It's a better franchise. One that has possibilities besides the same old forest temple fire temple fight ganon. Not that those were not great in their day but the world has moved on. I guarantee if they released a classic 3D Zelda right now people would complain about the linearity and lack of freedom.
@@eddiemoney1093 They should adopt the Mario model. The Mario franchise has happily existed with both linear and sandbox styles in their 3D games. If Zelda did a couple open world games and followed it up with one or two in the linear style, I think folks would be pleased. The existence of Echoes of Wisdom and Aonuma's recent interview makes me think that they've gone all-in on this concept of open world and player toolkits.
@@eddiemoney1093 That's simply an inaccurate description of the series. On top of that, the two titles that are the MOST similar are BotW and TotK. The classic formula stood for 30 years while this style has become stale with just two entries. I 100% agree that people would complain about the difference if Zelda went back to its roots but that's because, again, this is a different franchise now. Most of the "Zelda fans" only joined the series with BotW. You can like BotW and TotK, you can love them, but it's just different and we haven't had a _real_ Zelda since 2013.
The other thing with Gloom Hands vs Guardians is that if you stay out of their range for long enough, the Hands will just get bored and poof out of existence, dropping some materials on their way out. Barely any input needed, they're just gone. Meanwhile if a Guardian sees you, it will keep chasing you to the ends of Hyrule unless you find a way to lose it.
All you have to do is just climb up onto a higher platform. Just has to be as high as the gloom hands are tall. Or just climb the wall just out of reach. I did it once and I exploit that all the time now because it's effing hilarious.
I mean…true. I avoided guardians at all costs at the beginning of the game, but, by end game, I was hunting them for their components so I could make more ancient arrows. I wound up with like 75 ancient arrows to use on the final boss….but only needed about 10.
The guardians are also more imposing and in your way. Hyrule feels safer because every Gleeok (beside the Hylia bridge one), every Lynel, and every gloom puddle is off of the paths in the game. You rarely see them around NPCs as well, so you don't get to actually see frightened reactions. I do love TOTK a lot, and I think the map in and of itself is great, but it doesn't give you thrills in my eyes, doesn't make you fear for a second, doesn't break up the relative safety of the paths. The Lynels are always out of your way, and even if you come down and they notice you, they allow you to walk away if you don't draw your weapons (tried that myself)
@lydiagalantmotherf lynels were like that in BotW too but yeah, they're so out of the way that honestly, I barely saw them in TotK. It feels like there were more in BotW but I probably passed so far away from their new locations that they didn't even spawn into view.
As a fan of the lore, Eiji Aonuma coming out and admitting that there was no reason in particular for the Guardians, original shrine/towers and Devine Beasts being removed from TOTK is what made me stop playing it. They treated their own narrative as if it wasn't something that resonated with players when BOTW was still new and then acted confused when their lazy decision was met with criticism.
I can’t believe they just didn’t make a whole new map like wtf? Why would they use the same map from botw? Imagine if Majoras mask used the same map as ocarina of time.
This is one of the biggest fuck you in the face from Eiji Aonuma for me. Feel like the dev is just go and watch some youtube theorycrafting and be like: you know what, let just make a sequel and focus on zonai shits ppl are bitching about. and then shove a cock on my throat with this one. I think i know why they make it a sequel not a dlc, because it's so disconnected that even the dev themself cant even connect it to botw to make it a dlc.
It's not even laziness, it's just plain disrespect. Aonuma clearly has grown to hate this series and is trying to transform into just reflecting his personal ideal game. People always talk about giving creative freedom to developers and all that, but, honestly, Aonuma needs to be reigned in. He's totally destroying Zelda's brand identity at this point. I'm honestly amazed Nintendo's let him run this series for so long, considering he only had 1 really successful entry before TotK, and it was the one he didn't want to make that most closely followed the Ocarina of Time format (Twilight Princess). BotW was his only twist on the formula that paid off, and TotK did well just off of brand recognition from BotW. And now, between the remasters/remakes of the old games and his obsessed "convention breaking" new games, people aren't going to be able to just see Zelda on the shelves of a store and know they're gonna like it. Nintendo should be freaking out about this, but they're so loyal to their team leaders they're letting one risk long-term success for massive short-term sales. Zelda currently has negative momentum in sales. TotK had record launch sales but also post launch window sales closer to year 5 or 6 BotW and declining. That is not something a company wants to see in a game they took 6 years to develop, even if they increased their revenue per sale by roughly 17% with the price hike. I have to question why the business leadership is allowing this to be the only option Zelda has at this point
@@Chronoflation TOTK still sold 10m copies more (at the very least) than all previous zelda games (minus oot if you include the 3ds sales), the game not having long legs isn't a problem when his body already pulled 20m copies anyways
For most people, the problem is we wanted Breath of the Wild but with a dash of more Zelda. Instead we got Breath of the Wild: Nuts and Bolts. Seriously, who asked for this? Sure you can build a helicopter and fly it over a barren underground world… but I think most fans would happily trade all that away for some real dungeons and more enemy variety.
Who asked for bad motion controls? Who asked for an empty ocean that you're forced to slowly sail across? Who asked for doing fetch quests as a gimped wolf? Who asked for Zelda to be on a timer. Who asked for anything? Also, based on TotK's reception, people loved Ultrahand way more than any main gimmick in a Zelda game and considering the overall reception of the new games, they are a lot more popular than the ones with more enemy variety or """real""" dungeons. How can that be? 🤔
@@vadoslink446 because the only people who think totk is better than every other Zelda game have only played that “Zelda Game”. Say what you want about botw but to me it felt like an adventure like I was actually apart of the story. I also didn’t really think that botw needed great dungeons because that wasn’t the point. The point of those dungeons were to get you to go to those locations and guide you on a path that you don’t have to. Totk acted like they made actual dungeons and tried to make them the main main goal even though there’re just activate 5 terminals and open a thing etc.
@@pezdoma5674 The people who consider TotK to be the best are simply those who value nuance, complexity and player agency...something that's lacking in most of the older titles. Your comparison between TotK and BotW is incredibly hypocrital and doesn't make much sense, considering that Divine Beasts and Dungeons in TotK serve the exact same purpose and share their open design. Also, "just activate 5 terminals" is a dumb argument. There's nothing wrong with it. Might as well shit on old dungeons by saying "just collect keys".
Building is tedious and the problem is also that it lacks utility. You build something and ditch it because now the thing built doesn't fit the area anymore. It's like the problem of taking out your horse in BOTW times 10 - ultimately not really worth it, and gnaws at you to burn resources. After Torrent in Elden Ring, I just hate the lack of true ease of use and convenience in these types of travel mechanics/companions.
@@paczka695I'd rather create a mech and sky bike that I can take across areas. Especially when I figured out how to do it myself without any help online.
Yeah man, everybody loves those. Zelda was totally known for well crafted stories. I still cry every time when I think of Link's nameless uncle dying in the first minute of the game. Puzzles used to be so engaging too...man, always using your newest item on everything and slowly pushing blocks was peak puzzle design. And don't get me started on the bosses. I absolutely love standing around and waiting for the boss to expose his obvious weak spot. Screw the Zelda devs for actually developing a nuanced game.
No! Youre not actually saying the Geoglyphs were better than the memories! Finding the memories through the pictures was like an environmental puzzle and it was amazing! The geoglyphs were the opposite of that! No mystery to discover. And then running up and down the area like an idiot! 😡
What hurts me is that they just repeated the lost memories quest from botw in a worse way, instead of doing something different. I mean the geoglyphs exist because ancient Hylians found the dragon tears and wanted to preserve them as history right? Why not stick to that idea, but instead of drawing some pictures on the ground just hide them away in some mini dungeons? Could have been a good excuse to give the depths more content, have them hidden in all the Zonai ruins we find down there, maybe behind some puzzles.
I love ganondorf bossfight for your opposite reason. It feels personal you prepare for your entire journey just to fight this guy and the sages actually try to help you but get defeated in no time, this really makes you feel like the hero that is supposed to defeat him and the other thing that i loved is that ganondorf has a fighting style similar to yours so it feels like that you are fighting your true nemesis.
I agree that I enjoyed that boss fight more than calamity ganon, but I don't agree that it felt personal. It was implied at first that Ganondorf and Link would meet, perhaps in the past, in the intro of the game with Ganondorf uttering Links name, but as it turns out, this Ganondorf was just told by Rauru that one day some guy named Link would appear. I mean, OoT made more of a connection between Link and Ganondorf than ... this.
You know what really chaps my ass? In ToTK, I did the desert dungeon first and went "Oh boy, they really brought back the dungeons!" only to find out that was the only good one.
In Totk I always include the buildup to the entire dungeon itself.. For example the climb of the Wind Temple, the water works of Water temple and it's climb as well with zero gravity and imho it's designed and intended that way, the fire temple is already big enough on it's own.
@@linkfreak1176 That's presumptuous of you. Because I've also played Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Windwaker. So before you act like a dumbass and assume I haven't played Zelda before, at least put in the effort to ask whether or not I have. 👍
1:04:09 And there was such an easy fix for this. Instead of having each memory tied to a specific geoglyph, have it be that no matter what order you find the glyphs in, the story will be presented in the right order.
when i played totk the first time, once i left the gsi i assumed tutorial was over and everything else was suggests quests, like how going to kakariko first in botw wasn’t necessary. so instead of going to lookout landing immediately, i went to kakariko and hateno instead to see how they had changed. i assumed the paraglider simply wasn’t in the game. when i came across a skyview tower, i was confused on why i couldn’t open it. had to ask my sister what was wrong and ended in me having to backtrack back to where i started and go to lookout landing. it’s so small and so simple that really, it shouldn’t be an issue. but when that happened i was disappointed. i liked how in botw once you had exited tutorial space, you were free to do whatever you did or didn’t want to do
I straight up missed Lookout Landing and made a beeline for Hateno because I thought the paraglider might be there because, y’know, that’s where the tech lab is. Imagine my shock lmao
It feels like devs thought botw champion abilities were too OP so in totk the sage abilities are super nerfed. I’m shocked there’s people out there that think sages are better when they are objectively weaker and horrible to use
@@rmsgrey yunobo is only worth anything in caves and even then why would you deal with the long cooldown and him constantly disappearing in the small spaces when you can just use a hammer
@@megastarwarsrocks99 He's still better than shielding against three hits, and serves as a useful weapon in the on-rails sections, or when you want to strike explosive barrels.
The intro to tears of the kingdom was better than the entire game up to the boss fight at the end. I was so hyped and ready for a true Zelda experience and then the real game started.
I was SO hyped for an epic final battle. The fucking last stage with dragon Ganondorf was such a waste. I literally expected an Elden Ring level of epicness but we got a boring and slow fight against a dragon? This dragon fight was lamer than any of the three headed ones.
You know what my personal gripe is with totk? Exploration is gone, but not in the sense that it's the same map. In the sense that it's littered with stuff *everywhere*. I did a little test, I started from the same location in botw and totk, and just. Walked. I wanted to see if it would feel different, to see if I was crazy, and it was different! Botw has a lot of room to breathe. And while I understand that doesn't feel the most fun or exciting for players, it feels ESSENTIAL to exploration. Walking through the vast nothing, the open air- it's fun, it's relaxing personally, the perfect digital walk- And without that empty space it really doesn't feel like you're actually DISCOVERING anything, since there's always something every other step. You never *stop* discovering and it's exhausting. In totk you cannot walk 5 feet without encountering an enemy, a camp, something to build, something that falls on top of you- and so on and so on. Totk has too much going on personally, it feels overwhelming and yet it's all copy pasted. The sky island just litter the sky and I can't look at my pretty horizons without something blocking it. It feels like totk's world is build on "give the player as much dopamine as possible" and I hate that. Botw felt like a world. Empty but alive, breathing. Totk feels like a video game, and I do not care for it.
To me another reason exploration is gone in totk is the broken travel mechanics. Getting around in botw was a great part of the game, I loved figuring out how to get over a mountain, making a fire under a tree to sleep til the rain goes away, really interacting with the environment. In totk, there's no reason not to just make a hoverbike and go exactly where you need to go, which makes getting around way less engaging and way less fun after a few hours. I played botw a lot even after beating the game, totk I stopped playing after 2 dungeons.
Nah exploration really isn't gone. I mean the map in BOTW was filled with stuff too. And is it being different a bad thing? It should feel different in some way especially when it reuses the map. I mean TOTK has some to breathe too it really doesn't have too much going on and it doesn't really feel overwhelming tbh and isn't even all copy pasted either there is a good amount of variety there really. I mean no they complement the sky well and you look can past them and look at the horizons really. I disagree especially with how some people get quite frustrated with it lol, it really isn't based on giving the player as much dopamine as possible. I mean both felt full of stuff and alive really, I don't see how Totk feels like a video game really.
Wow! You just revealed a massive part of when I gave up on the exploring. I played it like BotW just getting distracted by every thing and tugging at the threads revealed. At first curious, and then engaged, then it became a routine thing- i was just doing it to do it. And then I wondered why I was doing it. Then the bubble burst over how boring and pointless it all was. But not only was the rewards painfully known, but I knew that the journey to that reward would feel so utterly miscellaneous
And there isn’t much variety of stuff to explore tbh the depths and sky islands are all mostly copy and pasted and the overworld I’ve already spent 200 hours in
Thank you, this was exactly how I felt and it's reassuring to see it said by someone else. BotW had felt empty in places, and I was hoping to see it be populated by less korok seeds and more life in TotK. The monkey's paw curled. The map has been populated, but by video game gimmicks, not by life. When I had last left BotW, I would spend hours just riding around the open fields with the Master Cycle, occasionally saving travellers from ambushes. Totk doesn't let me "go for a drive" like that, even though it lets you build vehicles. In fact, that's the perfect analogy for it. I had more fun with one simple but refined vehicle -- the Master Cycle Zero -- than I did with any overcomplicated and unreliable monstrosity made by the Ultra Hand. Beautiful but versatile simplicity, lost to bloat.
The biggest problem I had personally with TOTK is that much of it felt like busy work and wasn’t very fun to play. I just want a traditional Zelda but then with the possibilities of this generation.
This started in a weird tone for me. I think TOTK has a LOT of problems, and I really mean it, but you main complaining at the start is about how janky BOTW runes were and TOTK is not? It doesn't even sound fair. I'm not a speedrunner, I really don't care about pulling off a wind bomb if I'm playing BOTW, that is just a glitch, I don't think I've ever cared to try. If your style of play is trying to break a game as much as possible that's fine, but the fact that you can't fly a boat at high speed with magnesis and skip a lot of content is not a reason why TOTK is bad.
Yeah, agreed. Not to mention so many glitches were discovered years after BOTW’s release, such as BLSS, comparing the speedrun jank of a heavily dissected seven year old game to a game that’s only a year old is going to seem lackluster. And maybe that’ll change, maybe it won’t, but the thing is you just cannot expect a game to be broken wide open right away (and you shouldn’t want it to be! Glitches get patched when they’re found right away, as seen with things like auto build cancel slides and the XY duplication. It’s why I think BOTW is as broken open as it is, so many glitches were found after it was no longer being patched.)
It’s also just not the answer to the thesis statement of the video. The answer to “why were people disappointed in TotK?” is not and never will be “niche physics exploits that were in BotW aren’t in TotK”. I’d bet that less than 1% of players that played BotW even knew about windbombs, let alone used it in their playthroughs. The creator can certainly say “this is why I prefer BotW over TotK” but that’s not what they did, they’re arguing that this is why many people didn’t like the game and that’s just not the case. Also I hard disagree with the take that the story content makes the game less replayable. People love reexperiencing stories, people will rewatch their favorite movies, TV shows, reread their favorite books, replay their favorite games, over and over and over because they like the story and want to experience it again. TotK lacks replayability because the story presented isn’t all that great and so once you’ve played through it once, you don’t really feel much of a need to play through it again. If it was a compelling story, as is the case with most previous Zelda games, no one would bat an eye at having to replay the story content. I can’t count how many times I’ve played through the Kingdom Hearts franchise and even though the game allows me to skip all the cutscenes, I don’t because that’s why I keep coming back to it.
It's also weird how he says the older games don't have good movement then proceed to talk about unintended movement in BOTW, sliding in OOT is absolutely sick movement and he isn't mentionning this
yeah, some of his arguments made sense, but, like you, I don't think the 18M+ players of TOTK use windbombs or whatever. I wouldn't recommend it even -playing as speedrunners do I mean-. Once you fall into that rabbit hole, you can't ever come back to enjoying this game as a casual player (and he actually proves that point all over his video essay). Speedrunners don't mind this, they know it will happen, and even start new games with the mind set "now, what can I break here?" lol; but you absolutely can't think this is what the player base as a whole will experience. I actually speedran a long time ago, one obscure game few people know about, and although I was pretty bad at it, it made it impossible for me to enjoy the game as it was intended... I'm really carefull not to get into that particular head space again, I feel like it would spoil my fun (and also break my hands, but that's something else lol, don't ever get old) ^^
Ya, he sold it like a proper review but complained like a speedrunner instead of the zelda fan prospective he presented. Totk isn't bad because it's not a fuckin glitchy mess, it's bad because it's too similar to botw and thus stale since botw was only beloved due it being fresh, give it 5 years and I promise it'll have less stay than something like mm which has stayed striking to this day. It's more or less just a worse botw, and botw was not a great representation of what zelda fans like, in fact its a horrible example. Botw was an overreaction to people not liking how linear and hold holding SS was and while fresh is becoming stale quick, the best zelda games embraced the traditions zelda rather breaking from them. What makes this all worse for totk is that it somehow feels less like a zelda game than botw did which is nutty to me. Anyway his complaints about speed run jank is stupid, every game has it and its subjective as to weather its good or not but that's not going to make break a game for the general public, just speedrunners. Only time jank made a game better was sonic 06, and that's because 06 in a perfectly working state is steaming pile of shit lol
For me, TOTK suffers from excessive bloat, not bringing enough new to the table, a straight up bad story, but one thing that I feel doesn’t get talked about is how BOTW’s shiekah slate abilities are just more useful and more fun to use. Ultrahand and fuse are far more varied in what you can do, but ultimately you’re just gonna end up using the most efficient and easy versions of each use case, which makes them boring on repeat playthroughs. Magnesis being useful as a combat option since you can swing things so much faster with it never stops being an option, as you can sometimes one shot even the toughest of enemies with a large object, and thus conserve your weapons. Stasis is just plain fun to use, being able to send things flying and make fun of the physics engine, as well as using it to enhance mobility by riding the things you send flying (but not in a game breaking, boring way like tears) cannot be overstated. Having 2 bomb types whenever you need them is also just insanely practical and useful for combat situations, as well as allowing for expression of skill to enhance mobility with midair bomb launching. Cryonis doesn’t have a variety of use cases, but not having to worry about being able to cross water bodies is practical (not to mention being able to send guardians to space in that water patch in liurnia. Tears doesn’t encourage the player to engage with its abilities nearly as much.
One additional point regarding the runes in BotW is they involve immediate interactivity with Link, the environment and the enemies you encounter. None of these runes require you to “stop” playing the game to use them, they’re a seamless aspect of playing and progressing the game. In stark contrast, the runes in TotK 100% require you to disengage with whatever you’re doing to use them, you have to stop playing a hack n slash open world adventure game and stand in one spot for a while to play an isolated open sandbox crafting game. TotK has a genre identity crisis, it failed to make the sandbox crafting elements truly integrate into the game’s primary genre. Likewise, all the new additions to the map and even all the old map alterations fail to match BotW’s formula of rewarding exploration with unique locations. Hyrule has barely changed and the sky islands and the depths are shallow copy and paste assets, exploration has no reward. As for the story, the memories in BotW always enhanced context of the immediate story the player was engaging in, they were inherently tied to the player’s main game goal of taking the Divine Beast’s back from Ganon in order to use them to defeat him, likewise obtaining a cathartic conclusion to the Champion’s fates. In TotK, the memories are a snippet of a story you have no agency in, they undermine the game’s narrative drive of finding out what happened to Zelda because that mystery is solved via passively watching memories, not by any action the player does. Even Zelda lacks agency in those cutscenes, the best way to explain those cutscenes is we the player are passively watching Link as he passively watches memories of Zelda passively watching events of the past. It is so disconnected from what the player’s objectives are throughout the game, even the four village missions are about helping NPCs with their village’s problems, your objective has nothing to do with the secret stones, you just get them at end of a dungeon. Getting those secret stones have no consequences to the story either, they do nothing with them other than to give an arbitrary “reason” for how you gained the the sage’s abilities, which is really weird when Ganondorf treated the acquisition of secret stones so important he was willing to feign submission to a foreign king and seek out the opportunity to murder Sonia just to get one, why doesn’t he try to get the rest of the secret stones? Why don’t the sages give Link a secret stone to improve his chances against Ganondorf? The plot is so damn sloppy… Totk is an amalgamation of ideas with no uniting through line like BotW did.
Very good points about how the runes interact with the world and the passiveness of the story. And this doesn't even mention how cheap the Ganondorf bowing scene feels (going beyond being an homage to OoT to just plain being a rip off), the fact that this is Ganondorf's first reincarnation (Ganondorf was previously always Ganondorf Dragmire from OoT, implying that he couldn't reincarnate naturally the same way Link and Zelda do), and how ridiculously incompetent the "good guys" are (with Rauru saying he'd keep a close eye on Ganondorf, only to find out in the next cutscene that Ganondorf's been causing chaos throughout Rauru's kingdom with transformation magic to look like Zelda, for no reason other than to be a Twilight Princess reference and make Zelda feel important in the past even though she's really just some passive witness to the events, and then he kills her wife on top of all of the sabotage and chaos he created, all inside of Rauru's own castle where he had the most ability to easily watch over him. Fucking idiot failures. Rauru literally chose to let someone he knew was evil under his roof, his wife's blood is on his hands as much as Ganondorf's). God, what a fucking train wreck of a story that was. And the fact that so many people think it was good is beyond disheartening to me, because Nintendo will almost certainly be listening to those praises more than the people with the actual issues. They know they have an army of fans who will gaslight other people in the audience that Zelda was never about it's story and never had a good story before. God, I hate fanboys
@@Chronoflation the rauru thing is so true. it’s so silly. zelda knew who calamity GANON was so shouldn’t we be a little bit more careful around GANONdorf? 😭 at least zelda has good experience with gerudo so i can see why she’d want to be a little more lenient… rauru, on the other hand, does not. not including the gerudo sage, since she doesn’t even have any character despite how important she could’ve been for the story, since she didn’t even like her own people either.
"Even Zelda lacks agency in those cutscenes, the best way to explain those cutscenes is we the player are passively watching Link as he passively watches memories of Zelda passively watching events of the past." holy cow you're one of the only people I've seen mention this and it's been bugging me for months, I was flabbergasted when I saw people saying that it was so nice seeing Zelda have agency this time around compared to BOTW and I was so confused. To me it really does feel like Zelda is dragged around by the plot and decisions made around her before finally realizing her entire purpose this game is to be a glorified charging stand for the master sword.
about the tutorial: i wanted to explore GSI before heading to the temple of time. now, in botw, you can do the same thing before going to the first sheikah tower, and all the shrines will be cut off, but it's made VERY very clear you gotta go to that point. it's literally in front of you, Zelda says "go here," and your sheikah slate will open up to give you the location. in totk? you get the purah pad (why change the name), the construct says "Zelda waits at this location" and nothing pops up!!! then it goes on about "this is the temple of time" and you get a small popup in the minimap that i missed the first time. and there's a long pathway gently guiding you towards the temple. if you've played botw, you know that the game rewards you when you go off the beaten path. to explore! so that's what i did. i got to the snowy ascend shrine (somehow), which was obviously not activated yet, and then got to the water crossing. the constructs there talked about autobuild. i didn't have it yet! in botw, there would've been a dialogue accounting for that scenario which would've pointed me in the direction of the temple of time. but there wasn't, because this was totk: the game where they repeat the same cutscene after each dungeon. where the hieroglyphs can be encountered in any order, any time. you could've just let the memories play in a predetermined order, no matter which one you found first!!! we could've pulled a witcher, played as zelda in the past!!! in the same vein, i spent the first few days without a paraglider... oops i guess for going to kakariko first to speak to impa demon king? secret stone? that's the sort of carelessness which turned me off from totk. the thoughtful attention to detail in botw was lost. yes, totk objectively is a "better" game with a bigger scope, but they lost their focus, i think. i very often wondered, "is ultrahand really the only thing they did in 6 years of development?" same with the sky islands. "is this everything they did?" you know how mad i was when i found out they decreased the number of sky islands because otherwise the sky looked too "cluttered"??? yeah. big mad.
The more I’ve thought about it, there’s only so much you can do with Zonai vehicles if you want practicality, meanwhile I can spend hours driving around on the Master Cycle Zero and never get tired of it
we all expected all of Tears of the Kingdom's ideas to build up to something great instead, we found that all of its ideas built up to an air bike made of two fans and a steering stick
Pretty sure the reason ultra hand doesn't give you the ability to push objects like magnesis did is because that would also imply it could push around enemies. One of the key things about magnesis was that you could use it as a genuinely strong weapon that never breaks, but only if you happened to have a metal object nearby. With ultrahand hand you could use literally anything, so keeping this feature would've meant being able to handle every combat encounter by just telekinetically beating up whatever you see with boxes or tree trunks or that giant metal sphere you smuggled out of a shrine. I think something similar goes for recall as well: they removed the ability to freeze enemies because they buffed the ability to make it more puzzle friendly. When you pull it out, it immediately freezes time, so you have all the time in the world to plan out your next move. And unlike stasis, it has no cooldown whatsoever. There's no way they could've kept these features if it also worked on enemies, cause then link would just be an untouchable god of time who rewinds any enemy that looks at him funny. They had to pick between a balanced combat tool or a decent tool for solving puzzles, and they picked the latter. I _guess_ they did have the option to give it a cooldown specifically if it was used on enemies. But they also could have not made it where two fans and a steering stick trivializes all navigation in the game, so hindsight is 20/20 I guess, lol
Honestly, this probably could've been handled with a simple boolean flag for whether or not a game object could be moved by ultrahand or not. Maybe it'd be a little more technical than that, but it probably wouldn't be as hard as people think. I mean, they put 6 years into rebuilding and refining the physics engine so that everything would be a physics body instead of a rigidbody. They wasted tons of time on stuff that they really didn't need. They could've done this too. That said, it seems like their real goal was giving the player more "creative freedom" while nerfing them well below the power levels reached by BotW Link. That's why the Sages' abilities can't be used directly by Link. That's why they put a hard speed cap into the game to prevent reaching bomb launching levels of travel speed and why bombs themselves were removed from being a power. They want the players to be playing with the Legos that they want the players to play with and that's it. As creative of a game as this is, there is no way to mess with the system to forge your own interactions. It's really disappointing. It even nerfs the potential of ultrahand devices they purposefully made. Rockets are barely more useful than fans since a few extra fans will be able to reach that same peak speed as rockets, or close to it, and no amount of additional rockets will help push you beyond that. It feels like playing with Legos under your parents supervision, so you can only use them how your parents let you. There really is no room for creativity outside of that scope, unfortunately. I'm pretty sure they even patched out things like rocket jumping with rockets attacked to weapons. It's frustrating. Really frustrating and shows a lack of respect for the autonomy of the player, all while claiming they're giving us the ultimate sandbox toolset.
Honestly, is the puzzle design even good enough to warrant the change? I personally feel that the puzzle designs tend to lean far more to spoilsport type play, where the "correct" solution is to break the game into disparate parts because it's simpler and more rewarding to do so.
I feel like when comparing the intros of the two games, even discounting the length, there’s still a big difference in how those tutorials play out. The great plateau has some tutorial text, but it feels a lot more open ended and emblematic of the spirit of the game. The great sky island feels like a linear track that has standard tutorials to figure out a solution. The great plateau feels like a vertical slice of the game, the great sky island feels like a big tutorial area.
Listening to the video my immediate thought about the tutorials was the difference in the expectations they set up. BotW is minimalist and lets you get up and go, which underscores the goal of freedom and exploration that runs through the entire game. TotK has a story-heavy opening but then veers in a completely different direction for the rest of the game with the sandboxy building mechanics. BotW's tutorial feels much more in line with the themes of the game imo. On the other hand, TotK players who expected the same freedom as BotW have to sit through the longer tutorial, while players who like story and lore get baited by a tutorial that isn't particularly indicative of the game's direction.
Yes, thank you! Not to mention the great sky island is the PEAK of what you can expect from the sky islands. So disappointing to start with the best and not just a microcosm of the greater experience like BotW
My biggest issue with both games is the copy and paste rewards system. Once you've got loads of every resource and have filled your inventory with the same weapons, you realize that the games have run out of things to offer the player. This happens sooner in TotK than BotW, but it begins to discourage exploration. The experiences in both games can be preserved by ignoring much of the map and continuing through main/side quests. Nintendo needs to integrate a sense of linear progression into the this open world formula. That way you're constantly progressing through the game and it will prevent reaching what I call "The Great Plateau".
Breath of the Wild had a superior story with better shrines, characters, and side quests. The four champions all had interesting backstories and Kass was by far the greatest character in the entire game. He was way better than Penn. I would even argue that Breath of the Wild had better dungeons. We have seen water and fire temples before and they have been done much better than Tears of the Kingdom but at least Breath of the Wild had a unique concept where the dungeons take the form of a giant animal that fits its environment and navigating the entire beast made room for some interesting atmosphere and puzzles. The shrines in Tears of the Kingdom were annoying as hell especially the cave ones and Rauru should be a preacher with how many blessings he gives. The actual shrine puzzle should be harder and more challenging than actually finding the shrine itself. The four champions are superior to the sages in every way possible. When it comes to side quests and side adventures I honestly think that Breath of the Wild has it beat. I had a lot more fun doing side adventures in that game than I did with Tears of the Kingdom which a lot of them seem absolutely pointless. If you were to rank all of them side by side Tarrey Town from Breath of the Wild would be at the very top. Exploring the world, especially the depths, isn’t really all that rewarding because the game makes you grind out the tedious depths and all they reward you with is the same outfits and clothing from Breath of the Wild. It was lazy on Nintendo’s part and not very good in my personal opinion. Breath of the Wild soundtrack is vastly underrated and even though Tears of the Kingdom has some new music on it’s own it still for the most part borrows the music from its predecessor. Breath of the Wild has one of the most beautiful and underrated soundtracks in the entire series and I will DIE on that hill. Lastly, the dungeons in Tears of the Kingdom have pleasant atmosphere and vibes but if you really think about it they are not very good as well when it comes to gameplay. Water Temple is by far the worst dungeon in the entire series and it makes the Divine Beasts look like master pieces. Wind Temple is just a smaller and easier version of a Divine Beast. Navigating the rail carts in the fire temple was annoying and most people will end up cheesing it. And the spirit temple doesn’t even count because its just a list of chores you have to do leading up to the actual dungeon which only leads to a boss fight that really wasn’t that good. As a matter of fact you can literally cheese all the dungeons with autobuild which makes them 10x easier to begin with. The only decent temple was the lightning temple and even that was short as hell. In conclusion I think Tears of the Kingdom has good moments but Breath of the Wild was more impactful and more well balanced with better characters, shrines, side quests, and overall story.
When it comes to runes, I think the difference for me is that botw’s runes weren’t really intended to be used in the really fun ways people ended up using them, like windbombing for example. And so it felt really cool to use them in interesting and unique ways. ToTK just gave us ultrahand because they saw the fun things people did with the other runes, and now it’s not fun anymore lol. Idk if that makes sense, it’s kinda like the difference between going out with your friends when your parents allowed it as a teenager vs just sneaking out. Both were fun, but it felt way cooler and more fun when you were doing it the “wrong” way.
In BotW, we were in a sandbox without any supervision and just some basic toys we could do whatever we wanted with. In TotK, we're in a sandbox with a bunch of Legos that mommy and daddy gave us and they're watching us to make sure we use them properly or else they'll take the unintended fun away
@@unpingouinsurlabanquise4574not just that. BotW actually had fascinating things you could discover. It was actually fun to play and find things. Going to that far off island to be faced with a survivor challenge. Finding an odd spot in the forest and being faced with a darkness challenge. I'm intending to do a replay of BotW and id bet that it would still be fun- even though its so not new. Because exploration was actually fun in the game- which was really lame in TotK
I beat botw but didn't beat totk. But my main reason for loosing intrest is more to do with the world building. I played a LOT of botw, I finished 99% of the game. But the world lore and story is what got me hooked. Ultimately, that was my biggest issue with it; I WANTED more lore than what they had. So when TotK promised more I was excited... Until I started visiting old places. The game devs didn't want to isolate new players so they tried to keep the callbacks minimal... But that was the main problem. Key people knew Link and Zelda, it was stated they were traveling together for a few years. Yet everything you directly impacted was either glossed over or not addressed, AT ALL. People knew you through Zelda, but NOT for the quests you did in the first game. It really pulled me out of the immersion. I started to care less about story, and more about learning glitches to get ne through it, but that was around the time they were getting patched out. Eventually I just stopped playing all together. They made a world to get lost in, yet did vary little to bridge them together. You can bring horses from your botw file, so I don't understand why they couldn't add small flavor dialogue depending on how much you completed. There are ps2 games that did that better. Anyway great vid, there was only a small handful of things I didn't agree with, 10/10!
to now end does it bother me that the Gloom hands do not make the Master Sword glow. No, that's only when Phantom Ganon appears or when you fight gloom-covered enemies in the Depths. When against Phanon Ganon or Ganondorf, the Master Sword is at "full power" of 60 with unlimited durability. Against gloom enemies, it's 45 power with its usual durability of about 40. And if you fuse an item to it, it'll never reach full durability with the sparkle when it regenerates. The durability boost from fusion on the Master Sword is a once-per-save-file thing and it still hasn't been patched.
The depths almost stopped me playing the game 10 to 20 hours in. Various things frustrated me, and pushed me to go back to BotW to see if I truly did like it better, and I did, and for the same reason I loved it in the first place. It's been long enough, I've forgotten enough exact details, I enjoy just wandering around again, even after revisiting stuff in TotK just days to weeks earlier. Then I put down TotK long enough now, I'm not sure I'll ever go back to finish it.
@@linguini645exactly, TOTK made wondering around not fun because of the reused map, the Depth has very little difference one area looks like the other, and the sky islands were so empty and not much interesting things to do apart from the tutorial island.
9:25 i like how in Age of Calamity they made it so cryonis can actually be done anywhere your standing, and that doing it on water freezes any enemy. if it was like that in botw it'd probably be a much better rune
I love totk. is that okay? it has its flaws, its hiccups, but as a GAME, it was such an enjoyable experience. as a ZELDA game i can’t speak on behalf of story and improvements because i’m not a veteran. I loved almost every second of the game to the very end, and seeing so many huge videos saying this game is a disgrace makes me feel like my standards are too low, and i’m not judging hard enough. but its safe to say that if i had a good time then it’s a good game. at least, for my standards
You don't need to justify. This video shows it perfectly. It's just a subjective feeling and opinion that BotW is better than TotK. Most people speak out of nostalgia and they didn't feel the novelty in TotK. I know that feeling, too. I mean he even thinks calamity ganon is better than totk ganondorf and dragon. Like wtf. Calamity ganon is one of worst bosses I have ever seen. I love BotW as well but TotK makes me not wanna play botw ever again. The ONLY point I would give is the lore stuff. But I'm as well not so deep into that since it's not in my interest how games relate when they really are not intended to be relatable. I like it how Xenoblade did it with 1-3 but for Zelda it's kinda weird to me, to force connect games.
there's nothing wrong with liking Tears of The Kingdom; i think it's a fun game even though it really really disappointed me, i'm actually doing another playthrough after a year just to see how i feel about it now. it's a fun game, but the same six year timespan used to develop the previous game has basically gone towards nothing.
TOTK was more of an addition to BOTW. If you just played botw, you wouldn't need to play totk as botw story stand alone is a complete story. While for totk that's not the case. We wouldn't understand anything in totk if we never played botw. That's why even now I prefer the stand alone botw experience rather than the stand alone totk experience. You might have your own preference though 😅
I completed Breath of the Wild, when I think about the things that are boring to do and repetitive like Shrines and Korok seeds I got even more bored playing Tears of the Kingdom It is just like a Breath of the Wild DLC. My definition of "open-world" games is they should be more detailed, and every location city or village discovered should give a player unique quests or story that is only unique to that location even a little bit of mystery with good rewards or reputation system. An example of the best open-world single player games out there are The Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2.
I perfectly agree with your sentiments about BotW's jank.Nobody I know understands the joy I get from breaking a game wide open and doing something unintended, and one of the things I LOVED about BotW was solving shrines with some stupid use of a stasis launch or something like that, and even solving them in a way the devs allowed felt unintentional. When I played TotK, I didn't have nearly as much fun with the shrines because all of the weird "unintended" solutions always felt like they knew that would happen, which ruins the fun, or are so boring that they ruin the shrines altogether (rocket shield). shooting myself underneath the water with ragdoll to skip a puzzle felt great, but using recall to bring a shrine orb back just felt cheap.
@davidaitken8503 botw took thought and glitches to "break". Things like rocket shields break the game in the most bland way possible because they are an easy instant win button. Theres no satisfaction in shooting to the end of every shrine.
Big same. Most fun I had with TotK was solving the side bits where you have to hold up the sign for that one guy. I always just used my horse to prop it up when possible lmao
@@mynameiscal3478 Look. I'm all for goofing off in a game to find ways to break it every once in a while, but if it becomes the focal point to how you play, you're just being an idiot. If their is no satisfaction in shooting to the end of every shrine, don't do it. The fact that I have to give such a simple solution to a supposedly cognitively normal human being speaks to just how unbelievably stupid people in this world have become. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. There was a twit that complained that TotK wasn't as fun as BotW because all he did was fly over everything in a hover bike. I could never imagine someone being that stupid just to make up this story if I tried.
I still play it every once and awhile. It’s fun to go around hyrule, talk to the people, gather stuff and sell it in shops, and more. I used to do that in botw once i did everything but now since totk released, i don’t touch botw anymore.
the robor that gives you the purah pad, later goes "oh yea, I forgot yo give you the battery" could just as easily have been the one to give link his paraglider
Speaking personally, because BotW was a new formula, a first attempt at a whole new kind of Zelda, with all the flaws and missteps that came with it. Tears was an opportunity to improve on all the flaws (particularly the story/music/connection to past games) and it absolutely ignored all of those, and doubled down on the main criticisms people had with BotW. Sure, it fixed a few of the issues, but the developers also openly expressed disinterest in other issues. BotW was given more leeway because it was a first attempt. Tears doesn't have that luxury.
I dont mind anything else, but my BIGGEST issue is the complete lack of Link expressing emotions. Compare to all other games in the 3d era Link had big ranges of emotions, here is just stoic and surprised. No emotion when remembering his past no emotion when learning Zelda's fate, just...a doll.
@@shigerumiyamoto9612 Link was very emotive in those games when you consider the limitations of the time. Not just through facial expression. There was also flavour text, cutscene composition, foil characters, etc. Small moments that add up. The Hero of Time is the most interesting version of Link to analyse because of that tbh There were also companions in those games, so even in moments where Link didn't do much, you could shift focus onto them. Link in BOTW/TOTK is all by himself, so there's nothing to distract you from the fact that he's basically the standing guy emoji in every cutscene🧍♂. Age of Calamity did better at least. All he gets in the mainline modern games is a couple of joke interactions with insignificant NPCs, and cooking animations. smh
I would hardly call this game a masterpiece. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Even objectively speaking it has many obvious flaws and tons of continuity problems. It's decent for what it is. But not a masterpiece for a Zelda game at all
Yeah unlike botw were you could actually see that professional designers were at work, a lot of totk mechanics are just sloppy the entire fuse mechanic has way to many unnecessary steps because you can’t do it in menu. The fact that you can set arrow types is annoying, also why is the quick menu not separeted in regions for quicker selection and let’s not even get started on the sage abilitys. Story and gameplay don’t really match either and I know a lot of people didn’t like the story in botw either but at least there it matched the gameplay and how it was told.
While I don't disagree that the movement system of TOTK is completely TRIVIALIZED by the usage of the hoverbike, I feel like you've sort of created an unfair comparison, because the Breath of the wild glitches are clearly not intended methods of play. While I agree that they make the game more fun I feel like the fact that these aren't in fact mechanics that exist by design works counter to your argument. You can't really argue that BOTW is a better designed game if the reason it was more fun is due to things that weren't actually designed into it. Yes again, the glitches are fun but I can't give credit to the game for an unintended feature. Maybe instead you could speak about how the glitches being fun highlighted something that should have been improved or fleshed out in TOTK but was instead ignored or taken steps back on. For example the item duplication glitch highlights the durability system, or how movement needed more methods of engagement.
It's less about it being good game design and more just me expressing that the janky movement is a big factor as to why I personally like BOTW more, sure it's not intentional but the fact is that they're in the game and I personally think they enhance the game a ton
After 2k Hours in BOTW i never even once tried a glitch. Cause i dont care. I bought a HWFLY Chip and soldert that SoB in to my Switch just to downgrade so i can use easy duping in TOTK cause its NOT fun grinding all these dumb consumables. Dropped TOTK without even reaching 50h play time.
@TheGravityShifter to be fair, it applies to a lot of speedrunners. Also, I heard they did have a lot of fun glitches in TotK's early versions that they removed over various patches. That didn't happen in BotW despite the many patches, so that kinda sucks. Even if something is unintentional doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. The spin attack was also originally a glitch. One of the things that sets great designers apart from designers that are just good is their ability to recognize when unintentional things are fun and should be incorporated into the game. I'm pretty sure the entire idea for ultrahand came from players using magnesis on stacked items to make Link fly across the sky in BotW. I don't blame them for thinking Ultrahand would be a good idea after seeing that. The problem is the invisible hand holding the developers put in. This could've been better explained in the video, but they not only removed game breaking glitches, but fun traversal glitches that felt like hidden mechanics. They also put caps on object speed in the game so you couldn't do an equivalent to that bomb launching thing to move super fast from BotW even if you did find a new way to hyper launch yourself. I think the best description of the games is that BotW feels like you're playing in a sandbox without too many cool toys, but you're unsupervised and can do whatever you want. Whereas TotK feels like you're in a sandbox with the coolest Lego set your parents could find, but your parents are watching you play to make sure you don't get hurt or do anything too unruly with the new toys
@@TheGravityShifter intended experience. Great phrase to answer this. What is the supposed "intended experience" of BotW and TotK? Based on interviews, it seems to be player freedom. But the treatment of TotK seems intent on restricting that player freedom. I'll just use a simple analogy from the end of my first post to describe it. BotW is like a kid being thrown into a sandbox with a small handful of toys and left to do whatever they want in the sandbox with said toys. TotK is like your parents came back with the ultimate Lego set and kept watch from outside the sandbox to make sure you don't misuse the new Legos in ways they don't want you to use them
@@TheGravityShifterproblem is, that same freedom can spoil the story to you. Watching the cutscenes out of order can happen very easily, and behold - spoilers everywhere. Yes, the game tells you the order in that one temple whose name i forgot, and it sends you there through impa, but i have to choose to go there. If i let the game hold my hand i don't get spoiled, but if I decide for myself, the story gets ruined for me. If you take player freedom to the extreme, and get the master sword early, now the grand reveal of zelda being the light dragon is just gone. Botw allowed you freedom and it worked, because everything you could discover in whatever order you wanted to wasn't telling a story where the order of events matters that much, you already know everyone's dead and zelda is at the castle, the cutscenes are there just to give some substance to the cast, whereas totk is trying to narrate a story whose outcome you don't know anything about besides ganondorf's sealing under the castle. The cutscene at the master sword glyph straight up has flashbacks from the previous cutscenes. Also, doing the dragon's tears quest early makes chasing fake zelda around for the regional phenomena feel even more stupid. You know she's not real. Link knows she's not real. And he just doesn't say a word to anyone who gets gaslit by her, risks their lives chasing her, obeys her commands (looking at you, kakariko village quest) and so on. You're free to do things in the order you'd like but it makes the experience actively worse
People hated the durability mechanic in BotW. Nintendo doubled down on it in TotK by making you build everything from durability items with limited use. Collecting parts just to burn them is a slog. Yes, crafting is fun, but then you're disincentivized by the work to collect the parts. So the core gameplay loop focuses on the most unfun aspect of BotW. And then... this story. This... ugh.
they made weapons break twice as fast, forcing players to use Fuse...every time you shoot an arrow, attach something, scroll through dozens of items = boring, slows down gameplay
How are you disincentivized to collect the parts? Also in TOTK you would wanna collect weapons more to fuse more powerful weapons. It doesn't focus on the most unfon aspect of BOTW it focuses on the fun combat and exploration and stuff. The story isn't that bad tbh.
I like fuse it makes ingaging in combat fun again. In BOTW I horded my good weapons and ended up not having that much fun fighting enemies. In TOTK they fixed that by making all normal weapons do around the same amount of damage and by adding fuse. Fuse allows you to make your strong weapons buy collecting fuse materials from enemies. This motivates players to ingage more in combat instead of avoiding it because now for every tough enemie you defeat you will get a just as strong fuse material in return. I hope this mechanic returns future zelda games because it fixes so many of the games combat reward and incentive issues.
i think the biggest downfall that most people dont recognize as the main culprit IS the use of the exact same hyrule. botw's biggest and most inexplicable selling point was the VIBES. the novelty of it all, the sense of exploration, the feeling of being left in the wild, constantly being internally incentivized to go somewhere and still be happy you did even if there was nothing. it was really new and fresh and just shocking when i first played it. never had i experienced a feeling like that when i played a game besides when i was a kid. it managed to capture the same sense of wonder and excitement as when you go out in the real world and discover new places. Of course all the new mechanics and stuff had an impact as well, but nothing compares to that feeling of being internally driven to do things. TOTK falls super flat because you already know where everything is. theres no sense of internal drive anymore because you already know this world. its like trying to discover something new about the places you go to daily: very hard and not very rewarding. As you said, the depths and sky islands are wasted potential for this exact reason because they did not double down on the one thing that made BOTW one of the greatest games of all time. no reason to explore the world anymore. no child like wonder whenever you see something in the distance. you already know whats there. You already mentioned all of this in the video, and i heavily agree. I just think it is actually the number 1 reason totk is less fun than botw. i dont necessarily agree with all the other points made, and i only think those issues are magnified exactly because we are in the same hyrule. Imagine if totk wasnt a sequel, but a completely different game that had the mechanics of the current game but in a completely different world that you can explore and find new things in. i think 80% of totks issues would be fixed. And i do sometimes wish i could erase my memory of playing botw so i could play totk for the first time and see if that would make a difference. Familiarity is just such a double edged sword and sadly it didnt work out well for TOTK
At 13:09 I knew that I’m the exact botw nerd that this video was made for, when you mentioned windbombing for movement I got so excited cause that’s exactly what I’ve been saying. Totk could have been a lot more fun, If it wasn’t so anti glitches, cause it really feels like they saw all of the glitches in botw and made sure they wouldn’t be possible at all, even if it was at the detriment of practically like the ultra hand not being able to move objects with objects on top of them
I don’t know why, but breath of the wild felt.. really like a breath of fresh air compared to tears of the kingdom, tears of the kingdom just felt a little… cluttered for me
Tears was never an “upgrade” or “masterpiece” compared to BotW for me. It made a better built world with the Sheikah technology and Guardians, Ganon being a mindless monster instead of a bland repetitive bad guy. I felt more invested in finishing things with Ganon the more I saw the flashbacks and it felt rewarding to get all the Divine Beasts free at the cost of half the final boss’ HP. Meanwhile, TotK made weapon variety stale once you only use high damage parts on crap weapons, fusing things feels like a chore and how they “manage” the menus is a bigger slog than ever. Don’t get me started on the plot not making sense on its own, let alone a “SEQUEL”
Am I the only person that prefers TOTK? It's just so much more fun than BOTW, if I ever fancy playing zelda I don't pick up BOTW. I love that game but that TOTK is very similar but with more which is why it's so enjoyable & the story is much more interesting and engaging. I feel like a lot of people prefer BOTW for the nostalgia, although I do miss the guardians & sheikah technologies.
I agree with you, I also think it’s a major creativity problem with the player base. Totk has so many different solutions to issues/exploration that some people can’t wrap their head around. Sure there are issues I have with it, but if we’re just talking about level of fun playing these games years later ToTK has much more to do/things I can make up to have fun even after I’ve nearly completed the game 100%. I pick up the game and will just ride my horse or walk to another town for fun. ToTK is like red dead redemption, you get to enjoy the journey and have fun. Botw is like the newer Pokémon games, sure you can kinda go wherever but it doesn’t break you out of playing it just to get it finished.
Honestly I don't like either game that much, neither one FEELS like A Zelda game, I do like the scenery I absolutely loved the very first time I shot up into the sky out that first tower. The moment the game lost my interest is when I apported a NPC that I met in Breath of the Wild and the NPC didn't recognize who Link was, I can't really explain it right but that moment left me feeling hollow and empty and my emotional ties to the game died. Plus the lack of sky islands was extremely disappointing.
I just can’t agree. They have made TOTK because they knew how revolutionary BOTW was and it wasn’t a fluke. TOTK is revolutionary in it’s own right. This game shouldn’t have work on the switch, the fact that I have never seen any glitches in this game when there are so many ways it could go wrong is impressive. TOTK is not better than BOTW, it has it flaws and most of the criticisms towards this game is true, but dismissing everything that this game has for it will not make your disappointment any better. On a gameplay level, this game is the most impressive thing Nintendo has done in years. The story is not perfect but it is emotional with zelda becoming the eternal dragon, Ganondorf is cool and his boss fight is epic. All I am saying here is that this is the zelda curse all over again. Fans don’t like a zelda game and then in 5 or 10 years, people will say “this game was misunderstood ”. It happened for almost every zelda game since windwaker.
@@stevejeffrey11 Nah you’re just wrong. lol It wasn’t “lazy.” Story was actually way better than BOTW. Of course the depths is supposed to look like an underground version of Hyrule, that was the point. “Only a few sky islands” Your media illiteracy is showing. Genuinely go play the game and then come back.
@@Matt-eh2dyI’d say the story was still messy (it’s Nintendo so I’m not surprised lol), the depths were just too empty (a ton of walking and terrain without a whole lot to do other than the same few things), and the sky was good (but suffered from the same problem of too much repeats and not enough to do). Totk is super fun to play, but it’s also packed to the brim with a bunch of busywork that drags it down.
Finally, someone says something about how clunky Ultra Hand is. I have literally never gotten past the sky island because I used Ultra Hand a few times and was like "Yeah, no. If this is a big draw of the game, I'm not interested because this is too frustrating for me." I'm sure it gets easier, but after contorting my hands a few times to get what I wanted, I was done with it.
You know what would fix this? An upgrade to auto-build that lets you suspend the objects in a void so that you can build more precisely. Even so, Hyrule was not built to accommodate DIY vehicles.
It's cumbersome but does get a bit easier when you realize all of the axis are 8 corners, so it can't actually angle things in a full 360 rotation like magnesis. That said, I hate ultrahand too, so I get it
I think the only mistake TOTK made is reusing the same world as BOTW. What captivated us in BOTW was the infinite beauty of exploration. Which we fully explored. So reusing that same world, we won't feel the same about exploration because we already know what we're gonna find/see for the most part. Although I loved seeing old areas changed due to events or gleeoks flying around. I loved the tense feeling I got seeing a gleeok for the first time and trying to get close to it to admire its design lol But if you look at TOTK as it's own game, and not as BOTW sequel; and ignore the elements TOTK got FROM BOTW, TOTK is just as great, if not better. I couldn't go back to playing BOTW, because TOTK is BOTW with ALOT MORE added.
I don't know why people open these videos saying TotK is a masterpiece. That's like nepotism for entries in a video game franchise. So much of the game is re-used or undercooked. I think the highest I can give this game is a 7/10.
Giving ToTK a score above 7/10 is like giving OoT Master Quest a score above 7/10. The original game (BoTW/OoT) is good, so the same game with a different paint will also get a good score.
@@tarnw3301 It's not the sameness that gets it that score, though that does participate in a way. It's the clunky controls, padded content, and the barebones story that ruin it for me. If you want to see a game that re-uses a map effectively, Pokemon Black 2/White 2 is right there.
it was hilarious seeing people call it 'game of the year' before it was released, and then the hype died quickly. Streamers like Pointcrow who made years of BoTW content lost interest fast
Because instead of standing true in their own authentic opinions, they decide to contort themselves and say things to appease the crowd who will have a temper tantrum if they don’t like it. I miss the days when people were encouraged to be themselves and to be fearless when going against the crowd.
The ENTIRE game lacks content. For 6 years of development with a pre-built map, there's just far too little novelties and added content. I get that they were also adding in new mechanics but I think we all expected more. If FromSoft can make the entirety of Elden Ring in the same time as TotK, there's ZERO reason Nintendo can't make an open world on the same level.
I agree with a lot of the points you made, after the initial hype phase wore off I quickly came to realize that I preferred Botw much more and think it’s better than Totk. That said there are actually two points that stood out to me that I disagree with, the Geoglyphes and the End Boss. I despise the Geoglyphes indicating the place to obtain the memories. Having to find out where exactly those photos for the memories were taken was part of the fun for me in Botw and if I ever had trouble finding one there was Pikango to hint me in the right direction. The Geoglyphes on the other hand just kinda felt like a checklist to me since they were so easy to find and reach. There is also no reason as to why they are exactly located where they are, or why the Geoglyphes formed around the tears (Or I missed something?). With the End Boss, I do like the fight against Ganondorf more. When I played Botw I put off fighting Calamity Ganon for a long while, because well I was sure it’s gonna be hard as it’s the last challenge. Yet when I finally faced him I felt so let down actually, it just felt way too easy and not because I was just that good but because he felt so weak. I had more trouble with the Thunderblight Ganon than the final fight of the game. Now I have my issues with Totk’s final fight as well, mainly the lead up because like you I was super unprepared. In fact I had no idea you could cook something to heal your broken hearts, so there I was having made my way through all that trouble just to eventually have to reload a previous save so I can even leave and come back later. But the fight itself felt like the proper last challenge, unlike Calamity Ganon, Ganondorf was a proper match to Link. He now was back to his prime and of sound-mind, an opponent not just a big huge threat. Besides that though my opinion barely differs. I was actually surprised to hear someone else prefer the “Dungeons” of Botw more than those of Totk. Usually that is one of the few points the majority agrees upon that Totk did better. Yet for me they are not improved enough to say that I like them more than the Divine Beasts and in comparison those also made more sense in the story than what we got now with the Temple.
My opinions on the divine beasts are the minority and I am aware of that but hey opinions are opinions and i just prefer the atmosphere of those giant robots
Yeah even I have to admit the temples felt out of place… I can’t exactly explain it, but I think the reason I didn’t like the temples is because they didn’t have a build up or lore behind them. The divine beasts make sense because they are integral to the story in BOTW, we need them to stop the calamity but they are under Ganon’s control. It’s the reason we go to those villages, and going inside of them and beating the bosses are rewarding because not only do we get the beasts back, we also free the spirits of our comrades and it’s rewarding because they show their appreciation through their character, and give us an ability to help us on our journey. We also save the village there that have been plagued by the beasts for a century, so it’s a pleasure to see the people in that town react knowing they don’t have to be suppressed by the beasts anymore. But, in TOTk, I never got the same satisfaction of clearing a temple as I did with the beasts. We don’t even know these temples exist until the elders say “oh by the way, there’s this legend about-“ and I’m like, okay, but I’m just here to find Zelda. I don’t care about your history. The temples are also really big, and often times they are either in the sky or surrounded by lava, so one wrong move and I either fall or die right away. The puzzles are a bit more challenging, but also frustrating because I have to do five things before I can activate one of the terminals! I have to go around the temples so many times just to find out what I have to do, unlike with the beasts where they point you in the right direction, but don’t give you the answers. And the bosses… again I give credit that they at least have some variety than the blights and their designs are interesting, but am I the only one who found half of them annoying and the other half way too easy? At least the blights put up a fight and they had a style that added to their character which made up for their poor designs. Also, the only reason the temples were build was because they held a secret stone? Something we weren’t really supposed to get it’s just a thing you get, again no build up for these stones. All they do is provide you information about the sage and their battle of ganon and to give you a new ability. Which wouldn’t be a problem, but there are two major flaws to this. 1. The sages have no personality, we don’t know who they are, they never say their names or show their faces. They’re supposed to be an important character but the game treats them like an npc. And the memory they recall is just the same one! The battle of ganon which they say the same exact thing, we just see which sage gets beaten and then we cut to Zelda telling them about link! These memories are just copy and pasted, with little changes. I can’t even skip those cutscenes despot how boring they are. 2. The stones aren’t even given to you! They’re given to your companion you are with at the time. On top of that, the abilities you get are literally useless! Sidon has a water shield which is the same as daruk but shitter, you get a worse version of ubrosa’s fury from Riju, the Goron roll is good for blasting rocks but not much enemies… and you ride on a robot because… sure? Pretty much every ability you get is a weaker version of the champions and is hard to control. (Expect for Tulin, I like his ability because it’s useful to help get across wider gaps.) Also, now that I think about it, wasn’t ganon’s whole plan to get the secret stones so he could go against Raru and become powerful? If he knew there were more stones, then why didn’t he try and take the other ones? And clearly he was able to find them in those temples, because those monsters belong to him. So, why didn’t he just have the monsters either absorb the stones, or have them bring the stones to him so he could be more powerful? It would have made sense for his character and story. If they had explained more of the stones and why we needed to get them, it would have made finding them more important. I’m honestly wondering if the secret stones were added in the game at the last minute, given how little build up and importance they have in the story. Come to think of it, it makes me wonder if they were developing the map and models first and then added the story last, which explains why the plot is all over the place
@@cosmok-1367 I mean they did all have build up to them and there is some lore for them too. I mean I did, they look nicer and there was the phenomenons going on around them. I mean not exactly, you can see some of them and there are hints of them. If you don't care about the history then why say they didn't have lore behind them? Clearly you didn't pay attention to or care for it so why complain when that happens? I mean you gotta be careful then in that case with their size. Not really frustrating just cuz there are multiple steps, BOTW did that too but in TOTK there is more variety to it then just moving the dungeon around. I mean no TOTK's point you in the right directions too but don't give you the answers. How are they annoying or too easy? The new bosses put up a fight too and have more distinct styles, and the blights designs weren't even that bad either. That's not the only reason, they are also places of worship and stuff. Actually no the story does build them up gradually especially in the memories. There really aren't major flaws with them. 1. I mean yeah but the current champions have personality which is good enough at least and they actually matter. True that memory stuff is annoying. 2. Which they have actual personalities and them being given to them is fine. No the abilities aren't useless at all. No Sidon's shield is unique as a water one with it's properties and it isn't shitty, no Riju's has no cooldown and can be used a lot more often then Urbosa's fury so hers isn't a worse version of that, nah that works for hitting multiple enemies at once really, and the robot is great too for fights. Not really they aren't weaker versions of the champions and they aren't hard to control just annoying to activate and deactivate. (nah they are all good really) He couldn't find the others clearly and it would not be easy. Not really, even the monsters didn't get quite to them but were close. You don't think they tried? They couldn't get to it either though. I mean they explained them enough and why you needed them. I mean do have some build up and importance though. I doubt that is what happened and the plot really isn't all over the place tbh.
It's way better than BotW. BotW has way less meaningful rewards from chests, worse and less diverse shrines, less types of weapons and options and the worst: some parts of the map (like the jungle one) which serve no purpose in the story and I personally didn't even felt like exploring them because of the rewards being not meaningful anymore. BotW of course isn't bad, it's just that TotK does everything better, even the story.
I'll never forget what it felt like the first time i explored the dephts flying straight ahead into complete darkness with a zonai vehicle and a battery that was about to run out eventually. The not knowing was such an incredibly scary and interesting experience I couldn't compare it to anything and else. I wish I could go back to not knowing whats down there.
I think that for the vast majority of people your favorite in the Duology of BOTW and TOTK is gonna be whichever one you play first. I think that if the Depths had actual things to do in them, that would have made the game interesting since there would be an interesting new map to explore, but the only thing to find is auto build, but there's nothing interesting going on otherwise.
The argument that TotK is bad since most people hadn't played it again after the first playthrough, even a year after its release is a flawed one. As good as BotW may be, I hadn't touched that game in at least 3 years. Hell, one of my all time favorite games, Psychonauts, is a game I hadn't played in over a decade. There are thousands of great games to play out there, with new ones being released every month. And accounting that we all have only so much time to spend on video games, why should we play a game more than once? The only reason I can even claim to have played BotW twice is because I hadn't finished it the first time, and I'd felt that I was missing something (I wasn't). The rest of the points made in this video, from what I've seen, are more logically sound or are fully based on opinion, so I can't argue against them. Though I'm still of the opinion that TotK is a far better game than BotW.
I COULD go back and 100% this game, but I just don’t feel like it. That might be laziness, but there’s something just so bland about it currently. It’s like BOTW with new features, and I’ve already played enough of that game.
Slight correction, at 7:30 you do see this NPC multiple times if you follow the “monster slaying crew/patrol” quests, as he’s the captain in charge of that group
Judging by the comments section this will be a very hot take, but I firmly disagree with you. I am seeing a lot of similar videos to yours pop up recently, but I don't have the means to make a proper response video so here is an extremely long written response: Personally one of the reasons why I very much enjoyed tears over breath was directly related to the lack of guardians. Yes you can parry their lasers, but not only is it not obvious, its not the easiest without practice. 99.999999% of people are not going to sit there and practice parrying guardians meaningfully early in the game, especially because as you said going for a parry is a huge risk. As you said they were designed to instill panic and be avoid early on, I and I firmly believe that detracts and directly undermines the rest of the game experience. The guardians were CLEARLY and FREQUENTLY used to gatekeep areas of the map. Functionally they are placed in areas to ensure that the player either has the tools or the skills required to progress. Breath of the wild desperately wants to be the game known for adventure and exploration but keeps getting in the way of itself by way of guardians and malice. Even if you have the tools or skills to deal with them, when you are just in trying to explore and that laser shows up on your back I constantly found myself being frankly annoyed. You said that you found fighting multiple guardians really fun "because of a simple exploit" (time = 55:22) but I don't think it reflects positively on the design of a game that using an exploit that the vast majority of people are not going to be aware of during there first (and for most people only) time playing the game. I don't think there is anything wrong in finding enjoyment via game exploits (in single player games), but when approaching the game with the intent to engage with the designed experience and mechanics earnestly I found guardians (especially when plural) just a pain in the rear. To me at least, Gloom hands felt far more in line with previous zelda games (there are very similar enemies in older games), and I found the hands way more manageable while engaging in traditional combat. Putting some space here just to make this part more obvious, but gloom hands are SUPER easy to deal with if you use dazzle fruit or muddle buds (the plants that create light). I also really appreciated the lack of ranged attacks, as the area that the hands were active threats (and potentially annoying) were much smaller than the guardians. I will give you its not great that the hands come out of literally nowhere though, but there were many times where I felt like the same might as well be the case with how the guardians could spot link from insane distances. I disagree about them being less interesting or cool but that is subjective. I honestly found more enjoyment exploring Elden Ring, where much more difficult encounters gatekept areas, than I did exploring in breath of the wild. In Elden Ring for instance, despite more challenging speedbumps existing in the way of exploration, it worked and didn't take away from my experience because they didn't demand my attention incessantly or forcefully and abruptly change the pace of the game. Having to deal with sniper tracking me isn't conducive to me having the freedom to explore without bounds, it just made exploring, often the most interesting places, a chore in an otherwise quite relaxed game. Playing Tears I felt way more free to explore without contrived gatekeepers even if there was definitely environmental gatekeeping of exploration. Having the ability to use the sky to avoid having to tediously climb constantly (because lets be honest climbing is boring and tedious and essentially filler content unless you are really into exploring the same bland textures over and over again) and allowed me to have more freedom to engage with exploring in a way I was more interested in. With the abilities (runes) or whatever you want to call them. I found the breath of the wild abilities extremely underwhelming, clunky, and tedious when trying to engage with them in earnest. Especially compared to how items were used in previous games. A lot of your fun stemmed from "breaking" the game to address shortcomings in the intended design of the game. I actually feel that the abilities in TotK actually severely hurt the potential of the game, because I felt that it was very evident that the gave the player too much freedom and the developers struggled to create tailored experiences around them. I truly felt the game was at the best when link was restricted (be it the glimmer of potential in the lightning temple, or the proving grounds), but the abilities clearly flew in the face of this. Both were tedious and clunky. The sage stuff is better in botw, I will give you that. I still enjoyed exploring the sky Islands. Yeah there could have been more to do. Maybe my expectations were more tempered than most but its still better than a complete lack of them in BotW imo. On your point of exploration, and the returning to Hyrule, I enjoyed it because I could go explore at my own pace on my own terms. I was honestly rather disappointed with BotW exploration because of how tedious it was and how sparsely populated the world was. Tears not only managed to add more to the world but it also made the existing content feel more full. I agree that the tutorial shrines were poorly executed in ToTK, but I found literally all of the shrines in BoTW tedious and clunky. While cheesable in ToTK, I found the puzzle shrines fare more enjoyable as they were more open ended and less prescribed (the thing that botw is supposed to be all about). While I by no means believe that TotK actually succeeded in capturing the magic of classic zelda dungeons(the water temple was especially bad), I am just going to have to hard disagree on everything you said besides the lead up to the temples being better. You didn't say it but I will give it to you that the cutscenes after beating the divine beasts are miles better than the repeated cutscene after each temple. I believe the temples and their bosses were overall much better than the divine beasts. As for the story, I organically only stumbled upon a single extra memory in BotW my first time playing. So for me, the BotW story was essencially non-existent, and TotK was miles better. That said they could have done so many things better with the TotK story. There's no reason why they couldn't have had the cutscenes play in chronological (LOGICAL) order regardless of which one you picked up. Link discovering where zelda was could have, and should have, easily had a much greater influence on the ingame dialog. It was very strange to have important npcs ask about her and be left in the dark. Again though, I genuienly didn't organically encounter the BotW memories, because it functionally doesn't exist within the structure of the game without going out of your way to look for them. So in my books TotK's horribly implemented story was better than BotW's hidden story. I hate calamity ganon, I find him un-inspired, and he reeks of a rushed game. He feels like he's an amalgamation of all the bosses because he is...BECAUSE he's the only real boss. I personally feel like the final bosses of ToTK are some of the best final bosses of any games, let alone Zelda games. Clearly unintentional and obscure movement tech that breaks the game isn't something I think BotW deserves praise for. Don't get me wrong I am not saying I don't think it is fun. But is a game really a better game because it is broken in a way that only one in a million players would notice playing the game without the internet. So many people who play a ton of BotW do it because they like the Movement tech, but how many of them would realistically have encountered the movement tech without youtube? Using it, especially on a first play through, makes me feel like im not honestly engaging with the mechanics of the game, or having a genuine experience. You, yourself said that the methods to exploit botw are " so outlandish that how on earth would someone discover them while playing the game casually" and that is the crux of my issue with it. I just want to play Zelda casually. I love the series and I go into every game starting with the intention of engaging with the intended experience. The intended experience of TotK was just much better in my opinion. Really, tears just was a better breath of the wild for me. I do have complaints about the narrative structure, the dungeons, the menus, but nothing I don't also have complaints about for botw.
That's the thing. The arguments against TOTK are very subjective. Many do still like the game and find it to be the best one in the series. So many videos tend to say the same over and over again.
I think the bottom line is that Tears is a less broken BotW. Mechanics are generally better balanced for the intended play experience, which means there's less freedom to play the game your way. Take the Great Fairies as an example: in BotW, once you find a bud, you just need to get together a one time payment of rupees and then you can combine your random armor pieces you've accumulated with random inventory trash you've also accumulated to get all your armor up to higher levels, only occasionally needing to grind for specific resources for specific armor pieces. In TotK, you have to complete a specific side quest to open each bud, and then every single upgrade costs rupees, meaning you have to be a lot more intentional about what you upgrade (and still needing to farm specific resources from time to time). It also makes rupees retain their value much further into the game. On the other hand, TotK does suffer from clunky interface in a lot of ways. The issues with cooking return from BotW - both games "balance" the potential of cooked dishes to let you get around certain mechanics by making it slow and clunky to mass-produce dishes. If you want to turn ten hearty radishes into ten hearty fried wild greens, you need to open the menu, select the hearty radish, select "hold", leave the menu, select cook, skip the cutscene, accept the cooked dish, and then repeat another nine times. The arrow fuse interface can largely be fixed by sorting it to most-used, though that's still just a patch over the underlying issue. Activating Sage powers is terrible except for the gust while gliding or the goron power while riding a vehicle. And TotK's improvements over BotW for long-time Zelda fans generally suffer from being somewhat half-hearted. The temples have a more varied design and are more integrated into Hyrule than the Divine Beasts were, but structurally they're still "interact with five glowing spots on the map in any order then go to the boss", and, unlike the Divine Beasts which turn off Link's ability to climb in order to allow for navigation puzzles, the temples allow you to break them in various ways (except the desert temple, where Ascend will usually leave you either in the boss chamber or outside the pyramid rather than letting you bypass chunks of the temple), meaning a lot of players can just ignore the temples' puzzles and then complain about how they don't have any. Overall, I think I prefer TotK to BotW, but it's hard to convince myself of that because of the lack of polish in some weird places.
I get your argument, and I don't think that you're wrong for most of it, but I don't think the obscure movement tech being unintentional takes away from the game. It doesn't affect people who don't know about it, it just improves the experience of the people who do. The best comparison I have is wavedashing in smash bros melee. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that BOTW deserves praise for it because obviously it was unintentional, but I do think that TOTK deserves scrutiny for removing a lot of it. BTB's, skew clipping, and overloading the game don't affect the average player but was patched out presumably because players were having too much fun with it. Even stuff that was in TOTK but was patched out like zuggling and infinite horse stamina (which was also in BOTW). This stuff doesn't affect most people but it was still removed. I get that you want to play the game casually, but that shouldn't mean making the game worse for people who don't want to play casually.
@pokemon5life167 Let me be clear, I don't think that the movement and physics stuff take away from the game, and I am not saying it shouldn't count to how FUN a game is. But like you said, especially with stuff that is as obscure as they are, the movement tech exploits in BOTW, shouldn't be core what makes a game "good". Like they are way out of the intended use case and would not be used by the vast majority of players on their first, and most of the time, only playthroughs. As for TOTK taking them away, I believe nintendo themselves talked about having to fix most of them because of how everything needed to be converted to rely on physics so much due to the new ultrahand abilities. It wasn't patched out because "people were having too much fun with it" but because nintendo generally has a reputation for polish, and It effects their reputation when a large portion of the content being uploaded surrounding a game is effectively just showcasing how broken it was and how players are doing everything in their power to avoid the intended experience. They don't want one of their flagship characters to be associated with game breaking exploits that effectively give him the powers of a god, they want link to be associated as a character that is courageous and uses every tool he can to overcome great evil (even if the players themselves are ironically doing that by breaking the game it still doesn't create the associations they want) My want to play the game casually is more related to the things like the guardians being annoying gatekeepers or not wanting to have to climb excessive amounts of cliffsides staring at textures only to find barely anything at the top, than the idea that link could do something like use a bomb to push another bomb into him so that he flies really far and fast. I believe they said in an interview at one point that they removed the ability to do some of these things because they were problematic when trying to implement the new abilities. I don't think, there's anything wrong with devs wanting to polish the game and patching exploits that are clearly outside of the intended experience, especially when some of these new game features replace the use cases for some of the physics exploits. Like, yeah you aren't moving as fast on a hover bike as when you break your back with a bomb (or bounce on a moblin's head in bullet time) and it doesn't feel like you pulled off some cool move, but there's still meaningful satisfaction in building things that I very much enjoy and it solves the same problem (that there's honestly too much empty space and things to climb in hyrule) while being completely accessible to every player. They were clearly trying to replace some of these capabilities (at least the movement ones) with actual mechanics in the game, and frankly that is actually something that is generally good. Most people are just disappointed that TOTK isn't the game they imagined and wanted it to be. Older fans were disappointed that they doubled down on the BOTW formula and didn't go back to the traditional Zelda formula, and newer fans are frustrated that it is set in the same place that they have explored a thousand times and got too hung up on the fact that they can't use game breaking exploits to move around at crazy speeds to avoid exploring that they didn't feel the joy of exploring all the new things they added. I'd wager some also felt too frustrated that they no longer knew how to duplicate all the items they want, that they didn't realize that the new fuse system largely fixes the issues that lead them to want to duplicate the items in the first place. Even the tears as cutscenes were an attempt at fixing the memory mechanic from the first game, and hell at least I got to experience the story without having to go out of my way to do so. I definitely think they should have programmed the cutscenes to just show up chronologically regardless of the tear you find, and that they should have had more dialogue that was actually reflective of link being aware of where zelda is. My point is a lot of these changes are CLEARLY done in an effort to address problems in the previous game. Frankly, even though I am in the camp of people that would have rather seen the game have more linear dungeons like older titles, I tempered my expectations and was ready for another BOTW game with none of the dungeons and atmosphere I feel in love with as a kid. I don't think that either of the two games are the best in the series (I would pick OOT or LTTP), and while I am with @johnforkner that the way the dismissal of established lore. The whole Zonai thing is a complete miss if you ask me. I thought that the Rauru from OOT watching over you as an owl was way more compelling of a character, and the story of Skyward sword that they ignored was one of the only good things going for it (and SS's dungeons were actually really good). Again, though, tempered expectations let me not get too hung up on it as Zelda games have never been consistent with lore. In my opinion ToTK is a better game. I feel it does a much better job delivering the open world Zelda experience, allowing me to get lost in exploring hyrule without a lot of the frustrations of BoTW...and it had much better bosses allowing me to feel like im actually defeating evil instead of a futile attempt at killing some obscure anthropomorphic plague the 4 times only to find out that the final boss is the exact same boss all over again...(really making the final boss feel pointless)
I just miss the traditional style. It was perfectly fine, and had plenty of room for innovation, so there was no reason to completely trash it like they did.
@@tomgu2285 Nah, they never tried to sell an original Zelda game on Switch to know this answer. They know that it could have the potential to do much more than the 9M Twilight Princess did(previous best selling). By the time Twilight Princess did 9M Mario Galaxy made 12,75M. Then Mario Odyssey was able to increase sales to 28M withouth throwing 3D Mario formula in the garbage, just by evolving it. They went panic mode due to Skyward Sword weak sales. For some reason they decided it was a good idea to create a corridor game using motion controls.
@tomgu2285 You have mha as a pfp your opinion is invalid. It doesn't really matter how many sales you get. Shit gets sold well if you advertise it well. Botw is a good example for that. Your argument for high sales directly connecting to a game being good is incorrect. I could say the same thing for Fifa or CoD games. They sell very well but are objectively shit for a long time. If the next open world Zelda comes out, with the same formula, it will sell less than TP and Aonuma will be shivering.
I cannot agree less with defending the Divine Beasts. The temples feel like they actually have backstory relevant to their regions. The divine beasts in no way felt like a part of the world and only on replay could I actually differentiate them all, and the act of playing through them was a negative experience for me.
I love ToTK to goddamn death but I always said while playing that it felt more like a definitive edition of BOTW rather than a full-on sequel. I just feel like ToTK is currently suffering from the issue that a lot of Zelda games have where it’s gassed for like a year and then later on people suddenly think "Damn, this sucks..", I’ve seen it happen a lot in the past. But I still think it’s a masterpiece regardless of how many video essays I see saying otherwise. (STOP ARGUING IN THE COMMENTS, DAMN)
You're talking about the so-called "Zelda cycle". Which is more a meme than anything else. It's not a real thing, given that opinions about Zelda games don't really change all that much as people claim if you actually pay attention. "Majora's Mask" is the only game that has gone to something resembling what the Zelda cycle claims, but the rest? "The Wind Waker" was a case of people who played as children growing up and voicing their opinion, and the HD remaster fixing its main flaws. "Twilight Princess" has gotten stuck in a weird limbo, where its reputation is neither here nor there. "Skyward Sword" is still considered the second black sheep of the franchise alongside "The Adventure of Link" (the HD remaster didn't change anything in that regard. Onces its hype cycle ended, it's reputation was back where it started). And "Breath of the Wild" reputation never really dwindle in any meaningful capacity. And also... "Tears of the Kingdom" is just very poorly put together as a whole. It doesn't hold up any kind of analysis because the physics engine took so much of the game's development resources that it devoured the game's actual design.
What are you talking about? People have been saying this game sucks since it came out, myself included. The hate isn't something new More and more people are probably finishing the game these days and finding out for themselves how much of a disappointment the entire game was and are now making videos about it
for me i felt like it was a full on sequel to botw, i bought totk the day i was completing botw, and played the day after cuz download. maybe that makes me biased since i played it right after, but it felt so well fit in and it felt like i was playing the same game just a sequel. i really enjoy totk, and i’m still not done. i bought it 7 days ago lol
i love watching videos about why totk sucks while playing totk, not out of enjoyment (or else i wouldnt need the company of youtubers), but to get my fucking 70 dollars worth 😭
I would disagree with not having gloom food for the final fight. If the player followed the direct story path the gloom system is well and overly explained and anti gloom food shows up in a few quests as an component and reward the fact that the final charge take place in the depths is more than enough warning to expect the player to bring gloom healing food if they want that option available and if someone beelines to the finish then not having that resources is part of the challenge they are looking for.
In my opinion, breath of the wild is massively overrated and tears of the kingdom is a better game because it is more fun. I’m not someone who really cares about the story in Zelda games, so I prioritize the gameplay. Even saying that, totk is far from my favorite Zelda game, mostly because I’m just not a fan of open world games
Both of these games have pros and cons for me. Getting shrines feels quicker and more fun in Totk while longer in botw making it feel less grindy for upgrades. However totk brings in a lot of things that feel slow. Koroks give you longer tasks, mining battery ore is slow, side quests seem to be given by people telling of places using the names of those places which I don’t know or can’t see on my map while in botw most of the ones I remember looked off into the distance pointing you towards the side quest, and you have to constantly pause to drop items to fuse onto your weapons and arrows. However there are great upsides to totk. The building is great, the bosses are better, there is more enemy variety, the arm abilities are better, and more stuff previously locked into amiibo is now accessible. However, the rewards for completing parts of the main quest are worse and kind of niche. Sidon’s shield is mediocre mainly good for getting you wet to take advantage of Zora weapons, Yunobo makes using vehicle constructs worse by worsening your view, Riju needs to charge up her range but your arrows are quicker and you’re usually using them from a range she struggles to reach, and finally there is Tulin who is great with the only complaint comes from rarely blowing away items I wanted. The Master Sword’s quest was also worse. Getting to the forest and freeing the Deku Tree is great but getting on the Dragon can be annoying depending on where it’s flying. Aside from the initial surprise that attaining the sword needed more stamina rather than hearts the task is worse since I instantly knew I probably needed the second full wheel and used the demon statue to trade in my hearts. I couldn’t do that in botw since most if not all of my upgrades went to hearts and the number required was a mystery to me. The sword itself feels weaker in totk as it wants you to use fusion and isn’t that great even when glowing. I think it should be fine on its own as that’s the big upgrade that the Master Sword is in these games. You get a permanent sword that you can use for encounters and preserve your best weapons. Now since most weapons rely on the strapped on item including the Master Sword so it’s not as good at preserving your inventory outside of the depths where it glows against all opponents. The weapons as a whole feel worse since you don’t get many cool looking weapons. Everything consists of dull weapons that rely on the strapped on item which looks bad. The boko reaper was the only blade that looked like a neat upgrade to a sword while other enemy parts are too wide or don’t attach to a hilt. They’re just swords with a rock or weird object glued to its edge. You always need to keep a weapon with a weird thing strapped to it that is durable enough to keep breaking rocks while weak enough not to be wasted on rocks. I miss the unique designs for weapons that botw had. You had an actual mining hammer with several Goron weapons that can also fill the role. There were cool elemental weapons that were replaced by fruits and minerals. The minerals work but the fruit apart from fire look out of place on arrow tips.
I'm glad to see you put this out after you threw the idea out there a little while back. I'm really impressed with the scripting and editing here. Boomie zoomies
Hold up how did you have trouble running totk on the switch I never had that problem it didn't even lag for me all tho I did spend most of my running around in caves or the depths
I agree with the the depths design being boring altho it was the easiest way to get large numbers of white monster parts so I would go on a war path killing everything only to end up with unnecessary numbers of parts
i fucking love totk, but i wished they would incorporate classic zelda elements, like actual good and restricive dungeons, and a story that develops as you play. Its like the Zelda team thinks classic zelda is just bad for some reason, like they've thrown out 31 years of Zelda
Same. I at least appreciated BotW as a potential framework that classic Zelda could be built on top of to really flesh it out, but since they're clearly going in the opposite direction, I'm basically gonna skip all new games til someone new is in charge and they make a classic styled game again
@@alysupersmashshowthe problem is that the classic dungeons are antithetical to the design of ToTK's systems. Unless you lock powers behind progression, and then design the game to reward backtracking for other cool rewards, which then means you need items that aren't going to break.
Breath is better in nearly every way. Tears is a bunch of shit that both doesnt belong in Zelda imo and that nobody asked for. I just couldnt even finish it while Breath i could not put down even after over 200 hours. Really bummed me out when Tears released i was so hyped. Been on board since the OG.... Breath is the best only beaten by OoT by nostaligia and traditional Zelda formula that i prefer
I firmly believe that most of it not all of the Depths should’ve been scrapped and those resources should’ve been put into the sky. They spread themselves too thin and the games sleep inducing shallowness shows.
"On the fucking contrary." -beaver guy from max tennyson's UK simulator review. I loved the video, but if I really liked it, I wouldn't have to preface that I loved it, or even make a comment about it. I want to talk about some of the criticism that was mentioned in the video, because there are some issues with the game that are 100% true (like I feel progression needs a guide to have the best experience, something to get players into the new machanics with a surplus of materials for them), but there were only a handful that were valid. I suppose I should rant in order of parts. Part 1: I think this is correct for the wrong reason, TOTK is a better game but to enjoy it, you should play BOTW. BOTW was all about the freedom of the game, it was amazing in what it did, but to expect TOTK to have the same experience on the same map, or even a better one, is just wrong. TOTK is more about sandbox-ing the game that BOTW was, and it succeeded. Part 2: I don't usually play on different save files so I wouldn't know much about replayability from the beginning of a game, but I think TOTK's was better because I wasn't feeling exploring the same map, so extending the tutorial was fine with me. Part 3 & 4: TOTK's runes are a staple of the game, whereas BOTW's solve niche issues with exploration. Although TOTK's ascend and recall essentially do that too, in those situations, you were provided with solutions to problems that would be very annoying if recreated in BOTW, (1st game doesn't have the bird goat). Part 5: yeah this entire section is true. I know what the team was trying for, but the lack of power from the sages makes me ponder if I should've saved the other 3 (4) after Tulin. Part 6 & 7: I think the sky islands and depths are great because they add the situation of finding out the uses of the new zonai devices, but also in such a new experience that it's easily the most memorable part of the game. I understand where linguini is coming from when it comes to content from each one, it's just that the games discreetly changed categories, which answers what I think of part 8, besides the caves. The caves are cool to find, just extremely annoying to do so, so much so that they needed to add a mechanic just so you could find it. Now, that's not to jab at TOTK because we all know that if it was a situation in BOTW, there would be no help rather than a little mechanic. I just wanted to point it out as the improvement of a guide being minuscule. Part 9: Yeah, the tutorial shrine bit is true. But I enjoy the tests of combat (forgot the name) where you are taught to utilize scarce weapons and elements of combat like BOTW did with the master sword trials, except it was way more fun to do so with the game's new mechanics, (context, I threw an apple behind an enemy and snuck up behind him for a sneakstrike. 10/10 would isasc newton again). Part 10: The dungeons themselves are not enjoyable to me, I liked the progression to the dungeons and the bosses more, which seem to be what the devs liked more about them too, because yiu can refight bosses in the depths, and the path feels refurbished. Part 11: Guardians - why they succeed: these enemies directly combat the sense of freedom the player has in BOTW. For example, you can't flurry rush a guardian- in vanilla- and if you want to beat them, you have to exploit their o n l y weakness, (well i guess the legs can be another one, but its very clear that the eye is their only weakness.) And as for the gloom hands, they do the same thing guardians do, just in a different sense because if guardians were in TOTK, they wouldn't stand a chance against zonai devices. Also I'm pretty sure the gloom hands are supposed to be fought using zonai equipment, and the only reason people, myself included, feel like the way to beat them is you HAVE to use arrows, is because of how discarded zonai fusions are. They take up a spot in your inventory, which wouldn't be a problem, IF they had good durability. You can get armor that increases the effectiveness of them, but it's really out of the way to do so, because it's on a random sky island, whereas the skydiving armor is in distinct sky islands. Part 12: if im being real, TOTK had a better story imo because zelda is in the intro which means she's finally in my hands whereas I played through the entirety of BOTW to just have her be the one hot cashier I saw that one time and can only make fake scenarios of in my mind. Ok the previous statement is exaggerated, but it still felt way more intertwined eith the story than BOTW because I could actually play with the lore integral people than have them be consistently ghosts, those may seem the same, but I see the sages more as stands than evil spirits. Part 13: yeah the gloom part is true. They should've put more info on the new mechanics, have one of my sages say "hey dumbass make sure you have sun percs." As for the boss, the part about the ganon clones and sages are the same as calamity ganon losing half his HP for playing the game. I wanted to test my strength against a full strength boss too, especially in the game that is getting less flak than its successor. The part about imagine dragons is true. Part 14/15: Although I would've ignored this section because I like glitches and the raw enjoyment of a game's intented and unintended mechanics too, I'll use it to defend TOTK to the best of my ability. Movement boiling down to using the hover bike is certainly a mindset. I would've supported it if was mentioned that you just spam Tulin, but there's elements of combat potential that get missed out if you only use ultrahand and autobuild for the hover bike. For extended travel, yeah I might use a hover bike, but for something that's close to me, I'm doing the most random shit possible to get from point A to point B. The sandbox-ing is what makes the game, it wasn't really focused on freedom of exploration, but freedom of execution. Part 15: I never had TOTK take more than a minute personally, but the depths sometimes having to load is real. Outro-take: this is where I differ, TOTK was a game of all time, the experience is what msde it so memorable. For it to be a BOTW 2: Electric Boogaloo, I would not have enjoyed it as much. Although they could have certainly expanded on where BOTW left in terms of quality, I feel like it's fine where it is. It's a new experience, different from BOTW, but same in the replayability. I really hate that I have to leave it off with an IGN-ass review of "it has a little something for everyone," but it's slightly true. If you want a BOTW exploration freedom, replay BOTW. But if you want a BOTW creative freedom, play TOTK. Finally, thank you linguini for making this video. It has shows the key differences in each game and why people might've disliked it when it was supposed to be BOTW's successor. The video has too much water though, 7.7/10
I mean fair enough if you don't agree with me, this whole video is one big opinion piece to be fair so disagreement was something i expected The too much water bit at the end got me tho lmfao
i really hate the recent surge of totk hate, a bit because its justified but mainly its just the switch up due to hindsight. i still think this game is a 9/10, never got bored or sick of anything, just kind of sad that the hype didnt fully live up but tbf the hype was insane so it was inevitable
Nah, it's not justified at all. Totk is better than BotW in 90+% of aspects, people just got a hate boner over it because 1- unmatched expectations (their own fault) and 2- Zelda hate cycle. In a couple of years there will be videos saying how totk was actually a masterpiece and *insert newest Zelda game* is garbage and ruined the series.
Glad you fully enjoyed it. I'm a big fan of fun exploits though and that they patched up the good ones asap really ruined a lot of the fun I was looking forward to in the sequel relative to the first game.
Imo, TotK was set up to fail for many because the devs didn't realize what made BotW work. Ignorance is what made things work. BotW mechanics were often fighting themselves (Cooking replaced shrines, combat made things worse for you 99% of the time due to world leveling mixed with durability) TotK only had the ignorance of Fuse, which meant people would naturally learn how to use it without glitches quickly. Since most shrines were built allowing cheese players naturally invalidate things and in turn there is no "solving" as every answer that works is correct. You're now left with a game that slows down combat, has mostly redundant exploration, and relies entirely on its story to carry it. This isn't a book so this is really bad situation. There was still fun to be had, but the strengths got weaker and the weaknesses got bigger.
I haven’t finished the vid yet but my personal gripe with the game is the amount of available options in moment-to-moment gameplay. Because the possibilities are so expansive, I never feel like I’m doing or tackling anything in an acceptable way. It’s the difference between building a Lego than can be 20 different things, vs being given a huge amount of pieces and told to go wild. I just like a bit of structure. This is very preference-based and not an objective thing, but I’ve talked to a lot of folks who’ve felt the same. I think too much freedom can be a hindrance in the some contexts.
I 100% breath of the wild. This I did the main dungeons. Like 10% of the depths (absolutely despised every moment of it) and even less of the sky island. Maybe did 20 shrines. A few side quests. Put it down and never touched it again. I'll take a good game with a solid narrative and great puzzles over the ultra hand thing any day. It was cool in the beginning. Lost interest half way through.
@@linguini645 Tears of the kingdom was all about cool ideas and bad execution. Zelda being a dragon was a cool idea. But since this isn't a linear story, it was executed badly. What if they sent link to the first Hyrule kingdom. It would've been so cool even with the same map and it could've explained why there are no sheikah technology and guardians around. The first hour I thought this was the best game ever made. Then it became a drag. By the end of felt like work.
The problem is not TotK especially, but the problem of open World games. I've been saying that for years. A big world with almost nothing to do besides the same copy and paste quests. Boring and bad game design.
This, but I think open world games have so much potential that is never explored because bigger = better. I think Elden Ring handles this problem mich better but even this game could've focused less on quantity
You know, I had a thought. Remember when Nintendo wanted to make an Ocarina of Time sequel where they'd reshuffle the dungeons? Tears of the Kingdom is like that in a sense. You have the same map and go to the same dungeon locations and interact with a lot of the same characters. The same map is the biggest issue from what I've seen. The exploration is less exciting when it's all the same. And the Depths and Sky Islands are unnecessary other than the tutorial and final fight. Also, this is a personal issue, but what the HELL happened to all the Shieka tech? Where are the towers? The shrines? The guardians? It's like they were all just erased from the map. I would've liked to see hints of them, at least. Maybe some construction taking down the Shieka towers, or the shrines having been destroyed or deactivated in various ways (I mean with everything falling from the sky, that's a really good reason to have a bunch of them crushed). I'm sure there's some dialogue somewhere in the game explaining where it all went, but I'd like to actually _see_ it. Another thing I personally have a problem with is the conclusion. I really really don't like that Link gets his arm back and Zelda is a human again. It just erases the permanence of what happened to them.
The lore isn’t the end all. I have played both games and I like them both for different reasons. BOTW was straight up fantastic because it was first, it was the first to prove just how awesome a game could be, it still makes the list for the best games to play. BOTW will always have a place in my heart. The thing about TOTK, it is Zelda on crack. The sheer amount of things to do is absolutely impressive, the exploration and the tool building is next level in game play. I understand why the lore pisses people off, because it’s like they had these mechanics and truths in the first game and they were all dismissed for some other new ideas. I personally think that was a missed opportunity on Nintendo’s part, that they could have left some of the old tech and built on from there. The complaint of not getting the dungeon crawl feel with BOTW was more than made up with the exploration with the caves, sky islands and the underground areas in TOTK. I’m no purist but at the end of the day, both games are powerhouses and they need to looked at like two completely separate games to be fully appreciated.
TotK traded too much quality for quantity. Sure you now have 3 worlds to explore instead of 1, but one of them is mostly the same, the other is a mirrored version of that same world, and the third is a bunch of cookie cutter islands. BotW had new fun quests and challenges around every corner. TotK constantly recycles stuff.
It's a combination of burnout of the format (already) combined with granular lateral changes and severe design oversights. Basically, it's glorified DLC. Although to be fair, if it was a "real" sequel, people would still have issues with it because BotW had its own issues that will likely never be addressed, especially compared to all the prior games. The future of the series will likely be a rough one.
This game had so much potential to destroy the gaming world for the next decade but it just ended up being a DLC of the previous game with a lacklustre sky, lacklustre depths, a shockingly bad story, and a map with the EXACT SAME TOPOGRAPHY (I will never stop saying how terrible this was, you couldn’t even change up the location of a few things? The whole overworld HAD to be the same and you had 6 years to tinker with it???????) Peoples expectations are in the mud. This type of laziness wouldn’t have ever been accepted from any gaming company 10 years ago, but because it says “nintender” and “zelder” on the box it must be a good game that we praise. Complete cashgrab.
Removing the awesome champion abilities and replacing them with POS ghost companions with mediocre abilities that are a pain to use...that was unforgivable.
The runes in botw always felt lacking to me. Using magnesis would make me wonder what would it be like using it on any item (like ultrahand). Classic bombs were always cooller (i dont care about speedrun glitches). Cryonis was pretty niche, most of the time just for crossing rivers. Stasis was cool, but also lackluster. Dont get me wrong, the work pretty well for the game, but it felt like it needed an oomph.
Taking them at face value yeah they're pretty lame but if you dig a bit deeper the runes just present so many interesting quirks and things to mess around with
I feel like most of the people who don't like totk are just burned from botw and didn't played the game thinking " new game " but more like " botw dlc" and that made them think that "its just the same thing" when they didn't even treated it like a game
Yeah, and usually what I heard is: "Oh gosh it's the same map, that's boring, I'm going back to BOTW..." Which is pure bad faith. I don't dislike the first game and I know TOTK isn't perfect but let's be honnest for a second...
Imagine how mediocre TotK was that you need to constantly deny reality to feel its not a glorified dlc... Sorry but thinking something isn't real doesn't change truth, making TotK feel new was the devs job, not ours
@@Kooptj Imagine how mediocre BotW was that you need to constantly deny reality to feel it's not a glorified tech demo... Being reductive is a fun and easy way to dismiss someone's point without having to actually address any merit they may have, isn't it! Never mind whether your argument actually stands up to even a tiny bit of scrutiny: - you assume that DLC is bad: "Shadow of the Erdtree is just DLC! Fancy anyone liking that!" - you assume that it's reasonable to treat BotW as the main game and TotK as the secondary material when the later is significantly larger, so, if anything, BotW is the demo for TotK rather than the other way around (actually, there are enough things in BotW that aren't in TotK that describing them as a single game raises questions about whether you've actually played both of them). Next you'll be arguing that Link Between Worlds is just LttP DLC... Personally, after having finished BotW once and started replaying it something like three times without it keeping my interest very long, I found TotK brought enough novelty to sustain my interest through a complete playthrough (all shrines; nowhere near all koroks), and I might go back and start a replay at some point in the next 5-6 years.
To some degree. But there's also a lot of just not liking where they took the story, the lore, the mechanics. TotK has a lot of bad incentives that make the game less fun. Like who uses horses when you can drop a hoverbike or wing anywhere? Who cares about the rewards when you're getting similar meaningless rewards every 5 minutes? BotW was definitely a tech demo in many ways, but TotK is really just a showcase of Ultrahand and a lot of moving parts that don't work great together. Sure, there are people who don't like that the sense of exploration is basically gone from the reused world and the rewards for the new things ranging from being old to underwhelming. A sequel isn't made in a vacuum. Plenty have been able to make their worlds feel new again to returning players. Clearly this game had game design issues for so many people to feel burned by it, especially with so many having reasons beyond just the exploration issue
@@Chronoflation To be fair, I never used horses in BotW either - they're useless for exploring because you ditch them the moment you start scaling a hill, and then they're stuck on the other side of a hill and there's not much point going back for them. And they're hopelessly outclassed for travelling distances since you can just warp to where you want to be instead. Aside from a few specific quests that explicitly require horses, neither game saw me using them. That's not to say that TotK is a great game - it's an improvement on BotW in a lot of ways, but it's also a repeat of BotW in a lot of ways - for someone who hasn't played either, my guess is their favourite would be whichever they play first (since it'll get the full benefit of novelty) but when your game is showing less polish than the original Majora's Mask, you're doing something wrong...
Wowie isn't that a long video
Since this isn't Ultrakill this is going to flop so uh do the like and subscribe thing ok thanks
Do a binding of isaac video fr
you deserve more traction for the reviews and content you do on other games than ultrakill
Bro was correct
ngl i don't understand why more peeps don't watch you bc your vids are fire
This is god damn peak.
For a lot of Zelda fans it has less to do with the lack of speed run jank and more to do with a total dismissal of the lore.
This is fair but for me personally I am such a fan of the stupid janky shit in Botw lol
Feels like a different franchise at this point and I hope Nintendo is listening to the criticism
It's a better franchise. One that has possibilities besides the same old forest temple fire temple fight ganon. Not that those were not great in their day but the world has moved on.
I guarantee if they released a classic 3D Zelda right now people would complain about the linearity and lack of freedom.
@@eddiemoney1093 They should adopt the Mario model. The Mario franchise has happily existed with both linear and sandbox styles in their 3D games. If Zelda did a couple open world games and followed it up with one or two in the linear style, I think folks would be pleased.
The existence of Echoes of Wisdom and Aonuma's recent interview makes me think that they've gone all-in on this concept of open world and player toolkits.
@@eddiemoney1093 That's simply an inaccurate description of the series. On top of that, the two titles that are the MOST similar are BotW and TotK. The classic formula stood for 30 years while this style has become stale with just two entries.
I 100% agree that people would complain about the difference if Zelda went back to its roots but that's because, again, this is a different franchise now. Most of the "Zelda fans" only joined the series with BotW. You can like BotW and TotK, you can love them, but it's just different and we haven't had a _real_ Zelda since 2013.
The other thing with Gloom Hands vs Guardians is that if you stay out of their range for long enough, the Hands will just get bored and poof out of existence, dropping some materials on their way out. Barely any input needed, they're just gone. Meanwhile if a Guardian sees you, it will keep chasing you to the ends of Hyrule unless you find a way to lose it.
All you have to do is just climb up onto a higher platform. Just has to be as high as the gloom hands are tall. Or just climb the wall just out of reach. I did it once and I exploit that all the time now because it's effing hilarious.
I mean…true. I avoided guardians at all costs at the beginning of the game, but, by end game, I was hunting them for their components so I could make more ancient arrows. I wound up with like 75 ancient arrows to use on the final boss….but only needed about 10.
@@KevinsHopesame... Except I kept going until I had like 500 😅
The guardians are also more imposing and in your way. Hyrule feels safer because every Gleeok (beside the Hylia bridge one), every Lynel, and every gloom puddle is off of the paths in the game. You rarely see them around NPCs as well, so you don't get to actually see frightened reactions. I do love TOTK a lot, and I think the map in and of itself is great, but it doesn't give you thrills in my eyes, doesn't make you fear for a second, doesn't break up the relative safety of the paths. The Lynels are always out of your way, and even if you come down and they notice you, they allow you to walk away if you don't draw your weapons (tried that myself)
@lydiagalantmotherf lynels were like that in BotW too but yeah, they're so out of the way that honestly, I barely saw them in TotK. It feels like there were more in BotW but I probably passed so far away from their new locations that they didn't even spawn into view.
It barely feels like a sequel to BotW, but it doesn't feel like a standalone game either.
Thats such a good point that i havent thought about
So in other words it's glorified DLC
@@Gael-x999 real
Nah I disagree it feels like both really.
totk = dlc
they had too many ideas to add in dlc patch so made the same game twice, as the first game made them huge profit & sold many copies
As a fan of the lore, Eiji Aonuma coming out and admitting that there was no reason in particular for the Guardians, original shrine/towers and Devine Beasts being removed from TOTK is what made me stop playing it. They treated their own narrative as if it wasn't something that resonated with players when BOTW was still new and then acted confused when their lazy decision was met with criticism.
Not to mention how bad sonia and rauru are
I can’t believe they just didn’t make a whole new map like wtf? Why would they use the same map from botw? Imagine if Majoras mask used the same map as ocarina of time.
This is one of the biggest fuck you in the face from Eiji Aonuma for me. Feel like the dev is just go and watch some youtube theorycrafting and be like: you know what, let just make a sequel and focus on zonai shits ppl are bitching about. and then shove a cock on my throat with this one. I think i know why they make it a sequel not a dlc, because it's so disconnected that even the dev themself cant even connect it to botw to make it a dlc.
It's not even laziness, it's just plain disrespect. Aonuma clearly has grown to hate this series and is trying to transform into just reflecting his personal ideal game. People always talk about giving creative freedom to developers and all that, but, honestly, Aonuma needs to be reigned in. He's totally destroying Zelda's brand identity at this point. I'm honestly amazed Nintendo's let him run this series for so long, considering he only had 1 really successful entry before TotK, and it was the one he didn't want to make that most closely followed the Ocarina of Time format (Twilight Princess). BotW was his only twist on the formula that paid off, and TotK did well just off of brand recognition from BotW. And now, between the remasters/remakes of the old games and his obsessed "convention breaking" new games, people aren't going to be able to just see Zelda on the shelves of a store and know they're gonna like it. Nintendo should be freaking out about this, but they're so loyal to their team leaders they're letting one risk long-term success for massive short-term sales. Zelda currently has negative momentum in sales. TotK had record launch sales but also post launch window sales closer to year 5 or 6 BotW and declining. That is not something a company wants to see in a game they took 6 years to develop, even if they increased their revenue per sale by roughly 17% with the price hike. I have to question why the business leadership is allowing this to be the only option Zelda has at this point
@@Chronoflation TOTK still sold 10m copies more (at the very least) than all previous zelda games (minus oot if you include the 3ds sales), the game not having long legs isn't a problem when his body already pulled 20m copies anyways
For most people, the problem is we wanted Breath of the Wild but with a dash of more Zelda. Instead we got Breath of the Wild: Nuts and Bolts.
Seriously, who asked for this? Sure you can build a helicopter and fly it over a barren underground world… but I think most fans would happily trade all that away for some real dungeons and more enemy variety.
Who asked for bad motion controls? Who asked for an empty ocean that you're forced to slowly sail across? Who asked for doing fetch quests as a gimped wolf? Who asked for Zelda to be on a timer.
Who asked for anything?
Also, based on TotK's reception, people loved Ultrahand way more than any main gimmick in a Zelda game and considering the overall reception of the new games, they are a lot more popular than the ones with more enemy variety or """real""" dungeons. How can that be? 🤔
@@vadoslink446 because the only people who think totk is better than every other Zelda game have only played that “Zelda Game”. Say what you want about botw but to me it felt like an adventure like I was actually apart of the story. I also didn’t really think that botw needed great dungeons because that wasn’t the point. The point of those dungeons were to get you to go to those locations and guide you on a path that you don’t have to. Totk acted like they made actual dungeons and tried to make them the main main goal even though there’re just activate 5 terminals and open a thing etc.
@@pezdoma5674 The people who consider TotK to be the best are simply those who value nuance, complexity and player agency...something that's lacking in most of the older titles. Your comparison between TotK and BotW is incredibly hypocrital and doesn't make much sense, considering that Divine Beasts and Dungeons in TotK serve the exact same purpose and share their open design.
Also, "just activate 5 terminals" is a dumb argument. There's nothing wrong with it. Might as well shit on old dungeons by saying "just collect keys".
@@vadoslink446 "The people who consider ToTK to be the best are simply those who value nuance, complexity and player agency" holy reddit moment
@@aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaeiou guess nostalgiatards disagree about the fact that a non-linear game leads to more player agency, lmao.
I find building to be kind of tedious. The Depths are straight up boring. The depths are my least favorite part of the game.
Ultrahand is so cool but it takes so long to make anything actually interesting
@@linguini645and everything disappears in a matter of seconds or if you move the camera a little farther away.
@@RevaliHeeHo I think if you attach a piece of dragonshard it stays, something like that
TOTK becomes like Minecraft, I don’t like it. I prefer BOTW powers
Building is tedious and the problem is also that it lacks utility. You build something and ditch it because now the thing built doesn't fit the area anymore. It's like the problem of taking out your horse in BOTW times 10 - ultimately not really worth it, and gnaws at you to burn resources.
After Torrent in Elden Ring, I just hate the lack of true ease of use and convenience in these types of travel mechanics/companions.
We know you like well crafted stories, engaging puzzles, and intense boss battles, but wouldn't you rather glue a rock to a stick?
i pray for the day when we can have both
If the next Zelda doesn’t have huge exciting dungeons, then I’m not buying it
Clearly more people would rather buy the second option. Look at the sales.
@@paczka695I'd rather create a mech and sky bike that I can take across areas. Especially when I figured out how to do it myself without any help online.
Yeah man, everybody loves those. Zelda was totally known for well crafted stories. I still cry every time when I think of Link's nameless uncle dying in the first minute of the game. Puzzles used to be so engaging too...man, always using your newest item on everything and slowly pushing blocks was peak puzzle design. And don't get me started on the bosses. I absolutely love standing around and waiting for the boss to expose his obvious weak spot.
Screw the Zelda devs for actually developing a nuanced game.
No! Youre not actually saying the Geoglyphs were better than the memories!
Finding the memories through the pictures was like an environmental puzzle and it was amazing!
The geoglyphs were the opposite of that! No mystery to discover. And then running up and down the area like an idiot! 😡
I mean nah both were fun for different reasons, the botw ones could be too vague at times tbh
Agreed 100%. The memories were much more interesting.
Exactly all you have to do is get in the sky.
Litterly just a. Hot air balloon or fast travel to a sky shrine and fly
It’s the same answer everytime
@@damiantorres5569 all but 1 geoglyph I just warped to different towers and then found them and paraglided over to them
What hurts me is that they just repeated the lost memories quest from botw in a worse way, instead of doing something different. I mean the geoglyphs exist because ancient Hylians found the dragon tears and wanted to preserve them as history right? Why not stick to that idea, but instead of drawing some pictures on the ground just hide them away in some mini dungeons? Could have been a good excuse to give the depths more content, have them hidden in all the Zonai ruins we find down there, maybe behind some puzzles.
I love ganondorf bossfight for your opposite reason.
It feels personal you prepare for your entire journey just to fight this guy and the sages actually try to help you but get defeated in no time, this really makes you feel like the hero that is supposed to defeat him and the other thing that i loved is that ganondorf has a fighting style similar to yours so it feels like that you are fighting your true nemesis.
It's pretty cool how we can have such opposite interpretations of the same bossfight
@@linguini645 yes it is.
i understand your point the boss of botw is bigger and more grotesque but it really was too easy.
@@sarchiaponeseriale4380 That's fair calamity is a bit of a pushover
I agree that I enjoyed that boss fight more than calamity ganon, but I don't agree that it felt personal. It was implied at first that Ganondorf and Link would meet, perhaps in the past, in the intro of the game with Ganondorf uttering Links name, but as it turns out, this Ganondorf was just told by Rauru that one day some guy named Link would appear. I mean, OoT made more of a connection between Link and Ganondorf than ... this.
@@thephalange8630 what I was meaning is that they both fight similarly.
That's why it felt personal.
You know what really chaps my ass? In ToTK, I did the desert dungeon first and went "Oh boy, they really brought back the dungeons!" only to find out that was the only good one.
In Totk I always include the buildup to the entire dungeon itself.. For example the climb of the Wind Temple, the water works of Water temple and it's climb as well with zero gravity and imho it's designed and intended that way, the fire temple is already big enough on it's own.
I take it the Fire Temple and Construct Factory don't count as dungeons then, because both are excellent.
Fire temple was the best, don't get the hype for the lightning temple
@@RyansChannel0203You must have low standards, or never have played any of the previous Zelda Games
@@linkfreak1176 That's presumptuous of you. Because I've also played Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Windwaker.
So before you act like a dumbass and assume I haven't played Zelda before, at least put in the effort to ask whether or not I have. 👍
1:04:09 And there was such an easy fix for this. Instead of having each memory tied to a specific geoglyph, have it be that no matter what order you find the glyphs in, the story will be presented in the right order.
The glyphs are based on the memory tho that would make absolutely no sense. Finding the memory where queen Sonia dies at the master sword glyph… nah
when i played totk the first time, once i left the gsi i assumed tutorial was over and everything else was suggests quests, like how going to kakariko first in botw wasn’t necessary. so instead of going to lookout landing immediately, i went to kakariko and hateno instead to see how they had changed. i assumed the paraglider simply wasn’t in the game. when i came across a skyview tower, i was confused on why i couldn’t open it. had to ask my sister what was wrong and ended in me having to backtrack back to where i started and go to lookout landing. it’s so small and so simple that really, it shouldn’t be an issue. but when that happened i was disappointed. i liked how in botw once you had exited tutorial space, you were free to do whatever you did or didn’t want to do
I did the exact same thing and just ran off not getting the paraglider lmao
I straight up missed Lookout Landing and made a beeline for Hateno because I thought the paraglider might be there because, y’know, that’s where the tech lab is. Imagine my shock lmao
Same!
I feel like I'm the only person who saw lookout landing from the skydiving cutscene and went straight there. I just wanted to know what It was
So I'm not alone. I went to kakariko first thinking impa had my paraglider. Then I went to hateno all on foot
It feels like devs thought botw champion abilities were too OP so in totk the sage abilities are super nerfed. I’m shocked there’s people out there that think sages are better when they are objectively weaker and horrible to use
I'll take Yunobo over Daruk, but, yeah, the interface for Sage abilities (except when gliding/driving) is actively bad.
@@rmsgrey yunobo is only worth anything in caves and even then why would you deal with the long cooldown and him constantly disappearing in the small spaces when you can just use a hammer
@@megastarwarsrocks99 He's still better than shielding against three hits, and serves as a useful weapon in the on-rails sections, or when you want to strike explosive barrels.
@@rmsgrey Dpp?
The intro to tears of the kingdom was better than the entire game up to the boss fight at the end.
I was so hyped and ready for a true Zelda experience and then the real game started.
Preach 👏 Felt exactly the same
Yup. once the intro ended & I was forced to go through that 3-hour tutorial on Great Sky Island, my excitement went downhill from there
I was SO hyped for an epic final battle. The fucking last stage with dragon Ganondorf was such a waste. I literally expected an Elden Ring level of epicness but we got a boring and slow fight against a dragon? This dragon fight was lamer than any of the three headed ones.
@@pattiaufzack exactly! How is the final boss of the game, easier and less engaging than a mini boss that’s spammed all over the map?
Sonia and rauru are still trash
You know what my personal gripe is with totk? Exploration is gone, but not in the sense that it's the same map. In the sense that it's littered with stuff *everywhere*. I did a little test, I started from the same location in botw and totk, and just. Walked. I wanted to see if it would feel different, to see if I was crazy, and it was different!
Botw has a lot of room to breathe. And while I understand that doesn't feel the most fun or exciting for players, it feels ESSENTIAL to exploration. Walking through the vast nothing, the open air- it's fun, it's relaxing personally, the perfect digital walk- And without that empty space it really doesn't feel like you're actually DISCOVERING anything, since there's always something every other step. You never *stop* discovering and it's exhausting. In totk you cannot walk 5 feet without encountering an enemy, a camp, something to build, something that falls on top of you- and so on and so on.
Totk has too much going on personally, it feels overwhelming and yet it's all copy pasted. The sky island just litter the sky and I can't look at my pretty horizons without something blocking it. It feels like totk's world is build on "give the player as much dopamine as possible" and I hate that.
Botw felt like a world. Empty but alive, breathing. Totk feels like a video game, and I do not care for it.
To me another reason exploration is gone in totk is the broken travel mechanics. Getting around in botw was a great part of the game, I loved figuring out how to get over a mountain, making a fire under a tree to sleep til the rain goes away, really interacting with the environment. In totk, there's no reason not to just make a hoverbike and go exactly where you need to go, which makes getting around way less engaging and way less fun after a few hours. I played botw a lot even after beating the game, totk I stopped playing after 2 dungeons.
Nah exploration really isn't gone. I mean the map in BOTW was filled with stuff too. And is it being different a bad thing? It should feel different in some way especially when it reuses the map.
I mean TOTK has some to breathe too it really doesn't have too much going on and it doesn't really feel overwhelming tbh and isn't even all copy pasted either there is a good amount of variety there really. I mean no they complement the sky well and you look can past them and look at the horizons really. I disagree especially with how some people get quite frustrated with it lol, it really isn't based on giving the player as much dopamine as possible.
I mean both felt full of stuff and alive really, I don't see how Totk feels like a video game really.
Wow! You just revealed a massive part of when I gave up on the exploring.
I played it like BotW just getting distracted by every thing and tugging at the threads revealed.
At first curious, and then engaged, then it became a routine thing- i was just doing it to do it. And then I wondered why I was doing it.
Then the bubble burst over how boring and pointless it all was. But not only was the rewards painfully known, but I knew that the journey to that reward would feel so utterly miscellaneous
And there isn’t much variety of stuff to explore tbh the depths and sky islands are all mostly copy and pasted and the overworld I’ve already spent 200 hours in
Thank you, this was exactly how I felt and it's reassuring to see it said by someone else. BotW had felt empty in places, and I was hoping to see it be populated by less korok seeds and more life in TotK.
The monkey's paw curled. The map has been populated, but by video game gimmicks, not by life.
When I had last left BotW, I would spend hours just riding around the open fields with the Master Cycle, occasionally saving travellers from ambushes. Totk doesn't let me "go for a drive" like that, even though it lets you build vehicles.
In fact, that's the perfect analogy for it. I had more fun with one simple but refined vehicle -- the Master Cycle Zero -- than I did with any overcomplicated and unreliable monstrosity made by the Ultra Hand.
Beautiful but versatile simplicity, lost to bloat.
The biggest problem I had personally with TOTK is that much of it felt like busy work and wasn’t very fun to play. I just want a traditional Zelda but then with the possibilities of this generation.
This started in a weird tone for me. I think TOTK has a LOT of problems, and I really mean it, but you main complaining at the start is about how janky BOTW runes were and TOTK is not? It doesn't even sound fair. I'm not a speedrunner, I really don't care about pulling off a wind bomb if I'm playing BOTW, that is just a glitch, I don't think I've ever cared to try. If your style of play is trying to break a game as much as possible that's fine, but the fact that you can't fly a boat at high speed with magnesis and skip a lot of content is not a reason why TOTK is bad.
Yeah, agreed. Not to mention so many glitches were discovered years after BOTW’s release, such as BLSS, comparing the speedrun jank of a heavily dissected seven year old game to a game that’s only a year old is going to seem lackluster. And maybe that’ll change, maybe it won’t, but the thing is you just cannot expect a game to be broken wide open right away (and you shouldn’t want it to be! Glitches get patched when they’re found right away, as seen with things like auto build cancel slides and the XY duplication. It’s why I think BOTW is as broken open as it is, so many glitches were found after it was no longer being patched.)
It’s also just not the answer to the thesis statement of the video. The answer to “why were people disappointed in TotK?” is not and never will be “niche physics exploits that were in BotW aren’t in TotK”. I’d bet that less than 1% of players that played BotW even knew about windbombs, let alone used it in their playthroughs. The creator can certainly say “this is why I prefer BotW over TotK” but that’s not what they did, they’re arguing that this is why many people didn’t like the game and that’s just not the case.
Also I hard disagree with the take that the story content makes the game less replayable. People love reexperiencing stories, people will rewatch their favorite movies, TV shows, reread their favorite books, replay their favorite games, over and over and over because they like the story and want to experience it again. TotK lacks replayability because the story presented isn’t all that great and so once you’ve played through it once, you don’t really feel much of a need to play through it again. If it was a compelling story, as is the case with most previous Zelda games, no one would bat an eye at having to replay the story content. I can’t count how many times I’ve played through the Kingdom Hearts franchise and even though the game allows me to skip all the cutscenes, I don’t because that’s why I keep coming back to it.
It's also weird how he says the older games don't have good movement then proceed to talk about unintended movement in BOTW, sliding in OOT is absolutely sick movement and he isn't mentionning this
yeah, some of his arguments made sense, but, like you, I don't think the 18M+ players of TOTK use windbombs or whatever. I wouldn't recommend it even -playing as speedrunners do I mean-. Once you fall into that rabbit hole, you can't ever come back to enjoying this game as a casual player (and he actually proves that point all over his video essay). Speedrunners don't mind this, they know it will happen, and even start new games with the mind set "now, what can I break here?" lol; but you absolutely can't think this is what the player base as a whole will experience. I actually speedran a long time ago, one obscure game few people know about, and although I was pretty bad at it, it made it impossible for me to enjoy the game as it was intended... I'm really carefull not to get into that particular head space again, I feel like it would spoil my fun (and also break my hands, but that's something else lol, don't ever get old) ^^
Ya, he sold it like a proper review but complained like a speedrunner instead of the zelda fan prospective he presented. Totk isn't bad because it's not a fuckin glitchy mess, it's bad because it's too similar to botw and thus stale since botw was only beloved due it being fresh, give it 5 years and I promise it'll have less stay than something like mm which has stayed striking to this day. It's more or less just a worse botw, and botw was not a great representation of what zelda fans like, in fact its a horrible example. Botw was an overreaction to people not liking how linear and hold holding SS was and while fresh is becoming stale quick, the best zelda games embraced the traditions zelda rather breaking from them. What makes this all worse for totk is that it somehow feels less like a zelda game than botw did which is nutty to me.
Anyway his complaints about speed run jank is stupid, every game has it and its subjective as to weather its good or not but that's not going to make break a game for the general public, just speedrunners. Only time jank made a game better was sonic 06, and that's because 06 in a perfectly working state is steaming pile of shit lol
For me, TOTK suffers from excessive bloat, not bringing enough new to the table, a straight up bad story, but one thing that I feel doesn’t get talked about is how BOTW’s shiekah slate abilities are just more useful and more fun to use. Ultrahand and fuse are far more varied in what you can do, but ultimately you’re just gonna end up using the most efficient and easy versions of each use case, which makes them boring on repeat playthroughs. Magnesis being useful as a combat option since you can swing things so much faster with it never stops being an option, as you can sometimes one shot even the toughest of enemies with a large object, and thus conserve your weapons. Stasis is just plain fun to use, being able to send things flying and make fun of the physics engine, as well as using it to enhance mobility by riding the things you send flying (but not in a game breaking, boring way like tears) cannot be overstated. Having 2 bomb types whenever you need them is also just insanely practical and useful for combat situations, as well as allowing for expression of skill to enhance mobility with midair bomb launching. Cryonis doesn’t have a variety of use cases, but not having to worry about being able to cross water bodies is practical (not to mention being able to send guardians to space in that water patch in liurnia. Tears doesn’t encourage the player to engage with its abilities nearly as much.
The biggest issue of totk is that, without glitches and cheats, you need to farm ENDLESSLY. And the lore
One additional point regarding the runes in BotW is they involve immediate interactivity with Link, the environment and the enemies you encounter. None of these runes require you to “stop” playing the game to use them, they’re a seamless aspect of playing and progressing the game.
In stark contrast, the runes in TotK 100% require you to disengage with whatever you’re doing to use them, you have to stop playing a hack n slash open world adventure game and stand in one spot for a while to play an isolated open sandbox crafting game. TotK has a genre identity crisis, it failed to make the sandbox crafting elements truly integrate into the game’s primary genre.
Likewise, all the new additions to the map and even all the old map alterations fail to match BotW’s formula of rewarding exploration with unique locations. Hyrule has barely changed and the sky islands and the depths are shallow copy and paste assets, exploration has no reward.
As for the story, the memories in BotW always enhanced context of the immediate story the player was engaging in, they were inherently tied to the player’s main game goal of taking the Divine Beast’s back from Ganon in order to use them to defeat him, likewise obtaining a cathartic conclusion to the Champion’s fates.
In TotK, the memories are a snippet of a story you have no agency in, they undermine the game’s narrative drive of finding out what happened to Zelda because that mystery is solved via passively watching memories, not by any action the player does. Even Zelda lacks agency in those cutscenes, the best way to explain those cutscenes is we the player are passively watching Link as he passively watches memories of Zelda passively watching events of the past. It is so disconnected from what the player’s objectives are throughout the game, even the four village missions are about helping NPCs with their village’s problems, your objective has nothing to do with the secret stones, you just get them at end of a dungeon.
Getting those secret stones have no consequences to the story either, they do nothing with them other than to give an arbitrary “reason” for how you gained the the sage’s abilities, which is really weird when Ganondorf treated the acquisition of secret stones so important he was willing to feign submission to a foreign king and seek out the opportunity to murder Sonia just to get one, why doesn’t he try to get the rest of the secret stones? Why don’t the sages give Link a secret stone to improve his chances against Ganondorf? The plot is so damn sloppy… Totk is an amalgamation of ideas with no uniting through line like BotW did.
Very good points about how the runes interact with the world and the passiveness of the story. And this doesn't even mention how cheap the Ganondorf bowing scene feels (going beyond being an homage to OoT to just plain being a rip off), the fact that this is Ganondorf's first reincarnation (Ganondorf was previously always Ganondorf Dragmire from OoT, implying that he couldn't reincarnate naturally the same way Link and Zelda do), and how ridiculously incompetent the "good guys" are (with Rauru saying he'd keep a close eye on Ganondorf, only to find out in the next cutscene that Ganondorf's been causing chaos throughout Rauru's kingdom with transformation magic to look like Zelda, for no reason other than to be a Twilight Princess reference and make Zelda feel important in the past even though she's really just some passive witness to the events, and then he kills her wife on top of all of the sabotage and chaos he created, all inside of Rauru's own castle where he had the most ability to easily watch over him. Fucking idiot failures. Rauru literally chose to let someone he knew was evil under his roof, his wife's blood is on his hands as much as Ganondorf's).
God, what a fucking train wreck of a story that was. And the fact that so many people think it was good is beyond disheartening to me, because Nintendo will almost certainly be listening to those praises more than the people with the actual issues. They know they have an army of fans who will gaslight other people in the audience that Zelda was never about it's story and never had a good story before. God, I hate fanboys
@@Chronoflation the rauru thing is so true. it’s so silly. zelda knew who calamity GANON was so shouldn’t we be a little bit more careful around GANONdorf? 😭 at least zelda has good experience with gerudo so i can see why she’d want to be a little more lenient… rauru, on the other hand, does not. not including the gerudo sage, since she doesn’t even have any character despite how important she could’ve been for the story, since she didn’t even like her own people either.
"Even Zelda lacks agency in those cutscenes, the best way to explain those cutscenes is we the player are passively watching Link as he passively watches memories of Zelda passively watching events of the past."
holy cow you're one of the only people I've seen mention this and it's been bugging me for months, I was flabbergasted when I saw people saying that it was so nice seeing Zelda have agency this time around compared to BOTW and I was so confused. To me it really does feel like Zelda is dragged around by the plot and decisions made around her before finally realizing her entire purpose this game is to be a glorified charging stand for the master sword.
about the tutorial: i wanted to explore GSI before heading to the temple of time. now, in botw, you can do the same thing before going to the first sheikah tower, and all the shrines will be cut off, but it's made VERY very clear you gotta go to that point. it's literally in front of you, Zelda says "go here," and your sheikah slate will open up to give you the location. in totk? you get the purah pad (why change the name), the construct says "Zelda waits at this location" and nothing pops up!!! then it goes on about "this is the temple of time" and you get a small popup in the minimap that i missed the first time. and there's a long pathway gently guiding you towards the temple.
if you've played botw, you know that the game rewards you when you go off the beaten path. to explore! so that's what i did. i got to the snowy ascend shrine (somehow), which was obviously not activated yet, and then got to the water crossing. the constructs there talked about autobuild. i didn't have it yet! in botw, there would've been a dialogue accounting for that scenario which would've pointed me in the direction of the temple of time. but there wasn't, because this was totk: the game where they repeat the same cutscene after each dungeon. where the hieroglyphs can be encountered in any order, any time. you could've just let the memories play in a predetermined order, no matter which one you found first!!! we could've pulled a witcher, played as zelda in the past!!!
in the same vein, i spent the first few days without a paraglider... oops i guess for going to kakariko first to speak to impa
demon king? secret stone? that's the sort of carelessness which turned me off from totk. the thoughtful attention to detail in botw was lost. yes, totk objectively is a "better" game with a bigger scope, but they lost their focus, i think. i very often wondered, "is ultrahand really the only thing they did in 6 years of development?" same with the sky islands. "is this everything they did?"
you know how mad i was when i found out they decreased the number of sky islands because otherwise the sky looked too "cluttered"??? yeah. big mad.
Totk: has a cool opening area with intense cutscenes, and cool visuals.
Botw: I JUST WOKE UP IN A BATH TUB AFTER 100 YEARS :D
I don't dislike the intro to Totk i just think it hurts the games replayability in the long run
@@linguini645 I agree it should be skippable, but its also the only section of the game that is perfect lol.
botw conveys more mystery and an urge to figure out what's happened
totk's a really long unskippable cutscene sequence
It's only the beginning cutscene that's unskippable, though I can't imagine why you would want to skip that epic intro.
When you have to cherry pick and strawman to prove your point then it probably was never a good point lmao
If i had a nickle for ever hour + breakdown of why totk is disappointing I've watched in the last couple days. I'd have 2 nickles.
I have 4 nickels haha. I like @skittybitty's video the best 😊
3 nickels for me!!!
Which isn’t a lot but its weird it happened twice…
Feeble king has a great video as well:
th-cam.com/video/n_ZgCq_g1qk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=wZoyXvRuEpALum89
@@cloudshines812 Would your life have really been any worse if you didn't finish the line?
The more I’ve thought about it, there’s only so much you can do with Zonai vehicles if you want practicality, meanwhile I can spend hours driving around on the Master Cycle Zero and never get tired of it
Yes! Thank you. Somebody finally said it
we all expected all of Tears of the Kingdom's ideas to build up to something great
instead, we found that all of its ideas built up to an air bike made of two fans and a steering stick
Pretty sure the reason ultra hand doesn't give you the ability to push objects like magnesis did is because that would also imply it could push around enemies. One of the key things about magnesis was that you could use it as a genuinely strong weapon that never breaks, but only if you happened to have a metal object nearby. With ultrahand hand you could use literally anything, so keeping this feature would've meant being able to handle every combat encounter by just telekinetically beating up whatever you see with boxes or tree trunks or that giant metal sphere you smuggled out of a shrine.
I think something similar goes for recall as well: they removed the ability to freeze enemies because they buffed the ability to make it more puzzle friendly. When you pull it out, it immediately freezes time, so you have all the time in the world to plan out your next move. And unlike stasis, it has no cooldown whatsoever. There's no way they could've kept these features if it also worked on enemies, cause then link would just be an untouchable god of time who rewinds any enemy that looks at him funny. They had to pick between a balanced combat tool or a decent tool for solving puzzles, and they picked the latter.
I _guess_ they did have the option to give it a cooldown specifically if it was used on enemies. But they also could have not made it where two fans and a steering stick trivializes all navigation in the game, so hindsight is 20/20 I guess, lol
Couldn’t they have just made it so it didn’t work on “living” creatures?
Honestly, this probably could've been handled with a simple boolean flag for whether or not a game object could be moved by ultrahand or not. Maybe it'd be a little more technical than that, but it probably wouldn't be as hard as people think. I mean, they put 6 years into rebuilding and refining the physics engine so that everything would be a physics body instead of a rigidbody. They wasted tons of time on stuff that they really didn't need. They could've done this too.
That said, it seems like their real goal was giving the player more "creative freedom" while nerfing them well below the power levels reached by BotW Link. That's why the Sages' abilities can't be used directly by Link. That's why they put a hard speed cap into the game to prevent reaching bomb launching levels of travel speed and why bombs themselves were removed from being a power.
They want the players to be playing with the Legos that they want the players to play with and that's it. As creative of a game as this is, there is no way to mess with the system to forge your own interactions. It's really disappointing. It even nerfs the potential of ultrahand devices they purposefully made. Rockets are barely more useful than fans since a few extra fans will be able to reach that same peak speed as rockets, or close to it, and no amount of additional rockets will help push you beyond that. It feels like playing with Legos under your parents supervision, so you can only use them how your parents let you. There really is no room for creativity outside of that scope, unfortunately. I'm pretty sure they even patched out things like rocket jumping with rockets attacked to weapons. It's frustrating. Really frustrating and shows a lack of respect for the autonomy of the player, all while claiming they're giving us the ultimate sandbox toolset.
Honestly, is the puzzle design even good enough to warrant the change? I personally feel that the puzzle designs tend to lean far more to spoilsport type play, where the "correct" solution is to break the game into disparate parts because it's simpler and more rewarding to do so.
I feel like when comparing the intros of the two games, even discounting the length, there’s still a big difference in how those tutorials play out. The great plateau has some tutorial text, but it feels a lot more open ended and emblematic of the spirit of the game. The great sky island feels like a linear track that has standard tutorials to figure out a solution. The great plateau feels like a vertical slice of the game, the great sky island feels like a big tutorial area.
Listening to the video my immediate thought about the tutorials was the difference in the expectations they set up. BotW is minimalist and lets you get up and go, which underscores the goal of freedom and exploration that runs through the entire game. TotK has a story-heavy opening but then veers in a completely different direction for the rest of the game with the sandboxy building mechanics.
BotW's tutorial feels much more in line with the themes of the game imo. On the other hand, TotK players who expected the same freedom as BotW have to sit through the longer tutorial, while players who like story and lore get baited by a tutorial that isn't particularly indicative of the game's direction.
Yes, thank you! Not to mention the great sky island is the PEAK of what you can expect from the sky islands. So disappointing to start with the best and not just a microcosm of the greater experience like BotW
My biggest issue with both games is the copy and paste rewards system. Once you've got loads of every resource and have filled your inventory with the same weapons, you realize that the games have run out of things to offer the player. This happens sooner in TotK than BotW, but it begins to discourage exploration. The experiences in both games can be preserved by ignoring much of the map and continuing through main/side quests. Nintendo needs to integrate a sense of linear progression into the this open world formula. That way you're constantly progressing through the game and it will prevent reaching what I call "The Great Plateau".
Breath of the Wild had a superior story with better shrines, characters, and side quests. The four champions all had interesting backstories and Kass was by far the greatest character in the entire game. He was way better than Penn. I would even argue that Breath of the Wild had better dungeons. We have seen water and fire temples before and they have been done much better than Tears of the Kingdom but at least Breath of the Wild had a unique concept where the dungeons take the form of a giant animal that fits its environment and navigating the entire beast made room for some interesting atmosphere and puzzles.
The shrines in Tears of the Kingdom were annoying as hell especially the cave ones and Rauru should be a preacher with how many blessings he gives. The actual shrine puzzle should be harder and more challenging than actually finding the shrine itself.
The four champions are superior to the sages in every way possible. When it comes to side quests and side adventures I honestly think that Breath of the Wild has it beat. I had a lot more fun doing side adventures in that game than I did with Tears of the Kingdom which a lot of them seem absolutely pointless. If you were to rank all of them side by side Tarrey Town from Breath of the Wild would
be at the very top.
Exploring the world, especially the depths, isn’t really all that rewarding because the game makes you grind out the tedious depths and all they reward you with is the same outfits and clothing from Breath of the Wild. It was lazy on Nintendo’s part and not very good in my personal opinion.
Breath of the Wild soundtrack is vastly underrated and even though Tears of the Kingdom has some new music on it’s own it still for the most part borrows the music from its predecessor. Breath of the Wild has one of the most beautiful and underrated soundtracks in the entire series and I will DIE on that hill.
Lastly, the dungeons in Tears of the Kingdom have pleasant atmosphere and vibes but if you really think about it they are not very good as well when it comes to gameplay. Water Temple is by far the worst dungeon in the entire series and it makes the Divine Beasts look like master pieces. Wind Temple is just a smaller and easier version of a Divine Beast. Navigating the rail carts in the fire temple was annoying and most people will end up cheesing it. And the spirit temple doesn’t even count because its just a list of chores you have to do leading up to the actual dungeon which only leads to a boss fight that really wasn’t that good. As a matter of fact you can literally cheese all the dungeons with autobuild which makes them 10x easier to begin with. The only decent temple was the lightning temple and even that was short as hell.
In conclusion I think Tears of the Kingdom has good moments but Breath of the Wild was more impactful and more well balanced with better characters, shrines, side quests, and overall story.
When it comes to runes, I think the difference for me is that botw’s runes weren’t really intended to be used in the really fun ways people ended up using them, like windbombing for example. And so it felt really cool to use them in interesting and unique ways. ToTK just gave us ultrahand because they saw the fun things people did with the other runes, and now it’s not fun anymore lol. Idk if that makes sense, it’s kinda like the difference between going out with your friends when your parents allowed it as a teenager vs just sneaking out. Both were fun, but it felt way cooler and more fun when you were doing it the “wrong” way.
In BotW, we were in a sandbox without any supervision and just some basic toys we could do whatever we wanted with.
In TotK, we're in a sandbox with a bunch of Legos that mommy and daddy gave us and they're watching us to make sure we use them properly or else they'll take the unintended fun away
Bad story, bad lore continuity, underwhelming depths, sky island, and caves. Bad sidequests and repetitive side content, underwhelming rewards.
YES also once you farm lynels, there is pretty much no challenge
@@martinezbiz The lynels thing was the same for BotW
@@zahrachughtai3361 aww man. boring games for me then
Botw was awesome cuz it was New, now it's just dull
@@unpingouinsurlabanquise4574not just that. BotW actually had fascinating things you could discover. It was actually fun to play and find things. Going to that far off island to be faced with a survivor challenge.
Finding an odd spot in the forest and being faced with a darkness challenge.
I'm intending to do a replay of BotW and id bet that it would still be fun- even though its so not new. Because exploration was actually fun in the game- which was really lame in TotK
I beat botw but didn't beat totk. But my main reason for loosing intrest is more to do with the world building.
I played a LOT of botw, I finished 99% of the game. But the world lore and story is what got me hooked. Ultimately, that was my biggest issue with it; I WANTED more lore than what they had. So when TotK promised more I was excited... Until I started visiting old places.
The game devs didn't want to isolate new players so they tried to keep the callbacks minimal... But that was the main problem. Key people knew Link and Zelda, it was stated they were traveling together for a few years. Yet everything you directly impacted was either glossed over or not addressed, AT ALL. People knew you through Zelda, but NOT for the quests you did in the first game. It really pulled me out of the immersion. I started to care less about story, and more about learning glitches to get ne through it, but that was around the time they were getting patched out. Eventually I just stopped playing all together.
They made a world to get lost in, yet did vary little to bridge them together. You can bring horses from your botw file, so I don't understand why they couldn't add small flavor dialogue depending on how much you completed. There are ps2 games that did that better.
Anyway great vid, there was only a small handful of things I didn't agree with, 10/10!
Totk was my first zelda game ever and idk why i didnt jump in the games sooner, I had an amazing time 🙏🏻
Me too it was amazing
to now end does it bother me that the Gloom hands do not make the Master Sword glow. No, that's only when Phantom Ganon appears or when you fight gloom-covered enemies in the Depths. When against Phanon Ganon or Ganondorf, the Master Sword is at "full power" of 60 with unlimited durability. Against gloom enemies, it's 45 power with its usual durability of about 40. And if you fuse an item to it, it'll never reach full durability with the sparkle when it regenerates. The durability boost from fusion on the Master Sword is a once-per-save-file thing and it still hasn't been patched.
The depths almost stopped me playing the game 10 to 20 hours in. Various things frustrated me, and pushed me to go back to BotW to see if I truly did like it better, and I did, and for the same reason I loved it in the first place. It's been long enough, I've forgotten enough exact details, I enjoy just wandering around again, even after revisiting stuff in TotK just days to weeks earlier. Then I put down TotK long enough now, I'm not sure I'll ever go back to finish it.
wandering around is such a huge part of Botw and the reused map just kills that aspect of the game from Totk for me
@@linguini645exactly, TOTK made wondering around not fun because of the reused map, the Depth has very little difference one area looks like the other, and the sky islands were so empty and not much interesting things to do apart from the tutorial island.
@@lifeonleo1074agreed. I sold my totk LOL without finishing it eventhough I farmed the crap out of silver lynels
yeah enemies were copy and paste, oh but with slight appearance change...zzz...boring just like the entire depths copy & paste
9:25 i like how in Age of Calamity they made it so cryonis can actually be done anywhere your standing, and that doing it on water freezes any enemy. if it was like that in botw it'd probably be a much better rune
I love totk.
is that okay? it has its flaws, its hiccups, but as a GAME, it was such an enjoyable experience. as a ZELDA game i can’t speak on behalf of story and improvements because i’m not a veteran. I loved almost every second of the game to the very end, and seeing so many huge videos saying this game is a disgrace makes me feel like my standards are too low, and i’m not judging hard enough. but its safe to say that if i had a good time then it’s a good game. at least, for my standards
You don't need to justify. This video shows it perfectly. It's just a subjective feeling and opinion that BotW is better than TotK. Most people speak out of nostalgia and they didn't feel the novelty in TotK. I know that feeling, too. I mean he even thinks calamity ganon is better than totk ganondorf and dragon. Like wtf. Calamity ganon is one of worst bosses I have ever seen. I love BotW as well but TotK makes me not wanna play botw ever again. The ONLY point I would give is the lore stuff. But I'm as well not so deep into that since it's not in my interest how games relate when they really are not intended to be relatable. I like it how Xenoblade did it with 1-3 but for Zelda it's kinda weird to me, to force connect games.
@ ❤️
there's nothing wrong with liking Tears of The Kingdom; i think it's a fun game even though it really really disappointed me, i'm actually doing another playthrough after a year just to see how i feel about it now. it's a fun game, but the same six year timespan used to develop the previous game has basically gone towards nothing.
This has truly been a zelda moment
Niko spotted
OneShot godtier game
OneShot indeed god tier game, play it.
And if you already have, play it again
Nope been calling it glorified DLC since day 1
@@Gael-x999 are you saying you also dont like solstice?
TOTK was more of an addition to BOTW. If you just played botw, you wouldn't need to play totk as botw story stand alone is a complete story. While for totk that's not the case. We wouldn't understand anything in totk if we never played botw. That's why even now I prefer the stand alone botw experience rather than the stand alone totk experience. You might have your own preference though 😅
I completed Breath of the Wild, when I think about the things that are boring to do and repetitive like Shrines and Korok seeds I got even more bored playing Tears of the Kingdom It is just like a Breath of the Wild DLC.
My definition of "open-world" games is they should be more detailed, and every location city or village discovered should give a player unique quests or story that is only unique to that location even a little bit of mystery with good rewards or reputation system.
An example of the best open-world single player games out there are The Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2.
You forgot Elden Ring.
I perfectly agree with your sentiments about BotW's jank.Nobody I know understands the joy I get from breaking a game wide open and doing something unintended, and one of the things I LOVED about BotW was solving shrines with some stupid use of a stasis launch or something like that, and even solving them in a way the devs allowed felt unintentional. When I played TotK, I didn't have nearly as much fun with the shrines because all of the weird "unintended" solutions always felt like they knew that would happen, which ruins the fun, or are so boring that they ruin the shrines altogether (rocket shield). shooting myself underneath the water with ragdoll to skip a puzzle felt great, but using recall to bring a shrine orb back just felt cheap.
Botw is such a stupidly broken game in all of the best ways lmao
TotK let's you break the game as part of the natural design but that is somehow a bad thing? Do you even listen to how ridiculous you sound?
@davidaitken8503 botw took thought and glitches to "break". Things like rocket shields break the game in the most bland way possible because they are an easy instant win button. Theres no satisfaction in shooting to the end of every shrine.
Big same. Most fun I had with TotK was solving the side bits where you have to hold up the sign for that one guy. I always just used my horse to prop it up when possible lmao
@@mynameiscal3478 Look. I'm all for goofing off in a game to find ways to break it every once in a while, but if it becomes the focal point to how you play, you're just being an idiot. If their is no satisfaction in shooting to the end of every shrine, don't do it. The fact that I have to give such a simple solution to a supposedly cognitively normal human being speaks to just how unbelievably stupid people in this world have become. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. There was a twit that complained that TotK wasn't as fun as BotW because all he did was fly over everything in a hover bike. I could never imagine someone being that stupid just to make up this story if I tried.
I still play it every once and awhile. It’s fun to go around hyrule, talk to the people, gather stuff and sell it in shops, and more. I used to do that in botw once i did everything but now since totk released, i don’t touch botw anymore.
I do the complete opposite lol, i don't touch Totk anymore but I still regularly go back and play Botw
@@linguini645Lol, kinda the same, but because I sold TotK the same week when I bought it.
the robor that gives you the purah pad, later goes "oh yea, I forgot yo give you the battery" could just as easily have been the one to give link his paraglider
Speaking personally, because BotW was a new formula, a first attempt at a whole new kind of Zelda, with all the flaws and missteps that came with it.
Tears was an opportunity to improve on all the flaws (particularly the story/music/connection to past games) and it absolutely ignored all of those, and doubled down on the main criticisms people had with BotW. Sure, it fixed a few of the issues, but the developers also openly expressed disinterest in other issues.
BotW was given more leeway because it was a first attempt. Tears doesn't have that luxury.
I dont mind anything else, but my BIGGEST issue is the complete lack of Link expressing emotions. Compare to all other games in the 3d era Link had big ranges of emotions, here is just stoic and surprised. No emotion when remembering his past no emotion when learning Zelda's fate, just...a doll.
To be fair, he wasn't very expressive in OoT and MM either... heck not even TP really
@@shigerumiyamoto9612 toon link was and skyward sword kinda
@@shigerumiyamoto9612Link leaving the forest and saying his farewell to Saria has more low polygon emotion than Wild Link ever shows.
@@shigerumiyamoto9612I’ve played twilight princess 5 times, and he showed rage, joy, sadness, disgust. He had a personality that Wild Link could NEVER
@@shigerumiyamoto9612 Link was very emotive in those games when you consider the limitations of the time. Not just through facial expression. There was also flavour text, cutscene composition, foil characters, etc. Small moments that add up. The Hero of Time is the most interesting version of Link to analyse because of that tbh
There were also companions in those games, so even in moments where Link didn't do much, you could shift focus onto them. Link in BOTW/TOTK is all by himself, so there's nothing to distract you from the fact that he's basically the standing guy emoji in every cutscene🧍♂. Age of Calamity did better at least. All he gets in the mainline modern games is a couple of joke interactions with insignificant NPCs, and cooking animations. smh
I would hardly call this game a masterpiece. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Even objectively speaking it has many obvious flaws and tons of continuity problems. It's decent for what it is. But not a masterpiece for a Zelda game at all
Fair enough it does have its flaws
ultrahand was so janky & unpolished
Yeah I wasn't quite sure how the view that it's a masterpiece really could stand against the entire rest of the video 😅
Yeah unlike botw were you could actually see that professional designers were at work, a lot of totk mechanics are just sloppy the entire fuse mechanic has way to many unnecessary steps because you can’t do it in menu. The fact that you can set arrow types is annoying, also why is the quick menu not separeted in regions for quicker selection and let’s not even get started on the sage abilitys. Story and gameplay don’t really match either and I know a lot of people didn’t like the story in botw either but at least there it matched the gameplay and how it was told.
Masterpiece has lost meaning. It’s understandable because there’s not many examples of an actual one. Or like a flawed masterpiece? Makes zero sense
While I don't disagree that the movement system of TOTK is completely TRIVIALIZED by the usage of the hoverbike, I feel like you've sort of created an unfair comparison, because the Breath of the wild glitches are clearly not intended methods of play. While I agree that they make the game more fun I feel like the fact that these aren't in fact mechanics that exist by design works counter to your argument. You can't really argue that BOTW is a better designed game if the reason it was more fun is due to things that weren't actually designed into it. Yes again, the glitches are fun but I can't give credit to the game for an unintended feature. Maybe instead you could speak about how the glitches being fun highlighted something that should have been improved or fleshed out in TOTK but was instead ignored or taken steps back on. For example the item duplication glitch highlights the durability system, or how movement needed more methods of engagement.
It's less about it being good game design and more just me expressing that the janky movement is a big factor as to why I personally like BOTW more, sure it's not intentional but the fact is that they're in the game and I personally think they enhance the game a ton
After 2k Hours in BOTW i never even once tried a glitch. Cause i dont care.
I bought a HWFLY Chip and soldert that SoB in to my Switch just to downgrade so i can use easy duping in TOTK cause its NOT fun grinding all these dumb consumables.
Dropped TOTK without even reaching 50h play time.
@TheGravityShifter to be fair, it applies to a lot of speedrunners. Also, I heard they did have a lot of fun glitches in TotK's early versions that they removed over various patches. That didn't happen in BotW despite the many patches, so that kinda sucks. Even if something is unintentional doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. The spin attack was also originally a glitch. One of the things that sets great designers apart from designers that are just good is their ability to recognize when unintentional things are fun and should be incorporated into the game. I'm pretty sure the entire idea for ultrahand came from players using magnesis on stacked items to make Link fly across the sky in BotW. I don't blame them for thinking Ultrahand would be a good idea after seeing that. The problem is the invisible hand holding the developers put in. This could've been better explained in the video, but they not only removed game breaking glitches, but fun traversal glitches that felt like hidden mechanics. They also put caps on object speed in the game so you couldn't do an equivalent to that bomb launching thing to move super fast from BotW even if you did find a new way to hyper launch yourself. I think the best description of the games is that BotW feels like you're playing in a sandbox without too many cool toys, but you're unsupervised and can do whatever you want. Whereas TotK feels like you're in a sandbox with the coolest Lego set your parents could find, but your parents are watching you play to make sure you don't get hurt or do anything too unruly with the new toys
@@TheGravityShifter intended experience. Great phrase to answer this. What is the supposed "intended experience" of BotW and TotK? Based on interviews, it seems to be player freedom. But the treatment of TotK seems intent on restricting that player freedom.
I'll just use a simple analogy from the end of my first post to describe it. BotW is like a kid being thrown into a sandbox with a small handful of toys and left to do whatever they want in the sandbox with said toys. TotK is like your parents came back with the ultimate Lego set and kept watch from outside the sandbox to make sure you don't misuse the new Legos in ways they don't want you to use them
@@TheGravityShifterproblem is, that same freedom can spoil the story to you. Watching the cutscenes out of order can happen very easily, and behold - spoilers everywhere.
Yes, the game tells you the order in that one temple whose name i forgot, and it sends you there through impa, but i have to choose to go there.
If i let the game hold my hand i don't get spoiled, but if I decide for myself, the story gets ruined for me. If you take player freedom to the extreme, and get the master sword early, now the grand reveal of zelda being the light dragon is just gone.
Botw allowed you freedom and it worked, because everything you could discover in whatever order you wanted to wasn't telling a story where the order of events matters that much, you already know everyone's dead and zelda is at the castle, the cutscenes are there just to give some substance to the cast, whereas totk is trying to narrate a story whose outcome you don't know anything about besides ganondorf's sealing under the castle. The cutscene at the master sword glyph straight up has flashbacks from the previous cutscenes.
Also, doing the dragon's tears quest early makes chasing fake zelda around for the regional phenomena feel even more stupid. You know she's not real. Link knows she's not real. And he just doesn't say a word to anyone who gets gaslit by her, risks their lives chasing her, obeys her commands (looking at you, kakariko village quest) and so on. You're free to do things in the order you'd like but it makes the experience actively worse
People hated the durability mechanic in BotW.
Nintendo doubled down on it in TotK by making you build everything from durability items with limited use.
Collecting parts just to burn them is a slog. Yes, crafting is fun, but then you're disincentivized by the work to collect the parts.
So the core gameplay loop focuses on the most unfun aspect of BotW. And then... this story. This... ugh.
It was so bad, 😅 didn't learn much about the Zonai and everyone was being incompetent
they completely sidestepped the issue by rewarding breaking your items in fights with more and better materials for more and better weapons
they made weapons break twice as fast, forcing players to use Fuse...every time you shoot an arrow, attach something, scroll through dozens of items = boring, slows down gameplay
How are you disincentivized to collect the parts? Also in TOTK you would wanna collect weapons more to fuse more powerful weapons.
It doesn't focus on the most unfon aspect of BOTW it focuses on the fun combat and exploration and stuff. The story isn't that bad tbh.
I like fuse it makes ingaging in combat fun again.
In BOTW I horded my good weapons and ended up not having that much fun fighting enemies.
In TOTK they fixed that by making all normal weapons do around the same amount of damage and by adding fuse. Fuse allows you to make your strong weapons buy collecting fuse materials from enemies. This motivates players to ingage more in combat instead of avoiding it because now for every tough enemie you defeat you will get a just as strong fuse material in return.
I hope this mechanic returns future zelda games because it fixes so many of the games combat reward and incentive issues.
i think the biggest downfall that most people dont recognize as the main culprit IS the use of the exact same hyrule. botw's biggest and most inexplicable selling point was the VIBES. the novelty of it all, the sense of exploration, the feeling of being left in the wild, constantly being internally incentivized to go somewhere and still be happy you did even if there was nothing. it was really new and fresh and just shocking when i first played it. never had i experienced a feeling like that when i played a game besides when i was a kid. it managed to capture the same sense of wonder and excitement as when you go out in the real world and discover new places. Of course all the new mechanics and stuff had an impact as well, but nothing compares to that feeling of being internally driven to do things.
TOTK falls super flat because you already know where everything is. theres no sense of internal drive anymore because you already know this world. its like trying to discover something new about the places you go to daily: very hard and not very rewarding. As you said, the depths and sky islands are wasted potential for this exact reason because they did not double down on the one thing that made BOTW one of the greatest games of all time. no reason to explore the world anymore. no child like wonder whenever you see something in the distance. you already know whats there.
You already mentioned all of this in the video, and i heavily agree. I just think it is actually the number 1 reason totk is less fun than botw. i dont necessarily agree with all the other points made, and i only think those issues are magnified exactly because we are in the same hyrule. Imagine if totk wasnt a sequel, but a completely different game that had the mechanics of the current game but in a completely different world that you can explore and find new things in. i think 80% of totks issues would be fixed. And i do sometimes wish i could erase my memory of playing botw so i could play totk for the first time and see if that would make a difference. Familiarity is just such a double edged sword and sadly it didnt work out well for TOTK
At 13:09 I knew that I’m the exact botw nerd that this video was made for, when you mentioned windbombing for movement I got so excited cause that’s exactly what I’ve been saying. Totk could have been a lot more fun, If it wasn’t so anti glitches, cause it really feels like they saw all of the glitches in botw and made sure they wouldn’t be possible at all, even if it was at the detriment of practically like the ultra hand not being able to move objects with objects on top of them
I don’t know why, but breath of the wild felt.. really like a breath of fresh air compared to tears of the kingdom, tears of the kingdom just felt a little… cluttered for me
Tears was never an “upgrade” or “masterpiece” compared to BotW for me. It made a better built world with the Sheikah technology and Guardians, Ganon being a mindless monster instead of a bland repetitive bad guy. I felt more invested in finishing things with Ganon the more I saw the flashbacks and it felt rewarding to get all the Divine Beasts free at the cost of half the final boss’ HP.
Meanwhile, TotK made weapon variety stale once you only use high damage parts on crap weapons, fusing things feels like a chore and how they “manage” the menus is a bigger slog than ever. Don’t get me started on the plot not making sense on its own, let alone a “SEQUEL”
Am I the only person that prefers TOTK? It's just so much more fun than BOTW, if I ever fancy playing zelda I don't pick up BOTW. I love that game but that TOTK is very similar but with more which is why it's so enjoyable & the story is much more interesting and engaging. I feel like a lot of people prefer BOTW for the nostalgia, although I do miss the guardians & sheikah technologies.
I agree with you, I also think it’s a major creativity problem with the player base. Totk has so many different solutions to issues/exploration that some people can’t wrap their head around. Sure there are issues I have with it, but if we’re just talking about level of fun playing these games years later ToTK has much more to do/things I can make up to have fun even after I’ve nearly completed the game 100%. I pick up the game and will just ride my horse or walk to another town for fun. ToTK is like red dead redemption, you get to enjoy the journey and have fun. Botw is like the newer Pokémon games, sure you can kinda go wherever but it doesn’t break you out of playing it just to get it finished.
Honestly I don't like either game that much, neither one FEELS like A Zelda game, I do like the scenery I absolutely loved the very first time I shot up into the sky out that first tower.
The moment the game lost my interest is when I apported a NPC that I met in Breath of the Wild and the NPC didn't recognize who Link was, I can't really explain it right but that moment left me feeling hollow and empty and my emotional ties to the game died.
Plus the lack of sky islands was extremely disappointing.
@@Aurora-qn2dx exactly
So what you're saying is, botw is better because it had more bugs that allowed you to skip a ton of the game?!?!
that's a small part of it yeah, the option being there is what i like so you can choose to play the game however you want to play the game
In TotK you can skip a ton of the game without using bugs
you don't need bugs to beat totk, just build a hoverbike & fly over the entire world xD so boring
@@stevejeffrey11 ok, then dont build a hover bike?
@@Brendanowl just play BoTW without using fast travel, amazing experience !
I think TotK just proved that BotW was a fluke and they actually had no idea why it was as revolutionary as it actually was.
I just can’t agree. They have made TOTK because they knew how revolutionary BOTW was and it wasn’t a fluke. TOTK is revolutionary in it’s own right. This game shouldn’t have work on the switch, the fact that I have never seen any glitches in this game when there are so many ways it could go wrong is impressive. TOTK is not better than BOTW, it has it flaws and most of the criticisms towards this game is true, but dismissing everything that this game has for it will not make your disappointment any better. On a gameplay level, this game is the most impressive thing Nintendo has done in years. The story is not perfect but it is emotional with zelda becoming the eternal dragon, Ganondorf is cool and his boss fight is epic.
All I am saying here is that this is the zelda curse all over again. Fans don’t like a zelda game and then in 5 or 10 years, people will say “this game was misunderstood ”. It happened for almost every zelda game since windwaker.
Because it wasn't
they made the same game twice, $$$ , totk was a lazy 'sequel' ( more like DLC) crappy story, depths copy n paste, only a few sky islands
@@stevejeffrey11 Nah you’re just wrong. lol
It wasn’t “lazy.” Story was actually way better than BOTW. Of course the depths is supposed to look like an underground version of Hyrule, that was the point. “Only a few sky islands” Your media illiteracy is showing. Genuinely go play the game and then come back.
@@Matt-eh2dyI’d say the story was still messy (it’s Nintendo so I’m not surprised lol), the depths were just too empty (a ton of walking and terrain without a whole lot to do other than the same few things), and the sky was good (but suffered from the same problem of too much repeats and not enough to do). Totk is super fun to play, but it’s also packed to the brim with a bunch of busywork that drags it down.
Finally, someone says something about how clunky Ultra Hand is. I have literally never gotten past the sky island because I used Ultra Hand a few times and was like "Yeah, no. If this is a big draw of the game, I'm not interested because this is too frustrating for me." I'm sure it gets easier, but after contorting my hands a few times to get what I wanted, I was done with it.
Man I loved Totk, but if you gave up thay early, I really hope you got a refund because that's 70 down the drain otherwise
Very that!!!
You know what would fix this? An upgrade to auto-build that lets you suspend the objects in a void so that you can build more precisely.
Even so, Hyrule was not built to accommodate DIY vehicles.
It's cumbersome but does get a bit easier when you realize all of the axis are 8 corners, so it can't actually angle things in a full 360 rotation like magnesis. That said, I hate ultrahand too, so I get it
TOTK is BOTW but better, no need to play BOTW ever again. Awesome.
I think the only mistake TOTK made is reusing the same world as BOTW.
What captivated us in BOTW was the infinite beauty of exploration. Which we fully explored. So reusing that same world, we won't feel the same about exploration because we already know what we're gonna find/see for the most part. Although I loved seeing old areas changed due to events or gleeoks flying around. I loved the tense feeling I got seeing a gleeok for the first time and trying to get close to it to admire its design lol
But if you look at TOTK as it's own game, and not as BOTW sequel; and ignore the elements TOTK got FROM BOTW, TOTK is just as great, if not better.
I couldn't go back to playing BOTW, because TOTK is BOTW with ALOT MORE added.
I don't know why people open these videos saying TotK is a masterpiece. That's like nepotism for entries in a video game franchise.
So much of the game is re-used or undercooked. I think the highest I can give this game is a 7/10.
Giving ToTK a score above 7/10 is like giving OoT Master Quest a score above 7/10.
The original game (BoTW/OoT) is good, so the same game with a different paint will also get a good score.
@@tarnw3301 It's not the sameness that gets it that score, though that does participate in a way. It's the clunky controls, padded content, and the barebones story that ruin it for me.
If you want to see a game that re-uses a map effectively, Pokemon Black 2/White 2 is right there.
it was hilarious seeing people call it 'game of the year' before it was released, and then the hype died quickly. Streamers like Pointcrow who made years of BoTW content lost interest fast
Because instead of standing true in their own authentic opinions, they decide to contort themselves and say things to appease the crowd who will have a temper tantrum if they don’t like it. I miss the days when people were encouraged to be themselves and to be fearless when going against the crowd.
Exactly, I give BOTW at max a 7/10, and TOTK is either worse or identical in every way and feature.
The ENTIRE game lacks content. For 6 years of development with a pre-built map, there's just far too little novelties and added content. I get that they were also adding in new mechanics but I think we all expected more. If FromSoft can make the entirety of Elden Ring in the same time as TotK, there's ZERO reason Nintendo can't make an open world on the same level.
I agree with a lot of the points you made, after the initial hype phase wore off I quickly came to realize that I preferred Botw much more and think it’s better than Totk. That said there are actually two points that stood out to me that I disagree with, the Geoglyphes and the End Boss.
I despise the Geoglyphes indicating the place to obtain the memories. Having to find out where exactly those photos for the memories were taken was part of the fun for me in Botw and if I ever had trouble finding one there was Pikango to hint me in the right direction. The Geoglyphes on the other hand just kinda felt like a checklist to me since they were so easy to find and reach. There is also no reason as to why they are exactly located where they are, or why the Geoglyphes formed around the tears (Or I missed something?).
With the End Boss, I do like the fight against Ganondorf more. When I played Botw I put off fighting Calamity Ganon for a long while, because well I was sure it’s gonna be hard as it’s the last challenge. Yet when I finally faced him I felt so let down actually, it just felt way too easy and not because I was just that good but because he felt so weak. I had more trouble with the Thunderblight Ganon than the final fight of the game. Now I have my issues with Totk’s final fight as well, mainly the lead up because like you I was super unprepared. In fact I had no idea you could cook something to heal your broken hearts, so there I was having made my way through all that trouble just to eventually have to reload a previous save so I can even leave and come back later. But the fight itself felt like the proper last challenge, unlike Calamity Ganon, Ganondorf was a proper match to Link. He now was back to his prime and of sound-mind, an opponent not just a big huge threat.
Besides that though my opinion barely differs. I was actually surprised to hear someone else prefer the “Dungeons” of Botw more than those of Totk. Usually that is one of the few points the majority agrees upon that Totk did better. Yet for me they are not improved enough to say that I like them more than the Divine Beasts and in comparison those also made more sense in the story than what we got now with the Temple.
My opinions on the divine beasts are the minority and I am aware of that but hey opinions are opinions and i just prefer the atmosphere of those giant robots
Yeah even I have to admit the temples felt out of place… I can’t exactly explain it, but I think the reason I didn’t like the temples is because they didn’t have a build up or lore behind them.
The divine beasts make sense because they are integral to the story in BOTW, we need them to stop the calamity but they are under Ganon’s control. It’s the reason we go to those villages, and going inside of them and beating the bosses are rewarding because not only do we get the beasts back, we also free the spirits of our comrades and it’s rewarding because they show their appreciation through their character, and give us an ability to help us on our journey. We also save the village there that have been plagued by the beasts for a century, so it’s a pleasure to see the people in that town react knowing they don’t have to be suppressed by the beasts anymore.
But, in TOTk, I never got the same satisfaction of clearing a temple as I did with the beasts. We don’t even know these temples exist until the elders say “oh by the way, there’s this legend about-“ and I’m like, okay, but I’m just here to find Zelda. I don’t care about your history. The temples are also really big, and often times they are either in the sky or surrounded by lava, so one wrong move and I either fall or die right away. The puzzles are a bit more challenging, but also frustrating because I have to do five things before I can activate one of the terminals! I have to go around the temples so many times just to find out what I have to do, unlike with the beasts where they point you in the right direction, but don’t give you the answers.
And the bosses… again I give credit that they at least have some variety than the blights and their designs are interesting, but am I the only one who found half of them annoying and the other half way too easy? At least the blights put up a fight and they had a style that added to their character which made up for their poor designs.
Also, the only reason the temples were build was because they held a secret stone? Something we weren’t really supposed to get it’s just a thing you get, again no build up for these stones. All they do is provide you information about the sage and their battle of ganon and to give you a new ability. Which wouldn’t be a problem, but there are two major flaws to this.
1. The sages have no personality, we don’t know who they are, they never say their names or show their faces. They’re supposed to be an important character but the game treats them like an npc. And the memory they recall is just the same one! The battle of ganon which they say the same exact thing, we just see which sage gets beaten and then we cut to Zelda telling them about link! These memories are just copy and pasted, with little changes. I can’t even skip those cutscenes despot how boring they are.
2. The stones aren’t even given to you! They’re given to your companion you are with at the time. On top of that, the abilities you get are literally useless! Sidon has a water shield which is the same as daruk but shitter, you get a worse version of ubrosa’s fury from Riju, the Goron roll is good for blasting rocks but not much enemies… and you ride on a robot because… sure? Pretty much every ability you get is a weaker version of the champions and is hard to control. (Expect for Tulin, I like his ability because it’s useful to help get across wider gaps.)
Also, now that I think about it, wasn’t ganon’s whole plan to get the secret stones so he could go against Raru and become powerful? If he knew there were more stones, then why didn’t he try and take the other ones? And clearly he was able to find them in those temples, because those monsters belong to him. So, why didn’t he just have the monsters either absorb the stones, or have them bring the stones to him so he could be more powerful? It would have made sense for his character and story. If they had explained more of the stones and why we needed to get them, it would have made finding them more important.
I’m honestly wondering if the secret stones were added in the game at the last minute, given how little build up and importance they have in the story. Come to think of it, it makes me wonder if they were developing the map and models first and then added the story last, which explains why the plot is all over the place
@@cosmok-1367 I mean they did all have build up to them and there is some lore for them too.
I mean I did, they look nicer and there was the phenomenons going on around them. I mean not exactly, you can see some of them and there are hints of them. If you don't care about the history then why say they didn't have lore behind them? Clearly you didn't pay attention to or care for it so why complain when that happens? I mean you gotta be careful then in that case with their size. Not really frustrating just cuz there are multiple steps, BOTW did that too but in TOTK there is more variety to it then just moving the dungeon around. I mean no TOTK's point you in the right directions too but don't give you the answers.
How are they annoying or too easy? The new bosses put up a fight too and have more distinct styles, and the blights designs weren't even that bad either.
That's not the only reason, they are also places of worship and stuff. Actually no the story does build them up gradually especially in the memories. There really aren't major flaws with them.
1. I mean yeah but the current champions have personality which is good enough at least and they actually matter. True that memory stuff is annoying.
2. Which they have actual personalities and them being given to them is fine. No the abilities aren't useless at all. No Sidon's shield is unique as a water one with it's properties and it isn't shitty, no Riju's has no cooldown and can be used a lot more often then Urbosa's fury so hers isn't a worse version of that, nah that works for hitting multiple enemies at once really, and the robot is great too for fights.
Not really they aren't weaker versions of the champions and they aren't hard to control just annoying to activate and deactivate. (nah they are all good really)
He couldn't find the others clearly and it would not be easy. Not really, even the monsters didn't get quite to them but were close. You don't think they tried? They couldn't get to it either though. I mean they explained them enough and why you needed them.
I mean do have some build up and importance though. I doubt that is what happened and the plot really isn't all over the place tbh.
It's way better than BotW. BotW has way less meaningful rewards from chests, worse and less diverse shrines, less types of weapons and options and the worst: some parts of the map (like the jungle one) which serve no purpose in the story and I personally didn't even felt like exploring them because of the rewards being not meaningful anymore.
BotW of course isn't bad, it's just that TotK does everything better, even the story.
No, the story and world-building is absolutely worse in TotK.
@@billjacobs521 No it ain't, the story was pretty boring in BotW.
I'll never forget what it felt like the first time i explored the dephts flying straight ahead into complete darkness with a zonai vehicle and a battery that was about to run out eventually. The not knowing was such an incredibly scary and interesting experience I couldn't compare it to anything and else. I wish I could go back to not knowing whats down there.
I think that for the vast majority of people your favorite in the Duology of BOTW and TOTK is gonna be whichever one you play first. I think that if the Depths had actual things to do in them, that would have made the game interesting since there would be an interesting new map to explore, but the only thing to find is auto build, but there's nothing interesting going on otherwise.
Eh, I played BotW first but think I prefer TotK just because it *does* have more content. That said, I'm not like head over heels for either.
The argument that TotK is bad since most people hadn't played it again after the first playthrough, even a year after its release is a flawed one. As good as BotW may be, I hadn't touched that game in at least 3 years. Hell, one of my all time favorite games, Psychonauts, is a game I hadn't played in over a decade. There are thousands of great games to play out there, with new ones being released every month. And accounting that we all have only so much time to spend on video games, why should we play a game more than once? The only reason I can even claim to have played BotW twice is because I hadn't finished it the first time, and I'd felt that I was missing something (I wasn't).
The rest of the points made in this video, from what I've seen, are more logically sound or are fully based on opinion, so I can't argue against them. Though I'm still of the opinion that TotK is a far better game than BotW.
I COULD go back and 100% this game, but I just don’t feel like it. That might be laziness, but there’s something just so bland about it currently. It’s like BOTW with new features, and I’ve already played enough of that game.
Slight correction, at 7:30 you do see this NPC multiple times if you follow the “monster slaying crew/patrol” quests, as he’s the captain in charge of that group
Judging by the comments section this will be a very hot take, but I firmly disagree with you. I am seeing a lot of similar videos to yours pop up recently, but I don't have the means to make a proper response video so here is an extremely long written response:
Personally one of the reasons why I very much enjoyed tears over breath was directly related to the lack of guardians. Yes you can parry their lasers, but not only is it not obvious, its not the easiest without practice. 99.999999% of people are not going to sit there and practice parrying guardians meaningfully early in the game, especially because as you said going for a parry is a huge risk. As you said they were designed to instill panic and be avoid early on, I and I firmly believe that detracts and directly undermines the rest of the game experience. The guardians were CLEARLY and FREQUENTLY used to gatekeep areas of the map. Functionally they are placed in areas to ensure that the player either has the tools or the skills required to progress. Breath of the wild desperately wants to be the game known for adventure and exploration but keeps getting in the way of itself by way of guardians and malice. Even if you have the tools or skills to deal with them, when you are just in trying to explore and that laser shows up on your back I constantly found myself being frankly annoyed. You said that you found fighting multiple guardians really fun "because of a simple exploit" (time = 55:22) but I don't think it reflects positively on the design of a game that using an exploit that the vast majority of people are not going to be aware of during there first (and for most people only) time playing the game. I don't think there is anything wrong in finding enjoyment via game exploits (in single player games), but when approaching the game with the intent to engage with the designed experience and mechanics earnestly I found guardians (especially when plural) just a pain in the rear. To me at least, Gloom hands felt far more in line with previous zelda games (there are very similar enemies in older games), and I found the hands way more manageable while engaging in traditional combat.
Putting some space here just to make this part more obvious, but gloom hands are SUPER easy to deal with if you use dazzle fruit or muddle buds (the plants that create light). I also really appreciated the lack of ranged attacks, as the area that the hands were active threats (and potentially annoying) were much smaller than the guardians.
I will give you its not great that the hands come out of literally nowhere though, but there were many times where I felt like the same might as well be the case with how the guardians could spot link from insane distances. I disagree about them being less interesting or cool but that is subjective.
I honestly found more enjoyment exploring Elden Ring, where much more difficult encounters gatekept areas, than I did exploring in breath of the wild. In Elden Ring for instance, despite more challenging speedbumps existing in the way of exploration, it worked and didn't take away from my experience because they didn't demand my attention incessantly or forcefully and abruptly change the pace of the game. Having to deal with sniper tracking me isn't conducive to me having the freedom to explore without bounds, it just made exploring, often the most interesting places, a chore in an otherwise quite relaxed game. Playing Tears I felt way more free to explore without contrived gatekeepers even if there was definitely environmental gatekeeping of exploration. Having the ability to use the sky to avoid having to tediously climb constantly (because lets be honest climbing is boring and tedious and essentially filler content unless you are really into exploring the same bland textures over and over again) and allowed me to have more freedom to engage with exploring in a way I was more interested in.
With the abilities (runes) or whatever you want to call them. I found the breath of the wild abilities extremely underwhelming, clunky, and tedious when trying to engage with them in earnest. Especially compared to how items were used in previous games. A lot of your fun stemmed from "breaking" the game to address shortcomings in the intended design of the game. I actually feel that the abilities in TotK actually severely hurt the potential of the game, because I felt that it was very evident that the gave the player too much freedom and the developers struggled to create tailored experiences around them. I truly felt the game was at the best when link was restricted (be it the glimmer of potential in the lightning temple, or the proving grounds), but the abilities clearly flew in the face of this. Both were tedious and clunky.
The sage stuff is better in botw, I will give you that.
I still enjoyed exploring the sky Islands. Yeah there could have been more to do. Maybe my expectations were more tempered than most but its still better than a complete lack of them in BotW imo.
On your point of exploration, and the returning to Hyrule, I enjoyed it because I could go explore at my own pace on my own terms. I was honestly rather disappointed with BotW exploration because of how tedious it was and how sparsely populated the world was. Tears not only managed to add more to the world but it also made the existing content feel more full.
I agree that the tutorial shrines were poorly executed in ToTK, but I found literally all of the shrines in BoTW tedious and clunky. While cheesable in ToTK, I found the puzzle shrines fare more enjoyable as they were more open ended and less prescribed (the thing that botw is supposed to be all about).
While I by no means believe that TotK actually succeeded in capturing the magic of classic zelda dungeons(the water temple was especially bad), I am just going to have to hard disagree on everything you said besides the lead up to the temples being better. You didn't say it but I will give it to you that the cutscenes after beating the divine beasts are miles better than the repeated cutscene after each temple. I believe the temples and their bosses were overall much better than the divine beasts.
As for the story, I organically only stumbled upon a single extra memory in BotW my first time playing. So for me, the BotW story was essencially non-existent, and TotK was miles better. That said they could have done so many things better with the TotK story. There's no reason why they couldn't have had the cutscenes play in chronological (LOGICAL) order regardless of which one you picked up. Link discovering where zelda was could have, and should have, easily had a much greater influence on the ingame dialog. It was very strange to have important npcs ask about her and be left in the dark. Again though, I genuienly didn't organically encounter the BotW memories, because it functionally doesn't exist within the structure of the game without going out of your way to look for them. So in my books TotK's horribly implemented story was better than BotW's hidden story.
I hate calamity ganon, I find him un-inspired, and he reeks of a rushed game. He feels like he's an amalgamation of all the bosses because he is...BECAUSE he's the only real boss. I personally feel like the final bosses of ToTK are some of the best final bosses of any games, let alone Zelda games.
Clearly unintentional and obscure movement tech that breaks the game isn't something I think BotW deserves praise for. Don't get me wrong I am not saying I don't think it is fun. But is a game really a better game because it is broken in a way that only one in a million players would notice playing the game without the internet. So many people who play a ton of BotW do it because they like the Movement tech, but how many of them would realistically have encountered the movement tech without youtube? Using it, especially on a first play through, makes me feel like im not honestly engaging with the mechanics of the game, or having a genuine experience. You, yourself said that the methods to exploit botw are " so outlandish that how on earth would someone discover them while playing the game casually" and that is the crux of my issue with it. I just want to play Zelda casually. I love the series and I go into every game starting with the intention of engaging with the intended experience. The intended experience of TotK was just much better in my opinion.
Really, tears just was a better breath of the wild for me. I do have complaints about the narrative structure, the dungeons, the menus, but nothing I don't also have complaints about for botw.
That's the thing. The arguments against TOTK are very subjective. Many do still like the game and find it to be the best one in the series. So many videos tend to say the same over and over again.
I think the bottom line is that Tears is a less broken BotW. Mechanics are generally better balanced for the intended play experience, which means there's less freedom to play the game your way. Take the Great Fairies as an example: in BotW, once you find a bud, you just need to get together a one time payment of rupees and then you can combine your random armor pieces you've accumulated with random inventory trash you've also accumulated to get all your armor up to higher levels, only occasionally needing to grind for specific resources for specific armor pieces. In TotK, you have to complete a specific side quest to open each bud, and then every single upgrade costs rupees, meaning you have to be a lot more intentional about what you upgrade (and still needing to farm specific resources from time to time). It also makes rupees retain their value much further into the game.
On the other hand, TotK does suffer from clunky interface in a lot of ways. The issues with cooking return from BotW - both games "balance" the potential of cooked dishes to let you get around certain mechanics by making it slow and clunky to mass-produce dishes. If you want to turn ten hearty radishes into ten hearty fried wild greens, you need to open the menu, select the hearty radish, select "hold", leave the menu, select cook, skip the cutscene, accept the cooked dish, and then repeat another nine times. The arrow fuse interface can largely be fixed by sorting it to most-used, though that's still just a patch over the underlying issue. Activating Sage powers is terrible except for the gust while gliding or the goron power while riding a vehicle.
And TotK's improvements over BotW for long-time Zelda fans generally suffer from being somewhat half-hearted. The temples have a more varied design and are more integrated into Hyrule than the Divine Beasts were, but structurally they're still "interact with five glowing spots on the map in any order then go to the boss", and, unlike the Divine Beasts which turn off Link's ability to climb in order to allow for navigation puzzles, the temples allow you to break them in various ways (except the desert temple, where Ascend will usually leave you either in the boss chamber or outside the pyramid rather than letting you bypass chunks of the temple), meaning a lot of players can just ignore the temples' puzzles and then complain about how they don't have any.
Overall, I think I prefer TotK to BotW, but it's hard to convince myself of that because of the lack of polish in some weird places.
I get your argument, and I don't think that you're wrong for most of it, but I don't think the obscure movement tech being unintentional takes away from the game. It doesn't affect people who don't know about it, it just improves the experience of the people who do. The best comparison I have is wavedashing in smash bros melee. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that BOTW deserves praise for it because obviously it was unintentional, but I do think that TOTK deserves scrutiny for removing a lot of it. BTB's, skew clipping, and overloading the game don't affect the average player but was patched out presumably because players were having too much fun with it. Even stuff that was in TOTK but was patched out like zuggling and infinite horse stamina (which was also in BOTW). This stuff doesn't affect most people but it was still removed. I get that you want to play the game casually, but that shouldn't mean making the game worse for people who don't want to play casually.
@pokemon5life167
Let me be clear, I don't think that the movement and physics stuff take away from the game, and I am not saying it shouldn't count to how FUN a game is. But like you said, especially with stuff that is as obscure as they are, the movement tech exploits in BOTW, shouldn't be core what makes a game "good". Like they are way out of the intended use case and would not be used by the vast majority of players on their first, and most of the time, only playthroughs.
As for TOTK taking them away, I believe nintendo themselves talked about having to fix most of them because of how everything needed to be converted to rely on physics so much due to the new ultrahand abilities.
It wasn't patched out because "people were having too much fun with it" but because nintendo generally has a reputation for polish, and It effects their reputation when a large portion of the content being uploaded surrounding a game is effectively just showcasing how broken it was and how players are doing everything in their power to avoid the intended experience. They don't want one of their flagship characters to be associated with game breaking exploits that effectively give him the powers of a god, they want link to be associated as a character that is courageous and uses every tool he can to overcome great evil (even if the players themselves are ironically doing that by breaking the game it still doesn't create the associations they want)
My want to play the game casually is more related to the things like the guardians being annoying gatekeepers or not wanting to have to climb excessive amounts of cliffsides staring at textures only to find barely anything at the top, than the idea that link could do something like use a bomb to push another bomb into him so that he flies really far and fast. I believe they said in an interview at one point that they removed the ability to do some of these things because they were problematic when trying to implement the new abilities. I don't think, there's anything wrong with devs wanting to polish the game and patching exploits that are clearly outside of the intended experience, especially when some of these new game features replace the use cases for some of the physics exploits. Like, yeah you aren't moving as fast on a hover bike as when you break your back with a bomb (or bounce on a moblin's head in bullet time) and it doesn't feel like you pulled off some cool move, but there's still meaningful satisfaction in building things that I very much enjoy and it solves the same problem (that there's honestly too much empty space and things to climb in hyrule) while being completely accessible to every player. They were clearly trying to replace some of these capabilities (at least the movement ones) with actual mechanics in the game, and frankly that is actually something that is generally good.
Most people are just disappointed that TOTK isn't the game they imagined and wanted it to be. Older fans were disappointed that they doubled down on the BOTW formula and didn't go back to the traditional Zelda formula, and newer fans are frustrated that it is set in the same place that they have explored a thousand times and got too hung up on the fact that they can't use game breaking exploits to move around at crazy speeds to avoid exploring that they didn't feel the joy of exploring all the new things they added. I'd wager some also felt too frustrated that they no longer knew how to duplicate all the items they want, that they didn't realize that the new fuse system largely fixes the issues that lead them to want to duplicate the items in the first place.
Even the tears as cutscenes were an attempt at fixing the memory mechanic from the first game, and hell at least I got to experience the story without having to go out of my way to do so. I definitely think they should have programmed the cutscenes to just show up chronologically regardless of the tear you find, and that they should have had more dialogue that was actually reflective of link being aware of where zelda is. My point is a lot of these changes are CLEARLY done in an effort to address problems in the previous game.
Frankly, even though I am in the camp of people that would have rather seen the game have more linear dungeons like older titles, I tempered my expectations and was ready for another BOTW game with none of the dungeons and atmosphere I feel in love with as a kid.
I don't think that either of the two games are the best in the series (I would pick OOT or LTTP), and while I am with @johnforkner that the way the dismissal of established lore. The whole Zonai thing is a complete miss if you ask me. I thought that the Rauru from OOT watching over you as an owl was way more compelling of a character, and the story of Skyward sword that they ignored was one of the only good things going for it (and SS's dungeons were actually really good). Again, though, tempered expectations let me not get too hung up on it as Zelda games have never been consistent with lore.
In my opinion ToTK is a better game. I feel it does a much better job delivering the open world Zelda experience, allowing me to get lost in exploring hyrule without a lot of the frustrations of BoTW...and it had much better bosses allowing me to feel like im actually defeating evil instead of a futile attempt at killing some obscure anthropomorphic plague the 4 times only to find out that the final boss is the exact same boss all over again...(really making the final boss feel pointless)
I'm sorry you're so bad at guardians lil bro
I just miss the traditional style. It was perfectly fine, and had plenty of room for innovation, so there was no reason to completely trash it like they did.
Botw 30 Mio copies tears of the kingdom 20 Mio copies sold... Hmmm.... I think I see the reason. Anyway go play the older ones if you want.
@@tomgu2285 Nah, they never tried to sell an original Zelda game on Switch to know this answer. They know that it could have the potential to do much more than the 9M Twilight Princess did(previous best selling). By the time Twilight Princess did 9M Mario Galaxy made 12,75M. Then Mario Odyssey was able to increase sales to 28M withouth throwing 3D Mario formula in the garbage, just by evolving it. They went panic mode due to Skyward Sword weak sales. For some reason they decided it was a good idea to create a corridor game using motion controls.
@tomgu2285 You have mha as a pfp your opinion is invalid. It doesn't really matter how many sales you get. Shit gets sold well if you advertise it well. Botw is a good example for that. Your argument for high sales directly connecting to a game being good is incorrect. I could say the same thing for Fifa or CoD games. They sell very well but are objectively shit for a long time. If the next open world Zelda comes out, with the same formula, it will sell less than TP and Aonuma will be shivering.
I've played TotK almost every day since it came out. It brings me so much peace and happiness tbh.
That's fair enough, personally i play Botw instead of Totk but you're allowed to play whatever you want
@@linguini645No, she's not. She needs someone to restrict her playtime.
@@christianbell8347 Then that just shows how toxic you are.
@@Matt-eh2dyclearly a joke
I cannot agree less with defending the Divine Beasts. The temples feel like they actually have backstory relevant to their regions.
The divine beasts in no way felt like a part of the world and only on replay could I actually differentiate them all, and the act of playing through them was a negative experience for me.
I love ToTK to goddamn death but I always said while playing that it felt more like a definitive edition of BOTW rather than a full-on sequel.
I just feel like ToTK is currently suffering from the issue that a lot of Zelda games have where it’s gassed for like a year and then later on people suddenly think "Damn, this sucks..", I’ve seen it happen a lot in the past. But I still think it’s a masterpiece regardless of how many video essays I see saying otherwise.
(STOP ARGUING IN THE COMMENTS, DAMN)
You're talking about the so-called "Zelda cycle". Which is more a meme than anything else. It's not a real thing, given that opinions about Zelda games don't really change all that much as people claim if you actually pay attention.
"Majora's Mask" is the only game that has gone to something resembling what the Zelda cycle claims, but the rest? "The Wind Waker" was a case of people who played as children growing up and voicing their opinion, and the HD remaster fixing its main flaws. "Twilight Princess" has gotten stuck in a weird limbo, where its reputation is neither here nor there. "Skyward Sword" is still considered the second black sheep of the franchise alongside "The Adventure of Link" (the HD remaster didn't change anything in that regard. Onces its hype cycle ended, it's reputation was back where it started). And "Breath of the Wild" reputation never really dwindle in any meaningful capacity.
And also... "Tears of the Kingdom" is just very poorly put together as a whole. It doesn't hold up any kind of analysis because the physics engine took so much of the game's development resources that it devoured the game's actual design.
It's definitely a great game I just wanted to talk about why I felt that it fell flat compared to Botw instead of coming out as the superior game
What are you talking about? People have been saying this game sucks since it came out, myself included. The hate isn't something new
More and more people are probably finishing the game these days and finding out for themselves how much of a disappointment the entire game was and are now making videos about it
@@linguini645 Right right, makes sense
for me i felt like it was a full on sequel to botw, i bought totk the day i was completing botw, and played the day after cuz download. maybe that makes me biased since i played it right after, but it felt so well fit in and it felt like i was playing the same game just a sequel. i really enjoy totk, and i’m still not done. i bought it 7 days ago lol
i love watching videos about why totk sucks while playing totk, not out of enjoyment (or else i wouldnt need the company of youtubers), but to get my fucking 70 dollars worth 😭
I would disagree with not having gloom food for the final fight. If the player followed the direct story path the gloom system is well and overly explained and anti gloom food shows up in a few quests as an component and reward the fact that the final charge take place in the depths is more than enough warning to expect the player to bring gloom healing food if they want that option available and if someone beelines to the finish then not having that resources is part of the challenge they are looking for.
I didn't bring gloom food
In my opinion, breath of the wild is massively overrated and tears of the kingdom is a better game because it is more fun. I’m not someone who really cares about the story in Zelda games, so I prioritize the gameplay. Even saying that, totk is far from my favorite Zelda game, mostly because I’m just not a fan of open world games
Both of these games have pros and cons for me. Getting shrines feels quicker and more fun in Totk while longer in botw making it feel less grindy for upgrades. However totk brings in a lot of things that feel slow. Koroks give you longer tasks, mining battery ore is slow, side quests seem to be given by people telling of places using the names of those places which I don’t know or can’t see on my map while in botw most of the ones I remember looked off into the distance pointing you towards the side quest, and you have to constantly pause to drop items to fuse onto your weapons and arrows. However there are great upsides to totk. The building is great, the bosses are better, there is more enemy variety, the arm abilities are better, and more stuff previously locked into amiibo is now accessible.
However, the rewards for completing parts of the main quest are worse and kind of niche. Sidon’s shield is mediocre mainly good for getting you wet to take advantage of Zora weapons, Yunobo makes using vehicle constructs worse by worsening your view, Riju needs to charge up her range but your arrows are quicker and you’re usually using them from a range she struggles to reach, and finally there is Tulin who is great with the only complaint comes from rarely blowing away items I wanted. The Master Sword’s quest was also worse. Getting to the forest and freeing the Deku Tree is great but getting on the Dragon can be annoying depending on where it’s flying. Aside from the initial surprise that attaining the sword needed more stamina rather than hearts the task is worse since I instantly knew I probably needed the second full wheel and used the demon statue to trade in my hearts. I couldn’t do that in botw since most if not all of my upgrades went to hearts and the number required was a mystery to me.
The sword itself feels weaker in totk as it wants you to use fusion and isn’t that great even when glowing. I think it should be fine on its own as that’s the big upgrade that the Master Sword is in these games. You get a permanent sword that you can use for encounters and preserve your best weapons. Now since most weapons rely on the strapped on item including the Master Sword so it’s not as good at preserving your inventory outside of the depths where it glows against all opponents.
The weapons as a whole feel worse since you don’t get many cool looking weapons. Everything consists of dull weapons that rely on the strapped on item which looks bad. The boko reaper was the only blade that looked like a neat upgrade to a sword while other enemy parts are too wide or don’t attach to a hilt. They’re just swords with a rock or weird object glued to its edge. You always need to keep a weapon with a weird thing strapped to it that is durable enough to keep breaking rocks while weak enough not to be wasted on rocks. I miss the unique designs for weapons that botw had. You had an actual mining hammer with several Goron weapons that can also fill the role. There were cool elemental weapons that were replaced by fruits and minerals. The minerals work but the fruit apart from fire look out of place on arrow tips.
I'm glad to see you put this out after you threw the idea out there a little while back. I'm really impressed with the scripting and editing here.
Boomie zoomies
Thanks :D
Hold up how did you have trouble running totk on the switch I never had that problem it didn't even lag for me all tho I did spend most of my running around in caves or the depths
I agree with the the depths design being boring altho it was the easiest way to get large numbers of white monster parts so I would go on a war path killing everything only to end up with unnecessary numbers of parts
A lot of people have serious performance issues with Totk on switch so I guess you're lucky lmao
@@linguini645 oh
I had no issues with the game running either....
No issues here either
I never liked BOTW and TOTK even furthered my disdain towards modern Zelda. Just isn't the series I fell in love with.
i fucking love totk, but i wished they would incorporate classic zelda elements, like actual good and restricive dungeons, and a story that develops as you play. Its like the Zelda team thinks classic zelda is just bad for some reason, like they've thrown out 31 years of Zelda
Same. I at least appreciated BotW as a potential framework that classic Zelda could be built on top of to really flesh it out, but since they're clearly going in the opposite direction, I'm basically gonna skip all new games til someone new is in charge and they make a classic styled game again
@@alysupersmashshowthe problem is that the classic dungeons are antithetical to the design of ToTK's systems. Unless you lock powers behind progression, and then design the game to reward backtracking for other cool rewards, which then means you need items that aren't going to break.
Breath is better in nearly every way. Tears is a bunch of shit that both doesnt belong in Zelda imo and that nobody asked for. I just couldnt even finish it while Breath i could not put down even after over 200 hours. Really bummed me out when Tears released i was so hyped. Been on board since the OG.... Breath is the best only beaten by OoT by nostaligia and traditional Zelda formula that i prefer
I firmly believe that most of it not all of the Depths should’ve been scrapped and those resources should’ve been put into the sky. They spread themselves too thin and the games sleep inducing shallowness shows.
"On the fucking contrary." -beaver guy from max tennyson's UK simulator review.
I loved the video, but if I really liked it, I wouldn't have to preface that I loved it, or even make a comment about it. I want to talk about some of the criticism that was mentioned in the video, because there are some issues with the game that are 100% true (like I feel progression needs a guide to have the best experience, something to get players into the new machanics with a surplus of materials for them), but there were only a handful that were valid. I suppose I should rant in order of parts.
Part 1: I think this is correct for the wrong reason, TOTK is a better game but to enjoy it, you should play BOTW. BOTW was all about the freedom of the game, it was amazing in what it did, but to expect TOTK to have the same experience on the same map, or even a better one, is just wrong. TOTK is more about sandbox-ing the game that BOTW was, and it succeeded.
Part 2: I don't usually play on different save files so I wouldn't know much about replayability from the beginning of a game, but I think TOTK's was better because I wasn't feeling exploring the same map, so extending the tutorial was fine with me.
Part 3 & 4: TOTK's runes are a staple of the game, whereas BOTW's solve niche issues with exploration. Although TOTK's ascend and recall essentially do that too, in those situations, you were provided with solutions to problems that would be very annoying if recreated in BOTW, (1st game doesn't have the bird goat).
Part 5: yeah this entire section is true. I know what the team was trying for, but the lack of power from the sages makes me ponder if I should've saved the other 3 (4) after Tulin.
Part 6 & 7: I think the sky islands and depths are great because they add the situation of finding out the uses of the new zonai devices, but also in such a new experience that it's easily the most memorable part of the game. I understand where linguini is coming from when it comes to content from each one, it's just that the games discreetly changed categories, which answers what I think of part 8, besides the caves. The caves are cool to find, just extremely annoying to do so, so much so that they needed to add a mechanic just so you could find it. Now, that's not to jab at TOTK because we all know that if it was a situation in BOTW, there would be no help rather than a little mechanic. I just wanted to point it out as the improvement of a guide being minuscule.
Part 9: Yeah, the tutorial shrine bit is true. But I enjoy the tests of combat (forgot the name) where you are taught to utilize scarce weapons and elements of combat like BOTW did with the master sword trials, except it was way more fun to do so with the game's new mechanics, (context, I threw an apple behind an enemy and snuck up behind him for a sneakstrike. 10/10 would isasc newton again).
Part 10: The dungeons themselves are not enjoyable to me, I liked the progression to the dungeons and the bosses more, which seem to be what the devs liked more about them too, because yiu can refight bosses in the depths, and the path feels refurbished.
Part 11: Guardians - why they succeed: these enemies directly combat the sense of freedom the player has in BOTW. For example, you can't flurry rush a guardian- in vanilla- and if you want to beat them, you have to exploit their o n l y weakness, (well i guess the legs can be another one, but its very clear that the eye is their only weakness.) And as for the gloom hands, they do the same thing guardians do, just in a different sense because if guardians were in TOTK, they wouldn't stand a chance against zonai devices. Also I'm pretty sure the gloom hands are supposed to be fought using zonai equipment, and the only reason people, myself included, feel like the way to beat them is you HAVE to use arrows, is because of how discarded zonai fusions are. They take up a spot in your inventory, which wouldn't be a problem, IF they had good durability. You can get armor that increases the effectiveness of them, but it's really out of the way to do so, because it's on a random sky island, whereas the skydiving armor is in distinct sky islands.
Part 12: if im being real, TOTK had a better story imo because zelda is in the intro which means she's finally in my hands whereas I played through the entirety of BOTW to just have her be the one hot cashier I saw that one time and can only make fake scenarios of in my mind. Ok the previous statement is exaggerated, but it still felt way more intertwined eith the story than BOTW because I could actually play with the lore integral people than have them be consistently ghosts, those may seem the same, but I see the sages more as stands than evil spirits.
Part 13: yeah the gloom part is true. They should've put more info on the new mechanics, have one of my sages say "hey dumbass make sure you have sun percs." As for the boss, the part about the ganon clones and sages are the same as calamity ganon losing half his HP for playing the game. I wanted to test my strength against a full strength boss too, especially in the game that is getting less flak than its successor. The part about imagine dragons is true.
Part 14/15: Although I would've ignored this section because I like glitches and the raw enjoyment of a game's intented and unintended mechanics too, I'll use it to defend TOTK to the best of my ability. Movement boiling down to using the hover bike is certainly a mindset. I would've supported it if was mentioned that you just spam Tulin, but there's elements of combat potential that get missed out if you only use ultrahand and autobuild for the hover bike. For extended travel, yeah I might use a hover bike, but for something that's close to me, I'm doing the most random shit possible to get from point A to point B. The sandbox-ing is what makes the game, it wasn't really focused on freedom of exploration, but freedom of execution.
Part 15: I never had TOTK take more than a minute personally, but the depths sometimes having to load is real.
Outro-take: this is where I differ, TOTK was a game of all time, the experience is what msde it so memorable. For it to be a BOTW 2: Electric Boogaloo, I would not have enjoyed it as much. Although they could have certainly expanded on where BOTW left in terms of quality, I feel like it's fine where it is. It's a new experience, different from BOTW, but same in the replayability. I really hate that I have to leave it off with an IGN-ass review of "it has a little something for everyone," but it's slightly true. If you want a BOTW exploration freedom, replay BOTW. But if you want a BOTW creative freedom, play TOTK.
Finally, thank you linguini for making this video. It has shows the key differences in each game and why people might've disliked it when it was supposed to be BOTW's successor. The video has too much water though, 7.7/10
I mean fair enough if you don't agree with me, this whole video is one big opinion piece to be fair so disagreement was something i expected
The too much water bit at the end got me tho lmfao
a year after its release and avoiding spoilers as much as i can and i get the game… and i’m not even close to fully finishing the game.
i really hate the recent surge of totk hate, a bit because its justified but mainly its just the switch up due to hindsight. i still think this game is a 9/10, never got bored or sick of anything, just kind of sad that the hype didnt fully live up but tbf the hype was insane so it was inevitable
Nah, it's not justified at all. Totk is better than BotW in 90+% of aspects, people just got a hate boner over it because 1- unmatched expectations (their own fault) and 2- Zelda hate cycle. In a couple of years there will be videos saying how totk was actually a masterpiece and *insert newest Zelda game* is garbage and ruined the series.
Glad you fully enjoyed it. I'm a big fan of fun exploits though and that they patched up the good ones asap really ruined a lot of the fun I was looking forward to in the sequel relative to the first game.
@@pedro15305 Nintendo themselves advertised a darker tone for totk and what did we get?
@@thegamingbean953 I personally think totk is darker than botw, but if that's your biggest argument against it then you don't have very good ones lol
@@pedro15305 Oh the depths are creepy, now name one person who died, ganon is the only person who died
Imo, TotK was set up to fail for many because the devs didn't realize what made BotW work. Ignorance is what made things work.
BotW mechanics were often fighting themselves (Cooking replaced shrines, combat made things worse for you 99% of the time due to world leveling mixed with durability)
TotK only had the ignorance of Fuse, which meant people would naturally learn how to use it without glitches quickly. Since most shrines were built allowing cheese players naturally invalidate things and in turn there is no "solving" as every answer that works is correct.
You're now left with a game that slows down combat, has mostly redundant exploration, and relies entirely on its story to carry it. This isn't a book so this is really bad situation.
There was still fun to be had, but the strengths got weaker and the weaknesses got bigger.
I haven’t finished the vid yet but my personal gripe with the game is the amount of available options in moment-to-moment gameplay. Because the possibilities are so expansive, I never feel like I’m doing or tackling anything in an acceptable way.
It’s the difference between building a Lego than can be 20 different things, vs being given a huge amount of pieces and told to go wild. I just like a bit of structure.
This is very preference-based and not an objective thing, but I’ve talked to a lot of folks who’ve felt the same. I think too much freedom can be a hindrance in the some contexts.
I 100% breath of the wild. This I did the main dungeons. Like 10% of the depths (absolutely despised every moment of it) and even less of the sky island. Maybe did 20 shrines. A few side quests. Put it down and never touched it again. I'll take a good game with a solid narrative and great puzzles over the ultra hand thing any day. It was cool in the beginning. Lost interest half way through.
The depths was a huge disappointment for such a cool idea, 100% Botw is crazy tho gg
Me too except I never even bothered doing all of the dungeons.
@@linguini645 Tears of the kingdom was all about cool ideas and bad execution. Zelda being a dragon was a cool idea. But since this isn't a linear story, it was executed badly. What if they sent link to the first Hyrule kingdom. It would've been so cool even with the same map and it could've explained why there are no sheikah technology and guardians around. The first hour I thought this was the best game ever made. Then it became a drag. By the end of felt like work.
@@mignik01that would’ve required them to do actual work and not just release the same game from 6 years ago, so they couldn’t do that
The problem is not TotK especially, but the problem of open World games. I've been saying that for years.
A big world with almost nothing to do besides the same copy and paste quests.
Boring and bad game design.
This, but I think open world games have so much potential that is never explored because bigger = better. I think Elden Ring handles this problem mich better but even this game could've focused less on quantity
You know, I had a thought. Remember when Nintendo wanted to make an Ocarina of Time sequel where they'd reshuffle the dungeons? Tears of the Kingdom is like that in a sense. You have the same map and go to the same dungeon locations and interact with a lot of the same characters. The same map is the biggest issue from what I've seen. The exploration is less exciting when it's all the same. And the Depths and Sky Islands are unnecessary other than the tutorial and final fight.
Also, this is a personal issue, but what the HELL happened to all the Shieka tech? Where are the towers? The shrines? The guardians? It's like they were all just erased from the map. I would've liked to see hints of them, at least. Maybe some construction taking down the Shieka towers, or the shrines having been destroyed or deactivated in various ways (I mean with everything falling from the sky, that's a really good reason to have a bunch of them crushed). I'm sure there's some dialogue somewhere in the game explaining where it all went, but I'd like to actually _see_ it.
Another thing I personally have a problem with is the conclusion. I really really don't like that Link gets his arm back and Zelda is a human again. It just erases the permanence of what happened to them.
About the "TOTK is too powerful for the console it's on", I didn't realize the Switch had a fan inside of it until I played TOTK.
The lore isn’t the end all. I have played both games and I like them both for different reasons. BOTW was straight up fantastic because it was first, it was the first to prove just how awesome a game could be, it still makes the list for the best games to play. BOTW will always have a place in my heart. The thing about TOTK, it is Zelda on crack. The sheer amount of things to do is absolutely impressive, the exploration and the tool building is next level in game play. I understand why the lore pisses people off, because it’s like they had these mechanics and truths in the first game and they were all dismissed for some other new ideas. I personally think that was a missed opportunity on Nintendo’s part, that they could have left some of the old tech and built on from there. The complaint of not getting the dungeon crawl feel with BOTW was more than made up with the exploration with the caves, sky islands and the underground areas in TOTK. I’m no purist but at the end of the day, both games are powerhouses and they need to looked at like two completely separate games to be fully appreciated.
TotK traded too much quality for quantity. Sure you now have 3 worlds to explore instead of 1, but one of them is mostly the same, the other is a mirrored version of that same world, and the third is a bunch of cookie cutter islands. BotW had new fun quests and challenges around every corner. TotK constantly recycles stuff.
It's a combination of burnout of the format (already) combined with granular lateral changes and severe design oversights. Basically, it's glorified DLC. Although to be fair, if it was a "real" sequel, people would still have issues with it because BotW had its own issues that will likely never be addressed, especially compared to all the prior games. The future of the series will likely be a rough one.
This game had so much potential to destroy the gaming world for the next decade but it just ended up being a DLC of the previous game with a lacklustre sky, lacklustre depths, a shockingly bad story, and a map with the EXACT SAME TOPOGRAPHY (I will never stop saying how terrible this was, you couldn’t even change up the location of a few things? The whole overworld HAD to be the same and you had 6 years to tinker with it???????)
Peoples expectations are in the mud. This type of laziness wouldn’t have ever been accepted from any gaming company 10 years ago, but because it says “nintender” and “zelder” on the box it must be a good game that we praise. Complete cashgrab.
I honestly can’t believe they used the same map
It’s really telling to me that Elden Rings Dlc was more of a sequel to that game than totk was to botw
Removing the awesome champion abilities and replacing them with POS ghost companions with mediocre abilities that are a pain to use...that was unforgivable.
The runes in botw always felt lacking to me. Using magnesis would make me wonder what would it be like using it on any item (like ultrahand). Classic bombs were always cooller (i dont care about speedrun glitches). Cryonis was pretty niche, most of the time just for crossing rivers. Stasis was cool, but also lackluster. Dont get me wrong, the work pretty well for the game, but it felt like it needed an oomph.
Taking them at face value yeah they're pretty lame but if you dig a bit deeper the runes just present so many interesting quirks and things to mess around with
I feel like most of the people who don't like totk are just burned from botw and didn't played the game thinking " new game " but more like " botw dlc" and that made them think that "its just the same thing" when they didn't even treated it like a game
Yeah, and usually what I heard is: "Oh gosh it's the same map, that's boring, I'm going back to BOTW..." Which is pure bad faith. I don't dislike the first game and I know TOTK isn't perfect but let's be honnest for a second...
Imagine how mediocre TotK was that you need to constantly deny reality to feel its not a glorified dlc... Sorry but thinking something isn't real doesn't change truth, making TotK feel new was the devs job, not ours
@@Kooptj Imagine how mediocre BotW was that you need to constantly deny reality to feel it's not a glorified tech demo...
Being reductive is a fun and easy way to dismiss someone's point without having to actually address any merit they may have, isn't it!
Never mind whether your argument actually stands up to even a tiny bit of scrutiny:
- you assume that DLC is bad: "Shadow of the Erdtree is just DLC! Fancy anyone liking that!"
- you assume that it's reasonable to treat BotW as the main game and TotK as the secondary material when the later is significantly larger, so, if anything, BotW is the demo for TotK rather than the other way around (actually, there are enough things in BotW that aren't in TotK that describing them as a single game raises questions about whether you've actually played both of them). Next you'll be arguing that Link Between Worlds is just LttP DLC...
Personally, after having finished BotW once and started replaying it something like three times without it keeping my interest very long, I found TotK brought enough novelty to sustain my interest through a complete playthrough (all shrines; nowhere near all koroks), and I might go back and start a replay at some point in the next 5-6 years.
To some degree. But there's also a lot of just not liking where they took the story, the lore, the mechanics. TotK has a lot of bad incentives that make the game less fun. Like who uses horses when you can drop a hoverbike or wing anywhere? Who cares about the rewards when you're getting similar meaningless rewards every 5 minutes? BotW was definitely a tech demo in many ways, but TotK is really just a showcase of Ultrahand and a lot of moving parts that don't work great together. Sure, there are people who don't like that the sense of exploration is basically gone from the reused world and the rewards for the new things ranging from being old to underwhelming. A sequel isn't made in a vacuum. Plenty have been able to make their worlds feel new again to returning players. Clearly this game had game design issues for so many people to feel burned by it, especially with so many having reasons beyond just the exploration issue
@@Chronoflation To be fair, I never used horses in BotW either - they're useless for exploring because you ditch them the moment you start scaling a hill, and then they're stuck on the other side of a hill and there's not much point going back for them. And they're hopelessly outclassed for travelling distances since you can just warp to where you want to be instead. Aside from a few specific quests that explicitly require horses, neither game saw me using them.
That's not to say that TotK is a great game - it's an improvement on BotW in a lot of ways, but it's also a repeat of BotW in a lot of ways - for someone who hasn't played either, my guess is their favourite would be whichever they play first (since it'll get the full benefit of novelty) but when your game is showing less polish than the original Majora's Mask, you're doing something wrong...
Magnesis is better than Ultrahand solely because it has momentum and can deal damage
(Respectfully)
That’s a skill issue