Much like your critique of the game most of your criticism for the game is recycled from other's criticism of BOTW. Your argument about them using the same engine and using BOTW tech to do TOTK is not a good argument. Not to mention the same thing applies to the 2 most popular, titular titles in Zelda history did the exact same trick. But I'm also going to say that your arguments don't come off as good faith since the arguments you use (Big world with nothing in it, only the first area is fun, where are old zelda things? Where are the mechanics I like? Why does it have mechanics I don't?) All these arguments are rinse and repeat from critiques of breath of the wild.
God the pirates! I was incredibly disappointed with them just being Bokoblins. I honestly thought we could fight a group of humans with their own motivations, but I guess it wasn’t meant to be
ooooo skeleton pirates, heck yeah. we get stalfos already so some new evil from ganon would have been cool-like a nod to pirates of the Caribbean or something and a call back to other games. thats a great compromise. could tie into the lore too of lurenlin village-dang, that would have been cool. eventide island was their legit strong hold some skeleton pirate boss down there
I'm so glad other ppl also share this disappointing "pirates" experience, I can't believe I honestly let myself think that maybe there was going to be a pirate ship dungeon in Lurelin Village. the fake-out with the "5th temple" was a whole other level of "what the fuck how was this greenlit". really encompasses what went wrong with this game
I commented on the final trailer “I really didn’t want to be dissapointed by this game, but I was.” And all I got was hate comments, and people telling me I was a terrible person.
It worries me, the future of Zelda is seriously in danger cuz you know damn well they will keep this development philosophy going forward because people ate it up and they made millions. It's really scary....
@@mrplayfulshade There are articles about how Shigeru Miyamoto and Koizumi have butted heads over what the "essence" of the franchise is. Miyamoto believes in prioritizing gameplay over story, and has actually shut down actual games in development at Nintendo because he thought people wouldn't like them. Yes Aonuma is the "producer" of zelda games now, but it is undeniable that Miyamoto's philosophy on story is being pushed at HQ. I honestly have the theory that the writers for TotK intended for the tears to be somewhat linearly unlocked alongside the dungeons, with the big reveal at the end, but Miyamoto caught wind and did not like the idea of any linearity because of his view of Zelda being a game about freedom and exploration and ignored the larger implications of immersion breaking in the case the players did not play through the game in (ironically) the specific manner he intended.
I don't know, to me it seems Aonuma is obssesed with non-linearity, to the point that the entire game progression is circular and pointless.@@auginetic
i could accept it being more subtle in botw. but in totk if you are gonna replace that it better be something really cool-not some secret stones that do a bunch of nothing and go no where.
@@Wralis Just re-read my last comment, and see that I have truly let Din down. I really called her Eldin 😂😅 I saw another vid theorizing there is a chance the triforce faded into Legend once it served it's purpose. Still doesn't explain the absent goddesses. They would have to be the three dragons.
@@WralisThe secret stones are legit and not having the triforce is fine What isnt fine however, is Gabondorf's real motivations Hes just taking over hyrule just.. Because..?
The best part of TotK was how it shows that bigger isn't better, minimal UI is important, placing restrictions on the player helps them to feel satisfied, and that "freedom" isn't an end unto itself. I'd definitely prefer a smaller game with nothing but a grappling hook as opposed to the cluster fuck we got.
it's a fact that grapple hook makes games at min 70% better I agree. If they are gonna go this open world route again, would like to see a mix of open world and linear areas, kinda like how elden ring had with it's world/castles
@@Wralis The earlier 2D Zelda games were semi-open in that regard. Zelda 1, for example. You can do the first 3 dungeons in any order, no holds barred. You need the raft from 3 to enter 4, and you need the ladder from 4 to finish most of the later dungeons. Once you have those, you can access and finish the rest of the dungeons in basically any order (only exception are rooms where Digdogger appears, and you need Lv 5's recorder to deal with them). You then have to converge at the final dungeon to defeat Ganon. A Link to the Past, the first 4 dungeons are in a linear order, but the overworld is 80% open the moment you step out of the Sanctuary for the first time, so it feels far more open than it lets on. A full sweep of what you can acquire before stepping foot in the first dungeon is: 5 Heart Containers, Boomerang, Ice Rod, Magic Powder, Bombs, 2 Bottles, The Bug Net and 3 remaining Heart Pieces. Once you get the Hammer from the first dungeon in the Dark World, you can access almost all the remaining dungeons; you just need to visit Thieve's Town first to get the Titan's Mitt to lift the dark rocks. Ice Palace requires you to have the Fire Rod from Skull Woods to even get past the first room, and Turtle Rock requires you to have the Cane of Somaria from Misery Mire and Fire and ICe Rods to fully finish it. Everything else is doable in any order, but you must finally converge at Ganon's Tower for the final stretch. I think this semi-open setup works best for games, as the player still gets to have plenty of agency, while also making it so that you can still have ramping difficulty after the converging points. I don't like it when it's linear the whole way through, but that doesn't mean the games can't still be good: See the Oracles being my favourite Zelda games, lol. They're linear as heck, but there's still plenty of secrets to find and they've got the most mechanically deep items and puzzles (especially Ages, like the Switch Hook) in the series.
The primary feeling I had while playing Tears was disbelief. It was insulting to me. Make me explore the same space again (or totally vapid new ones) buy the same armor again, upgrade that armor again (but it takes longer and is more convoluted), do shrines to get hearts and stamina again. All while being more on rails than the first which is antithetical to the design philosophy
yeah i would love to see temples evolve along side the series-what we got left...a lot to be desired. Thought the lightning temple would fit great in the depths since ya know...the undead stuff n all that.
@@Wralisi jusr seen an interview where the director was saying he didnt understand why players would want to go back to the old constricted style of game design. He said the new open world was the future and that those games with one option on where to go are obsolete. Which shows a fundamental lack of understanding for what players want. I dont think anyone wants to play exactly the same game as ocarina or majoras mask. I know i want less linearity and more complex level design than what was present on super Nintendo and n64 and that botw is far from the only option to achieve that. There must be a way to improve the older style without losing what it did so well.
yeah i feel ya. luckily i played botw in 2020 so didn't have that long to wait, but the game was still fresh-ish in my mind when playing totk so i guess that's a good/bad thing? thanks for checking out the video
It doesn't matter how long you waited. What matters is how much time they had, how many people, what resources, etc. This was a sequal and not a totally new game. But it was much more. Man, the fuse system alone is worth the money.
That makes no sense, of course it matters. That was the whole point of this video, we got breath of the wild AGAIN after 6 years and some fans were left bored with this. @@devalapar7878
@@devalapar7878the fuse system is fun the first hours of gameplay and the first time you fuse a certain combination but after that it feels so repetitive for me
It’s nice to see someone actually talk sense and get some positive feedback. I too am a massive and longtime fan of this franchise and have played and loved every game in the 3D lineup. That was until TotK. After the honeymoon phase of a new Zelda ended, I realised that I was just playing BotW again, except this time with even more repetitive padding. Never in all my days have I been more disappointed in a game and I too though that to be an impossibility prior to release. Go figure…
@@ash8244 This game is only “better than BotW ever was” exactly because BotW was so good. It’s a complete rehash with a handful of neat new ideas that simply aren’t palpable enough to set this game apart from its predecessor. It is the exact opposite of what a 3D Zelda game should be at it’s core: unique.
My biggest annoyance with the story is that it doesn't have a story to tell. It's not about anything. Usually a story hassome point, some question that is being asked, some metaphorical conflict, something to latch onto. But in this game things just happen. With everyone sweaing fealty to Zelda in the end it feels like we are supposed to think that Zelda grew into a leader this game, but there is nothing to that. She basically just bumbles around the entire story, until she sacrifices herself. The sacrifice could be something, but since they just reverse it in the end there is nothing to it. Also that fake-out of "oh, this is permanen" "there is no going back" "you will stop being yourself" etc. building up to a moment only for it to not matter at all is pure emotional maniupulation transformed into a game.
It's bad writing and not only did this feel like emotional manipulation I feel hoodwinked and swindled out of $70 because how dare Nintendo bait us with the sick trailer of Ganondorf, essentially being the embodiment of doomsday but as you said, things just happen and there's nothing to tell. We don't learn about the Zonai, Zelda pretty much let everything happen, NO ONE tried to stop Ganondorf before it was too late to do anything. Link doesn't say anything about Zelda's whereabouts so now the cutscenes feel out of place and awkward. And throughout the game, it tries to gaslight it's players in a sense of "That's not Zelda, where is she?" And when you come face to face with skeletal Ganondorf the game is like "HA! See, HE was Zelda all a long, bet you didn't guess that" Like seriously? This is what we waited 6 years for? Shame on you Nintendo. There was nothing heart felt about Zelda sacrificing herself, because not only was it reversed at the end with NO explanation, that shouldn't have been her first course of action. How did she not know that Ganondorf was responsible for the calamity? Didn't she take pictures? Didn't she seal the Calamity for 100 years with it's name GANON in it? She's suppose to be insightful and wise. Here, it just felt like the devs only wanted to out shine or out do her sacrifice in BotW which wasn't needed. Nintendo, you fumbled the bag with this one.
speaking of the story, one of the things I hate about it that I never see brought up much is that it feels like a Saturday morning cartoon ending and there are basically no long term consequences to *anything* that happens in the plot. At the end of BOTW, the world is still destroyed. Hyrule is still in tatters. Hyrule castle and the town around it are in ruins. The victory, although satisfying, still has the feeling that this wasn't the ideal way that it should have gone, which makes it a nice ending but still a bittersweet one. Villages are still razed, the champions are still dead, there is still that feeling of loss. There is a hope for rebuilding in the future though, which is why the ending isn't purely a bitter one. (that and also the fact that you beat the big bad and saved a generally likable character) In TOTK, everything is wrapped up in a nice little bow. Zelda is completely fine, infact she (IIRC) doesn't even remember being a dragon. So she thought she was going to (essentially) die by eating her dragon stone, then mere moments later (in her perspective) she wakes up as her old self back with Link catching her in the sky. Link's arm is fixed too. I wasn't one of the people who thought Zelda should have stayed a dragon but I wish we would have had to put the legwork in to get her changed back. I feel like way more people would have been okay with Zelda turning back into a Hylian if we had to even try a little bit to fix her. It's really weird to think about how TOTK doesn't have plans for DLC, and this is likely to be the last game set in the BOTW version of Hyrule, but they still made sure to wrap everything up in such a way that they could do another game in this version of Hyrule if they really wanted to. This is why I feel like it's very much a Saturday morning cartoon ending, stuff happened, but it also wrapped up just perfectly for another story to happen later that can completely ignore anything that happened in the previous "episode" It feels weird how almost everything resets. Yes, Hyrule castle is hovering a few hundred feet off the ground now, and yes there are holes in the ground and sky islands, but in the grand scheme of things everything reset to how it was just prior to Zelda and Link going into the depths of the castle. Basically, one of the only long-term consequences of anything that happens in TOTK is that the average Hyrulian's chance of randomly getting turned into a thin paste by a rock the size of a house falling on them has increased by a notable margin.
Zelda games have simple narratives with a lot of subtext. - OoT is about the loss of innocence. - Majora is about grieving and connecting with ppl. - BoTW is about living with tragedy, and carrying on the legacy of loved ones. ToTK isn’t about anything. It’s a collection of events with no subtext. It’s about sacrifice, and then it isn’t.
@@frewtlewps1152 Thats how I felt. It was a large collection of side quest and side adventures with the story being a multi-part side adventure. There's no flow or direction in the story. There were many times where I didn't know where to go in the story so I just started exploring and happen to continue the story. With how much BotW got slack for no story, TotK was much worse.
@@RedBaronFlyerif they made a third one it would be about an entirely different ancient civilization and would try extremely hard to not alienate new players, thereby failing as a sequel
The thing about the sky being empty boggles me even more considering the people of lookout landing (as i remember some npc telling me) have paragliders. They built these new skyview towers not just for link but for the townsfolk as well, yet NO ONE ever uses one even though they clearly state that they're curious about visiting the sky islands that are literally right above their head.
“Tears of the kingdom wants you to forget what botw exists” is the truest thing imaginable to me. I remember constantly getting the feel of “hey I’m just playing botw again” after the first 10 or so hours, and the thought kept happening more and more and more until I reached the 3rd dungeon just after killing a bunch of bokoblins(new content lmao) and I just realized like man I’m having absolutely no fun and literally forcing myself to try to enjoy this 70 game, maybe I should put it down, and since then I’ve never looked back😭
Honestly if nintendo could have captured what made the great sky islands so special without making the rest seem play out like a ubisoft botw game, nintendo genuinely would have made a masterpiece. It’s a damn shame
Yo thanks for leaving your thoughts and checking the video out? Something similar happened to my friend. Got a temple out of order and spoiled some stuff and they felt so bad about it they haven't picked the game back up. Hopefully the dlc is good? Idk ac6 comes out this week lol 😂
@@WralisUnfortunately, Nintendo said they have no plans for DLC this time. Not even something as simple as upscaling enemies for Master Mode. Its quite a shame. Guess we'll have to go get new content from the modding community.
@@Jokerxeno1 ToTK is basically what Nintendo wanted Skyward Sword to be, if the technology existed at the time. Even the original LoZ was supposed to have time travel and we didn't get "proper" time traveling until OoT. If you think about it that way, things kind of make sense.
ya know i didn't see this comment until now but the no DLC thing and seeing what the zelda team said about why they aren't making dlc at this time makes a lot of sense-ran out of ideas for this world-at least the people in charge, idk-thats a bid disappointing, botw dlc was awesome-the master bike or whatever worked better than any piece of crap i put together myself with ultra hand except hover bike...hover bike reigns supreme
I did a blind playthrough, and went wild with my Amiibos straight off the bat so I could get some green tunics. I just have a small deck of NFC cards for every Zelda amiibo that I got for like $10. I had no clue that they re-used the Amiibos as "treasures" around the map/Depths. So as I was exploring the Depths, I ended up having two of each armor piece because I already had them before I even knew the Depths existed. The treasures were so meaningless to me. Majora's Mask was of course nice to find... although it was just the same item I had in BOTW so it was not exciting by any means. But finding Majora's Mask makes the Bubbulgem rewards pointless!!! Why make the player work for all those masks when they can just kill a few lynels for Majora's Mask?
4 months later, we’re still not allowed to dislike/ critic this game….. What a shame, nobody can have a opinion on this game, unless you say it’s perfect.
I’m positive this is not true tbh because I’ve been seeing more negatives/critics being talked about recently but then again statements like these can be true or wrong because the internet is a pretty wide place with lots of spaces to talk about specific topics
@@insertnamehere259 We are called crazy. If that were true, the game would not have a 10/10 everywhere. It’s not our fault, it’s the fanboys giving it a 10. When at best it’s a 7/10.
Maybe people just like the game? Many criticism I see in the video are talked about in almost all the reviews I’ve seen and I agree with almost all of them but no one ever said it’s perfect, not only Zelda fanboys play this game so maybe it’s not on people to enjoy the game while you don’t
Stfu People hate on this game left right and centre. Yes It’s not for everyone but the gameplay is top notch and it’s incredibly fun. people saying it’s bad just mean it’s not for them. That’s fine just don’t complain about it when other people love it. You say this but you’d do the same thing with something you love. The game has gotten perfect scores tho and people conspire saying they get paid off or this and that. No it’s just a well made game that people people years to make. I love it, I have things I think could be improved but that’s the same with every game. I don’t BG3 is very good and I’d overhyped but I don’t comment on videos saying it’s bad or people are wrong for liking it, and I’m not saying your doing this but a bunch of people are.
I'm genuinely surprised they didn't have islands appear over Gerudo Desert after the sandstorm clears. There could have been mirages in the sky or something, you know? It's nice to hear someone else agree that the great sky island being the most impressive is a huge disappointment. It's presented like a spectacle and I remember thinking "if this is the first island, I can't wait to see what else is out there." Imagine my disappointment. I loved a lot of the sky islands, but they were each one-and-done locations. So much of the sky map feels under developed.
18:16 By the way, this was the first red flag for me. I have every Zelda amiibo and I was using them for several days in TOTK before I discovered my first treasure in the depths. I was shocked, sad, and angry. I avoided spoilers for the game and figured it was fine to use the amiibo since they worked for BOTW, so I figured I may as well see if I could unlock the classic tunics again. There I was already with about half of the armor sets and I opened that damn chest in the depths just to get a tunic or some shit that I already had from the amiibo...... Again, the game overall just feels under developed.
for real-and the fact you had to upgrade all the armor again if you really wanted to use it was just...a big ask. and I didn't mind farming stuff in botw but totk felt more tedious? i'm not sure. kind of spoilers? I got the sky sword or w.e very very very early in the game-like within the first 6 hours and it sat in my inventory until the end b.c I didn't wanna break it-i gotta stop now or there gonna be a part 2 to this video...
@@Wralis Oh yeah, the fact that there still is no way to prevent weapons from breaking meant I never wanted to actually use the good ones, the master sword included. It's a bit paradoxical. Acquire stronger weapons, but if you use them you lose them (at least the master sword recharges, but still). This was especially painful for the unique weapons. Instead of being used to slice apart gleeoks, they sit in display cases in Link's house next to a giant picture of Purah. I say that as someone who likes the concept of equipment management in this style, but its execution has flaws. They really didn't want to add blacksmith NPC or some other way to fortify weapons and shields? "Here, go collect rare diamonds and other materials so a goron can make the Boulder Breaker, but hit too many boulders and it'll break!" Anyway, I'd def watch another video. Good work on this one!
5:13 I know, right? I was so excited and pumped to get down there and see who the pirates were and what they were like. The whole time I was thinking to myself, "No way! They brought back the Gerudo pirates from Majora's Mask! That's hype as fuck!" Sadly, I got down there to find a bunch of dumb red fucks hanging out and having a beach episode and everyone around calling them pirates. Like, what the fuck for? Why does standing beside some fucking water suddenly make these goofy assholes pirates?
Lol, it just reminds me of the old Nintendo, when they put more effort into enemy pirates for a game with actually minimal story on an inferior console like DKC2 over two and a half decades ago. Smh
Totk felt like an enormous waste of potential. I remembered being the most excited when the first announcement was made in 2019, even though if Botw wasn’t my favorite game. My first time playing MM was mind blowing, knowing it was built on top off Oot. I love both games to death and still replay them back to back frequently. The first playthrough of Botw felt very special, and I was reasonably satisfied after exploring every corner of the newest Hyrule. For these reasons, my expectations were the highest ever when it came to this sequel. That all changed when the second trailer released and I realized what approach this sequel was going to take. I still don’t have the slightest idea how so many people were okay with Nintendo to use the same map for a Zelda game. The Hyrule in the final game is 90% identical, and the Sky and Depths were not that interesting. Even little things like the reused armor and weapon designs bummed me out. My imagination was the strongest ever thinking what the new overworld was going to be like (Termina, Koholint Island, etc.) or even an original villain, with the artstyle and charm of botw of course. Instead I felt like we got remake of a game from 6 years ago that was already a reboot of franchise 35+ years in the making. The worst part of Totk for me is that it doesn’t stand on it’s own away from its predecessor. I implied that I can replay OoT and MM independently from each other. Both games have their own identity, while neither game invalidates the other’s existence. I can’t say the same for Totk and Botw. They are way too similar in almost every aspect that the most popular discussion of the game is debating which of them is superior. Like why did Totk not fix any of the problems players had with the first game. I never seen this amount of confusion for a Zelda game upon release. You have the people who defend it as 11/10 game and the other saying it is $70 DLC, with even more derivations in between. It's cool building whatever you want with the new Zonai devices, but is that's really it? Even after completing the game, I still can’t stop imagining what could have been. TL;DR “BotW 2” was a promising idea. I was disappointed that TotK was not the sequel to BotW, like MM was to OoT.
I can understand that. Sometimes it's weird how companies market their games now a days-they are so vague and withholding for almost no reason, to me. I remember when Aounuma said it was gonna be like MM but i think a lot of that got lost in translation b.c this isn't like MM at all-I guess he meant in reusing assets? but MM used that to save time to build a new world+new mechanics. - and with the trailers we got w/ link and zelda cave diving made me think there was gonna be some kind of mystery going on at the very least but there isn't really-hoping the next zelda game is a bit more out there
@@nicke5801 Nintendo never said that. People were comparing it to MM because he first trailer looked dark, but Nintendo responded saying that it's not like MM, it's completely different and what they've shown is darker than MM.
ive listened to a lot of discourse about this game, yet you're the first to FINALLY talk about zelda and how dirty they did her in this game! i agree 100% and even forgot that she had the purah pad pictures to show too smh. there are 4 things about her inaction that miffed me. 1. couldnt make the ganon, calamity ganon connection and warn rauru about it. 2. didnt leave a slab behind somewhere on the surface, warning her future self about the trouble she would have with her sealing powers and how to awaken them sooner 3. knew she was committing suicide and still decided to eat the stone right away instead of living a full life first 4. knew the master sword was the key to killing ganon, but left no note for link at the zonai temple of time (or with the sages) about where to find her and the sword. great video!
I'm guessing her "tears" was her way of leaving clues behind to have Link find her, but that still doesn't justify the horrible writing. They watered her down mentally and physically for the sake of the plot and when your story has to resort to that method then it's not good writing in my opinion. I'm mad she didn't realize who GANONdorf was nor did she try to like maybe seal him away with her own power BEFORE he got a stone. You know back in Breath of Wild, she finally discovers and awakens her divine goddess power to seal the Calamity and nowhere did she say that, "I lost my power during that time" or anything of the sort. So why in Tears of the Kingdom, she just resorts to unaliving herself because that was the only option? No, you were just being dumb 😅 but again it's not her fault, because the story definitely feels like an afterthought or they just simply didn't care to make one
@@blackchickiedee7 yes! and even the tears wouldve been made redundant if they just allowed rauru to describe the events he experienced with zelda to link while his ghost was still around during the GSI intro. im guessing the reason they didnt do this though is because it wouldve ruined the "where's zelda" plotline. Her whereabouts (as well as the whereabouts of the master sword) shouldnt have been a mystery imo. the sages saw her transform, the steward construct that took the purah pad (likely) saw her transform, and rauru shouldve deduced that the new dragon was likely zelda.
@@daveglass6008 yeah, the where's Zelda plot line really fell flat in this installment. And they didn't have to go down that route if they just, cared to make a better story. I'm not going back to TOTK, it has no replay value for me like the other ones do. Maybe to see Ganondorf :3 but even then I can just go to the Internet for that
@@blackchickiedee7 oh, that's interesting since I adore everything else about the game lol. I love the depths, the larger sky islands are great places to vibe at (the view from the sky overall is incredible), and the new abilities are absolutely amazing! I went into totk hoping it would supplant botw as my new favorite game of all time, but my grievances with the story held it back. hopefully zelda team figures out how to marry linear storytelling with open world gameplay for the next title and kills it! currently enjoying a second playthrough that heavily exploits some of the fun glitches in the game; and without a paraglider! its a fun challenge
I am a diehard Zelda fan and enjoyed BoTW for the novelty, despite its flaws and it being wildly overrated..... but unfortunately Tears of the Kingdom is a bloated, tedious and formless mess that’s only fun in a “junk food” kind of way. There is no novelty this time around, so the undercooked gamed design from BoTW just isn't acceptable now. There are no real rewards for exploring- shrines are lame and useless once your stamina wheel is maxed, and weapons will never be exciting to find bc they break after fighting 3 of the 10 million copy-pasted, reskinned enemies. Not to mention that the map is exactly the same, so there’s no excitement in seeing what’s over the next hill. This is just BOTW again with none of that game's core issues addressed, but instead just more BOTW dumped on top of it. Depths are completely barren (I got every light root) and sky islands were a copy and pasted joke (went to every single island). The main quest was very weak and the side quests are fetch quests with no payoff. Ultra hand was neat but in no way constitutes an entire sequel. I could go on but I don’t want to write an essay that no one will read
holy, you got every light root? I ran out of steam collecting them and just stopped. Ya know that is something I did notice is that there were a lot more side quests but they did feel like 100% fetch quests. The one for bolson was kind of fun? (if i'm remembering correctly) w/ building some truck to deliver a bunch of logs. but then the whole Lurielin stuff felt like a big dud
@@Wralis yes every light root and Sky Island. I was looking far and wide for the 10/10 sequel everyone was talking about.... couldn't find it. This game was podcast gaming i just had talk shows playing in the background B-Lining for them
Yeah it feels like TotK was only made to show case the new engineering mechanics and that's not a good reason to make a sequel to a game. From a story standpoint, a sequel is supposed to expand or continue lore or a journey for the characters and that wasn't done here. Unfortunately we gave into the hype and spent money on a game that shouldn't been $70 in the first place. I honestly feel hoodwinked and bamboozled
This isn't the only issue by any means, but I think Nintendo trying to make such a heavy asset and conceptual rehash of BotW was probably the most severe and consequential issue in TotK, especially in light of being the very next new game in the series after BotW. It was an enormous mistake to have the game set in BotW's Hyrule again. This might sound too cynical and reductive, but I get the feeling that Nintendo basically wanted to repackage BotW with a new coat of paint more than make a "real" sequel to iterate and build off of it; TotK's extreme hesitance to explicitly acknowledge BotW is the most damning thing that makes me feel this way, because that was almost certainly done as a way to make TotK more newcomer-friendly (despite being, y'know, a direct sequel).
this is a good point and kind of where a lot of my initial static with the game came from-it didn't feel like a direct sequel and like a reboot or fresh coat of paint like you said. My favorite zelda game, Majora's mask, was a huge asset swap and honestly i don't really mind that-personally? but MM was so removed from oot it felt fine-but yeah having all this same stuff in the same world and "ehhh let's not talk about the calamity" is jarring.
@Wralis MM also came out 2 years later after OOT while we had to wait 6 years to get TOTK. The fact we had to wait that long on a game that reuses so many assets is, in my opinion, one of the reasons why it disappoints.
Don't read this, I'm just ranting about this game. For me, I think the biggest mistake you can do wile playing this game, is to be a fan of Zelda. I have played every Zelda game apart from the Oracle games and I was super invested in all the hype for TotK, watching speculation and expectations videos so when I finally got to play the game, I already had an idea as to what would be my perfect BotW sequel and TotK fumbled the ball so hard. None of the expectations anyone had had been met yet people kept praising the game. Zelda was a nonentity throughout the game, "Ganondorf" wasn't Ganondorf the sky was empty, the depth were an afterthought, you don't repair the Master Sword, the surface is largly the same, the interesting story happens in the past which you can't play, the dungeons while more visually interesting than the Divine Beasts are basically the same things, there are no items to broaden your arsenal, the game is not darker than BotW in fact it may be more childish in many aspects and as the first indication to me that the game was not gonna be what I expected, the "Rauru" mentioned in the opening is not Rauru and "Ganondorf" doesn't have any knowledge of Link or the Master Sword, he's just been told they would be his undoing and when he has Link crippled, the Master Sword shattered and Zelda seemingly vanished, what does he do? He sits on his ass the entire game. Cursing the various people of Hyrule to preven the sages from Awakening even thought he clapped them in the past and should not be worried about them at all and doing random evil acts like scaring away Zelda's horse for some reason. He does no manipulation, no planning and no destruction throughout the entire game which is why he is not Ganondorf to me but an imposter, in fact, in the first trailer there was a miral of Ganondorf wielding his iconic trident yet yet all he has in the game are generic sword, spear, club and longbow. This game made me so mad, I've completely stopped following any Zelda content and have decided to play every single Zelda game back to back just to make sure I still like Zelda. If the next game is another BotW clone, I might just completely turn my back on Nintendoas a whole as Zelda games cover the majority of what I play and I can't believe that the last real Zelda game we've had came out 10 years ago with ALBW. TotK had 12 years of development as BotW's development started right after SS came out and TotK is pretty much BotW but again and yet it feels so rushed, empty of content yet bloated at the same time and again people are calling it a "masterpiece" and the "greatest game of al time" while I'm just left depressed everytime I think of it.
I agree wholeheartedly. TOTK is genuinely the worst Zelda game I’ve ever played, and if the games keep going down this path I’m just going to tap out. It has NOTHING that made Zelda what it was to me: no sweeping soundtrack that sends chills up my spine, no likable characters that make me want to save Hyrule as quickly as possible, no good dungeons or puzzles, no fun combat, Link has zero personality, and isn’t like all the previous incarnations who I idolized as a kid, just nothing of value in that train-wreck of a game. I immediately went back and played Skyward Sword twice, and went through Ocarina of Time in the first time in years and had a blast. I still love the old Zelda games, and if anything, TOTK made me appreciate them even more.
Amen man! You said everything I've been feeling for a while now. Could'nt have said it better myself. It's such a shame that after all this time, this is Nintendo's "best" for a Zelda game? The disrespect to the lore, the false advertising of the sky (boring once you realize the same 3 sky islands are copy-pasted aside from the GSI and a few others) Depths got boring quick. No underwater exploration eother. Annoying Sages, No items, minimal enemy variety once again, barebones combat, etc. This game had so much potential and just fell flat. Smh 🤦🏿♂️Ima just play the old games, theyve reminded me what Zeldas supposed to be like.
I hate the shrines in this game, they are massively dissapointing The temples are underwhelming and boring The fact that every single enemy one shots me regardless of what sort of enemy it is makes me feel that Nintendo wanted to compensate for the boring shrines and temples I hope Twilight Princess and Wind Waker come to the switch soon, because I need to play a REAL Zelda game
I think the reason TOTK seems so disappointing is because it's feels like Nintendo got caught up in they're own hubris of trying to reinvent the franchise. BOTW did a ton to reinvigorate the franchise, and in many ways they succeeded. But, in that process many of the staples of Zelda titles were relegated to more minor elements of the game in favor of a go anywhere do anything approach and created a whole new litany of problems for themselves. For the most part I believe BOTW succeeded in trying to put a new spin on the formula. With TOTK however i truly believe many fans of the series myself included had hoped that the more engaging elements of past titles, story, progression, and dungeons didn't take such a back seat to exploration and minor puzzles, but instead worked better to complement one another. TOTK feels like Nintendo doubling down on what worked for BOTW while either disregarding or only integrating the most minor elements of the past into this new formula. What it's lead to and why i think there's so much negative commentary on TOTK is a game that's as wide as an ocean but as shallow as a puddle. Very little from the top of the Sky island's down to the Depths feels as though they're anything unique, and more like repetitive fetch quests. The story may tell a more grandiose story, but it's paper thin at best and convoluted at worst. Dungeous now have unique bosses and individualized themes. but most every unique mechanic can simply be cheesed through, and never buildup to greater challenges as you gradually explore through each dungeon. What it ultimately leads to at the end of the day is a game that doesn't offer any significant improvement on the BOTW formula, while still falling woefully short on the elements that made traditional Zelda games so engaging and memorable. While I don't think TOTK is a bad game as someone who has completed every title in the franchise it has to be one of if not the most underwhelming Zelda experiences I ever played through, and is the only title in the mainline franchise that i have zero desire to go back and replay again.
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾 It's clear that the team just wanted to capitalized on BOTW's success when even the prior installment had it's own problems. It's crazy to me that this game is honestly DLC and we got charged $70 for it but no one is outraged 😅 I'm not saying we should gather torches and pitchforks and head down to Nintendo but, I do feel bamboozled and feel as though TOTK wasn't really it's own game - just BOTW 2.0
I feel like one thing people don't talk enough is the disappearance of the Calamity. In TotK everyone is like "120 Sheikah shrines? Divine Beasts? Guardians? Calamity Ganon? Champions? Never heard of them." It baffles me how in 4-5 years of restoration (maybe less), they got rid of all that Sheikah tech and still added almost NOTHING to Hyrule. I'm totally biased on this because I adore the Champions, but I find it *so* unfair that they barely talked about them. TotK was originally called BotW 2, implying that it was a sequel and you had to play BotW before TotK. Yet they somehow still made it so that it feels like a completely original game where nothing happened before it. I just hope they make the Calamity (Sheikah, Champions, etc.) at least a *little* more relevant in future Zelda installments, even if they'll probably just be a one-time thing. But you CANNOT make *TWO* games (BotW, AoC) and say "Hey, let's forget this ever happened!" and make a completely new game using the EXACT SAME MAP and (almost) EXACT SAME CHARACTERS. Also, on an unrelated note, I feel it's worth mentioning that Yona says she's 'from another domain'. Nintendo? Please elaborate??? Where is this second domain? If we do get a DLC, I will be extremely disappointed if they don't do something cool with this. I think it will *sort of* make up for the lack of new areas if we get to see what's outside of Hyrule.
the only reason i can think of why they just don't mention botw is to make it so if you didn't play botw you could play totk and not miss anything? but that doesn't make for a great sequel-that's why I refer to totk as a "reboot"
I mean at the beginning, Zelda does mention the Calamity, when you do the school quest, Symin tells a bunch of students what happened ten thousand and 100 years ago. Sidon is still in grief about Mipha, and Riju mentions Urbosa in her diary. If you play the BOTW DLC, you actually see the picture in your old house. But other than that, I completely agree.
@@northproductions6104People still regularly talk about the pandemic after about 3 years, and it effected us for like 2, with unknown lasting effects. And even if this was being made during the pandemic itself, there are major events all the time. Japan's people could easily remember "the earthquake of '97" or something. People talk about historic events. The people of Hyrule should definitely still bring up such a catastrophic event as one that's lasted a century within most of everyone's lifetimes.
The Depths were interesting for like an hour or so at most. Throwing light seeds does save arrows, but it is so fucking tedious exploring down there. At first I was digging it, since it's a call back to the Dark World. (Which is something I was really hoping they'd implement before release.) When I said i wanted a Dark World, I didn't mean literally 😂
oh for sure, those first few hours in the depths were kinda mind blowing for me-didn't expect it and wasn't spoiled on it. lol yeah, did feel like a huge genius when i tossed a light bloom on a car down there tho, but then the puzzle in "how do i light stuff up" was solved and that was within the first 2 hrs of being down there.
I'd have loved the Depths a lot more if they had actual lore - difference races used to live down here, and sooo... what, exactly? Was it a past Hyrule? Does anyone care? Is there anything for me to recognise? No? Okay. Course, then it'd take me even longer to get through the game so..
This game is unrewarding to play. Most treasure chests contain worthless items. The rewards you gain from “exploring” are countless Korok seeds. It become a punishment after so many hours.
I told myself playing this so many time: this is fuck... trolling! -Constructions falling apart at the worst time or you don't know why it don't work (10-20 minutes lost each time). -Only 4 not great temples on a massive empty overworld. -Shitty rewards after 30 minutes of busy work. -Climbing, walking, flying 100 hours to see and do the same recycled things again and again. I could go on and on. This is a disjointed and diluted mess! It may be the last Zelda I played. I play the series since the first one in 1986.
@@repingers9777 I really think open-ended can mesh with actual Zelda game design. It just can't be a totally structureless freeform physics playground or be set in a wastefully excessive gargantuan world.
The story specifically told that once you turn into a dragon you will FULLY loose yourself, you will never be yourself agai- oh wait two ghosts appears and does some magic in the air while link is falling down and BOOM dragon turned back to zelda... Does not make ANY sense.
I had a similar experience with the “where’s zelda” story issue, though I had found the last of the initial tear memories, the one when Zelda is saying she knows what she has to do and we get the Deku tree and dragonification snips. I had not yet seen those memories (I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know there was a new dragon at first. I thought the one that broke the cloud barrier at the start was Naydra). Unrelated to the non linear.. it kinda just raised more questions for me with its connection to BotW. If the Water Temple is the source of the pure water…where was it in BotW? Were the geoglyph patterns there since that last memory? If so Why are they only now visible? I enjoyed my time, but the non-linear story and lack of gaining new gear/skills was kind of a bummer for me.
thanks a lot for checking the video out and leaving a comment. Time travel, especially in a sequel, brings up a whole host of questions. Like there must have been 2 master swords for any of the calamities to be combated and on and on and on.
My opinion is that this game was purely to milk the cow of this new formula until the next installment. This is basically a big DLC, nothing else. Or maybe we can call it a 1.5 version of Breath of the Wild. There is no major change to the game engine. It's exactly the same as Breath of the Wild, but with added areas and powers. So, while I agree with everything that was said in this video, I can't overlook the fact that this game couldn't have been much better because that's what you get when you invest a minimum of effort just to make more money.
I actually think it took 5x the amount of effort to get what we got with totk-they probably would have had a way easier time building an entire game around the mechanics they have instead of trying to jam the mechanics in a world that was clearly not built for them-hence the weird sky blocks shoved into the sides of cliffs/mountains so you can ascend in places you couldn't in botw- i get what you mean tho, and it deff can feel that way for sure
"In the next Zelda game, Echoes of the Land, our hero loses his powers because of Ganon's mysterious return! Zelda goes missing, but it turns out she was sent to a parallel dimension where a benevolent ganon gets to know her, and he gets corrupted by a dark force, becoming the tragic villain for this game! Build anything using fire and minerals! Hopefully mining and searching for wood won't get annoying by the 80th hour! Buy in 7 seven years for 80€!"
@@Awesomeflame16 kind of! I can't believe they actually went for the sound theme. I really hope the next one isn't "Taste of the stars" or "Saliva of the spirit" XD
I agree with basically 100% of this. I enjoyed the game overall despite its flaws but I acknowledge them all, the story being the one that really bugs me the most. Another thing I think of that you didn't mention is how the game sets up that there's a "depths exploration squad". So you start out expecting to occasionally meet some of them. But after the first one you meet, they're always actually just Yiga in disguise. After the third or so time you stop wondering "will this be the time it's a real one," and you eventually find out it's never a real one. To me it's just a good example of how Nintendo doesn't seem to think about the consequences of these kinds of implementation decisions and how boring they make their games.
Twilight princess gets so much hate, but compared to totk I have much better memories with Twilight princess. Totk is missing main quest items and puzzles that go with .
Twilight Princess has the 2nd best atmosphere of the entire series (i'm just a boomer that loves MM), that gloomy digi-ness is just so good. I always have a hard time replaying that game but have fond memories of it.
While i think this game was amazing, I do agree with you on everything. The non-linear reveal of the story really diluted the impact of the stroyline for me. I think the depths was at first really encapsulating but then i soon realized it was more or less "empty". After completing some shrines and developing a cheese way to do things, the shrines just became an already solved puzzle. For the last 50 or so shrines I just decided to do it the way the devlopers intended; just so it would be challenging. I also hated the activation mechanic of the sages... soooo clunky and it just made for less fluid gameplay and combat. I liked the mineru construct sage but it seemed like it could have been soo much more useful and customizable than what was available. My biggest gripe is the lack of Ganondorf throughout the playthrough. It would have been cool to see more of him, even if it was just an appearance or cutscene. Meeting him at the end of the game for the first time made him so forgettable. The comic relief villian, Master Khoga was much more compelling.
Wow, thanks a lot for checking out the video and sharing your thoughts! Mineru deff felt really underdeveloped. An awesome idea for some mech but it felt really clunky to use her at all. I kind of wish that she would "enhance" zonai devices, so like a cannon does a spread shot when attached to the mech instead of a single shot or something along those lines. Khoga has so much personality! Any time I saw him I couldn't help but think "we need more of this" there was definitely a lot I left out of this but I agree with you. Since Ganondorf is an actual character I wish we saw way more of him outside of "phantom ganon" They had great voice actors for the main cast too, would have been cool to see more developed there.
that can be their gimmick and it can still feel unsatisfactory? it's like the paddle shrine where you can just shoot a bomb arrow at the target and skip all the puzzle, while clever(?) it can feel like "well what was the point of all this junk in here?" or dazzle fruit to get around actually doing any of the mirror challenges- that leads to a lack of that "a-ha" moments that really good puzzles provide.
Yeah, Ganondorf needed more time on the screen. He needed an actual motif, and not just "Oh hey taking over Hyrule would be fun". Also, small thing but bring back ganondorf playing an organ
Imagine if the Depths had its own races of ppl/creatures with their towns and problems to solve. Imagine if the Skies still had the Zonai ppl with their towns as well. Wouldn't it be great to have 3 civilizations interact with each other? The Game would become a legendary classic.
i think the major issue for me was the hype i had with the story of the game, i really thought and convinced myself before the game launch that totk would have the best story ever telled in a zelda game, and it was because of the damn trailer, it seemed so perfect, but when i played the game i just felt dissapointment :(
Yeah that trailer...lol I was excited to see link and Zelda together but they booted her out as fast as possible. Instead of ya know... including her and interacting
@@a..27stephenson yes and the people defending the game are very dismissive of any negative opinions. We should be able to talk about it. Just because someone eats sh** doesn’t mean it taste good. People are just used to eating sh**.
@@Cascada200Sitting there saying something is shit isn’t a valid criticism though. There are valid criticisms of the game but this contrarian hate train is super fucking weird man. It’s just a game but people are consistently getting their panties in a wad because it was good, and it was popular. Beep boop, must hate popular thing
I was thinking all these points through my play-through, I was very disappointed and dissatisfied, if I had not played botw this game would be perfect and amazing, but since I have 400 hours in botw everything just felt the same after the first 30 hours
dang 400 hours?!?! that is some serious gaming. I didn't play botw until 2020 and really loved it, should have probably played it earlier 😅 thanks for checking out the video!
I logged 652 hours in BOTW and personally am so glad TotK was more of the same - but I can see others disappointment with it. Honestly, playing BOTW I just wanted more BOTW…and that’s a lot of people’s complaint but to me I’m over here like heeeeelllll yeeeeaahhhh
@@Wralissame man. I played BotW in 2020 so it’s not nostalgic to you and I like it is to everyone calling Tears of the Kingdom a masterpiece. But you shouldn’t HAVE to endure a 6 year hiatus in order to enjoy a video game’s sequel 🤦♂️. I could play oot and mm back to back and they were just fine and distinctly different. Totk is botw with new stuff added. The same game, same topographical map, same same same. I wonder how this game will look in the future next to BotW. I guarantee everyone who hasn’t played either will be skipping BotW to play totk. You simply cannot play totk if BotW is 3 years fresh in your memory. That’s nintendos fault.
no botw and this game are both trash and you need to come to terms with your lack of experience blinding you to the reality of the problems baked into both these games
BotW was so fun to me. I played so many hours of BotW without even completing one divine beast. Tears, I started losing interest a little bit when we started off on sky island, no doubt due to having to start building stuff.
i will admit the ultra hand could have worked a little better so much of the time- and it probably would have felt more rewarding if we were using it to explore new areas everywhere-idk-just felt janky a lot
The reason why it was so fun to jimmy your horse up a sheer mountain face in Skyrim, or throw sausages at NPCs in Baulder’s Gate 3 so that they would keep arresting your friend, is because it’s funny seeing how you can stretch the rules that you’re given. It feels like you’re doing something you’re not meant to do. It feels like you have control. Freedom. What doesn’t feel like freedom is when a game puts two hooks & a platform next to the very obvious zip-line with the word “Creativity!” scrawled on it in red paint. Nintendo can’t even give the players the dignity of throwing random assets around the world so that we would have to *think* and perhaps *plan* -or god forgive get *creative* having to fashion a zip-line cart from environmentally-appropriate bits of rubble or plant matter or ANYTHING. If I’m being honest, the more I sit and think about this game, the more I genuinely cannot believe that this is what Nintendo put out. Like just… wow.
Totk for botw players is kind of like a big dlc, game+ and master quest hybrid thing. The new things are fun but not enough for those who played botw. It's just a chore. Man, botw was incredible when played the first time, it was just a fantastic experience. Makes me worried about the future of the franchise, all I know is using the same map is the worst idea for a series like this.
in hindsight, yeah-reusing the map was a flop-and it's like they had to 5x the work just to make their new mechanics fit in a world specifically not built for them. idk i hope the next one is better-but, i'll have to wait and see
I honestly feel disappointed in the game. I only did 6 shrines I have 4 hearts and stock stamina. I’m already on my last shrine and I’m only doing it cuz I’m tired of yunobo annoying me when I’m trying to farm for things in the Goron region. There doesn’t seem like there’s any difficulty progression in the game. It feels very stagnant at times
thank for checkin out the video and leaving a comment. yeah the world "scaling" is not amazing...the enemies just require more stuff thrown at them to defeat, it's not like their moves change that much or are wholly unique.
@@Wralis you know theres a exp mechanic that’s hidden. Stupid asf you fight one harder enemy early on lots of other enemies stop appearing so much at the level they should be.
Wow, that point about there being no one in the sky is very true and not something I had even thought about. The Rito are choosing to freeze to death instead of fly up here?? Birds literally migrate!
I loved totk but I have to agree with the vast majority of things you said here. My main issue was with a bunch of minor conveniences That kinda just culminated into a distaste for certain parts of the game. For example, Ultrahand. It was an incredibly fun power to use and experiment with, but also incredibly frustrating to use at times. Not only does it have an infuriatingly aggressive auto-lock system with no method of temporary disabling it, but theres also no feature to indicate symmetricality when placing zonai devices onto other items/devices. This doesn't sound like a big deal on paper, but when you realize a good majority of the airborne vehicles you'll be making rely heavily on the symmetrical placement of fans/wings to fly straight it starts to become a huge pain in the ass to detach devices and reattach them over and over in an attempt to get it 'perfect.' Either giving the player an option grid layout on the device being worked on or an optional symmetrical lock-in feature would've made this much less frustrating for me personally. Another thing is the activation of the champion abilities, something you pointed out as well. It makes absolutely no sense to me that Yunobo and Tulin's abilities have context-sensitive activation conditions that let you bypass the god awful 'chase down the champion' minigame but Riju and Sidon were shown no such love. When blocking, the player should have the option to press 'A' and activate Sidon's ability as it's first phase is defensive. And Riju's ability definitely should've been able to be activated while an arrow is drawn with your bow, especially considering she seems to run away from the player most of the four. A mini gripe I had was with the limit on hot air balloons and wings. I can infer some of the balancing reasons that went into the implementation of this feature but it's execution fell so flat that I have yet to see anyone who is actually satisfied with it. I can't comprehend why they would give us so many tools to utterly break their game in some areas, the ability to upgrade our batteries to an obscene amount, and yet the wings will take you about as far as a botw shield surfing trip in the desert. At the very least, extending the range of these devices would make them much more valuable to incorporate in our builds. My last gripe is with performance. Yes, its the switch and no I wasn't expecting mind blowing constant 30 fps with no dips in the adaptive resolution, but the amount of severe frame drops I had ESPECIALLY during combat felt really dissatisfying. It's even more frustrating when you realize that the majority of frame drops you'll experience in totk is from the often times unnecessarily high-fidelity vfx of your abilities (the waves that emit from link while using ultrahand, the green adhesive splatter when you detach objects with ultrahand, explosions from bombs and cannons, etc.) The switch's hardware is akin to that of an android tablet and I really feel like the devs could've considered this more to achieve a better balance between visuals and performance. botw wasn't perfect in this category but totk consistently performs worse in most, if not all cases. Overall, I really enjoyed totk and I'll obviously keep playing it. If I had to compare it to botw I'd personally say totk trumps it, but I definitely enjoyed my first experience with botw more than with totk.
thanks for the thoughtful comment and checking out the video. a bunch of suggestions you brought up are really good, like the sage's powers and how to "prime" them-it's like a riff on how they worked in botw. I didn't even bring up ultrahand or any of that b.c the video would have been an hour+ and I feel the video is a lot already. And yeah the performance is worse in some ways than botw. But the new sound effects were really good too. but yeah I'd love to see this running at 60fps, botw and totk lend themselves to upscaling really well. The art direction is really strong and would be awesome to see better visuals/performance accompany that.
Late to the party, but I swear to God, I'm just 5 mins in the video yet it's like you already said about everything I felt about that cursed disappointment of a game (arguably the biggest ever for me, especially as a fellow Zelda enjoyer). The pirates man, I'll always remember how much of a letdown it was. And to a higher degree, the story and how the developers seemingly made me want to forget Breath of the Wild. 4 years of waiting and 70 bucks for this shit
ToTK was boring, it really bored me so much, that I didn't play through it. I am so sick of the formular by now, even though I really enjoyed BotW, I really, really hope Nintendo is doing a completely new Zelda now.
You hit the nail on the spot with the game losing a lot of its magic if you´ve played BOTW. The sky island was so much fun and got me all excited but then when you got down on the surface it was more or less, do you remember the BOTW map? Yeah! ok well, everything is pretty much the same so just go on the same path etc... I think my biggest problem is that BOTW did not need a sequel, the champions the king and all of old Hyrule had an ending where it felt bittersweet. Like older titles, where you thought that you actually did something to change the world, there was a feeling of urgency and when it was all over you felt a sense of completion. Now I am not the biggest fan of BOTWbut BOTW was its own game, my favorite one is TP but BOTW was its own game, TOTK just let me down. The story element spoiled me too many times, my irritation of knowing where Zelda was but Link just not telling anyone and also (SPOILER). The ending is just reversing everything, Link got his arm back, and Zelda is no longer an immortal dragon THAT WAS NON REVERSABLE?! And it just ends like that. Everything was good, no one you really cared for died, I mean even Ganondorf was just chilling in his room, I bet you could have gone years before you had to do something about him... My biggest gripe with TOTK is fan service, it just felt like they threw in everything they thought people liked from older games, but forgot why they had an impact in the old games in the first place. Just because I'm running around in TP clothing does not mean I can turn into a wolf or see Midna again. Also, the older games had this sense of having the same world without the same map. I know the timeline is a mess but there were hints like oh you have this person with a similar name, or this town has existed with different variations, but that felt like a normal time progression. TOTK just felt like, oh those old games? yeah, look we acknowledge that they existed, maybe here have some old clothing or ruins that is the same from BOTW. I don't know maybe I'm being petty but I loved the feeling of the games being their own games, and just feel like 8/10 having a sequel is not the right way to go. My biggest love for Zelda is their way of just creating a whole new world with its own sense of purpose and mostly the story. I want to care for the characters I played but TOTK just felt bland and and like a copy. Thank you for giving the game the criticism I think it deserved, it was a fun game but I feel like I´ve either forgotten half of it or mixed it with BOTW... I'm really hoping that the next game has more similarities to the old game with a more Linnegar story as well as temples, I feel like that was what Zelda did best. Maybe a non-popular opinion but I do not think the open world with non-linear storyplay is how Zelda should be... Maybe it's time to create a new character with a new game that lets Nintendo try this out, and let Zelda do what Zelda dows but, but maybe I need to let go of a want of the old games in a newer format.
thanks for checking out the video and sharing your thoughts. -.- god yeah the old "sets" from other games just...did nothing for me. open those treasure chests to get cap of the wind and wanted to toss my controller. You go through this hard to mine through areas, fight a phantom ganon to get...a hat from WW that i have zero intention of wearing.
I feel like with the characters specifically… they didn’t want a Zelda game. They wrote these characters for Zelda but didn’t intend to use them as such. They’ve completely abandoned their personality’s. Even goat man. He HAS no personality, all he does is seal away Ganondorf and call it a day. The side characters all spew the same basic dialogue over and over. From Sidon to Riju, it’s like they’ve completely forgot about who these characters even are and their entire reason for being here. Ganondorf, Sidon and Zelda I believe are by far the biggest offenders of this. Sidon doesn’t even mention Mipha once I don’t think? And Zelda like you said just seems so stupid in this game, and lastly Ganondorf. Ganondorf is the most basic lameo potato cookie cutter villain WITH ZERO MOTIVATION just cause they needed likely nostalgia bait and something to move the story forward. Though I do love that final boss and the midway boss with him, cause as much as I hate his characterization in this game his design is super cool.
Good long review. Said a lot of things I personally felt. Especially about the emptiness and lack of reward in the shrines and depths. In all, totk was a lengthy amount of bloatware to show off the hand gimmick and didn’t add much else. And Zelda! Wtf Zelda! Why???
The story of TotK feels very stitched-together from disperate ideas that often don't quite fit together because they resulted from several changes made during developement. I have no proof of this, but this is what it feels like. Examples: Why does Ganondorf suddenly become all powerful by possessing a single Secret Stone, like you pointed out ? Maybe this was initially meant to be the moment Ganondorf aquires the Triforce or - at least the Triforce of Power (the Triforce not being in play as a power-up macguffin feels very strange in a Zelda game that mentions the Sages and the Imprisoning War). Why are the secret stones worn so openly by the sages - maybe they were initially meant to be "sacred stones", connected to the shrines ? Why are Zelda's sacrifice and Link's right arm retconned and why does Impa's supposed research not play into it at all - maybe that was a late change to avoid a downer ending - Rauru coming back in the end despite his ghost appearently "dying" after the tutorial seems to point in that direction ? Why was Zelda travelling with Link so heavily implied in the trailers and then written completely out of the actual gameplay/present day story ? Maybe the game was initially supposed to feature Zelda following Link as a companion or something and that got thrown out. I understand that game developement is difficult and changes need to be made but it feels like some story beats were held onto a little to tightly when they could have easily been smoothed over before stitching them together.
I think I figured out why they had to distance TOTK from BOTW so badly and it comes down to all of the glaring inconsistencies in the story. TOTK's story is inconsistent with itself, but when you factor in the story of BOTW, they hit like a ton of Zonaite. Time travel in general is always a touchy and difficult thing to pull off in fiction, as even then, things have to make sense. Nowhere could this be made more glaringly obvious than with the Master Sword. If the Master Sword was stuck to the Light Dragon since Hyrule's founding king and queen, what was the Master Sword in BOTW? And literally every other iteration of Link and Zelda in between? TOTK's ancient past would have been far more ancient than the ancient Hyrule of BOTW, considering the fact that 10k years prior, the Sheikah had been around for a very long time and had developed advanced technology to fight this primal evil tied to Hyrule's very existence. This relationship between Hyrule and Ganon was made very clear in BOTW. Since Zelda travels back in time to the literal founding of Hyrule, this is gonna put this part of the story much further in the past, rendering it impossible for any other Link to have used to Master Sword, making the 10k year old story in BOTW impossible... and actually, making it impossible for any other Link to even have existed, considering the fact that he was name-dropped to Ganon right before mummification. Furthermore, this would also mean that Zelda and Zeldragon would have not only existed at the same time, but for the entirety of Zelda's life, which at this point in the story would be at least 22 years. This is a massive time paradox that cannot just be hand-waved away and is one of the biggest problems that arises when fiction writers take a completely lazy approach to the concept of time travel. This problem is so blatant that it doesn't even *need* to conflict with BOTW's story to be made obvious... it exists within TOTK's own lore. You know you done fucked up when you can't even get your own lore straight in isolation.
The master sword thing not being there bothered me a lot. The ONLY thing I can think of is that there are 2 master swords. The one in Zelda five head and the one at the deku tree. It's dumb, they don't explain this, but it's the only explanation I can think of. Bc the calamity's happened, so idk it's not great lol
My personal opinion with tears of the kingdom is They over focused on “what was bad about botw, and what was good about botw, and let’s just infuse the good stuff into the new game and leave out the bad” they did a lot of things they did in botw in tears of the kingdom, but it just didn’t work the same way it worked for botw because they took out aspects of stuff that they did have in botw that made the choices and storyline and map make sense. But with tears of the kingdom they didn’t have the same context or same storyline so it just didn’t work as well for this game. The game was fun, and the new abilities and shrines were amazing changes and the excitement I had towards the beggining of the game was amazing. But it quickly faded. My gripe is they shouldn’t have used botw formula for the storyline and just put it in totk. That was a very bad move on their part. I got WAYY too much Deja vu with the storyline gameplay that was out of context. Especially because it made way more sense in breath of the wild. I didn’t love the storyline either and I think it had to do with the delivery, not with the storyline itself
thanks a lot for checking out the video and leaving a comment. sorry for the late reply. Yeah the new abilities were great but feel like they would have been more fun in a different world, couldn't help but feel like "okay, this is kinda reboot territory" as in nintendo thinking "well they loved botw, so let's give it to them again, but with some powers that don't really fit in the world."
This is one Zelda fanboy you haven't alienated. In fact, I had many of the same criticisms. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game, and it scratched my Zelda itch, but like BOTW, the game too much emphasizes quantity over quality. Outside of the main quest, I didn't feel compelled to complete yet another insignificant fetch quest, gather yet another Korok seed or obtain the same piece of nostalgia gear. And I was expecting more of a change/rebuild of Hyrule given the development time. I would have traded the entire depths and frankly the sky islands for new & vastly expanded towns, greater number and complexity of NPCs and more information on the main characters and what they've been doing the last 3-6 years. We got very little of that. Those expectations were based on my experience with Majora's Mask and what they were able to do in just a year. Maybe some of this will come in a DLC, but unlikely given Nintendo's track record. I'm more expecting another Master mode and some absurd set of trials that will make Link even more overpowered than he needs to be.
Thanks for the comment! O yeah all the "collect 10 fireflies so I can play the flute for lil kid" repeated 10000 times made me nope out of more quests than engaging with them. I am interested to see what they will do, but yeah I have a feeling it will be just that. we'll have to wait and see
Yeah agreed the game feels more focused on showing you how it has, over how much it offers, which isn't much story wise and world building wise who are the zonai, why are there only two in the past, did gannon kill most of them? Why doesn't zelda mention the calamity gannon incident and doesn't do jack, when a guy named gannon comes and crosses her path. little things like that and the amount of unnecessary fetch quests and korok seeds really big down the experience, no finding my hundred korok seed under a rock isn't fun, it's tedious and annoying that these guys are locked behind upgrading your inventory again
i have rewatched this video many, many times, and i agree SO MUCH with it all, totk threatened my love for the franchise that botw had reignited (my fav is still ww) and after finishing it two weeks after release (didnt rush, jsut played alot) i havent touched it since and have no desire to do ever start it up again, the more time goes on the more i find wrong about it and words to describe what gave me this .... empty feeling; and i put my expecations low, i knew what i hoped for, but knew nintendo would never go so far, so i settled for pretty much being as open as i can towards what the game offers me- and the more i played the more a feeling of ... unease even, started to get stronger, i felt like the game was laughing at me for having cared about what botw established, and the producers commentary not long ago made it all so much worse (the shiekah tech just "vanishing" ????? hello?? you just didnt care to give it a reason) and i think it all truly fell apart when i went back to the great platou and the shrine of life was just .. gone like it was precisely scraped off the walls, and no one cared, it was like the game was desperate to try and make me forget botw had happened just a few years earlier (i realyl dont like how a common argument is that nintendo ignored anything from what botw established bc they didnt want to alienate new players .. which is jsut, so dumb? its a direct SEQUEL, if you dont play the first one and are then confused playing the second one its our own fault? its not like you cant look up info or summaries? also wouldnt that have been advertisement for botw again? huh?) all little changes felt so artificial, stuck onto the world like stickers, seriously, what good did all the little rock crumbs weirldy fusing with normal mountains do; characters acting off like link is new to this world somehow, the way the whole "is that *obviosuly not real zelda* zelda?? wtf why does she do evil stuff??" thing was just .... i felt like the game was treating me like i was stupid, you cant even tell anyone so your just left there yelling at the screen that its not zelda OBVIOUSLY no matter how much of the tears you found too, and i personally hate how everything that ever was is now suddendly sonau (english zonai), theres no place they havent touched, every NPC is now obsessd with them too and im not a fan of the sonau tech either (i feel like botw managed that balance way better, between medival kinda world with high tech stuff from the shiekah, totk tips that balance bc the sonau tech just felt so .. out of place, like an obvious box of toys for players to build mechs with but not the world nor the story being build around it) also how the game constantly sets up something and then just drops it, sonia telling zelda about how to use her powers- welp she uses it like, twice to reverse some weapons and then turns into a glorified version of the sword pedestal in the krog forest, and her powers really dont matter; impa saying she will find a way to help zelda turn back and it .. going nowhere; even the intro felt like they were dangling a carrot in front of you that oh look here is zelda, physically, with you, and you can actually interact with h- WOOPs gone for the entirety of the "story" i think this is the first zelda game i actually, dislike, like a fully "that was a waste of my time" kind of feeling, and it being connected to botw means it hurt that game in retrospect, botws cool mysteries got solved in totk with the lamest answer, stuff getting retconned, and things not mattering- also, as you said, zelda .. didnt feel like botw zelda past the intro, she was like a different character standing prettily at the side and your pretty prize at the end and nothing more the ending alone was so ... unsatisfying, it just gets all magically solved! zelda is back despite it being said over and over that such a tranformation ISNT reversable, and you dont even take part in it! i didnt want to get to the end for a long time bc i thoguht i was missing a big quest from impa to find some mcguffin or something so i can help zelda turn back at the end, but no! you just beat the one-note bad guy and everythings back to like nothing happened :)) links arm too, you just get it back! not even a scar, nothing, even tho rauru says that links arm is beyond saving, the amount of light thingies you colelct (that supposedly were to cleanse the miasma out of it) doesnt matter either, none of the "sacrifice" matters in the end and you didnt even have to do anything for it, it all just goes back to status quo, like nothing actually happened, isnt that coolio :)) since i finished the game rather early, i felt so SO alone in feeling so massively disappointed and empty bc all i was seeing was praise over praise, even people needlessly hating on botw again by calling it a tech demo (tbh totk felt more like a tech demo to show off ultrahand) or singing praise to how totk fixed it all (it made botws problem largely .. worse imo), it feels validating to see others talk about alot of the issues i had the one thing i can actually say was amazing was the music, i loved botws music, but totk has so many new great pieces there (the build up to the end and the ending fights soundtrack for example) which honestly just make me even more sad of all the wasted potential (as a sidenote about the names of the stones, i am not native english speaking and i played the game in my own language; they are called essentially "enigma-stones" or "mystic-stones" there so i think that weird "secret" thing is a translation quirk of the english version, it likes to needlessly change alot of stuff for some reason) totk feels like an epicly presented nothing burger, as soon as you are not distracted by the cool music and pretty visuals you realize you are biting into nothing of substance APOLOGIES for the long rant, i tried to shorten it as best as i could but i tend to ramble alot bc im very passionate about the zelda franchise so this all truly comes from a place of love, not mindless hatred or "gamerbro angery at game not being all they wanted", anyway thank you for making this video! it is very well done and i will probably watch it again :D
*MY GOD!* Everything you’ve said I completely agree with. I’ve always said that Breath of the Wild needs more defending, and I’m so happy to hear what you said😊
Might seem a little on the extreme side of things to say, but I feel like I went through a roller coaster with this game. I started out viewing the early trailers and convincing myself it would feel like the dlc (I know, the $70 dlc argument is tired). Then I saw the final trailer and got swept into the hype of how awesome and new it would be. Then the more I play it, I think to myself "yeah, this does feel like DLC". Albeit a very significant DLC or at the very least, Breath of the Wild remixed.
@@Wralis Yeah, but Kohga's character is still done way better in AoC. It's a shame that they didn't give him voice acting or much importance to the plot. Can you imagine if there was a Yiga phase to the Demon King's army?
never played aoc actually-grew up playing too many dynasty warrior type games lol yeah-it's kind of weird you go back to yiga HQ too and he isn't there at all.
I agree with you on just about everything, it's a very well put together video! I have about 200 hours on the game because I tried so hard to see what everybody liked about the game, and found the same criticisms you had. Around the time I got to 30 hours it just wasn't the same and ran into the same gripes you had, one thing I really loathed was all the things that were just fetch quests. Truly was a disappointment.
oh the fetch quests is something i didn't put down, which is weird b.c i stopped doing quests after unlocking the great fairies and got so sick of them, which is a bummer b.c the music was so good but god was that annoying
If you managed to play a "Single Player" game for 200 hours and came out still disappointed then: A: You're patience is Godlike since 99% of gamers doesn't have that patience to play a game they are disappointed or kinda feeling meh.. B. Your standard is so high not even the 2nd coming Christ will faze you.. C. You're lying about your play time.... Like there's no game that will fit everyone's shoes but for a game to manage to grip you for 200 hours means there's alot in there that interests you.... And I think it's better to look at those positive side than the negative ones. I'm not saying the game is perfect because nothing is but I'm just saying that this game is really good...
i mean people put years into WoW and when they dropped the wow token they bounced from the game-that's 1000's of hours of game time- and they answered all of your questions with "because I tried so hard to see what everybody liked about the game, " so this person went above and beyond to get the appeal, understand the game-and it apparently is too much effort? and if they played for 5 hours and put it down you'd probably say they didn't give it much of a chance. 🤷♂️
Wholeheartedly agree on Zelda being taken out of a the main story. And through fricking *time travel* at that! I wanted so badly to be able to have Zelda accompany us through our journey and get even more insight into her as a person and her ambiguous relationship with Link. And the Sages.....their character arcs could have done so much better. Tulin's hurt the most with how rushed it was. Oh...and Ganondorf needed FAR more presence in the main story.
all very good points. Ganondorf was a point i didn't really get in the game, he's just under the castle-and having zeldapuppet doing stuff, would have been cool to see him out and about being more of an antagonist. maybe in the sequel it'll be more robust? idk lol Thanks for the comment and checkin out the video!
Thank you for bringing up the issue with the blessing shrines!!! I've been saying this and I honestly thought it was just me! There are just too many blessing shrines.
it felt noticeable-especially after doing them all. I get there will maybe more in the DLC and hopefully they have some really off the wall puzzles to solve-but to keep getting raru's blessings felt not great
One of my biggest disappointments mechanic wise was no swimming. Such much could have been done with that like the Water Temple actually be at the bottom of the sea or lake and not high up in the sky. Nintendo figured it out about 20 yrs and so much could have been done in this game. The lack of story and direction is the biggest disappointment to me. It felt it was written in parts and thrown together. Too many side quests and adventures. I tried to figure out where to go to next in the story with the bread crumb clues they give but in most cases I gave up and just explored. Solved many quests and story events at random without knowing what I was doing. BotW got criticism for not having a story, but imo it gave you direction. TotK had a half ass story and minimal direction.
@@APsGTGAnd a new Yiga attack mechanic. The Sages though. Oh my god I just wanted to stop playing when I first used Sidon’s Sage ability and he was my favourite character in BOTW but his Sage ability is so useless. One thing that TOTK has better is the Ganondorf boss fight. Thousand times better than Calamity Ganon.
I used to think BoTW was too empty, but now I realize that was for the best. The map being empty with very few permanent activities made it more fun to just waste time goofing off. TotK feels like a Ubisoft checklist open world. I have caves, shrines, lightroots, minibosses, armors, wells, etc etc to find, and they all get marked on my map. As an OCD gamer, that drives me insane. And unlike other open world games like Elden Ring, there is not challenge of execution. Combat and puzzles are trivially easy, so the only engaging content is finding stuff. And since I already know where all the landmarks are from BotW, the new stuff to find just ends up being rubbing my face on every mountain and hill looking for cave entrances. The inventory management is also absolute ass. Why can we not favorite items in our inventory? We build a whole ass house but we can't have a chest to keep materials we don't want to use? I see people doing all these cool fuse combos to fight Lynels, but what they skip out is spending over half the battle menuing.
the inventory management is kind of the worse part about the game-you pick up so much stuff and there is just not a fast way to access it. kinda like w/ the armor you have to select each individual piece to equip it instead of just like "equip all" or hold down a button for a little longer to equip the entire set. thanks for checking out the video and leaving a comment
Solid review. I think most of us long time Zelda fans who enjoyed all the new things about BotW feel this way about TotK. I played Tears for ~95 hours. The first 60 I was having a great time discovering all the new stuff. I did what the game heavily suggested I do at the beginning. Everything at the fort and then go towards Rito. Then I just explored around. Little disappointments built up bit by bit and I was starting to turn the game into a job by doing everything I saw. But I still had fun. Then I did one of the floating ruins. Same exact experience as you. Started awesome then ended so incredibly bad that I couldn't get shake my disappointment. The last 30 hours was me losing any sense of fun. I started skipping shrines and green stone shrine quests out of fatigue for the green stones being freebie shrines and far too many of the normal shrines being the eventide island style challenge. It was fun when they had weird gimmicks, but I swear there's like 20 of them and it wasn't fun anymore. I hadn't done a korok challenge in who knows how long because they were far too tedious for a reward that didn't matter anymore. I begrudgingly stopped for Addison. Why couldn't he just build one single sign on his own so there's some kind of character growth? I would always check a cave I found but even that was getting boring with lots of tiny caves that are just some enemies and a chest. In those last 30 I did the Goron and Zora main quests. Getting to the temples was cool. Then it turned they were just different versions of the same temple I did at the beginning. Get to the contextual button and press it. I also got the last of the tears during this. I genuinely feel like this is the worst story in any Zelda game. The Zonai are not relevant to anything other than as a replacement for the Sheikah. The mindless low-tier anime dialogue and stupid choices by the characters made me hate watching the cutscenes. I couldn't play anymore. I thought I was burnt out and needed a break. That was a month after the game came out and I haven't wanted to play it since. I honestly think I would've been happier with anything else as the new Zelda. Maybe Breath of the Wild just shouldn't have had a sequel. Definitely not like this. Every other Zelda sequel has offered a whole new experience over the previous game. Zelda II, Majora' Mask, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, Triforce Heroes. Not all great but at least they were something new.
in botw, a very cool aspect of the game was that you really could beat the game in any order that you wanted to. the game was designed in such a way that nothing you do would spoil a future event in the game or make you feel like you’re not doing things in the right order. it was brilliant game design since you really were free to do whatever you wanted. in totk, this sense of freedom was taken away. i went into the game figuring i could just do things whenever i wanted to (like in its predecessor) but that wasn’t the case at all. the part in the game after you beat the fifth dungeon is the best example of this. the game starts listing off tasks for you to complete, like finding the master sword or fighting master kohga, and if you already completed those tasks they would just instantly be marked off. that was annoying because it was clear that the game wanted me to do that stuff much later in the run. then if you do the dragon tear quest early (which a good chunk of players did) then you’ll have a major twist of the game revealed to you way before you were supposed to know and it ruins a lot of the major plot points. there’s so much wrong with this game it’s really sad
yeah i remember the first thing i did in the game was unlock all the towers to have the map-and then getting some quests from random npcs i found and their quests were "unlock the towers" and i already did that so just had to sit there mashing A until i accepted/turned in all the quests lol i mean-it was like "oh i already did that" but made me second guess a lot of my time thinking "am i...should i...?"
With the amount of inspiration ToTK took from Mononoke, I kinda wish they had just gone a little further with it and made Rauru’s arm something that was slowly killing Link. Imagine feeling like our boy is actually in danger for once, making it a race against the clock so that he can survive (and also save the kingdom.) DEFINITELY would’ve made me care. But then again, adding a sense of urgency might mess with people’s desire to explore or something idk. Personally I felt both BoTW and ToTK were mostly hollow experiences once the fun of the game mechanics wore off.
The developers of this game were weak. They showed a little hint of it with the malice leaving links body when he gets a light shrine thing, and then never again. Would’ve been a cool storyline, and that’s probably why they didn’t do it.
BotW was better because it was more focused and fresh. TotK improves on BotW but if you played BotW, TotK does not give you enough to spend 100 hrs on top of the 100hrs you already spent in BotW. Too much dev time was spent on the crazy advanced physics engine. The game lacks meaningful density and narrative immersion.
i can see that, but then begs the question "is botw worth playing after totk?" and i don't think the goal of a sequel should be to completely replace the game that came before it but each unique experiences ya know? i can always go back and play dark souls 1, and have even after all the new from soft games have come out and still have fun with it-but idk if I can go back and play totk or botw again-dunno, we'll have to see how time treats these games.
The way TotK plays it does seem as if it's designed to (mostly) ignore BotW with how little that game is acknowledged in conversations aswell as making a few minor retcons here and there, almost like a bit of a reboot of Zelda lore. One of more egregious transgressions is the MasterSword in BotW and even more so in TotK, which previously used to be regarded as this indestructable blade of evils bane that no evil can ever touch, yet in TotK it gets shattered easily like any other regular blade, atleast in "that one cutscene"...and then for the rest of the game once you acquired it it eventually "runs out of energy" and needs to recharge for like 10min. or so I believe. Better then have it shatter like any other weapon, but still absolute BS for a weapon like THIS. On that note the weapon durability system was a bad idea and I hope....no....I expect that Nintendo abandons this concept for the next games and NEVER brings it back.
I never played BotW, it didn't look appealing to me. Weapon durability was one of the main things I didn't like. With the fuse ability I was willing to give TotK a shot. In the beginning it was a little overwhelming because there was so much you could do. Exploration became unrewarding as you see everything the game has to offer within the first 10 hours. "What a cool place, I wonder what I'll find here.. oh another shrine, cool.". Loved the wind temple, was the first one that I did. The fire temple in the underground was really cool to discover, then it became clear that all dungeons were just palette swaps. They became disappointing after that, especially the water temple. It looked nice but that was it. Some of the shrine puzzles were more fun than the temples. I enjoyed the story, but I was glad to finish it. No desire to grind dragon parts to upgrade my gear, stopped doing the shrines. Screw the seeds. The tedium became frustrating at the end. I enjoyed my time with the game overall, and the positives do outweigh the negatives. The freedom to do things the way you want were really refreshing, but I don't think I'll go through it again any time soon.
Thank you for calling out Zelda's stupidity. Nintendo and their insistence to barely acknowledge BotW really made her seem like an idiot and led to her getting several people killed. It sucks that we'll probably never get a decent Zelda story again, after what Nintendo said about how they handled the stories currently. I also wouldn't be surprised if we just get BotW again as these game sold so much.
my only gripes are that they didnt focus more on the sky islands and the depths offer nothing else to do once you find all the great mines and coliseums. no sidequests from npc explorers, no explanation for why the enemies are mining the zonaite. Are they working for the yiga, probably not, I doubt that Ganondorf is even aware of their worship of him. not many unique structures that aren't a mine, coliseum, temple, or hideout. there is only 3 places in the depths that have unique buildings that arent part of a temple, the abandoned fortress, gerudo cemetery, and the construct factory. There is no place in the depths where I can look around and think "yeah I know what region im in". the depths are pretty barren once you get your battery maxed out and found all the clothes.
Thanks a lot for the comment! More quests/activity down there would have helped for sure. The one with Robbie was pretty cool, but then the dude just bounces back to Hateno and chills for the rest of the game 😆which I don't blame him, but someone else could have explored down there. What would have been really cool is like when you get the Yiga set and go to their hide out for trails, if we could "work with them" in the yiga disguise to mess around in the depths outside of just picking them off at their camps.
It literally is DLC the game. I honestly feel like Nintendo wanted more of a return on their initial investment when it came to developing the first game so let's recycle, repackage and resell it back to people. I love Zelda but this was a joke of a game in terms of a sequel.
Man, I was hooked playing this game, but fundamentally I agree with you. Was so excited about playing a continuation to the botw story, but if we're to have a reboot of botw, which this definitely felt like,I would've been happy to wait longer to play on a more powerful piece of hardware.
thanks for checking out the video and leaving a comment. yeahhh i didn't bring up performance/visuals at all b.c the problems I had with the game super seceded that, but I was constantly aware of the limitations. sure when "teh switch 2" comes out they will re-release totk/ and the entirety of the switch library to be "HD" like they did with the wiiU games.
@@Wralis The visuals are honestly something that I would normally be fine with, even the choppy frame rate, but given that Hyrule is so similar, I feel like it would've helped to have some performance enhancements at least. Which we'll probably get when Nintendo resells the game for the same price in 3-4 years time 😬
The game had all the elements to tell a good story. I can easily head cannon away most of the story beats to make sense, so I can only conclude that Nintendo just couldn't be bothered. The controls, the build mechanics, the puzzles all suffer from what I can only assume was not enough play testing. It's so easy to cheese the entire game with a hover bike or something similar. There's too much freedom, which removes the purpose of puzzles entirely. Then there's the Sages, God help us...there is no way anyone in development play tested the Sages and thought "this is great". It was either rushed or skipped entirely. UI is trash, button mapping is trash. This game was not play tested properly, that is the main flaw.
Nintendo wants to make Zelda more accessible for everyone, that means focusing more on mechanics that are "fun" to play with and less on the other elements. It's a Mariofication of the franchise, Zelda for the masses. Zelda used to offer more depth, more lore, but this is where we are now. We'll see what Nintendo does next, BotW offers a great base to build upon, but I can tell you TotK is definitely not the way forward.
idk if it's just nostalgia or what but 3d zeldas up to TP had really dark elements and still did well. Yeah botw was a great starting point-i mean look at all the channels that have survived for years just talking about the various unexplained interesting things in the world of botw alone. and totk it just shows it's entire hand and leaves you going "oh...that's it" there is no greater mystery or anything- what in the 3rd game there is a parallel world of hyrule and its the same as botw but all jumbled up now? 🥱
@@Wralis I agree, also if you look at TH-camrs content made for previous games you had all these theories, not only of the main story but of other elements like the dungeon lore, side characters, side quests, etc. Now you just have people making mechas and whatnot, which, as cool as some builds look, for a long time Zelda fan feels shallow and detached from the experience I used to love. I don't want to hate on TotK cuz it has its merits, but as a Zelda game...I don't know man.
i feel the same-there is a lot to like here, and i can see that, but again it feels like a weird side step rather than a big leap like botw was in terms of shaking so much up. I was wanting a new experience completely like botw. But i like this new style, just hope they do something different next time...just would suck if it takes 6 years
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. I can put everything else aside, but the story for TOTK disappointed me. The more memories I found, the more I was able to pics together that Zelda was found to be the light dragon; so when she turned and my suspicions were correct, I was sad but not surprised. At the beginning when she disappeared I wanted to find her, and have her as my beloved companion where you play as her. She and Link secretly married. I didn’t have as much of an emotional connection I did with her here compared to BOTW which is a huge disappointment.
I was concerned about this game, so I waited until I could get one used. After playing for about 5 hours, I sold the game for what I paid for it. First time that ever happened for me.
Breath of the Wild had a superior story with better shrines, characters, and side quests. The part that was disappointing the most is that before the game came out Nintendo was selling to everyone that the main reason why people should be excited about the game is the fact that we were going to the sky. That was the main selling point. Come to find out that it’s just small copy and paste islands with the same exact shrine puzzles for nearly all of them and the two sky dungeons are incredibly short and easy. The depths were just as tedious if not worse. This means that 90% of the entire game still takes place on the same surface and the same hyrule as Breath of the Wild and its not as impactful or meaningful as visiting these areas the first time around in Breath of the Wild. Tarrey Town is a perfect example. I’m not trying to build cars and planes. I’m trying to play a damn Zelda game and this was by far the worst Zelda experience.
My gripes with these last two games are the same. Nintendo has a problem with trying to fill up the space in the game since Hyrule is so massive now. Too many shrines for my taste and not enough temples that are part of the main story. We used to get like 10 temples and bosses but now it's just been 4 in each game. I don't count Mineru, it just doesn't really feel like a boss temple to me. More new skins would've been better too.
Mineru as a whole felt like an after thought. everything about the character. You get to that cool shrouded sky island to find that mask to just go straight to the depths lol I had found the construct factory wayyy before finding mineru and spent like an hour trying to do the puzzles around there just to find out I couldn't do them yet, but nothing was stopping me from trying and wasting my time.
@fgclash454 Nope, Majoras mask was not that great. It was a lot of busy work. Only ever bothered completing it once and haven't touched it since. It's not as universally loved by zelda fans either. There are some good things about it but on the whole, it's a miss. We're allowed to complain about things, we are the customers after all and it's not as if I'm giving unfair criticism.
@@fgclash454yes because majora's Mask temples are actually challenging and long and the game is good from start to finish. Majora's Mask is miles better than botw/totk
I totally agree with you with this, I feel like almost everything in the game is a worse version of what breath of the wild. The most disappointing thing for me, was that there is nothing memorable to do on the map, outside the main missions, the map is just a empty place with a bunch of NPCs asking for favors, on Breath of the wild you had some really cool discoveries, like, the terrey town mission, with leads to a wedding, one of the shrines was a freaking dragon stuck in the mountain, there is nothing like this in TOTK, also, BOTW had those places specifically made for shrines, like the windy challenge near the ocean, or the two ring, or the place you had to trow a snow ball to hit the door, those places was specifically made for that, so it feels like the world and the gameplay works together, but on TOTK, those same places are there, but they have no purpose, it's pretty disappointing to keep playing the game after the maij dungeons, and everything you find is NPCs asking for you to cook rice. They should have done an entire different world, with new places and things to do, that would be a lot more fun.
Thanks for checking out the video and leaving your thoughts. I agree, if there was a zonai like town in the sky or something to add some life up there or just kind of anything it maybe wouldn't have felt so bad, maybe. But yeah the surface lacked that complete newness botw had going for it
The events leading up to the 100 year tour in the shrine of resurrection should have been game one. And the sequel should’ve have been after as ganondorf breaks free from Zelda’s hold
26:43 That's the thing though. Just because there is no "wrong way" doesn't mean that there isn't a "right way." Every single puzzle in the game has a "correct" solution. The problem is that 9 time out of ten, its quicker and easier to just completely skip the puzzle instead of engaging with it. And because you get the same reward no matter how you "solved" the puzzle, it makes doing the puzzles the intended way feel pointless.
True. I was kind of positive on that quality of the shrines but honestly i think that open ended "solve it your way" approach to every shrine really dragged them all down. very unsatisfying
Thanks for checking out the video and leaving a comment! the pirates thing was just a nit pick, but kind of about the broader problem of enemy variety. hope the next zelda is more of a blend of new/classic zelda
I just started a new playthrough of Wonder HD... on Cemu because stupid Nintendo doesn't want to remind people of what a great zelda game is kn the switch and distract people from Tears. But yea its absolutely addictive playing Ww again. And that something I just cant feel at all towards tears, I did feel it for the beginning of Botw but I think when I finally found the master sword and found out its battery powered... just killed my love for the new "formula" . It's dumb Nintendo is becoming Ubisoft with open world zelda. Explore this huge area!!! And find korok seeds around every corner. 😮💨 whatever, I'm gonna try out minsih cap next, but certainly not through Nintendos extortion pack, or expansion pack b.s. payed already to play classics but the moment better classics were finally on the table, they're like "nope pay us more! You're not just paying for the classics, you're also paying to play with others on our crappy online 'service'" what a load of shit. Sorry rant over. 😅
I hope this video gets some traction. I agree with much. I, like you, have been playing Zelda for a while, but when I say a while, I mean I CUT MY TEETH on the original 8-bit cartridge brand new out of the box. For me, playing Zelda (and Metroid) was always about a fun gaming experience. As the franchise progressed, the story-telling became a bigger part of it, but that never really bothered me too much, even all the way up to the reviled Skyward Sword, maybe the most linear of them all. Still, when I was playing TOTK, I was YEARNING for an experience more like Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess, or even Wind Waker. BOTW was a great game DESPITE sacrificing a lot of the elements of those classics I mentioned. TOTK tries to reinvent something that was literally just invented in BOTW, and, as a result, neglected to bring any of the good things back that BOTW sacrificed. If I'm being honest, I felt as if it was a chore just to finish the game, and it was the least satisfying "beating of a Zelda game" of my life. I have beaten every other Zelda game except Majora's Mask, and I am only holding out on that one because I want to get 100% of the heart pieces before I go face Majora. Anyway. thanks for making this video of a seemingly less popular, but still clearly viable opinion.
lol if you ask the mods over on /r/zelda or /r/totk my opinion is deff the way more popular and annoying. but i get what you mean and thanks for checking out the video and sharing your thoughts. chore is a good way to put it too-a bunch of fetch quests and check marks-which i guess need to exist in a open world game to some degree, at least how zelda approaches it. doesn't make it any more fun. I remember getting Robbie to Hateno village and when i found him i had already completed most of the quests he had just by playing the game before talking to him? just means i'm so good at questing i can just complete them on my own heh
@@Wralis DUDE!! Tell me about it! This game has so few meaningful "rewards," that just chaining together activating some light roots is one of the more rewarding activities. So the game rewards you for that type of thing, and does NOT (meaningfully) reward social interaction or side-questing, and therefore, the exact same thing happened to me - by the time I spoke to Robbie, the whole damn tablet was upgraded. I just don't get what was wrong with the series-long staple of having a dungeon item in an early accessible dungeon unlock a new part of the map to explore, and then a new dungeon becomes available, and then a new dungeon item becomes available, and then that item unlocks even more of the overworld to explore, and so on. This game-play dynamic is not only fun, it has been a core game-play element in Zelda AND Metroid games since their inception. I would like to see a return to that style. That doesn't mean we need to sacrifice the two best innovations from the new games: the paraglider and the ability to climb anything, it just means that once you get the hook-shot, you won't NEED to climb walls that have vines or other grapple points. Also, once you get the Pegasus boots, you don't have to rely so heavily on warp-points, and you can actually explore the world more. I just think there is so much more to add to this new BOTW/TOTK style of game IF that same dungeon item unlocking new parts of the world element is present. Anyway, it was great chatting with you about this! I would love to start making videos about this stuff, I love it, I just don't have the tech know-how.
Wholeheartedly agree with your points. After clocking in 90 hrs, i asked myself if this was worth $70.... it wasnt. Now i am worried for the next Zelda game, especially if they decide to go open world again
thanks for checking out the video! Yeah i feel a mix of both open and more linear would be really awesome. I love the freedom in some areas, but i mean in shrines we can't climb walls, it feels like baby steps and they need to make a gigantic leap w/ the series in terms of setting/story
1.5 year after Fallout 3 we got Fallout NV which looked very different to FO3 except some reused assets from FO3 but TOTK is just a very expensive BOTW DLC which took 6 years of development.
I would like to hear from some of the programmers on totk. Bc I'm sure just getting ultra hand to work was a monumental effort. But that in and of it self doesn't make a great game ya know? Ascend was like a debug tool they used while testing to get out of the caves they made and decided to make it an ability. It makes you wonder where their thoughts were during that long dev time
90 hours.... not worth it ? You dedicated all that time which is more than alot of big games, but it wasn't worth it ? I feel you'd have given up after 1/12 of that if you didn't like it
When I was playing this for the first time I was excited! I was thinking this was gonna be dark, I didn't watch any videos, or trailers besides the first 2, and playing it felt exciting. The sky island was cool, then I had to go to Hyrule castle, and then told to go back to the 4 towns I've already been to, and go the Hyrule. The sky wasn't important, and the depths was cool at first, but then leaned that is was basically just the same Hyrule be revised hight. And I kept thinking "please don't let this be the end" and then when Tulin said "together we can't lose" I wanted to stop playing. Is this what Zelda is now? Expensive cash grabs? When I was done I was thinking "really!? That's it!? Wow, the trailers were really the best part of this" Tldr, it's just botw
At first I really enjoyed TOTK. The new features such as ultrahand, the sky islands, caves, depths, etc. all felt like such a vast change from BOTW. I did the rito quest first as it was what seemed like the game intended. Up until this point I was having a blast playing and had no issues. The climb up the storm over Hebra was amazing and that dive into the wind temple was amazing. When I heard that classic temples were returning it skyrocketed my hype for the game. The new, open style Zelda mixed with the classic, linear driven Zelda would have been perfect. However, as soon as I got to the wind temple and realized it had the same fundamental design as the divine beasts (turn on x amount of switch’s in any order) I was so disappointed. While the spectacle and atmosphere of the classic dungeons was present, the most important aspect, the gameplay was missing. After this point i slowly started to realize how shallow the game truly. The awe of the new mechanics started to wane and the game felt more and more tedious as I progressed.
my first map chest was the one in the spiral area that gives the twilight tunic. i already had it from the only zelda based amiibo i have. that felt like a slap in the face
I HAVE played every Zelda game to completion (except TotK - and I don't think I will complete it). I spent countless hours theorycrafting about the true order of the Zelda games. As soon as Hyrule Historia came out, I bought it, and I was even so meticulous that I didn't buy the special edition, because the standard edition looked more like The Book of Mudora from A Link to the Past. I had lengthy conversations about the true place of Breath of the Wild in the timelines, and have many pages of notes and documentation to back up my theory that it happens in the far distant future after the Wind Waker timeline (and it still holds up even with TotK, even though they repurposed a lot of terms and events for their timeline in that game). Tears of the Kingdom was great for a while. But the longer I played, the more disappointed I got. More and more ideas felt half-baked. More and more mechanics progressed from being quirky to being frustrating (arrow fusing, sage powers). I turned off all sages except Tulin more often than not, due to really bad button mapping (why didn't they just do something like BotW with context-specific cues? Like, why couldn't you trigger Riju's ability when drawing your bow?). I absolutely hated the new weapon system after long enough. Exploring the world wasn't as fun because I'd basically seen most of it in my all-shrine and all-quest completion of BotW and the Master Mode. Once I finished everything new, I had no compulsion to go explore the rest of the world. The story just felt off and like a worse retread of BOtW. Tears of the Kingdom killed any excitement I have for future Zelda titles. I desperately hope they reverse course.
idk how you timeline folks do it. i look at timeline talk and don't even give it 1 second thought-i just play the games 100% independent like final fantasy use to be, single entries. heard they are releasing some book to drain some more pockets -maybe get some better lore stuff in there.
@@Wralis To answer your first question: it's autism. It's always the autism lol. I will brag and say I was MOSTLY correct in my placement of things on the timeline, except I didn't account for Ganondorf beating Link as being one of the timelines lol. It would be neat to see whatever new book they're publishing, but I dunno if I'm as interested as I would have been. Story/lore have never been Nintendo's primary focus with Zelda, but it was still there to uphold the gameplay. BotW and TotK have a story (even if they're basically the same story, and TotK is an unsatisfying one), but the story is completely optional. Where it used to ride shotgun while the gameplay was the driver, it feels like they stuffed it in the trunk now.
Time Stamps:
0:00 intro
2:29 The Tears Syndrom
5:40 The Map
6:48 The Sky
14:14 The Surface
15:43 The Depths
20:11 The Gameplay
30:12 THE STORY
42:27 e n d
Much like your critique of the game most of your criticism for the game is recycled from other's criticism of BOTW.
Your argument about them using the same engine and using BOTW tech to do TOTK is not a good argument. Not to mention the same thing applies to the 2 most popular, titular titles in Zelda history did the exact same trick.
But I'm also going to say that your arguments don't come off as good faith since the arguments you use (Big world with nothing in it, only the first area is fun, where are old zelda things? Where are the mechanics I like? Why does it have mechanics I don't?) All these arguments are rinse and repeat from critiques of breath of the wild.
...i never said they used the same engine in this video. Or asked any of these questions you are saying. @@yallneedjesus5465
yo wtf happen to the replies here?? @yallneedjesus5465 i only see 2 replies from days ago now....
God the pirates! I was incredibly disappointed with them just being Bokoblins. I honestly thought we could fight a group of humans with their own motivations, but I guess it wasn’t meant to be
which is kind of a cop out b.c we fight yiga and they are humans...dunno such a weird decision
ooooo skeleton pirates, heck yeah. we get stalfos already so some new evil from ganon would have been cool-like a nod to pirates of the Caribbean or something and a call back to other games. thats a great compromise.
could tie into the lore too of lurenlin village-dang, that would have been cool. eventide island was their legit strong hold some skeleton pirate boss down there
I'm so glad other ppl also share this disappointing "pirates" experience, I can't believe I honestly let myself think that maybe there was going to be a pirate ship dungeon in Lurelin Village. the fake-out with the "5th temple" was a whole other level of "what the fuck how was this greenlit". really encompasses what went wrong with this game
I never doubted they were going to be bokoblins.
I mean they have only so much time and resources.
I commented on the final trailer “I really didn’t want to be dissapointed by this game, but I was.” And all I got was hate comments, and people telling me I was a terrible person.
Sorry to hear that. Just voiced how ya felt about something.
It worries me, the future of Zelda is seriously in danger cuz you know damn well they will keep this development philosophy going forward because people ate it up and they made millions. It's really scary....
When people praise it blindly we’ll just keep getting mediocre content from Nintendo.
@@mrplayfulshade There are articles about how Shigeru Miyamoto and Koizumi have butted heads over what the "essence" of the franchise is. Miyamoto believes in prioritizing gameplay over story, and has actually shut down actual games in development at Nintendo because he thought people wouldn't like them. Yes Aonuma is the "producer" of zelda games now, but it is undeniable that Miyamoto's philosophy on story is being pushed at HQ.
I honestly have the theory that the writers for TotK intended for the tears to be somewhat linearly unlocked alongside the dungeons, with the big reveal at the end, but Miyamoto caught wind and did not like the idea of any linearity because of his view of Zelda being a game about freedom and exploration and ignored the larger implications of immersion breaking in the case the players did not play through the game in (ironically) the specific manner he intended.
I don't know, to me it seems Aonuma is obssesed with non-linearity, to the point that the entire game progression is circular and pointless.@@auginetic
It Still bothers me that the three Goddesses Farore, Eldin, and Nayru, and the Triforce depicted in older games, are absent in these two games.
i could accept it being more subtle in botw. but in totk if you are gonna replace that it better be something really cool-not some secret stones that do a bunch of nothing and go no where.
@@Wralis Just re-read my last comment, and see that I have truly let Din down. I really called her Eldin 😂😅
I saw another vid theorizing there is a chance the triforce faded into Legend once it served it's purpose. Still doesn't explain the absent goddesses. They would have to be the three dragons.
@@Joe_334to me BotW and TotK are a separate timeline
@@JCardo2502 except a quest in totk literally confirms that botw happened.
@@WralisThe secret stones are legit and not having the triforce is fine
What isnt fine however, is Gabondorf's real motivations
Hes just taking over hyrule just.. Because..?
The best part of TotK was how it shows that bigger isn't better, minimal UI is important, placing restrictions on the player helps them to feel satisfied, and that "freedom" isn't an end unto itself. I'd definitely prefer a smaller game with nothing but a grappling hook as opposed to the cluster fuck we got.
it's a fact that grapple hook makes games at min 70% better
I agree. If they are gonna go this open world route again, would like to see a mix of open world and linear areas, kinda like how elden ring had with it's world/castles
@@Wralis The earlier 2D Zelda games were semi-open in that regard. Zelda 1, for example. You can do the first 3 dungeons in any order, no holds barred. You need the raft from 3 to enter 4, and you need the ladder from 4 to finish most of the later dungeons. Once you have those, you can access and finish the rest of the dungeons in basically any order (only exception are rooms where Digdogger appears, and you need Lv 5's recorder to deal with them). You then have to converge at the final dungeon to defeat Ganon.
A Link to the Past, the first 4 dungeons are in a linear order, but the overworld is 80% open the moment you step out of the Sanctuary for the first time, so it feels far more open than it lets on. A full sweep of what you can acquire before stepping foot in the first dungeon is: 5 Heart Containers, Boomerang, Ice Rod, Magic Powder, Bombs, 2 Bottles, The Bug Net and 3 remaining Heart Pieces. Once you get the Hammer from the first dungeon in the Dark World, you can access almost all the remaining dungeons; you just need to visit Thieve's Town first to get the Titan's Mitt to lift the dark rocks. Ice Palace requires you to have the Fire Rod from Skull Woods to even get past the first room, and Turtle Rock requires you to have the Cane of Somaria from Misery Mire and Fire and ICe Rods to fully finish it. Everything else is doable in any order, but you must finally converge at Ganon's Tower for the final stretch.
I think this semi-open setup works best for games, as the player still gets to have plenty of agency, while also making it so that you can still have ramping difficulty after the converging points. I don't like it when it's linear the whole way through, but that doesn't mean the games can't still be good: See the Oracles being my favourite Zelda games, lol. They're linear as heck, but there's still plenty of secrets to find and they've got the most mechanically deep items and puzzles (especially Ages, like the Switch Hook) in the series.
@@Wralis Not really...like they don't automatically make a game better.
It's flawed but not really a cluster fuck.
@@Jdudec367 name one bad game that has a grapple hook in it
The primary feeling I had while playing Tears was disbelief. It was insulting to me. Make me explore the same space again (or totally vapid new ones) buy the same armor again, upgrade that armor again (but it takes longer and is more convoluted), do shrines to get hearts and stamina again. All while being more on rails than the first which is antithetical to the design philosophy
I had similar feelings.
Why this game felt like a soft reboot or a 1.5
where botw took a giant leap totk took a baby step at best.
@@Wralis 100% dude. And most times that baby step was backwards lol.
We all want temples back, a shadow temple in the depths would’ve been awesome
yeah i would love to see temples evolve along side the series-what we got left...a lot to be desired.
Thought the lightning temple would fit great in the depths since ya know...the undead stuff n all that.
@@Wralisi jusr seen an interview where the director was saying he didnt understand why players would want to go back to the old constricted style of game design. He said the new open world was the future and that those games with one option on where to go are obsolete.
Which shows a fundamental lack of understanding for what players want. I dont think anyone wants to play exactly the same game as ocarina or majoras mask. I know i want less linearity and more complex level design than what was present on super Nintendo and n64 and that botw is far from the only option to achieve that. There must be a way to improve the older style without losing what it did so well.
Completely agree with all of this, to me it doesn't feel like we got a new Zelda game, and we waited 6 years..
yeah i feel ya.
luckily i played botw in 2020 so didn't have that long to wait, but the game was still fresh-ish in my mind when playing totk so i guess that's a good/bad thing?
thanks for checking out the video
It doesn't matter how long you waited. What matters is how much time they had, how many people, what resources, etc.
This was a sequal and not a totally new game. But it was much more. Man, the fuse system alone is worth the money.
That makes no sense, of course it matters. That was the whole point of this video, we got breath of the wild AGAIN after 6 years and some fans were left bored with this. @@devalapar7878
@@devalapar7878the fuse system is fun the first hours of gameplay and the first time you fuse a certain combination but after that it feels so repetitive for me
Meanwhile I've been waiting 10 years for a new Zelda game.
It’s nice to see someone actually talk sense and get some positive feedback. I too am a massive and longtime fan of this franchise and have played and loved every game in the 3D lineup. That was until TotK. After the honeymoon phase of a new Zelda ended, I realised that I was just playing BotW again, except this time with even more repetitive padding. Never in all my days have I been more disappointed in a game and I too though that to be an impossibility prior to release. Go figure…
yes... They've finally given us a less than stellar game, something we'd expect from any other studio
This game is better than botw ever was. And I loved botw, your probably just not very bright and a fake zelda fan as always
"Less than stellar" this game was outstanding though, THERE IS NO BAD ZELDA GAMES. CDI GAMES NOT INCLUDED.
@@ash8244
This game is only “better than BotW ever was” exactly because BotW was so good. It’s a complete rehash with a handful of neat new ideas that simply aren’t palpable enough to set this game apart from its predecessor. It is the exact opposite of what a 3D Zelda game should be at it’s core: unique.
My biggest annoyance with the story is that it doesn't have a story to tell. It's not about anything. Usually a story hassome point, some question that is being asked, some metaphorical conflict, something to latch onto. But in this game things just happen. With everyone sweaing fealty to Zelda in the end it feels like we are supposed to think that Zelda grew into a leader this game, but there is nothing to that. She basically just bumbles around the entire story, until she sacrifices herself. The sacrifice could be something, but since they just reverse it in the end there is nothing to it.
Also that fake-out of "oh, this is permanen" "there is no going back" "you will stop being yourself" etc. building up to a moment only for it to not matter at all is pure emotional maniupulation transformed into a game.
It's bad writing and not only did this feel like emotional manipulation I feel hoodwinked and swindled out of $70 because how dare Nintendo bait us with the sick trailer of Ganondorf, essentially being the embodiment of doomsday but as you said, things just happen and there's nothing to tell. We don't learn about the Zonai, Zelda pretty much let everything happen, NO ONE tried to stop Ganondorf before it was too late to do anything. Link doesn't say anything about Zelda's whereabouts so now the cutscenes feel out of place and awkward. And throughout the game, it tries to gaslight it's players in a sense of "That's not Zelda, where is she?" And when you come face to face with skeletal Ganondorf the game is like "HA! See, HE was Zelda all a long, bet you didn't guess that" Like seriously? This is what we waited 6 years for? Shame on you Nintendo. There was nothing heart felt about Zelda sacrificing herself, because not only was it reversed at the end with NO explanation, that shouldn't have been her first course of action. How did she not know that Ganondorf was responsible for the calamity? Didn't she take pictures? Didn't she seal the Calamity for 100 years with it's name GANON in it? She's suppose to be insightful and wise. Here, it just felt like the devs only wanted to out shine or out do her sacrifice in BotW which wasn't needed. Nintendo, you fumbled the bag with this one.
speaking of the story, one of the things I hate about it that I never see brought up much is that it feels like a Saturday morning cartoon ending and there are basically no long term consequences to *anything* that happens in the plot.
At the end of BOTW, the world is still destroyed. Hyrule is still in tatters. Hyrule castle and the town around it are in ruins. The victory, although satisfying, still has the feeling that this wasn't the ideal way that it should have gone, which makes it a nice ending but still a bittersweet one. Villages are still razed, the champions are still dead, there is still that feeling of loss. There is a hope for rebuilding in the future though, which is why the ending isn't purely a bitter one. (that and also the fact that you beat the big bad and saved a generally likable character)
In TOTK, everything is wrapped up in a nice little bow. Zelda is completely fine, infact she (IIRC) doesn't even remember being a dragon. So she thought she was going to (essentially) die by eating her dragon stone, then mere moments later (in her perspective) she wakes up as her old self back with Link catching her in the sky. Link's arm is fixed too. I wasn't one of the people who thought Zelda should have stayed a dragon but I wish we would have had to put the legwork in to get her changed back. I feel like way more people would have been okay with Zelda turning back into a Hylian if we had to even try a little bit to fix her.
It's really weird to think about how TOTK doesn't have plans for DLC, and this is likely to be the last game set in the BOTW version of Hyrule, but they still made sure to wrap everything up in such a way that they could do another game in this version of Hyrule if they really wanted to. This is why I feel like it's very much a Saturday morning cartoon ending, stuff happened, but it also wrapped up just perfectly for another story to happen later that can completely ignore anything that happened in the previous "episode"
It feels weird how almost everything resets. Yes, Hyrule castle is hovering a few hundred feet off the ground now, and yes there are holes in the ground and sky islands, but in the grand scheme of things everything reset to how it was just prior to Zelda and Link going into the depths of the castle.
Basically, one of the only long-term consequences of anything that happens in TOTK is that the average Hyrulian's chance of randomly getting turned into a thin paste by a rock the size of a house falling on them has increased by a notable margin.
Zelda games have simple narratives with a lot of subtext.
- OoT is about the loss of innocence.
- Majora is about grieving and connecting with ppl.
- BoTW is about living with tragedy, and carrying on the legacy of loved ones.
ToTK isn’t about anything. It’s a collection of events with no subtext. It’s about sacrifice, and then it isn’t.
@@frewtlewps1152 Thats how I felt. It was a large collection of side quest and side adventures with the story being a multi-part side adventure. There's no flow or direction in the story. There were many times where I didn't know where to go in the story so I just started exploring and happen to continue the story. With how much BotW got slack for no story, TotK was much worse.
@@RedBaronFlyerif they made a third one it would be about an entirely different ancient civilization and would try extremely hard to not alienate new players, thereby failing as a sequel
The thing about the sky being empty boggles me even more considering the people of lookout landing (as i remember some npc telling me) have paragliders. They built these new skyview towers not just for link but for the townsfolk as well, yet NO ONE ever uses one even though they clearly state that they're curious about visiting the sky islands that are literally right above their head.
Not to mention the bird people who can...fly.
“Tears of the kingdom wants you to forget what botw exists” is the truest thing imaginable to me. I remember constantly getting the feel of “hey I’m just playing botw again” after the first 10 or so hours, and the thought kept happening more and more and more until I reached the 3rd dungeon just after killing a bunch of bokoblins(new content lmao) and I just realized like man I’m having absolutely no fun and literally forcing myself to try to enjoy this 70 game, maybe I should put it down, and since then I’ve never looked back😭
Honestly if nintendo could have captured what made the great sky islands so special without making the rest seem play out like a ubisoft botw game, nintendo genuinely would have made a masterpiece. It’s a damn shame
Yo thanks for leaving your thoughts and checking the video out?
Something similar happened to my friend. Got a temple out of order and spoiled some stuff and they felt so bad about it they haven't picked the game back up.
Hopefully the dlc is good? Idk ac6 comes out this week lol 😂
@@WralisUnfortunately, Nintendo said they have no plans for DLC this time. Not even something as simple as upscaling enemies for Master Mode. Its quite a shame. Guess we'll have to go get new content from the modding community.
@@Jokerxeno1 ToTK is basically what Nintendo wanted Skyward Sword to be, if the technology existed at the time. Even the original LoZ was supposed to have time travel and we didn't get "proper" time traveling until OoT.
If you think about it that way, things kind of make sense.
ya know i didn't see this comment until now but the no DLC thing and seeing what the zelda team said about why they aren't making dlc at this time makes a lot of sense-ran out of ideas for this world-at least the people in charge, idk-thats a bid disappointing, botw dlc was awesome-the master bike or whatever worked better than any piece of crap i put together myself with ultra hand
except hover bike...hover bike reigns supreme
I did a blind playthrough, and went wild with my Amiibos straight off the bat so I could get some green tunics. I just have a small deck of NFC cards for every Zelda amiibo that I got for like $10. I had no clue that they re-used the Amiibos as "treasures" around the map/Depths. So as I was exploring the Depths, I ended up having two of each armor piece because I already had them before I even knew the Depths existed. The treasures were so meaningless to me. Majora's Mask was of course nice to find... although it was just the same item I had in BOTW so it was not exciting by any means. But finding Majora's Mask makes the Bubbulgem rewards pointless!!! Why make the player work for all those masks when they can just kill a few lynels for Majora's Mask?
4 months later, we’re still not allowed to dislike/ critic this game…..
What a shame, nobody can have a opinion on this game, unless you say it’s perfect.
I’m positive this is not true tbh because I’ve been seeing more negatives/critics being talked about recently but then again statements like these can be true or wrong because the internet is a pretty wide place with lots of spaces to talk about specific topics
@@insertnamehere259
We are called crazy.
If that were true, the game would not have a 10/10 everywhere.
It’s not our fault, it’s the fanboys giving it a 10.
When at best it’s a 7/10.
Maybe people just like the game? Many criticism I see in the video are talked about in almost all the reviews I’ve seen and I agree with almost all of them but no one ever said it’s perfect, not only Zelda fanboys play this game so maybe it’s not on people to enjoy the game while you don’t
Stfu People hate on this game left right and centre. Yes It’s not for everyone but the gameplay is top notch and it’s incredibly fun. people saying it’s bad just mean it’s not for them. That’s fine just don’t complain about it when other people love it. You say this but you’d do the same thing with something you love. The game has gotten perfect scores tho and people conspire saying they get paid off or this and that. No it’s just a well made game that people people years to make. I love it, I have things I think could be improved but that’s the same with every game. I don’t BG3 is very good and I’d overhyped but I don’t comment on videos saying it’s bad or people are wrong for liking it, and I’m not saying your doing this but a bunch of people are.
Nah, after BG3 only fan zombies say that the game is perfect. Too many masterpieces released since TotK released.
The fact they had all the main story points in the same locations was crazy to me .
it really is. meeting zonai ppl in the sky and inhabitants of the depths would be so good-but ain't no body up there or down there.
When it came to the treasure maps I was really disappointed continuously getting gear that I literally already had because of my use of amibo.
what are you supposed to do with 2 sets of the same armor?
@@Wralis sell one lol
I'm genuinely surprised they didn't have islands appear over Gerudo Desert after the sandstorm clears. There could have been mirages in the sky or something, you know? It's nice to hear someone else agree that the great sky island being the most impressive is a huge disappointment. It's presented like a spectacle and I remember thinking "if this is the first island, I can't wait to see what else is out there." Imagine my disappointment. I loved a lot of the sky islands, but they were each one-and-done locations. So much of the sky map feels under developed.
18:16 By the way, this was the first red flag for me. I have every Zelda amiibo and I was using them for several days in TOTK before I discovered my first treasure in the depths. I was shocked, sad, and angry. I avoided spoilers for the game and figured it was fine to use the amiibo since they worked for BOTW, so I figured I may as well see if I could unlock the classic tunics again. There I was already with about half of the armor sets and I opened that damn chest in the depths just to get a tunic or some shit that I already had from the amiibo...... Again, the game overall just feels under developed.
for real-and the fact you had to upgrade all the armor again if you really wanted to use it was just...a big ask. and I didn't mind farming stuff in botw but totk felt more tedious? i'm not sure.
kind of spoilers?
I got the sky sword or w.e very very very early in the game-like within the first 6 hours and it sat in my inventory until the end b.c I didn't wanna break it-i gotta stop now or there gonna be a part 2 to this video...
@@Wralis Oh yeah, the fact that there still is no way to prevent weapons from breaking meant I never wanted to actually use the good ones, the master sword included. It's a bit paradoxical. Acquire stronger weapons, but if you use them you lose them (at least the master sword recharges, but still).
This was especially painful for the unique weapons. Instead of being used to slice apart gleeoks, they sit in display cases in Link's house next to a giant picture of Purah.
I say that as someone who likes the concept of equipment management in this style, but its execution has flaws. They really didn't want to add blacksmith NPC or some other way to fortify weapons and shields? "Here, go collect rare diamonds and other materials so a goron can make the Boulder Breaker, but hit too many boulders and it'll break!"
Anyway, I'd def watch another video. Good work on this one!
I think it would've been interesting if both Link & Zelda got sent to the past
5:13 I know, right? I was so excited and pumped to get down there and see who the pirates were and what they were like. The whole time I was thinking to myself, "No way! They brought back the Gerudo pirates from Majora's Mask! That's hype as fuck!"
Sadly, I got down there to find a bunch of dumb red fucks hanging out and having a beach episode and everyone around calling them pirates. Like, what the fuck for? Why does standing beside some fucking water suddenly make these goofy assholes pirates?
lol
at least give them an eye patch or a peg leg or something. I mean...anything lol
cannons? a n y t h i n g
Lol, it just reminds me of the old Nintendo, when they put more effort into enemy pirates for a game with actually minimal story on an inferior console like DKC2 over two and a half decades ago. Smh
Totk felt like an enormous waste of potential. I remembered being the most excited when the first announcement was made in 2019, even though if Botw wasn’t my favorite game. My first time playing MM was mind blowing, knowing it was built on top off Oot. I love both games to death and still replay them back to back frequently. The first playthrough of Botw felt very special, and I was reasonably satisfied after exploring every corner of the newest Hyrule.
For these reasons, my expectations were the highest ever when it came to this sequel. That all changed when the second trailer released and I realized what approach this sequel was going to take. I still don’t have the slightest idea how so many people were okay with Nintendo to use the same map for a Zelda game. The Hyrule in the final game is 90% identical, and the Sky and Depths were not that interesting. Even little things like the reused armor and weapon designs bummed me out. My imagination was the strongest ever thinking what the new overworld was going to be like (Termina, Koholint Island, etc.) or even an original villain, with the artstyle and charm of botw of course. Instead I felt like we got remake of a game from 6 years ago that was already a reboot of franchise 35+ years in the making.
The worst part of Totk for me is that it doesn’t stand on it’s own away from its predecessor. I implied that I can replay OoT and MM independently from each other. Both games have their own identity, while neither game invalidates the other’s existence. I can’t say the same for Totk and Botw. They are way too similar in almost every aspect that the most popular discussion of the game is debating which of them is superior. Like why did Totk not fix any of the problems players had with the first game. I never seen this amount of confusion for a Zelda game upon release. You have the people who defend it as 11/10 game and the other saying it is $70 DLC, with even more derivations in between. It's cool building whatever you want with the new Zonai devices, but is that's really it? Even after completing the game, I still can’t stop imagining what could have been.
TL;DR
“BotW 2” was a promising idea. I was disappointed that TotK was not the sequel to BotW, like MM was to OoT.
I can understand that. Sometimes it's weird how companies market their games now a days-they are so vague and withholding for almost no reason, to me.
I remember when Aounuma said it was gonna be like MM but i think a lot of that got lost in translation b.c this isn't like MM at all-I guess he meant in reusing assets? but MM used that to save time to build a new world+new mechanics.
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and with the trailers we got w/ link and zelda cave diving made me think there was gonna be some kind of mystery going on at the very least but there isn't really-hoping the next zelda game is a bit more out there
@@Wralis Aonuma never said it's like MM
@@hist150project5 idk who it was but i definitely remember someone at nintendo saying it would be like MM was to OoT, when totk was first announced
@@nicke5801 Nintendo never said that. People were comparing it to MM because he first trailer looked dark, but Nintendo responded saying that it's not like MM, it's completely different and what they've shown is darker than MM.
darker than MM? you're high lol@@hist150project5
ive listened to a lot of discourse about this game, yet you're the first to FINALLY talk about zelda and how dirty they did her in this game! i agree 100% and even forgot that she had the purah pad pictures to show too smh. there are 4 things about her inaction that miffed me.
1. couldnt make the ganon, calamity ganon connection and warn rauru about it.
2. didnt leave a slab behind somewhere on the surface, warning her future self about the trouble she would have with her sealing powers and how to awaken them sooner
3. knew she was committing suicide and still decided to eat the stone right away instead of living a full life first
4. knew the master sword was the key to killing ganon, but left no note for link at the zonai temple of time (or with the sages) about where to find her and the sword.
great video!
I'm guessing her "tears" was her way of leaving clues behind to have Link find her, but that still doesn't justify the horrible writing. They watered her down mentally and physically for the sake of the plot and when your story has to resort to that method then it's not good writing in my opinion. I'm mad she didn't realize who GANONdorf was nor did she try to like maybe seal him away with her own power BEFORE he got a stone. You know back in Breath of Wild, she finally discovers and awakens her divine goddess power to seal the Calamity and nowhere did she say that, "I lost my power during that time" or anything of the sort. So why in Tears of the Kingdom, she just resorts to unaliving herself because that was the only option? No, you were just being dumb 😅 but again it's not her fault, because the story definitely feels like an afterthought or they just simply didn't care to make one
@@blackchickiedee7 yes! and even the tears wouldve been made redundant if they just allowed rauru to describe the events he experienced with zelda to link while his ghost was still around during the GSI intro. im guessing the reason they didnt do this though is because it wouldve ruined the "where's zelda" plotline. Her whereabouts (as well as the whereabouts of the master sword) shouldnt have been a mystery imo. the sages saw her transform, the steward construct that took the purah pad (likely) saw her transform, and rauru shouldve deduced that the new dragon was likely zelda.
@@daveglass6008 yeah, the where's Zelda plot line really fell flat in this installment. And they didn't have to go down that route if they just, cared to make a better story. I'm not going back to TOTK, it has no replay value for me like the other ones do. Maybe to see Ganondorf :3 but even then I can just go to the Internet for that
@@blackchickiedee7
oh, that's interesting since I adore everything else about the game lol. I love the depths, the larger sky islands are great places to vibe at (the view from the sky overall is incredible), and the new abilities are absolutely amazing! I went into totk hoping it would supplant botw as my new favorite game of all time, but my grievances with the story held it back. hopefully zelda team figures out how to marry linear storytelling with open world gameplay for the next title and kills it!
currently enjoying a second playthrough that heavily exploits some of the fun glitches in the game; and without a paraglider! its a fun challenge
I am a diehard Zelda fan and enjoyed BoTW for the novelty, despite its flaws and it being wildly overrated..... but unfortunately Tears of the Kingdom is a bloated, tedious and formless mess that’s only fun in a “junk food” kind of way. There is no novelty this time around, so the undercooked gamed design from BoTW just isn't acceptable now.
There are no real rewards for exploring- shrines are lame and useless once your stamina wheel is maxed, and weapons will never be exciting to find bc they break after fighting 3 of the 10 million copy-pasted, reskinned enemies. Not to mention that the map is exactly the same, so there’s no excitement in seeing what’s over the next hill.
This is just BOTW again with none of that game's core issues addressed, but instead just more BOTW dumped on top of it. Depths are completely barren (I got every light root) and sky islands were a copy and pasted joke (went to every single island). The main quest was very weak and the side quests are fetch quests with no payoff. Ultra hand was neat but in no way constitutes an entire sequel. I could go on but I don’t want to write an essay that no one will read
holy, you got every light root? I ran out of steam collecting them and just stopped.
Ya know that is something I did notice is that there were a lot more side quests but they did feel like 100% fetch quests. The one for bolson was kind of fun? (if i'm remembering correctly) w/ building some truck to deliver a bunch of logs. but then the whole Lurielin stuff felt like a big dud
@@Wralis yes every light root and Sky Island. I was looking far and wide for the 10/10 sequel everyone was talking about.... couldn't find it. This game was podcast gaming i just had talk shows playing in the background B-Lining for them
i kinda got that feeling too, i really tried to take my time, but having seen the world already i just wanted to see the new stuff as fast as possible
Yeah it feels like TotK was only made to show case the new engineering mechanics and that's not a good reason to make a sequel to a game. From a story standpoint, a sequel is supposed to expand or continue lore or a journey for the characters and that wasn't done here. Unfortunately we gave into the hype and spent money on a game that shouldn't been $70 in the first place. I honestly feel hoodwinked and bamboozled
This isn't the only issue by any means, but I think Nintendo trying to make such a heavy asset and conceptual rehash of BotW was probably the most severe and consequential issue in TotK, especially in light of being the very next new game in the series after BotW. It was an enormous mistake to have the game set in BotW's Hyrule again. This might sound too cynical and reductive, but I get the feeling that Nintendo basically wanted to repackage BotW with a new coat of paint more than make a "real" sequel to iterate and build off of it; TotK's extreme hesitance to explicitly acknowledge BotW is the most damning thing that makes me feel this way, because that was almost certainly done as a way to make TotK more newcomer-friendly (despite being, y'know, a direct sequel).
this is a good point and kind of where a lot of my initial static with the game came from-it didn't feel like a direct sequel and like a reboot or fresh coat of paint like you said.
My favorite zelda game, Majora's mask, was a huge asset swap and honestly i don't really mind that-personally? but MM was so removed from oot it felt fine-but yeah having all this same stuff in the same world and "ehhh let's not talk about the calamity" is jarring.
@Wralis MM also came out 2 years later after OOT while we had to wait 6 years to get TOTK. The fact we had to wait that long on a game that reuses so many assets is, in my opinion, one of the reasons why it disappoints.
@@Gump1405very good point. In all fairness the pandemic slowed them down
@@stavrosbegetis2173 i think that most probably be the reason why. I don't see how else it could have taken 6 years to come out.
They could have just added proper big dungeons.
There, fixed it.
Don't read this, I'm just ranting about this game.
For me, I think the biggest mistake you can do wile playing this game, is to be a fan of Zelda. I have played every Zelda game apart from the Oracle games and I was super invested in all the hype for TotK, watching speculation and expectations videos so when I finally got to play the game, I already had an idea as to what would be my perfect BotW sequel and TotK fumbled the ball so hard. None of the expectations anyone had had been met yet people kept praising the game. Zelda was a nonentity throughout the game, "Ganondorf" wasn't Ganondorf the sky was empty, the depth were an afterthought, you don't repair the Master Sword, the surface is largly the same, the interesting story happens in the past which you can't play, the dungeons while more visually interesting than the Divine Beasts are basically the same things, there are no items to broaden your arsenal, the game is not darker than BotW in fact it may be more childish in many aspects and as the first indication to me that the game was not gonna be what I expected, the "Rauru" mentioned in the opening is not Rauru and "Ganondorf" doesn't have any knowledge of Link or the Master Sword, he's just been told they would be his undoing and when he has Link crippled, the Master Sword shattered and Zelda seemingly vanished, what does he do? He sits on his ass the entire game. Cursing the various people of Hyrule to preven the sages from Awakening even thought he clapped them in the past and should not be worried about them at all and doing random evil acts like scaring away Zelda's horse for some reason. He does no manipulation, no planning and no destruction throughout the entire game which is why he is not Ganondorf to me but an imposter, in fact, in the first trailer there was a miral of Ganondorf wielding his iconic trident yet yet all he has in the game are generic sword, spear, club and longbow. This game made me so mad, I've completely stopped following any Zelda content and have decided to play every single Zelda game back to back just to make sure I still like Zelda. If the next game is another BotW clone, I might just completely turn my back on Nintendoas a whole as Zelda games cover the majority of what I play and I can't believe that the last real Zelda game we've had came out 10 years ago with ALBW. TotK had 12 years of development as BotW's development started right after SS came out and TotK is pretty much BotW but again and yet it feels so rushed, empty of content yet bloated at the same time and again people are calling it a "masterpiece" and the "greatest game of al time" while I'm just left depressed everytime I think of it.
as per your instructions i have not read this. but thanks for checking out the video
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I agree wholeheartedly. TOTK is genuinely the worst Zelda game I’ve ever played, and if the games keep going down this path I’m just going to tap out. It has NOTHING that made Zelda what it was to me: no sweeping soundtrack that sends chills up my spine, no likable characters that make me want to save Hyrule as quickly as possible, no good dungeons or puzzles, no fun combat, Link has zero personality, and isn’t like all the previous incarnations who I idolized as a kid, just nothing of value in that train-wreck of a game. I immediately went back and played Skyward Sword twice, and went through Ocarina of Time in the first time in years and had a blast. I still love the old Zelda games, and if anything, TOTK made me appreciate them even more.
Amen man! You said everything I've been feeling for a while now. Could'nt have said it better myself. It's such a shame that after all this time, this is Nintendo's "best" for a Zelda game? The disrespect to the lore, the false advertising of the sky (boring once you realize the same 3 sky islands are copy-pasted aside from the GSI and a few others) Depths got boring quick. No underwater exploration eother. Annoying Sages, No items, minimal enemy variety once again, barebones combat, etc. This game had so much potential and just fell flat. Smh 🤦🏿♂️Ima just play the old games, theyve reminded me what Zeldas supposed to be like.
I hate the shrines in this game, they are massively dissapointing
The temples are underwhelming and boring
The fact that every single enemy one shots me regardless of what sort of enemy it is makes me feel that Nintendo wanted to compensate for the boring shrines and temples
I hope Twilight Princess and Wind Waker come to the switch soon, because I need to play a REAL Zelda game
I think the reason TOTK seems so disappointing is because it's feels like Nintendo got caught up in they're own hubris of trying to reinvent the franchise. BOTW did a ton to reinvigorate the franchise, and in many ways they succeeded. But, in that process many of the staples of Zelda titles were relegated to more minor elements of the game in favor of a go anywhere do anything approach and created a whole new litany of problems for themselves. For the most part I believe BOTW succeeded in trying to put a new spin on the formula. With TOTK however i truly believe many fans of the series myself included had hoped that the more engaging elements of past titles, story, progression, and dungeons didn't take such a back seat to exploration and minor puzzles, but instead worked better to complement one another.
TOTK feels like Nintendo doubling down on what worked for BOTW while either disregarding or only integrating the most minor elements of the past into this new formula. What it's lead to and why i think there's so much negative commentary on TOTK is a game that's as wide as an ocean but as shallow as a puddle. Very little from the top of the Sky island's down to the Depths feels as though they're anything unique, and more like repetitive fetch quests. The story may tell a more grandiose story, but it's paper thin at best and convoluted at worst. Dungeous now have unique bosses and individualized themes. but most every unique mechanic can simply be cheesed through, and never buildup to greater challenges as you gradually explore through each dungeon.
What it ultimately leads to at the end of the day is a game that doesn't offer any significant improvement on the BOTW formula, while still falling woefully short on the elements that made traditional Zelda games so engaging and memorable. While I don't think TOTK is a bad game as someone who has completed every title in the franchise it has to be one of if not the most underwhelming Zelda experiences I ever played through, and is the only title in the mainline franchise that i have zero desire to go back and replay again.
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It's clear that the team just wanted to capitalized on BOTW's success when even the prior installment had it's own problems. It's crazy to me that this game is honestly DLC and we got charged $70 for it but no one is outraged 😅 I'm not saying we should gather torches and pitchforks and head down to Nintendo but, I do feel bamboozled and feel as though TOTK wasn't really it's own game - just BOTW 2.0
This isn't dlc
I feel like one thing people don't talk enough is the disappearance of the Calamity. In TotK everyone is like "120 Sheikah shrines? Divine Beasts? Guardians? Calamity Ganon? Champions? Never heard of them." It baffles me how in 4-5 years of restoration (maybe less), they got rid of all that Sheikah tech and still added almost NOTHING to Hyrule.
I'm totally biased on this because I adore the Champions, but I find it *so* unfair that they barely talked about them. TotK was originally called BotW 2, implying that it was a sequel and you had to play BotW before TotK. Yet they somehow still made it so that it feels like a completely original game where nothing happened before it. I just hope they make the Calamity (Sheikah, Champions, etc.) at least a *little* more relevant in future Zelda installments, even if they'll probably just be a one-time thing.
But you CANNOT make *TWO* games (BotW, AoC) and say "Hey, let's forget this ever happened!" and make a completely new game using the EXACT SAME MAP and (almost) EXACT SAME CHARACTERS.
Also, on an unrelated note, I feel it's worth mentioning that Yona says she's 'from another domain'. Nintendo? Please elaborate??? Where is this second domain? If we do get a DLC, I will be extremely disappointed if they don't do something cool with this. I think it will *sort of* make up for the lack of new areas if we get to see what's outside of Hyrule.
the only reason i can think of why they just don't mention botw is to make it so if you didn't play botw you could play totk and not miss anything? but that doesn't make for a great sequel-that's why I refer to totk as a "reboot"
I mean at the beginning, Zelda does mention the Calamity, when you do the school quest, Symin tells a bunch of students what happened ten thousand and 100 years ago. Sidon is still in grief about Mipha, and Riju mentions Urbosa in her diary. If you play the BOTW DLC, you actually see the picture in your old house.
But other than that, I completely agree.
@@northproductions6104People still regularly talk about the pandemic after about 3 years, and it effected us for like 2, with unknown lasting effects. And even if this was being made during the pandemic itself, there are major events all the time. Japan's people could easily remember "the earthquake of '97" or something. People talk about historic events.
The people of Hyrule should definitely still bring up such a catastrophic event as one that's lasted a century within most of everyone's lifetimes.
@@amandaslough125 Yeah that’s basically what I said.
The Depths were interesting for like an hour or so at most. Throwing light seeds does save arrows, but it is so fucking tedious exploring down there. At first I was digging it, since it's a call back to the Dark World. (Which is something I was really hoping they'd implement before release.) When I said i wanted a Dark World, I didn't mean literally 😂
oh for sure, those first few hours in the depths were kinda mind blowing for me-didn't expect it and wasn't spoiled on it.
lol yeah, did feel like a huge genius when i tossed a light bloom on a car down there tho, but then the puzzle in "how do i light stuff up" was solved and that was within the first 2 hrs of being down there.
I'd have loved the Depths a lot more if they had actual lore - difference races used to live down here, and sooo... what, exactly? Was it a past Hyrule? Does anyone care? Is there anything for me to recognise? No? Okay.
Course, then it'd take me even longer to get through the game so..
This game is unrewarding to play. Most treasure chests contain worthless items. The rewards you gain from “exploring” are countless Korok seeds. It become a punishment after so many hours.
definitely can feel that way.
Not always the case but that's exactly why I want another linear Zelda game
I told myself playing this so many time: this is fuck... trolling!
-Constructions falling apart at the worst time or you don't know why it don't work (10-20 minutes lost each time).
-Only 4 not great temples on a massive empty overworld.
-Shitty rewards after 30 minutes of busy work.
-Climbing, walking, flying 100 hours to see and do the same recycled things again and again.
I could go on and on.
This is a disjointed and diluted mess! It may be the last Zelda I played. I play the series since the first one in 1986.
Its so tedious.
@@repingers9777 I really think open-ended can mesh with actual Zelda game design. It just can't be a totally structureless freeform physics playground or be set in a wastefully excessive gargantuan world.
Of course there arent any NPCs on the sky islands because they also know that there is nohting to find or do up there 😂
The story specifically told that once you turn into a dragon you will FULLY loose yourself, you will never be yourself agai- oh wait two ghosts appears and does some magic in the air while link is falling down and BOOM dragon turned back to zelda...
Does not make ANY sense.
I had a similar experience with the “where’s zelda” story issue, though I had found the last of the initial tear memories, the one when Zelda is saying she knows what she has to do and we get the Deku tree and dragonification snips. I had not yet seen those memories (I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know there was a new dragon at first. I thought the one that broke the cloud barrier at the start was Naydra).
Unrelated to the non linear.. it kinda just raised more questions for me with its connection to BotW. If the Water Temple is the source of the pure water…where was it in BotW? Were the geoglyph patterns there since that last memory? If so Why are they only now visible?
I enjoyed my time, but the non-linear story and lack of gaining new gear/skills was kind of a bummer for me.
thanks a lot for checking the video out and leaving a comment.
Time travel, especially in a sequel, brings up a whole host of questions. Like there must have been 2 master swords for any of the calamities to be combated and on and on and on.
My opinion is that this game was purely to milk the cow of this new formula until the next installment. This is basically a big DLC, nothing else. Or maybe we can call it a 1.5 version of Breath of the Wild. There is no major change to the game engine. It's exactly the same as Breath of the Wild, but with added areas and powers.
So, while I agree with everything that was said in this video, I can't overlook the fact that this game couldn't have been much better because that's what you get when you invest a minimum of effort just to make more money.
I actually think it took 5x the amount of effort to get what we got with totk-they probably would have had a way easier time building an entire game around the mechanics they have instead of trying to jam the mechanics in a world that was clearly not built for them-hence the weird sky blocks shoved into the sides of cliffs/mountains so you can ascend in places you couldn't in botw-
i get what you mean tho, and it deff can feel that way for sure
Agreed. The BotW remake we didn't need.
Damn! Only one sentence, but unironically one of the most savage comments dissing TOTK ive seen since release.
@@ACW-dn9wb 😂 but it's exactly how I felt since traversing the Great Sky Island at the beginning of the game.
"In the next Zelda game, Echoes of the Land, our hero loses his powers because of Ganon's mysterious return!
Zelda goes missing, but it turns out she was sent to a parallel dimension where a benevolent ganon gets to know her, and he gets corrupted by a dark force, becoming the tragic villain for this game!
Build anything using fire and minerals! Hopefully mining and searching for wood won't get annoying by the 80th hour!
Buy in 7 seven years for 80€!"
i'm getting major star wars flashbacks. Zelda: "Everyone...somehow Ganon has returned"
loooool
@@Wralis hahaha, I didn't think about that
Perfect, except that this series of Zelda titles follow the obvious "Secretion of the Geography" leitmotif.
DID YOU JUST PREDICT ECHOES OF WISDOM'S TITLE
@@Awesomeflame16 kind of! I can't believe they actually went for the sound theme.
I really hope the next one isn't "Taste of the stars" or "Saliva of the spirit" XD
I agree with basically 100% of this. I enjoyed the game overall despite its flaws but I acknowledge them all, the story being the one that really bugs me the most. Another thing I think of that you didn't mention is how the game sets up that there's a "depths exploration squad". So you start out expecting to occasionally meet some of them. But after the first one you meet, they're always actually just Yiga in disguise. After the third or so time you stop wondering "will this be the time it's a real one," and you eventually find out it's never a real one. To me it's just a good example of how Nintendo doesn't seem to think about the consequences of these kinds of implementation decisions and how boring they make their games.
Twilight princess gets so much hate, but compared to totk I have much better memories with Twilight princess. Totk is missing main quest items and puzzles that go with .
Twilight Princess has the 2nd best atmosphere of the entire series (i'm just a boomer that loves MM), that gloomy digi-ness is just so good. I always have a hard time replaying that game but have fond memories of it.
TOTK doesn’t have half the vibes and magic that TP had. Remember Snowpeak ruins? Now that was vibes.
While i think this game was amazing, I do agree with you on everything. The non-linear reveal of the story really diluted the impact of the stroyline for me. I think the depths was at first really encapsulating but then i soon realized it was more or less "empty". After completing some shrines and developing a cheese way to do things, the shrines just became an already solved puzzle. For the last 50 or so shrines I just decided to do it the way the devlopers intended; just so it would be challenging. I also hated the activation mechanic of the sages... soooo clunky and it just made for less fluid gameplay and combat. I liked the mineru construct sage but it seemed like it could have been soo much more useful and customizable than what was available. My biggest gripe is the lack of Ganondorf throughout the playthrough. It would have been cool to see more of him, even if it was just an appearance or cutscene. Meeting him at the end of the game for the first time made him so forgettable. The comic relief villian, Master Khoga was much more compelling.
Wow, thanks a lot for checking out the video and sharing your thoughts!
Mineru deff felt really underdeveloped. An awesome idea for some mech but it felt really clunky to use her at all. I kind of wish that she would "enhance" zonai devices, so like a cannon does a spread shot when attached to the mech instead of a single shot or something along those lines.
Khoga has so much personality! Any time I saw him I couldn't help but think "we need more of this"
there was definitely a lot I left out of this but I agree with you. Since Ganondorf is an actual character I wish we saw way more of him outside of "phantom ganon" They had great voice actors for the main cast too, would have been cool to see more developed there.
The whole point of shrines was to be these puzzles that let you create your own solution. You're playing into the gimmick and are still complaining.
that can be their gimmick and it can still feel unsatisfactory?
it's like the paddle shrine where you can just shoot a bomb arrow at the target and skip all the puzzle, while clever(?) it can feel like "well what was the point of all this junk in here?"
or dazzle fruit to get around actually doing any of the mirror challenges-
that leads to a lack of that "a-ha" moments that really good puzzles provide.
@@Wralis kohga got more personality than the entire cast imo
Yeah, Ganondorf needed more time on the screen. He needed an actual motif, and not just "Oh hey taking over Hyrule would be fun". Also, small thing but bring back ganondorf playing an organ
Imagine if the Depths had its own races of ppl/creatures with their towns and problems to solve. Imagine if the Skies still had the Zonai ppl with their towns as well. Wouldn't it be great to have 3 civilizations interact with each other? The Game would become a legendary classic.
That would’ve taken too much soul and creativity. Much easier to make it a barren empty pit for the sake of saying “new map tho!”
Unfortunately Nintendo values quantity over quality these days. Its a damn shame to think about "what could've been".
i think the major issue for me was the hype i had with the story of the game, i really thought and convinced myself before the game launch that totk would have the best story ever telled in a zelda game, and it was because of the damn trailer, it seemed so perfect, but when i played the game i just felt dissapointment :(
So, when i watched the trailer i put the pieces together to what i wanted the story to be and how i wanted it to be told
Yeah that trailer...lol
I was excited to see link and Zelda together but they booted her out as fast as possible. Instead of ya know... including her and interacting
About time more people are giving a carefully thought out review instead of over glorifying mediocre games. Thanks!!
Fr
People just don’t criticise things anymore
@@a..27stephenson yes and the people defending the game are very dismissive of any negative opinions. We should be able to talk about it. Just because someone eats sh** doesn’t mean it taste good. People are just used to eating sh**.
@@Cascada200 couldn’t have phrased it better
@@Cascada200Sitting there saying something is shit isn’t a valid criticism though. There are valid criticisms of the game but this contrarian hate train is super fucking weird man. It’s just a game but people are consistently getting their panties in a wad because it was good, and it was popular.
Beep boop, must hate popular thing
I was thinking all these points through my play-through, I was very disappointed and dissatisfied, if I had not played botw this game would be perfect and amazing, but since I have 400 hours in botw everything just felt the same after the first 30 hours
dang 400 hours?!?! that is some serious gaming.
I didn't play botw until 2020 and really loved it, should have probably played it earlier 😅
thanks for checking out the video!
I logged 652 hours in BOTW and personally am so glad TotK was more of the same - but I can see others disappointment with it.
Honestly, playing BOTW I just wanted more BOTW…and that’s a lot of people’s complaint but to me I’m over here like heeeeelllll yeeeeaahhhh
I haven't checked in a while because I played on the Wii U but I think I had around 2000 hours in breath of the wild.😅
@@Wralissame man. I played BotW in 2020 so it’s not nostalgic to you and I like it is to everyone calling Tears of the Kingdom a masterpiece.
But you shouldn’t HAVE to endure a 6 year hiatus in order to enjoy a video game’s sequel 🤦♂️. I could play oot and mm back to back and they were just fine and distinctly different. Totk is botw with new stuff added. The same game, same topographical map, same same same.
I wonder how this game will look in the future next to BotW. I guarantee everyone who hasn’t played either will be skipping BotW to play totk. You simply cannot play totk if BotW is 3 years fresh in your memory. That’s nintendos fault.
no botw and this game are both trash and you need to come to terms with your lack of experience blinding you to the reality of the problems baked into both these games
BotW was so fun to me. I played so many hours of BotW without even completing one divine beast.
Tears, I started losing interest a little bit when we started off on sky island, no doubt due to having to start building stuff.
i will admit the ultra hand could have worked a little better so much of the time-
and it probably would have felt more rewarding if we were using it to explore new areas everywhere-idk-just felt janky a lot
The reason why it was so fun to jimmy your horse up a sheer mountain face in Skyrim, or throw sausages at NPCs in Baulder’s Gate 3 so that they would keep arresting your friend, is because it’s funny seeing how you can stretch the rules that you’re given. It feels like you’re doing something you’re not meant to do. It feels like you have control. Freedom.
What doesn’t feel like freedom is when a game puts two hooks & a platform next to the very obvious zip-line with the word “Creativity!” scrawled on it in red paint.
Nintendo can’t even give the players the dignity of throwing random assets around the world so that we would have to *think* and perhaps *plan* -or god forgive get *creative* having to fashion a zip-line cart from environmentally-appropriate bits of rubble or plant matter or ANYTHING.
If I’m being honest, the more I sit and think about this game, the more I genuinely cannot believe that this is what Nintendo put out. Like just… wow.
yeah as time has gone on I've got way more negative about totk than this video
I went through this with bright eyes and rose colored goggles, then a few weeks after I finished it I was like “wow that kinda sucked”
Totk for botw players is kind of like a big dlc, game+ and master quest hybrid thing. The new things are fun but not enough for those who played botw. It's just a chore. Man, botw was incredible when played the first time, it was just a fantastic experience. Makes me worried about the future of the franchise, all I know is using the same map is the worst idea for a series like this.
in hindsight, yeah-reusing the map was a flop-and it's like they had to 5x the work just to make their new mechanics fit in a world specifically not built for them.
idk i hope the next one is better-but, i'll have to wait and see
True. I'm scared to buy it now. I'm afraid since I've played BOTW so long that I'm afraid this game won't be worth the 50$
I honestly feel disappointed in the game. I only did 6 shrines I have 4 hearts and stock stamina. I’m already on my last shrine and I’m only doing it cuz I’m tired of yunobo annoying me when I’m trying to farm for things in the Goron region. There doesn’t seem like there’s any difficulty progression in the game. It feels very stagnant at times
thank for checkin out the video and leaving a comment.
yeah the world "scaling" is not amazing...the enemies just require more stuff thrown at them to defeat, it's not like their moves change that much or are wholly unique.
@@Wralis you know theres a exp mechanic that’s hidden. Stupid asf you fight one harder enemy early on lots of other enemies stop appearing so much at the level they should be.
Wow, that point about there being no one in the sky is very true and not something I had even thought about. The Rito are choosing to freeze to death instead of fly up here?? Birds literally migrate!
I loved totk but I have to agree with the vast majority of things you said here. My main issue was with a bunch of minor conveniences That kinda just culminated into a distaste for certain parts of the game. For example, Ultrahand. It was an incredibly fun power to use and experiment with, but also incredibly frustrating to use at times. Not only does it have an infuriatingly aggressive auto-lock system with no method of temporary disabling it, but theres also no feature to indicate symmetricality when placing zonai devices onto other items/devices. This doesn't sound like a big deal on paper, but when you realize a good majority of the airborne vehicles you'll be making rely heavily on the symmetrical placement of fans/wings to fly straight it starts to become a huge pain in the ass to detach devices and reattach them over and over in an attempt to get it 'perfect.' Either giving the player an option grid layout on the device being worked on or an optional symmetrical lock-in feature would've made this much less frustrating for me personally.
Another thing is the activation of the champion abilities, something you pointed out as well. It makes absolutely no sense to me that Yunobo and Tulin's abilities have context-sensitive activation conditions that let you bypass the god awful 'chase down the champion' minigame but Riju and Sidon were shown no such love. When blocking, the player should have the option to press 'A' and activate Sidon's ability as it's first phase is defensive. And Riju's ability definitely should've been able to be activated while an arrow is drawn with your bow, especially considering she seems to run away from the player most of the four.
A mini gripe I had was with the limit on hot air balloons and wings. I can infer some of the balancing reasons that went into the implementation of this feature but it's execution fell so flat that I have yet to see anyone who is actually satisfied with it. I can't comprehend why they would give us so many tools to utterly break their game in some areas, the ability to upgrade our batteries to an obscene amount, and yet the wings will take you about as far as a botw shield surfing trip in the desert. At the very least, extending the range of these devices would make them much more valuable to incorporate in our builds.
My last gripe is with performance. Yes, its the switch and no I wasn't expecting mind blowing constant 30 fps with no dips in the adaptive resolution, but the amount of severe frame drops I had ESPECIALLY during combat felt really dissatisfying. It's even more frustrating when you realize that the majority of frame drops you'll experience in totk is from the often times unnecessarily high-fidelity vfx of your abilities (the waves that emit from link while using ultrahand, the green adhesive splatter when you detach objects with ultrahand, explosions from bombs and cannons, etc.) The switch's hardware is akin to that of an android tablet and I really feel like the devs could've considered this more to achieve a better balance between visuals and performance. botw wasn't perfect in this category but totk consistently performs worse in most, if not all cases.
Overall, I really enjoyed totk and I'll obviously keep playing it. If I had to compare it to botw I'd personally say totk trumps it, but I definitely enjoyed my first experience with botw more than with totk.
thanks for the thoughtful comment and checking out the video.
a bunch of suggestions you brought up are really good, like the sage's powers and how to "prime" them-it's like a riff on how they worked in botw.
I didn't even bring up ultrahand or any of that b.c the video would have been an hour+ and I feel the video is a lot already.
And yeah the performance is worse in some ways than botw. But the new sound effects were really good too.
but yeah I'd love to see this running at 60fps, botw and totk lend themselves to upscaling really well. The art direction is really strong and would be awesome to see better visuals/performance accompany that.
Late to the party, but I swear to God, I'm just 5 mins in the video yet it's like you already said about everything I felt about that cursed disappointment of a game (arguably the biggest ever for me, especially as a fellow Zelda enjoyer). The pirates man, I'll always remember how much of a letdown it was. And to a higher degree, the story and how the developers seemingly made me want to forget Breath of the Wild. 4 years of waiting and 70 bucks for this shit
ToTK was boring, it really bored me so much, that I didn't play through it. I am so sick of the formular by now, even though I really enjoyed BotW, I really, really hope Nintendo is doing a completely new Zelda now.
You hit the nail on the spot with the game losing a lot of its magic if you´ve played BOTW. The sky island was so much fun and got me all excited but then when you got down on the surface it was more or less, do you remember the BOTW map? Yeah! ok well, everything is pretty much the same so just go on the same path etc... I think my biggest problem is that BOTW did not need a sequel, the champions the king and all of old Hyrule had an ending where it felt bittersweet. Like older titles, where you thought that you actually did something to change the world, there was a feeling of urgency and when it was all over you felt a sense of completion.
Now I am not the biggest fan of BOTWbut BOTW was its own game, my favorite one is TP but BOTW was its own game, TOTK just let me down. The story element spoiled me too many times, my irritation of knowing where Zelda was but Link just not telling anyone and also (SPOILER). The ending is just reversing everything, Link got his arm back, and Zelda is no longer an immortal dragon THAT WAS NON REVERSABLE?! And it just ends like that. Everything was good, no one you really cared for died, I mean even Ganondorf was just chilling in his room, I bet you could have gone years before you had to do something about him... My biggest gripe with TOTK is fan service, it just felt like they threw in everything they thought people liked from older games, but forgot why they had an impact in the old games in the first place. Just because I'm running around in TP clothing does not mean I can turn into a wolf or see Midna again. Also, the older games had this sense of having the same world without the same map. I know the timeline is a mess but there were hints like oh you have this person with a similar name, or this town has existed with different variations, but that felt like a normal time progression. TOTK just felt like, oh those old games? yeah, look we acknowledge that they existed, maybe here have some old clothing or ruins that is the same from BOTW.
I don't know maybe I'm being petty but I loved the feeling of the games being their own games, and just feel like 8/10 having a sequel is not the right way to go. My biggest love for Zelda is their way of just creating a whole new world with its own sense of purpose and mostly the story. I want to care for the characters I played but TOTK just felt bland and and like a copy. Thank you for giving the game the criticism I think it deserved, it was a fun game but I feel like I´ve either forgotten half of it or mixed it with BOTW... I'm really hoping that the next game has more similarities to the old game with a more Linnegar story as well as temples, I feel like that was what Zelda did best. Maybe a non-popular opinion but I do not think the open world with non-linear storyplay is how Zelda should be... Maybe it's time to create a new character with a new game that lets Nintendo try this out, and let Zelda do what Zelda dows but, but maybe I need to let go of a want of the old games in a newer format.
thanks for checking out the video and sharing your thoughts.
-.- god yeah the old "sets" from other games just...did nothing for me. open those treasure chests to get cap of the wind and wanted to toss my controller.
You go through this hard to mine through areas, fight a phantom ganon to get...a hat from WW that i have zero intention of wearing.
I feel like with the characters specifically… they didn’t want a Zelda game. They wrote these characters for Zelda but didn’t intend to use them as such. They’ve completely abandoned their personality’s. Even goat man. He HAS no personality, all he does is seal away Ganondorf and call it a day. The side characters all spew the same basic dialogue over and over. From Sidon to Riju, it’s like they’ve completely forgot about who these characters even are and their entire reason for being here. Ganondorf, Sidon and Zelda I believe are by far the biggest offenders of this. Sidon doesn’t even mention Mipha once I don’t think? And Zelda like you said just seems so stupid in this game, and lastly Ganondorf. Ganondorf is the most basic lameo potato cookie cutter villain WITH ZERO MOTIVATION just cause they needed likely nostalgia bait and something to move the story forward. Though I do love that final boss and the midway boss with him, cause as much as I hate his characterization in this game his design is super cool.
Good long review. Said a lot of things I personally felt. Especially about the emptiness and lack of reward in the shrines and depths. In all, totk was a lengthy amount of bloatware to show off the hand gimmick and didn’t add much else. And Zelda! Wtf Zelda! Why???
The story of TotK feels very stitched-together from disperate ideas that often don't quite fit together because they resulted from several changes made during developement. I have no proof of this, but this is what it feels like. Examples:
Why does Ganondorf suddenly become all powerful by possessing a single Secret Stone, like you pointed out ? Maybe this was initially meant to be the moment Ganondorf aquires the Triforce or - at least the Triforce of Power (the Triforce not being in play as a power-up macguffin feels very strange in a Zelda game that mentions the Sages and the Imprisoning War).
Why are the secret stones worn so openly by the sages - maybe they were initially meant to be "sacred stones", connected to the shrines ?
Why are Zelda's sacrifice and Link's right arm retconned and why does Impa's supposed research not play into it at all - maybe that was a late change to avoid a downer ending - Rauru coming back in the end despite his ghost appearently "dying" after the tutorial seems to point in that direction ?
Why was Zelda travelling with Link so heavily implied in the trailers and then written completely out of the actual gameplay/present day story ? Maybe the game was initially supposed to feature Zelda following Link as a companion or something and that got thrown out.
I understand that game developement is difficult and changes need to be made but it feels like some story beats were held onto a little to tightly when they could have easily been smoothed over before stitching them together.
I think I figured out why they had to distance TOTK from BOTW so badly and it comes down to all of the glaring inconsistencies in the story. TOTK's story is inconsistent with itself, but when you factor in the story of BOTW, they hit like a ton of Zonaite. Time travel in general is always a touchy and difficult thing to pull off in fiction, as even then, things have to make sense. Nowhere could this be made more glaringly obvious than with the Master Sword. If the Master Sword was stuck to the Light Dragon since Hyrule's founding king and queen, what was the Master Sword in BOTW? And literally every other iteration of Link and Zelda in between? TOTK's ancient past would have been far more ancient than the ancient Hyrule of BOTW, considering the fact that 10k years prior, the Sheikah had been around for a very long time and had developed advanced technology to fight this primal evil tied to Hyrule's very existence. This relationship between Hyrule and Ganon was made very clear in BOTW. Since Zelda travels back in time to the literal founding of Hyrule, this is gonna put this part of the story much further in the past, rendering it impossible for any other Link to have used to Master Sword, making the 10k year old story in BOTW impossible... and actually, making it impossible for any other Link to even have existed, considering the fact that he was name-dropped to Ganon right before mummification. Furthermore, this would also mean that Zelda and Zeldragon would have not only existed at the same time, but for the entirety of Zelda's life, which at this point in the story would be at least 22 years. This is a massive time paradox that cannot just be hand-waved away and is one of the biggest problems that arises when fiction writers take a completely lazy approach to the concept of time travel. This problem is so blatant that it doesn't even *need* to conflict with BOTW's story to be made obvious... it exists within TOTK's own lore. You know you done fucked up when you can't even get your own lore straight in isolation.
The master sword thing not being there bothered me a lot. The ONLY thing I can think of is that there are 2 master swords. The one in Zelda five head and the one at the deku tree. It's dumb, they don't explain this, but it's the only explanation I can think of. Bc the calamity's happened, so idk it's not great lol
All of this inconsistency bothers me a LOT.
My personal opinion with tears of the kingdom is They over focused on “what was bad about botw, and what was good about botw, and let’s just infuse the good stuff into the new game and leave out the bad”
they did a lot of things they did in botw in tears of the kingdom, but it just didn’t work the same way it worked for botw because they took out aspects of stuff that they did have in botw that made the choices and storyline and map make sense. But with tears of the kingdom they didn’t have the same context or same storyline so it just didn’t work as well for this game.
The game was fun, and the new abilities and shrines were amazing changes and the excitement I had towards the beggining of the game was amazing. But it quickly faded.
My gripe is they shouldn’t have used botw formula for the storyline and just put it in totk. That was a very bad move on their part. I got WAYY too much Deja vu with the storyline gameplay that was out of context. Especially because it made way more sense in breath of the wild.
I didn’t love the storyline either and I think it had to do with the delivery, not with the storyline itself
thanks a lot for checking out the video and leaving a comment. sorry for the late reply.
Yeah the new abilities were great but feel like they would have been more fun in a different world, couldn't help but feel like "okay, this is kinda reboot territory" as in nintendo thinking "well they loved botw, so let's give it to them again, but with some powers that don't really fit in the world."
This is one Zelda fanboy you haven't alienated. In fact, I had many of the same criticisms.
Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game, and it scratched my Zelda itch, but like BOTW, the game too much emphasizes quantity over quality. Outside of the main quest, I didn't feel compelled to complete yet another insignificant fetch quest, gather yet another Korok seed or obtain the same piece of nostalgia gear. And I was expecting more of a change/rebuild of Hyrule given the development time. I would have traded the entire depths and frankly the sky islands for new & vastly expanded towns, greater number and complexity of NPCs and more information on the main characters and what they've been doing the last 3-6 years. We got very little of that. Those expectations were based on my experience with Majora's Mask and what they were able to do in just a year.
Maybe some of this will come in a DLC, but unlikely given Nintendo's track record. I'm more expecting another Master mode and some absurd set of trials that will make Link even more overpowered than he needs to be.
Thanks for the comment!
O yeah all the "collect 10 fireflies so I can play the flute for lil kid" repeated 10000 times made me nope out of more quests than engaging with them.
I am interested to see what they will do, but yeah I have a feeling it will be just that. we'll have to wait and see
Yeah agreed the game feels more focused on showing you how it has, over how much it offers, which isn't much story wise and world building wise who are the zonai, why are there only two in the past, did gannon kill most of them? Why doesn't zelda mention the calamity gannon incident and doesn't do jack, when a guy named gannon comes and crosses her path. little things like that and the amount of unnecessary fetch quests and korok seeds really big down the experience, no finding my hundred korok seed under a rock isn't fun, it's tedious and annoying that these guys are locked behind upgrading your inventory again
i have rewatched this video many, many times, and i agree SO MUCH with it all, totk threatened my love for the franchise that botw had reignited (my fav is still ww) and after finishing it two weeks after release (didnt rush, jsut played alot) i havent touched it since and have no desire to do ever start it up again, the more time goes on the more i find wrong about it and words to describe what gave me this .... empty feeling;
and i put my expecations low, i knew what i hoped for, but knew nintendo would never go so far, so i settled for pretty much being as open as i can towards what the game offers me- and the more i played the more a feeling of ... unease even, started to get stronger, i felt like the game was laughing at me for having cared about what botw established, and the producers commentary not long ago made it all so much worse (the shiekah tech just "vanishing" ????? hello?? you just didnt care to give it a reason)
and i think it all truly fell apart when i went back to the great platou and the shrine of life was just .. gone like it was precisely scraped off the walls, and no one cared, it was like the game was desperate to try and make me forget botw had happened just a few years earlier
(i realyl dont like how a common argument is that nintendo ignored anything from what botw established bc they didnt want to alienate new players .. which is jsut, so dumb? its a direct SEQUEL, if you dont play the first one and are then confused playing the second one its our own fault? its not like you cant look up info or summaries? also wouldnt that have been advertisement for botw again? huh?)
all little changes felt so artificial, stuck onto the world like stickers, seriously, what good did all the little rock crumbs weirldy fusing with normal mountains do; characters acting off like link is new to this world somehow, the way the whole "is that *obviosuly not real zelda* zelda?? wtf why does she do evil stuff??" thing was just .... i felt like the game was treating me like i was stupid, you cant even tell anyone so your just left there yelling at the screen that its not zelda OBVIOUSLY no matter how much of the tears you found too, and i personally hate how everything that ever was is now suddendly sonau (english zonai), theres no place they havent touched, every NPC is now obsessd with them too and im not a fan of the sonau tech either (i feel like botw managed that balance way better, between medival kinda world with high tech stuff from the shiekah, totk tips that balance bc the sonau tech just felt so .. out of place, like an obvious box of toys for players to build mechs with but not the world nor the story being build around it)
also how the game constantly sets up something and then just drops it, sonia telling zelda about how to use her powers- welp she uses it like, twice to reverse some weapons and then turns into a glorified version of the sword pedestal in the krog forest, and her powers really dont matter; impa saying she will find a way to help zelda turn back and it .. going nowhere; even the intro felt like they were dangling a carrot in front of you that oh look here is zelda, physically, with you, and you can actually interact with h- WOOPs gone for the entirety of the "story"
i think this is the first zelda game i actually, dislike, like a fully "that was a waste of my time" kind of feeling, and it being connected to botw means it hurt that game in retrospect, botws cool mysteries got solved in totk with the lamest answer, stuff getting retconned, and things not mattering- also, as you said, zelda .. didnt feel like botw zelda past the intro, she was like a different character standing prettily at the side and your pretty prize at the end and nothing more
the ending alone was so ... unsatisfying, it just gets all magically solved! zelda is back despite it being said over and over that such a tranformation ISNT reversable, and you dont even take part in it! i didnt want to get to the end for a long time bc i thoguht i was missing a big quest from impa to find some mcguffin or something so i can help zelda turn back at the end, but no! you just beat the one-note bad guy and everythings back to like nothing happened :)) links arm too, you just get it back! not even a scar, nothing, even tho rauru says that links arm is beyond saving, the amount of light thingies you colelct (that supposedly were to cleanse the miasma out of it) doesnt matter either, none of the "sacrifice" matters in the end and you didnt even have to do anything for it, it all just goes back to status quo, like nothing actually happened, isnt that coolio :))
since i finished the game rather early, i felt so SO alone in feeling so massively disappointed and empty bc all i was seeing was praise over praise, even people needlessly hating on botw again by calling it a tech demo (tbh totk felt more like a tech demo to show off ultrahand) or singing praise to how totk fixed it all (it made botws problem largely .. worse imo), it feels validating to see others talk about alot of the issues i had
the one thing i can actually say was amazing was the music, i loved botws music, but totk has so many new great pieces there (the build up to the end and the ending fights soundtrack for example) which honestly just make me even more sad of all the wasted potential
(as a sidenote about the names of the stones, i am not native english speaking and i played the game in my own language; they are called essentially "enigma-stones" or "mystic-stones" there so i think that weird "secret" thing is a translation quirk of the english version, it likes to needlessly change alot of stuff for some reason)
totk feels like an epicly presented nothing burger, as soon as you are not distracted by the cool music and pretty visuals you realize you are biting into nothing of substance
APOLOGIES for the long rant, i tried to shorten it as best as i could but i tend to ramble alot bc im very passionate about the zelda franchise so this all truly comes from a place of love, not mindless hatred or "gamerbro angery at game not being all they wanted", anyway
thank you for making this video! it is very well done and i will probably watch it again :D
*MY GOD!* Everything you’ve said I completely agree with. I’ve always said that Breath of the Wild needs more defending, and I’m so happy to hear what you said😊
Might seem a little on the extreme side of things to say, but I feel like I went through a roller coaster with this game. I started out viewing the early trailers and convincing myself it would feel like the dlc (I know, the $70 dlc argument is tired). Then I saw the final trailer and got swept into the hype of how awesome and new it would be. Then the more I play it, I think to myself "yeah, this does feel like DLC". Albeit a very significant DLC or at the very least, Breath of the Wild remixed.
My biggest problem with TotK is how unbelievably cookie-cutter it's story was and how dry the characters were. It really stopped me from caring
yeah-i found myself only really liking Khoga, Bolson and Hudson (kind of)
everyone else just kinda standing around b.c there isn't much going on
@@Wralis Yeah, but Kohga's character is still done way better in AoC. It's a shame that they didn't give him voice acting or much importance to the plot. Can you imagine if there was a Yiga phase to the Demon King's army?
never played aoc actually-grew up playing too many dynasty warrior type games lol
yeah-it's kind of weird you go back to yiga HQ too and he isn't there at all.
I agree with you on just about everything, it's a very well put together video!
I have about 200 hours on the game because I tried so hard to see what everybody liked about the game, and found the same criticisms you had. Around the time I got to 30 hours it just wasn't the same and ran into the same gripes you had, one thing I really loathed was all the things that were just fetch quests. Truly was a disappointment.
oh the fetch quests is something i didn't put down, which is weird b.c i stopped doing quests after unlocking the great fairies and got so sick of them, which is a bummer b.c the music was so good but god was that annoying
If you managed to play a "Single Player" game for 200 hours and came out still disappointed then:
A: You're patience is Godlike since 99% of gamers doesn't have that patience to play a game they are disappointed or kinda feeling meh..
B. Your standard is so high not even the 2nd coming Christ will faze you..
C. You're lying about your play time....
Like there's no game that will fit everyone's shoes but for a game to manage to grip you for 200 hours means there's alot in there that interests you.... And I think it's better to look at those positive side than the negative ones. I'm not saying the game is perfect because nothing is but I'm just saying that this game is really good...
i mean people put years into WoW and when they dropped the wow token they bounced from the game-that's 1000's of hours of game time-
and they answered all of your questions with "because I tried so hard to see what everybody liked about the game, "
so this person went above and beyond to get the appeal, understand the game-and it apparently is too much effort? and if they played for 5 hours and put it down you'd probably say they didn't give it much of a chance.
🤷♂️
Wholeheartedly agree on Zelda being taken out of a the main story. And through fricking *time travel* at that! I wanted so badly to be able to have Zelda accompany us through our journey and get even more insight into her as a person and her ambiguous relationship with Link.
And the Sages.....their character arcs could have done so much better. Tulin's hurt the most with how rushed it was.
Oh...and Ganondorf needed FAR more presence in the main story.
all very good points.
Ganondorf was a point i didn't really get in the game, he's just under the castle-and having zeldapuppet doing stuff, would have been cool to see him out and about being more of an antagonist.
maybe in the sequel it'll be more robust? idk lol
Thanks for the comment and checkin out the video!
Thank you for bringing up the issue with the blessing shrines!!! I've been saying this and I honestly thought it was just me! There are just too many blessing shrines.
it felt noticeable-especially after doing them all. I get there will maybe more in the DLC and hopefully they have some really off the wall puzzles to solve-but to keep getting raru's blessings felt not great
One of my biggest disappointments mechanic wise was no swimming. Such much could have been done with that like the Water Temple actually be at the bottom of the sea or lake and not high up in the sky. Nintendo figured it out about 20 yrs and so much could have been done in this game.
The lack of story and direction is the biggest disappointment to me. It felt it was written in parts and thrown together. Too many side quests and adventures. I tried to figure out where to go to next in the story with the bread crumb clues they give but in most cases I gave up and just explored. Solved many quests and story events at random without knowing what I was doing. BotW got criticism for not having a story, but imo it gave you direction. TotK had a half ass story and minimal direction.
All we get is a new zora water attack. In 6 years, that’s the best they could come up with
@@APsGTGAnd a new Yiga attack mechanic. The Sages though. Oh my god I just wanted to stop playing when I first used Sidon’s Sage ability and he was my favourite character in BOTW but his Sage ability is so useless. One thing that TOTK has better is the Ganondorf boss fight. Thousand times better than Calamity Ganon.
I used to think BoTW was too empty, but now I realize that was for the best. The map being empty with very few permanent activities made it more fun to just waste time goofing off.
TotK feels like a Ubisoft checklist open world. I have caves, shrines, lightroots, minibosses, armors, wells, etc etc to find, and they all get marked on my map. As an OCD gamer, that drives me insane.
And unlike other open world games like Elden Ring, there is not challenge of execution. Combat and puzzles are trivially easy, so the only engaging content is finding stuff. And since I already know where all the landmarks are from BotW, the new stuff to find just ends up being rubbing my face on every mountain and hill looking for cave entrances.
The inventory management is also absolute ass. Why can we not favorite items in our inventory? We build a whole ass house but we can't have a chest to keep materials we don't want to use? I see people doing all these cool fuse combos to fight Lynels, but what they skip out is spending over half the battle menuing.
the inventory management is kind of the worse part about the game-you pick up so much stuff and there is just not a fast way to access it. kinda like w/ the armor you have to select each individual piece to equip it instead of just like "equip all" or hold down a button for a little longer to equip the entire set.
thanks for checking out the video and leaving a comment
Solid review. I think most of us long time Zelda fans who enjoyed all the new things about BotW feel this way about TotK.
I played Tears for ~95 hours. The first 60 I was having a great time discovering all the new stuff. I did what the game heavily suggested I do at the beginning. Everything at the fort and then go towards Rito. Then I just explored around. Little disappointments built up bit by bit and I was starting to turn the game into a job by doing everything I saw. But I still had fun.
Then I did one of the floating ruins. Same exact experience as you. Started awesome then ended so incredibly bad that I couldn't get shake my disappointment.
The last 30 hours was me losing any sense of fun. I started skipping shrines and green stone shrine quests out of fatigue for the green stones being freebie shrines and far too many of the normal shrines being the eventide island style challenge. It was fun when they had weird gimmicks, but I swear there's like 20 of them and it wasn't fun anymore. I hadn't done a korok challenge in who knows how long because they were far too tedious for a reward that didn't matter anymore. I begrudgingly stopped for Addison. Why couldn't he just build one single sign on his own so there's some kind of character growth? I would always check a cave I found but even that was getting boring with lots of tiny caves that are just some enemies and a chest.
In those last 30 I did the Goron and Zora main quests. Getting to the temples was cool. Then it turned they were just different versions of the same temple I did at the beginning. Get to the contextual button and press it. I also got the last of the tears during this. I genuinely feel like this is the worst story in any Zelda game. The Zonai are not relevant to anything other than as a replacement for the Sheikah. The mindless low-tier anime dialogue and stupid choices by the characters made me hate watching the cutscenes. I couldn't play anymore. I thought I was burnt out and needed a break. That was a month after the game came out and I haven't wanted to play it since.
I honestly think I would've been happier with anything else as the new Zelda. Maybe Breath of the Wild just shouldn't have had a sequel. Definitely not like this. Every other Zelda sequel has offered a whole new experience over the previous game. Zelda II, Majora' Mask, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, Triforce Heroes. Not all great but at least they were something new.
in botw, a very cool aspect of the game was that you really could beat the game in any order that you wanted to. the game was designed in such a way that nothing you do would spoil a future event in the game or make you feel like you’re not doing things in the right order. it was brilliant game design since you really were free to do whatever you wanted. in totk, this sense of freedom was taken away. i went into the game figuring i could just do things whenever i wanted to (like in its predecessor) but that wasn’t the case at all. the part in the game after you beat the fifth dungeon is the best example of this. the game starts listing off tasks for you to complete, like finding the master sword or fighting master kohga, and if you already completed those tasks they would just instantly be marked off. that was annoying because it was clear that the game wanted me to do that stuff much later in the run. then if you do the dragon tear quest early (which a good chunk of players did) then you’ll have a major twist of the game revealed to you way before you were supposed to know and it ruins a lot of the major plot points. there’s so much wrong with this game it’s really sad
yeah i remember the first thing i did in the game was unlock all the towers to have the map-and then getting some quests from random npcs i found and their quests were "unlock the towers" and i already did that so just had to sit there mashing A until i accepted/turned in all the quests lol
i mean-it was like "oh i already did that" but made me second guess a lot of my time thinking "am i...should i...?"
With the amount of inspiration ToTK took from Mononoke, I kinda wish they had just gone a little further with it and made Rauru’s arm something that was slowly killing Link. Imagine feeling like our boy is actually in danger for once, making it a race against the clock so that he can survive (and also save the kingdom.) DEFINITELY would’ve made me care.
But then again, adding a sense of urgency might mess with people’s desire to explore or something idk. Personally I felt both BoTW and ToTK were mostly hollow experiences once the fun of the game mechanics wore off.
The developers of this game were weak. They showed a little hint of it with the malice leaving links body when he gets a light shrine thing, and then never again. Would’ve been a cool storyline, and that’s probably why they didn’t do it.
39:36 OMG YES!!!!! Japanese translation says they’re “sacred” stones.
BotW was better because it was more focused and fresh. TotK improves on BotW but if you played BotW, TotK does not give you enough to spend 100 hrs on top of the 100hrs you already spent in BotW. Too much dev time was spent on the crazy advanced physics engine.
The game lacks meaningful density and narrative immersion.
I think for everyone that didnt play BOTW, this game will be absolutely mind blowing.
i can see that, but then begs the question "is botw worth playing after totk?"
and i don't think the goal of a sequel should be to completely replace the game that came before it but each unique experiences ya know?
i can always go back and play dark souls 1, and have even after all the new from soft games have come out and still have fun with it-but idk if I can go back and play totk or botw again-dunno, we'll have to see how time treats these games.
The way TotK plays it does seem as if it's designed to (mostly) ignore BotW with how little that game is acknowledged in conversations aswell as making a few minor retcons here and there, almost like a bit of a reboot of Zelda lore.
One of more egregious transgressions is the MasterSword in BotW and even more so in TotK, which previously used to be regarded as this indestructable blade of evils bane that no evil can ever touch, yet in TotK it gets shattered easily like any other regular blade, atleast in "that one cutscene"...and then for the rest of the game once you acquired it it eventually "runs out of energy" and needs to recharge for like 10min. or so I believe. Better then have it shatter like any other weapon, but still absolute BS for a weapon like THIS.
On that note the weapon durability system was a bad idea and I hope....no....I expect that Nintendo abandons this concept for the next games and NEVER brings it back.
I never played BotW, it didn't look appealing to me. Weapon durability was one of the main things I didn't like. With the fuse ability I was willing to give TotK a shot. In the beginning it was a little overwhelming because there was so much you could do. Exploration became unrewarding as you see everything the game has to offer within the first 10 hours. "What a cool place, I wonder what I'll find here.. oh another shrine, cool.".
Loved the wind temple, was the first one that I did. The fire temple in the underground was really cool to discover, then it became clear that all dungeons were just palette swaps. They became disappointing after that, especially the water temple. It looked nice but that was it.
Some of the shrine puzzles were more fun than the temples.
I enjoyed the story, but I was glad to finish it. No desire to grind dragon parts to upgrade my gear, stopped doing the shrines. Screw the seeds. The tedium became frustrating at the end. I enjoyed my time with the game overall, and the positives do outweigh the negatives. The freedom to do things the way you want were really refreshing, but I don't think I'll go through it again any time soon.
Yea I pretty much agree with you. Now after a couple of months I can confidently say that TOTK was pretty underwhelming, sadly.@@RawrItsJuul
Damn, forgot that I liked this review months ago already... but it holds very well.
thanks for checkin it out again
Thank you for calling out Zelda's stupidity. Nintendo and their insistence to barely acknowledge BotW really made her seem like an idiot and led to her getting several people killed.
It sucks that we'll probably never get a decent Zelda story again, after what Nintendo said about how they handled the stories currently. I also wouldn't be surprised if we just get BotW again as these game sold so much.
my only gripes are that they didnt focus more on the sky islands and the depths offer nothing else to do once you find all the great mines and coliseums. no sidequests from npc explorers, no explanation for why the enemies are mining the zonaite. Are they working for the yiga, probably not, I doubt that Ganondorf is even aware of their worship of him. not many unique structures that aren't a mine, coliseum, temple, or hideout. there is only 3 places in the depths that have unique buildings that arent part of a temple, the abandoned fortress, gerudo cemetery, and the construct factory. There is no place in the depths where I can look around and think "yeah I know what region im in". the depths are pretty barren once you get your battery maxed out and found all the clothes.
Thanks a lot for the comment!
More quests/activity down there would have helped for sure. The one with Robbie was pretty cool, but then the dude just bounces back to Hateno and chills for the rest of the game 😆which I don't blame him, but someone else could have explored down there.
What would have been really cool is like when you get the Yiga set and go to their hide out for trails, if we could "work with them" in the yiga disguise to mess around in the depths outside of just picking them off at their camps.
It literally is DLC the game.
I honestly feel like Nintendo wanted more of a return on their initial investment when it came to developing the first game so let's recycle, repackage and resell it back to people.
I love Zelda but this was a joke of a game in terms of a sequel.
They want revenge for us not buying the Wii u and are trying to make up money for it
Man, I was hooked playing this game, but fundamentally I agree with you. Was so excited about playing a continuation to the botw story, but if we're to have a reboot of botw, which this definitely felt like,I would've been happy to wait longer to play on a more powerful piece of hardware.
thanks for checking out the video and leaving a comment.
yeahhh i didn't bring up performance/visuals at all b.c the problems I had with the game super seceded that, but I was constantly aware of the limitations.
sure when "teh switch 2" comes out they will re-release totk/ and the entirety of the switch library to be "HD" like they did with the wiiU games.
@@Wralis The visuals are honestly something that I would normally be fine with, even the choppy frame rate, but given that Hyrule is so similar, I feel like it would've helped to have some performance enhancements at least. Which we'll probably get when Nintendo resells the game for the same price in 3-4 years time 😬
😆😆
@@primateboogaloo i mean like its the same game with better visuals at least give us a discount nintendo 😭
The game had all the elements to tell a good story. I can easily head cannon away most of the story beats to make sense, so I can only conclude that Nintendo just couldn't be bothered.
The controls, the build mechanics, the puzzles all suffer from what I can only assume was not enough play testing. It's so easy to cheese the entire game with a hover bike or something similar. There's too much freedom, which removes the purpose of puzzles entirely. Then there's the Sages, God help us...there is no way anyone in development play tested the Sages and thought "this is great". It was either rushed or skipped entirely. UI is trash, button mapping is trash. This game was not play tested properly, that is the main flaw.
Nintendo wants to make Zelda more accessible for everyone, that means focusing more on mechanics that are "fun" to play with and less on the other elements. It's a Mariofication of the franchise, Zelda for the masses. Zelda used to offer more depth, more lore, but this is where we are now. We'll see what Nintendo does next, BotW offers a great base to build upon, but I can tell you TotK is definitely not the way forward.
idk if it's just nostalgia or what but 3d zeldas up to TP had really dark elements and still did well.
Yeah botw was a great starting point-i mean look at all the channels that have survived for years just talking about the various unexplained interesting things in the world of botw alone. and totk it just shows it's entire hand and leaves you going "oh...that's it" there is no greater mystery or anything-
what in the 3rd game there is a parallel world of hyrule and its the same as botw but all jumbled up now? 🥱
@@Wralis I agree, also if you look at TH-camrs content made for previous games you had all these theories, not only of the main story but of other elements like the dungeon lore, side characters, side quests, etc.
Now you just have people making mechas and whatnot, which, as cool as some builds look, for a long time Zelda fan feels shallow and detached from the experience I used to love.
I don't want to hate on TotK cuz it has its merits, but as a Zelda game...I don't know man.
i feel the same-there is a lot to like here, and i can see that, but again it feels like a weird side step rather than a big leap like botw was in terms of shaking so much up. I was wanting a new experience completely like botw. But i like this new style, just hope they do something different next time...just would suck if it takes 6 years
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. I can put everything else aside, but the story for TOTK disappointed me. The more memories I found, the more I was able to pics together that Zelda was found to be the light dragon; so when she turned and my suspicions were correct, I was sad but not surprised. At the beginning when she disappeared I wanted to find her, and have her as my beloved companion where you play as her. She and Link secretly married. I didn’t have as much of an emotional connection I did with her here compared to BOTW which is a huge disappointment.
I was concerned about this game, so I waited until I could get one used.
After playing for about 5 hours, I sold the game for what I paid for it.
First time that ever happened for me.
Thank you for letting me know about the "Floor is Lava" challenge in the Great Sky Island. I probably would never have known otherwise.
Glad I could help!
Breath of the Wild had a superior story with better shrines, characters, and side quests.
The part that was disappointing the most is that before the game came out Nintendo was selling to everyone that the main reason why people should be excited about the game is the fact that we were going to the sky. That was the main selling point. Come to find out that it’s just small copy and paste islands with the same exact shrine puzzles for nearly all of them and the two sky dungeons are incredibly short and easy. The depths were just as tedious if not worse. This means that 90% of the entire game still takes place on the same surface and the same hyrule as Breath of the Wild and its not as impactful or meaningful as visiting these areas the first time around in Breath of the Wild. Tarrey Town is a perfect example.
I’m not trying to build cars and planes. I’m trying to play a damn Zelda game and this was by far the worst Zelda experience.
My gripes with these last two games are the same. Nintendo has a problem with trying to fill up the space in the game since Hyrule is so massive now. Too many shrines for my taste and not enough temples that are part of the main story. We used to get like 10 temples and bosses but now it's just been 4 in each game. I don't count Mineru, it just doesn't really feel like a boss temple to me. More new skins would've been better too.
Mineru as a whole felt like an after thought. everything about the character. You get to that cool shrouded sky island to find that mask to just go straight to the depths lol
I had found the construct factory wayyy before finding mineru and spent like an hour trying to do the puzzles around there just to find out I couldn't do them yet, but nothing was stopping me from trying and wasting my time.
Majoras mask had 4 dungeons and it was really loved, stop complaining
@fgclash454 Nope, Majoras mask was not that great. It was a lot of busy work. Only ever bothered completing it once and haven't touched it since. It's not as universally loved by zelda fans either. There are some good things about it but on the whole, it's a miss. We're allowed to complain about things, we are the customers after all and it's not as if I'm giving unfair criticism.
@@fgclash454majoras mask was also only made in a year and each dungeon individually is more interesting than all the botw/totk dungeons combined
@@fgclash454yes because majora's Mask temples are actually challenging and long and the game is good from start to finish. Majora's Mask is miles better than botw/totk
I agree the way the story was told annoyed me in both games and made them very hard to replay. I havent played through all of totk because i got bored
I totally agree with you with this, I feel like almost everything in the game is a worse version of what breath of the wild.
The most disappointing thing for me, was that there is nothing memorable to do on the map, outside the main missions, the map is just a empty place with a bunch of NPCs asking for favors, on Breath of the wild you had some really cool discoveries, like, the terrey town mission, with leads to a wedding, one of the shrines was a freaking dragon stuck in the mountain, there is nothing like this in TOTK, also, BOTW had those places specifically made for shrines, like the windy challenge near the ocean, or the two ring, or the place you had to trow a snow ball to hit the door, those places was specifically made for that, so it feels like the world and the gameplay works together, but on TOTK, those same places are there, but they have no purpose, it's pretty disappointing to keep playing the game after the maij dungeons, and everything you find is NPCs asking for you to cook rice.
They should have done an entire different world, with new places and things to do, that would be a lot more fun.
Thanks for checking out the video and leaving your thoughts.
I agree, if there was a zonai like town in the sky or something to add some life up there or just kind of anything it maybe wouldn't have felt so bad, maybe. But yeah the surface lacked that complete newness botw had going for it
Very thought out! I loved your points and felt this to my core.
really appreciate the comment and checking out the video
The events leading up to the 100 year tour in the shrine of resurrection should have been game one. And the sequel should’ve have been after as ganondorf breaks free from Zelda’s hold
26:43 That's the thing though. Just because there is no "wrong way" doesn't mean that there isn't a "right way." Every single puzzle in the game has a "correct" solution. The problem is that 9 time out of ten, its quicker and easier to just completely skip the puzzle instead of engaging with it. And because you get the same reward no matter how you "solved" the puzzle, it makes doing the puzzles the intended way feel pointless.
True.
I was kind of positive on that quality of the shrines but honestly i think that open ended "solve it your way" approach to every shrine really dragged them all down. very unsatisfying
The same about pirates. I think that the game was fun. It kept me engaged during my playthrough. But Zelda games used to be much more than just fun.
Thanks for checking out the video and leaving a comment!
the pirates thing was just a nit pick, but kind of about the broader problem of enemy variety.
hope the next zelda is more of a blend of new/classic zelda
I just started a new playthrough of Wonder HD... on Cemu because stupid Nintendo doesn't want to remind people of what a great zelda game is kn the switch and distract people from Tears. But yea its absolutely addictive playing Ww again. And that something I just cant feel at all towards tears, I did feel it for the beginning of Botw but I think when I finally found the master sword and found out its battery powered... just killed my love for the new "formula" . It's dumb Nintendo is becoming Ubisoft with open world zelda. Explore this huge area!!! And find korok seeds around every corner. 😮💨 whatever, I'm gonna try out minsih cap next, but certainly not through Nintendos extortion pack, or expansion pack b.s. payed already to play classics but the moment better classics were finally on the table, they're like "nope pay us more! You're not just paying for the classics, you're also paying to play with others on our crappy online 'service'" what a load of shit.
Sorry rant over. 😅
@@clockworkNate To me Minish Cap still stands as the greatest Zelda of all time, but I'm biased, since it was the first ever game I owned.
I hope this video gets some traction. I agree with much. I, like you, have been playing Zelda for a while, but when I say a while, I mean I CUT MY TEETH on the original 8-bit cartridge brand new out of the box. For me, playing Zelda (and Metroid) was always about a fun gaming experience. As the franchise progressed, the story-telling became a bigger part of it, but that never really bothered me too much, even all the way up to the reviled Skyward Sword, maybe the most linear of them all. Still, when I was playing TOTK, I was YEARNING for an experience more like Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess, or even Wind Waker. BOTW was a great game DESPITE sacrificing a lot of the elements of those classics I mentioned. TOTK tries to reinvent something that was literally just invented in BOTW, and, as a result, neglected to bring any of the good things back that BOTW sacrificed. If I'm being honest, I felt as if it was a chore just to finish the game, and it was the least satisfying "beating of a Zelda game" of my life. I have beaten every other Zelda game except Majora's Mask, and I am only holding out on that one because I want to get 100% of the heart pieces before I go face Majora. Anyway. thanks for making this video of a seemingly less popular, but still clearly viable opinion.
lol if you ask the mods over on /r/zelda or /r/totk my opinion is deff the way more popular and annoying. but i get what you mean and thanks for checking out the video and sharing your thoughts.
chore is a good way to put it too-a bunch of fetch quests and check marks-which i guess need to exist in a open world game to some degree, at least how zelda approaches it. doesn't make it any more fun. I remember getting Robbie to Hateno village and when i found him i had already completed most of the quests he had just by playing the game before talking to him? just means i'm so good at questing i can just complete them on my own heh
@@Wralis DUDE!! Tell me about it! This game has so few meaningful "rewards," that just chaining together activating some light roots is one of the more rewarding activities. So the game rewards you for that type of thing, and does NOT (meaningfully) reward social interaction or side-questing, and therefore, the exact same thing happened to me - by the time I spoke to Robbie, the whole damn tablet was upgraded. I just don't get what was wrong with the series-long staple of having a dungeon item in an early accessible dungeon unlock a new part of the map to explore, and then a new dungeon becomes available, and then a new dungeon item becomes available, and then that item unlocks even more of the overworld to explore, and so on.
This game-play dynamic is not only fun, it has been a core game-play element in Zelda AND Metroid games since their inception. I would like to see a return to that style. That doesn't mean we need to sacrifice the two best innovations from the new games: the paraglider and the ability to climb anything, it just means that once you get the hook-shot, you won't NEED to climb walls that have vines or other grapple points. Also, once you get the Pegasus boots, you don't have to rely so heavily on warp-points, and you can actually explore the world more. I just think there is so much more to add to this new BOTW/TOTK style of game IF that same dungeon item unlocking new parts of the world element is present.
Anyway, it was great chatting with you about this! I would love to start making videos about this stuff, I love it, I just don't have the tech know-how.
Wholeheartedly agree with your points. After clocking in 90 hrs, i asked myself if this was worth $70.... it wasnt. Now i am worried for the next Zelda game, especially if they decide to go open world again
thanks for checking out the video!
Yeah i feel a mix of both open and more linear would be really awesome. I love the freedom in some areas, but i mean in shrines we can't climb walls, it feels like baby steps and they need to make a gigantic leap w/ the series in terms of setting/story
1.5 year after Fallout 3 we got Fallout NV which looked very different to FO3 except some reused assets from FO3 but TOTK is just a very expensive BOTW DLC which took 6 years of development.
I would like to hear from some of the programmers on totk. Bc I'm sure just getting ultra hand to work was a monumental effort. But that in and of it self doesn't make a great game ya know? Ascend was like a debug tool they used while testing to get out of the caves they made and decided to make it an ability. It makes you wonder where their thoughts were during that long dev time
90 hours.... not worth it ? You dedicated all that time which is more than alot of big games, but it wasn't worth it ? I feel you'd have given up after 1/12 of that if you didn't like it
i mean ppl watched games of thrones till the end and didn't like it, did it make it all not worth it? idk-but that's how they experienced it
When I was playing this for the first time I was excited! I was thinking this was gonna be dark, I didn't watch any videos, or trailers besides the first 2, and playing it felt exciting. The sky island was cool, then I had to go to Hyrule castle, and then told to go back to the 4 towns I've already been to, and go the Hyrule. The sky wasn't important, and the depths was cool at first, but then leaned that is was basically just the same Hyrule be revised hight. And I kept thinking "please don't let this be the end" and then when Tulin said "together we can't lose" I wanted to stop playing. Is this what Zelda is now? Expensive cash grabs? When I was done I was thinking "really!? That's it!? Wow, the trailers were really the best part of this"
Tldr, it's just botw
me and my sister had many tears of disappointment as well...
I wish they had more develop the sky with dungeons and temples ! I loved the atmosphere, the sonos stuff
Someone who didn't care about this game would not make a 43 minute long video. Good on you for providing valuable feedback.
At first I really enjoyed TOTK. The new features such as ultrahand, the sky islands, caves, depths, etc. all felt like such a vast change from BOTW. I did the rito quest first as it was what seemed like the game intended. Up until this point I was having a blast playing and had no issues. The climb up the storm over Hebra was amazing and that dive into the wind temple was amazing.
When I heard that classic temples were returning it skyrocketed my hype for the game. The new, open style Zelda mixed with the classic, linear driven Zelda would have been perfect.
However, as soon as I got to the wind temple and realized it had the same fundamental design as the divine beasts (turn on x amount of switch’s in any order) I was so disappointed. While the spectacle and atmosphere of the classic dungeons was present, the most important aspect, the gameplay was missing.
After this point i slowly started to realize how shallow the game truly. The awe of the new mechanics started to wane and the game felt more and more tedious as I progressed.
my first map chest was the one in the spiral area that gives the twilight tunic. i already had it from the only zelda based amiibo i have. that felt like a slap in the face
Never had a chance at game of the year. You can’t give people crap (the same game same story etc) and expect them to eat it.
The fact that it was even a nominee was more than it deserved
I HAVE played every Zelda game to completion (except TotK - and I don't think I will complete it). I spent countless hours theorycrafting about the true order of the Zelda games. As soon as Hyrule Historia came out, I bought it, and I was even so meticulous that I didn't buy the special edition, because the standard edition looked more like The Book of Mudora from A Link to the Past. I had lengthy conversations about the true place of Breath of the Wild in the timelines, and have many pages of notes and documentation to back up my theory that it happens in the far distant future after the Wind Waker timeline (and it still holds up even with TotK, even though they repurposed a lot of terms and events for their timeline in that game).
Tears of the Kingdom was great for a while. But the longer I played, the more disappointed I got. More and more ideas felt half-baked. More and more mechanics progressed from being quirky to being frustrating (arrow fusing, sage powers). I turned off all sages except Tulin more often than not, due to really bad button mapping (why didn't they just do something like BotW with context-specific cues? Like, why couldn't you trigger Riju's ability when drawing your bow?). I absolutely hated the new weapon system after long enough. Exploring the world wasn't as fun because I'd basically seen most of it in my all-shrine and all-quest completion of BotW and the Master Mode. Once I finished everything new, I had no compulsion to go explore the rest of the world. The story just felt off and like a worse retread of BOtW.
Tears of the Kingdom killed any excitement I have for future Zelda titles. I desperately hope they reverse course.
idk how you timeline folks do it. i look at timeline talk and don't even give it 1 second thought-i just play the games 100% independent like final fantasy use to be, single entries.
heard they are releasing some book to drain some more pockets -maybe get some better lore stuff in there.
@@Wralis To answer your first question: it's autism. It's always the autism lol. I will brag and say I was MOSTLY correct in my placement of things on the timeline, except I didn't account for Ganondorf beating Link as being one of the timelines lol.
It would be neat to see whatever new book they're publishing, but I dunno if I'm as interested as I would have been. Story/lore have never been Nintendo's primary focus with Zelda, but it was still there to uphold the gameplay. BotW and TotK have a story (even if they're basically the same story, and TotK is an unsatisfying one), but the story is completely optional. Where it used to ride shotgun while the gameplay was the driver, it feels like they stuffed it in the trunk now.