Every time the bullet time puzzle at the Water Temple gets brought up, I'm not sure whether to be embarrassed or impressed with myself for forgetting bullet time existed and instead solving it with a pure blind-luck shot.
Honestly I think it's a good puzzle. Just should have been a shrine puzzle. Hell, they still could've kept it in the water temple but should've either had a couple more iterations (like the boat bouncing in the wind temple) or had it be part of a shrine prior.
One of the things that bothered me the most with the story is after the incredibly emotional final dragon tear where we learn of Zelda's sacrifice, no one cares. Purah seems like she doesn't believe us and none of the NPCs act any different. I even questioned why "Find Zelda" was even a quest anymore, because like, she sacrificed herself for the Master Sword, we found the sword, that's why she told us to find her. We did it. But the game really doesn't care about her sacrifice outside of that and it kind of upset me
Except... the game DOES care. The other sages do express their shock and grievances at the event, but there's really no time for them to mourn on the matter when Ganondorf is, you know, Actively Destroying Your Homeland And Trying To Kill Everyone. He's extended root-like veins into the land of Hyrule itself, through the depths, to try and drain it of life to restore himself, and is, you know, actively making monsters to try and kill people and conquer the land. And you, as Link, neither have the time nor priorities to broadcast to the entire hopeful kingdom that misses their princess "Hey so your Princess is never coming home, she's a dragon now", because... what do you think that will do to people? To the children at Hateno School waiting for her to come back? To Penn and the Lucky Gazette, actively investigating her disappearance with clueless determination? To all your desperate neighbors and scared friends? Purah herself also hesitates when speaking but eventually puts on a brave face, and one of her last wishes that she tells you, FROM her FOR ZELDA, is to punch Ganondorf in the face for her. She HAS to maintain her position at Lookout Landing, but still expresses those wishes loudly and with determination. You also tell Impa about Zelda at the end of the quest, and she, above all the others, expresses the MOST grief and regret at the situation, as both you and Zelda's oldest and arguably closest friend. However, she doesn't lose hope, and insists she'll try to look into matters further, in hopes of finding a way to return her from her dragon form. And as for "Find Zelda" still being a quest, even after the Dragon Tears... it's because that's Link. Something translation to English loses is that the entire Quest Journal is LINK'S journal, which expresses and follows his own thoughts as he follows through on quests. He REFUSES to believe that's it. He REFUSES to believe that Zelda is lost, doomed to forever fly the skies in a sleep without end, because he wants to believe, through to the very end, that there's still a way to save her. To bring her back. To make it right. And there is. And he finds it, WITH that stubborn determination. "Find Zelda" doesn't complete until after Zelda is really, truly saved, having been turned back with the power of Recall, amplified not just by Rauru and Sonia's love for Zelda, but Link's as well (If you'll recall, Sonia's advice on Recall was "asking an object about its memories, who and what it was, how it got there, and returning to that time"), caught in a fall (where the title of the triumphant falling rescue music is, not kidding, "Not this time!"), and reawakened. Only when Zelda is herself, is back, is safe with Link, only THEN does he consider his quest to "Find Zelda" complete.
@@carmichaelcarlisle6635 I think that's a cute way to see it and probably how it was supposed to be read, but also that's just not how it felt to me during gameplay. I never actually talked to Impa at the end of the quest, and Purah didn't sound like she was "putting on a brave face" to me it felt like she was just disregarding me. In my recordings of playing the game I even talked about how the games major ignoring that She Turned Into A Dragon made me say that she had to go back to normal at the end because otherwise the game would care more :/ Again, I like your interpretation, it's cute and that's how I think it was meant to be seen, but there's a difference between that and how it /felt/ while playing the game
Link's reaction kinda bothered me. Just stares into the sky for a bit. Almost feels like he knows the game will undo it anyway at the end, and while I have zero gripes about how they did that, I wish Link had reacted more fittingly in the moment, even if briefly.
Ngl when I realized there was an actual find zelda quest still present after finding out about what happened i was just confused and kind of felt insulting to the whole emotional part of the story idk
@@carmichaelcarlisle6635Honestly the whole turning Zelda back I to a human cheapens her sacrifice. Not having a perfect happy ending is fine. Maybe have a spell that removes her part of the triforce to make her a mortal dragon with her memories returned thanks to Link collecting them. A dragon who can live out her days with her friends, but still as a dragon. But even that might be a cop out. Of course as long as the dragon is immortal you can have no sequals... Though a equal where Zelda as a dragon is queen of Hyrule would be interesting.
nah there were just a lot less of them and we didn't have caves so they were not a problem. then nintendo in their infinite wisdom made it a problem 10/10
yeah exactly. you get the canon out, you power it up and they use ultra hand to point it. it is extremely fun i dont understand the hate about it@@chasecreed2
@AmixLiark The canons only destroy the cracked rocks. Any minerals, rocks, or weapons will just drop or will be bounced around a little, not destroyed though.
one thing i don't see people talk about with the sages is that the game tells you you can whistle to make the sages gather around you in combat. You cannot do this.
I was constantly awestruck throughout this video from all these sudden realizations about why this game frustrated me so much. Each point you brought up felt like unearthing a repressed memory of another aspect of this game I had forgotten even annoyed me in the first place. During my playthrough, each flaw individually just felt like a nitpick that I could learn to live with, but laying them all out together like this really put things into perspective. You were able to put into words so many feelings I felt about this game that I didn't know how to express. The biggest revelation by far, though, was when you brought up the Wii U game pad. I had never considered what the UI would have been like with a second screen. As soon as you said it I audibly gasped, and had to pause the video to just sit and contemplate what could have been. I was reminded of Scott the Woz's recent retrospective on the Wii U as a whole, and how few games made any meaningful use of the game pad at all. BotW and the Wii U were made for each other, and divorcing them made them both drastically worse off. Fantastic video, Ceave. Glad to see you back on TH-cam.
You don't even need button remapping to fix the Sage abilities. They can be contextual button presses when performing certain actions: Tulin when gliding, Riju when shooting, Sidon when guarding and Yunobo when charging. Mineru's construct is the only exception that makes sense because you ride it. It's downright baffling that the current system made it into the game. You have to TRY to design something that bad.
Only problem with limiting a Tulin hotkey to when gliding is he does have *some* ground uses outside the way he's used in the wind temple (mostly a free sideways fan, but yeah).
@@citrusella-nomorecraptions The wind temple is the only place where that's needed. They could've just removed that part of it when using the spirit avatar
@@citrusella-nomorecraptions I think they could have done both. A contextual menu like Tulin has but you can also go up and "lets go" him. The other sages have no contextual trigger which is where I think it's lacking. Sidon should 100% have his lets go appear when your holding the shield in guard & Riju should appear when you've the bow drawn. Then also have it so you could activate them by walking up and doing your thing. At a minimum they should have removed horse whistling and put it in the ability slot where the map is & then when pressing down on the d pad had a "lets go" menu
I feel it could have done with both, or a "Summon to Me" button that functions like the standard abilities wheel so you don't have to run around after them to use their abilities
I think my main problem with the game is the rampant inconvenience, with one of the most egregious examples being trying to use the sages in combat. It would have been so simple to put the sages' powers on a selection wheel mapped to the dpad down button, making them convenient and useful. Instead, they went with just about the least convenient way possible to activate them. It's just disappointing more than anything.
Yeah, but if I imagine all these inconvenient things being mapped onto the game pad, it just makes me sad because if they forced you to play it like that, or even gave you the option to do so, it flow so great and solve a lot of problems, while also making healing harder
@@JoshuaGlock Same. Like, I'm sure that there are players who give a darn about horses, but since they're fundamentally worse transportation than tping to a skyview tower nearby, it kinda ticks me off that the stable shenanigans are so extensive, and that they're required for the great fairies. Doing that series of quests was easily the most infuriating part of my first playthrough. And then because they tried so hard to force horses down my throat, they didn't leave room to make the sages, an infinitely more central game mechanic, convenient for me.
@@noahlebaron729believe me, even I as a horse lover hate this. It's so much easier and quicker to just approach the horse yourself 99% of the time instead of whistling (or whistling while approaching it). It wouldn't hurt at all for that button to be somewhere more hidden since I used it not more than 6 times (most of which were me standing awkwardly for the horse to approach for a few minutes to see how long it takes)
1:16:32 The secret stones are called... "secret stones". The difference is that "secret stone" is a common folk lore/fairy tale item, and that the word is cool (for lack of better word), in japanese. It would be like the Master Sword being called "The Sword in the Stone" or something like that. It might translate horribly and sound stupid, but it would literally just be "Sword in Stone", due to the reference to the Authurian legend. But yeah, they should really just have called them Magical Stones, or Sage Tears, or ANYTHING with a cool ring to it. (I'm sure somebody else have commented this, but you can some words for The Algorithm, just in case.)
I think something from the Cultivation lexicon might work, like Ki Stone or Mana Core or something like that, because Secret Stones have a very big Cultivation feeling
"Secret stones" should have been called "sacred stones" "gloom" which is an even dumber name than secret stone should have been called "miasma" or even just called "malice" again, I don't care if they're technically not the same thing, malice is a way better name than gloom
Accidentally entering Mineru's mech instead of climbing a dazed lynel, then fumbling around not knowing how to get out, then being mercilessly killed by the now awaken lynel is one of the most aggravating game experiences I've ever had.
Just as aggravating as picking up loot then Yonobo zips in the way and you accidentally explode the barrels in camp by launching him, instant death, do the whole encounter over again. I have the sages permanently disabled as they are a liability, either by being in the way or by inadvertently killing me.
The realization that the Wii U Gamepad was probably the primary intent for the menus in BotW/TotK hit me like a cold bucket of water Being hit in the face with a bucket hurts btw I don't recommend it
It had never occurred to me but it seems so obvious now that it's been pointed out. Crazy that one of the biggest problems with these two games is more or less directly caused by the financial failure of the Wii U
While it was in development, Breath of the Wild was doubtlessly seen as the flagship title that would catapult the Wii-U to success. Unfortunately for Nintendo, the Wii-U was already considered a failure before Breath of the Wild was finished, so instead it was to become the flagship title for the Switch on day one. It's an historical irony that the game that caused Switchs to fly off the shelf wasn't even meant to be played on the Switch at all.
I did Tears of the Kingdom in a very specific order so I found out about the Zelda betrayal as late as possible, but even I, finding out as late as I did, was frustrated when the story kept pretending like I shouldn't know. I started writing about how Link is actually angry Ganon is impersonating Zelda and is going after him on purpose instead of, like, him being dumb and still not getting it after the first four sages lol
My friend and I did the Rito, Gerudo, and Zora regions first. We then did a handful of memories out of order, but by coincidence had not gotten the one where Sonia and Zelda ambush the doppleganger. We had also only done a handful of Zelda sightings missions, so we had no idea that she's going around and causing problems because to us it just seemed like a bunch of misunderstandings. We decided to investigate the giant thundercloud in Faron which led us to get Mineru way before the story asked us to, and THEN we finally did the Goron region, and were very confused as to why Zelda would give the Gorons drugs. Before going to Hyrule Castle to follow up on Purah's most recent Zelda sighting, we decided to go and get the last few memories, and THEN we discovered that there's a doppelganger Zelda and everything clicked into place. We have generally thought that doing the Goron mission last inadvertently led us to one of the best plot twists the game had to offer, but I do sometimes wonder if there would have been more shock and surprise if we had gone to Hyrule Castle and followed Zelda asking us to follow her without knowing that it was an evil doppelganger.
@@51918 That's soooo cool. I remember during the game I was like "The Ring Ruins? Well, I trust Zelda, so there probably is something bad there I'd hate to disobey orders" to going "GANON WHAT ARE YOU HIDING WHY CAN'T I TELL THEEEMMMMMM"
There's a lot of cases of 'you don't know this when you actually do' like non-story NPCs acting like you don't know them, and it's odd because it's SO satisfying when the actual story cast knows you. I know it's technically not impossible for someone to have never met, say, Bolson in BotW, but I don't feel like that'd be a problem to ignore. It'd be more fun for people that did play all of BotW to feel like that carried over the way Tarrey Town and your horse apparently did. (Also really funny how if you summon a SECOND Epona from the Amiibo even though you had her already, the guy won't let your rename that horse because 'It'd be too confusing." XD
I roleplay Link as a dunce that kicks in every door and demands to see zelda. Everything he does is to see zelda. Pirates? They probably captured zelda. A shrine? She probably is examining it. A chest? She probably is hiding inside. A bossmonster? TELL ME WHERE SHE IS YOU DEMON. A korok? Maybe he saw zelda, lets ask! A random mountain or forest? She probably got lost, better check it. Hateno? Wtf guys this is my house, I was raised here with the other elders, you know me, wtf. A banana? Zelda loves bananas! OMG ZELDA I WAS SEARCHING FOR YOU aaand shes gone. Damn, I have to get quicker. I did this before I realized Link is a official dunce. But its very fitting. Also its fun to find new excuses to just play the game
@@quonit37 one of my early theories was that zelda is playing extreme ocarina of time. Switching between multiple time zones and having to do everything in order and correct, so it wont end bad. Which on one hand explains a lot of shrines and ruin puzzles but also leads to odd moments of "evil zelda" that are necessary for the big picture. Cause if someone else would do it link looses the opportunity and ganon wins. But yeah thats sadly not true and I was doubting from the beginning that nintendo would do such an amazing thing.
1:05:15 another issue with the execution delay is that when your attempt to solve a puzzle fails, you're never quite sure if it's because you have the wrong solution, or because you have the right solution but are executing it poorly.
This is precisely what ended up ruining Tunic for me right at the end. Not giving the player _any_ feedback, even when they've successfully navigated far, far, down the correct path, only to silently fail on a single misstep, is disrespectful to both time and sanity.
Author pointing out that he create vehicle in temple of spirit that fell down He create new one instead of recalling it to the starting point by Recall ability. I think this is lack of logical thinking, or lack of basic knowledge about mechanic in game (this is one of the last areas to explore in the plot), not the problem of the delayed execution.
@@quinkrinson3872 I think, this game is super fair in terms of logic and basic mechanics. But you need to have "right" attitude to solving problems. To make MVP and go further, and on and on and on, in the loop. The engineering mindset. While watching this film, I'm constantly have thought that author is overthinking everything, over-engineering everything. I understand that over-engineering if you have that high skill to make fun of doing complex stuff. This is fine. But there is a serious problem when you, as a player, avoiding the most straightforward mechanics and get frustrated. And after that you create long rant about mechanics which you doesn't understand. This is my biggest issue to this film and author.
@@MD-uc8bx I think you misunderstood the criticism. They were stating that the act of solving problems became so tedious that there was no more intrinsic motivation to try and actually engage with problem-solving steps. Ceave did use the engineering mindset: after this failure they used they most efficient solution that required the least thinking and cheesed all the remaining puzzles. They didn't have fun doing this, and I think its reasonable that they wouldn't and a valid criticism of the game.
Another ui problem: since the skip dialogue button is mapped to the b button, but the b button is also used to automatically stop interacting with an npc, interactions with the great fairies and beedle and such are incredibly annoying, since you have to make sure you're mashing b just the right number of times to get through the 8th time the fairy tells you that ranking a set to level 2 can give a buff, but not press b enough times to close out of the menu and have to wait for the fairy to go back down into her hole and then come back out again to keep upgrading stuff, and again make sure not to mash b too many times to close the menu AGAIN.
Me whenever this happens Ḯ̷̢̫̯͙̱̮̖͇̐͂͐͐͒̎̃͝͝͠͝ ̴̡̪̮̠͕̲̜̖͚̥̝̮̋̑͛̈̆͜Ḻ̴̡̯͔͔̺̝͊͌̌̒̽̋̌͠O̴͙̬͖͉̞̝̟̒̈̓͝V̸͎̭̗̺̯̉́Ȩ̴̙̫̻͉̳̄͛̊̌̆́͗́̀̾͂̕ ̸̪͇̳̙̑̍̓̇͆́̾͘Ṫ̸̢̧̤͉̖̖͙̖͙̞͇̺͎͑̿̅̀̆͂̚H̵̛͎̬̪͖̳̯̝̬̮̫̤̘͍̊͂̈́͜I̵̡̟̺̞̥̍̈́̔̈́͐̀͝S̵̢̡͓͖̝̩̘͙͚̱̟͕͍̈́͐͋̊̓͛̇̀̇̀̚͘͝ ̴̢̞̦̗̭͓̩̩̩͇̈́͐́̐͋̀͋̀͋̑͌̾͜ͅS̷͈̘̞͎͇̤̣̭̤̿̌̈́͗̄͐̌̆̓͗͋̓T̶̡͇͖̙͚̖͖̹͍̓͌̀̃̇͆̈́̍͊̉͜͠U̴̡̧̲̙͇̮̣̠͛P̴̛̩̔̅͌̃̾͛I̴̞̬̳̔͜D̷̙̬̤̝̾̂̓̃̐̊͂̒̕͠ ̷̨̙̺͇͚͖̠̹͍̅̊̎́͜͠G̶̢͓̭͎͖̲̩̰͎̝͔̥͉̀͌͂͊̋͌͜͝ͅA̵̡͔͙̹̲͍͖̹͉̯̗͉̞̠͑̈͋̽͗M̶̢̖̮̹͉͈͓͈̝̱͉̙̹͕̺͗̈̋̾̀̀͐͊̊̒͘͝͝E̵̲͚̻̟͍̩͉̥̳̫͚͉̙̍̾͗̆͌̒͐̒͛̔͋̕͝
the reason you constantly throw your weapon when you wanna use ultra hand is because when using ultra hand you use R a lot to rotate. so it becomes associated with the move in your muscle memory.
Exactly. It happened to me when I first started the game, but after I realized why I was throwing the weapon, it was really easy to stop the muscle memory.
The only instance of anything close to this for me is forgetting to hold R in order to rotate the item and being momentatily confused on why it doesn't turn. I think this guy may gave coordination issues.🤷
@@xg223 - So you've already lowered yourself by talking sh it about a "du mb" guy who turned out to be more informed than you, but now you're trying to laugh off fact.
@@xg223 - Why do other people have to take insults from you, just because you have problems? According to you, that should be "you having you problems", right?
Only 6 minutes in and he has already pinpointed my exact biggest problem with the game; that it wants to give you the freedom to do anything in any order, but also punishes you with frustration if you don’t do their unknowable intended order.
In a way I appreciate that though. I did the water temple first. The enemies were thrashing me with ease, so it forced me to play smarter. I used korok leafs throw them off. I enjoyed that.
really? I never felt like I was punished for the order in which I did things with one minor exception(although it was pretty big story-wise): The dragon tear memory things. And I'm only talking specifically about TOTK, not BOTW. I pretty much made it my mission to go after all the tears before I did much of anything else. I stopped to do a few things along the way like shrines and koroks, but I mostly made my way directly to the tears. So I learned REALLY early on about where Zelda was and that she wasn't actually wreaking havoc around Hyrule. And the fact that Link just acted like an idiot and went along with it every single time, instead of being able to tell the NPCs how stupid they were being drove me nuts. That needed fixed. Linearity isn't the way to fix it though. They need to either just do away with the tears entirely or come up with better reasons for you to search those specific areas as well as not have the Yiga clan trying to trick you into thinking you've found Zelda because every instance of that BS only works if you do all the tears last. And that's not gonna happen because they're designed to draw your attention to them, and friggin' Impa has you go to one really early on in the main quest.
@@TheRealNintendoKid A couple examples: Some shrines are impossible without the Paraglider, but also not obviously so. When I first got to the surface, I didn’t know when or even if I’d get a paraglider, so I just explored like normal. Spent way too long on impossible shrines before giving up. Also; I spent a lot of frustrating time exploring Thunderhead and Dragonhead Isles in the fog, because I had no indication that a later main quest would cause them to clear up. Finally; a friend of mine got all the way up to the Wind Temple without Tulin, having no idea that he was supposed to have Tulin. Spent a while trying to figure out how to activate the devices before giving up and looking up a guide. And then he had to re-climb the whole area with Tulin to get back there later since Tulin won’t follow you there if you warp.
@@GendoIkari_82 Also the great fairy quest only able to be started in hebra as well as herbra npcs teaching you the most about the early game. You are so very clearly supposed to go there first. I had the same thing but with the water temple i flew up there thinking it was just a normal place to explore but silly me for trying to have freedom in an open world game. Its even worse because my first dungeon was the spirit temple. I flew up to the interesting island in a thunderstorm using my energy cells i got from the depths and then found the big door. I then realized i needed hearts so i did a good amount of shrines and then did the temple and got that sage first. It was so cool they allowed me to do that but you just arent allowed to do that with the other ones? The dungeons should be modeled like that one. They should be barred off by something like hearts if you want to have linear difficulty. You communicate to the player this one maybe shouldnt be "first" but still give them the freedom to choose to do it. Edit: also autobuild its so easy to miss that if you decide to play/explore differently and its a core ability. You have to go back to all the places in the depths youve previously explored for schemea stones if you got the ability late (which a lot of people do)
@@GendoIkari_82 I did exactly that. I didn't get the glider until about 20 hours in when my friends told me where it was. I didn't even see Lookout Landing because the first time I hit the over world, I saw a falling rock and took it up to a floating island with a chest and was trapped there. I also went in search of pants, since I missed them after the shrine in the cold zone on Tutorial Island. I only learned at about 40 hours and six month later (when I started playing again) that I had missed the cold weather pants on Tutorial Island. I had also missed the tutorial on the zonai device gumball machines and gave up after trying to drop ores and monster parts in ones I found later.
Ceave, as someone with hearing issues, I massively appreciate you including subtitles for every video. You're one of the best gaming TH-camrs and the subtitles are the cherry on top.
Same! I have Auditory Processing Disorder (my hearing is technically fine, but there's sometimes a brain side issue that can make understanding what people are saying difficult) and subtitles are always welcome! It makes videos so much easier to watch
@@jayveerisdabest7500 I think that was a problem with a lot of videos that had properly timed captions--TH-cam would just time them all at 00:00:00 and then basically the whole file imploded. (I don't know if they fixed it or not because I haven't had the issue on THIS video but on other ones--I reported it back then.)
I love how at 10:00 you mention a shrine that teaches us that we can use ultrahand to move an object, and then use rewind to ride it, while that strategy for that particular shrine, is in fact, cheesing it and completely skipping the intended puzzle the shrine offers
@@burushifudara this is the intended For everyone else, yes, there are multiple solutions that are "intended". But in this particular puzzle, the "most intended" solution is to carry the previous boulder to the next section and fuse them to build a "bridge" in equilibrium. Why is it the most intended? Well, you start with one boulder in a flat section so you just use it like a bridge, then you have two boulders and two slopes, fuse them and they don't slide anymore, then we have 3 boulders and a pyramid (3 sides) fuse them and they can stand atop the pyramid.
I didn't realize giving myself an extra heart was going to completely nerf fairies because they no longer healed me enough to get full health and reactivate the 1-shot protection.
That Is why I only got hearts after maxing out my stamina. I didn't want to do away with one-hit protection, which effevtively means much more health. Having 4 hearts when that is full is so much better imo.
the only games where fairies heal you completely are Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, all the rest of Zelda games they just heal you from 5 to 8 hearts. They're just designed to revive you, not to be a full heal, if not they're too broken
@@NL-Xto more fully explain, if you have 3 hearts, the fairy heals you to full and activates the 1-shot protection so you could tank 1 hit without having to pause and heal. With more hearts, the fairy won't activate the protection so you have to pause immediately and heal to full or you'd die again next hit. It's minor but it's a nuisance.
With the parrying vs dodging point, i agree v heavily as i remember thinking during my playthrough “oh i don’t really need to parry” i think this is a byproduct of guardians no longer being in the game. parrying was one of the faster ways to kill a guardian by reflecting the lasers back, but with no enemy to replace them in that way parrying really j becomes something you use to feel cool occasionally at the cost of the more effective flurry rush
I miss Guardians gloom hands are great and fun but very once-off - gloom hands once are gloom hands everywhere compare to skywatchers, decayed, stalkers, the decayed ones that only activate when you come near and spook you... just feels like something was lost
i do use it against lynels because the short stun they get after a parry allows me to easily shoot them in the head, gibing me a chance to mount them and deal damage without my weapons taking any damage
The fear that, moving forward, Nintendo is going to make every new 3D Zelda game a big, open world, physics sandbox mirrors what happened to Animal Crossing. It was once a game about making friends and collecting, but over time it drifted further and further into the territory of decorating and renovation. Late game in New Horizons practically feels like The Sims with cheats enabled, and "making friends" is barely even a consideration. In much the same way, dungeon design and progression, once core features of Zelda, have come to feel like an afterthought.
@@ventriloquistmagician4735 It wouldn't be bad if it wasn't at the cost of what made the series popular in the first place. When the villagers in a game about being a villager are boring to talk to then something has probably gone wrong.
@@ventriloquistmagician4735wtf are you talking about man 😭 it's not like Nintendo is giving these games to us for free. TOTK cost $80 USD and we're allowed to complain about it if we didn't have a good time. Get off your high horse LMFAO
It bothers me so much how inexpressive Link is. The only emotion he EVER shows in this game is anger/protectiveness and the poses with the camera. Mineru was like "Zelda is alive now because of you, Link" and Zelda just looks at Link who's standing there like 😐 I can't fathom how we've gone from SS having the MOST expressive and relatable Link to BotW/TotK with a board of wood. Not only him, either. EVERY character is stiff. You save Zelda, she wakes up from being a dragon forever, and she just... stands there. That's it. Characters just... They STAND there.
this really gets to me, actually. was looking at zelda's face during all memories, AND the ending cutscenes, thinking "girl your eye shape is hardly changing, aren't you distressed or tired or something?"
I had the exact same thoughts playing BOTW already, because in the nearly absent storyline for this game, the very few emotional moments (including Zelda and Link getting reunited) seriously lack character emotions. TOTK's story was better written and filled with little moments of emotions, but sadly still not coming from the characters themselves, just the writing.
To be fair, you can equip it with powerful weapons or materials, which is atleast something. Though I 100% agree its clunky and very underpowered, especially for its large ass hitbox.
That mech suuuuuuuuuuucks And after having already fought and easily won against Kohga in a mech on foot, having to fight the mech again but in a crappy mech of my own was such a drag
I did find the mech early in the game and not at the end as intented. And because the game had not mentioned it anywhere, the surprise felt like a great and satisfactory discovery. On the contrary, the first time I reached the temple of Wind I did it without Tureli, what makes it impossible to beat and left me scratching my head for quite some time as the game does not tell you that he is mandatory for it.
totk is really good at that, it’s so frustrating. even the demon dragon fight is that, and so was beast ganon. gigantic screen filling monster that just stands there and lets you win. huge letdown right at the finish lines in both games.
Why does it have durability? Why does it have no damage reduction? Why is it so goddamn slow? Every time I try out the mech, even the upgraded one it only somewhat consistently beats up hinox because there's no other enemy that size that doesnt either have a specific weak point or just outdamages the mech
_THAT_ dragon tear is the worst one in the game. Absolutely robs any momentum and tension that the story had up to the point because you immediately figure out the entire plot of the game, start to finish, with that one, single memory, and there are still like 50 hours left to go before you see it come to fruition. So frustrating.
@Pikaclev i presume the one where mineru goes "to become an immortal dragon is to lose oneself" yadda yadda... i adore totks story but fr that was the most blatant chekhov's gun moment of all time Thinking abt it again maybe this comment was referring to the zelda "betrayal" tear. For me personally that was more of just a shocking moment than a plot twist because i assumed there was an evil zelda doppelganger somewhat early on (i went to gorons second) but i can see this comment referring to either of those tears tbh
@@Goobywooby3what's worse imo is what I did. I really love the master sword as a weapon so early on I specifically focused on getting it....I literally got the master sword before any of the tears...it completely ruined the story for me lmao
The Master Sword quest was a cool setup. Unfortunately, Nintendo had a nice setup to also fuck over the twist, which I ran into. I wanted to check out the Deku Tree right away, so I went there after learning about the dragon tear memories in the field and temple with Impa. I couldnt figure out how to get into the forest, but there is a dragon tear memory right there, and its either the last memory or one of the last, and it shows the snippet of the quote "To eat your stone would turn you into a dragon, to become an immortal dragon is to lose yourself" It doesn't take a genius to put the new White dragon with gold hair I just saw 30 minutes ago with this quote to know what happened immediately. I took me a little bit more playing to get enough stamina to float a glider off the Great Sky Isle and then float to the dragon, but I had the Master Sword a handful of hours into the game. I didnt get to learn anything slowly over the game or first figure out how to help the Deku Tree and have to be far enough along to beat the gloom hands... And the entire main quest line was annoying now because both myself and Link know that Zelda is the dragon, but every quest is all about "Oh Zelda might be here, she was spotted!" But Link doesnt say ANYTHING to the other people!
There are so many ways to ruin this game's pacing it's ridiculous. It's a good story, don't get me wrong, but the way it gives you information is so poorly structured.
@@donn741 I didnt notice that the ruin showed the order, my GF pointed that out to me after I ruined it for myself. I just looked at the map on the floor, not really at the walls.
This is actually a very easy problem to fix programmatically, so it's annoying that Nintendo set things up the way they did. SImply setting it up so memories are recieved in the correct order regardless of the tear location is a no brainer. The memories are their own events, so there's no good reason for it.
@@mkyasha Yeah the memories have nothing to do with where you see them, why not just give you the next memory in sequence for each tear? Or they could just give you the tear as an item, and you go plug it in in the ruin that has the tablets in order. Anything would be better.
About the mech, sometimes the mech actually works against you. For example, if you fuse something like a cannon to Mineru, you would expect for it to do massive damage while fighting enemies, but instead if youre not on the mech Mineru just sometimes shoots you. Honestly Nintendo needs to rework Mineru because it ends up killing Link before even being able to kill a Bokoblin.
I never attach anything to mineru and only use her for mining to save durability and hopping on and off her back for bullet time in gleeok fights. She can be useful just not in the way the devs intended lol.
You know... The physics engine and contraption-building mechanics of this game really are something to behold. Which is weird because on one hand I'm impressed by them and I have to applaud them for their achievements. But on the other hand... I just don't care? Like... I'm playing a Zelda game. I want to raid dungeons, solve puzzles, explore caves and fight bosses like you do in the older games. I love the idea of an open-world Zelda game, but not with all of this physics and vehicle stuff taking up such a big chunk of it. If I wanted to build vehicles I would've played Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts. Honestly, I didn't get anything out of what was arguably this game's biggest feature, and that stings.
Agreed! It’s actually amazing all the physics and building mechanics they were able to do, and yet….I would trade it all just to have some normal freaking swords that aren’t degraded, and don’t have to have stupid rocks and things hanging off of them. 🤦🏻♂️ And yes, if you can’t tell, I also hate fuse. Turns out I like swords and shields in my “sword and shield” fantasy game. Not a stick with a wing on the end of it, a freaking SWORD!
My experience was to the contrary. While I do prefer the oldhead zeldas, I experienced totk differently than you. You complain about the building part not adding to the game but for me, building machines was my primary method of solving puzzles and combat problems right up to the end. I flew with a flying bike everywhere, I killed bosses and armies of enemies with spinning death lasers and frost emitters, I built tanks and drill vehicles to plow through rocks like butter and mow down enemies while being utterly safe from harm. My approach to almost every situation in the game was spontaneously coming up with a machine or physics/game mechanic I could take advantage of in any given moment to both trivialize the problem or keep me safe while successfully solving the puzzle or raiding a temple or even finding better ways to travel. Horses are basically useless in totk in light of superior alternatives the zonai devices let you create. If you know how the world works and you know how to use the tools the game gives you, the game is actually too easy. Zonai machines add so much to the game that they trivialize other parts of it to the point that it can feel boring or less impactful. Like, flying with a hoverbike in the zora dungeon makes all its puzzles way easier because you can just zip from one mcguffan switch to the next in quick succession without ever interacting with the bubbles. Combat situations can be solved without you ever swinging a sword or blocking an attack or even directly engaging with an enemy in typical style if you have the right zonai devices handy and enough battery to power them for long enough to get the job done. part of my fun was derived from the satisfactory results I got from my creative and spontaneous machine solutions to my problems as I explored and did puzzles on the fly, made me feel like I was well rewarded for intelligent problem solving brains over brawns style
@@Sigmaairav What you just described was the intended way to play the game. I'm glad that it clicked for you. This was clearly where the majority of the six year development effort was invested. For the apparent minority of us who don't get excited about physics sandboxes, a few questionably cannonical easter eggs are not enough to scratch that Zelda itch. Imagine if after Hyrule Warriors, Nintendo announced that this was the vision for the series going forwards. 'Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you cannot hack and slash your way through waves of mobs?' These are the ideals of a different genre of gameplay.
I’m so glad you did that super long bit about the controls because I felt like I was going crazy playing the game. It goes all the way down to every layer of the experience. The fact that they assigned “unsticking” Ultrahand parts to WIGGLING THE RIGHT STICK(????) in a super annoying awkward way (that only chips away at the pitifully short lifespan of joycon sticks) instead of the R3 button is the most baffling thing I’ve ever seen. And that’s to say nothing of all the times I activated sage abilities and blew items away while trying to pick them up! It’s strange because like you said it’s so polished in so many other areas and they had such a long time to develop it. I really don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect them to have put more thought into this. Great video as always :) genuinely so happy to have you back
TotK's UI definitely needs an overhaul and I'm not a fan of the building mechanics in general--amazing for another game, perhaps, but totally disconnected from what I want in a Zelda game--but you may find it more intuitive to "unstick" just by shaking the controller, which is also an option.
Yup, every one of the points was spot on and put into words abstract stuff I had felt but couldn't articulate. I too throw my weapon when trying to ultra hand and I'm 200+ hours into the game. And I too pretty much ignore or even turn off most of the sages because they are so ridiculously clunky to use in combat or get in the way when I'm exploring.
"There's two shrines you can see" Me, even when you're highlighting it: "Where's that lake one?" Me later when it's shown again: "No, seriously, where is it? I don't see anything...".
Ceave's coming to the point where his videos feel like watching full-blown movies. It fills my heart with joy when I see he has graced us with a video once more.
Nah mate, movies feel like a comitment, and are therefor hard to decide to watch. There is however, absolutely no reason to not watch a ceave video imideately
@@dennan7537 I think that's just a thing TH-cam videos have. I'd genuinely much rather watch a 4-hour video on the most random of topics that I barely even care about, than a 2-hour movie that's said to be one of the greatest movies in animation history.
My biggest problem was the punishing of sequence braking finding the construct factory in the depths had no sign saying come back later. Or being kicked out of the ring ruins even though you know zelda is evil because you have finished the master sword quest.
i had already stumbled into the 5th temple by myself and i still couldnt get to the ring ruin. i had to go talk to everyone at lookout landing and tell them i had completed that part of the quest already
Ironically that is very much how traditional Zelda used to be. You'd see an obvious chest and think to yourself "How do I get that?" and spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it when it's actually because you don't have an item that is accessible to you at that point and have to come back later.
yessss, if they wanted to give the player so much freedom while keeping a plot, they needed to back it up with quests that change depending on what you do first. I figured out that zelda was evil by about the second dungeon, but the game just kept forcing me down its predetermined path that assumed i was so dumb that i couldnt see where the plot was going. It was insulting, tbh
@@blackice8634 The difference there being that you are lacking something crucial in the traditional games to get to that chest, while in TotK, Link just seemingly refused to use the knowledge he acquired to overcome this issue. Personally, that felt like a huge disconnect, because Link is otherwise willing to explain what he knows and people exclaim how marvelous he is for having done things in advance... not this time though - better keep to yourself that the real princess is a dragon who lost pretty much everything that defined her as a person, and the princess that people saw is actually a puppet constructed by the demon king...
I felt the same way with the Forbidden Woods. I just assumed, due to my experience with BOTW, that I was just somehow getting the sequence wrong to navigate the woods. This was made more unclear because some directions you took would let you go farther than others, so I assumed I needed the right path. Googling it not only let me know that there was no path, but also spoiled the true way to access the woods, which would have been more satisfying if I discovered it on my own. Why they couldn’t have put a Korok by the woods entrance to warn Link that he could not enter there, is a shame. With games this open ended, sometimes you need a little direction to know when you aren’t doing something wrong.
Same sentiment I’ve got. Many times I explored places that looked like it’s hiding something good (I’m always hoping for an armor piece) and then all I get from the chest is a Zonai charge.
Yeah, rock caves are really fun to clear our for me until the sound of my 5th demolition weapon breaking settles in and I realize 15 minutes of weapon gathering effort has just been wasted on traversal. Like, c'mon, the most efficient way to clear them is also the REALLY BORING way: Yunobo on a cooldown or Zonai Cannons...That're also on a secondary Stamina system.
@ED-gw9rg Tbf, when you break the cracked rocks, they drop smaller rocks and rusty weapons. The game's heavily hinting you to fuse a rock to one of the weapons they provide. You really shouldn't be tearing through you inventory. (Also, unless you only have a few batteries, cannons are way faster than using a weapon)
I may have ruined the story for me by getting all the tears and sword before any of the dungeons. I knew the plot twist way before it was revealed. And the Deku Tree was like "oh you already got the sword, i was about to send you on a wild quest but ok." Following fake Zelda in the castle was still pretty fun.
i got the exact opposite because i beat the final boss before doing any geoglyphs. i literally did not know what to do with them because i never met up with impa.
@@highdefinition450 I did the fire temple second, after the wind and it was so insanely obvious that the zelda is a fake in the fire. She makes a motion and then the mask takes more control, it is just so obvious. The wind temple was at least pretty subtle and you think, "why is she doing this" instead of "Its a fake and the game pretends it isn't." Worst part of the game.
Im going to be honest: The plot twist was very predictable and did not hit as well as the Zelda team likely hoped it would. The second I saw a silent Zelda at the castle once you are finally let out of the turorial zone in the sky was when I knew we are dealing with another Puppet Zelda. That's what, the 4th time we had one? Maybe 3rd, if you want to be technical it's the first time we had a Phantom Zelda but what is that worth when we have her just be like any of the Puppet Zeldas in the previous instalments? The only time I actually felt intrigued about this phantom Zelda was when we got to the castle to fight and she had a stupid monologue.
@@stanbasicidol9444 I have only played awakening, botw, and totk but I still saw it coming as soon as I got to goron city and it was so annoying no one is smart enough to realize that her entering a monster isn’t suspicious and proves a fake.
I think my favorite part of your videos is that you don't treat the games like they're in a vacuum and actually look into the economics behind the decisions made in games. It's something I thought would be boring but now I look at all art through that lens and your videos really help with that. I wish for your future videos to go even more into depth when it comes to the money side of games. Great stuff, Stay strong brother!
I'm jealous of your 'correct' experience with the wind temple. I tend to go around exploring first in open world games and TotK is really good at drawing attention to important things which is really bad. I explored the Depths first since that's where the new content is for me, the surface being all familiar terrain. So first i found the Construct Factory, access denied, but explored and solved a lot of it. Then the fire temple, couldn't get close due to the heat. Then the spirit temple, access denied. Going back to the surface I wanted to check out the sky and automatically got drawn to the water temple, where I finished some of the puzzles and scratched my head why I couldn't get the water wheels to turn with hydrants. Then found the access denied switch and back tracked all the way down the path up to the temple, to finally find Sidon (with a long back and forth sequence before he decides to come up to the water temple to press the buttons) Next the fire temple (with another cool approach you can easily skip if not careful) which was rather confusing and I ended up climbing and gliding for the last two switches after a glitch threw me off the temple. Then another interesting phenomena in the sky drew me to the 5th sage, construct factory access point. Completing that spoiled the rest of the story for me. (which finding glyphs out of order had already messed up) Figuring I couldn't screw it up further I went for the master sword to get the final huge plot spoiler before even getting the beginning parts of the story. And then I investigated the big cyclone in the sky by flying over and into it with 4 fans plus control stick, completely missing the excitement of following the jumpy things. Plus I had already gone up to max height so it wasn't all that high in comparison, I was actually on the way back down... The wind temple is by far the weakest. I solved all the puzzles in 15 minutes, but still have to go looking for Rito to do the final honors since not even a stack of fans will budge those turbines. Need his special 'wind'. Luckily the lightning temple is well hidden and doesn't draw attention to itself prematurely. I also find it the most cohesive dungeon out of the 5, albeit still short. I didn't quite follow the intended solutions but for once it didn't feel like 'cheesing' the puzzles by drawing out my own paths with mirrors. Unlike simply flying to the destinations in the other temples and Lomei mazes. TotK is an amazing sandbox, yet a train wreck when it comes to story and quest design :/
Dang, you really got worked over lol, I had the same experience with the water temple and having to get Sidon first, and I immediately understood "I see. They're going to make me do the temples their way. Guess I'll let them hold my hand for each other one." And was able to mostly avoid that again.
My goodness, I’ve played almost every single mainline Zelda game and that controller solution you proposed blew my mind, I’ve never even realized that the controls of this game are fundamentally different than almost every other game in the series, your solution of button mapping is so intuitive it’s incredible even its not even intuitive it’s just what Nintendo had us use before in prior games
I think that even this solution wouldn't work as great because TOTK simply has way too many items and you would be switching the buttons all the time. Such a system works quite well if the menu consists of 20-ish items, but TOTK literally has hundreds of materials, weapons, abilities, etc.
@@SeeTv.Yeah exactly, he even complained earlier about the menu management being too slow... Just imagine having to map 6 buttons everytime you want to play in a different style
How about just giving players the choice? Stick with botw "modern" prescribed button placements or go back to "classic" programmable buttons. Also while we're at it give me more HUD options
@@artu.rinconmaybe set up a few combat, shrine and travel presets. Also, I know for a fact that this would have worked significantly better on a gamepad as paper Mario color splash had a similar system of collecting dozens of distinct items you would need to scroll through to find the appropriate one to solve a puzzle or combat an enemy but you could find what you needed in less than a second without even pausing to break immersion, by simply scrolling on a separate screen.
@@quangdinhvo986 You're basically asking them to design two different games at that point, which would lead to both options suffering in quality. But I guess even that would beat simply not designing the UI beyond the bare minimum...
That last part really hit me what I felt after I finished the game, love this breath of the wild saga, But I wish we can have a more traditional Zelda once again
its also just how long the botw style games take to make. it's been 12 years since SS and in that time we've gotten 2 mainline 3d zelda games. In the 12 years before that we got MM, WW, TP, and SS I'd honestly much rather have smaller, shorter games that come out more frequently than these monster games releasing every half a decade when most of that extra time seems to be spent on content that starts to feel repetitive halfway through
reminds me of something ive been saying about splatoon (my favorite franchise) for a while, which is that i really dont want there to be a splatoon 4. the story has concluded, the world has moved on from inkopolis, and some things deserve to end rather than go on forever
One detail people have forgotten; the dungeons don't introduce new enemies anymore. Its a big part of why I say nintendo does not value freedom much at all despite breaking the entire gameflow around it. They refuse to put something infront of you that you might not be able to do yet, other than the big dragon baddies and maybe lynels for new players. Just like botw, totk suffers from having a wide amount of stuff at the beginning, and absolutely nothing fresh for the rest of the game. Totk just takes longer for its beginner material to run dry.
In the end, I don't wan t some progression system stuffed in every fold of hyrule. I like the physics and machine stuff but I would like it more in a puzzle game that makes full use of it. I like the combat and collection but would prefer it in a game dedicated to exploring that combat. I like the characters but would prefer them in a game that lets them do anything other than moan and leave everything to link. In short, the botw zeldas refused convention but failed entirely, and then partially, to fill the void the they'd made by removing those conventions. The games lean too much on player imagination and liberation without goals, foes, or dangers that would make freedom exciting to explore.
Very good video as always. One thing that also left me a bit disappointed is when the sages are like "oh ill never leave your side you can count on me in battle" but then they just... dont come with you lol. I can understand why from both a dev perspective it might cause some timeline/story issues and some of them do have other duties but like tulin has zero reason not to come with you instead of just sending his ghost.
None of them have real duties. Tulin is free, Yunobo has a company that can opperate wihout him, Sidon pretends he has to do stuff but he has a girl that can take his place when he is out, riju has a replacement too and honestly she just would say that she does it and her bodyguard would be pissed about it cause thats a pretty riju thng to do. On top they could still teleport to you. Teleportation is a lore thing, no ghosts needed. Easy. But we have soulless vessels instead.
@@Zachruff As far as I can tell the german translation of both botw and totk is a lot more accurate and coherent than the english. Though I havnt played TOTK on japanese yet, its just more fitting than whatever the english did. Thats said, the chosen grammar of german is readable but hard to speak. Someone clearly didnt tested this out. But thats a general problems of most games and books.
Truly thank you, whilst playing the game at launch I actually couldn't believe no one was talking about some of these things. Being stuck in rock hammer limbo, and seeing people building robots with 2 batteries. I'm happy you're enjoying it but you can't leave me thinking I'm crazy in the world of the highest rated game of all time. I thought I was becoming a contrarian 😭
People will get around to it eventually. There's plenty to gripe about even in games that are pretty great overall. I heavily disliked BotW and had tons of issues with this game, but the end of it, and really liking the fuse mechanic left me feeling very positive about it as a whole. That doesn't stop the annoying bits from being annoying. XD
@@rareosts5752 mhm - What is also probably a strong factor for this is that I didn't grow up with any Nintendo consoles, but had an xbox 360. So that a/b and x/y are vice versa often threw me.
Can I just say, I like that you don't constantly feel the need to apologize for criticism. You say "this part of the game is mediocre" and then explain why. Too many youtubers constantly feel the need to shower the game with praise as though criticizing a popular game is a crime.
@@SailorCheryl Yeah but this is nothing compared to his normal channel where he always says "I *love* this game and Nintendo worked *so* hard on it..." over and over. I was just being nice.
I enjoyed the story of this game at face value, but it lacked a lot of impact from the first game that I really struggled to put into words for the longest time. This game's story is bombastic: it is epic in scale and reaches far more dramatic heights than BOTW, but I found myself missing the more muted tone in BOTW. TOTK's important plot points happen thousands of years prior to what you're actually doing; which really only involves cleanup work around the four major towns. The main, present-day plot lacks almost all the impact the plot presented in the memories has up until the final confrontation. This is in stark contrast to BOTW, as the minimalistic plot put less of a focus on historical events and more focus on the actions of Link, and by extension, the player. The story of BOTW was the order you visited the divine beasts (if at all), the shrines you collected, your discovery of the mastery sword, etc. Memories in that game served to provide historical context and supplement what you were already doing and were basically optional to have a grasp on what was happening. TOTK, on the other hand, contains memories that are unarguably essential to complete the game, and that carries its own issues. For example: the second memory I discovered (while bee-lining to visit each tower to unlock the full map before I did anything else) was the master sword-shaped memory just north of the Lost Woods, in which Zelda learns of the process by which people can become dragons. I immediately intuited that this would be her eventual fate, and I just happened to glance upward when I finished the cutscene to see the light dragon flying overhead. An amazing moment in its own right, but this spelled a number of inconveniences for me: 1) I now understood where Zelda was and what her fate turned out to be, far before the game expected me to 2) I realized that the memories in TOTK presented a linear story that needed to be viewed in order, making me drop everything to figure that out 3) I was too early in the game to actually get the master sword--I immediately headed up to the light dragon only to find that I was being gated out by my stamina meter; far less diagetically cohesive than the heart container check for the sword in BOTW. That second inconvenience was only exacerbated when I discovered the memory by the frost gleeok in the northwestern portion of the map, which shows Ganondorf in his demonic form calling forth his armies. This necessitated seeking out Impa, from whom I discovered the first memory, only to find an in-game room that literally spells out the viewing order of the memories. I now had to interrupt my natural exploration to seek out the actually compelling plot of the game, which was one of many instances where this game disappointed me. They really really wanted to make a grander story with far more grandeur than BOTW, but in doing so they developed a story that conflicts with how you're meant to interact with the world and overall has far less impact (at least for me) than the player-driven "story" of BOTW.
2 Things need to happen in the next Zelda. a) A new map and b) Stop telling the story in retrospect. The story in TOTK is much better than that of BOTW but it is done exactly the same way. I want the story to unfold as it is going, not just getting memories of it later.
Tldr, but the story from breath of the Wild with much worse than tears and I actually skipped most of the cutscenes because they were so bad but I very much enjoyed tears
I had a similar thing happen. The second tear I got was the one near the front gleeok. This immediately spoiled ganondorf killing Sonia, stealing the stone, and ultimately powering up. I saw this before I even knew who any of the character were! It felt like I skipped to the ending of a movie without watching it. It really killed any investment I had in the story because I already knew what was going to happen. It baffles me that Nintendo allowed us to view a linear story out of order. Why couldn't they just make it so that it plays linearly no matter where you go first??? or why couldn't those cutscenes be played after each dungeon?? ugh.
@@benclapp6100 Exactly. Video game stories only really get to me if I'm allowed to be part of them. Experiencing them in retrospect does not allow for that.
I also went up to the cold shrine first because it was more visible, but I realized it was awkward enough that it couldn't have been the intended route. What the Great Plateau got right is that doing the shrines in any order was more or less equally valid, and that is a microcosm of the rest of the world. The Great Sky Island allowed you to do things in any order, but most orders punished you, and unfortunately that is also a microcosm of the rest of the world. Like until you do Wind Temple you can't get the scanner or travel medallions, but you can go 50h+ before realizing that. Yes, some dialogue lines tell you to try that first, but this is the sequel to Breath of the Wild, and all 4 regions have a quest marker, so you can't blame people for trying them in any order.
When I fell down into the world off the sky island I got all turned around. I tried to go to close landmarks, like the bridge of hylia, and got fucked up by a gleeok. Then I went to the duelling peaks and there was nothing there explaining what to do. It took me about an hour to eventually find Lookout landing. The reuse of the map messed me up because I already had assumptions about important places and it lead me in the wrong direction. I started the game with immense frustration.
Well, I still largely disagree with that opinion but for context, I'll drop a little 'cohesiveness' for the _much_ More exciting gameplay that Tears offered. Fiddly janky stuff like the Sage controls etc, I can deal with. I dealt with them in a much more limited and linear game like Skyward Sword, and I can surely deal with them here. I much prefer Tears 'chaotic Fun' regardless.
I want to add an additional note on "Secret Stones." Although the Japanese term (秘石) does use the kanji associated with secrecy (秘), it does not use the word "secret" itself and is in fact a singular word, meaning "secret stone" is not exactly a direct translation - that would only be the direct translation if the original term were 秘密の石 or something to that effect, with an adjective modifying a noun. What Japanese can do is fuse separate kanji into a singular new word, which is very fluid and precise and often mystical. In this case, the kanji for "secret" is used in quite a number of fantastical words such as 神秘, meaning "mystery beyond human comprehension - the realm of the gods." This means that 秘石 will not be associated with crude thoughts like combining basic "secrets" with basic "stones", as if they're just normal stones that are secret or whatever, and instead will be associated with a wide range of nuance (not *necessarily* divine mystery or anything, though). Thus, in conclusion, I think "secret stone" is a pretty poor translation and not a direct one. It takes a singular, original word compound with a wide range of nuance and turns into something mundane and clunky. As for a superior translation, that's hard since it's an original compound (or well, other fantasy works have used it, but it's not like a "real" Japanese word). The translators likely would not have used "secret stone" if they could help it - English can't fuse kanji like that, so we're likely stuck using two words, but I would try to avoid the resulting mundanity of "secret stone." I think one really good option would have been to invent an original word which would evoke similar wonder in a concise way, similar to "triforce" - maybe the 'heptastone" (lol). Otherwise, I would have looked into exploring avenues like "divine gemstone", "stones of yore", etc etc. There's really infinite options here, and conversing with the story writer to glean insight on their nature could help a lot. The key thing I wanted to convey though is that "secret stones' is NOT a direct translation in either connotation or denotation. It's more like the translation you end up with when mapping the pieces of a word to the closest English words. It's not translating "Erephanto" as "Elephant", it's translating "The Divine Elephant" as "tusked animal" because we don't know what Elephants are, and then wondering why a divine mystical beast has such a lame name as "The Divine Tusked Animal"
So they tried to hard to directly translate one thing and got a stupid name like "secret stone" But for both BotW and TotK they also go out of their way to butcher the translations of the Hyrule Compendium, completely changing it from the intended journal written by Link and containing his thoughts and feelings about events and turning it into a generic quest log in second person I can't get my head around the decisions NoA makes while localizing games.
The first time I heard them say "Secret Stone" I honestly laughed at how stupid it sounds. Then I realised that it kind of reminded me of the horrible translation of the original Legend of Zelda. It's got the same sort of energy as "EASTMOST PENNISULA IS THE SECRET" or "SPECTACLE ROCK IS AN ENTRANCE TO DEATH" sort of energy to it. Despite that, though, it's still a dumb name. I'd have given my right arm if we could have got NoE to do the English localisation instead. They're so much better at being faithful while still maintaining a level of charm and creativity. Besides, maybe then we could have got an actual English woman to voice Zelda instead of the most generic "american person doing a posh English voice" with no attention paid to pronunciation whatsoever.
Weirdly enough, in the non-English translations of the game, which tend to be more accurate to the original text from what I've seen, the stones are still called "Secret stones".
the execution delay point was so accurate to me, i cheesed every single puzzle by attaching rockets in the spirit temple and so many shrines with just fusing rockets to shields
Just to add my small grain of sand. In an interview, Aonuma said that the game had already been finished one year before release but they spent the last year exclusively polishing the physics systems, which pretty much goes to asure your point that they spent a copious amount of development time into the physics, because, and I reiterate, it was one entire year just to polish the physics system. In a personal note, I unfortunately rather find this to be a waste of time and resources as I personally haven´t found this system to be as interesting or useful as many other people have stated, but rather just a gimmick. A very impressive one at that, but nothing much more interesting than what they could have done with so much time in their hands. It really makes me wonder what they could´ve done.
This should be the singular most popular critique of TotK that Nintendo should absolutely see. The Zelda team adressed so many fan opinions in the past, I really hope they see this one. Also im about halfway into the video, maybe he adresses it later but I wanna mention how much i hated the "zelda impostor" thing. I saw the "memory" of Ganondorf transforming into a zelda body right at the start so I was so incredibly triggered every of the many times a quest is based on NPCs not getting zelda is fake
My biggest issue with totk control scheme is D-Up being the item "quick menu" but then having to press RB and /then/ D-Up to hold an item to throw instead of D-Up then RB to hold an item to throw. (Basically, open the menu, and press the throw button to throw it, instead of getting ready to throw your melee weapon, and then selecting an item to get ready to throw it.)
This is a wonderful video and a cathartic watch - there are so many elements of TOTK that irritate me and it was great to hear many of them so clearly and intelligently articulated. The controls in particular - I knew something wasn't quite right but you've articulated perfectly exactly what the problem is. There are three things that aren't touched on in the video that I think are major design mistakes that undermine many of TOTK's excellent qualities: 1. The ability to launch into the air or leap down from the sky at any time and fly to your destination, combined with the re-used overworld map, totally undermines the exploration of BOTW - in BOTW, I'd see something in the distance that interested me, I'd walk there, and encounter all kinds of interesting things along the way. In TOTK, if I need to go somewhere, I just warp to a tower, launch into the sky, and fly there, because it's so much easier, and because I feel like I've probably already seen what's on the way to that destination. 2. The depths are terrible. They created an area almost as large as the overworld that takes a solid 20 hours to explore and they filled it with 2 hours of content. It's incredibly repetitive both aesthetically and from a gameplay perspective. 3. The narrative - you touched on this a little bit but I think because you can do everything out of order, Nintendo seems to think they need to give you all the important information in *every single cutscene*. I was so sick of being talked down to about the Demon King and the Secret Stones by the mid point of the game that it completely undermined any emotional engagement I might otherwise have had with the story.
I used to love talking with the NPCs in BOTW because they all had something interesting to say. After the 50th time of someone saying "have you heard about the ring ruins?" I stopped talking to the NPCs altogether.
There are so many elements at Work, be it gameplay or a snippet or Lore/story, that We were thrown that there are _bound_ to be some oversight and untidy loose ends. They did need a bit more time with this I have to admit, just to accommodate for and polish the Sequence breaking possibilities.
I understand why Breath of the Wild had wonky controls but that doesn't explain why after six years in development Tears didn't build nor revise a single system. There's no way they couldn't have done it they just for some baffling reason chose not to.
I'm glad you're still going to continue your analytical videos because they're honestly my favourites from you to watch. You have such a unique approach to writing and your analysis is always intriguing to consider, and it really shines through with this video too. Tears of the Kingdom is such a weird game for me because while I really loved playing it, a lot of its problems kind of weighed on the back of my mind. There was always the sense that something or other wasn't really clicking, and your video really dragged those issues to light. I'm looking forward to your future videos. Welcome back, Ceave.
I’ve never had a game where I felt so 100 percent sure was the greatest game I’ve ever played while playing it, that upon completion I felt was overall a very underwhelming experience. It’s an odd game that’s hard for me to describe. I will say that’s it’s full of unnecessary fluff and filler, and the dungeons are IMO the worst in the entire series. And sadly, the depths turned out to be a colossal disappointment. The first time you descend to the depths and find a Yiga camp, congratulations! You’ve seen the entire depths. Same for the sky islands but it’s even worse. It starts with the amazing great sky islands, setting a high expectation for what you will see in the sky, and after that, nothing comes even close. All just little copy pasted islands that are largely pointless…with maybe one minor exception. This video did a great job explaining a lot of my frustrations.
This is exactly how I felt after completing Tarry Town in BotW, but after playing TotK I'm actually a little softer on BotW. BotW at least had interesting characters (for as much as you interacted with them) and was actually designed with non-linearity in mind. I might actually replay BotW at some point, but I gave away my copy of TotK. I didn't even finish it.
I absolutely loved this video! It's perhaps my favourite Ceave analytical video. The long runtime really allowed it to illuminate many important aspects of the game in depth. Really excited for the Hollow Knight one too!
This is the first video I see of you , but your personality, clear explanations of your reasoning and editing have won me over handily, I look forward to more !
The Spirit Temple is also where my spirit died. I literally used up a week of PTO to play this game. I was trying to take my time and savor the game, but i just couldn't feel myself fully getting immersed; there were good moments, but a lot of tedium and frustration. Then I hit the Spirit Temple and finally realized I kind of hated the most fundamental mechanics of the game. I realized this was a physics sandbox and "not my Zelda." Was actually a very depressing moment. The mech sucked. I never turned it on again after the plot stopped needing it.
The first shrine where you unlock ultrahand was so magical and I thought the whole game would progressively get harder puzzles, but the first ultrahand puzzle was about the same difficulty as every other shrine. I never really had to put any thought into solving the puzzles, just had to execute the obvious solutions
He made an excellent point when he explained that all of them rewarded you with the knowledge of unexpected uses of your abilities. But if you already had the knowledge, you essentially gain nothing and shrines become worse than the blessing ones because of the execution time.
@@isodoubIet I don't really agree that openworld is bad at all for the zelda series, it's that Nintendo hasn't shown any growth on their grasp on when to use linearity instead of baseline exploration in said open world, 6 years after their first experiment with it. You CAN have proper restrictions on movement, exploration, and abuse of other helpful overworld mechanics, and they did that super well with shrines, but they presented the openworld in a way that fundamentally did not let them raise the difficulty of their puzzles overtime. They could have restricted areas, quests, dungeons, shrines, movement, and more from you AND THEY ABSOLUTELY SHOULD HAVE in a lot of cases, but they didn't. Their openworld, when not struggling with any instance of what otherwise should have been a more focused and linear area, is fantastic and does service to the Zelda franchise so much more than blind haters of the last 2 games will denounce. It's not a bad fit for Zelda - it's an unfortunate showing of Nintendo's unwillingness to truly go in and fix the obvious problems to a game over half a decade later. The potential is there, but as with a lot of things in TOTK, it's unnecessarily squandered in ways so easily avoidable it hurts (i want to love this game SO BAD).
@@solo._.dude15 Nintendo chose, very deliberately, to _not_ implement any form of an open world that restricts movement or level gates/skill gates areas. The lack of a reasonable difficulty curve or meaningful progression is a direct result of that decision, and it is clear that it is married to their idea of what an open world should be.
The moment the game started to annoy me was with the memories. The Upheaval and the Regional Variants were amazing in their storytelling and sense of mystery but one single memory killed all that mystery. I knew exactly what to expect at Hyrule Castle once I got up there and was disappointed by how the rest of the story panned out.
The memories should've been linear like at the end of a temple, I immediately got the rise of the demon king memory after the first memory, which basically spoiled the rest of the memories
I'm pretty sure they figured most players would put off doing the memories for the most part and just bumrush the temples and then the castle. But like, do they even understand gamers? Of course we're going to want to explore the big open world. The fact that it takes so long to get to the point where you can even get the shrine sensor and other purah pad abilities where the completion requirements to upgrade them are inevitably already met, making the completion requirements pointless, shows that they have never watched anyone play their games from start to finish. And I don't entirely blame them, imagine watching 150+ hours of footage per beta tester. And yet they really needed to, since they obviously are some sort of weird extraterrestrials who don't understand human psychology and if they're going to sell games to us humans, they ought to learn about us more. The story they wanted to tell in this game obviously had an intended dungeon order, an intended main quest order, and an intended memory order, but they don't restrict you to that, so their story just comes out totally jumbled and spoils itself. This isn't a trapping of the open world formula, it's a failure of the game design-all they had to do was make the main quest sequence linear while making the side quests non-linear. But that'd take extra coding, so they didn't do it, because they figured most humans would think like their fellow extraterrestrials do, which is to not explore, not investigate interesting looking things, not to go check up on places from the past game to see how they're doing, and to just mindlessly follow an order of operations that they don't even communicate properly to you.
@@drewbabe " And I don't entirely blame them, imagine watching 150+ hours of footage per beta tester." If only there were a way to reduce the amount of gameplay to review per player... hmmmmm
i got the memory where fake zelda tries to kill the zonai queen person as my first memory, completely ruined the rest of the story for me. I knew exactly what was going to happen and the game was just stretching it out.
I think the main problem is going for something that is completely open ended where you can do anything in any order. The main quest(s) would allow for better storytelling if they were in a linear order, but you still have the freedom to explore and do side quests whenever you want
41:40 This is a really great explanation of the intersection of some pretty improtant UX principles. "Aerial Associations" is essentially a combination of the Gestalt Principle of Proximity (things that are near each other will be perceived as being related) and Norman's concept of Natural Mappings (controls are more intuitive when there is a logical relationship between the layout of the controls and what those controls do).
A game that often gets compared to BOTW solved the healing issue: Genshin Impact. The characters get full after eating a certain amount of food, making them unable to eat. This 1) incentivizes cooked food since it heals a larger amount than eating the ingredients 2) solves the issue of invincibility when you have large amounts of food.
True, but that'd only increase the annoyance with cooking food, and the whole reason that we have the problem is that it was never redesigned after being ported from the Wii U. If they changed how healing works, then they would just as well rework how menus work in general.
Really happy to see someone make a video articulating the exact problem (execution delay) I had with totk with even the same terminology I used. It really marred the game for me. I started feeling it much earlier than the shadow temple, too.
For the ultra hand, I also think that it’s because the « throw weapon » button is the « Rotate» button in ultra hand mode, which is the one you press most of the time while using ultra hand
What I think Nintendo was going for with the controls was to keep the ranged combat options (bow and throw) together. Shielding/targeting has always been ZL (or whatever it was called on the controller at the time) so keep it there for consistency. Left dpad for shields since shielding is handled with the left of the controller, Right dpad for weapons since right side of the controller has all your attacks. L for powers since thats the available shoulder button. I feel like swapping L and R would cause more problems than it solves by arbitrarily separating the two ranged options. The easiest solution (imo) would be to allow button remapping, but Nintendo doesn't really do that.
I'm glad that I'm not the only one with a mostly negative and disappointed perspective on this game. The entire time I did have fun playing, but after a while I started thinking that instead of playing a game that supposedly is about traversing a world literally torn apart by an evil king that's filled with cheerful people with only mild inconveniences, I could be playing Twilight Princess. Twilight Princess gets a lot of shit, but there's a reason that people still draw and think about Midna well after a decade of the game being out, she is with you for the entire game. For the entire storyline you are listening to her snark and her desperation to save her people from an evil tyrant, her unique character, flaws, motivations, hopes, and dreams seep into every thread of the game and you become emotionally invested in her when you race her to the castle to try to save her from Zants light poisoning. I want to care about Princess Zelda, I want to care about her 100 years of battle, and her torment at being unable to save either Sonia or Rauru, and being transformed into a dragon for thousands of years to pour every ounce of strength into a single blade, but I only know her through 20 minutes of cutscenes. Zelda is supposed to be the emotional through line to both Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of The Kingdom, but we don't ever get ANY time with her in TOTK, we don't get to see her relationship with the other champions, we don't get to see her begin to put Hyrule back together after the Calamity has passed, she gets to have an adventure thousands of years in the past and meet the first king of Hyrule and his queen, and were some dipshit in the future just following the notes she left. The game spends so little time on its genuinely interesting and cool story that it falls flat on its face, no NPCs acknowledge the reveal that she's a dragon, nobody seems to care or believe link despite guiding him towards the dragons tears, the game itself throws it's most dramatic twist in the garbage. The tonal problem between having a land LITERALLY BE TORN ASUNDER and having no death, no sickness, nothing to suggest that anyone has been anything but displaced or inconvenienced by THEIR WORLD BEING TORN APART leads to incredible cognitive dissonance. There's a lot to find in Tears of the Kingdom, but there's not much to care about. The only times I felt a sense of dread, and was excited, was when I went to Gerudo town and it was abandoned and desolated, filled with Gibdos, I thought "Finally! Tension!" But no, everyone welcomed me into without having to disguise myself, without having anyone furious at me for violating their sacred customs, everyone was helpful and polite. They all felt like tutorials, not people. The reference items started to feel like an insult, because all they did was remind me that I spent seventy dollars to be reminded that I could be playing a better game.
Wonderful, I haven't even finished the game yet and probably shouldn't have clicked on this video but this comment confirms almost all my fears are true. What a shame.
@@deft4184 it's a goddamn shame too!! this game has all the pieces to be an instant masterpiece, but because Nintendo scrimped on storytelling and level design to copy and paste the same level and enemies over and over a giant empty map, they just couldn't put them together. The physics engine is astounding, but that's... that's all that's special about this game, it's mechanics and it's physics engine, everything else feels the same or worse from breath of the wild. Scrolling through dozens and dozens of items every goddamn time I needed to attach something to an arrow genuinely made me put down the game for good because the UI is so unfriendly. Skyward Swords controls were also janky and not optimal, and Fi and the menu popping up and item I've gotten before when you saved exited and came back were both annoying, but there was *never* a point where I felt bored or like playing it was a waste of my time or busywork because there were things to explore and the tools I gained through my journey unlocked new things to find unique to it's world, Skyward Sword isn't a great game, but it's still good. Compared to this boring, repetitive, copy and paste of a game it's a fucking masterpiece.
Age of Calamity brings a lot more life to these characters and it’s a shame that people don’t want to play it because it plays differently than all other Zelda games. But it’s still fun, and uses a lot of botw items and flurry rush mechanic, which makes it satisfying to pull off
Glad to hear you're doing better creatively. :D In my opinion, the choices made for all of the sages were baffling. Why is Tulin the only sage integrated into your abilities? Why doesn't Mineru make you into an unstoppable juggernaut only limited by your battery power? Why do the sages teleport out of combat as soon as you jump on a rock? Why don't the sages have an on/off toggle but no way to adjust their aggression? Why does noone acknowledge that the sages are adventuring with you? Why does Tulin keep blowing away my loot?
Technically, Yunobo /does/ have an integration, but an annoying one, since you can't angle the shot up or down, and it only works on vehicles going a certain speed, so it's not great for smaller-scale situations like breaking ores or the rock tunnels. Most use I've gotten is very specifically mining out the zonaite clusters that are in the mine tunnels since he has the potential to destroy all of them at once. Riju should've been available whenever you draw your bow, since you're unlikely to press A for anything else at that time, and Sidon could've had some kind of shield activation, since the first part of the ability is a bubble.
In my humble onion, diverging onto a completely unexpected different game to eventually bring the subject back around to the main game is one of the best things Ceave does to pace his videos and keep things interesting. I hope to see more from this channel in the coming years!
I like how this review is also open world! I skipped the section about the Gorons and Gerudo storylines because I haven't done them yet, but I was able to go to the Controls discussion. Really good review!
On the dungeon side of things, I think ToTK could've benefitted massively from going counter to its own design in those. Each of the dungeons can be completed in any order, each of the locks within can be completed in any order, and you can play completely by your own rules and build contraptions to cheese 'em or follow an intended route. I think most of us probably at least cheesed the fire temple at some point. The locks take the place of the small keys, and the door at the end takes the place of the big key. It... doesn't really feel that rewarding to me. The dungeons in OoT, TP, and WW felt amazing to me for their heavy gating and, I don't know... having a hookshot or a boomerang (and the new-style boomerangs just don't do it for me.) The item gates made things interesting to me, much more than starting the game with all the kit I'd ever need does.
This is a really great critique! You did a great job explaining certain things that I found annoying but didn't quite understand why, like with the controls!
Honestly the biggest problem in totk for me were the sages. And I don't mean just Mineru, though she's by far the most disappointing. Like, you go through so much trouble to get them, they swear to help you and be by your side and all that... And then end up being more annoying than anything else (except Tulin). Like you said, being able to map their abilities to the different buttons would actually make it so much better. And yeah, it'd work for everything else too, but at least I didn't get as annoyed by those other aspects.
I like how you mentioned the meaninglessness of the exploration with how little the progress bars mean in both games. In breath of the wild, while the exploration doesn't lead to much, the need to have to walk around to new areas makes it so that you end up being pushed into these new goals via having to interact with the world. In tears of the kingdom, you can skip over all the environment, and all of the meaningless goals, by making a flying ship that can go over half the map if you fly over the new sky islands, which themselves are sparse, repetitive and ultimately meaningless.
Good points! Not to mention, getting the memories in BotW requires detailed familiarity with the map, whereas TotK only expects the player to fly over the impossible-to-miss geoglyphs and then jump down. It's almost like a built-in concession to people who were disappointed by the reused map that you can just fly over everything, but would the devs have felt comfortable allowing this on an original map, and is it beneficial to the actual structure of the game?
The goals aren't meaningless though and have a point to them, the sky islands aren't that repetitive or meaningless either like there is always useful stuff to find on them.
@@JMurrinYTcorrect which is another problem with the game you don't need to go in a certain order you can find out Sonya died before you find out how she died, and then if you found the cutscene showing how she died and the go to cutscene before that it will feel very.... incomplete
Yeah they even put aimable launchpads on sky islands, and next to shrine warp points to boot, which reads loud and clear as 'just skip all those pesky ground parts lol'
I remember the absolute satisfaction I got from scaling the twin peaks in BOTW, a true test of determination that felt like a real challenge. In TOTK? Four fans and a steering stick, baby!
I'm genuinely SO happy that the honeymoon period is ending and people are starting to critique TOTK a bit more. I was having fun for my first 100 hours, but then the flaws started piling on and I couldn't bring myself to finish the game. Everything started feeling too same-y, as if I'd done everything before, in a game released 5 years prior and the design flaws in the story and gameplay REALLY started to get on my nerves. 🤦♂️
About combat and healing... I found it really fun to use a MsgNotFound sword with a light dragon part attached, and give myself a voluntary restriction that I could only heal by hitting things. This brought back a lot of the old-zelda-game feel, instead of just pausing to eat mid-battle.
@@ttmfndng201 Yeah. Nintendo keeps patching out all the fun. :( In case anyone reads this and doesn't already know... Turn off auto-update! TotK 1.1.1 and earlier are the best versions of the game, while 1.1.2 and later patched out a lot of really cool things. The game was better before removing the "glitches", because the glitches allow access to features the game _should_ have had. More generally though, hypothetical reader... never install updates without reading about them first. Decide on your own if you want them, instead of trusting a corporation to do it for you.
@@TiltCntrlzI made 1 of each gleeok horn, 1 light dragon horn, 1 gloom spear, 1 silver lizalfos tail, 1 queen gibdo guster, 1 silver Lynel horn and 1 molduga jaw. I don’t know why I do this to myself
From what I remember reading from interviews, the majority of the development time went into rebuilding the engine to handle the sky islands and the depths seamlessly, and because they were working on the engine again, feature creep kept growing with things like the updated lighting engine.
What annoys me the most is that this game is essentially a redo of BOTW, not a sequel. The way it plays is the EXACT SAME. Bear with me here, it's a long list: - Wake up in mysterious circumstances in a closed area that serves as tutorial. - Meet a mysterious figure guiding you to gain your core gameplay abilities. - Traverse tuto area and complete shrines to find the 4 abilities that you will use throughout the game, get more familiar with those, as well as understand better other gameplay mechanics. - Pray at the statue of Goddess, unlock cutscene, mysterious figure reveal its identity and connection to Zelda. - Access to the rest of the map is now granted and the main quest is revealed: SAVE ZELDA. - Now the map is open and you can go pretty much everywhere you want, although you are guided to a specific point to progress the story. - Character at specific point reveals critical problems in 4 main regions of the map: Zora, Goron, Rito, and Gerudo. Those should be investigated by you. - An incarnation of Ganon is the cause of Hyrule's misery, of course. It's clear that his lair is now at Hyrule Castle. - At the 4 main regions, you meet key characters of the 4 main races, most importantly their young hero (who's destiny is to live up to the heroism of someone back in their lineage). - Link is requested to help bringing back the balance and well-being of each region. This is done by completing some sort of mega-shrine - not exactly a Dungon as Zelda used to have, but more like isolated puzzles that upon completion eventually give access to a boss. - Each of those are themed according to the main element of the 4 regions, namely water, fire, wind, and lightning. - Defeating the boss brings back the peace in each region and completes part of the main quest. Doing so also grants Link a special power that can be used in the rest of the game to help for traversal, shielding, or combat. - Along the way you find and complete several shrines by solving puzzles, doing combat, or completing overworld activities granting a blessing (orb). - Exchanging 4 orbs grants you either more life or stamina. - Along the way you find Koroks in suspicious places. - Exchanging Korok seeds to Hestu grants Link with more inventory space. - Along the way you meet an excentric character with a passion for creatures. He's in a weird hot-hair balloon and can be found at night near towns. - Exchanging parts with this character gives you fun additional pieces of armor. - Along the way you fight several camps of enemies and mini-bosses. - Doing so allows you to find weapons, chests, food, etc. It's also an occasion to make use of your 4 abilities to mess around and ambush these enemies in goofy ways. - Along the way you clash against the Yiga Clan, who are determined to revive the incarnation of Ganon to its full strength. - You can defeat them in the world, and defeat their silly boss Master Koga. You can also retreive the Thunder Helm at their hideout. - Along the way you can find some mini-games in the world organized by characters from the 4 main regions, costing a few rupees. - Doing better and better at those mini-games gifts you with more and more rupees. - Along the way you find very specific locations of the overworld with the help of hints from the map. - Doing so unlocks a dozen or so cutscenes that slowly reveal the story of the game in a non-linear fashion. Not surprizingly, Zelda is the key to everything, and her own sacrifice is what allows Link to ultimately save not only Hyrule, but her as well. - Along the way there are some gimmicks to challenge you more/differently, like removing your equipment temporarily, or putting you in complete darkness. - Overcoming those special obstacles usually leads to a shrine or a special treasure. - Along the way you find four fairies that can enhance your clothing. - Completing their requests unlocks each of them for increasing levels of enhancements. - Your inventory is made up of all sorts of armor pieces like climbing gear, stealth outfit, Zora armor for swimming, barbarian set with attack-increasing stats, etc. You also have easter-egg pieces from past games, like Dark Link, Midna's helmet, Majora's Mask, etc. - A particular set can be found by completing the three big mazes found in Hyrule. - One of the quest allows you to purchase a home from Bolson construction. - One of the most involved quests requires you to pretty much build a town from scratch. - The master sword is obviously a key part of the story. Knowledge of it is held by the Deku Tree, located deep in the Korok Forest. But one does not simply walk in the Korok Forest.. only by being clever can you reach the home of the Koroks.. - Exploring the entirety of the map leads to gaining strong weapons, armors, and shields - as well as maxing out on stamina and hearts. - It's usually at that point where you feel you've done pretty much everything in the game and/or feel strong enough that you decide to go fight the final boss (although you can do it at any time). - A mini dungeon at Hyrule Castle eventually leads to the big showdown. - If you have completed the "dungeons" of the main quest, you don't have to fight their bosses now. They've been taken care of already, and the heroes of the regions assist you in battle. Otherwise, the bosses block the path to Ganon's incarnation and you have to defeat them by yourself. - You then face Ganon one-on-one. All your skills and strongest equipment are unleashed to ultimately defeat him. - Ganon resists his demise and makes a final desperate attempt at overpowering you by turning into a giant beast form. This leads to a fight outside the castle, in open air, that is very easy but far more cinematic. Zelda is actively supporting you in that final phase. - Once the final blow is rendered, Zelda is finally freed, and in a short cutscene you share a moment with her in Hyrule Field. She's confused but happy, and the land is finally safe. - Cut to credits. Seriously?!?! Aesthetically, thematically, and mechanically, it's the SAME game. I had a good time with the game, some stuff was definitely on the level of the unique Nintendo quality we can expect, but overall this game became tiresome real fast once I realized 80% of my time would be either: - Building/crafting, - Exploring without visibility (depths, sand storm, snow storm, pitch black areas), or - Doing insipid busywork for fetch quests TOTK really doubled down on nearly everything that they shouldn't have from BOTW imo. Edit: The "Tedium" segment of the video couldn't be any more on point. Bravo!
Exactly my thoughts. I really enjoyed Totk the same way I enjoyed Botw in 2017. But being honest these games are so similar that Totk just feels like a complete and definitive version of Botw. One of my friends recently bought a Switch and asked whether it is better to play Botw first. I said he better plays only Totk. Playing both games one after another would be so frustratingly tedious
@@Sidewalk277 While I do agree that it would be frustratingly tedious, I don't think I would recommend TOTK in that situation. BOTW feels like a way more cohesive and interesting experience imo. Discovering the world was much more fun for me than the heavy building/crafting gimmick.
Not to mention exploration and quest completion becomes more tedious when you realise your rewards are just the same stuff from the last game and the characters you meet are the same but not and they don't remember you. In my opinion TOTK was not made with BOTW players/fans in mind
@@mafiaboss3077 100%. Tbh my only incentive to explore the depth was the hidden treasures, but when I realized it was the exact same stuff I had in BOTW, dealing with the omnipresent annoying darkness just didn't feel worth it anymore. That whole map was very formulaic anyway (especially when you realize it's just the Hyrule topology replicated but upside down)
That awkward moment where I did the entire hateno mayor quest hoping to have the clothing lady give me a paraglider before not getting it and realizing that there was a story quest for me.
@@Zeldrake the game does say though that your goal is to find Zelda. Given what happened in the intro, most players should feel like getting back there is a priority . the first thing a player sees when they jump off the sky to the surface is Hyrule castle floating in the sky. If you go straight to the castle you will run into lookout landing. Which directly leads you to get the paraglider. Very straightforward
@@YellowElevator815 on the flipside, seeing all that scary evil red energy destroy link's arm & now all around Hyrule Castle means I Don't Want Anything To Do With That, much like how in BOTW you're very much not encouraged to visit the castle immediately
@@YellowElevator815 Like how in BotW if you go there like things suggest YOU GO TO THE FINAL BOSS. Most people learned to go there last so most people won't go straight there because the previous game taught us otherwise.
Re: healing - I think they moved away from enemies dropping hearts because they wanted to give you a reason to hunt animals and gather fruits and vegetables. I think there should be a healing potion you can brew, with the needed ingredients being relatively rare, and that and faeries should be the only ways of instantly healing mid-combat - because yeah, eating a million apples in the pause menu to instantly heal from death's door to full health is absurd. Most food should give you a regen effect, if that, instead, and you should need to eat it before commencing combat.
On the comment of rocks: At some point you have access to cannons through the gumball machines. Get a ton. It is always good to have one or two fused to a weapon. Then the rock walls become a non-issue as you blast through them quickly with a cannon + Yunobo.
I do wish the game had doen a better job of pointing that out- I constantly forgot I had that option, even after getting the mining turret or whatever that canon-on-a-spike blueprint was called
You don't even need to fuse it, just drop one on the ground and aim it with Ultrahand. One cannon can get you through even the most rock-filled cave. But a fused cannon might break early.
Not only does Yunobo's charge take a long time to get back, you have to CHASE HIM BACK DOWN EVERY TIME and either sift through the other sages or just straight up turn them off to make sure you don't press one of them on accident instead
Similarly, having the Sage ability and item pick-up mapped to the same button stinks too. Often times I would want to pick something up and Tulin would run up to me and I'd accidentally blow something away. Happened to one of the first dragon parts I farmed and Tulin blew it straight off a cliff in Gerudo Valley. I still haven't forgiven him.
@@mrcat3493 Oh mannnn yeah I can imagine that. In BotW I never had to turn off the Champion abilities, but in this game if I don't turn off the Sage abilities I feel like I'm actively making my game worse. Most frequently for me is in a battle, or just after, I'll be pressing A a lot to pick up monster parts and then I'll turn on Riju's ability and have to chase her town to turn it back off, or just wait it out.
And he's actually the least annoying to chase down because he's bigger and slower. XD I use him the most. I think their AI thinks you're running that way whenever you turn around and try to run to them for your power. You can't even block and select them at the same time.
@@quonit37 IKR? It gets out of control with five of them running around and, quite frankly, they are useless outside of a use-case scenario. Riju was really only helpful/fun in caves with horriblins, Tulin for gliding. The rest kind of suck.
28:50 Elemental attacks hit twice. Once with the element itself and once with the damage part of the attack. This makes it bypass the one shot protection. Gleeoks, lightning, fused elemental weapons, explosions (I think), and any other attack that inflicts ice, electric, or fire damage. I also remember getting one shot by a lynel in the depths one time so maybe gloom has an effect on one shot protection. I haven't tested this gloom theory though so it could be wrong. Edit: Btw nice video ceave. Glad to see you're back!
Did you wear max upgraded armor when facing the lynel? When facing the depths final evo lynel, if you don’t have fully upgraded armor, it bypasses the 1 shot rule. (Never got 1 shoted when doing the lynel colliseum with +4 barb set)
@@jordanertz3034 I see. I was wondering if gloom hits twice like the other elements, but that makes a lot more sense. The minibosses that one-shot in BOTW probably also one-shot in TOTK then.
@@mooneater4596 I think it does do some sort of calculation of armor or progress because I've noticed that in this game and in the last. I assume that different minibosses have a value that if you are higher than in armor you cannot get one-shot by that enemy. No clue what the actual calculations are tho.
So, for me, the one issue that stood out the most to me was: When you are using the Autobuild rune, the game will disable your ability to pull out Zonai parts from your inventory. The fact that, during the single most likely situation for you to want to pull out Zonai parts, you are not allowed to do that, is a good indicator of how little thought was put into how the player is actually going to play the game, in my opinion.
That does not sound like an oversight but like a clear decision for specific gameplay. Like not allowing to fuse in the menus. I think they want to create a feeling that it is really happening on that realm and not from a videogame menu.
I would never use the Zonai parts in autobuild. Autobuild is so cheap with 3 Zonaite per missing part that I value the Zonai parts in the inventory much higher. I used the Zonai parts for building something new that isn't part of the autobuild history.
honestly i hate to say this but; skill issue. it takes no brain to just pull out the zonai devices beforehand, like sure the first time i understand the anger but afterwards is just honestly you being salty something didnt go your way. its not that hard to go into the menu and pull out the devices beforehand. its just a few more button clicks...cmon.
@@-letspretendidontexist-8479 Nope, things that bother you are not necessarily a skill issue. Doing it in an easier way for the player was a possibility and Nintendo decided to do it this way. And that is fine.
@@m0n0deferia Agreed! Whether it's a good system or not is a different question. Although I, generally speaking, like the physicality of BOTW/TOTK over the ancient menu/physics system that is Elden Ring (but that game has other great things going for it that the open world Zeldas lack).
This is EASILY the best Tears of the Kingdom retrospective yet. Your video style and writing is so much better than the likes of some other recent videos that I will not call out.
@@OoTZOMMMoOThank you for saying this so I didn't have to. It really bugs me how people have started using that word without even knowing its meaning lol
About the shield parry thing, it was more useful in botw because of the existence of guardians, but I agree they should've changed it a bit since they got rid of those. Now the only usefulness it serves is against lynels using an almost broken royal guard's claymore. The claymore does double damage when it's almost broken, so you don't want to flurry rush it, you shield parry their attacks so you can crit them with your bow easier, then you ride on their back because hitting a lynel while riding their back doesn't do durability damage to your sword.
Shield parries don't even reflect most projectiles! You're telling me that Link can send a whole-ash laser back with a parry, but he can't do that to a Shock Fruit Arrow?
I think the design of BoTW intended the full shield block to be the low risk, low reward option. A successful parry reward you with a stun, no durability lost. A perfect dodge is the highest risk/reward because you need to dodge with backflip or side step correctly, and I think the time window is similar to a parry. I really think they believed most people will actually put their 2 handed weapon away to use shield as a drawback for better spear range and claymore powerful charge attack.
@@EarthWingedDragon A fine opinion and analysis, and I would actually agree if the timing for a flurry rush was tighter. Parry timings are so much more strict than flurry rush timings, you have so much leeway with a flurry rush, taking all the risk out of "high risk, high reward," making it just "high reward."
I already had the master sword when I explored under the koruk forest and ascended up to the deku tree... I had no idea there was an epic quest associated with everything...
my big issue with that quest is that the gloom hands showed up as i was making my way to the deku tree in the first place. so I was trying to get there this enemy showed up and i killed it and phantom ganon appeared and it was like "woah wtf" but then I got to the deku tree and dived in and its just "oh you again?"
I now have the words to explain why various game design choices are so annoying. I knew the button mapping, quick menu, and sage activation was bad and wanted custom button mapping. You connected OG Zelda button mapping. But probably one of your best insights was explaining the button mapping is bad because it's contradicting and doesn't appropriately theme actions to controller regions nor directions. What a long video, but it was so worth it!
@@alexs29 Nintendo gets so much forgiveness for having the most annoying, tedious, minor flaws in game design that are extremely easy to resolve. They only removed a few of these flaws in Tears of the Kingdom (and added like 30 more minor aspects of annoyance) yet people only focus on the few they removed. Nintendo fans are so easy to please.
I agree with most of these point, which quite surprised me. I really like totk, except for me lacking motivation to explore after beating the game (30-40 hrs), and doing all Lightroots and Shrines (110 hrs), but the only point I didn’t fully experience during my playthrough was the control issues. I guess I had to much experience with Botws throwing button, as I have 250+ hrs in that game only on my main savefile. Overall another amazing video, so incredibly glad you’re back Ceave!
I never played BotW, but I also didn’t really have any trouble with the control scheme. Sure, some things were noticeable like the need to drop items to fuse, the quick menu only really being usable for a couple items in most used mode, etc, but overall it felt just fine.
Majority of the control section didn’t make sense to me in the vid bc I really didn’t have a problem with the controls. It felt like he made it a lot more complicated then it actually was
One of my personal greatest frustration points during my playthrough was finding the Water 'Temple' while exploring and solving all the puzzles but not being able to progress because of lacking Seidon's ability. Either let me break the sequencing and beat the temple, don't let me find it like the Thunder Temple or make it very clear I'm not supposed to do anything up there. This way it left me feeling so blue balled!
Same, but Wind Temple for me. I just happened to wander up that way after hitting the Skyview Tower and only realized after I was at the top that I was blocked from progression. I dropped a Travel Medallion... and STILL had to reclimb the damn thing once I started Tulin's quest. The game is so self-contradictory.
It's so ridiculous! They just pasted the structure of a standard Zelda game on top of the open world and then just started hacking away any elements that didn't work, instead of trying to actually find a way to integrate that sense of adventure and progression into the freedom of the open environment. And I *know* Nintendo have the skills to figure that out, but because they're so headstrong and bullishly proud of BotW, they didn't bother trying to use the time and resources they were reusing from BotW to make a game that stays more true to the Zelda series. Instead they decided to just... waste six years of valuable development time on doing next to nothing? This game honestly could still have easily been postgame DLC to Breath of the Wild, and the only reason that it isn't is because it'd sell more copies as a standalone game.
@@papersonic9941 I wouldn't call it "at the entrance." It's at the entrance to the jumping-maze sequence up to the Temple. I dropped my medallion at the warp point at the Temple itself because it refused to activate for me without Tulin.
I played for 10 hours without finding the paraglider. I had to look up online to learn that I'd missed the necessary quest. In Botw, after the turorial, I had all I needed to do anything in the game. Loved it. In Totk, I was really annoyed that my exploration was unclearly hamstrung by quest elements I hadn't completed yet.
Tbf you have to go to Hyrule Castle, complete that mission, then return to lookout landing to get the paraglider. How are you expected to know to return when you aren’t told?
@@RalorPenwat yeah, I went there. Then the main quest started, and I thought I'd rather explore. How am I supposed to know that the paraglider is at the end of that quest element? After all, I finished the tutorial didn't I? Look, fun game, I've put in near 100 hours, I'm enjoying it. I've just been frustrated multiple times and had to set it down. I'm not sure why we would think it's a 10/10 perfect game deserving game of the year if it clearly has so many flaws that make it a pain to play.
The ZR toggle you propose is brilliant and already in use. Final Fantasy XIV uses it to great effect to have up to 32 programmable buttons on the face buttons at any given time. For your idea: Single Press and Hold ZR would let you have those 12 programmable buttons. But if you add a double tap and then hold ZR you could have up to 18 programmable buttons in Zelda. How do I know it works? Because I use that double tap daily in Final Fantasy. You'd think it's clunky, but it's very intuitive and works like a charm.
1:24:15 I was thinking about this before when I sometimes play BotW! I just think to myself how convenient this game would be if I just used the GamePad for the map, or how less broken it would be to consume food on the bottom screen during combat, or how less frequent I would in general be going through the menus. There are these gimmick puzzles in BotW that force you to use motion controls. These are some of the last remaining bits that utilize the GamePad's unique features left over in the game, and I just find that so interesting! Like, BotW was supposed to better showcase what the Wii U GamePad could do before they fully removed most features. Man, like, the Wii U just makes me sad! Like, it had such a cool Swiss army knife of a controller, and they were too scared to take many risks with it because people weren't buying their games and people were ridiculing games like StarFox Zero. But for every StarFox Zero, there was a Super Mario Maker, a game that uses the GamePad in an ingenious way! Splatoon is still best played on Wii U! Even after the third Splatoon game, they just couldn't implement a seamless way for players to have instant access to the map like they did before.
This was amazing. You always have the genuine curiosity and courage to actually dive deep into what you are talking about, analysing and interpreting the mechanics with originality and depth in seemless relation to any other aspect of the game that may be relevant, almost no rote repetition of general discourse and making it stupidly entertaining all the way though. Hoo-ray. So glad you're back
For someone who grew up playing every Zelda game when it was released...this just doesn't feel like Zelda anymore. Flying across the map in a self-assembled spaceship is cool, but it doesn't fit the mythos.
I think that design progression bars without meaning rewards is to not punish players who do not play 100% of the game, focusing big rewards to the main campaign.
Every time the bullet time puzzle at the Water Temple gets brought up, I'm not sure whether to be embarrassed or impressed with myself for forgetting bullet time existed and instead solving it with a pure blind-luck shot.
Honestly I think it's a good puzzle. Just should have been a shrine puzzle. Hell, they still could've kept it in the water temple but should've either had a couple more iterations (like the boat bouncing in the wind temple) or had it be part of a shrine prior.
I just spammed it with bomb arrows 😂
I think I just didn't have the patience. I might have used recall too, I don't even remember
So I wasn't the only one 😂😂
I don't remember that part? I did the water temple and don't remember a bullet hell.
One of the things that bothered me the most with the story is after the incredibly emotional final dragon tear where we learn of Zelda's sacrifice, no one cares. Purah seems like she doesn't believe us and none of the NPCs act any different.
I even questioned why "Find Zelda" was even a quest anymore, because like, she sacrificed herself for the Master Sword, we found the sword, that's why she told us to find her. We did it. But the game really doesn't care about her sacrifice outside of that and it kind of upset me
Except... the game DOES care.
The other sages do express their shock and grievances at the event, but there's really no time for them to mourn on the matter when Ganondorf is, you know, Actively Destroying Your Homeland And Trying To Kill Everyone. He's extended root-like veins into the land of Hyrule itself, through the depths, to try and drain it of life to restore himself, and is, you know, actively making monsters to try and kill people and conquer the land. And you, as Link, neither have the time nor priorities to broadcast to the entire hopeful kingdom that misses their princess "Hey so your Princess is never coming home, she's a dragon now", because... what do you think that will do to people? To the children at Hateno School waiting for her to come back? To Penn and the Lucky Gazette, actively investigating her disappearance with clueless determination? To all your desperate neighbors and scared friends?
Purah herself also hesitates when speaking but eventually puts on a brave face, and one of her last wishes that she tells you, FROM her FOR ZELDA, is to punch Ganondorf in the face for her. She HAS to maintain her position at Lookout Landing, but still expresses those wishes loudly and with determination.
You also tell Impa about Zelda at the end of the quest, and she, above all the others, expresses the MOST grief and regret at the situation, as both you and Zelda's oldest and arguably closest friend. However, she doesn't lose hope, and insists she'll try to look into matters further, in hopes of finding a way to return her from her dragon form.
And as for "Find Zelda" still being a quest, even after the Dragon Tears... it's because that's Link. Something translation to English loses is that the entire Quest Journal is LINK'S journal, which expresses and follows his own thoughts as he follows through on quests.
He REFUSES to believe that's it. He REFUSES to believe that Zelda is lost, doomed to forever fly the skies in a sleep without end, because he wants to believe, through to the very end, that there's still a way to save her. To bring her back. To make it right.
And there is. And he finds it, WITH that stubborn determination. "Find Zelda" doesn't complete until after Zelda is really, truly saved, having been turned back with the power of Recall, amplified not just by Rauru and Sonia's love for Zelda, but Link's as well (If you'll recall, Sonia's advice on Recall was "asking an object about its memories, who and what it was, how it got there, and returning to that time"), caught in a fall (where the title of the triumphant falling rescue music is, not kidding, "Not this time!"), and reawakened. Only when Zelda is herself, is back, is safe with Link, only THEN does he consider his quest to "Find Zelda" complete.
@@carmichaelcarlisle6635 I think that's a cute way to see it and probably how it was supposed to be read, but also that's just not how it felt to me during gameplay. I never actually talked to Impa at the end of the quest, and Purah didn't sound like she was "putting on a brave face" to me it felt like she was just disregarding me. In my recordings of playing the game I even talked about how the games major ignoring that She Turned Into A Dragon made me say that she had to go back to normal at the end because otherwise the game would care more :/
Again, I like your interpretation, it's cute and that's how I think it was meant to be seen, but there's a difference between that and how it /felt/ while playing the game
Link's reaction kinda bothered me. Just stares into the sky for a bit. Almost feels like he knows the game will undo it anyway at the end, and while I have zero gripes about how they did that, I wish Link had reacted more fittingly in the moment, even if briefly.
Ngl when I realized there was an actual find zelda quest still present after finding out about what happened i was just confused and kind of felt insulting to the whole emotional part of the story idk
@@carmichaelcarlisle6635Honestly the whole turning Zelda back I to a human cheapens her sacrifice.
Not having a perfect happy ending is fine. Maybe have a spell that removes her part of the triforce to make her a mortal dragon with her memories returned thanks to Link collecting them. A dragon who can live out her days with her friends, but still as a dragon. But even that might be a cop out. Of course as long as the dragon is immortal you can have no sequals... Though a equal where Zelda as a dragon is queen of Hyrule would be interesting.
Destructible rocks were A LOT better when we had remote bombs
nah there were just a lot less of them and we didn't have caves so they were not a problem. then nintendo in their infinite wisdom made it a problem
10/10
I was pretty annoyed by the rocks too. Then I realized you can fuse the zonai cannon to a weapon
yeah exactly. you get the canon out, you power it up and they use ultra hand to point it. it is extremely fun i dont understand the hate about it@@chasecreed2
@@SimonLabdoes it not destroy crystals that precipitate from the broken rocks?
@AmixLiark The canons only destroy the cracked rocks. Any minerals, rocks, or weapons will just drop or will be bounced around a little, not destroyed though.
one thing i don't see people talk about with the sages is that the game tells you you can whistle to make the sages gather around you in combat.
You cannot do this.
it KINDA works
I saw that on the loading screen and freaked! Like finally! A way to get these fuckers to come to me. I never got it to work.
You *can* do that. They run from where they are, though, and I'm not sure they'd stay at their near-you destination for long once they get there.
You can. It just doesn't work well
@@viktorthevictor6240 of course it doesn't. nintendo is great at thinking up mechanics but terrible in actually implementing them
I was constantly awestruck throughout this video from all these sudden realizations about why this game frustrated me so much. Each point you brought up felt like unearthing a repressed memory of another aspect of this game I had forgotten even annoyed me in the first place.
During my playthrough, each flaw individually just felt like a nitpick that I could learn to live with, but laying them all out together like this really put things into perspective. You were able to put into words so many feelings I felt about this game that I didn't know how to express.
The biggest revelation by far, though, was when you brought up the Wii U game pad. I had never considered what the UI would have been like with a second screen. As soon as you said it I audibly gasped, and had to pause the video to just sit and contemplate what could have been. I was reminded of Scott the Woz's recent retrospective on the Wii U as a whole, and how few games made any meaningful use of the game pad at all. BotW and the Wii U were made for each other, and divorcing them made them both drastically worse off.
Fantastic video, Ceave. Glad to see you back on TH-cam.
Ironic that the game about a guy sleeping for 100 years got screwed over by bad timing
You don't even need button remapping to fix the Sage abilities. They can be contextual button presses when performing certain actions: Tulin when gliding, Riju when shooting, Sidon when guarding and Yunobo when charging. Mineru's construct is the only exception that makes sense because you ride it.
It's downright baffling that the current system made it into the game. You have to TRY to design something that bad.
Only problem with limiting a Tulin hotkey to when gliding is he does have *some* ground uses outside the way he's used in the wind temple (mostly a free sideways fan, but yeah).
Also, remember that this is Nintendo's very first 70 dollar game...Are they like, trying to condition us with this kinda crap or smth?
@@citrusella-nomorecraptions
The wind temple is the only place where that's needed. They could've just removed that part of it when using the spirit avatar
@@citrusella-nomorecraptions I think they could have done both. A contextual menu like Tulin has but you can also go up and "lets go" him.
The other sages have no contextual trigger which is where I think it's lacking. Sidon should 100% have his lets go appear when your holding the shield in guard & Riju should appear when you've the bow drawn. Then also have it so you could activate them by walking up and doing your thing.
At a minimum they should have removed horse whistling and put it in the ability slot where the map is & then when pressing down on the d pad had a "lets go" menu
I feel it could have done with both, or a "Summon to Me" button that functions like the standard abilities wheel so you don't have to run around after them to use their abilities
I think my main problem with the game is the rampant inconvenience, with one of the most egregious examples being trying to use the sages in combat. It would have been so simple to put the sages' powers on a selection wheel mapped to the dpad down button, making them convenient and useful. Instead, they went with just about the least convenient way possible to activate them. It's just disappointing more than anything.
Yeah, but if I imagine all these inconvenient things being mapped onto the game pad, it just makes me sad because if they forced you to play it like that, or even gave you the option to do so, it flow so great and solve a lot of problems, while also making healing harder
Yeah, whenever I go to pick up items, that annoying bird blows them all away
They completely wasted the down dead. I never used it to call for a horse not even once.
@@JoshuaGlock Same. Like, I'm sure that there are players who give a darn about horses, but since they're fundamentally worse transportation than tping to a skyview tower nearby, it kinda ticks me off that the stable shenanigans are so extensive, and that they're required for the great fairies. Doing that series of quests was easily the most infuriating part of my first playthrough. And then because they tried so hard to force horses down my throat, they didn't leave room to make the sages, an infinitely more central game mechanic, convenient for me.
@@noahlebaron729believe me, even I as a horse lover hate this. It's so much easier and quicker to just approach the horse yourself 99% of the time instead of whistling (or whistling while approaching it). It wouldn't hurt at all for that button to be somewhere more hidden since I used it not more than 6 times (most of which were me standing awkwardly for the horse to approach for a few minutes to see how long it takes)
1:16:32
The secret stones are called... "secret stones". The difference is that "secret stone" is a common folk lore/fairy tale item, and that the word is cool (for lack of better word), in japanese.
It would be like the Master Sword being called "The Sword in the Stone" or something like that. It might translate horribly and sound stupid, but it would literally just be "Sword in Stone", due to the reference to the Authurian legend.
But yeah, they should really just have called them Magical Stones, or Sage Tears, or ANYTHING with a cool ring to it.
(I'm sure somebody else have commented this, but you can some words for The Algorithm, just in case.)
Sacred stones would’ve been so much better
Sacred stones seems to be the fan consensus on what they *should* have been called.
I think something from the Cultivation lexicon might work, like Ki Stone or Mana Core or something like that, because Secret Stones have a very big Cultivation feeling
They called them secret stones yet it seemed like everyone knew about them
"Secret stones" should have been called "sacred stones"
"gloom" which is an even dumber name than secret stone should have been called "miasma" or even just called "malice" again, I don't care if they're technically not the same thing, malice is a way better name than gloom
Accidentally entering Mineru's mech instead of climbing a dazed lynel, then fumbling around not knowing how to get out, then being mercilessly killed by the now awaken lynel is one of the most aggravating game experiences I've ever had.
Just as aggravating as picking up loot then Yonobo zips in the way and you accidentally explode the barrels in camp by launching him, instant death, do the whole encounter over again. I have the sages permanently disabled as they are a liability, either by being in the way or by inadvertently killing me.
this is why I turn off mineru most of the time
I despise minerus construct, I keep her vow off at all times
@@eldritch_midnight6007 I keep the construct active for the sole purpose of bullet time
Just stay on the robot and block it’s attack until it heads back
The realization that the Wii U Gamepad was probably the primary intent for the menus in BotW/TotK hit me like a cold bucket of water
Being hit in the face with a bucket hurts btw I don't recommend it
I literally gasped irl
like wdym you made this for one of your most outdated consoles??
It had never occurred to me but it seems so obvious now that it's been pointed out. Crazy that one of the biggest problems with these two games is more or less directly caused by the financial failure of the Wii U
Goddamnit Wii U!
While it was in development, Breath of the Wild was doubtlessly seen as the flagship title that would catapult the Wii-U to success. Unfortunately for Nintendo, the Wii-U was already considered a failure before Breath of the Wild was finished, so instead it was to become the flagship title for the Switch on day one. It's an historical irony that the game that caused Switchs to fly off the shelf wasn't even meant to be played on the Switch at all.
I did Tears of the Kingdom in a very specific order so I found out about the Zelda betrayal as late as possible, but even I, finding out as late as I did, was frustrated when the story kept pretending like I shouldn't know. I started writing about how Link is actually angry Ganon is impersonating Zelda and is going after him on purpose instead of, like, him being dumb and still not getting it after the first four sages lol
My friend and I did the Rito, Gerudo, and Zora regions first. We then did a handful of memories out of order, but by coincidence had not gotten the one where Sonia and Zelda ambush the doppleganger. We had also only done a handful of Zelda sightings missions, so we had no idea that she's going around and causing problems because to us it just seemed like a bunch of misunderstandings.
We decided to investigate the giant thundercloud in Faron which led us to get Mineru way before the story asked us to, and THEN we finally did the Goron region, and were very confused as to why Zelda would give the Gorons drugs.
Before going to Hyrule Castle to follow up on Purah's most recent Zelda sighting, we decided to go and get the last few memories, and THEN we discovered that there's a doppelganger Zelda and everything clicked into place.
We have generally thought that doing the Goron mission last inadvertently led us to one of the best plot twists the game had to offer, but I do sometimes wonder if there would have been more shock and surprise if we had gone to Hyrule Castle and followed Zelda asking us to follow her without knowing that it was an evil doppelganger.
@@51918 That's soooo cool. I remember during the game I was like "The Ring Ruins? Well, I trust Zelda, so there probably is something bad there I'd hate to disobey orders" to going "GANON WHAT ARE YOU HIDING WHY CAN'T I TELL THEEEMMMMMM"
There's a lot of cases of 'you don't know this when you actually do' like non-story NPCs acting like you don't know them, and it's odd because it's SO satisfying when the actual story cast knows you. I know it's technically not impossible for someone to have never met, say, Bolson in BotW, but I don't feel like that'd be a problem to ignore. It'd be more fun for people that did play all of BotW to feel like that carried over the way Tarrey Town and your horse apparently did.
(Also really funny how if you summon a SECOND Epona from the Amiibo even though you had her already, the guy won't let your rename that horse because 'It'd be too confusing." XD
I roleplay Link as a dunce that kicks in every door and demands to see zelda. Everything he does is to see zelda.
Pirates? They probably captured zelda. A shrine? She probably is examining it. A chest? She probably is hiding inside. A bossmonster? TELL ME WHERE SHE IS YOU DEMON. A korok? Maybe he saw zelda, lets ask! A random mountain or forest? She probably got lost, better check it. Hateno? Wtf guys this is my house, I was raised here with the other elders, you know me, wtf. A banana? Zelda loves bananas! OMG ZELDA I WAS SEARCHING FOR YOU aaand shes gone. Damn, I have to get quicker.
I did this before I realized Link is a official dunce. But its very fitting.
Also its fun to find new excuses to just play the game
@@quonit37 one of my early theories was that zelda is playing extreme ocarina of time. Switching between multiple time zones and having to do everything in order and correct, so it wont end bad. Which on one hand explains a lot of shrines and ruin puzzles but also leads to odd moments of "evil zelda" that are necessary for the big picture. Cause if someone else would do it link looses the opportunity and ganon wins.
But yeah thats sadly not true and I was doubting from the beginning that nintendo would do such an amazing thing.
1:05:15 another issue with the execution delay is that when your attempt to solve a puzzle fails, you're never quite sure if it's because you have the wrong solution, or because you have the right solution but are executing it poorly.
This is precisely what ended up ruining Tunic for me right at the end. Not giving the player _any_ feedback, even when they've successfully navigated far, far, down the correct path, only to silently fail on a single misstep, is disrespectful to both time and sanity.
Author pointing out that he create vehicle in temple of spirit that fell down
He create new one instead of recalling it to the starting point by Recall ability.
I think this is lack of logical thinking, or lack of basic knowledge about mechanic in game (this is one of the last areas to explore in the plot), not the problem of the delayed execution.
well to be fair he didn't have the right solution so it makes sense that he had to take unnecessary extra steps and failed
@@quinkrinson3872 I think, this game is super fair in terms of logic and basic mechanics. But you need to have "right" attitude to solving problems. To make MVP and go further, and on and on and on, in the loop. The engineering mindset.
While watching this film, I'm constantly have thought that author is overthinking everything, over-engineering everything.
I understand that over-engineering if you have that high skill to make fun of doing complex stuff. This is fine. But there is a serious problem when you, as a player, avoiding the most straightforward mechanics and get frustrated. And after that you create long rant about mechanics which you doesn't understand.
This is my biggest issue to this film and author.
@@MD-uc8bx I think you misunderstood the criticism. They were stating that the act of solving problems became so tedious that there was no more intrinsic motivation to try and actually engage with problem-solving steps. Ceave did use the engineering mindset: after this failure they used they most efficient solution that required the least thinking and cheesed all the remaining puzzles. They didn't have fun doing this, and I think its reasonable that they wouldn't and a valid criticism of the game.
Another ui problem: since the skip dialogue button is mapped to the b button, but the b button is also used to automatically stop interacting with an npc, interactions with the great fairies and beedle and such are incredibly annoying, since you have to make sure you're mashing b just the right number of times to get through the 8th time the fairy tells you that ranking a set to level 2 can give a buff, but not press b enough times to close out of the menu and have to wait for the fairy to go back down into her hole and then come back out again to keep upgrading stuff, and again make sure not to mash b too many times to close the menu AGAIN.
Me whenever this happens
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Like all games aren’t like this.
Just don't button mash? Lmao
@@mikuenjoyerXD That's not really a solution to something so basic it shouldn't even be possible to be an issue in the first place
I hate beetle's dialogue about not hating things before getting to know it 😬 Stop preaching & just sell me some arrows dip shite!
the reason you constantly throw your weapon when you wanna use ultra hand is because when using ultra hand you use R a lot to rotate. so it becomes associated with the move in your muscle memory.
Exactly. It happened to me when I first started the game, but after I realized why I was throwing the weapon, it was really easy to stop the muscle memory.
The only instance of anything close to this for me is forgetting to hold R in order to rotate the item and being momentatily confused on why it doesn't turn. I think this guy may gave coordination issues.🤷
@@xg223 - These are well known control scheme design issues, some inherited from BotW. Why are you talking shit?
@@xg223 - So you've already lowered yourself by talking sh it about a "du mb" guy who turned out to be more informed than you, but now you're trying to laugh off fact.
@@xg223 - Why do other people have to take insults from you, just because you have problems? According to you, that should be "you having you problems", right?
Only 6 minutes in and he has already pinpointed my exact biggest problem with the game; that it wants to give you the freedom to do anything in any order, but also punishes you with frustration if you don’t do their unknowable intended order.
In a way I appreciate that though. I did the water temple first. The enemies were thrashing me with ease, so it forced me to play smarter. I used korok leafs throw them off. I enjoyed that.
really? I never felt like I was punished for the order in which I did things with one minor exception(although it was pretty big story-wise): The dragon tear memory things. And I'm only talking specifically about TOTK, not BOTW. I pretty much made it my mission to go after all the tears before I did much of anything else. I stopped to do a few things along the way like shrines and koroks, but I mostly made my way directly to the tears. So I learned REALLY early on about where Zelda was and that she wasn't actually wreaking havoc around Hyrule. And the fact that Link just acted like an idiot and went along with it every single time, instead of being able to tell the NPCs how stupid they were being drove me nuts. That needed fixed. Linearity isn't the way to fix it though.
They need to either just do away with the tears entirely or come up with better reasons for you to search those specific areas as well as not have the Yiga clan trying to trick you into thinking you've found Zelda because every instance of that BS only works if you do all the tears last. And that's not gonna happen because they're designed to draw your attention to them, and friggin' Impa has you go to one really early on in the main quest.
@@TheRealNintendoKid A couple examples: Some shrines are impossible without the Paraglider, but also not obviously so. When I first got to the surface, I didn’t know when or even if I’d get a paraglider, so I just explored like normal. Spent way too long on impossible shrines before giving up.
Also; I spent a lot of frustrating time exploring Thunderhead and Dragonhead Isles in the fog, because I had no indication that a later main quest would cause them to clear up.
Finally; a friend of mine got all the way up to the Wind Temple without Tulin, having no idea that he was supposed to have Tulin. Spent a while trying to figure out how to activate the devices before giving up and looking up a guide. And then he had to re-climb the whole area with Tulin to get back there later since Tulin won’t follow you there if you warp.
@@GendoIkari_82 Also the great fairy quest only able to be started in hebra as well as herbra npcs teaching you the most about the early game. You are so very clearly supposed to go there first. I had the same thing but with the water temple i flew up there thinking it was just a normal place to explore but silly me for trying to have freedom in an open world game. Its even worse because my first dungeon was the spirit temple. I flew up to the interesting island in a thunderstorm using my energy cells i got from the depths and then found the big door. I then realized i needed hearts so i did a good amount of shrines and then did the temple and got that sage first. It was so cool they allowed me to do that but you just arent allowed to do that with the other ones? The dungeons should be modeled like that one. They should be barred off by something like hearts if you want to have linear difficulty. You communicate to the player this one maybe shouldnt be "first" but still give them the freedom to choose to do it.
Edit: also autobuild its so easy to miss that if you decide to play/explore differently and its a core ability. You have to go back to all the places in the depths youve previously explored for schemea stones if you got the ability late (which a lot of people do)
@@GendoIkari_82 I did exactly that. I didn't get the glider until about 20 hours in when my friends told me where it was. I didn't even see Lookout Landing because the first time I hit the over world, I saw a falling rock and took it up to a floating island with a chest and was trapped there. I also went in search of pants, since I missed them after the shrine in the cold zone on Tutorial Island. I only learned at about 40 hours and six month later (when I started playing again) that I had missed the cold weather pants on Tutorial Island. I had also missed the tutorial on the zonai device gumball machines and gave up after trying to drop ores and monster parts in ones I found later.
Ceave, as someone with hearing issues, I massively appreciate you including subtitles for every video. You're one of the best gaming TH-camrs and the subtitles are the cherry on top.
Echoing this (pun intended)! They're so, so helpful.
Same! I have Auditory Processing Disorder (my hearing is technically fine, but there's sometimes a brain side issue that can make understanding what people are saying difficult) and subtitles are always welcome! It makes videos so much easier to watch
mine just glitch out and render all the subtitles at once for about 4 seconds at a random point and not show any again ever
@@jayveerisdabest7500 I think that was a problem with a lot of videos that had properly timed captions--TH-cam would just time them all at 00:00:00 and then basically the whole file imploded. (I don't know if they fixed it or not because I haven't had the issue on THIS video but on other ones--I reported it back then.)
I love how at 10:00 you mention a shrine that teaches us that we can use ultrahand to move an object, and then use rewind to ride it, while that strategy for that particular shrine, is in fact, cheesing it and completely skipping the intended puzzle the shrine offers
I did that shrine by resting the objects on the next ledge and then ascending up through them. Was that the intended solution, or did I cheese it too?
@@rayflyers Fuse the spheres so they don't fall off from the thing in the middle, then once they're stable, you jump on them to get to the other side
The intention is to have multiple solutions, I also use the ultra hand + rewind a lot of the time
@@burushifudara this is the intended
For everyone else, yes, there are multiple solutions that are "intended". But in this particular puzzle, the "most intended" solution is to carry the previous boulder to the next section and fuse them to build a "bridge" in equilibrium. Why is it the most intended? Well, you start with one boulder in a flat section so you just use it like a bridge, then you have two boulders and two slopes, fuse them and they don't slide anymore, then we have 3 boulders and a pyramid (3 sides) fuse them and they can stand atop the pyramid.
Nobody can tell me that it’s intended that i can skip 95% of shrines by moving something with ultra hand and reversing it. It’s just bad game design.
I like that even when people are trying to list the powers as they are actually named in game, almost everyone says "Rewind" in place of "Recall" 😂
It’s just a better name
Yaaaah, it's rewind time!
I think it’s the former name of that ability on trailers
I didn't realize giving myself an extra heart was going to completely nerf fairies because they no longer healed me enough to get full health and reactivate the 1-shot protection.
They're not entirely nerfed since they still save you if you die unexpectedly. Gives you a chance to heal again.
That Is why I only got hearts after maxing out my stamina. I didn't want to do away with one-hit protection, which effevtively means much more health. Having 4 hearts when that is full is so much better imo.
the only games where fairies heal you completely are Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, all the rest of Zelda games they just heal you from 5 to 8 hearts. They're just designed to revive you, not to be a full heal, if not they're too broken
@@NL-Xto more fully explain, if you have 3 hearts, the fairy heals you to full and activates the 1-shot protection so you could tank 1 hit without having to pause and heal. With more hearts, the fairy won't activate the protection so you have to pause immediately and heal to full or you'd die again next hit. It's minor but it's a nuisance.
@@jebussonofgob oh well, that is why I prefered the 4 bottles and hearts from enemies healing system
With the parrying vs dodging point, i agree v heavily as i remember thinking during my playthrough “oh i don’t really need to parry” i think this is a byproduct of guardians no longer being in the game. parrying was one of the faster ways to kill a guardian by reflecting the lasers back, but with no enemy to replace them in that way parrying really j becomes something you use to feel cool occasionally at the cost of the more effective flurry rush
I miss Guardians
gloom hands are great and fun but very once-off - gloom hands once are gloom hands everywhere
compare to skywatchers, decayed, stalkers, the decayed ones that only activate when you come near and spook you... just feels like something was lost
@@Zeldrakegreed. I still remember so clearly the first time I saw the active guardian on the great plateau and my heart was like 💀
i do use it against lynels because the short stun they get after a parry allows me to easily shoot them in the head, gibing me a chance to mount them and deal damage without my weapons taking any damage
except you literally have to learn how to shield parry to beat ganon at the end and i was *extremely* frustrated because i was horrible at it.
@@rachel8216 I never shield parried against Ganon. It's not necessary, at the very least.
The fear that, moving forward, Nintendo is going to make every new 3D Zelda game a big, open world, physics sandbox mirrors what happened to Animal Crossing.
It was once a game about making friends and collecting, but over time it drifted further and further into the territory of decorating and renovation. Late game in New Horizons practically feels like The Sims with cheats enabled, and "making friends" is barely even a consideration.
In much the same way, dungeon design and progression, once core features of Zelda, have come to feel like an afterthought.
shame nintendo didn't make the same game 15 times
@@ventriloquistmagician4735 It wouldn't be bad if it wasn't at the cost of what made the series popular in the first place. When the villagers in a game about being a villager are boring to talk to then something has probably gone wrong.
@@ventriloquistmagician4735Id totally rather be playing ocarina of time 4 right now than breath of the wild 1.5
@@pianoman7753 spoiled child
@@ventriloquistmagician4735wtf are you talking about man 😭 it's not like Nintendo is giving these games to us for free. TOTK cost $80 USD and we're allowed to complain about it if we didn't have a good time. Get off your high horse LMFAO
It bothers me so much how inexpressive Link is. The only emotion he EVER shows in this game is anger/protectiveness and the poses with the camera. Mineru was like "Zelda is alive now because of you, Link" and Zelda just looks at Link who's standing there like 😐 I can't fathom how we've gone from SS having the MOST expressive and relatable Link to BotW/TotK with a board of wood. Not only him, either. EVERY character is stiff. You save Zelda, she wakes up from being a dragon forever, and she just... stands there. That's it. Characters just... They STAND there.
Agreed, but replace SS with WW.
this really gets to me, actually. was looking at zelda's face during all memories, AND the ending cutscenes, thinking "girl your eye shape is hardly changing, aren't you distressed or tired or something?"
I had the exact same thoughts playing BOTW already, because in the nearly absent storyline for this game, the very few emotional moments (including Zelda and Link getting reunited) seriously lack character emotions.
TOTK's story was better written and filled with little moments of emotions, but sadly still not coming from the characters themselves, just the writing.
@@Sapphireeyes104you are so right oh my god. I miss that part of WW so much
@@jada9263 I honestly want another super expressive Zelda game like that one again sometime. It just made me smile so much
You described my feelings about the mech almost word-for-word. The game builds up such a feeling of excitement, and then immediately kills it
To be fair, you can equip it with powerful weapons or materials, which is atleast something. Though I 100% agree its clunky and very underpowered, especially for its large ass hitbox.
That mech suuuuuuuuuuucks
And after having already fought and easily won against Kohga in a mech on foot, having to fight the mech again but in a crappy mech of my own was such a drag
I did find the mech early in the game and not at the end as intented. And because the game had not mentioned it anywhere, the surprise felt like a great and satisfactory discovery.
On the contrary, the first time I reached the temple of Wind I did it without Tureli, what makes it impossible to beat and left me scratching my head for quite some time as the game does not tell you that he is mandatory for it.
totk is really good at that, it’s so frustrating. even the demon dragon fight is that, and so was beast ganon. gigantic screen filling monster that just stands there and lets you win. huge letdown right at the finish lines in both games.
Why does it have durability? Why does it have no damage reduction? Why is it so goddamn slow?
Every time I try out the mech, even the upgraded one it only somewhat consistently beats up hinox because there's no other enemy that size that doesnt either have a specific weak point or just outdamages the mech
_THAT_ dragon tear is the worst one in the game. Absolutely robs any momentum and tension that the story had up to the point because you immediately figure out the entire plot of the game, start to finish, with that one, single memory, and there are still like 50 hours left to go before you see it come to fruition. So frustrating.
lol, so it's like a bigger version of a high execution delay
Which one, just say the number?
@Pikaclev i presume the one where mineru goes "to become an immortal dragon is to lose oneself" yadda yadda... i adore totks story but fr that was the most blatant chekhov's gun moment of all time
Thinking abt it again maybe this comment was referring to the zelda "betrayal" tear. For me personally that was more of just a shocking moment than a plot twist because i assumed there was an evil zelda doppelganger somewhat early on (i went to gorons second) but i can see this comment referring to either of those tears tbh
@@Goobywooby3what's worse imo is what I did. I really love the master sword as a weapon so early on I specifically focused on getting it....I literally got the master sword before any of the tears...it completely ruined the story for me lmao
@RowsieFox Not to mention the master sword sucks. Its worse then botw by a large margin, even the base mastersword
The Master Sword quest was a cool setup. Unfortunately, Nintendo had a nice setup to also fuck over the twist, which I ran into. I wanted to check out the Deku Tree right away, so I went there after learning about the dragon tear memories in the field and temple with Impa. I couldnt figure out how to get into the forest, but there is a dragon tear memory right there, and its either the last memory or one of the last, and it shows the snippet of the quote "To eat your stone would turn you into a dragon, to become an immortal dragon is to lose yourself" It doesn't take a genius to put the new White dragon with gold hair I just saw 30 minutes ago with this quote to know what happened immediately. I took me a little bit more playing to get enough stamina to float a glider off the Great Sky Isle and then float to the dragon, but I had the Master Sword a handful of hours into the game. I didnt get to learn anything slowly over the game or first figure out how to help the Deku Tree and have to be far enough along to beat the gloom hands... And the entire main quest line was annoying now because both myself and Link know that Zelda is the dragon, but every quest is all about "Oh Zelda might be here, she was spotted!" But Link doesnt say ANYTHING to the other people!
There are so many ways to ruin this game's pacing it's ridiculous. It's a good story, don't get me wrong, but the way it gives you information is so poorly structured.
They really needed to just… NOT have that memory be a dragon tear. If you changed that one specifically, the story would be so much better
@@donn741 I didnt notice that the ruin showed the order, my GF pointed that out to me after I ruined it for myself. I just looked at the map on the floor, not really at the walls.
This is actually a very easy problem to fix programmatically, so it's annoying that Nintendo set things up the way they did. SImply setting it up so memories are recieved in the correct order regardless of the tear location is a no brainer. The memories are their own events, so there's no good reason for it.
@@mkyasha Yeah the memories have nothing to do with where you see them, why not just give you the next memory in sequence for each tear? Or they could just give you the tear as an item, and you go plug it in in the ruin that has the tablets in order. Anything would be better.
About the mech, sometimes the mech actually works against you. For example, if you fuse something like a cannon to Mineru, you would expect for it to do massive damage while fighting enemies, but instead if youre not on the mech Mineru just sometimes shoots you. Honestly Nintendo needs to rework Mineru because it ends up killing Link before even being able to kill a Bokoblin.
Yeah, Mineru freezes me all the time. Super-deflating.
least us 1.1.2 users can use her to dupe
@@Tailsbot98761 Hidden sage ability unlocked, LOL!
@@Tailsbot98761 I guess mineru has one use then
I never attach anything to mineru and only use her for mining to save durability and hopping on and off her back for bullet time in gleeok fights. She can be useful just not in the way the devs intended lol.
You know... The physics engine and contraption-building mechanics of this game really are something to behold. Which is weird because on one hand I'm impressed by them and I have to applaud them for their achievements. But on the other hand... I just don't care? Like... I'm playing a Zelda game. I want to raid dungeons, solve puzzles, explore caves and fight bosses like you do in the older games. I love the idea of an open-world Zelda game, but not with all of this physics and vehicle stuff taking up such a big chunk of it. If I wanted to build vehicles I would've played Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts. Honestly, I didn't get anything out of what was arguably this game's biggest feature, and that stings.
My heart sank during the demo where the first showed off how impressive ultrahand would be.
Agreed! It’s actually amazing all the physics and building mechanics they were able to do, and yet….I would trade it all just to have some normal freaking swords that aren’t degraded, and don’t have to have stupid rocks and things hanging off of them. 🤦🏻♂️
And yes, if you can’t tell, I also hate fuse. Turns out I like swords and shields in my “sword and shield” fantasy game. Not a stick with a wing on the end of it, a freaking SWORD!
Same, honestly.
My experience was to the contrary. While I do prefer the oldhead zeldas, I experienced totk differently than you. You complain about the building part not adding to the game but for me, building machines was my primary method of solving puzzles and combat problems right up to the end. I flew with a flying bike everywhere, I killed bosses and armies of enemies with spinning death lasers and frost emitters, I built tanks and drill vehicles to plow through rocks like butter and mow down enemies while being utterly safe from harm.
My approach to almost every situation in the game was spontaneously coming up with a machine or physics/game mechanic I could take advantage of in any given moment to both trivialize the problem or keep me safe while successfully solving the puzzle or raiding a temple or even finding better ways to travel.
Horses are basically useless in totk in light of superior alternatives the zonai devices let you create. If you know how the world works and you know how to use the tools the game gives you, the game is actually too easy.
Zonai machines add so much to the game that they trivialize other parts of it to the point that it can feel boring or less impactful. Like, flying with a hoverbike in the zora dungeon makes all its puzzles way easier because you can just zip from one mcguffan switch to the next in quick succession without ever interacting with the bubbles.
Combat situations can be solved without you ever swinging a sword or blocking an attack or even directly engaging with an enemy in typical style if you have the right zonai devices handy and enough battery to power them for long enough to get the job done.
part of my fun was derived from the satisfactory results I got from my creative and spontaneous machine solutions to my problems as I explored and did puzzles on the fly, made me feel like I was well rewarded for intelligent problem solving brains over brawns style
@@Sigmaairav What you just described was the intended way to play the game. I'm glad that it clicked for you. This was clearly where the majority of the six year development effort was invested.
For the apparent minority of us who don't get excited about physics sandboxes, a few questionably cannonical easter eggs are not enough to scratch that Zelda itch.
Imagine if after Hyrule Warriors, Nintendo announced that this was the vision for the series going forwards. 'Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you cannot hack and slash your way through waves of mobs?' These are the ideals of a different genre of gameplay.
I’m so glad you did that super long bit about the controls because I felt like I was going crazy playing the game. It goes all the way down to every layer of the experience. The fact that they assigned “unsticking” Ultrahand parts to WIGGLING THE RIGHT STICK(????) in a super annoying awkward way (that only chips away at the pitifully short lifespan of joycon sticks) instead of the R3 button is the most baffling thing I’ve ever seen. And that’s to say nothing of all the times I activated sage abilities and blew items away while trying to pick them up!
It’s strange because like you said it’s so polished in so many other areas and they had such a long time to develop it. I really don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect them to have put more thought into this. Great video as always :) genuinely so happy to have you back
TotK's UI definitely needs an overhaul and I'm not a fan of the building mechanics in general--amazing for another game, perhaps, but totally disconnected from what I want in a Zelda game--but you may find it more intuitive to "unstick" just by shaking the controller, which is also an option.
you can also unstick ultrahand by shaking the controller *thumbs up, but I'm too lazy to look for the emojis*
I seriously was starting to feel like I was crazy, because no one else felt this way about Tears of the Kingdom. Glad I’m not the only one.
Yup, every one of the points was spot on and put into words abstract stuff I had felt but couldn't articulate.
I too throw my weapon when trying to ultra hand and I'm 200+ hours into the game.
And I too pretty much ignore or even turn off most of the sages because they are so ridiculously clunky to use in combat or get in the way when I'm exploring.
Yeah I felt the same way. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy nut but it does feel like critics are generally going soft on the game 🤷♂️
There are dozens of us!
You sound like a insecure person.
You sound like a conspiracy nut
"There's two shrines you can see"
Me, even when you're highlighting it: "Where's that lake one?"
Me later when it's shown again: "No, seriously, where is it? I don't see anything...".
Ceave's coming to the point where his videos feel like watching full-blown movies. It fills my heart with joy when I see he has graced us with a video once more.
Nah mate, movies feel like a comitment, and are therefor hard to decide to watch. There is however, absolutely no reason to not watch a ceave video imideately
@@dennan7537 I think that's just a thing TH-cam videos have. I'd genuinely much rather watch a 4-hour video on the most random of topics that I barely even care about, than a 2-hour movie that's said to be one of the greatest movies in animation history.
amen
My biggest problem was the punishing of sequence braking finding the construct factory in the depths had no sign saying come back later. Or being kicked out of the ring ruins even though you know zelda is evil because you have finished the master sword quest.
i had already stumbled into the 5th temple by myself and i still couldnt get to the ring ruin. i had to go talk to everyone at lookout landing and tell them i had completed that part of the quest already
Ironically that is very much how traditional Zelda used to be. You'd see an obvious chest and think to yourself "How do I get that?" and spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it when it's actually because you don't have an item that is accessible to you at that point and have to come back later.
yessss, if they wanted to give the player so much freedom while keeping a plot, they needed to back it up with quests that change depending on what you do first. I figured out that zelda was evil by about the second dungeon, but the game just kept forcing me down its predetermined path that assumed i was so dumb that i couldnt see where the plot was going. It was insulting, tbh
@@blackice8634 The difference there being that you are lacking something crucial in the traditional games to get to that chest, while in TotK, Link just seemingly refused to use the knowledge he acquired to overcome this issue.
Personally, that felt like a huge disconnect, because Link is otherwise willing to explain what he knows and people exclaim how marvelous he is for having done things in advance... not this time though - better keep to yourself that the real princess is a dragon who lost pretty much everything that defined her as a person, and the princess that people saw is actually a puppet constructed by the demon king...
I felt the same way with the Forbidden Woods. I just assumed, due to my experience with BOTW, that I was just somehow getting the sequence wrong to navigate the woods. This was made more unclear because some directions you took would let you go farther than others, so I assumed I needed the right path. Googling it not only let me know that there was no path, but also spoiled the true way to access the woods, which would have been more satisfying if I discovered it on my own. Why they couldn’t have put a Korok by the woods entrance to warn Link that he could not enter there, is a shame. With games this open ended, sometimes you need a little direction to know when you aren’t doing something wrong.
TOTK being full of progression system with no rewards is a really really good observation. Playing that game is like constantly feeling cheated.
Same sentiment I’ve got. Many times I explored places that looked like it’s hiding something good (I’m always hoping for an armor piece) and then all I get from the chest is a Zonai charge.
Yeah, rock caves are really fun to clear our for me until the sound of my 5th demolition weapon breaking settles in and I realize 15 minutes of weapon gathering effort has just been wasted on traversal.
Like, c'mon, the most efficient way to clear them is also the REALLY BORING way: Yunobo on a cooldown or Zonai Cannons...That're also on a secondary Stamina system.
@ED-gw9rg Tbf, when you break the cracked rocks, they drop smaller rocks and rusty weapons. The game's heavily hinting you to fuse a rock to one of the weapons they provide. You really shouldn't be tearing through you inventory.
(Also, unless you only have a few batteries, cannons are way faster than using a weapon)
@@jamesmccloud1002 I mean, sure, but...What's the point of having your own arsenal if the game's gonna snap it in half and hand you a new one?
That ticked me off about Skyward Sword too. Is there a Zelda game that rewards you for playing to completion that I'm probably forgetting?
I may have ruined the story for me by getting all the tears and sword before any of the dungeons. I knew the plot twist way before it was revealed. And the Deku Tree was like "oh you already got the sword, i was about to send you on a wild quest but ok." Following fake Zelda in the castle was still pretty fun.
i got the exact opposite because i beat the final boss before doing any geoglyphs. i literally did not know what to do with them because i never met up with impa.
I just don't know if they expected us to think that was actually Zelda lmao
@@highdefinition450 I did the fire temple second, after the wind and it was so insanely obvious that the zelda is a fake in the fire. She makes a motion and then the mask takes more control, it is just so obvious. The wind temple was at least pretty subtle and you think, "why is she doing this" instead of "Its a fake and the game pretends it isn't." Worst part of the game.
Im going to be honest: The plot twist was very predictable and did not hit as well as the Zelda team likely hoped it would. The second I saw a silent Zelda at the castle once you are finally let out of the turorial zone in the sky was when I knew we are dealing with another Puppet Zelda. That's what, the 4th time we had one? Maybe 3rd, if you want to be technical it's the first time we had a Phantom Zelda but what is that worth when we have her just be like any of the Puppet Zeldas in the previous instalments? The only time I actually felt intrigued about this phantom Zelda was when we got to the castle to fight and she had a stupid monologue.
@@stanbasicidol9444 I have only played awakening, botw, and totk but I still saw it coming as soon as I got to goron city and it was so annoying no one is smart enough to realize that her entering a monster isn’t suspicious and proves a fake.
I think my favorite part of your videos is that you don't treat the games like they're in a vacuum and actually look into the economics behind the decisions made in games. It's something I thought would be boring but now I look at all art through that lens and your videos really help with that. I wish for your future videos to go even more into depth when it comes to the money side of games. Great stuff, Stay strong brother!
Wholistic reviews are so valuable
I'm jealous of your 'correct' experience with the wind temple. I tend to go around exploring first in open world games and TotK is really good at drawing attention to important things which is really bad. I explored the Depths first since that's where the new content is for me, the surface being all familiar terrain. So first i found the Construct Factory, access denied, but explored and solved a lot of it. Then the fire temple, couldn't get close due to the heat. Then the spirit temple, access denied.
Going back to the surface I wanted to check out the sky and automatically got drawn to the water temple, where I finished some of the puzzles and scratched my head why I couldn't get the water wheels to turn with hydrants. Then found the access denied switch and back tracked all the way down the path up to the temple, to finally find Sidon (with a long back and forth sequence before he decides to come up to the water temple to press the buttons) Next the fire temple (with another cool approach you can easily skip if not careful) which was rather confusing and I ended up climbing and gliding for the last two switches after a glitch threw me off the temple.
Then another interesting phenomena in the sky drew me to the 5th sage, construct factory access point. Completing that spoiled the rest of the story for me. (which finding glyphs out of order had already messed up) Figuring I couldn't screw it up further I went for the master sword to get the final huge plot spoiler before even getting the beginning parts of the story.
And then I investigated the big cyclone in the sky by flying over and into it with 4 fans plus control stick, completely missing the excitement of following the jumpy things. Plus I had already gone up to max height so it wasn't all that high in comparison, I was actually on the way back down... The wind temple is by far the weakest. I solved all the puzzles in 15 minutes, but still have to go looking for Rito to do the final honors since not even a stack of fans will budge those turbines. Need his special 'wind'.
Luckily the lightning temple is well hidden and doesn't draw attention to itself prematurely. I also find it the most cohesive dungeon out of the 5, albeit still short. I didn't quite follow the intended solutions but for once it didn't feel like 'cheesing' the puzzles by drawing out my own paths with mirrors. Unlike simply flying to the destinations in the other temples and Lomei mazes.
TotK is an amazing sandbox, yet a train wreck when it comes to story and quest design :/
Dang, you really got worked over lol, I had the same experience with the water temple and having to get Sidon first, and I immediately understood "I see. They're going to make me do the temples their way. Guess I'll let them hold my hand for each other one." And was able to mostly avoid that again.
My goodness, I’ve played almost every single mainline Zelda game and that controller solution you proposed blew my mind, I’ve never even realized that the controls of this game are fundamentally different than almost every other game in the series, your solution of button mapping is so intuitive it’s incredible even its not even intuitive it’s just what Nintendo had us use before in prior games
I think that even this solution wouldn't work as great because TOTK simply has way too many items and you would be switching the buttons all the time. Such a system works quite well if the menu consists of 20-ish items, but TOTK literally has hundreds of materials, weapons, abilities, etc.
@@SeeTv.Yeah exactly, he even complained earlier about the menu management being too slow... Just imagine having to map 6 buttons everytime you want to play in a different style
How about just giving players the choice? Stick with botw "modern" prescribed button placements or go back to "classic" programmable buttons. Also while we're at it give me more HUD options
@@artu.rinconmaybe set up a few combat, shrine and travel presets. Also, I know for a fact that this would have worked significantly better on a gamepad as paper Mario color splash had a similar system of collecting dozens of distinct items you would need to scroll through to find the appropriate one to solve a puzzle or combat an enemy but you could find what you needed in less than a second without even pausing to break immersion, by simply scrolling on a separate screen.
@@quangdinhvo986 You're basically asking them to design two different games at that point, which would lead to both options suffering in quality. But I guess even that would beat simply not designing the UI beyond the bare minimum...
That last part really hit me what I felt after I finished the game, love this breath of the wild saga, But I wish we can have a more traditional Zelda once again
its also just how long the botw style games take to make. it's been 12 years since SS and in that time we've gotten 2 mainline 3d zelda games. In the 12 years before that we got MM, WW, TP, and SS
I'd honestly much rather have smaller, shorter games that come out more frequently than these monster games releasing every half a decade when most of that extra time seems to be spent on content that starts to feel repetitive halfway through
Good game but a terrible Zelda game. The game didn't even hook me like the old ones did.
reminds me of something ive been saying about splatoon (my favorite franchise) for a while, which is that i really dont want there to be a splatoon 4. the story has concluded, the world has moved on from inkopolis, and some things deserve to end rather than go on forever
One detail people have forgotten; the dungeons don't introduce new enemies anymore. Its a big part of why I say nintendo does not value freedom much at all despite breaking the entire gameflow around it. They refuse to put something infront of you that you might not be able to do yet, other than the big dragon baddies and maybe lynels for new players. Just like botw, totk suffers from having a wide amount of stuff at the beginning, and absolutely nothing fresh for the rest of the game. Totk just takes longer for its beginner material to run dry.
In the end, I don't wan t some progression system stuffed in every fold of hyrule.
I like the physics and machine stuff but I would like it more in a puzzle game that makes full use of it.
I like the combat and collection but would prefer it in a game dedicated to exploring that combat.
I like the characters but would prefer them in a game that lets them do anything other than moan and leave everything to link.
In short, the botw zeldas refused convention but failed entirely, and then partially, to fill the void the they'd made by removing those conventions. The games lean too much on player imagination and liberation without goals, foes, or dangers that would make freedom exciting to explore.
Very good video as always. One thing that also left me a bit disappointed is when the sages are like "oh ill never leave your side you can count on me in battle" but then they just... dont come with you lol. I can understand why from both a dev perspective it might cause some timeline/story issues and some of them do have other duties but like tulin has zero reason not to come with you instead of just sending his ghost.
Also, do you ever play games in German? Would love to hear if yuo've had any bad/questionable experiences with localization at all
Tulin's parents don't want him to go outside of the region tito town is in
Tulin is still a child and spoiler alert.... they do come later in the game themselves.
None of them have real duties.
Tulin is free, Yunobo has a company that can opperate wihout him, Sidon pretends he has to do stuff but he has a girl that can take his place when he is out, riju has a replacement too and honestly she just would say that she does it and her bodyguard would be pissed about it cause thats a pretty riju thng to do.
On top they could still teleport to you. Teleportation is a lore thing, no ghosts needed. Easy.
But we have soulless vessels instead.
@@Zachruff As far as I can tell the german translation of both botw and totk is a lot more accurate and coherent than the english. Though I havnt played TOTK on japanese yet, its just more fitting than whatever the english did.
Thats said, the chosen grammar of german is readable but hard to speak. Someone clearly didnt tested this out. But thats a general problems of most games and books.
Truly thank you, whilst playing the game at launch I actually couldn't believe no one was talking about some of these things. Being stuck in rock hammer limbo, and seeing people building robots with 2 batteries. I'm happy you're enjoying it but you can't leave me thinking I'm crazy in the world of the highest rated game of all time. I thought I was becoming a contrarian 😭
Maybe they were scared of nintendo fanboys defending the game flaws
Things like the rocks and controls are ultimately really minor in comparison to what the game does well.
People will get around to it eventually. There's plenty to gripe about even in games that are pretty great overall. I heavily disliked BotW and had tons of issues with this game, but the end of it, and really liking the fuse mechanic left me feeling very positive about it as a whole. That doesn't stop the annoying bits from being annoying. XD
Nobody says the game is without flaw LMAO.
@@tumultuousv What are the flaws to you, then?
I fricking LOVED the explanation on why the controls just felt so darn unintuitive. Even after 120+ combined hpurs between TotK and BotW.
I don't know, it felt pretty intuitive to me. Maybe this video and its comments section are just a skill issue support group?
@@rareosts5752 mhm - What is also probably a strong factor for this is that I didn't grow up with any Nintendo consoles, but had an xbox 360.
So that a/b and x/y are vice versa often threw me.
U can rebind the buttons if u want
Also the hundreds of play testers didnt find it a problem enough 😅
@@rareosts5752 No need to try and skill shame because your personal experience was different.
the dpad "quick" menuing buttons still confuse me (also why the heck is botw quick menuing quicker than totk????)
Can I just say, I like that you don't constantly feel the need to apologize for criticism. You say "this part of the game is mediocre" and then explain why. Too many youtubers constantly feel the need to shower the game with praise as though criticizing a popular game is a crime.
Well, also because they worry the comment section will eat them alive...
Considering reviewers get death threats over their opinions and it's devastating to their mental health, there's a reason for that.
@@SailorCheryl Yeah but this is nothing compared to his normal channel where he always says "I *love* this game and Nintendo worked *so* hard on it..." over and over. I was just being nice.
Very well said!
That happens because of the brainless TotK fanboys who will attack anyone who doesn't say its the best game of all time
I enjoyed the story of this game at face value, but it lacked a lot of impact from the first game that I really struggled to put into words for the longest time. This game's story is bombastic: it is epic in scale and reaches far more dramatic heights than BOTW, but I found myself missing the more muted tone in BOTW. TOTK's important plot points happen thousands of years prior to what you're actually doing; which really only involves cleanup work around the four major towns. The main, present-day plot lacks almost all the impact the plot presented in the memories has up until the final confrontation.
This is in stark contrast to BOTW, as the minimalistic plot put less of a focus on historical events and more focus on the actions of Link, and by extension, the player. The story of BOTW was the order you visited the divine beasts (if at all), the shrines you collected, your discovery of the mastery sword, etc. Memories in that game served to provide historical context and supplement what you were already doing and were basically optional to have a grasp on what was happening. TOTK, on the other hand, contains memories that are unarguably essential to complete the game, and that carries its own issues.
For example: the second memory I discovered (while bee-lining to visit each tower to unlock the full map before I did anything else) was the master sword-shaped memory just north of the Lost Woods, in which Zelda learns of the process by which people can become dragons. I immediately intuited that this would be her eventual fate, and I just happened to glance upward when I finished the cutscene to see the light dragon flying overhead. An amazing moment in its own right, but this spelled a number of inconveniences for me:
1) I now understood where Zelda was and what her fate turned out to be, far before the game expected me to
2) I realized that the memories in TOTK presented a linear story that needed to be viewed in order, making me drop everything to figure that out
3) I was too early in the game to actually get the master sword--I immediately headed up to the light dragon only to find that I was being gated out by my stamina meter; far less diagetically cohesive than the heart container check for the sword in BOTW.
That second inconvenience was only exacerbated when I discovered the memory by the frost gleeok in the northwestern portion of the map, which shows Ganondorf in his demonic form calling forth his armies. This necessitated seeking out Impa, from whom I discovered the first memory, only to find an in-game room that literally spells out the viewing order of the memories. I now had to interrupt my natural exploration to seek out the actually compelling plot of the game, which was one of many instances where this game disappointed me.
They really really wanted to make a grander story with far more grandeur than BOTW, but in doing so they developed a story that conflicts with how you're meant to interact with the world and overall has far less impact (at least for me) than the player-driven "story" of BOTW.
Ah yes, the master sword tear. The one that ruins the story
2 Things need to happen in the next Zelda. a) A new map and b) Stop telling the story in retrospect. The story in TOTK is much better than that of BOTW but it is done exactly the same way. I want the story to unfold as it is going, not just getting memories of it later.
Tldr, but the story from breath of the Wild with much worse than tears and I actually skipped most of the cutscenes because they were so bad but I very much enjoyed tears
I had a similar thing happen. The second tear I got was the one near the front gleeok. This immediately spoiled ganondorf killing Sonia, stealing the stone, and ultimately powering up.
I saw this before I even knew who any of the character were! It felt like I skipped to the ending of a movie without watching it.
It really killed any investment I had in the story because I already knew what was going to happen.
It baffles me that Nintendo allowed us to view a linear story out of order. Why couldn't they just make it so that it plays linearly no matter where you go first??? or why couldn't those cutscenes be played after each dungeon?? ugh.
@@benclapp6100 Exactly. Video game stories only really get to me if I'm allowed to be part of them. Experiencing them in retrospect does not allow for that.
I also went up to the cold shrine first because it was more visible, but I realized it was awkward enough that it couldn't have been the intended route.
What the Great Plateau got right is that doing the shrines in any order was more or less equally valid, and that is a microcosm of the rest of the world.
The Great Sky Island allowed you to do things in any order, but most orders punished you, and unfortunately that is also a microcosm of the rest of the world.
Like until you do Wind Temple you can't get the scanner or travel medallions, but you can go 50h+ before realizing that. Yes, some dialogue lines tell you to try that first, but this is the sequel to Breath of the Wild, and all 4 regions have a quest marker, so you can't blame people for trying them in any order.
I got the scanner and travel medallions before the Wind Temple.
Scanner and travel medallion arent tied to Wind Temple, tf you on about
I hated how much they push you to certain directions instead of letting me stumble onto things
When I fell down into the world off the sky island I got all turned around. I tried to go to close landmarks, like the bridge of hylia, and got fucked up by a gleeok. Then I went to the duelling peaks and there was nothing there explaining what to do. It took me about an hour to eventually find Lookout landing. The reuse of the map messed me up because I already had assumptions about important places and it lead me in the wrong direction. I started the game with immense frustration.
Well, I still largely disagree with that opinion but for context, I'll drop a little 'cohesiveness' for the _much_ More exciting gameplay that Tears offered.
Fiddly janky stuff like the Sage controls etc, I can deal with. I dealt with them in a much more limited and linear game like Skyward Sword, and I can surely deal with them here. I much prefer Tears 'chaotic Fun' regardless.
I want to add an additional note on "Secret Stones." Although the Japanese term (秘石) does use the kanji associated with secrecy (秘), it does not use the word "secret" itself and is in fact a singular word, meaning "secret stone" is not exactly a direct translation - that would only be the direct translation if the original term were 秘密の石 or something to that effect, with an adjective modifying a noun. What Japanese can do is fuse separate kanji into a singular new word, which is very fluid and precise and often mystical. In this case, the kanji for "secret" is used in quite a number of fantastical words such as 神秘, meaning "mystery beyond human comprehension - the realm of the gods." This means that 秘石 will not be associated with crude thoughts like combining basic "secrets" with basic "stones", as if they're just normal stones that are secret or whatever, and instead will be associated with a wide range of nuance (not *necessarily* divine mystery or anything, though).
Thus, in conclusion, I think "secret stone" is a pretty poor translation and not a direct one. It takes a singular, original word compound with a wide range of nuance and turns into something mundane and clunky. As for a superior translation, that's hard since it's an original compound (or well, other fantasy works have used it, but it's not like a "real" Japanese word). The translators likely would not have used "secret stone" if they could help it - English can't fuse kanji like that, so we're likely stuck using two words, but I would try to avoid the resulting mundanity of "secret stone." I think one really good option would have been to invent an original word which would evoke similar wonder in a concise way, similar to "triforce" - maybe the 'heptastone" (lol). Otherwise, I would have looked into exploring avenues like "divine gemstone", "stones of yore", etc etc. There's really infinite options here, and conversing with the story writer to glean insight on their nature could help a lot. The key thing I wanted to convey though is that "secret stones' is NOT a direct translation in either connotation or denotation. It's more like the translation you end up with when mapping the pieces of a word to the closest English words. It's not translating "Erephanto" as "Elephant", it's translating "The Divine Elephant" as "tusked animal" because we don't know what Elephants are, and then wondering why a divine mystical beast has such a lame name as "The Divine Tusked Animal"
So they tried to hard to directly translate one thing and got a stupid name like "secret stone"
But for both BotW and TotK they also go out of their way to butcher the translations of the Hyrule Compendium, completely changing it from the intended journal written by Link and containing his thoughts and feelings about events and turning it into a generic quest log in second person
I can't get my head around the decisions NoA makes while localizing games.
@@mjc0961 they try to write their own script instead of doing their job, it's a horrible disrespect to the source material
The first time I heard them say "Secret Stone" I honestly laughed at how stupid it sounds. Then I realised that it kind of reminded me of the horrible translation of the original Legend of Zelda. It's got the same sort of energy as "EASTMOST PENNISULA IS THE SECRET" or "SPECTACLE ROCK IS AN ENTRANCE TO DEATH" sort of energy to it.
Despite that, though, it's still a dumb name. I'd have given my right arm if we could have got NoE to do the English localisation instead. They're so much better at being faithful while still maintaining a level of charm and creativity. Besides, maybe then we could have got an actual English woman to voice Zelda instead of the most generic "american person doing a posh English voice" with no attention paid to pronunciation whatsoever.
Weirdly enough, in the non-English translations of the game, which tend to be more accurate to the original text from what I've seen, the stones are still called "Secret stones".
So Zelda got it's own "Mr Needlemouse" situation
the execution delay point was so accurate to me, i cheesed every single puzzle by attaching rockets in the spirit temple and so many shrines with just fusing rockets to shields
Sounds like a skill issue.
Just to add my small grain of sand. In an interview, Aonuma said that the game had already been finished one year before release but they spent the last year exclusively polishing the physics systems, which pretty much goes to asure your point that they spent a copious amount of development time into the physics, because, and I reiterate, it was one entire year just to polish the physics system.
In a personal note, I unfortunately rather find this to be a waste of time and resources as I personally haven´t found this system to be as interesting or useful as many other people have stated, but rather just a gimmick. A very impressive one at that, but nothing much more interesting than what they could have done with so much time in their hands. It really makes me wonder what they could´ve done.
This should be the singular most popular critique of TotK that Nintendo should absolutely see. The Zelda team adressed so many fan opinions in the past, I really hope they see this one.
Also im about halfway into the video, maybe he adresses it later but I wanna mention how much i hated the "zelda impostor" thing. I saw the "memory" of Ganondorf transforming into a zelda body right at the start so I was so incredibly triggered every of the many times a quest is based on NPCs not getting zelda is fake
My biggest issue with totk control scheme is D-Up being the item "quick menu" but then having to press RB and /then/ D-Up to hold an item to throw instead of D-Up then RB to hold an item to throw. (Basically, open the menu, and press the throw button to throw it, instead of getting ready to throw your melee weapon, and then selecting an item to get ready to throw it.)
God, yes. It just seems so backwards the way it currently is.
THIS RIGHT HERE
this would've been such an easy fix wtf
This is a wonderful video and a cathartic watch - there are so many elements of TOTK that irritate me and it was great to hear many of them so clearly and intelligently articulated. The controls in particular - I knew something wasn't quite right but you've articulated perfectly exactly what the problem is.
There are three things that aren't touched on in the video that I think are major design mistakes that undermine many of TOTK's excellent qualities:
1. The ability to launch into the air or leap down from the sky at any time and fly to your destination, combined with the re-used overworld map, totally undermines the exploration of BOTW - in BOTW, I'd see something in the distance that interested me, I'd walk there, and encounter all kinds of interesting things along the way. In TOTK, if I need to go somewhere, I just warp to a tower, launch into the sky, and fly there, because it's so much easier, and because I feel like I've probably already seen what's on the way to that destination.
2. The depths are terrible. They created an area almost as large as the overworld that takes a solid 20 hours to explore and they filled it with 2 hours of content. It's incredibly repetitive both aesthetically and from a gameplay perspective.
3. The narrative - you touched on this a little bit but I think because you can do everything out of order, Nintendo seems to think they need to give you all the important information in *every single cutscene*. I was so sick of being talked down to about the Demon King and the Secret Stones by the mid point of the game that it completely undermined any emotional engagement I might otherwise have had with the story.
I see two reasons.
1. covid-19.
2. Totk began development as DLC for Botw.
demon king? secret stone?
I used to love talking with the NPCs in BOTW because they all had something interesting to say. After the 50th time of someone saying "have you heard about the ring ruins?" I stopped talking to the NPCs altogether.
There are so many elements at Work, be it gameplay or a snippet or Lore/story, that We were thrown that there are _bound_ to be some oversight and untidy loose ends. They did need a bit more time with this I have to admit, just to accommodate for and polish the Sequence breaking possibilities.
I understand why Breath of the Wild had wonky controls but that doesn't explain why after six years in development Tears didn't build nor revise a single system. There's no way they couldn't have done it they just for some baffling reason chose not to.
they revised the system a teeny bit by turning the rune slide left-right into a rune wheel which is something I guess
@@Zeldrakewhich is arguably worse but whatever
If you’re talkin about the menus and not controlling Link then I agree, in particular the arrow fusion thing it’s annoying as hell at first
I'm glad you're still going to continue your analytical videos because they're honestly my favourites from you to watch. You have such a unique approach to writing and your analysis is always intriguing to consider, and it really shines through with this video too. Tears of the Kingdom is such a weird game for me because while I really loved playing it, a lot of its problems kind of weighed on the back of my mind. There was always the sense that something or other wasn't really clicking, and your video really dragged those issues to light. I'm looking forward to your future videos. Welcome back, Ceave.
I’ve never had a game where I felt so 100 percent sure was the greatest game I’ve ever played while playing it, that upon completion I felt was overall a very underwhelming experience. It’s an odd game that’s hard for me to describe. I will say that’s it’s full of unnecessary fluff and filler, and the dungeons are IMO the worst in the entire series. And sadly, the depths turned out to be a colossal disappointment. The first time you descend to the depths and find a Yiga camp, congratulations! You’ve seen the entire depths. Same for the sky islands but it’s even worse. It starts with the amazing great sky islands, setting a high expectation for what you will see in the sky, and after that, nothing comes even close. All just little copy pasted islands that are largely pointless…with maybe one minor exception. This video did a great job explaining a lot of my frustrations.
It’s all just one big gimmick. Cool at first but wears out super quick. ZERO replay value. Worst Zelda in the series by far
This is exactly how I felt after completing Tarry Town in BotW, but after playing TotK I'm actually a little softer on BotW. BotW at least had interesting characters (for as much as you interacted with them) and was actually designed with non-linearity in mind.
I might actually replay BotW at some point, but I gave away my copy of TotK. I didn't even finish it.
I absolutely loved this video! It's perhaps my favourite Ceave analytical video. The long runtime really allowed it to illuminate many important aspects of the game in depth. Really excited for the Hollow Knight one too!
This is the first video I see of you , but your personality, clear explanations of your reasoning and editing have won me over handily, I look forward to more !
He's had another channel too, mostly dedicated to cool things in Mario Maker, he was kinda originally known as the Mario Maker Science Guy of sorts.
The Spirit Temple is also where my spirit died. I literally used up a week of PTO to play this game. I was trying to take my time and savor the game, but i just couldn't feel myself fully getting immersed; there were good moments, but a lot of tedium and frustration. Then I hit the Spirit Temple and finally realized I kind of hated the most fundamental mechanics of the game. I realized this was a physics sandbox and "not my Zelda." Was actually a very depressing moment. The mech sucked. I never turned it on again after the plot stopped needing it.
The first shrine where you unlock ultrahand was so magical and I thought the whole game would progressively get harder puzzles, but the first ultrahand puzzle was about the same difficulty as every other shrine. I never really had to put any thought into solving the puzzles, just had to execute the obvious solutions
He made an excellent point when he explained that all of them rewarded you with the knowledge of unexpected uses of your abilities. But if you already had the knowledge, you essentially gain nothing and shrines become worse than the blessing ones because of the execution time.
That's why the open world formula is such a bad fit for zelda.
Too bad though, all new zelda games in the foreseeable future will be open world.
The game gives you the tools to build all sorts of cool contraptions, but then only ever asks you to build like 3 variation of the same car thing
@@isodoubIet I don't really agree that openworld is bad at all for the zelda series, it's that Nintendo hasn't shown any growth on their grasp on when to use linearity instead of baseline exploration in said open world, 6 years after their first experiment with it. You CAN have proper restrictions on movement, exploration, and abuse of other helpful overworld mechanics, and they did that super well with shrines, but they presented the openworld in a way that fundamentally did not let them raise the difficulty of their puzzles overtime. They could have restricted areas, quests, dungeons, shrines, movement, and more from you AND THEY ABSOLUTELY SHOULD HAVE in a lot of cases, but they didn't. Their openworld, when not struggling with any instance of what otherwise should have been a more focused and linear area, is fantastic and does service to the Zelda franchise so much more than blind haters of the last 2 games will denounce. It's not a bad fit for Zelda - it's an unfortunate showing of Nintendo's unwillingness to truly go in and fix the obvious problems to a game over half a decade later. The potential is there, but as with a lot of things in TOTK, it's unnecessarily squandered in ways so easily avoidable it hurts (i want to love this game SO BAD).
@@solo._.dude15 Nintendo chose, very deliberately, to _not_ implement any form of an open world that restricts movement or level gates/skill gates areas. The lack of a reasonable difficulty curve or meaningful progression is a direct result of that decision, and it is clear that it is married to their idea of what an open world should be.
The moment the game started to annoy me was with the memories. The Upheaval and the Regional Variants were amazing in their storytelling and sense of mystery but one single memory killed all that mystery. I knew exactly what to expect at Hyrule Castle once I got up there and was disappointed by how the rest of the story panned out.
The memories should've been linear like at the end of a temple, I immediately got the rise of the demon king memory after the first memory, which basically spoiled the rest of the memories
I'm pretty sure they figured most players would put off doing the memories for the most part and just bumrush the temples and then the castle. But like, do they even understand gamers? Of course we're going to want to explore the big open world. The fact that it takes so long to get to the point where you can even get the shrine sensor and other purah pad abilities where the completion requirements to upgrade them are inevitably already met, making the completion requirements pointless, shows that they have never watched anyone play their games from start to finish. And I don't entirely blame them, imagine watching 150+ hours of footage per beta tester. And yet they really needed to, since they obviously are some sort of weird extraterrestrials who don't understand human psychology and if they're going to sell games to us humans, they ought to learn about us more. The story they wanted to tell in this game obviously had an intended dungeon order, an intended main quest order, and an intended memory order, but they don't restrict you to that, so their story just comes out totally jumbled and spoils itself. This isn't a trapping of the open world formula, it's a failure of the game design-all they had to do was make the main quest sequence linear while making the side quests non-linear. But that'd take extra coding, so they didn't do it, because they figured most humans would think like their fellow extraterrestrials do, which is to not explore, not investigate interesting looking things, not to go check up on places from the past game to see how they're doing, and to just mindlessly follow an order of operations that they don't even communicate properly to you.
@@drewbabe " And I don't entirely blame them, imagine watching 150+ hours of footage per beta tester."
If only there were a way to reduce the amount of gameplay to review per player... hmmmmm
I was so disappointed when every dungeon played(pretty much) the same cutscene. Surely they couldve came up with something different for each one
i got the memory where fake zelda tries to kill the zonai queen person as my first memory, completely ruined the rest of the story for me. I knew exactly what was going to happen and the game was just stretching it out.
I think the main problem is going for something that is completely open ended where you can do anything in any order. The main quest(s) would allow for better storytelling if they were in a linear order, but you still have the freedom to explore and do side quests whenever you want
That would require Nintendo to not spend 5 years on making The Legend of Zelda: A link to Garry's Mod.
Open worlds are killing gaming
This is the most freedom we get in any game yet it holds your hand during every dungeon lmao
41:40 This is a really great explanation of the intersection of some pretty improtant UX principles. "Aerial Associations" is essentially a combination of the Gestalt Principle of Proximity (things that are near each other will be perceived as being related) and Norman's concept of Natural Mappings (controls are more intuitive when there is a logical relationship between the layout of the controls and what those controls do).
A game that often gets compared to BOTW solved the healing issue: Genshin Impact. The characters get full after eating a certain amount of food, making them unable to eat. This 1) incentivizes cooked food since it heals a larger amount than eating the ingredients 2) solves the issue of invincibility when you have large amounts of food.
True, but that'd only increase the annoyance with cooking food, and the whole reason that we have the problem is that it was never redesigned after being ported from the Wii U. If they changed how healing works, then they would just as well rework how menus work in general.
Really happy to see someone make a video articulating the exact problem (execution delay) I had with totk with even the same terminology I used. It really marred the game for me. I started feeling it much earlier than the shadow temple, too.
For the ultra hand, I also think that it’s because the « throw weapon » button is the « Rotate» button in ultra hand mode, which is the one you press most of the time while using ultra hand
What I think Nintendo was going for with the controls was to keep the ranged combat options (bow and throw) together. Shielding/targeting has always been ZL (or whatever it was called on the controller at the time) so keep it there for consistency. Left dpad for shields since shielding is handled with the left of the controller, Right dpad for weapons since right side of the controller has all your attacks. L for powers since thats the available shoulder button. I feel like swapping L and R would cause more problems than it solves by arbitrarily separating the two ranged options. The easiest solution (imo) would be to allow button remapping, but Nintendo doesn't really do that.
I'm glad that I'm not the only one with a mostly negative and disappointed perspective on this game. The entire time I did have fun playing, but after a while I started thinking that instead of playing a game that supposedly is about traversing a world literally torn apart by an evil king that's filled with cheerful people with only mild inconveniences, I could be playing Twilight Princess.
Twilight Princess gets a lot of shit, but there's a reason that people still draw and think about Midna well after a decade of the game being out, she is with you for the entire game. For the entire storyline you are listening to her snark and her desperation to save her people from an evil tyrant, her unique character, flaws, motivations, hopes, and dreams seep into every thread of the game and you become emotionally invested in her when you race her to the castle to try to save her from Zants light poisoning.
I want to care about Princess Zelda, I want to care about her 100 years of battle, and her torment at being unable to save either Sonia or Rauru, and being transformed into a dragon for thousands of years to pour every ounce of strength into a single blade, but I only know her through 20 minutes of cutscenes. Zelda is supposed to be the emotional through line to both Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of The Kingdom, but we don't ever get ANY time with her in TOTK, we don't get to see her relationship with the other champions, we don't get to see her begin to put Hyrule back together after the Calamity has passed, she gets to have an adventure thousands of years in the past and meet the first king of Hyrule and his queen, and were some dipshit in the future just following the notes she left.
The game spends so little time on its genuinely interesting and cool story that it falls flat on its face, no NPCs acknowledge the reveal that she's a dragon, nobody seems to care or believe link despite guiding him towards the dragons tears, the game itself throws it's most dramatic twist in the garbage. The tonal problem between having a land LITERALLY BE TORN ASUNDER and having no death, no sickness, nothing to suggest that anyone has been anything but displaced or inconvenienced by THEIR WORLD BEING TORN APART leads to incredible cognitive dissonance.
There's a lot to find in Tears of the Kingdom, but there's not much to care about. The only times I felt a sense of dread, and was excited, was when I went to Gerudo town and it was abandoned and desolated, filled with Gibdos, I thought "Finally! Tension!" But no, everyone welcomed me into without having to disguise myself, without having anyone furious at me for violating their sacred customs, everyone was helpful and polite. They all felt like tutorials, not people.
The reference items started to feel like an insult, because all they did was remind me that I spent seventy dollars to be reminded that I could be playing a better game.
This!
Wonderful, I haven't even finished the game yet and probably shouldn't have clicked on this video but this comment confirms almost all my fears are true. What a shame.
@@deft4184 it's a goddamn shame too!! this game has all the pieces to be an instant masterpiece, but because Nintendo scrimped on storytelling and level design to copy and paste the same level and enemies over and over a giant empty map, they just couldn't put them together. The physics engine is astounding, but that's... that's all that's special about this game, it's mechanics and it's physics engine, everything else feels the same or worse from breath of the wild. Scrolling through dozens and dozens of items every goddamn time I needed to attach something to an arrow genuinely made me put down the game for good because the UI is so unfriendly.
Skyward Swords controls were also janky and not optimal, and Fi and the menu popping up and item I've gotten before when you saved exited and came back were both annoying, but there was *never* a point where I felt bored or like playing it was a waste of my time or busywork because there were things to explore and the tools I gained through my journey unlocked new things to find unique to it's world, Skyward Sword isn't a great game, but it's still good. Compared to this boring, repetitive, copy and paste of a game it's a fucking masterpiece.
Age of Calamity brings a lot more life to these characters and it’s a shame that people don’t want to play it because it plays differently than all other Zelda games. But it’s still fun, and uses a lot of botw items and flurry rush mechanic, which makes it satisfying to pull off
@@halami2149 Second this, dare I say I actually enjoyed it more than BoTW...
Glad to hear you're doing better creatively. :D
In my opinion, the choices made for all of the sages were baffling. Why is Tulin the only sage integrated into your abilities? Why doesn't Mineru make you into an unstoppable juggernaut only limited by your battery power? Why do the sages teleport out of combat as soon as you jump on a rock? Why don't the sages have an on/off toggle but no way to adjust their aggression? Why does noone acknowledge that the sages are adventuring with you? Why does Tulin keep blowing away my loot?
Technically, Yunobo /does/ have an integration, but an annoying one, since you can't angle the shot up or down, and it only works on vehicles going a certain speed, so it's not great for smaller-scale situations like breaking ores or the rock tunnels.
Most use I've gotten is very specifically mining out the zonaite clusters that are in the mine tunnels since he has the potential to destroy all of them at once.
Riju should've been available whenever you draw your bow, since you're unlikely to press A for anything else at that time, and Sidon could've had some kind of shield activation, since the first part of the ability is a bubble.
Yunobo giving my hoverbike a drift is the worst offence just after mineru imo
@@Testperson001 I just defaulted to a 3 fan model. It has better control and you can transport koroks with it/Yunobo doesn't fuck you over.
@@strangestecho5088 You can carry koroks with a 2 fan hoverbike
I genuinely think most of these issues were left in the game to intentionally extend your playtime.
In my humble onion, diverging onto a completely unexpected different game to eventually bring the subject back around to the main game is one of the best things Ceave does to pace his videos and keep things interesting. I hope to see more from this channel in the coming years!
I like how this review is also open world! I skipped the section about the Gorons and Gerudo storylines because I haven't done them yet, but I was able to go to the Controls discussion. Really good review!
On the dungeon side of things, I think ToTK could've benefitted massively from going counter to its own design in those. Each of the dungeons can be completed in any order, each of the locks within can be completed in any order, and you can play completely by your own rules and build contraptions to cheese 'em or follow an intended route. I think most of us probably at least cheesed the fire temple at some point. The locks take the place of the small keys, and the door at the end takes the place of the big key. It... doesn't really feel that rewarding to me. The dungeons in OoT, TP, and WW felt amazing to me for their heavy gating and, I don't know... having a hookshot or a boomerang (and the new-style boomerangs just don't do it for me.) The item gates made things interesting to me, much more than starting the game with all the kit I'd ever need does.
This is a really great critique! You did a great job explaining certain things that I found annoying but didn't quite understand why, like with the controls!
"The problem is that we have significantly more holes than we have balls"
- Ceave 2023
Honestly the biggest problem in totk for me were the sages. And I don't mean just Mineru, though she's by far the most disappointing.
Like, you go through so much trouble to get them, they swear to help you and be by your side and all that... And then end up being more annoying than anything else (except Tulin). Like you said, being able to map their abilities to the different buttons would actually make it so much better. And yeah, it'd work for everything else too, but at least I didn't get as annoyed by those other aspects.
I like how you mentioned the meaninglessness of the exploration with how little the progress bars mean in both games. In breath of the wild, while the exploration doesn't lead to much, the need to have to walk around to new areas makes it so that you end up being pushed into these new goals via having to interact with the world.
In tears of the kingdom, you can skip over all the environment, and all of the meaningless goals, by making a flying ship that can go over half the map if you fly over the new sky islands, which themselves are sparse, repetitive and ultimately meaningless.
Good points! Not to mention, getting the memories in BotW requires detailed familiarity with the map, whereas TotK only expects the player to fly over the impossible-to-miss geoglyphs and then jump down. It's almost like a built-in concession to people who were disappointed by the reused map that you can just fly over everything, but would the devs have felt comfortable allowing this on an original map, and is it beneficial to the actual structure of the game?
The goals aren't meaningless though and have a point to them, the sky islands aren't that repetitive or meaningless either like there is always useful stuff to find on them.
@@JMurrinYTcorrect which is another problem with the game you don't need to go in a certain order you can find out Sonya died before you find out how she died, and then if you found the cutscene showing how she died and the go to cutscene before that it will feel very.... incomplete
Yeah they even put aimable launchpads on sky islands, and next to shrine warp points to boot, which reads loud and clear as 'just skip all those pesky ground parts lol'
I remember the absolute satisfaction I got from scaling the twin peaks in BOTW, a true test of determination that felt like a real challenge. In TOTK? Four fans and a steering stick, baby!
I'm genuinely SO happy that the honeymoon period is ending and people are starting to critique TOTK a bit more.
I was having fun for my first 100 hours, but then the flaws started piling on and I couldn't bring myself to finish the game. Everything started feeling too same-y, as if I'd done everything before, in a game released 5 years prior and the design flaws in the story and gameplay REALLY started to get on my nerves. 🤦♂️
About combat and healing... I found it really fun to use a MsgNotFound sword with a light dragon part attached, and give myself a voluntary restriction that I could only heal by hitting things. This brought back a lot of the old-zelda-game feel, instead of just pausing to eat mid-battle.
That seems like it would be interesting... If nintendo hadn't patched that glitch
@@ttmfndng201 Yeah. Nintendo keeps patching out all the fun. :(
In case anyone reads this and doesn't already know... Turn off auto-update! TotK 1.1.1 and earlier are the best versions of the game, while 1.1.2 and later patched out a lot of really cool things. The game was better before removing the "glitches", because the glitches allow access to features the game _should_ have had.
More generally though, hypothetical reader... never install updates without reading about them first. Decide on your own if you want them, instead of trusting a corporation to do it for you.
I use 6 MsgNotFound swords. One fused with a Gloom Club (mining & range), one with each Gleeok Horn, one with Light Dragon horn and one with Cannon.
@@TiltCntrlzI made 1 of each gleeok horn, 1 light dragon horn, 1 gloom spear, 1 silver lizalfos tail, 1 queen gibdo guster, 1 silver Lynel horn and 1 molduga jaw. I don’t know why I do this to myself
@@totalqualityanimations4855totally canon link, carrying 80 billion master swords for every situation known possible.
In Breath of the Wild, switching runes was the up direction on the d-pad. In Tears, it's L. I was using up for a good while in the beginning
From what I remember reading from interviews, the majority of the development time went into rebuilding the engine to handle the sky islands and the depths seamlessly, and because they were working on the engine again, feature creep kept growing with things like the updated lighting engine.
What annoys me the most is that this game is essentially a redo of BOTW, not a sequel.
The way it plays is the EXACT SAME. Bear with me here, it's a long list:
- Wake up in mysterious circumstances in a closed area that serves as tutorial.
- Meet a mysterious figure guiding you to gain your core gameplay abilities.
- Traverse tuto area and complete shrines to find the 4 abilities that you will use throughout the game, get more familiar with those, as well as understand better other gameplay mechanics.
- Pray at the statue of Goddess, unlock cutscene, mysterious figure reveal its identity and connection to Zelda.
- Access to the rest of the map is now granted and the main quest is revealed: SAVE ZELDA.
- Now the map is open and you can go pretty much everywhere you want, although you are guided to a specific point to progress the story.
- Character at specific point reveals critical problems in 4 main regions of the map: Zora, Goron, Rito, and Gerudo. Those should be investigated by you.
- An incarnation of Ganon is the cause of Hyrule's misery, of course. It's clear that his lair is now at Hyrule Castle.
- At the 4 main regions, you meet key characters of the 4 main races, most importantly their young hero (who's destiny is to live up to the heroism of someone back in their lineage).
- Link is requested to help bringing back the balance and well-being of each region. This is done by completing some sort of mega-shrine - not exactly a Dungon as Zelda used to have, but more like isolated puzzles that upon completion eventually give access to a boss.
- Each of those are themed according to the main element of the 4 regions, namely water, fire, wind, and lightning.
- Defeating the boss brings back the peace in each region and completes part of the main quest. Doing so also grants Link a special power that can be used in the rest of the game to help for traversal, shielding, or combat.
- Along the way you find and complete several shrines by solving puzzles, doing combat, or completing overworld activities granting a blessing (orb).
- Exchanging 4 orbs grants you either more life or stamina.
- Along the way you find Koroks in suspicious places.
- Exchanging Korok seeds to Hestu grants Link with more inventory space.
- Along the way you meet an excentric character with a passion for creatures. He's in a weird hot-hair balloon and can be found at night near towns.
- Exchanging parts with this character gives you fun additional pieces of armor.
- Along the way you fight several camps of enemies and mini-bosses.
- Doing so allows you to find weapons, chests, food, etc. It's also an occasion to make use of your 4 abilities to mess around and ambush these enemies in goofy ways.
- Along the way you clash against the Yiga Clan, who are determined to revive the incarnation of Ganon to its full strength.
- You can defeat them in the world, and defeat their silly boss Master Koga. You can also retreive the Thunder Helm at their hideout.
- Along the way you can find some mini-games in the world organized by characters from the 4 main regions, costing a few rupees.
- Doing better and better at those mini-games gifts you with more and more rupees.
- Along the way you find very specific locations of the overworld with the help of hints from the map.
- Doing so unlocks a dozen or so cutscenes that slowly reveal the story of the game in a non-linear fashion. Not surprizingly, Zelda is the key to everything, and her own sacrifice is what allows Link to ultimately save not only Hyrule, but her as well.
- Along the way there are some gimmicks to challenge you more/differently, like removing your equipment temporarily, or putting you in complete darkness.
- Overcoming those special obstacles usually leads to a shrine or a special treasure.
- Along the way you find four fairies that can enhance your clothing.
- Completing their requests unlocks each of them for increasing levels of enhancements.
- Your inventory is made up of all sorts of armor pieces like climbing gear, stealth outfit, Zora armor for swimming, barbarian set with attack-increasing stats, etc. You also have easter-egg pieces from past games, like Dark Link, Midna's helmet, Majora's Mask, etc.
- A particular set can be found by completing the three big mazes found in Hyrule.
- One of the quest allows you to purchase a home from Bolson construction.
- One of the most involved quests requires you to pretty much build a town from scratch.
- The master sword is obviously a key part of the story. Knowledge of it is held by the Deku Tree, located deep in the Korok Forest. But one does not simply walk in the Korok Forest.. only by being clever can you reach the home of the Koroks..
- Exploring the entirety of the map leads to gaining strong weapons, armors, and shields - as well as maxing out on stamina and hearts.
- It's usually at that point where you feel you've done pretty much everything in the game and/or feel strong enough that you decide to go fight the final boss (although you can do it at any time).
- A mini dungeon at Hyrule Castle eventually leads to the big showdown.
- If you have completed the "dungeons" of the main quest, you don't have to fight their bosses now. They've been taken care of already, and the heroes of the regions assist you in battle. Otherwise, the bosses block the path to Ganon's incarnation and you have to defeat them by yourself.
- You then face Ganon one-on-one. All your skills and strongest equipment are unleashed to ultimately defeat him.
- Ganon resists his demise and makes a final desperate attempt at overpowering you by turning into a giant beast form. This leads to a fight outside the castle, in open air, that is very easy but far more cinematic. Zelda is actively supporting you in that final phase.
- Once the final blow is rendered, Zelda is finally freed, and in a short cutscene you share a moment with her in Hyrule Field. She's confused but happy, and the land is finally safe.
- Cut to credits.
Seriously?!?! Aesthetically, thematically, and mechanically, it's the SAME game.
I had a good time with the game, some stuff was definitely on the level of the unique Nintendo quality we can expect, but overall this game became tiresome real fast once I realized 80% of my time would be either:
- Building/crafting,
- Exploring without visibility (depths, sand storm, snow storm, pitch black areas), or
- Doing insipid busywork for fetch quests
TOTK really doubled down on nearly everything that they shouldn't have from BOTW imo.
Edit: The "Tedium" segment of the video couldn't be any more on point. Bravo!
Exactly my thoughts. I really enjoyed Totk the same way I enjoyed Botw in 2017. But being honest these games are so similar that Totk just feels like a complete and definitive version of Botw.
One of my friends recently bought a Switch and asked whether it is better to play Botw first. I said he better plays only Totk. Playing both games one after another would be so frustratingly tedious
@@Sidewalk277 While I do agree that it would be frustratingly tedious, I don't think I would recommend TOTK in that situation. BOTW feels like a way more cohesive and interesting experience imo. Discovering the world was much more fun for me than the heavy building/crafting gimmick.
@@thisisfyne oh yeah and I miss the old runes especially the bombs and oh the chainsaw blade.That was my favourite weapon
Not to mention exploration and quest completion becomes more tedious when you realise your rewards are just the same stuff from the last game and the characters you meet are the same but not and they don't remember you.
In my opinion TOTK was not made with BOTW players/fans in mind
@@mafiaboss3077 100%. Tbh my only incentive to explore the depth was the hidden treasures, but when I realized it was the exact same stuff I had in BOTW, dealing with the omnipresent annoying darkness just didn't feel worth it anymore. That whole map was very formulaic anyway (especially when you realize it's just the Hyrule topology replicated but upside down)
That awkward moment where I did the entire hateno mayor quest hoping to have the clothing lady give me a paraglider before not getting it and realizing that there was a story quest for me.
how is that even possible.
yeah the game really doesn't say "hey go here for a paraglider," I wandered to a tower and was told NOPE YOU CAN'T DO THIS LOL
@@Zeldrake the game does say though that your goal is to find Zelda. Given what happened in the intro, most players should feel like getting back there is a priority . the first thing a player sees when they jump off the sky to the surface is Hyrule castle floating in the sky. If you go straight to the castle you will run into lookout landing. Which directly leads you to get the paraglider. Very straightforward
@@YellowElevator815 on the flipside, seeing all that scary evil red energy destroy link's arm & now all around Hyrule Castle means I Don't Want Anything To Do With That, much like how in BOTW you're very much not encouraged to visit the castle immediately
@@YellowElevator815 Like how in BotW if you go there like things suggest YOU GO TO THE FINAL BOSS.
Most people learned to go there last so most people won't go straight there because the previous game taught us otherwise.
Re: healing - I think they moved away from enemies dropping hearts because they wanted to give you a reason to hunt animals and gather fruits and vegetables. I think there should be a healing potion you can brew, with the needed ingredients being relatively rare, and that and faeries should be the only ways of instantly healing mid-combat - because yeah, eating a million apples in the pause menu to instantly heal from death's door to full health is absurd. Most food should give you a regen effect, if that, instead, and you should need to eat it before commencing combat.
On the comment of rocks: At some point you have access to cannons through the gumball machines. Get a ton. It is always good to have one or two fused to a weapon. Then the rock walls become a non-issue as you blast through them quickly with a cannon + Yunobo.
I do wish the game had doen a better job of pointing that out- I constantly forgot I had that option, even after getting the mining turret or whatever that canon-on-a-spike blueprint was called
You don't even need to fuse it, just drop one on the ground and aim it with Ultrahand. One cannon can get you through even the most rock-filled cave. But a fused cannon might break early.
Not only does Yunobo's charge take a long time to get back, you have to CHASE HIM BACK DOWN EVERY TIME and either sift through the other sages or just straight up turn them off to make sure you don't press one of them on accident instead
Similarly, having the Sage ability and item pick-up mapped to the same button stinks too. Often times I would want to pick something up and Tulin would run up to me and I'd accidentally blow something away. Happened to one of the first dragon parts I farmed and Tulin blew it straight off a cliff in Gerudo Valley. I still haven't forgiven him.
@@mrcat3493 Oh mannnn yeah I can imagine that. In BotW I never had to turn off the Champion abilities, but in this game if I don't turn off the Sage abilities I feel like I'm actively making my game worse.
Most frequently for me is in a battle, or just after, I'll be pressing A a lot to pick up monster parts and then I'll turn on Riju's ability and have to chase her town to turn it back off, or just wait it out.
And he's actually the least annoying to chase down because he's bigger and slower. XD I use him the most. I think their AI thinks you're running that way whenever you turn around and try to run to them for your power. You can't even block and select them at the same time.
@@quonit37 IKR? It gets out of control with five of them running around and, quite frankly, they are useless outside of a use-case scenario. Riju was really only helpful/fun in caves with horriblins, Tulin for gliding. The rest kind of suck.
@@mrcat3493 Honestly it'd be way more helpful if when you whistled they'd just STOP and stay still instead of try to get even closer.
Im glad im not the only one who kept throwing my weapon trying to open up abilities
28:50
Elemental attacks hit twice. Once with the element itself and once with the damage part of the attack. This makes it bypass the one shot protection. Gleeoks, lightning, fused elemental weapons, explosions (I think), and any other attack that inflicts ice, electric, or fire damage.
I also remember getting one shot by a lynel in the depths one time so maybe gloom has an effect on one shot protection. I haven't tested this gloom theory though so it could be wrong.
Edit: Btw nice video ceave. Glad to see you're back!
IIrc one-shot protection doesn't apply to lynel attacks or certain boss enemies.
Did you wear max upgraded armor when facing the lynel? When facing the depths final evo lynel, if you don’t have fully upgraded armor, it bypasses the 1 shot rule. (Never got 1 shoted when doing the lynel colliseum with +4 barb set)
From what I've heard, the 1 shot protection doesn't work if the attack does over 20 damage more than your max health
@@jordanertz3034 I see. I was wondering if gloom hits twice like the other elements, but that makes a lot more sense.
The minibosses that one-shot in BOTW probably also one-shot in TOTK then.
@@mooneater4596 I think it does do some sort of calculation of armor or progress because I've noticed that in this game and in the last. I assume that different minibosses have a value that if you are higher than in armor you cannot get one-shot by that enemy. No clue what the actual calculations are tho.
So, for me, the one issue that stood out the most to me was:
When you are using the Autobuild rune, the game will disable your ability to pull out Zonai parts from your inventory.
The fact that, during the single most likely situation for you to want to pull out Zonai parts, you are not allowed to do that, is a good indicator of how little thought was put into how the player is actually going to play the game, in my opinion.
That does not sound like an oversight but like a clear decision for specific gameplay. Like not allowing to fuse in the menus.
I think they want to create a feeling that it is really happening on that realm and not from a videogame menu.
I would never use the Zonai parts in autobuild. Autobuild is so cheap with 3 Zonaite per missing part that I value the Zonai parts in the inventory much higher. I used the Zonai parts for building something new that isn't part of the autobuild history.
honestly i hate to say this but; skill issue. it takes no brain to just pull out the zonai devices beforehand, like sure the first time i understand the anger but afterwards is just honestly you being salty something didnt go your way. its not that hard to go into the menu and pull out the devices beforehand. its just a few more button clicks...cmon.
@@-letspretendidontexist-8479 Nope, things that bother you are not necessarily a skill issue. Doing it in an easier way for the player was a possibility and Nintendo decided to do it this way. And that is fine.
@@m0n0deferia Agreed! Whether it's a good system or not is a different question.
Although I, generally speaking, like the physicality of BOTW/TOTK over the ancient menu/physics system that is Elden Ring (but that game has other great things going for it that the open world Zeldas lack).
This is EASILY the best Tears of the Kingdom retrospective yet. Your video style and writing is so much better than the likes of some other recent videos that I will not call out.
I agree that it’s well made but he spends like half the video talking about how he accidentally pressed the wrong button
@@jumpyman9754I think an entire hour long video could be made about just this game's menus and control scheme (they suck)
It's not a retrospective lol the game has only been out a couple months and we have no new development from where we can have a retrospective
@@OoTZOMMMoOThank you for saying this so I didn't have to. It really bugs me how people have started using that word without even knowing its meaning lol
@@ds90seph It has become a new fancy way to say "review" on youtube, just like the words: "Analysis", "critique" and "case study".
About the shield parry thing, it was more useful in botw because of the existence of guardians, but I agree they should've changed it a bit since they got rid of those. Now the only usefulness it serves is against lynels using an almost broken royal guard's claymore. The claymore does double damage when it's almost broken, so you don't want to flurry rush it, you shield parry their attacks so you can crit them with your bow easier, then you ride on their back because hitting a lynel while riding their back doesn't do durability damage to your sword.
Shield parries don't even reflect most projectiles! You're telling me that Link can send a whole-ash laser back with a parry, but he can't do that to a Shock Fruit Arrow?
@@ED-gw9rg Yes.
I think the design of BoTW intended the full shield block to be the low risk, low reward option. A successful parry reward you with a stun, no durability lost. A perfect dodge is the highest risk/reward because you need to dodge with backflip or side step correctly, and I think the time window is similar to a parry.
I really think they believed most people will actually put their 2 handed weapon away to use shield as a drawback for better spear range and claymore powerful charge attack.
@@EarthWingedDragon A fine opinion and analysis, and I would actually agree if the timing for a flurry rush was tighter. Parry timings are so much more strict than flurry rush timings, you have so much leeway with a flurry rush, taking all the risk out of "high risk, high reward," making it just "high reward."
I already had the master sword when I explored under the koruk forest and ascended up to the deku tree... I had no idea there was an epic quest associated with everything...
my big issue with that quest is that the gloom hands showed up as i was making my way to the deku tree in the first place. so I was trying to get there this enemy showed up and i killed it and phantom ganon appeared and it was like "woah wtf" but then I got to the deku tree and dived in and its just "oh you again?"
@@dalmationblack Imagine if it was a callback dungeon to OOT. Or if the boss was a new version of Manhandla. Would have been so much cool
*Meanwhile at the GotY awards 2023*
Baldur's Gate 3: "Thank you, thank you! Honestly we didn't expect to win 5 awa- oh another one? Okay 6 awards!"
Zelda TotK: "O-only 1 award...?"
I now have the words to explain why various game design choices are so annoying. I knew the button mapping, quick menu, and sage activation was bad and wanted custom button mapping. You connected OG Zelda button mapping. But probably one of your best insights was explaining the button mapping is bad because it's contradicting and doesn't appropriately theme actions to controller regions nor directions. What a long video, but it was so worth it!
So that Nintendo can purposefully (and easily) remove these features in a future release and receive critical praise for doing so.
@@alexs29 Nintendo gets so much forgiveness for having the most annoying, tedious, minor flaws in game design that are extremely easy to resolve. They only removed a few of these flaws in Tears of the Kingdom (and added like 30 more minor aspects of annoyance) yet people only focus on the few they removed.
Nintendo fans are so easy to please.
I agree with most of these point, which quite surprised me. I really like totk, except for me lacking motivation to explore after beating the game (30-40 hrs), and doing all Lightroots and Shrines (110 hrs), but the only point I didn’t fully experience during my playthrough was the control issues. I guess I had to much experience with Botws throwing button, as I have 250+ hrs in that game only on my main savefile. Overall another amazing video, so incredibly glad you’re back Ceave!
Me with 210 hours in the game and still only 3 sages... And still a lot to explore... Well...
I never played BotW, but I also didn’t really have any trouble with the control scheme. Sure, some things were noticeable like the need to drop items to fuse, the quick menu only really being usable for a couple items in most used mode, etc, but overall it felt just fine.
Majority of the control section didn’t make sense to me in the vid bc I really didn’t have a problem with the controls. It felt like he made it a lot more complicated then it actually was
That breakable rocks comment speaks to my soul. Found the secret royal tunnel before getting Yunobo. It just kept GOING
@htatem8897 I did the exact same thing. Damn my need for perfection!
One of my personal greatest frustration points during my playthrough was finding the Water 'Temple' while exploring and solving all the puzzles but not being able to progress because of lacking Seidon's ability. Either let me break the sequencing and beat the temple, don't let me find it like the Thunder Temple or make it very clear I'm not supposed to do anything up there. This way it left me feeling so blue balled!
Same, but Wind Temple for me. I just happened to wander up that way after hitting the Skyview Tower and only realized after I was at the top that I was blocked from progression. I dropped a Travel Medallion... and STILL had to reclimb the damn thing once I started Tulin's quest. The game is so self-contradictory.
It's so ridiculous! They just pasted the structure of a standard Zelda game on top of the open world and then just started hacking away any elements that didn't work, instead of trying to actually find a way to integrate that sense of adventure and progression into the freedom of the open environment.
And I *know* Nintendo have the skills to figure that out, but because they're so headstrong and bullishly proud of BotW, they didn't bother trying to use the time and resources they were reusing from BotW to make a game that stays more true to the Zelda series. Instead they decided to just... waste six years of valuable development time on doing next to nothing?
This game honestly could still have easily been postgame DLC to Breath of the Wild, and the only reason that it isn't is because it'd sell more copies as a standalone game.
@@alfiehicks1Very true. Not a bad game per se but come on this is embarrassing after six years
@@argentpuck Isn't there a shrine basically at the entrance to the Wind Temple? You should be able to warp once you have Tulin.
@@papersonic9941 I wouldn't call it "at the entrance." It's at the entrance to the jumping-maze sequence up to the Temple. I dropped my medallion at the warp point at the Temple itself because it refused to activate for me without Tulin.
I played for 10 hours without finding the paraglider. I had to look up online to learn that I'd missed the necessary quest. In Botw, after the turorial, I had all I needed to do anything in the game. Loved it. In Totk, I was really annoyed that my exploration was unclearly hamstrung by quest elements I hadn't completed yet.
Bruh, the game literally zooms in on lookout landing. That's on you
Tbf you have to go to Hyrule Castle, complete that mission, then return to lookout landing to get the paraglider. How are you expected to know to return when you aren’t told?
@@JayoticMTG the quest explicitly tells you to return to lookout landing and talk to purah, hoz also tells you to talk to purah
@@TerraKnight27 fair enough, quests that’s on me. I kinda mash through the dialogue lol
@@RalorPenwat yeah, I went there. Then the main quest started, and I thought I'd rather explore.
How am I supposed to know that the paraglider is at the end of that quest element? After all, I finished the tutorial didn't I?
Look, fun game, I've put in near 100 hours, I'm enjoying it. I've just been frustrated multiple times and had to set it down. I'm not sure why we would think it's a 10/10 perfect game deserving game of the year if it clearly has so many flaws that make it a pain to play.
The ZR toggle you propose is brilliant and already in use. Final Fantasy XIV uses it to great effect to have up to 32 programmable buttons on the face buttons at any given time.
For your idea: Single Press and Hold ZR would let you have those 12 programmable buttons. But if you add a double tap and then hold ZR you could have up to 18 programmable buttons in Zelda. How do I know it works? Because I use that double tap daily in Final Fantasy. You'd think it's clunky, but it's very intuitive and works like a charm.
1:24:15 I was thinking about this before when I sometimes play BotW! I just think to myself how convenient this game would be if I just used the GamePad for the map, or how less broken it would be to consume food on the bottom screen during combat, or how less frequent I would in general be going through the menus. There are these gimmick puzzles in BotW that force you to use motion controls. These are some of the last remaining bits that utilize the GamePad's unique features left over in the game, and I just find that so interesting! Like, BotW was supposed to better showcase what the Wii U GamePad could do before they fully removed most features.
Man, like, the Wii U just makes me sad! Like, it had such a cool Swiss army knife of a controller, and they were too scared to take many risks with it because people weren't buying their games and people were ridiculing games like StarFox Zero. But for every StarFox Zero, there was a Super Mario Maker, a game that uses the GamePad in an ingenious way! Splatoon is still best played on Wii U! Even after the third Splatoon game, they just couldn't implement a seamless way for players to have instant access to the map like they did before.
This was amazing. You always have the genuine curiosity and courage to actually dive deep into what you are talking about, analysing and interpreting the mechanics with originality and depth in seemless relation to any other aspect of the game that may be relevant, almost no rote repetition of general discourse and making it stupidly entertaining all the way though. Hoo-ray. So glad you're back
For someone who grew up playing every Zelda game when it was released...this just doesn't feel like Zelda anymore. Flying across the map in a self-assembled spaceship is cool, but it doesn't fit the mythos.
I wish nintendo had done this open world experimentation with a new ip and left zelda more or less alone
I think that design progression bars without meaning rewards is to not punish players who do not play 100% of the game, focusing big rewards to the main campaign.