, but I learned my lesson. Will not be buying another zelda game until nintendo decides to actually make one instead of making a giant procedurally generated wilderness.
@@isodoubIet It isn't shit in this way either. They made a Zelda not a giant procedurally generated wilderness.
Like the first game, everyone will learn the completely wrong lessons from this one because of its insane success.
Ill be damned if they havent exhausted the formula by this point. If they dont change things up by their next entry, including artstyle, it will be too awkward. It needs a change now like Wind Waker -> Twilight Princess
@@Bajso84 I've seen that comment a lot but I feel that Tears of the Kingdom changed up its core mechanics a whole lot more than most sequels.
@@PauLtus_B I don't even know how you can say that. the gameplay loop is exactly the same as BOTW... see a shrine, navigate the landscape to it , repeat. The animations and weather systems are exactly the same too. They just changed the rune abilities but the only one that actually affected gameplay is ultrahand
prepare for bad piggies gameplay and floating islands in every open world from now on + the next sonic game
every other hack studio will again copy only the surface level elements, preserving it's flaws and understanding none of its virtues. because botw was a flawless game and its marginally improved expansion pack is flawless-er
its a shame that something initially so innovative spawned so much clout chasing from copy cats, and now the most derivative, unoriginal and complacent game in the entire series.
So, you only do Salty Caramel Ice cream I take it?
Will you add rock salt nuggets on top once Tears picks up its GOTY?
Nintendo usually explores a lot of new ideas while making new zelda games, but for totk it just feels like they played it as safe as possible, and built on things that botw already had. The game doesn't have an identity that separates it from botw. It just feels like more of the same game
Which makes it worse, IMO. They really, REALLY should not have used the same story delivering mechanism.
@@beardalaxyIt was so lame when I realized the tear drops were just memories again. Same armor sets, same style of buildup sequences to the same type of dungeons, same isolated tutorial island, same koroks, more ancient technology, it's like there was an edict inside Nintendo that said because BotW was popular, that they had to structure TotK exactly the same way. Which misses the point, because half the reason BotW was so well-received was because of how DIFFERENT and NEW it was, how much it challenged rote Zelda conventions.
This whole video reflects my sentiments exactly towards this game. I honestly hope more people start to realize what Nerrel feels in this video because Tears of the Kingdom doesn't deserve the overly high score of 10/10. Because much like every other mainline Zelda game, they all get 10/10 scores despite the criticisms. Zelda bias is absolutely real with reviewers.
Same here I love this game but I noticed the sam mistakes made from botw. Also I just feel like the zelda team just doesn't care about writing anymore.
It's because every mainline 3D Zelda game as a gimmick that's awesome for like the first 30-40 hours before people start to notice the crucial flaws with the game.
@@poenpotzu2865 I'd say Zelda stories peaked with Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess. I see no reason why Zelda games should have voice acting when there's very minimal story and character interactions outside of the one's in cutscenes, but that's just mainly tied to important characters rather than when we meet them in the overworld. Outside of those few key story events, dialogue is relegated to text box interactions like the previous games before they voice acting.
@@doclouis4236totk has a lot of people who think it’s a perfect game and you do have a lot of people who only rate it that beacuse they are looking past it’s flaws due to it being Zelda. But a lot of people do genuinely think totk is next to flawless which you shouldn’t frown upon because that’s a genuine opinion. But I do agree it’s fine to be critical of the game if you don’t think it’s perfect. I agree with the sentiment that I wish alot of the dungeons went back to the progression of the traditional Zelda games. I do think the botw and totk has something missing when it comes world building. The races and territories don’t have a sense of community like the older games. And I also don’t like the vice acting I much prefer the text boxes and mumbling, I think it adds character. I do think people need to relise that you can be a big fan of something and be critical of it but also think that people do believe totk is perfect.
TotK doesn't deserve more than a 7 or 8/10.
Its refreshing to here a new opinion and not “this fixes all BoTW’s problems!”
I can literally see that video in the recommended bar haha!
Funnily enough, that video has been pumping up in my recommendations. Nothing against that opinion though,but I agree with Nerrel.
@@enman009 same that video is all over my feed
@@mattmas6628 I feel almost tempted to share this video in that comment section, just for the sake of discussion.
Not only does TOTK not fix all of BOTW's problems, it even introduces new problems that BOTW didn't have. I think TOTK is going to be very divisive in the future because it's a wildly inconsistent experience, with higher highs and lower lows than BOTW.
12:30 The fact that they didn't allow custom arrow item hotbars seems insane. It's such an obvious feature that practically everyone seems to think of at some point.
Being able to bind up to a few dozen materials into a favorites bar that's under the main row seems like a no brainer. What's worse is that your most used list starts to look extra stupid if you use the multishot bow in the glitch-in-the-matrix-tunnel dupe glitch.
"Sir, why is whole raw chickens and fleet lotus seeds in your top 10 most used materials?"
"Uhh, it's Ganon's weakness. He simply can't resist some KFC with some Fleet Lotus Seed pepper on top. He dies in one hit after lowering his guard after one bite of this stuff."
that's the kind of crap that happens because designers at nintendo HARDLY look at how their competitors does certain things in their games, they have a sort of unwritten "code" that pushes them to come up with every little idea on their own without looking outside of their bubble
@@monstertheaterstudio speak for yourself
I don't doubt it's hard for a small-scale indie dev to manage their projects.
...Nintendo, however, one of the pioneers of the industry, oldest and most wealthy game developer in the world, with each game boasting hundreds, if not thousands of workers... I think it's completely fair to criticize them.
@@katsenberg3036 Even indie devs need criticism to grow. Game dev being hard isn't an excuse.
As a massive Zelda fan, I really appreciate a youtuber like you. I enjoyed this game so much but I am sick of most botw&totk content creator that are just total fanboys.
As a massive Zelda fan i'm sick of this BotW junk.
Paid shills maybe
@@eddiedead2702 same it needs to end
@@eddiedead2702they’re fun for what they are but wish we’d get actually good designed and challenging puzzles instead of this shit. Like really, a sand box building mechanics? When you think about it what is this game even trying to be. Yeah I enjoyed it because it’s polished nicely and such but it’s just so weird what this franchise has turned into
I just find BotW to be boring but Tears actually lets me get around on a proper timeframe.
I like to walk around Skyrim for Fun but in BotW once i lost all my good weapons trying to get into the Desert, i put the game down and stopped.
In Tears I could easily rebuild my arsenal even using Subpar stuff.
That was the big changing point for me.
i am watching this for the 12th time to balance out all the 10/10s this game is getting for no reason
The depths are too repetitive. They stretched out an area that could have been 1/10th the size with carefully crafted variation and unique locations to one the size of the overworld map because it was easy to just invert the z axis and copy paste/
The depths just broke me, and that's why. I can't do another mine. I can't hit another zonite deposit. I'm just so done.
You come across a bokoblin camp and decide to take it out. There are many different ways to go about it; you could use muddlebuds to make them fight each other, you could blow them up, make a rolling death machine with lasers, or just walk in and hack and slash with the most powerful weapon fuse combination. But why do any of that when there are countless bokoblin camps and none of them matter? You don't get any real rewards. None of it feels significant. That's 70% of the game. Copy paste content that DOES NOT MATTER.
The outro did not elaborate that after constructing the weapon to defeat gannondorf that it would break after being swung 4 times.
I love how people, like myself, are afraid to talk about FACTS, for being then attacked and hated. Fact is BotW is the prequel, it happened, it's canon, yet when you play its sequel TotK it feels like everything in the game is actively telling you that BotW was just a fever dream. Unique items, like armor sets, are no longer with Link, which is fine, obviously you can't start a game with a full set of hearts and your previous inventory, because that then Link would be op. However, you also can't strip him off of unique items and scatter them anew throughout the same map and just have Link run across this and act like he's never seen this armor set before. They did include some new ones, but it's ridiculous. And the lack of any proof of existence of the sheikah tech is even more ridiculous. Yes, you can make the argument that Hyrule has gotten rid of sheikah tequ due to them avoiding history repeating itself, this is just a guess though, since no one mentiones anything about any such occurrence, which again makes you feel like BotW's exostence is being denied. There should have been a screw or two every now and then in the depths around hyrule castle at least, because they couldn't have found every single piece of sheikah tech, but left all the weaponry laying around in hyrule castle. Maybe they used some type of magic to get rid of everything, but that is never mentioned or explained. It makes no sense, the story doesn't make any sense to existing Zelda games either. It's a hot hot hot mess, almost feels like the first hyrule warriors that came out and had this odd story, that felt a bit like.zelda, but not really zelda. It's like no one knowing zelda games worked on this.
PS it's also such bs that Link has constantly very important information, but isn't sharing it with anyone ever, even though people are actively searching for Zelda, it alienates him from the player, because most people would share the information with Purah and co, while Link is just standing around. It's seriously annoying.
I like how assassins creed brotherhood did it
@@kokaboba The biggest insult for me was going back to the Great Plateau, to see the Shrine Of Resurrection. Only to find... nothing. It's like it never existed, and you just have this random Yiga hideout and a Steward Construct that asks you to go somewhere else first. What a joke.
@@sulex3491 The devs removed it.
There is still a single guardian on Robbie's hut. i think the implication is they all rusted away otherwise. Otherwise, yeah, it is weird the master thief took all your stuff and scattered it around or something
I think the best way to expiriance TOTK is by just not having played BOTW
because its essentially the same game
Disagree. Replayed BOTW as a preparation for TOTK, and it just enhanced the experience
@@tomasbedoya2901 not enough for 6 years
How does it enhance the experience when you've already explored that same land and 90% assets are straight reused from botw?? Someone who Never played botw are gonna have a far better experience
@@beeferoni786 according to which criteria? I’ve played 90+ hours of TOTK. Have only done one temple and have stumbled upon almost no recycled content. If that is not enough, I don’t know what you expect from a game
I hate how they made the Master Sword garbage in this game when they say the light dragon powered it up. They talked about how if it's infused with powerful light energy its power is near limitless. But it's worse than in botw, when it could be more powerful if you complete dlc, but in this game, it makes me think Zelda did a shit job powering it up
i poured 300 hours into BOTW and i stopped 40 hours into TOTK. it feels like the same damn game. im really upset how little new stuff there was compared to BOTW after 6 damn years.
They should have upped the level of destruction left by the upheaval, more giant chunks of land crashing into the ground and cracks that could completely change the landscape. Imagine if the giant ravine near the rito area had expanded, completely isolating the place, or if a massive island had crashed into the sea near the beach regions.
Yeah but that would actually take effort and creativity.😢
I really find the comparison to a rom hack very fitting and had thought of the same thing myself while playing. It's not just the lack of new content that makes it feel that way, but the general style the whole game follows. It stays very close to BotW, even if this doesn't make sense at all, and does a lot of things, just because BotW does them.
In BotW, the structure of the story with the memories was neccessary to be that way, to work with the open game play and not clash with that. The story itself was very clearly built around that structure, and while neither the story itself or the structure of it were great, it formed something that made sense as a whole. You have a very simple story, that you understand almost completely from the start and just collect some more details about it. TotK instead tries to tell a bigger and linear story. Collecting memories out of order doesn't make sense here at all, and it seems like they just did it, because BotW did it.
As for other aspects, I think the rom hack comparison fits even better, since even the quality of these slightly altered things is on that level. Instead of coming up with a new idea, they reskinned shrines and made the exact same thing again. The great fairies work the exact same way, but are lazily moved to other places, where they obviously don't fit in the environment and look completely stupid. Instead of coming up with a completely new interesting system for how armor works, they kept all of it and replaced paying rupees with escorting some NPCs. The horse god is moved somewhere else, which leaves an awkward empty space where it previously was. Oh, BotW had a big horse somewhere, let's do that again and put it there, and make a completely obnoxious side quest around it, to pretend as if this was even slightly interesting. The monster shop guy is replaced by a copy of himself with a different color. All of the armor sets in the depths seem like some fan found the assets for them in BotW and really wanted to have them here as well. The thunder helmet was part of the main quest in BotW, why is it a reward in the Yiga camp here? It didn't even have to be part of the game at all.
There are countless more things like this, and it all just feels forced to be so close to BotW instead of doing something new and unique.
Very true, I love this game but it's frustrating how it's a lot of reused content with "sequel" slapped on it. I'll never understand how some say it makes its predecessor obsolete. QoL improvements are nice, but BotW is the better experience for me.
Yeah some elements of the gameplay simply don't make sense for this world. Vehicle building sucks because you can barely make a functional land vehicle that moves fast and handles well and doesn't get stuck on hills, all things the Master Cycle could already do 5 years ago in BOTW. Even Ascend, as cool as it is, is a tool that seems to have been made for BOTW's world that can't really take much advantage of it. They have to copy paste the same fallen rock asset everywhere so you have things to use it on.
I don't like the ROM hack comparison
Modern ROM hacks have way more polish and fantasy and ingenuity
@@fluffy_tail4365 Not really, this has a lot of polish to it.
That isn't fitting at all. There isn't a lack of new content, there is a lot of new content and the general style the game follows is fine. It does make sense though, and it does them because it makes sense too.
It does make sense here as there is still a reason for it, no it's because they wanted to take another shot at it again.
It doesn't fit well at all, no they are altered quite a lot..it is a sequel. Except they did come up with new ideas and they didn't reskin shrines or made the exact same thing again, the new mechanics and stuff you do is new ideas. That isn't lazily done at all, no they do fit in the enviorment and don't look stupid. Which was good and works out. That spot really isn't awkward. Pretend? It is interesting and fun to get it. You mean someone of a different species? It really isn't like that at all. Because it fell down there, along with the other stuff.
Not really, and it doesn't feel forced at all, and it is something new and unique but it still has to be a sequel to BOTW.
This man speaks a language that many hate most….facts.
I remember the steps of disappointment I went through in this game. What really pushed me over the edge is when lurelin was invaded by “pirates” only to find out it was the same 3 enemies copy and pasted all throughout the last game. But what broke me the most was when I got to the deku tree. I was freaking out so excited thinking I’m about to play a deku tree dungeon, being that I absolutely love the deku tree dungeon in OOT…but nope.
They made the biggest map in the franchise but yet didn’t add a graveyard. Cmon that’s a Zelda staple.
That Deku Tree disappointment was SO REAL (I felt the same). Why couldn't we have a dungeon? Nope, we must not deviate too far from the BOTW copy-paste!
there was ALOT that frustrated me, but what finally pushed ME over the edge was after beating that five-lynel gauntlet in the Depths, and finding out my prize was...MAJORA'S MASK?? Wait....a lame, weak version of the mask that barely does anything useful...**sighs**
The dungeons as a whole were a lot down imo. About the size of the divine beast dungeons but they didn't even have the beast abilities from that game. Nothing like what used to be such a series staple.
@@nsamadhi33 The Depths are so pointless. Most of it being a dumping ground for reused Amiibo costumes that are purely for looks is a complete waste for the size of the map.
@@Moonboogie soooooo pointless. Like why recycle these useless armors??
Honestly I would rather have no building mechanic if it meant we got a more interest world and story :/ Nintendo really gave us Zelda Nuts & Bolts and everyone clapped
That's Nintendo fanboys for you. Their current mission is trying to explain why the TTYD remake being 30fps is a good thing (original was 60)
@@tetermcNintendo fanboys usually have good reason to be fanboys.
Nintendo has a really good batting average and has a lot of good will that is usually paid off.
The problem is when they put out a mid or even a dud, it’s so rare that the fans often have to like delude themselves. Trick themselves into believing it’s actually good.
It really feels like “am I so out of touch? No it’s the children who are wrong.” But as a community mindset.
@@tetermc i mean the ttyd remake is a pretty big visual upgrade over the original, i find it impossible you could look at both and think it's just an upres. i dont mind 30fps, if the devs arent able to get a stable 60fps. especially in a turn based rpg like paper mario, im fine with a stable 30fps. i dont really buy into this "60 should be the standard" i think in some cases it's absurd, but i dont think ttyd remake is that bad. the switch is just really outdated hardware at this point and i cant wait for the next system to hopefully clean things up. the switch having only 4gb ram is absurd and inexcusable though (especially because they were originally going to have 2gb ram and capcom had to beg them to make it 4gb, i really think capcom just barely saved the switch with that)
My mini review no one asked for:
1. Despite being used as promotional material, the sky feels very empty.
2. Fusing bombs with shields makes most built contraptions trivial.
3. The instant you get down from the initial area it is BOTW all over again.
Conclusion: This game is the best if you skipped botw, otherwise, it has the same flaws botw has and then some.
I'm at 80 hours in with TotK... and it caused me to put it down to replay Majora's Mask... and now I appreciate Majora *EVEN MORE* than I already did.
The themes. The symbolism. The level of focused gameplay. The density of the world. The atmosphere. 20+ years later and there's still no world or game experience quite like Majora's Mask.
EXACTLY. Anyone who says TOTK even comes close to the deep, provocative artistry of Maj Mask or Ocarina isn’t a serious person.
There is obviously far more heart and meaning and thought placed into MM than TOTK or BOTW could ever hope to have.
@@jhallo1851 So because they dare to disagree with you they aren't a serious person? Fuck off with that bs.
That isn't even remotely true in the very slightest.
The themes and symbolism? BOTW and TOTK has that too. They also have focused gameplay. They also have more stuff to do They have beautiful atmosphere too with TOTK being more darker too. You mean one where you gotta keep going back in time? Ok and there is no game or world like Tears of the Kingdom with a open world game with puzzles and combat like Zelda with all of the things you can make and all of the sky islands and stuff too, there really is nothing like ultra hand or weapon fusing.
@@jaydenc367 it’s not the same in BOTW or TOTK. These games have very little to say and are so far from the roots of the series.
Link is based on Celtic mythology. This is why he wears green. He’s the “green man.”
This is the reason behind the heavy use of spirals, the number 3 (triforce), and many other things which are thrown away for the sake of this weird, distant Legend of Zelda.
Every piece of Ocarina of Time was placed with purpose. Down to the clothes, accessories, weapons EVERYTHING. The way the story was HAND CRAFTED to create the best experience possible.
BOTW and TOTK are simply generic open world ideas with a Zelda coat of paint. Garry’s mod did what TOTK did almost 15 years ago.
Zelda used to be ahead of the times. Now it’s far behind the curve. Pretty sad.
@@jaydenc367 also, one of the most important and recognizable weapons in gaming is the Master Sword.
BOTW turned this sword of legends into a shitty sword that for some reason has to recharge. It can survive for eternity but if you swing it a bit it needs to recharge.
This is emblematic of how much disregard has been had for the lore and world of LOZ.
can we talk about how little new music there is in this game?
Standard fare for the average 3D sandbox games these last few decades; Resident Evil hasn't had amazing music since Code Veronica due to this unfortunate reality.
@@osurplessI thought resident evil 4 had some nice tracks and RE7 made a decent effort to. Not as good as the older games but still.
People don’t realize how far more new music could have gone in making totk feel like a proper sequel. The ambiental music, the stable music, horse riding music, all of it should have been different from BOTW.
thank you! these new zelda games are good, but its really important to point out their flaws and not just get lost in the sea of people ignoring any criticism.
You can say the same for older zeodas once you take off the nostalgia glasses
@@frogglen6350no shit games are games not the bible
@@frogglen6350 This is exactly what the OP is talking about. Someone criticizes BotW or TotK and people come out of the woodwork and go "UMM BUT THE OLDER GAMES ARE DATED AND WORSE. AHAHA"
You're literally the problem. We all recognize they're dated in ways, but they're still more fun to play and were made a long time ago. This game just came out and has so many dumb flaws that shouldn't make it in a AAA release.
@@BreadCatMarcus Are people not allowed to disagree?
@@frogglen6350 Where was the disagreement? You didn't disagree with anything that was said, you used it as a platform to jump right into shitting on the older games to defend the new ones. That's not disagreement, that's just being a tool.
TotK was such a nothing burger that I had no idea it actually released, and then I forgot that it had released even after knowing it had.
BotW had people non stop talking about it for months, nay, years. This fizzled out within weeks.
Using BotW as a template is great, but not when this is essentially an expansion pack. At least MM reused assets, but didn’t essentially reuse the game.
People are still talking about this game and pretty much everyone thinks it outclasses BotW in every way. You living under a rock?
@@lukeshioshio how's this comment aged? I have zero drive to touch this game again, at least not for years to come, but am happy to replay the pre-BotW games
The "I'd rather the game was half as big" is something I literally told a friend haha. 100 hours in it was just pure burn out and I explored absolutely zero of the Gerudo region. Had the map been smaller I imagine that would not be the case.
Most disappointing thing in the game is that there were *no* Redead but rather Gibdo and that means we have to wait another 10 years for a new Redead scream, ugh
I really don't feel like a Zelda game should be 100 hours long.
I think Nintendo had a clear opportunity to make the map more cohesive and reasonable but just decided not to.
During my whole playthrough I was thinking: man, they should really have fractured Hyrule when the castle went up and unleashed all the gloom.
IMO this would have allowed to:
- Re-use that map in a way that felt more fresh and new (especially if also playing with verticality)
- Give them the opportunity to discard some of the most empty areas
- Justify the appearance of all the new caves, as well as creating the openings to go to the depths. Much better solution than randomly digging through the existing hills/mountains or creating simple straw-like holes everywhere that go directly down to the underground.
- Justify the disappearance of the old Sheikah towers and divine beasts (put their ruins in the depths for added nostalgia)
I dunno, TOTK really felt like a missed opportunity too often. Which is surprizing because Nintendo is usually really good at finding solutions that solves multiple problems at once.
I feel like inevitably they’ll have to scale back some degree of the “absolute freedom” approach for the next main game so that it doesn’t just have Breath of the Wild’s core design again. Think Mario Sunshine making level progression more linear to try and have more variation between missions.
…I’m also sure just like with Mario we’ll have people complaining about those rollbacks for over a decade.
@@citizen3000 To be fair, they are not known for being short.
I'd rather have a game be 30 to 60 hours long and every second of it be a memorable experience instead of a 100+ hour game where half of the play time isn't memorable at all and just drags.
I loved BoTW for the exploration and with the map 90% the same so some of the magic is gone. But I love this game. I'm going slow cuz I don't want it to be over.
I think if BotW never existed, this would probably be the best Zelda game ever made for a very long time. But you are right, the best part of Breath of the Wild was completely left behind by the reused map.
Makes me question if the developers even understood the appeal of BotW.
@@quibquiberton4184 I think they most definitely misunderstood
@@jahnotreal I just don't understand how anyone can create such a masterpiece, and not understand how they did it. Maybe they spent too much time and resources trying to get Ultrahand to work, and realized around the time the pandemic hit that they didn't have the time to change the map much? It just doesn't make any sense.
@@quibquiberton4184 sadly many sequels to great movies and games have this problem. It just baffles my mind that even the new parts of the map like the sky islands and depths are literally copy and paste. It's almost feels like they were afterthoughts. I enjoyed TOTK, but it honestly did just feel like a super meaty $70 dlc.
I genuinely dont know how a system as comically bad as the sages got into a game that's whole identity is fun gameplay systems.
The only thing that could have made the overworld worth exploring again is meaningful new uses of the landscape, secrets, rewards of actual value, dungeons in places that always seemed perfect for dungeons the first time around (they wouldn't have to be main quest-related, there could be local evils), etc. Nintendo did none of those things. Instead they built two more areas (above and below) that are also ultimately empty. It's a bizarre choice. The fact that they doubled down on having shrines again (a good chunk of which were bland, even if they were better than those of BOTW) instead of combining multiple shrine designs to create good dungeons with actual necessary loot is an absurdity.
yeah it's pretty much the OPPOSITE of what I hoped for. what's sad for me is that in the RARE brand new (and not empty like Depths) areas like Tarey Town i actually enjoy the game and the new mechanics a lot - but 85% of ToTK feels like completely recycled BoTW and I totally hate that. ToTK needed to do what Majora's Mask did and bring us a 100% new (smaller!) map (reused assets would be fine). and fuck Koroks + Bubbulbs.
First thing I did was book it for Akkala Fortress. Nothing. :( Just a cave under the hill it was built on.
Calling this game a Master Quest is extra harsh when you remember that Eiji Aonuma didn't want to make a simple remix of Ocarina of Time. And here he is making a remix
Directed by Fujibayashi, you’d think it’d be good since he directed more Zelda’s than anyone.
Maybe he wanted to do a remix of BotW. Although I wouldn't call it a remix, that's pretty reductive.
This game was born from the dev team having too many ideas for Breath of the Wild DLC. I knew this was going to be more like Mario Galaxy 2 than Majora's Mask.
It's a shame too cause I'd argue that there are elements of OoT and MM that are wayyyy more worth while to remix than just remixing the previous game with BoTW. The complex and challenging dungeons, the characters and side quests, the extremely memorable music etc are all things that are superior about the old games that I feel new Zelda games need to return to imo
@@steamedyam and it is good
Honestly should’ve been Sidon’s trident training (with gyro controls)
We need more piloting Mecha games.
They TRASHED the overworld. The bucolic, subtle, natural beauty of Hyrule has been LITTERED with a bunch of GARBAGE. Robot pieces, random scraps of wood, monsters and camps that don't fit the aesthetic of the game. Imagine a beautiful renaissance painting and then a 13 year old scribbles a bunch of Donut Steel cartoons all over it with crayons and claims it's just a "Clear Upgrade from the original". That's what this game is.
100% agree. Half the reason I enjoyed BotW so much was because it felt like going on a hike out in nature. Very calming and engrossing.
Sometimes I get the same feeling in TotK. The floating islands in the sky sometimes give off a sort of naturalistic Ghibli movie feel. But most of the time, the more fantastical stuff littered absolutely everywhere tears me right out of that feeling of immersion. "Oh yeah, I'm playing a videogame."
FRRRR !!
Because it is a videogame? Also it's a fantasy series, fuck realism in video games. Go play your boring triple A trash
Yeah my heart kinda sunk with all the garbage in the plains. They could have had rock and earth and trees fall from above as an excuse to rescuplt or move around the terrain, but instead just chucked space trash at it.
@@KyriosHeptagrammaton I think they should have had gigantic craters in the ground that drastically change the landscape, and exhume a bunch of horrifying monsters and underground temples and ancient Shiekah constructions. Seemed like a no brainier after the massive columns that sprung up by Hyrule Castle in BotW, that revealed the Guardians and Divine Beasts. I don't think they needed to drop any bland garbage on the landscape to change it up enough.
Quick note adding to your point; ALL the temple bosses are re-used, unaltered, one - if not two or three - other times!
i feel like they shouldve kept the 120 shrine number...or even decreased it and maybe either made them larger or something ? 152 shrines is INSANE and though i unpopularly enjoy the shrine crystal fetch quests, the amount of "raurus blessing" shrines made me want to claw my eyes out. i literally walked up to a shrine once and it was a raurus blessing.
Thank God for taurus blessings shrines, the only shrines I liked
yeah it's like "oh hey raurus blessing I wonder what content I missed out on to be met with this nothingburger of a shrine"
like the one near Zora's domain that's just a monster camp, you can just skydive in and get the shrine immediately
@@tsrenis the one i found was literally just laying in a canyon near death mountain lol. there might have been something there but i just airstriked it because i dont wanna run around this map that ive already explored to death in the other game....i was thinking of doing the same thing i did in lategame BOTW which was to not use the fast travel and just ride horse everywhere but oh my god it got so old quick especially with the AMOUNT of shrines
I have most of the shrines and I only found one random blessing shrine. Every other blessing shrine had a quest leading up to it
@@broshi1752eah not sure what these people are talking about, I think there was one or two blessing shrines max which felt like there was no puzzle. And even then for the first one I’m thinking of I think I may have cheesed it by gliding off a nearby cliff anyway
There was an easy setup to make the reused map more interesting. Set the game further into the future when Hyrule was fully rebuilt. All the ruins from the old game could have been actual towns, and old towns could have been expanded on.
I also feel like the underground wild have been way more interesting if they took an Elden Ring approach to it. Instead of a big and empty map that looks the same and doesn’t have much to do, they could have crates smaller zones with unique themes.
Each region could have had its own sections Gerudo desert could have featured an underground version of the arbiters grounds. There are some cave in the desert with an old prison, and that could have cool if expanded on. Lanayru could have been flooded ruins. Faron could have had an ancient Zonai city or something.
Easy setup, ultra difficult resource management. We would've ended up with either even more bland samey areas that only serve to make the game feel even more empty by adding more fetch quests and repetitive infrastructure, or the game would have to be so different it couldn't reasonably be a sequel to Breath of the Wild at all, and would probably have to be pushed back to release on the next Nintendo console.
I like the Depths but i really only got one thing I would change, you really dont get punished for walking around in Dark and it really mob light down there.
They should of either made a shadow monster eventually blitz you if you stay in the Dark or the Gloom merged with the Darkness down there.
Just needs to emphasis the Light down there.
Elden Ring’s underground is considerably worse fym
@@Auvisome The fuck do YOU mean? Elden Ring's underground kicked ass.
@@AuvisomeI can’t possible see how. They’re actually uniquely designed areas with their own sets of enemies, quests, secrets, and things worth discovering.
TotK’s depths are big, empty, looks mostly the same, and contains the the same 2-3 enemies you fight 90% the time on the surface. The only purpose of going down there is to grind for Zoanite or find an occasional schematic. There’s nothing interesting to see or do.
This game committed the worst sin it could've for me. After 20 years of playing Zelda games I can no longer trust them to be fun for me and I must wait for reviews to find out if they're worth my time.
If you didn't enjoy botw then you won't enjoy zelda moving forward and if that's the case just find a new game to love.
@@weaponx6345 I loved Breath of the Wild. That game was about exploring Hyrule and I liked that. I had grown to hate Skyward Sword on attempted replays so the "breath of fresh air" was amazing.