When people say TotK's story is worse I think what they actually mean is that it told its story more poorly, which I think is true. On paper TotK has the better story hands down. But a story itself doesn't live in a vacuum. The way it is told matters.
@@DumplingDoodle I agree, but what they actually mean is the way they'll tell it. In Botw it doesnt matter what memory you pick since they dont have spoilers about the Plot since King Rhoam already told us everything we need to know, the Memories only show the Relationship between Link and the others, and the main topic of them is mostly about Zelda's... Emotional Instability if I can say it that way, Fury, Sorrow, Fear, Hopelessnes and so on just in a complete mix-up. It is nice to see but not very interesting compared to TotM In Tears of the Kingdom there are many Different Main Topics in the Memories. In some you see Zelda in a mysterious world that is unfamiliar to her, in another memory Ganon appears and straight up murders everyone, and in the memory that comes chronologically before the last Dragon Tear you get Zelda's Whole Fate spoiled after Ganon was sealed. The whole point of these Tears are to find out about Zelda's Fate with the Bonus of seeing our Big G Daddydorf himself in Action. In Breath of the wild you dont need to find out anything since you basically know everything you need to know, they are just a little bonus basically, in Tears of the Kingdom you basically know nothing about what happened, but that also means that one Information that you get too early would ruin the whole experience for you, they should have had a better solution like they make the memories only available in a specific order only show them all in order.
That really has nothing to do with it. The story is a pandering mess that disrespects fans of the original series, as well as fans of BotW. It has some cool moments, but everything good about it is skin-deep. As soon as you try to think about it at any deeper level, it just gets worse and worse. That’s why perception shifted so drastically after a few months.
the "story" of totk is not only told poorly but non-existent. these events that happened in the past don't form a coherent or sensible narrative. why was ganondorf trying to conqure hyrule? when did he start? when did king colonator (rauru) decide to let ganondorf into his castle? why are we expected to see rauru as one of the good guys when he's done literally nothing but come into hyrule and claim the land and establish a kingdom? why are the awfully titled "secret stones" (dear lord why) more powerful than the triforce, something established as something beyond powerful? how the hell did the master sword break from evil energy when any and all evil is supposed to be weakened and defeated by the blade regardless of it's strength? nothing in the story makes any sense, and none of it is connected to one another. also, negative opinions on totk have always existed since before it officially released, i myself played it a few weeks early when it leaked. the game is a genuine slog to go through, is boring, bloated with repetitive meaningless content, wastes the player's time with filler, and does little to nothing of value when you give it even the slightest thought
I’ll tell you what happened with me, I really enjoyed playing the game, but then as time went on I did not feel the same urge to explore and find secrets that I did with botw. Not only is it the same map but it’s also littered with repetitive tasks and aesthetics. The more I looked back the more I realized while it was enjoyable I’m not sure it was the most well written or designed game, especially when I started to look at older Zelda games. I started to think about my experience and then my opinion of the game changed it’s pretty simple. We talked about botw for 6 years it had a huge impact… I’m not sure totk will have that same impact, at least not to the degree that people are praising it. I don’t think we’ll be talking about or even playing Totk in 6 years. A lot of ppl have already explored the map to death in botw. And the additional maps aren’t substantial to me personally. The world felt emptier than botw imo, but with botw I felt that that emptiness worked with the premise. I’m ready for a return to a traditional Zelda. I’m not sure why we’ve grown so attached to the open world experience. Linearity and restriction i think made zelda special. totk was really fun, but it didnt really fix my issues i had with botw.
the emptiness in botw was necessary for its tone. those moments of quiet, somber silence staring out on an empty world overtaken by nature are what gives the game such thick atmosphere. totk fails in that regard. it does a better job of feeling like an epic story, but it doesn't feel real. the weight of ganon's actions aren't fully felt. there was a lot of implications of horrible atrocities that happened during the calamity. destroyed homesteads, abandoned villages, very few npcs - they didn't, couldn't say anything explicitly, being a nintendo game - but i think that made it that much stronger. you get to piece together just what happened to the hyrule you once knew as you play. totk is just another run of the mill zelda story, but told in the same way as botws. but where botw benefitted from a lack of exposition, totk tries to have its cake and eat it too. they won't let you engage in the actual story, but they will tell you all about it. botw had that to an extent, but it felt like learning of a long-past tragedy, giving fuel to the ambition to kill ganon. not a lame time paradox that you're a part of, but not involved in.
@@DumplingDoodle Tears of the Kingdom isn't as empty because Hyrule, after the defeat of Calamity Ganon, is on the road to recovery. There's still plenty of destruction, but steps are being made to reverse that. With Calamity Ganon gone, there was nothing stopping the restoration of the Kingdom of Hyrule.
I disagree entirely. TOTK adds on to BOTW's maps in such organic and fun ways, despite it not being 100% consistent across all areas of the maps. The new runes/Zonai abilities make exploring old areas feel new, the Korok puzzles are more engaging than before, caves (despite having lacking rewards) are SHOCKINGLY diverse in how much fun they are, what you can do in them, and how many puzzles are in them; most importantly, some areas of the map actually shocked me in how different they felt. Death Mountain feels like a completely new area now that the lava has disappeared, and it probably has the most creative & interesting caves in the game. Gerudo Desert also feels brand new, with the sand pits sprinkled throughout that leads to caves, the quicksand added to the upper left corner, and the dust storm you have to navigate through when getting to Gerudo Town. It's not perfect, but I was surprised how much fun it felt and how they took advantage of previously existing areas, especially in some areas of the map.
i think it doesn't feel "special" because it isnt choreographed, in botw 90% of the players entered the desert the way it was intended, or the zora domains and a large etc. roads meant something. totk gives u extreme freedom and in a sense you need to exploit it to make the experience your own, because if you played botw to death the experience they're trying to give u is: more and freely. i totally agree with the most given complain to this game and that's the lack of dungeons. i see why this game could have make it extremely hard to make, but legacy dungeons like elden ring would have been a perfect fit to it. like 5-6, 1 to 2 hs dungeons spread around the sky instead of the 4 repetitive concepts used in the sky islands we have.
The only thing I want to add without voicing much of an opinion since I'm biased as hell (totk gave me major MM nostalgia and that has been my favourite game for at least 15 years now, for me personally it'll therefore always top botw) is that a major reason botw was relevant and played for so long was the amount of mods and fun challenges people came up with. Since Nintendo started claiming numerous creators videos where they have fun modding the game I believe they crippled totk's potential for no reason. Maybe not the sole reason why the game may or may not be played as long or longer than botw, but definitely a point to consider imo
I think from a coding perspective, it’s too difficult to suddenly suspend certain game mechanics in the same loading zone and it’s definitely a lot harder to stop people from cheesing them. especially in a game, like tears of the kingdom where The potential for a player exploits is very high. shrines allow an enclosed and confined loading zone to implement the desired mechanics and make sure the intended play style is adhered to
They certainly did not pick the easy way out. The game has a lot of unique and powerful abilities and items, and everything works surprisingly well, even when you actively try to brake the game. In a market that is constantly flooded with low effort and uninspired games, this is something to appreciate.
"shrines allow an enclosed and confined loading zone to implement the desired mechanics and make sure the intended play style is adhered to" not really true at all because all shrines were on the same giant map and people found more then enough ways to break out of the boundaries, but as you said, with so much freedom the potential for exploits is near infinite.
yes an the older zelda games had heart pieces in the over world i'm not sure why nintendo didn't try to shake up the process of getting blessings like putting a "secrets boss or extremely hard puzzle at the end of a few shrines".
This seems to happen with a lot of games. You start off in honeymoon phase, where everyone is excited and focuses on its positives. Only on its positives. But eventually the positives become "old news" because everyone has already talked about them so much. That doesnt mean they are invalid, they're just not the hot topic anymore. So the internet starts to focus on the negatives, and only on the negatives. This gives off the impression that the game is the worst thing ever and a huge disappointment. But unless the game is genuinely bad (Skyward Sword), this "worst game ever" phase never lasts forever. Eventually the negatives become old news too. General opinion on the game balances out and the internet fairly judges it based on its positives _and_ negatives. Criticisms are valid, but so are the PRAISES, which is why most people come to like each Zelda game in the end. Because out of the 20 games we have, nearly _every single one_ is objectively good. So just sit back and let the cycle keep going. 💡💡 *EDIT: A bunch of people called me out for saying Skyward Sword is bad. But back when SS was a few months old, calling it bad was the popular opinion. So suddenly most people like it now? This confirms everything I've been saying, the extreme hate for Zelda games is just a phase of the cycle. It's not permanent. Valid criticisms will always be there, but all the talk of each game being "the worst thing ever" never lasts long. Not even for SS it seems. Games can be flawed and still be amazing, people.* ...I personally enjoyed SS btw.
I clearly remember this happening with BotW. It was praised for refreshing Zelda and revolutionizing open world games. But even that becomes old news, and the negative things about the game were brought to attention. It took a while, maybe even until NOW with TotK, but it finally balanced out and I think most people fairly judge it.
Its called the "Zelda Effect" where the last game in the series is the best one. Unless it's bad enough like Skyward Sword, like you said. There was a time when Twilight Princess was a "cheap Ocarina clone" and Wind Waker was the best game. Or a time when MM wasn't a "real Zelda" for using the timer mechanic. But now we all look back and appreciate those games.
@@met3155 man the absolute _hatred_ towards Wind Waker made it sound worse than Zelda 2. But now? It's an S tier game. The only Zeldas that maintain their bad reps... are the games that are actually bad.
Honestly, from what I see, the only bad Zelda games ever made are the CDi games, and even they have at least one redeeming quality: prime YTP material.
first of all where is skyward sword genuinely bad, i mean motion controls are kinda annoying but with the switch port and emulators it was pretty good just very linear imo. I 100% agree with you and imo you can tell that by how people see botw now, when i played it it went downhill for me after the water dungeon and i just rushed the game around 2nd to third dungeon. I was thinking like how tf is this a 10/10 game, the open world concept may be a 10/10 but not the whole game and i never understood how people liked it that much and now people say its around an 8/10 lower or higher depending on who you ask. Id give it a 7/10 cause imo the open world concept was good but not executed well, i think elden ring did that way better
I was obsessed with TOTK for months after release, but now i find myself not wanting to go back to it the way i did with botw, after the excitement wears off it does leave a feeling that it was missing a lot of content.
This is such a non issue. Oh you played the game for hundreds of hours, and enjoyed it thoroughly? Sounds like a great fucking game. I hear this a lot, people play the shit out of a game, enjoy it, and start getting burnt out, and then pretend it was never actually good to begin with, or worse than previous entries because they simply played it and finished.
@@WhitfieldR its called the zelda cycle. every new zelda is met with immediate praise, followed by waves of criticism, and folk bitching about how theyre dissapointed it didnt entertain them for years to come and that it wasnt worth the wait, then the next zelda comes out and people start talking about how much better the new one is and how the previous one was a "precursor", then EVENTUALLY given a decade, people start to praise the game again, and call it "underrated" because of its inevitable wave of influence it has on the gaming industry as a whole. the zelda community is so fucking huge that were seeing a pattern in poor critical thinking emerge consistently.
I've seen people switch their opinions about games several times. They stir up controversy to get more views and more attention. Also at 4:22, it's a story thing. The shrines were meant to be a way to train Link after he woke up from his 100-year nap.
The shrines make perfect sense as Zelda has told Raru and Sonia about Link's heroic exploits so they made the shrines to aid Link similar to how the Sheikah did it with their shrines.
I think the Internet’s overwhelming positive reaction in the weeks after the game launched just meant negative opinions were drowned out or intentionally withheld to avoid being dog piled by other fans. So there would be plenty of people who haven’t changed their minds that are only now having their opinions be visible online, I can confirm my opinion on TotK has stated consistently low. I have to say, it came across fairly disingenuous to dismiss the validity of all negative opinions over the accusation they originally praised the game, which just isn’t true. Likewise saying BotW has a better story isn’t people switching their opinions on BotW (which you sort of frame as “proof” against the legitimacy of all their opinions) people were making a specific comparison between the two games, it’s better in relativity to TotK, but not when compared to older Zelda titles. Leaving that out inaccurately frames what people meant. Regardless, another thing to consider is those initial positive reviews were being made when people started playing, it was a first impression review rather than one formed from the totality of their play through. A lot of people’s opinions on things like the Depths started intensely positive, until all the disappointment set in when it didn’t live up to expectations. So this may now just be their final post-playthrough opinion of the game. But another possibility is more people simply have the emotional distance necessary to give a more analytical critique, their personal love/enjoyment of the game may not have changed, it just doesn’t prevent them from engaging in critiquing a games shortcomings. Which is especially common in the context of people discussing the improvements they want in the NEXT game, after a big Zelda release everyone begins speculating on how Nintendo can make the next one even better, so focusing so much of game flaws and shortcomings is a natural part of that community discourse and isn’t necessarily an expression of “hate” towards the last game.
The honey moon phase is now over and people are realizing that a game that doubles down of everything BotW did, including the bad stuff actually, isn't very good. Doesn't help that 90% of the world is the same so the magic of exploring from BotW is gone and all the new stuff is disappointing at best, and useless padding at worst. Also it sucks that the story isn't good but on top of that this game barely feels like a sequel, going out of its way to barely connect to BotW, then Nintendo recently out right saying they don't care for story and lore.
For story I think its less of botw has the better story but rather it has the better story *telling* and it's story matched the world and gameplay better. In a vacuum totk and watching cutscenes in order totk has the better story without a doubt. But the way it's told is messy, getting them in any order doesnt work like in botw. The story will spoil itself because you can get it any order. Plus the story feels disconnected from the gameplay and the gameplay hinders it. With a much grander story it sucks how we dont exactly play a role. Not to mention the repetitive cutscenes and how link plays dumb if you learn everything too early. Basically with Totks storytelling its so easy to mess it up and thus it trips over it's feet. Botws story is pretty nonexistent and quieter, but it doesnt have the problems totk does. It serves the gameplay and world, botw has excellent environmental storytelling. There is so much world building that totk doesn't have and the stuff it does add is tacked on and doesnt make sense half the time. So, no the story of botw isnt better, but it is told better and suits the game. Also the ending of totk really sours the ending. The ending basically puts them right to how things were at the beginning and makes you ask "what was the point?" The final fight was sick tho For me personally Im mixed. Totk has some pretty high highs but also some low lows and a lot of the little things kept adding up to bring the overall experience down. I never thought it was the best game at the beginning but I was really enjoying the game at the beginning but I kept getting disappointed at things like the two new areas. Idk botw overall is more consistent and the more well thought out games. Interviews for totk just keep revealing how they just really didnt think things through especially when it came to the connection to botw. Meanwhile its crazy how well thought out botw is especially for their first go at this type of openworld game. Again I dont hate totk, im mixed on it and I do acknowledge it does some things better (dungeons and bosses specifically).
"link has amnesia in a post apocalyptic world, go remember." is a much better plot device than "hyrule is rebuilding, link remembers stuff, but also it doesn't matter - go find someone elses memories instead."
Totk is the best Zelda for me personally. The shrines were unique thanks to all those different zonai devices. It was so easy to get sidetracked because of so much stuff to do in open world. Main quest was fun and dungeons much better than divine beasts from botw. Game gives so much freedom in doing the puzzles the intended way or just cheeze them using zonai divices if you don't like them. Story was really good for a zelda game and me tear up in certain parts and all that culminated in an epic final boss which is for me the best Ganon fight in the series. Totk was peak zelda experience for me and is my favourite switch game for now and I don't see anything beating this masterpiece
It had a lot of ups and quite a few annoying downs, which is what makes it difficult to appreciate at times. The 3-layers world is amazing and gave me a lot of great memories. As you say, there is so much to do in the world, if not right next to you, it might above or below. It made the world more dense and more fun to traverse. People are still actively coming up with new zonai constructions to this day and trying to push the physics to the max. This is not the sign of a bad game, or a game with nothing to do in it! The main powers were more fun and more versatile than in BotW, the shrines were usually better, the story, characters and cut scenes were usually better... There are a few things hard to accept with TotK, but in general, it is a brilliant game, and a unique and fun one at that.
ToTK has the best gameplay I’ve ever seen in a single player game. It’s the most creative and fun game I’ve ever played. The only thing lacking in ToTK is lore, in order to explain things like the Ancient Sages, the Zonai, the Sky, the Depths, and where the Sheikah Tech went.
The fact that it reused Hyrule was a unique and new experience of its own. It felt like revisiting your hometown after decades, with countless changes and a million new things to do. And I actually cared for the towns in peril because I experienced life with them for myself. Unlike in BotW, where you're just _told_ you have a history with them and are supposed to care. They built upon a world we love so much instead of scrapping it. That's so rare for Zeldas that I'm glad we got to experience this game.
Yeah I know what you mean, it's gotta be one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen. The whole "Looks like a $70 DLC" take was kind of a legitimate talking point back in February, months before the game even launched and we knew almost nothing about it. When the game actually released, the reception was overwhelmingly "The '$70 DLC' crowd is looking real quiet now" and "Ok, now I see why this game took them 6 years to make". Seeing people suddenly come back out of the woodwork with the "Feels like DLC" take and "6 years for what?" long after these talking points have been laid to rest, has been so bizarre and it kinda weirds me out. Feels like I've been dragged straight back to February. I do also think the topic of GOTY looming on the horizon and BG3 vs TotK tribalism is also playing a huge part.
I didn't play BG3 and have zero interest in it and I dropped TotK, so not for me. Maybe for some people, but I think a lot of people, after they got over new and shiny thing and the genuine technical marvel that is ultrahand, the cracks started to become more obvious. I personally never cared for ultrahand. I thought it was cool, again, a technical marvel, but I'm not a creative with things like that. Plus, with 2 other abilities basically being "ultrahand for weapons" and "instant ultrahand", it got pretty old, and even began to interfere with the game to some extent. Like I can't use my zonai devices in shrines, but I sure can bring in a rocket shield and a wing shield to fly over any puzzle. Mind you, I barely did stuff like that, and I still got burnt out feeling like the game mechanics broke themselves. When I solved one of those puzzles where you're supposed to knock a ball into it by just shooting an arrow with an item attached to it at the thing, I became incredibly disheartened. It felt like there was no point to anything I was doing. I do shrines to get more hearts. I get more hearts to fight strong opponents to get their parts to make stronger weapons to fight stronger opponents to go into the depths to mine zonaite to autobuild more part to get to new sky islands or shrines to get more hearts. It's all just cyclical doing things to do the thing that let's me do the thing I'm already doing but easier. It felt almost like a mobile game to me after 50 hours, like I was doing things just to do them and then I dropped it
After replaying all the game doing 100% again, it feels more awesome, and exploring was a lot less tedius - because I explored with a target in mind. I did a lot more contructs (since I did not want to use the hover bike) and used mods to extend the time of zonai itens - the wings become a lot of fun! I did a lot more fights, and tried a lot more things, like breaking boulders with Riju or some weird construct. I used planes, cars, robots, etc. The temples were a lot more fun too.
@@mbii7667 Not really. Nintendo already has western ESG money invested in them. Why do you think Pokemon no longer acknowledges gender and they're making a Peach game with no reference to her emotional powers like she had back in Super Princess Peach. Hating on TotK is far from a woke psy-op. If anything, this game gets the "elf gender" woke loons in a tizzy for Zelda's T&A. People just stopped liking the game when they played enough to realize they waited longer for the sequel than the original just to get more of the same in the same world with even more impressive physics, but not even in as fun as a way since they kept updating the game to nerf fun exploits of those physics, like Rocket jumping
I wasn't aware there was much discourse along these lines, but I'm not surprised to learn that there is. Here's my criticism of Tears of the Kingdom. The disjointed story was not particularly effective in my playthrough. A great example of that was the discovery of the Thunderhead Isles. The fact that there's a huge storm around the place absolutely drew me in. I did the Wind Temple first, and the giant thunderstorm over Faron seemed a natural next step, given the similarity in tone to the Wind Temple and the new power you get there. I go there, and, no spoilers, but you know what happens there. To find out much, MUCH later there is a whole elaborate and really cool quest line that leads you there was a huge bummer. The sense of discovery and mystery inherent in such a huge quest was completely lost on me because I inadvertently solved one of the biggest mysteries in the game. Regarding the criticisms, here's an analogy. Generally, I feel like Tears of the Kingdom is a great game, but it is so full of stuff that it feels like chewing on the kind of steak that just gets bigger the longer you chew it. Ultimately, you might just spit it out instead of swallowing it, and that leaves you feeling empty. Myself, I prefer Breath of the Wild. It feels, to me, like a much better example of the "open air" concept the Zelda team were going for than Tears of the Kingdom. There is less to do, yes, but your imagination fills in the gaps. Sometimes less is more.
yup, they gave up on the total freedom of choice they had in botw. did the same thing, also did the same thing with the water and fire temples. happened across them, couldn't do anything until later. in botw, i would've been able to do the dungeons solo, then go meet yunobo/sidon, and have them throw some confused but thankful dialogue my way as things go back to normal. would i miss out on their stories? yes. did that stop anyone from buttrushing ganon with a tree branch in botw? no. in botw the divine beasts at least made sense as to why you couldn't enter them solo. instead of a little story sequence, they give you a task. how you completed that task was up to you. sure you can sneak yunobo up death mountain, or you can go destroy all the drones and have him stroll over in peace. sure you can steal the thunder arrows from the lynel or find them otherwise, or you can kill the lynel and get extra. in totk, you just get shuffled along a linear sequence, until the game decides you can play again. not to say those sequences are necessarily bad, but they're not free.
This happened to me when I found about the forgotten temple and all they tell you about the tears… way after I had already found all the tears on my own just exploring lol
@@DumplingDoodleno that's not true. Botw had the same type of quests that lead up to the Divine beasts. You were still required to find the champions of the area, and then work with them to get into the beast. Imo most of what people don't like about totk, is what they don't like about open world games. What they want is to add more linearity to them, but that ruins the game. What they want is traditional zelda, and that's not coming back thankfully. So we have to work to make open world zelda even better
Conflating two different groups of ppl with each other and trying to imply that the ppl who never liked totk in the first place now ‘suddenly’ hate it is so weird. Also even if that were the case, why do you oppose people changing their minds…? There’ve been numerous totk critique video’s that were uploaded within the month the game was released, with countless comments that also post about their grievances with the game. Totk fans try to not to be disingenuous nintendo meatrider challenge
i new this was going to happen because it was very clear to me that totk was just "more botw", but people will only understand that after they see the next one, then they will see how much better totk could have been...that being said, i enjoy totk very much
I'm one of many who had their opinions on totk change within the first month. The new mechanics were hella innovative and fun. Take those cool mechanics and combine it with a a world that turned out to be twice as big as the original, the thrill of discovery was insane! And it was that thrill that fed people for a bit. But then, the more you play it the more hollow it feels. This sky and underworld are so cool during your introductory period, but then, at a point you realize they're shallow and lifeless. I explored all of the depths, and it became a chore after about 20% of the way through. They we're literally created to act as toy boxes for the new mechanics. New mechanics are cool, but that's really never been this soul of Zelda and why people play. Also, why are more than half of the armors you find ripped straight from the first game. Like what? Additional, The game forces you constantly to enter a menu, which is laggy. I tired so much of constantly going to the menu for items, weapons, and to initiate the new abilities. Such a chore. Cave and Wells were added to the surface, which were really nice. Otherwise, it's literally the same ol, but WITHOUT the sense of discovery. You're literally exploring the same world with the exact same gameplay processes as the first game. It brings nothing exciting to the table or to discover. In botw, sure there were no caves or wells, but there was a whole dang world to discover. New environment, new towns, new art style, new mechanics, new characters, new enemies, etc. You also have major unique discoveries that you don't get in totk, such as the island, making your way through the lost woods, the dark shadow temple,, the big temple in the cliffs (actually fun and unique in botw), etc. The shrines were better as well. I would definitely agree that the story was tighter in botw as well. There was a world built around that story, a history, grand guardian ruins of old battles, etc. Totk's story was basically "baddy is mean and he's definitely going to wait for you so he can talk to you about how evil he is". All the while, I am hearing everyone talk about how weird Zelda is being, even though I learned why 20% of the way through the game. "Demon King gordo"? "Secret Stones"? AND it's hard not to go into what effect it had on the overallseries. Im not a lore fanatic, but it felt like this game literally just erased everything all the games have contributed to the series just so they can make literally ALL of Hyrule based around people who apparently lived on little rocks in the sky. I don't feel like people are suddenly loving botw's by saying it's better than totk's To sum that up, totk was praised because it seemed so grand. Map is huge, people were telling us there were pirates attacking, people were talking about how insane Kakariko village was now, I was hearing of this mystery beast, etc. But then, when people dug their hands into it, they discovered the it was all a tease. Something new? No! Just more of the same as the first title, within the exact same world. And people are saying Nintendo had a bad year? I've heard none of that. Maybe it's a 4chan then?
Yeah, I feel this. Plus, the world feels so much less dangerous without the guardians or their ruins around and it feels like such a waste that they're all gone. Sure, the ones reactivated by Ganon blowing up or otherwise being destroyed, whatever, but the divine beasts and all shieka tech being just plain gone and never discussed. That is weird. All the people had to know the dangers of the Guardians and the such all around for the past century, and the ruins around the world. It's more than weird that they're gone. It's also kinda really annoying that they basically reused the ancient technology setup again too with the zonai after obliterating the shieka tech too. Like, my God, does the story of this game feel iterative of BotW. They unnecessarily nuke the world history on BotW to introduce a new one. And sure, they could've referenced that shieka tech was the shieka carrying on the legacy and technological developments of the zonai. But they didn't do that. It feels like they're treating the player like an idiot. I hate it. It's literally the same setup with the ancient but technologically advanced society. Who had their own Temple of Time, had their own shrines, had their own king, had their own memories, etc etc etc. Ot improved on some things, like having more obvious indicators where the memories were, rather than just some pictures, but I'd even argue that was to the detriment of the story because it made it easy to discover the stories biggest plot twist before you even realize Zelda's warping all around doing questionable things. I legit saw the murder memory before I finished the lookout landing opening part of the game cause I got bored talking to people there and just wanted to explore. I only went back to finish it when I realized that was where the paraglider was and I couldn't do any of the Skyview towers until I finished that. God the tutorial part of this game is long and it giving you access to the world before the tutorial finished was game design that BotW understood better than TotK. They tried to have their cake and eat it too, reusing story beats, reusing the world, and just trying to recontextualize it into a somewhat more traditional Zelda story story in an open world game and it just didn't work. Despite there being more characters and them being more involved in the story, the game just felt less alive than BotW. It oddly felt more game-y, less immersive, and really just comes off like the DLC it was meant to be, but forced in a narrative and quests to just make it feel worth the investment of a full game. It's interesting while you're discovering things, before you realize 8 out of 10 sky islands are the same thing and 90% of the depths are one layer of assets spread over a Hyrule sized map that's only interesting because it's so dark you can't see that every direction around you is the same. I did like the Frox, Dragons, and return of Gibdos, though they were immediately less frightening than they were in Ocarina of Time once I realized they go down to one shock fruit arrow (and don't have a freaky scream). Between this, the jank in the difficulty curve (mostly from armor) that's somehow worse than BotW's despite the nice improvement of every enemy encampment having 1 enemy that levels up with you as you get stronger (which at least lets every group of enemies feel like you aren't necessarily wasting a strong weapon, since you can get a strong drop at every encampment), and bullet time not activating consistently, as well as still having a general lack of enemy variety (wtf are the PIRATES normal Bokoblins? At least give them pirate hats), it just doesn't do it for me. Not at the scale they're going for here. If it was a tighter map, more dense and not spread over 100+ hours, sure, it'd be fine. But the more time people have with this game, the worse it feels and the more the cracks become apparent. Of course the internet is gonna be full of negativity after months, most people are needing months to finish the game. Or even get significantly into it. Sure, I had fun for about 20 of my 50 hours. But most of my fun was counterbalanced with annoyances. The great sky island I thought was letting me and wanted me to explore before going to the temple of time. Actually, no, that's just a waste of time since you can't activate any warp points and can't access lots of spots without ultrahand. Fuse is fun, but then you realize they just nerfed weapons to make another power out of what was effectively still ultrahand. There's no reason fuse had to be separate from ultrahand other than they didn't have any ideas for another ability. Thank God they had the sense to make their ascend debugging tool into a mechanic, cause it'd have only been recall and ultrahand if not for that. I mean, isn't it weird that 3 of the powers are just ultrahand? Ultrahand, fuse, and auto-build. They're just ultrahand, weapons ultrahand, and shortcut ultrahand. And the auto-build breaks the game since you can rebuild anything whenever you want at the cost of just a bit of zonai. What is the point of a big map if you're gonna give everyone the ability to just fly over the whole thing? Just so people have space to fly? Realizing that was when it hit me, TotK isn't a good game. It's actually pretty mediocre as a game. It's just the ultimate creative's sandbox. Which is fine, creative need games designed for them too. That's why everything is a grind in the game. Like wtf are pony points even for. You get them for sleeping. That isn't an achievement. That's not a gameplay reward. It's store rewards card. Why do people need a store rewards card in a game? It's just there to waste time, give people an excuse for doing things while they play with their toys. If you aren't into those toys, then the game just feels like a massive time waster after you get over what little there is to discover in the game. I'm never gonna get to that final boss fight with Ganondorf and I do regret that, cause it does actually look like the best Ganondorf boss fight ever made, I'll give the game that, but everything leading up to it and the story around it are just not a fun experience for people not into the ultrahand game. Actually, I did run down through the hyrule castle depths and that was easily the best part of the game because it was the sole linearly designed part of the game, and it forced me to approach each challenge as they came up, and, unlike the caves, they actually rewarded me with the final challenge of the game, though I went through too early and didn't have the prep to defeat the army (especially since I went before unlocking any sages to help me and didn't meet Hestu yet to stock up on strong weapons and gear, lol). I give the game credit for what it does right, but, as a game, it does very little really well. Mostly just as a sandbox to play with ultrahand does it do anything really well. It's a technical marvel, but that's about it for a player like me
@@Chronoflation Funny enough, I found the game to actually be more fun if I skimped out on using the Ultrahand or Autobuild abilities.....I use them, but only at utmost need.....or when I was stuck on something....Like the part where you go down into the depths of the reservoir after Sidon creates the vortex. I made the mistake of going in there with just a handful of Bomb Flowers, but didn't want to have to leave and come back......So, I made as long of a bridge as I could using the materials around me and used that to reach the end of the level. I personally have made it to the point where I could fight Ganondorf......I've done all the Shrines, collected all the memories, got all the armor sets (Still grinding to upgrade them all, though, grr......) and cleared all of the temples, unlocking all the Sages. I just haven't done it yet.....
Yeh, being someone who’s been in the community and been doing content for 4 years it’s insane to see, especially since my opinion is that I absolutely love the game and I got most things I wanted from it, seeing the complete turn around has been NUTS Keep up the good work, great vid :))
@@mkjjoe I'm on a discord with a bunch of longtime big zelda Tubers, and they're pretty much all saying they've seen this before. It happens to every Zelda game, even the best ones. There are some good videos calling out the discourse around Zelda and how it's always been this awful.
@@josh67091 the discourse has been even _worse_ than it is now. Wind Waker is one of the most cherished games but was absolutely hated by (seemingly) everyone back when it was the latest game. Majora's Mask got similar treatment to TotK for reusing so much from its prequel, but ALSO for trying something new: the 3 day timer. Even Ocarina of Time caused a little controversy because not everyone was on board with moving to 3D. No matter how great a game the Zelda team comes up with, some people will ALWAYS be unsatisfied. And they're very good at making themselves heard.
The issue though is that valid criticism may also be dismissed amidst trendy negativity. For example my review of the game has remained consistent since a few weeks after release, and there are definitely flaws worth pointing out. But I've been surprised to see a lot more of lazier criticism pop up in recommendation over the last month or so. While this applies to each title, the idea that TOTK is loosing steam much quicker is also a symptom that it's derivative of BOTW, people got around faster and the new stuff isn't as substantial as the foundation established 6 years ago with all its possibilities.
@@josh67091 "There are some good videos calling out the discourse around Zelda and how it's always been this awful." Any links?(heh.) The Zelda cycle is something that I used see talked about on 4chan alot, and something I noticed starting with Majoras mask, but the concept of the Zelda cycle seems to be obscure now, and its to the point that people no longer deny they are doing it, but actually deny that it ever existed as a criticism of ootfanatics.
As someone who played through the entire story, and did all the shrines in like 1 week, I ended up being disappointed with the story, but also the dungeons by the last few of them. Ill start with the dungeons. Im doing my second play through right now, where I have to take everything at a slower pace, like only two, three hours a day, right now ive only done the Zora and Gerudo dungeons, and im planning on doing the Goron or Construct one next, but besides the “push the five buttons” gimmick being overused and making the dungeons way shorter than they could be, I felt the dungeons were way to cheesable. Mainly the Fire temple, where I literally just climbed over the puzzles in my first play through, im planning not to do that in my second, but theres also a part at the beginning of Lightning Temple where you just use ascend at a certain spot and completely skip the first part of the dungeon. Its wierd and i think the dungeons could have been a little less open so that players would actually have to engage with the puzzles. My favorite dungeon in my first play through was the Construct Factory just because I ended up stumbling upon it after exploring the Thunderhead Isles without knowing about Mineru or unlocking the Fifth Sage quest beforehand. It was thrilling to just discover a fifth dungeon like that without it being because plot. Speaking of plot, I could go over how BotW story is better than TotK, or how the Champions like Revali and Urbosa were way more interesting than the ancient sages, who didnt even have names or faces, and whos cutscenes were all the same with: “Secret Stone, Demon King, Imprisoning War?” But I would rather talk about another aspect of the story that I didnt like: I once was skimming through TH-cam and saw a thumbnail for a video called: “Is TotK to open?” I never watched the video admittedly, and I forgot who made it, but I would still argue that TotK is actually secretly too linear. Its clear upon playing through the game that Nintendo wanted you to do the dungeons and memories in a certain order and it shows, even if you find the memory where its revealed that the Zelda weve been seeing in the present is just a puppet of Ganondorf, you dont have the option of telling Purah or the Zonai Survey Team until after you fight Phantom ganon at Hyrule Castle. Its just one example, but its one of those things where doing things out of the intended order punishes players with idk poor dialogue or whatever you want to call it. Overall, I thought TotK was a good game. Not my favorite Zelda, that title would go to both A Link Between Worlds and Twilight Princess, but it was alright, I just feel there are definitely areas that could have been improved upon, and I think that this early criticism is actually healthy for Nintendo, as theyll see the criticisms, and try and improve upon them for the next game. Twilight Princess exists because people were originally hard in Windwakers childish artstyle, and BotW and TotK exist because people were hard on Skyward Swords hyper linearity. One could only imagine the type of zelda game well get from people being hard on this games flaws. Thank you for reading my YT Comments essay :)
I know I'm two months late, but since this comment enumerated some of the things I didn't like about TotK, I'll bite. (Spoiler warning) I actually think the problem was that TotK wasn't linear enough. It appears to me like many elements of TotK's design were done ONLY because BotW did them, and the aggressive nonlinearity seems to be one of them. For a small example, everyone complains about the copy-paste sage cutscenes after each dungeon, but TotK's nonlinearity more or less forced that, because the devs can't guarantee that the player knows about "Demon King? Secret Stones?" after any given dungeon-you can do them in any order. Another example is the massive narrative dissonance created by allowing you to fight Ganondorf right out of the box. In terms of the story, there's no way in heck that Link should be able to solo that fight (Ganondorf solo'ed five sages and Rauru), but the game still lets you do it, and seemingly only because you could do it in BotW. Not to mention that doing this, or not having drawn the Master Sword, completely undermines and even disrespects Zelda's story. Basically, the nonlinearity seriously threatens TotK's narrative imo
Since you asked for an explanation for the sudden shift, I'll give you my personal experience. I initially didn't like BotW, because I'm a huge Zelda fan and I had a hard time adjusting, but I played the ever living sh*t out of BotW and in time, I've come to accept and love it as a Zelda game. When they announced BotW 2 with Ganondorf, I believed it's THE Ganondorf from OoT and I was beyond excited and with the intro to the game I was ecstatic! Rauru mentioned too? I thought Omg, they listened, they heard our prayers, traditional dungeons will be back, they are going back to OoT, the best game of all time, in my opinion. When I saw shrines were back I wanted to throw up and prayed that it was just those 3 on the great sky island, but then there came the 4th one, we were guided by a ghostly king of Hyrule, we go back to Hyrule, I've seen it all for years, Sheikah tech is without anyone batting an eye gone, no one even mentions it, new towers were built, my thought was why tear down the other towers to rebuild new ones, but then recently Nintendo announced that "sheikah tech disappeared of its own accord, perhaps since its duty was done" shamelessly, in my opinion, ignoring BotW and the Sheikah tech having been around, even though it had already fullfilled its purpose 10,000 years prior to the events of BotW. Why disappear now? Every step I took in TotK felt more and more like an alternate universe, where BotW just never happened. Nintendo, in my opinion, completely disrespected not only all of Zelda 3D, but its very own prequel. And I spoke out about it, since you ask why now, people were shredding me, which normally doesn't really bother me, but they were telling me that I was not a real Zelda fan, like the past 25 years of me investing way too much of my free time into everything Zelda! It felt like I felt during the playthrough of TotK, like Nintendo and now these other Zelda fans, of whom I am convinced have never actually played any other 3D Zelda, were ignoring my existence, like TotK did BotW. THAT is why I believe BotW to be the better game, for the sole reason of exploration was the reward. I agree with you and I had the same idea and conclusion of them having better put out heart pieces and stamina vessel pieces all over Hyrule, than reintroducing shrines. If I had never played BotW, TotK would be great, but most of us did, and I'm talking about 100s of hours of BotW. Some people even found all the Korok seeds. We didn't speak out before because of the hate, but we have grown now that the "honeymoon" phase is over and that we realize 'that's odd, BotW I played for months everyday for hours, even years, but... ever since I finished TotK, I haven't touched it' that's how you know after a while, okay this game was not worth $70, highest price for a Zelda game ever, to play a DLC that actively denies its prequel.
@@arturocastroverde3349 even BotW had this turnover, although its now considered "so much better" than TotK with its empty world, 12 enemies, lack of dungeon variety, and nothing to do with monster parts. LOL!
@@kirbyupspecial and we can't forget how in botw weapons are all the same, there are absolutely no bonuses depending on which kind you use. No incentive to fight for them unlike in totk. Oh what's this? "The durability is worse in totk?" Well that's why they gave almost every weapon Durability Up+. So on top of the unique bonuses weapons now have, they also last a long time ESPECIALLY fused with monsters parts. And people seem to have forgotten how a 3rd of the Shrines were tests of strengths which are almost universally hated. Proving grounds are actually fun because they aren't copy paste mindless 1v1 fights. And somehow the 3 caves are better than the 147 ones in totk? Not all of totk's have something special but a lot of them do, especially in the desert. I can think of some that straight up felt like natural mini dungeons. Something people wanted instead of Shrines in botw. Speaking of natural puzzles, remember how botw was supposed to be full of them? Like if there's a large gap you can fell a tree and walk across. That didn't happen once after leaving the Great Plateau. In totk I'm using all kinds of tricks with the environment now because it actually forces you to.
In terms of gameplay they should’ve added more sky islands with more variety and a couple of larger ones like the great sky island, and the depths being smaller would’ve been better so that they could make it look more unique, and there were way too many blessing shrines but besides that it was very fun and the addition of the ultrahand powers were awesome In terms of the story(Massive spoilers): it was a mess, sure botw’s story wasn’t perfect but at least it picked one aspect of the story to focus on and execute it very well, that being Zelda’s character development The memories worked to great effect in the first game because you already know the outcome of everyone losing to the Calamity so seeing the memories in different orders doesn’t hinder their effect too much since each memory builds on her character, the same goes for the champions as they had their own memories to establish their personalities and goals which is a lot more than anything the sages ever got in totk Totk’s memories aren’t character focused stories as they’re about the mystery of what happened to Zelda so seeing it in the wrong order(which is practically guaranteed to happen unless you know which ones to see first) would ruin your investment in seeing the other memories And we never learn anything about Ganondorf beyond him being the king of the Gerudo and that he’s evil for the sake of being evil The secret stones are also very inconsistent since Ganondorf having one stone somehow makes him extremely OP, but other characters get very minor buffs in comparison just for the sake of keeping all of them together weaker than Ganondorf Ganondorf’s plan to get Sonia’s secret stone was very stupid considering that he just tried to take over Hyrule a day ago but Rauru still accepts him “just to keep him close” and Sonia, despite having no abilities that would make her strong in a 1 v 1 fight, thinks that luring Ganondorf away from Rauru is a good idea when she should’ve just had Rauru hide somewhere than blast Ganondorf to smithereens the moment he shows up I could go on but my overarching point here is that Totk’s gameplay is great, especially the Ganondorf boss fight which is a top tier boss fight but the story is more than lacking, despite that I still had a great experience with the game and I wouldn’t call it a bad game by any means
I love Tears of the Kingdom, but there are two things they should have done to make it better. Introduce both the steering stick and auto-build a lot sooner and more easily once you arrived on the surface. And make it that the story clips go in order no matter what dragon tear you go to.
The steering stick was a big problem for me. I was looking in every one of those dispensers and I only found one after I was more than halfway done with the game. So I didn’t really have access to the vehicles until that point. As for the tears, the game does give you the order right at the beginning of the quest.
All your suggestions actually make the game worse. Go replay the game. You have no clue what you’re talking about and don’t know what brilliant game design is all about.
@@DanielMazahreh damn, speaking of totk, your ass sounds like purah rn, very snarky and holier than thou. it's a lot less endearing when you're not in a video game.
They should have made the dragon's tears more linear in that when you unlock one the light dragon appears to show you the nexts. In BOTW, the memories made sense as they're mostly just random events in Link and Zelda's lives leading up to the return of the Calamity so they don't necessarily need to be linear. TOTK has more of a linear story with its memories so having them scattered can make things a little cross eyed.
I have said it before. I love both games, and i take them at face value. They brought their own unique style of play and adventure! The dungeons were an improvement, however the traditional Legend of Zelda dungeons had mini bosses in them where you had to defeat them to get the key items in the game. Then you fought the boss and earned the temple's new weapon to use forever! The finding of switches in these temples wad a different approach to the solution and I liked it! Sure I wished there was more, but I had fun anyway! Overall i love both games and I personally treat it like it was a part one and part two of the Legend of Zelda experience!
I think the fights you have before each dungeon are meant to be the new minibosses. They aren't quite what people want but hey its more than what BotW had!
I love both games too. Everyone has an opinion. Not everyone is going to like something. Both stories and gameplay are great. I spent so many hours on Botw. I can always go back to the world and see if I missed anything or just explore because the world is unique and cool. My mind hasn’t changed. Both games are good.
@@NoSpoilers-wd4vv And these fights indeed force you to use the main "item" before you enter the dungeon. The climb to the wind temple forces you to use the wind sage ability and the trampoline ships, for example.
Because it's just more BotW and doubles down on all of the criticisms people had with that game. Instead of ditching weapon durability they made it even more fidily and resource intensive. Instead of giving you an active story happening in real time you're still just piecing together a much more interesting story that happened in the decent past, except now with plot twists that can be completely spoiled if you dont go out of your way to get the memories in order. Instead of actual dungeons we just got re-skinned divine beasts with the environmental manipulation that actually made those interesting ripped out. The draw of exploration in BotW is non existent because it's the same world map from before and the new additions are underwhelming. Both the sky and the depths are mostly empty space devoid of substantial content. There is much more repetitive content. Sages are a massive downgrade from champion powers. Theres no mystery left in the game because everything has just been attributed to the Zonai. The villian is still absent and void of personality, which is unforgivable since they used an established popular character instead of the mindless raging calamity Ganon. The game is completely stifled by its complete commitment to total non-linearity. This game doubles down so hard on every fault BotW had that it even hurts that game retroactively...and all of this came in a package sold to us for $70 dollars. It is the most derivative entry in the entire franchise and opinions will only get worse from here the longer people have to ruminate on that fact.
Here's the reason for the weird delay on people's opinions, I think - It's a big game, thus it takes many, many hours of gameplay to come to any real conclusions about it. This happened with me. It took me 120+ hours or so of playing the game to realize I had quite a few problems with it. The first few dozen hours is really fun, it feels like a new experience and rediscovering Hyrule since BotW was interesting... at first. 20-30 hours in I started developing a slight sinking feeling of deja vu and disappointment that I was mostly in denial of. 60-80 hours in, I started noticing repeating patterns; the same Shrine challenges, the same lame quest rewards, and a whole hell of a lot of repeated content held over from BotW. 100+ hours in, I had done most of the main story quests, which were all samey and unsatisfactory. 120+ hours in, I had completed the main story and done most of the main side quests and whatnot, and had to admit to myself that, yes, this really is just Breath of the Wild Again. Beat for beat, it is just BotW again - same characters, same world, same basic plot, same shrine structure, same dungeon structure, even the same problems like weapon durability and insta-healing in the pause menu. I waited six years and spent $70 on what amounted to the same damn game I'd already played. Needless to say, that's a little disappointing. My point is, it takes a long time to realize this, hence why you get so many people praising the game at first, and now many of them are complaining they don't like it. It especially takes a while when you're in denial for a long time like I was, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who wanted to believe that the big new Zelda game wasn't this much of a rehash of the previous one as it ended up being.
@@Caleb_Bravo99you think people would be happy if they rehashed the exact same game in the exact same world with the exact same assets for Witcher 3, Skyrim, red dead redemption 2 etc? A rehash is not good. People want new products.
My relationship with this game is pretty unique in that I loved it to death while playing it, but then entirely stopped thinking about it once I finished it. It had no staying power in my memory like other games this year. I think that says something, it was sort of like video game junk food in my opinion.
Having well over 300 hours into both games id like to have a say, I have been playing zelda since NES. When you love something, you stick with it through good and bad. i remember playing at 6 years old for the first time. I remember when i first played it on the 64, OOT and majoras mask were INCREDIBLE, i could go on, with that being said i also have enjoyed it on every system since then and have never really thought in the sense that any of them were garbage, i have loved every single zelda game ive played. I cannot say that about any other game series, including pokemon, there are even crappy pokemon versions. That is something to me. People can complain all they want, I will forever love zelda. Both botw and totk are incredible games and just add to the legacy. Are there flaws, sure, everything has flaws. But people should enjoy the games for their own unique individualality instead of trying to act like they are all the same dang game. Geez.
I mean yes we should appreciate that zelda kept such high standards but with botw/totk they took the og zelda formular from us aswell as the lore and then you look at fromsoft which made a similar open world concept while keeping everything the fans like and i ask myself why nintendo cant do that, like atleast give us normal dungeons
@erikin they can't deliver the classic experience in an open world because of the lack of linearity. Classic Zelda has items in dungeons that are required for future puzzles and dungeons. That way they can iterate on each other and have a smooth difficulty curve, something impossible to do in a world where any challenge can be faced in any order. Even the more classically designed Link Between Worlds had this issue since you could face dungeons in any order as you rented your items to use from the shop and upgraded them in the shops. Early game felt hard, late game felt easy, cause the difficulty curve was flat. Once you understand the types of puzzles in the game, you can do any of the dungeons cause there isn't much new to figure out after that point. Traditional Zelda does not mix well with open world. Personally, I wish they'd tier out access to dungeons and puzzles and even the story to allow them to create some amount of a building curve. They should make the game more like Ocarina of Time. You have child dungeons, then adult dungeons after those child dungeons, and some adult dungeons require accomplishing some things as an adult before you can do them. Imagine if only the Ruto dungeon was available at first, or Ruto and Zora, then Goron and Gerudo came after you beat those 2, and then the 5th dungeon was only accessible after all 4 of those and you couldn't just stumble upon it and they designed the difficulty around that. They should honestly have done that with access to the tears to make sure you didn't find Zelda's final memories before the early ones, and every 3 or 4 memories do what they did with the final memory and make the payoff memories act as checkpoints for the player. The problem is, this goes directly against their design philosophy that they wanted to follow for these games. They didn't want to restrict the player at all in these games. Problem is, Zelda is a franchise built on the limiting of what players can do and making them work out their way through those limitations. This is why so many people will say BotW and TotK aren't Zelda games. They're basically a new franchise wearing the skin of Zelda. That's not necessarily bad, but it's something that means these games aren't for all of the old fans. Some old fans, sure. It just depends on what people went to the franchise for. For me, classic 3D and 2D Zelda were my favorite franchises, next to Pokemon and Xenoblade. After dropping Tears some 50 hours in, I can safely say this new Zelda format is a pass from me going forward. I'm sure I'll buy the next one praying it's more like the classics, but I'm also fairly confident I'll end up dropping it partway through too.
@@Chronoflation ill read your whole comment another day, sry i dont have time rn but i just wanna say its def possible not giving us all items/abilities right at the start of the game, just like previous zelda games where you had to go back to some places after getting a certain item like bombs and other open world games do that aswell and i think its cool unlocking the whole world by progress and not just braindead exploration
Its just natural that people compare every game to the other games even if they are different, since, you know, not everyone has money or time to spend on every single game, so they just have to make the choice of what theyll enjoy more
tbf it legitimately doesn't deserve it. the most impactful game this year is by far bg3, wether you like it or not. totk was huge, and ultrahand is an incredible mechanic, but bg3 gave AAA studios a fucking existential crisis bc of how much stuff they packed in there, some devs literally had tantrums on twitter over it. it wins.
@@10-5playz it doesn't deserve to be discredited, but it also doesn't deserve to be overcredited either. it's a good game, and in a world where bg3 released just a few months later, it probably would be goty. but now that's looking much less likely.
I'd say it deserves all the praise it's received. Same with BG3 since enough people feel that way. I'm not gonna ride either one especially since I've only played one but I wouldn't be mad if either one won.@@DumplingDoodle
The reason for this change is bc when the game realeased everyone was in the honeymoon phase with the game, now that all the people can see it in an objective way they see what totk really is, a big dlc
So about the story of totk being better than botw. I personally believe so, but it's not because I necessarily love botw's story. When botw came out it disappointed me, I had expected more from the story of a zelda game and it made me concerned for future games if they're all going to take on this simple approach. I was delighted to learn that totk would have a more involved plot. The thing is...after playing totk I have come to appreciate botw's story more for being extremely well suited to the open world formula. Tears of the Kingdom's story is fine (I wouldn't say it's anything special, it didn't make me feel anything really, but it's not bad), but the way it is presented to the player is *horrible*. Like I was literally putting my controller down and looking at my phone during the 'imprisoning war' cutscenes. The fact that you don't get your paraglider until you do a bunch of linear running to and from Hyrule Castle is Awful, like I felt personally like it completely went against the ethos of the game to force me to watch a story cutscene instead of letting me do what I wanted immediately. There are good elements, of course, even great ones. But they're bogged down by so much of the story being horribly presented. I don't like botw's story any more after playing totk, but I do think that I understand better why it was constructed in the way that it was. Because the way Totk went about it does *not* work Also side note, I personally do not think that the opinion on totk changed on a dime because of haters or anything, I think it is a natural consequence of the fact that totk is really fun to play for the first couple of hours, but the game doesn't have that much staying power. The issues that people are bringing up are in my opinion entirely legitimate, but a lot of it isn't something that you notice until you've almost finished the game. Such as the story, the broken reward structures in the game, etc. I think most people really wanted to like TOTK, I know I did, and so when everyone first started playing people were really optimistic, perhaps to the point of disregarding some flaws.
1. I thought TotK was overhyped, but it was still really good. However, I was one of the few who loved BotW's story, so I'm probably biased. 2. A lot of the Tears haters are just being pessimists for pessimism's sake.
I think TOTk has a few problems that were not a thing in BOTW, the memories for instance, since the player already know the results of what happened 100 years, anyone can pick up the memories in any order that really doesn't matter, in TOTK the memories have a more linear approach and if you pick up the ones that happened later, getting the earlier ones seems pointless, not only that, but despite you have all the memories unlocked, Link will still act like he doesn't know that Zelda in the human form is fake and the real one is a dragon. Another thing that is a common complain is that, if you decide to skip a few enemies like Boss Bokoblin, Captain Construct and Lynel, and if you advance the game for like 2 or 3 temples, you will have a very hard time to find horns from these monsters to upgrade your armor, since most of those scale, their 1st form becomes much rarer to find, so you need to rely and waiting for many bloodmoon so you can finally have enough materials to upgrade your stuff. Those are a few common complains that I was able to find in forums, and they certainly do have the point. Those issues I presented were absent in BOTW, but I am not saying TOTK is worst than BOTW overall, what I am saying is that, despite TOTK fix issues with BOTW, the developers created new issues in the game that, really didn't need to be there IMO. TOTK has other issues that I think are annoying, but I still like this game better than BOTW.
While I don't deny some people are simply being contrarians the thing that soured me on TotK is that it feels like it runs out of steam really early. The first few hours where amazing. Exploring and figuring out the great sky island. Discovering the depths. Fighting the new enemies and bosses. The problem is that that's kind of where it ends. All the other sky islands are the same 3 or 4 copypasted ones. The entire depths is all the same homogenous slop. Those few new enemies and bosses are basically the ONLY new enemies and bosses. Everywhere you go it's the same stuff over and over and over again. That coupled with the still lackluster dungeons and clunky storytelling led to this growing feeling of dissapointment the more I played. BotW felt like a great stepping stone for a new era of Zelda while TotK just feels like Botw, but again, even if it is a better game in a vacuum.
What I think you may not get is Tears is, in almost 0 ways, an actual SEQUEL to Breath. As someone who played both games, I grew to hate TotK by the ending because it took everything I loved from the last game and just wiped it all from existence. No Guardians, no Sheikah Slate, no Divine Beasts…just a boring rehash with weaker replacements. The Guardians are more threatening machines than the Zonai scraps, the Sheikah tech looks more fitting of this reality than the out of place Zonai parts and this Ganondorf is somehow as predictable as any other Ganon. What they should’ve done was keep everything from BotW in tact and, I dunno, make a true follow-up that explores more into what the first game talked about. The Shrines don’t matter, the “Ultra Hand” powers didn’t matter, the story is not a great one…it’s just not a”good game”. And I personally have no reason to believe we’re getting any kind of “Switch 2” or any kind of new console unless Nintendo THEMSELVES say it. To me, everyone is just blind sighted about this game and can’t admit that it doesn’t work as a sequel for Breath of the Wild or as a game worthy of all this praise. I legit hated Tears by the end and want to still say Age of Calamity was the BETTER game.
Yeah, I think things turned especially negative on the announcement there would be no DLC. That and a boring first half of the year saw it cruising to GOTY with people openly rooting for the game that would most likely win. Now that there are actually more likely candidates, people jumped off so they wouldn't be seen backing a loser.
No, there is no switch up. The people who are complaining are NOT the same people who say it's great. It's not new either. These people were complaining from day one.
I didn’t like the game from the start. The moment zelda said “this means the zonai founded hyrule” they lost me. I wasn’t vocal about this because the hype was still alive and I would’ve been crucified. Plus I still had fun. Months later I’ve come to realize the fun was mindless and hollow. Its tedious fun that has no replayability. The story is the worst zelda story I’ve ever played. If this is the direction the franchise is going I hate it. Now that the hype has died down others are coming to the same conclusion. Its not a switch up to have an idea marinate over time. But sure defend nintendo because that billion dollar company totally needs it. Its us fans who want better that are totally in the wrong here
Facts. It had no suave. Everything was just shoehorned in with no tact. I felt the same way at the Zonai “reveal”. My hopes for this game completely died when jumping back down to the surface directly after the gsi, that’s when it became the exact same game as BotW.
I was one of those who, when I started playing, thought that TOTK was the "definitive" version while BOTW was the beta. But that impression didn't last long, to be honest, and after having played 150+ hours in each of the games, I still think BOTW is a good game, but I hate TOTK. I can see that you're amazed by this change in people's opinions, but this is something quite common that happens with many cultural products. Time filters products and it's not uncommon for things that are considered big "hits" to fall by the wayside after a few months or years, while other products survive (even if they weren't so successful before). The idea is that over time people are more likely to reflect on the true quality of something, more people with different perspectives will evaluate it, the fleeting emotions that can affect how people view a product are left behind, etc. That last reason is quite relevant, by the way, mainly because of marketing that creates expectations that can distort our perception of a game. I admit that the change of heart about TOTK is going too fast, but I don't doubt that it's genuine, because it happened to me, I was sure that TOTK was an excellent game, but the more I delved into it, the more disappointed and annoyed I became. I'll just cite a quick example: the story. Yes, BOTW has a vague background story, which makes people disappointed and wanting more, but at least it's told well.The memories make sense, you're a hero who has woken up after 100 years and no longer knows where you are, and now you have the chance to recover some of your roots in that world, with the other heroes, etc. It works perfectly in that game, but why the hell is this same method used in TOTK?In TOTK, none of it works, the story contradicts itself and spoils itself, the story is selective conveniently leaving out things from the previous game , the same cutscene is repeated several times when you kill the bosses, etc. It's a total disaster. And this is just one of the points worth criticizing. There are several others. People expected TOTK to build on BOTW and offer a more complete and complex adventure. The reality is that Nintendo decided to re-release BOTW, but now focusing on a different gimmick.They didn't just copy and paste the world of BOTW, they copied and pasted the entire structure of the game, from the tutorial to the final boss, without worrying in the slightest about whether it would make sense in the new reality. A copied+pasted game based on gimmicks that get old quickly... I mean, who still thinks it's funny to crucify Koroks? Yeah...
I find it odd how you can like BotW but hate TotK? I understand that you could have a preference but TotK is basically BotW+. It has almost everything that made BotW great with new additions. As you said it’s basically the same game structure. So, story aside, how can you like one and hate the other?
@@amysteriousviewer3772 I don't like BOTW, I just think it's a good game and that opinion remains even after I got tired of it and quit it for good. I can't say the same for TOTK, I don't think it's a good game, in fact despite minor improvements over BOTW, it didn't address the major problems of that game (in fact it doubled down on basically everything that didn't work well in the first one), and it killed one of the few things about BOTW that I find really valuable, which is the exploration of that vast unknown world. The world is no longer unknown in TOTK, and the new parts are not worth exploring. Worse: the act of exploring itself has made Link's basic options, including climbing and riding horses, totally secondary since you now have about 10 different ways of flying accessible from the first moment you descend into the overworld.
I never disliked the game, but it had the same issue of botw that after the dungeons, nothing has the same kick to it, all the enemies fell less interesting to fight, since you defeated the main bosses. The overworld in my opinion feels almost as barren as the first game, most of it is just wandering around, which gets kinda stale after a while.
It's because of two things: 1. modern gamers are more mainstream. They are hype driven. Their dopamin kicks when they can be part of a trend. They confuse this joy with the actual game itself. But this is a volatile emotion, like the mainstream audience is by nature. 2. Mainstream TH-camrs are pretenders. They pretend opinions, which they align with the opinion of the masses, because they are affraid of backlash. They pretend positive emotions because a) they sell better and b) doesn't make the companies angry. The game wasn't good in first place. But people tried to silence critics, who were first. Like always in human history.
We're a particular group of Zelda fans who liked BOTW for being different but preserving the spirit and hates TOTK for changing things a bit too much. I personally did not care about crafting at all, even if it was astonishing on a tecnical level. I thought Ganondorf was way more enjoyable and deeper as a character BEFORE TOTK (BOTW clearly made it even more subtly deeper and complex, but TOTK reboots the shit out of everything). I thought the story was not structured to be experienced nonlinearly. I discovered the entire plot twist around Zelda and exactly where she is with the very first tear I casually found while I was chasing the lightdragon because I was curious when I saw it. Entire story lost its mistery right at the start of the game, for me. Characters can look really dumb with that perspective. I personally was fed up with the weapon breaking system, and thought attaching blades to the hilts was cool the first 10 times. Then, it became a chore I was obligated to go through every 10 swings. It felt worse than BOTW. It slowed down the action A LOT. I think we are also, as a group, particylarlt hating how they clearly rebooted the entire franchise without saying a word. And they did it very badly. TOTK is not only incoherent with the rest of the Zelda games, but with BOTW too. Its direct prequel. And that is unacceptable. Also, the series with Skyward Sword had reached a comfortable level of complexity in its lore. Characters had clear dilemmas and motivations, Ganondorf was the enemy AND a victim. The role of the goddesses seemed more gray, and there was a mistery around the origin of "demons" and who was the tecnically rightful inhabitant of the planet. All very cool things, that could have been expanded subtly (BOTW) or just left there from title to title, without imoeding gameplay in anyway. They had managed to strike a balance in this 30 years. TOTK, just by itself, convolutes and simplify EVERYTHING. Now the nature of everything is a weird mix between old lore and new lore (and often can't make sense), and a bunch of things are way less interesting. Ganondorf went from a deep but not intrusive character, to an obnoxious banal simple bad guy who wants to be powerful and fight strong guys... Why the heck did they thought about rebooting him into GOKU of all chatacters?! Japan has an unhealthy obsession with obsessed fighters as characters lately. P.S. I want to say that I don't think the game is bad. It's super good. Game of the Year. It's just very different from what I think Zelda could be, and I like BOTW a lot more
My take on it is... you're talking about two different groups of people. You had this huge positive outpouring in the beginning, and these players were your average fan, swings by, plays the latest game, wow 10/10 I liked the part where you built the stuff. And in that group of course, you had your fans for whom Breath was their first game, they're not interested in the rest of the franchise. So you have all these guys who pick up the newest title, smash through it for a couple months, then drop it and they're onto the next thing. And they're not concerned about the narrative or the reused assets or anything else. They're on the hype train and they're riding it into the sunset. Then you have the other group, who was drowned out by that ocean of players. They were basically not allowed to share their opinions because anyone saying anything negative was met with overwhelming criticism from folks who didn't want to hear any of it, didn't want to see anyone pointing out the flaws in their shiny new toy. This didn't happen with Breath of the Wild because, while it was a departure from the Legend of Zelda as we knew it, it had a lot of promise for greater things in the future, and for what it was, it's a very solid standalone experience. But you throw Tears into the mix and now it's clear they're just doubling down on everything Breath was with only the most token effort to visit anything that Zelda was before Breath. And unfortunately, that puts the writing on the wall for the future of the franchise. So that's where I think this switch up is coming from... Those who aren't that invested have moved on already, and that just leaves you die-hards and us bitter old fucks. There's your tl;dr.
Literally just pay attention to what people are saying. ToTK's story sucks because it disregards Zelda lore while sprinkling in nostalgia bait like Lon-Lon ranch for no reason. Since BoTW was so barebones it left lore-building up to mystery. ToTK retroactively ruined that mystery. The rest of the game is a menu-fest. Not fun. Rehashed combat on a rehashed world. When BoTW put so much emphasis on exploration this ToTK made the mistake of rehashing the world. Most of the scores were hype anyway. This game sucked.
The reason is TOTK uses a lot of cheap mechanics to keep the player occupied: koroks, blupees, caves, mining in the depths, building pointless contraptions. TOTK began to felt cheap after about 20 hours... Going to the four phenomena, seeing fake Zelda, having repeated sage dialogue 😖 People don't like having their time wasted. All this game was was: save the 4 races (again), get Mineru, fighting Ganondorf. That's probably a 30 hour game that gets spread to 200 hours because of pointless mining in a world we already traversed. Honestly makes me feel sick... And I went balls in for TOTK. Oled, amiibo, collectors edition, pro controller, switch case 🤢
You obv didn’t have any emotions with exploring the caves, finding the hidden amiibo clothing chests with the treasure maps in the dark depths was really fun to me. The abilities are much better we can all agree on that, and time wasted? The game has like 200 more good missions and adventures to do then botw, building your own house was fun, and finding hidden temples in caves and hidden buildings in caves and underground was truly amazing. You obv skipped through the game and didn’t take time to really do much…
@@IntrovertMaxxing you did what all? You completed all shrines? Got the hidden achievements? Invaded the yiga hideout? Upgrade all armor to get hidden abilities? Fight the hidden boss battle in the depths? Complete the mine cart challenges? Find and complete all 15 coliseums? Explore the abandoned forgotten hidden room in one of the temples? The way you said it was all “meaningless” just proves that you didn’t really explore lol. If you really did spend 300 hours you wouldn’t of even played those 300 hours, you would’ve stopped at like 100 if you feel this way, you clearly didn’t really play the game if you did “everything” and all was meaningless, cause I’ll tell you everything had a purpose in this game 😂
wanted to go for that 100% aswell until i realised it pointless and how much work it is. I had sum frame drops several times but never was it unplayable, it was literally frame drops down to 24 or so for 3 secs, nothing that seemed like a porblem to me
Its basically just 1 or 2 "content creators" say something about something and all their fan boys just copy what was said this is how it works on any subject nowadays
I think it's more general than that, some commenters gave good explanations of how it can work in phases. Zelda always had these cycles of criticism overall. Also TOTK comes at the peak of the franchise's popularity after its biggest success yet, so more eyes in an age with more vocal social networks means more noise, that doesn't mean it's all criticism in bad faith. The game does have flaws, IMO what matters is to express it fairly if there's even a small chance that Nintendo will take that into account.
@@YamuThatcher that ain't scott the woz, your ass is watching steve the wiz or smth. he makes fun of things worth making fun of, he's got a fucking comedy channel lmao. only game i've seen him bash repeatedly is like, chibi robo ziplash.
I've had mixed opinions on TotK after beating it myself. I avoided watching opinion videos on TotK, and to me, it's just people finally catching on to the same issues I had with the game. It was fun, but got repetitive after some time, and I was overall not that into the game as a whole compared to BotW. It started off really strong, but I think the people who have this negative opinion was just trying to prove to themselves they like the game more than they did because they waited 6 years, but ultimately realized they didn't like it as much as BotW. That's not to say BotW is the better game. For me, the issue is the fact TotK reuses the same map as BotW while adding not enough new things that are interesting enough. The sky and depths got repetitive because they look the same all the time. Hyrule was interesting because each area had different biomes. Take any screenshot in the depths and most people can't point out where in the depths it is, unless you're in the lava area under Death Mountain. The caves were great, but caves can only be interesting for so long before it feels repetitive. The main issue is the story. That's not to say BotW has a better story, but rather, BotW's story suits this "open air" gameplay better than TotK. BotW's story is non-linear. TotK's story is linear. Linear story doesn't work when you can view it out of order. In addition, the opening of TotK made it feel like the story is going to be more important, but it really isn't. They reused the same story structure as BotW. Using memories that can be seen out of order, which isn't effective for a linear story. Using the same 4 regions to place their Not-Divine-Beast-Temples-But-Still-Uses-The-Same-Puzzle-Gimmick-As-The-Divine-Beasts. Don't get me started on the same 4 cutscenes of, "Demon King? Secret Stone?" It feels more of the same. It feels repetitive. The story being in the past, yet again, and Zelda is not involved in the present story, yet again, is dissatisfying. The story had 2 cool moments. When Link finds the Master Sword, and when Zelda turns into the dragon. But the story is so sparse that it doesn't make up for the terrible pacing in the rest of the scenes. And it's also disappointing that the narrative is inconsistent with even BotW. NPCs that should know Link doesn't know him, and it's not like it's a timeline reset or anything. Certain NPCs definitely know Link, like Hudson, and yet NPCs like Bolson and Hestu has no idea who Link is. And it is so frustrating figuring out that Zelda is the dragon and the "Zelda" running around is fake, but the game acts like "WhY iS zElDa DoInG tHiS?" as if we can't figure it out after the first time that she's not real. It created a narrative dissonance between me as the player and the game. I know the truth and the game refuses to let Link tell the NPCs that truth and repeats the same "mystery" 4 times. 5 if you include Purah being confused on why Zelda is in Hyrule Castle.
Most people need a few months to play such a game. And many report that at some point the burned out and take a break. Happened to me too after finishing 3 dungeons. It was supposed to be 10x better than BOTW according to the hype, but it felt like BOTW but with less structure, just littered with content. It just didn't have the "completely new experience" thing going on. I never really engaged with the dungeons, like no need to use the rails, no need to use the water bubbles. Just hit the switches and kill the boss. In BOTW each beast had puzzles I had to do, and the fight to get into the beast was always epic. I liked revisiting the old places and see how they changed. I didn't like the political conflict story in Hateno village at all. Also the gray style of shrines now is less appealing to me than the blue high tech style in BOTW.
At least the story has a reason why the story takes place in the past but yeah they could have centered it around the present. I really like the story in this game, with the shrines I loved how goofy you could be with quite a bit of em I can just remember me laughing to myself just trying to build this fucked answer to a puzzle that didn’t need to be over the top lol, and I like 3 of the 6 boss fights in TOTKs main story. What I don’t like is how small and repetitive a lot of the Sky Islands are, the lack of change on the land, the Zonai not being fleshed out more, and the inconsistencies the world building has. In conclusion I have never felt so conflicted with how I feel about a game I have always been able to say how I feel about a game but with TOTK I love it but so disappointed with pieces of this game.
In into 2 mins of the vid, but the reason why people are saying botw had a great story because totk story was truly bottom of the barrel and made everyone appreciate botw story, now I’m not invalidating that everyone said that the story wasn’t good in botw. It was decent story but people felt disappointed for the potential it could’ve had. Now that totk managed to have a even worse story, people now appreciate the “good enough” story
It's just not engaging to explore a place you've already seen nearly the exact same way. And this makes every step you take feel tedious, especially when every step takes longer too compared to BotW. Lots more menuing, a lot more busywork in order to progress. There's nothing inspired or surprising about this game. It's repetitive. And yeah, TotK executes its story very poorly.
I think because now the hype is over and people see the game for what it really is. more than half of the game is taken 1:1 from botw, and the new additions are quite mediocre, like the small copy-pasted islands in the sky or the empty underground with only one biome. the side missions are just delivery boy missions and the story is poorly written without any attention. sure they improved the physics and added a building system but the game is literally botw again.
I think its a minor but extremely loud group of fans that will never ever be satisfied with anything. Edit: Fun fact for some people, I hated BOTW on release for alot of the reasons yall hate this game (I've warmed up to it since, but i still.wouldnt say its a top 10 zelda game for me), however I felt TOTK fixed every issue I had with it for the most part.
No it’s fans of the entire series, the classic games. I’m satisfied with good games that present a challenge. I’m not satisfied with a six year sequel that feels like it could have been a dlc release in 2017. It’s ok if botw is the only zelda title you’ve played, go play a few of the classics and see if your opinion changes.
@7milesdavis Been playing for 25 years bro 🤣🤣. Change is a good thing, like how they changed everything I disliked about BOTW. So if that's "Dlc" I'm cool with it. 😎
There were people who shit on tears before they even announced the title or _anything_ about the game. Some people, like the man commenting above, probably just don’t like change and they want the same formula of games that they remember growing up with. It’s the safety of it that keeps them so attached, at least that’s what I believe. But Nintendo cannot keep producing the same types of games over and over, why would they? If they did that, they wouldn’t break through the molds like they did with botw and show what is possible in games. But this is sadly going to be a thing with every fandom out there. Change is inevitable, and so is criticism!
It's what happens when hype dies down and people see more clearly. I still love the game but I'm heavily critical of it after 100% completion. they brought the most monotonous pure time wasting activity from botw (korok seeds) and doubled down on it. besides more koroks now there are bubble gems, light roots, wells.etc all time wasting activities with no end rewards because "oh the devs never intended for all of them to be found"
Switching opinions is not always a sign of lacking of confidence or being lost in your thoughts not being able to find an answer, it is also very very very often a clear sign of growth and better understanding of things, things we couldn't see deeper because we were believing too much and put too much trust, hope or higher expectations than needed, or because of lack of experience. On the other hand not switching opinions not always confirms that our beliefs are right, sometimes we do it just for the sake of it painfully showing fear to see the truth, arrogance, or child-like behavior (precisely because a child would need from time to time some experience to get knowledge and therefore switch an opinion OR not), mainly when reality is showing clear as day before our eyes, but its fair to say that for some people it could take more time than for others. Point is: switching opinions is not intrinsically good or bad, is an action that can only be put into question on a context (and then talk, have a conversation), never by itself. I've been playing 250+ hours, I don't care about the story, I don't care about those boring characters, and I hate those long long conversations with all those lame NPCs. Game play is great and fun, I believe gameplay was nintendo's one and only goal here, and later, the story was just adapted and glued to the sandbox. Personally, I don't feel the story driving nor motivating the experience at all. Today, for nintendo, the story on a Zelda game has the same value as the story on a Mario game. I don't know if that's ok, but it certainly didn't stop me from playing. It is a weird mixture of fun gameplay and non interesting elements. I often say BOTW is a demo, and TOTK is the actual game, and for a newcomer, I recommend skipping BOTW cause all together with the changes to the map added areas and game-play-wise TOTK is definitely better. Cheers!
For me, my opinion of the game has slowly formed over the last few months after having time for my own excitement to die down, having time to fully digest the story/content and then playing through it a couple of times in different ways. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s things that botw did way better than Totk. And then there’s things that Totk did way better than botw. I did notice I got burnt out on tears pretty quickly compared to breath, but that could be because I was deeply looking forward to a DLC and that was shut down. Which is ok! To me, it is a second game to botw. That’s what it was meant to be, and that’s what it did for me. It made me cry, which was surprising. I respect those who don’t like it, because there are some valid issues. There are things I disliked, things I liked, things I loved. And I found things that I loved overwhelmingly more than things I didn’t.
I hear what you're saying. In fact, I think it's a problem with all sorts of media now. Something comes out that is not actually as bad as people claim, yet everyone says it is trash. Although it seems distant, I feel like the root problem of this occurrence is the consumption of media. We are used to bigger budgets, better CGI, better elsewhere it leads us to care less because something "newer" just came out and that was better than the latter.
This phenomenon is weird for games in general but normal for Zelda. I'm a longtime Zelda fan but I'll be the first to admit the whole fanbase has this crazy toxic positivity vibe. Every game that comes out has to get a 10 right away and if you speak ill of the game at all you get shut down and buried by fans, a negative review will get you death threats, etc. So you have to wait a few months before you can criticize a Zelda game for your words to see the light of day. I thought TOTK was underwhelming within the first 20 hours, it was great fun but I knew it didn't solve some of BOTWs biggest issues and actually was a step backwards in some ways, such opinions could never be voiced at the start. I especially agree with your point at 5:33 that BOTW had a better atmosphere and mood, but saying that at launch could get you shot.
I'm so sick of the "enlightened" Nintendo fans. I appreciate your views. Everyone believes they have the secret, inside story because of something they read on Twitter. I couldn't even tell you how many videos I've seen about Switch 2, Twilight Princess, & Wind Waker. It's really annoying because we can't just enjoy the new thing anymore. If the "Switch 2" was released tomorrow, they would immediately begin a new rumor about the next console or "Switch 3." When totk came out, there were 100's of videos speculating on what the next zelda game will be like. At least finish THIS game before wishing for another. Online insanity is killing everything from gaming to politics & I am so sick of it. Excellent video! ☕️👍🏻
I think most Zelda fans coming from Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Twilight Princess simply want another Zelda game in that traditional way, with darker tones and more interesting characters with more depth.
You are totally right, As a zelda fan I want a great balance between this new era and the traditional one, I like tears of the kingdom but I feel like something is missing, maybe the bad story or exploring the same map
it was always bad. i unfortunately never had the pleasure of enjoying this game, and i didnt even pay for it. i pirated it 3 weeks early and was extremely disappointed with it from start to finish. i felt frustrated and upset the whole time i played it.
I hated TotK on the day it came out. It was fun for about two hours and then it became an insanely boring slog. I livestreamed it on the day it came out. It's complete ass and I actually had people dropping off of my livestream the more frustrated I got with its bullshit. I knew the Zelda fanbois were gonna be hyping it up for ages and it would be awhile before the real reviews started coming out. I saw it for its overwhelming flaws from the start and everyone hated me for it.
I love this game but I feel like it didn’t have the replay value of botw. I kept going back to that one. Haven’t gone back to tears yet. Maybe when the new switch comes out and I can play it in that again and see if I feel the same
This seems to be the cycle with ALL Zelda games. Windwaker is the most infamous example considering how much HATE it got until they re-made. Now everyone loves it, I guarantee the day BOTW/TOTK gets its remake the opinions are going to SWITCH. Because as all these other franchises get bogged with micro-transactions, and Games as Service Zelda will hold up at series that pushes critical thinking, adventure, and creativtiy, standing as a test to its timelessness
I actually liked TotK more than BoTW. But that could mainly be due to be not 100% completing it & getting myself fatigued, even though I spent countless hours slaying Golden Lynels for 5 Burst Shot Bows but it never got tiring. I had a hiatus from August-October due to no Master Mode/DLC being released but I recently started playing again. My only gripe is Nintendo forcing my console to update from 1.1.2 to 1.2.1, so no more (fun) duping.
TOTK does a lot of things better than BOTW. Its shrines offer more creative solutions with Ultra hand, there are more characters with bigger side quests, there are more locales with the sky islands, caves, and depths, and the story, I think, is better as well. By itself, anyway. BOTW told the story it needed to; its Hyrule was largely desolate in its design, so telling a story about an almighty foe (Calamity Ganon) destroying it long ago (as the player is exploring the desolate aftermath) seems like all they could do, since there needed to be an explanation as to WHY this Hyrule was so empty. TOTK went further to tell of the origin of this kingdom, its ruler, and allowed more characters, especially Zelda, to have a stronger presence in the story. There's the Zonai parts people have had fun with, the new fuse mechanic that satisfied many players who despised the weapon system in BOTW, I could go on. In a side by side comparison, TOTK, I think, is obviously the superior game. With all that said, I personally hate TOTK. The way I see it, all these things that make it superior to BOTW simply needed to be there to justify the game's existence. The Zelda team took six years and charged us $70 for this game. And was the result really worth that time and effort? They could have moved on to the next big project, one that didn't reuse BOTW's assets. An all new adventure in an all new Hyrule. THAT'S the game we could have been waiting for. And what kind of legacy will TOTK have? BOTW's is undeniable. For years, it's been hailed as one of the finest open world games you can play. There was just a sense of magic in exploring that world for the first time. TOTK is the game that mostly just threw more toys into the same sandbox. So in a way, maybe Breath of the Wild is the superior game after all.
I think this is something that happens frequently in games. I loved both Majora's Mask and Wind Waker when they came out, but was surprised to find out they were disliked on release, and now they are seen fondly. I think it's the fact that the more you spend time with something, the more you notice it's flaws and strengths. Same thing happened with Starfield, it was liked by many on release but now a lot of those find the game boring. I've seen this kind of thing too many times with a lot of games.
Nintendo manipulating their fans into believing that cell shading is an art style they chose because it’s like watercolours when the real reason is because the switch can’t handle anything realistic.
After 2 times 100% the game the second one was more fun and I did a lot of things and the most weird possible way lol I explored in phases: only depths, only sky and then, the surface, using the official book and a online map. Was a awesome experience, a lot better than blindly doing 100% like I did in my first 100%.
We love TotK; Breath of the Wild is good too. I think people are hating on TotK because it's hard to duplicate your weapons now. Subpar gamers just can't handle it. But the greater reason... was no hope of a DLC. That was what everyone was holding out hope that the best game ever would get better. But since it can't get better it's just sub par now. We just made an new TotK recording today actually at CandA Gaming. Thanks for your channel and commentary!
I feel like a large contingent turned against it when news there would be no additional content came out. When people could think "it'll get a content addition or two like BotW did" they built a picture in their mind of the game with the added weight of some additional content, and when they found out that wasn't coming the game no longer felt like "enough". Personally I like the game but would still like... any kind of addition down the line aside from patching out exploits
I'd say that tears of the kingdom is bad not because of the game itself, but because of the fact that it reuses so much of botw and because what it implements to compensate for the reused assets is repetitive or not executed well (for example the depths). If totk was released instead of botw it would be received much better than botw the timing of totk gave us a lot that we were already familiar which took away a lot of the adventurous aspect that made botw so good, also the format of totk is incredibly blatant and not fun (intro, 5 temples, boss.) edit: also we NEED to remember that the Nintendo switch is INSURMOUNTABLY limited, the switch already set itself up for failure, the devs have as much skill as the Elden ring devs do they simply had the wrong resources.
I think the biggest issue with TotK is that it's way too ambitious for the aging hardware and they might have conceded many compromises in order or to work more or less smoothly. I wish it were delayed to the next gen system so they could've made the sky islands and the depths way more substantial in content
@@Caleb_Bravo99 no it isn't. We only had the one map in BotW. We learned of a brand new are in the sky islands so of course we expected some actual content. There wasn't any.
One: nostalgia, all of six years' worth. Two: now there's a need to rethink that familiar world, and some things are more difficult, and others are easier. I like both games. My complaint is the lack of continuity between the *three* games (there are very worthwhile bits of story tucked away in HW:AOC) ... Too much "who's the Link guy?" in TotK, waay to much "oops, no Sheikah tech left, no comment". They could have capitalized so much on the situation... And so on.
I’ve noticed that some Zeldatubers believe that if they want to be smart or unbiased, that mean they have to be super critical of Totk. The main complaints are about plot points like “why Zelda didn’t remain a dragon”, “why Link recovered his arm”, “why the whole sheika tech disappeared”, and the like. I really don’t get the need of feeling let down because a story didn’t went as you wanted it to be.
Lol, those complaints aren't the story not going the way you wanted, they're literally plotholes in the story. Especially the shieka tech thing, the game almost goes out of its way to never bring up anything of that nature, which is really weird since Zelda was obsessed with it and this game's story pretty heavily involves shieka scientists. It's just weird writing at best, and bad writing at worst. The game wants to have the emotional beats of Zelda sacrificing herself and then undoes it at the end with no explanation. And sure, it's pretty easy to understand she's recovered using her own time power to rewind her physical state and same for Link's arm. But it's not rewarding because the game doesn't foreshadow that at all. Have you heard of Checkov's gun? It's a writing mechanic of "if you introduce something to the reader, you better use it", like how they bring up the secret stones turning people into dragons. But they also bring up it being permanent, and then don't deliver on that. They bring up Mineru saying she'll research how to reverse it, but they don't have her deliver any information on her discoveries, if any before they just do it. So they failed to deliver on 1 Checkov's gun while resolving something that would've been fixed with that resolution. And it only would've taken 1 scene, even just one sentence to fix, which is what makes it so annoying. It also resolved an emotional sacrifice without sacrificing anything else. It makes it feel unearned. There's a lot of simple writing techniques and philosophies that help make scenes like this feel more rewarding it earned for the characters that can be resolved with 1 or 2 simple additions to the narrative, and not having those can be the difference between a story that leaves many people feeling unfulfilled and satisfied. That said, story is basically a footnote to most complaints I've heard. It annoys people who pay more attention to their stories, but isn't game breaking. The delivery of said story is a much bigger issue, and how the world lacks any response to it. You get the memories of Ganon's fake Zelda and the real Zelda turning into the light dragon but Link doesn't inform anyone, it doesn't affect the present timeline plot or dialogue in any way. That's an issue and makes Link look incompetent. The dungeons basically being prettier divine beasts that you can easily hack your way through with zonai devices is an issue. Most shrines having their "challenges" be outright skippable is an issue. There being no permanent rewards for quests other than armor and some stable stuff is a problem. Especially when the quest for things like the stable is "sleep at a stable". Like, just sell a diamond and sleep at a stable 25 times, congrats, you got the pony rewards, feel accomplished? The game is big for the sake of being big, it does very little with it and the zonai mechanics are basically designed to have you find your best way to skip over all that land anyways, so it's basically just a traversable loading screen between points of interest. For a more objective issue, the item quick access/bow fusion menu can easily take 20-30 seconds to scroll through every time you need to find a new item to use, flurry rush bullet time activation can happen with some attacks long after they miss you (like when horriblins stab the ground) while other times you can do a frame perfect dodge and it won't activate, the tutorial lasts way too long and even after you get off the tutorial sky island you still need to go through another hour or more through lookout landing and the castle talking to people just to get the paraglider and unlock the ability to access Skyview towers, making this opening far longer than even Twilight Princess, which has historically been seen as the most long-winded opening in the franchise and a big complaint for it. And, quite frankly, the game didn't really fix any of the issues from BotW. The somewhat tried with the dungeons, they are kinda better than Divine Beasts, at least some are, but zonai devices also make them more broken and cheeseable than the Divine Beasts ever were, so it gives and takes away. A lot of TotK is like that, giving and taking away. And a lot of that is cause Zelda is a franchise, prior to BotW, built on limiting the player and making them work through those limitations. BotW and TotK have the opposite design philosophy, so players who want the game to "feel like Zelda" can't get it. Not really. Not if that gameplay aspect of overcoming limitations and solving puzzles that can't be brute forced is what you loved about it
Well..if a story isnt good and it has several logical problems, of course sensible people would be bothered/let down. The game was 70-damn-dollars after all; For that price, i expect a little more than middle-school, Wattpad-level writing.
I think it's just because of what kind of game TotK is. Both it and BotW are games that give the most amazing first impressions ever, possibly the best of any game, and then only go downhill the longer you keep playing them once you hit a certain point. On some level this backlash was present for BotW, but people gave it a pass for how new and different it was. Now with Tears of the Kingdom being a sequel with many of the same issues, people are a lot more harsh in critiquing that
This is news to me. I dont use social media like that. However, now that the honeymoon phase is over with the game, I'm starting to see some really bad game design that I didnt notice the first few go-rounds playing it.
both zelda games botw and totk had some let downs like, the rito can fly up to the sky isles but you don't meet any up in the sky. the depths could have had twili looking building. well the over world in both could have. had not just blessings in shrines but rare weapons or gear like wind waker shield in the lost forest shrine or bosses that guard the pedestal in botw where you receive a blessing gear breaking well why not have a secret great fairy XD these are just my thoughts both games are fine for a single playthough
When TOTK first launched, it was so exciting to explore new map layers, story elements, and abilities. After getting used to the abilities and finishing the story, there is nothing left to do that wasn’t there in BOTW. The new map layers add nothing to the map IMO, because the depths are the exact same terrain over and over again and the sky islands are tiny with nothing to do on most. When the majority of the map is one that you’ve explored for 8 years, I don’t feel excited to look for landmarks and completionist things
It really has nothing to do with the Switch 2 this has happened before with other Zelda games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword when Skyward Sword first came out they were are like this game is good has a good story decent gameplay has better dungeons than Twilight Princess and then later they do a complete one eighty and start trashing the game. the same also happened with Wind Waker and Twilight Princess.
I just jumped into a second playthrough after 400 hours of my first playthrough. I get the problems some people have and I have my gripes too but the game is just too much fun that it's pros far outweigh the cons. Zelda really redefined ope world sandboxes with these last two games and I hope they stick with this formula wile making the necessary changes to keep things fresh.
Agreed, like someone else said, games can be flawed and still be amazing overall. Cons aren't as big of a deal when there are so, SOO many things that make up for them.
Honestly I super disagree bro. I genuinely hope that with the next Zelda game they go back to the OG formula, cause TOTK just wasn’t it (I played Breath Of The Wild and loved it but I can’t find anything for this game but genuine disappointment and distain)
![[MPD직캠] 베이비몬스터 직캠 8K 'FOREVER' (BABYMONSTER FanCam) | @MCOUNTDOWN_2024.7.11](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ylRx8QOuGXo/mqdefault.jpg)
When people say TotK's story is worse I think what they actually mean is that it told its story more poorly, which I think is true. On paper TotK has the better story hands down. But a story itself doesn't live in a vacuum. The way it is told matters.
story vs plot. the story is great, the plot is awful. same with botw.
@@DumplingDoodle
I agree, but what they actually mean is the way they'll tell it.
In Botw it doesnt matter what memory you pick since they dont have spoilers about the Plot since King Rhoam already told us everything we need to know, the Memories only show the Relationship between Link and the others, and the main topic of them is mostly about Zelda's... Emotional Instability if I can say it that way, Fury, Sorrow, Fear, Hopelessnes and so on just in a complete mix-up.
It is nice to see but not very interesting compared to TotM
In Tears of the Kingdom there are many Different Main Topics in the Memories.
In some you see Zelda in a mysterious world that is unfamiliar to her, in another memory Ganon appears and straight up murders everyone, and in the memory that comes chronologically before the last Dragon Tear you get Zelda's Whole Fate spoiled after Ganon was sealed.
The whole point of these Tears are to find out about Zelda's Fate with the Bonus of seeing our Big G Daddydorf himself in Action.
In Breath of the wild you dont need to find out anything since you basically know everything you need to know, they are just a little bonus basically, in Tears of the Kingdom you basically know nothing about what happened, but that also means that one Information that you get too early would ruin the whole experience for you, they should have had a better solution like they make the memories only available in a specific order only show them all in order.
@@Chris-gx1eiEh gotta disagree with getting scenes early. While I did do it in order, I know there some fans who enjoy piecing the story together.
That really has nothing to do with it. The story is a pandering mess that disrespects fans of the original series, as well as fans of BotW. It has some cool moments, but everything good about it is skin-deep. As soon as you try to think about it at any deeper level, it just gets worse and worse. That’s why perception shifted so drastically after a few months.
the "story" of totk is not only told poorly but non-existent. these events that happened in the past don't form a coherent or sensible narrative. why was ganondorf trying to conqure hyrule? when did he start? when did king colonator (rauru) decide to let ganondorf into his castle? why are we expected to see rauru as one of the good guys when he's done literally nothing but come into hyrule and claim the land and establish a kingdom? why are the awfully titled "secret stones" (dear lord why) more powerful than the triforce, something established as something beyond powerful? how the hell did the master sword break from evil energy when any and all evil is supposed to be weakened and defeated by the blade regardless of it's strength? nothing in the story makes any sense, and none of it is connected to one another.
also, negative opinions on totk have always existed since before it officially released, i myself played it a few weeks early when it leaked. the game is a genuine slog to go through, is boring, bloated with repetitive meaningless content, wastes the player's time with filler, and does little to nothing of value when you give it even the slightest thought
I’ll tell you what happened with me, I really enjoyed playing the game, but then as time went on I did not feel the same urge to explore and find secrets that I did with botw. Not only is it the same map but it’s also littered with repetitive tasks and aesthetics. The more I looked back the more I realized while it was enjoyable I’m not sure it was the most well written or designed game, especially when I started to look at older Zelda games. I started to think about my experience and then my opinion of the game changed it’s pretty simple. We talked about botw for 6 years it had a huge impact… I’m not sure totk will have that same impact, at least not to the degree that people are praising it. I don’t think we’ll be talking about or even playing Totk in 6 years. A lot of ppl have already explored the map to death in botw. And the additional maps aren’t substantial to me personally. The world felt emptier than botw imo, but with botw I felt that that emptiness worked with the premise. I’m ready for a return to a traditional Zelda. I’m not sure why we’ve grown so attached to the open world experience. Linearity and restriction i think made zelda special. totk was really fun, but it didnt really fix my issues i had with botw.
the emptiness in botw was necessary for its tone. those moments of quiet, somber silence staring out on an empty world overtaken by nature are what gives the game such thick atmosphere. totk fails in that regard. it does a better job of feeling like an epic story, but it doesn't feel real. the weight of ganon's actions aren't fully felt. there was a lot of implications of horrible atrocities that happened during the calamity. destroyed homesteads, abandoned villages, very few npcs - they didn't, couldn't say anything explicitly, being a nintendo game - but i think that made it that much stronger. you get to piece together just what happened to the hyrule you once knew as you play. totk is just another run of the mill zelda story, but told in the same way as botws. but where botw benefitted from a lack of exposition, totk tries to have its cake and eat it too. they won't let you engage in the actual story, but they will tell you all about it. botw had that to an extent, but it felt like learning of a long-past tragedy, giving fuel to the ambition to kill ganon. not a lame time paradox that you're a part of, but not involved in.
@@DumplingDoodle Tears of the Kingdom isn't as empty because Hyrule, after the defeat of Calamity Ganon, is on the road to recovery. There's still plenty of destruction, but steps are being made to reverse that. With Calamity Ganon gone, there was nothing stopping the restoration of the Kingdom of Hyrule.
I disagree entirely. TOTK adds on to BOTW's maps in such organic and fun ways, despite it not being 100% consistent across all areas of the maps. The new runes/Zonai abilities make exploring old areas feel new, the Korok puzzles are more engaging than before, caves (despite having lacking rewards) are SHOCKINGLY diverse in how much fun they are, what you can do in them, and how many puzzles are in them; most importantly, some areas of the map actually shocked me in how different they felt. Death Mountain feels like a completely new area now that the lava has disappeared, and it probably has the most creative & interesting caves in the game. Gerudo Desert also feels brand new, with the sand pits sprinkled throughout that leads to caves, the quicksand added to the upper left corner, and the dust storm you have to navigate through when getting to Gerudo Town.
It's not perfect, but I was surprised how much fun it felt and how they took advantage of previously existing areas, especially in some areas of the map.
i think it doesn't feel "special" because it isnt choreographed, in botw 90% of the players entered the desert the way it was intended, or the zora domains and a large etc. roads meant something.
totk gives u extreme freedom and in a sense you need to exploit it to make the experience your own, because if you played botw to death the experience they're trying to give u is: more and freely. i totally agree with the most given complain to this game and that's the lack of dungeons. i see why this game could have make it extremely hard to make, but legacy dungeons like elden ring would have been a perfect fit to it. like 5-6, 1 to 2 hs dungeons spread around the sky instead of the 4 repetitive concepts used in the sky islands we have.
The only thing I want to add without voicing much of an opinion since I'm biased as hell (totk gave me major MM nostalgia and that has been my favourite game for at least 15 years now, for me personally it'll therefore always top botw) is that a major reason botw was relevant and played for so long was the amount of mods and fun challenges people came up with. Since Nintendo started claiming numerous creators videos where they have fun modding the game I believe they crippled totk's potential for no reason.
Maybe not the sole reason why the game may or may not be played as long or longer than botw, but definitely a point to consider imo
I think from a coding perspective, it’s too difficult to suddenly suspend certain game mechanics in the same loading zone and it’s definitely a lot harder to stop people from cheesing them. especially in a game, like tears of the kingdom where The potential for a player exploits is very high.
shrines allow an enclosed and confined loading zone to implement the desired mechanics and make sure the intended play style is adhered to
They certainly did not pick the easy way out. The game has a lot of unique and powerful abilities and items, and everything works surprisingly well, even when you actively try to brake the game.
In a market that is constantly flooded with low effort and uninspired games, this is something to appreciate.
"shrines allow an enclosed and confined loading zone to implement the desired mechanics and make sure the intended play style is adhered to" not really true at all because all shrines were on the same giant map and people found more then enough ways to break out of the boundaries, but as you said, with so much freedom the potential for exploits is near infinite.
yes an the older zelda games had heart pieces in the over world i'm not sure why nintendo didn't try to shake up the process of getting blessings like putting a "secrets boss or extremely hard puzzle at the end of a few shrines".
This seems to happen with a lot of games. You start off in honeymoon phase, where everyone is excited and focuses on its positives. Only on its positives. But eventually the positives become "old news" because everyone has already talked about them so much. That doesnt mean they are invalid, they're just not the hot topic anymore.
So the internet starts to focus on the negatives, and only on the negatives. This gives off the impression that the game is the worst thing ever and a huge disappointment. But unless the game is genuinely bad (Skyward Sword), this "worst game ever" phase never lasts forever.
Eventually the negatives become old news too. General opinion on the game balances out and the internet fairly judges it based on its positives _and_ negatives. Criticisms are valid, but so are the PRAISES, which is why most people come to like each Zelda game in the end. Because out of the 20 games we have, nearly _every single one_ is objectively good. So just sit back and let the cycle keep going.
💡💡 *EDIT: A bunch of people called me out for saying Skyward Sword is bad. But back when SS was a few months old, calling it bad was the popular opinion. So suddenly most people like it now? This confirms everything I've been saying, the extreme hate for Zelda games is just a phase of the cycle. It's not permanent. Valid criticisms will always be there, but all the talk of each game being "the worst thing ever" never lasts long. Not even for SS it seems. Games can be flawed and still be amazing, people.*
...I personally enjoyed SS btw.
I clearly remember this happening with BotW. It was praised for refreshing Zelda and revolutionizing open world games. But even that becomes old news, and the negative things about the game were brought to attention. It took a while, maybe even until NOW with TotK, but it finally balanced out and I think most people fairly judge it.
Its called the "Zelda Effect" where the last game in the series is the best one. Unless it's bad enough like Skyward Sword, like you said. There was a time when Twilight Princess was a "cheap Ocarina clone" and Wind Waker was the best game. Or a time when MM wasn't a "real Zelda" for using the timer mechanic. But now we all look back and appreciate those games.
@@met3155 man the absolute _hatred_ towards Wind Waker made it sound worse than Zelda 2. But now? It's an S tier game. The only Zeldas that maintain their bad reps... are the games that are actually bad.
Honestly, from what I see, the only bad Zelda games ever made are the CDi games, and even they have at least one redeeming quality: prime YTP material.
first of all where is skyward sword genuinely bad, i mean motion controls are kinda annoying but with the switch port and emulators it was pretty good just very linear imo.
I 100% agree with you and imo you can tell that by how people see botw now, when i played it it went downhill for me after the water dungeon and i just rushed the game around 2nd to third dungeon. I was thinking like how tf is this a 10/10 game, the open world concept may be a 10/10 but not the whole game and i never understood how people liked it that much and now people say its around an 8/10 lower or higher depending on who you ask. Id give it a 7/10 cause imo the open world concept was good but not executed well, i think elden ring did that way better
I was obsessed with TOTK for months after release, but now i find myself not wanting to go back to it the way i did with botw, after the excitement wears off it does leave a feeling that it was missing a lot of content.
DLC could fix that. This game could use a DLC. Hell I wouldn’t mind the DLC being Switch 2 exclusive at least eventually the game could get more.
I did the same thing, but I just returned to it and haven’t stopped playing since.
This is such a non issue. Oh you played the game for hundreds of hours, and enjoyed it thoroughly? Sounds like a great fucking game. I hear this a lot, people play the shit out of a game, enjoy it, and start getting burnt out, and then pretend it was never actually good to begin with, or worse than previous entries because they simply played it and finished.
@@isaacfrancis5721 you said it best. The switch up is insane.
@@WhitfieldR its called the zelda cycle. every new zelda is met with immediate praise, followed by waves of criticism, and folk bitching about how theyre dissapointed it didnt entertain them for years to come and that it wasnt worth the wait, then the next zelda comes out and people start talking about how much better the new one is and how the previous one was a "precursor", then EVENTUALLY given a decade, people start to praise the game again, and call it "underrated" because of its inevitable wave of influence it has on the gaming industry as a whole. the zelda community is so fucking huge that were seeing a pattern in poor critical thinking emerge consistently.
I've seen people switch their opinions about games several times. They stir up controversy to get more views and more attention. Also at 4:22, it's a story thing. The shrines were meant to be a way to train Link after he woke up from his 100-year nap.
The shrines make perfect sense as Zelda has told Raru and Sonia about Link's heroic exploits so they made the shrines to aid Link similar to how the Sheikah did it with their shrines.
Or they just don’t want to get harassed by the community lol remember what happened with botw
I think the Internet’s overwhelming positive reaction in the weeks after the game launched just meant negative opinions were drowned out or intentionally withheld to avoid being dog piled by other fans.
So there would be plenty of people who haven’t changed their minds that are only now having their opinions be visible online, I can confirm my opinion on TotK has stated consistently low. I have to say, it came across fairly disingenuous to dismiss the validity of all negative opinions over the accusation they originally praised the game, which just isn’t true.
Likewise saying BotW has a better story isn’t people switching their opinions on BotW (which you sort of frame as “proof” against the legitimacy of all their opinions) people were making a specific comparison between the two games, it’s better in relativity to TotK, but not when compared to older Zelda titles. Leaving that out inaccurately frames what people meant.
Regardless, another thing to consider is those initial positive reviews were being made when people started playing, it was a first impression review rather than one formed from the totality of their play through. A lot of people’s opinions on things like the Depths started intensely positive, until all the disappointment set in when it didn’t live up to expectations. So this may now just be their final post-playthrough opinion of the game.
But another possibility is more people simply have the emotional distance necessary to give a more analytical critique, their personal love/enjoyment of the game may not have changed, it just doesn’t prevent them from engaging in critiquing a games shortcomings. Which is especially common in the context of people discussing the improvements they want in the NEXT game, after a big Zelda release everyone begins speculating on how Nintendo can make the next one even better, so focusing so much of game flaws and shortcomings is a natural part of that community discourse and isn’t necessarily an expression of “hate” towards the last game.
It was always bad. There you go.
The honey moon phase is now over and people are realizing that a game that doubles down of everything BotW did, including the bad stuff actually, isn't very good. Doesn't help that 90% of the world is the same so the magic of exploring from BotW is gone and all the new stuff is disappointing at best, and useless padding at worst. Also it sucks that the story isn't good but on top of that this game barely feels like a sequel, going out of its way to barely connect to BotW, then Nintendo recently out right saying they don't care for story and lore.
For story I think its less of botw has the better story but rather it has the better story *telling* and it's story matched the world and gameplay better.
In a vacuum totk and watching cutscenes in order totk has the better story without a doubt. But the way it's told is messy, getting them in any order doesnt work like in botw. The story will spoil itself because you can get it any order. Plus the story feels disconnected from the gameplay and the gameplay hinders it. With a much grander story it sucks how we dont exactly play a role. Not to mention the repetitive cutscenes and how link plays dumb if you learn everything too early. Basically with Totks storytelling its so easy to mess it up and thus it trips over it's feet. Botws story is pretty nonexistent and quieter, but it doesnt have the problems totk does. It serves the gameplay and world, botw has excellent environmental storytelling. There is so much world building that totk doesn't have and the stuff it does add is tacked on and doesnt make sense half the time. So, no the story of botw isnt better, but it is told better and suits the game.
Also the ending of totk really sours the ending. The ending basically puts them right to how things were at the beginning and makes you ask "what was the point?" The final fight was sick tho
For me personally Im mixed. Totk has some pretty high highs but also some low lows and a lot of the little things kept adding up to bring the overall experience down. I never thought it was the best game at the beginning but I was really enjoying the game at the beginning but I kept getting disappointed at things like the two new areas. Idk botw overall is more consistent and the more well thought out games. Interviews for totk just keep revealing how they just really didnt think things through especially when it came to the connection to botw. Meanwhile its crazy how well thought out botw is especially for their first go at this type of openworld game. Again I dont hate totk, im mixed on it and I do acknowledge it does some things better (dungeons and bosses specifically).
"link has amnesia in a post apocalyptic world, go remember." is a much better plot device than "hyrule is rebuilding, link remembers stuff, but also it doesn't matter - go find someone elses memories instead."
@@DumplingDoodle agree botw has the better memory setup it's more natural
@@Nova-gh5yr definitely. can't wait for the legend of zelda: snot of the suburbs to do it again!
Totk is the best Zelda for me personally. The shrines were unique thanks to all those different zonai devices. It was so easy to get sidetracked because of so much stuff to do in open world. Main quest was fun and dungeons much better than divine beasts from botw. Game gives so much freedom in doing the puzzles the intended way or just cheeze them using zonai divices if you don't like them. Story was really good for a zelda game and me tear up in certain parts and all that culminated in an epic final boss which is for me the best Ganon fight in the series. Totk was peak zelda experience for me and is my favourite switch game for now and I don't see anything beating this masterpiece
It had a lot of ups and quite a few annoying downs, which is what makes it difficult to appreciate at times. The 3-layers world is amazing and gave me a lot of great memories. As you say, there is so much to do in the world, if not right next to you, it might above or below. It made the world more dense and more fun to traverse.
People are still actively coming up with new zonai constructions to this day and trying to push the physics to the max. This is not the sign of a bad game, or a game with nothing to do in it!
The main powers were more fun and more versatile than in BotW, the shrines were usually better, the story, characters and cut scenes were usually better...
There are a few things hard to accept with TotK, but in general, it is a brilliant game, and a unique and fun one at that.
Finally, someone else who thinks this is the GOAT game!
I agree. People only hate this game because they think it’s too similar to BOTW, when it has a lot more content.
ToTK has the best gameplay I’ve ever seen in a single player game. It’s the most creative and fun game I’ve ever played. The only thing lacking in ToTK is lore, in order to explain things like the Ancient Sages, the Zonai, the Sky, the Depths, and where the Sheikah Tech went.
The fact that it reused Hyrule was a unique and new experience of its own. It felt like revisiting your hometown after decades, with countless changes and a million new things to do. And I actually cared for the towns in peril because I experienced life with them for myself. Unlike in BotW, where you're just _told_ you have a history with them and are supposed to care.
They built upon a world we love so much instead of scrapping it. That's so rare for Zeldas that I'm glad we got to experience this game.
called it even before release. Totk is more of an expansion to botw than a new game.
Yeah I know what you mean, it's gotta be one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen. The whole "Looks like a $70 DLC" take was kind of a legitimate talking point back in February, months before the game even launched and we knew almost nothing about it. When the game actually released, the reception was overwhelmingly "The '$70 DLC' crowd is looking real quiet now" and "Ok, now I see why this game took them 6 years to make".
Seeing people suddenly come back out of the woodwork with the "Feels like DLC" take and "6 years for what?" long after these talking points have been laid to rest, has been so bizarre and it kinda weirds me out. Feels like I've been dragged straight back to February.
I do also think the topic of GOTY looming on the horizon and BG3 vs TotK tribalism is also playing a huge part.
I didn't play BG3 and have zero interest in it and I dropped TotK, so not for me. Maybe for some people, but I think a lot of people, after they got over new and shiny thing and the genuine technical marvel that is ultrahand, the cracks started to become more obvious. I personally never cared for ultrahand. I thought it was cool, again, a technical marvel, but I'm not a creative with things like that. Plus, with 2 other abilities basically being "ultrahand for weapons" and "instant ultrahand", it got pretty old, and even began to interfere with the game to some extent. Like I can't use my zonai devices in shrines, but I sure can bring in a rocket shield and a wing shield to fly over any puzzle. Mind you, I barely did stuff like that, and I still got burnt out feeling like the game mechanics broke themselves. When I solved one of those puzzles where you're supposed to knock a ball into it by just shooting an arrow with an item attached to it at the thing, I became incredibly disheartened. It felt like there was no point to anything I was doing. I do shrines to get more hearts. I get more hearts to fight strong opponents to get their parts to make stronger weapons to fight stronger opponents to go into the depths to mine zonaite to autobuild more part to get to new sky islands or shrines to get more hearts. It's all just cyclical doing things to do the thing that let's me do the thing I'm already doing but easier. It felt almost like a mobile game to me after 50 hours, like I was doing things just to do them and then I dropped it
Game is basically DLC though
After replaying all the game doing 100% again, it feels more awesome, and exploring was a lot less tedius - because I explored with a target in mind.
I did a lot more contructs (since I did not want to use the hover bike) and used mods to extend the time of zonai itens - the wings become a lot of fun!
I did a lot more fights, and tried a lot more things, like breaking boulders with Riju or some weird construct.
I used planes, cars, robots, etc.
The temples were a lot more fun too.
It's a psy-op by woke Western developers that don't like being showed up by Nintendo
@@mbii7667 Not really. Nintendo already has western ESG money invested in them. Why do you think Pokemon no longer acknowledges gender and they're making a Peach game with no reference to her emotional powers like she had back in Super Princess Peach. Hating on TotK is far from a woke psy-op. If anything, this game gets the "elf gender" woke loons in a tizzy for Zelda's T&A. People just stopped liking the game when they played enough to realize they waited longer for the sequel than the original just to get more of the same in the same world with even more impressive physics, but not even in as fun as a way since they kept updating the game to nerf fun exploits of those physics, like Rocket jumping
I wasn't aware there was much discourse along these lines, but I'm not surprised to learn that there is. Here's my criticism of Tears of the Kingdom. The disjointed story was not particularly effective in my playthrough. A great example of that was the discovery of the Thunderhead Isles. The fact that there's a huge storm around the place absolutely drew me in. I did the Wind Temple first, and the giant thunderstorm over Faron seemed a natural next step, given the similarity in tone to the Wind Temple and the new power you get there. I go there, and, no spoilers, but you know what happens there. To find out much, MUCH later there is a whole elaborate and really cool quest line that leads you there was a huge bummer. The sense of discovery and mystery inherent in such a huge quest was completely lost on me because I inadvertently solved one of the biggest mysteries in the game. Regarding the criticisms, here's an analogy. Generally, I feel like Tears of the Kingdom is a great game, but it is so full of stuff that it feels like chewing on the kind of steak that just gets bigger the longer you chew it. Ultimately, you might just spit it out instead of swallowing it, and that leaves you feeling empty. Myself, I prefer Breath of the Wild. It feels, to me, like a much better example of the "open air" concept the Zelda team were going for than Tears of the Kingdom. There is less to do, yes, but your imagination fills in the gaps. Sometimes less is more.
yup, they gave up on the total freedom of choice they had in botw. did the same thing, also did the same thing with the water and fire temples. happened across them, couldn't do anything until later. in botw, i would've been able to do the dungeons solo, then go meet yunobo/sidon, and have them throw some confused but thankful dialogue my way as things go back to normal. would i miss out on their stories? yes. did that stop anyone from buttrushing ganon with a tree branch in botw? no.
in botw the divine beasts at least made sense as to why you couldn't enter them solo. instead of a little story sequence, they give you a task. how you completed that task was up to you. sure you can sneak yunobo up death mountain, or you can go destroy all the drones and have him stroll over in peace. sure you can steal the thunder arrows from the lynel or find them otherwise, or you can kill the lynel and get extra. in totk, you just get shuffled along a linear sequence, until the game decides you can play again. not to say those sequences are necessarily bad, but they're not free.
This happened to me when I found about the forgotten temple and all they tell you about the tears… way after I had already found all the tears on my own just exploring lol
Also TOTK’s story just feels so lazy💀
Like this is a AAA Zelda game that plays the EXACT SAME cutscene four different times.
I know, right? @@RNGuice
@@DumplingDoodleno that's not true. Botw had the same type of quests that lead up to the Divine beasts. You were still required to find the champions of the area, and then work with them to get into the beast.
Imo most of what people don't like about totk, is what they don't like about open world games. What they want is to add more linearity to them, but that ruins the game. What they want is traditional zelda, and that's not coming back thankfully. So we have to work to make open world zelda even better
Because the novelty wore off.
Conflating two different groups of ppl with each other and trying to imply that the ppl who never liked totk in the first place now ‘suddenly’ hate it is so weird. Also even if that were the case, why do you oppose people changing their minds…?
There’ve been numerous totk critique video’s that were uploaded within the month the game was released, with countless comments that also post about their grievances with the game.
Totk fans try to not to be disingenuous nintendo meatrider challenge
i new this was going to happen because it was very clear to me that totk was just "more botw", but people will only understand that after they see the next one, then they will see how much better totk could have been...that being said, i enjoy totk very much
I'm one of many who had their opinions on totk change within the first month. The new mechanics were hella innovative and fun. Take those cool mechanics and combine it with a a world that turned out to be twice as big as the original, the thrill of discovery was insane! And it was that thrill that fed people for a bit. But then, the more you play it the more hollow it feels. This sky and underworld are so cool during your introductory period, but then, at a point you realize they're shallow and lifeless. I explored all of the depths, and it became a chore after about 20% of the way through. They we're literally created to act as toy boxes for the new mechanics. New mechanics are cool, but that's really never been this soul of Zelda and why people play. Also, why are more than half of the armors you find ripped straight from the first game. Like what? Additional, The game forces you constantly to enter a menu, which is laggy. I tired so much of constantly going to the menu for items, weapons, and to initiate the new abilities. Such a chore.
Cave and Wells were added to the surface, which were really nice. Otherwise, it's literally the same ol, but WITHOUT the sense of discovery. You're literally exploring the same world with the exact same gameplay processes as the first game. It brings nothing exciting to the table or to discover. In botw, sure there were no caves or wells, but there was a whole dang world to discover. New environment, new towns, new art style, new mechanics, new characters, new enemies, etc. You also have major unique discoveries that you don't get in totk, such as the island, making your way through the lost woods, the dark shadow temple,, the big temple in the cliffs (actually fun and unique in botw), etc. The shrines were better as well.
I would definitely agree that the story was tighter in botw as well. There was a world built around that story, a history, grand guardian ruins of old battles, etc. Totk's story was basically "baddy is mean and he's definitely going to wait for you so he can talk to you about how evil he is". All the while, I am hearing everyone talk about how weird Zelda is being, even though I learned why 20% of the way through the game. "Demon King gordo"? "Secret Stones"? AND it's hard not to go into what effect it had on the overallseries. Im not a lore fanatic, but it felt like this game literally just erased everything all the games have contributed to the series just so they can make literally ALL of Hyrule based around people who apparently lived on little rocks in the sky. I don't feel like people are suddenly loving botw's by saying it's better than totk's
To sum that up, totk was praised because it seemed so grand. Map is huge, people were telling us there were pirates attacking, people were talking about how insane Kakariko village was now, I was hearing of this mystery beast, etc. But then, when people dug their hands into it, they discovered the it was all a tease. Something new? No! Just more of the same as the first title, within the exact same world.
And people are saying Nintendo had a bad year? I've heard none of that. Maybe it's a 4chan then?
Yeah, I feel this. Plus, the world feels so much less dangerous without the guardians or their ruins around and it feels like such a waste that they're all gone. Sure, the ones reactivated by Ganon blowing up or otherwise being destroyed, whatever, but the divine beasts and all shieka tech being just plain gone and never discussed. That is weird. All the people had to know the dangers of the Guardians and the such all around for the past century, and the ruins around the world. It's more than weird that they're gone. It's also kinda really annoying that they basically reused the ancient technology setup again too with the zonai after obliterating the shieka tech too. Like, my God, does the story of this game feel iterative of BotW. They unnecessarily nuke the world history on BotW to introduce a new one. And sure, they could've referenced that shieka tech was the shieka carrying on the legacy and technological developments of the zonai. But they didn't do that. It feels like they're treating the player like an idiot. I hate it. It's literally the same setup with the ancient but technologically advanced society. Who had their own Temple of Time, had their own shrines, had their own king, had their own memories, etc etc etc. Ot improved on some things, like having more obvious indicators where the memories were, rather than just some pictures, but I'd even argue that was to the detriment of the story because it made it easy to discover the stories biggest plot twist before you even realize Zelda's warping all around doing questionable things. I legit saw the murder memory before I finished the lookout landing opening part of the game cause I got bored talking to people there and just wanted to explore. I only went back to finish it when I realized that was where the paraglider was and I couldn't do any of the Skyview towers until I finished that. God the tutorial part of this game is long and it giving you access to the world before the tutorial finished was game design that BotW understood better than TotK.
They tried to have their cake and eat it too, reusing story beats, reusing the world, and just trying to recontextualize it into a somewhat more traditional Zelda story story in an open world game and it just didn't work. Despite there being more characters and them being more involved in the story, the game just felt less alive than BotW. It oddly felt more game-y, less immersive, and really just comes off like the DLC it was meant to be, but forced in a narrative and quests to just make it feel worth the investment of a full game. It's interesting while you're discovering things, before you realize 8 out of 10 sky islands are the same thing and 90% of the depths are one layer of assets spread over a Hyrule sized map that's only interesting because it's so dark you can't see that every direction around you is the same.
I did like the Frox, Dragons, and return of Gibdos, though they were immediately less frightening than they were in Ocarina of Time once I realized they go down to one shock fruit arrow (and don't have a freaky scream).
Between this, the jank in the difficulty curve (mostly from armor) that's somehow worse than BotW's despite the nice improvement of every enemy encampment having 1 enemy that levels up with you as you get stronger (which at least lets every group of enemies feel like you aren't necessarily wasting a strong weapon, since you can get a strong drop at every encampment), and bullet time not activating consistently, as well as still having a general lack of enemy variety (wtf are the PIRATES normal Bokoblins? At least give them pirate hats), it just doesn't do it for me. Not at the scale they're going for here. If it was a tighter map, more dense and not spread over 100+ hours, sure, it'd be fine. But the more time people have with this game, the worse it feels and the more the cracks become apparent. Of course the internet is gonna be full of negativity after months, most people are needing months to finish the game. Or even get significantly into it. Sure, I had fun for about 20 of my 50 hours. But most of my fun was counterbalanced with annoyances. The great sky island I thought was letting me and wanted me to explore before going to the temple of time. Actually, no, that's just a waste of time since you can't activate any warp points and can't access lots of spots without ultrahand. Fuse is fun, but then you realize they just nerfed weapons to make another power out of what was effectively still ultrahand. There's no reason fuse had to be separate from ultrahand other than they didn't have any ideas for another ability. Thank God they had the sense to make their ascend debugging tool into a mechanic, cause it'd have only been recall and ultrahand if not for that. I mean, isn't it weird that 3 of the powers are just ultrahand? Ultrahand, fuse, and auto-build. They're just ultrahand, weapons ultrahand, and shortcut ultrahand. And the auto-build breaks the game since you can rebuild anything whenever you want at the cost of just a bit of zonai. What is the point of a big map if you're gonna give everyone the ability to just fly over the whole thing? Just so people have space to fly?
Realizing that was when it hit me, TotK isn't a good game. It's actually pretty mediocre as a game. It's just the ultimate creative's sandbox. Which is fine, creative need games designed for them too. That's why everything is a grind in the game. Like wtf are pony points even for. You get them for sleeping. That isn't an achievement. That's not a gameplay reward. It's store rewards card. Why do people need a store rewards card in a game? It's just there to waste time, give people an excuse for doing things while they play with their toys. If you aren't into those toys, then the game just feels like a massive time waster after you get over what little there is to discover in the game. I'm never gonna get to that final boss fight with Ganondorf and I do regret that, cause it does actually look like the best Ganondorf boss fight ever made, I'll give the game that, but everything leading up to it and the story around it are just not a fun experience for people not into the ultrahand game. Actually, I did run down through the hyrule castle depths and that was easily the best part of the game because it was the sole linearly designed part of the game, and it forced me to approach each challenge as they came up, and, unlike the caves, they actually rewarded me with the final challenge of the game, though I went through too early and didn't have the prep to defeat the army (especially since I went before unlocking any sages to help me and didn't meet Hestu yet to stock up on strong weapons and gear, lol). I give the game credit for what it does right, but, as a game, it does very little really well. Mostly just as a sandbox to play with ultrahand does it do anything really well. It's a technical marvel, but that's about it for a player like me
@@Chronoflation Funny enough, I found the game to actually be more fun if I skimped out on using the Ultrahand or Autobuild abilities.....I use them, but only at utmost need.....or when I was stuck on something....Like the part where you go down into the depths of the reservoir after Sidon creates the vortex. I made the mistake of going in there with just a handful of Bomb Flowers, but didn't want to have to leave and come back......So, I made as long of a bridge as I could using the materials around me and used that to reach the end of the level. I personally have made it to the point where I could fight Ganondorf......I've done all the Shrines, collected all the memories, got all the armor sets (Still grinding to upgrade them all, though, grr......) and cleared all of the temples, unlocking all the Sages. I just haven't done it yet.....
This is the best year for Nintendo in my lifetime at the very least....
Yeh, being someone who’s been in the community and been doing content for 4 years it’s insane to see, especially since my opinion is that I absolutely love the game and I got most things I wanted from it, seeing the complete turn around has been NUTS
Keep up the good work, great vid :))
@taker601 puts it nicely in their comment, it's a typical cycle for Zelda (and for long-lasting franchises to an extent I'm sure)
@@mkjjoe I'm on a discord with a bunch of longtime big zelda Tubers, and they're pretty much all saying they've seen this before. It happens to every Zelda game, even the best ones. There are some good videos calling out the discourse around Zelda and how it's always been this awful.
@@josh67091 the discourse has been even _worse_ than it is now. Wind Waker is one of the most cherished games but was absolutely hated by (seemingly) everyone back when it was the latest game.
Majora's Mask got similar treatment to TotK for reusing so much from its prequel, but ALSO for trying something new: the 3 day timer.
Even Ocarina of Time caused a little controversy because not everyone was on board with moving to 3D.
No matter how great a game the Zelda team comes up with, some people will ALWAYS be unsatisfied. And they're very good at making themselves heard.
The issue though is that valid criticism may also be dismissed amidst trendy negativity. For example my review of the game has remained consistent since a few weeks after release, and there are definitely flaws worth pointing out. But I've been surprised to see a lot more of lazier criticism pop up in recommendation over the last month or so. While this applies to each title, the idea that TOTK is loosing steam much quicker is also a symptom that it's derivative of BOTW, people got around faster and the new stuff isn't as substantial as the foundation established 6 years ago with all its possibilities.
@@josh67091 "There are some good videos calling out the discourse around Zelda and how it's always been this awful."
Any links?(heh.)
The Zelda cycle is something that I used see talked about on 4chan alot, and something I noticed starting with Majoras mask, but the concept of the Zelda cycle seems to be obscure now, and its to the point that people no longer deny they are doing it, but actually deny that it ever existed as a criticism of ootfanatics.
As someone who played through the entire story, and did all the shrines in like 1 week, I ended up being disappointed with the story, but also the dungeons by the last few of them.
Ill start with the dungeons. Im doing my second play through right now, where I have to take everything at a slower pace, like only two, three hours a day, right now ive only done the Zora and Gerudo dungeons, and im planning on doing the Goron or Construct one next, but besides the “push the five buttons” gimmick being overused and making the dungeons way shorter than they could be, I felt the dungeons were way to cheesable. Mainly the Fire temple, where I literally just climbed over the puzzles in my first play through, im planning not to do that in my second, but theres also a part at the beginning of Lightning Temple where you just use ascend at a certain spot and completely skip the first part of the dungeon. Its wierd and i think the dungeons could have been a little less open so that players would actually have to engage with the puzzles. My favorite dungeon in my first play through was the Construct Factory just because I ended up stumbling upon it after exploring the Thunderhead Isles without knowing about Mineru or unlocking the Fifth Sage quest beforehand. It was thrilling to just discover a fifth dungeon like that without it being because plot.
Speaking of plot, I could go over how BotW story is better than TotK, or how the Champions like Revali and Urbosa were way more interesting than the ancient sages, who didnt even have names or faces, and whos cutscenes were all the same with: “Secret Stone, Demon King, Imprisoning War?” But I would rather talk about another aspect of the story that I didnt like: I once was skimming through TH-cam and saw a thumbnail for a video called: “Is TotK to open?” I never watched the video admittedly, and I forgot who made it, but I would still argue that TotK is actually secretly too linear. Its clear upon playing through the game that Nintendo wanted you to do the dungeons and memories in a certain order and it shows, even if you find the memory where its revealed that the Zelda weve been seeing in the present is just a puppet of Ganondorf, you dont have the option of telling Purah or the Zonai Survey Team until after you fight Phantom ganon at Hyrule Castle. Its just one example, but its one of those things where doing things out of the intended order punishes players with idk poor dialogue or whatever you want to call it.
Overall, I thought TotK was a good game. Not my favorite Zelda, that title would go to both A Link Between Worlds and Twilight Princess, but it was alright, I just feel there are definitely areas that could have been improved upon, and I think that this early criticism is actually healthy for Nintendo, as theyll see the criticisms, and try and improve upon them for the next game. Twilight Princess exists because people were originally hard in Windwakers childish artstyle, and BotW and TotK exist because people were hard on Skyward Swords hyper linearity. One could only imagine the type of zelda game well get from people being hard on this games flaws.
Thank you for reading my YT Comments essay :)
Secret Stone, Demon King, Imprisoning War? These cutscenes were lazily done imo.
The Fire Temple was the only one I struggled with, ironically (in terms of finding the 5 switches)
I know I'm two months late, but since this comment enumerated some of the things I didn't like about TotK, I'll bite. (Spoiler warning)
I actually think the problem was that TotK wasn't linear enough. It appears to me like many elements of TotK's design were done ONLY because BotW did them, and the aggressive nonlinearity seems to be one of them.
For a small example, everyone complains about the copy-paste sage cutscenes after each dungeon, but TotK's nonlinearity more or less forced that, because the devs can't guarantee that the player knows about "Demon King? Secret Stones?" after any given dungeon-you can do them in any order.
Another example is the massive narrative dissonance created by allowing you to fight Ganondorf right out of the box. In terms of the story, there's no way in heck that Link should be able to solo that fight (Ganondorf solo'ed five sages and Rauru), but the game still lets you do it, and seemingly only because you could do it in BotW. Not to mention that doing this, or not having drawn the Master Sword, completely undermines and even disrespects Zelda's story.
Basically, the nonlinearity seriously threatens TotK's narrative imo
Since you asked for an explanation for the sudden shift, I'll give you my personal experience. I initially didn't like BotW, because I'm a huge Zelda fan and I had a hard time adjusting, but I played the ever living sh*t out of BotW and in time, I've come to accept and love it as a Zelda game. When they announced BotW 2 with Ganondorf, I believed it's THE Ganondorf from OoT and I was beyond excited and with the intro to the game I was ecstatic! Rauru mentioned too? I thought Omg, they listened, they heard our prayers, traditional dungeons will be back, they are going back to OoT, the best game of all time, in my opinion. When I saw shrines were back I wanted to throw up and prayed that it was just those 3 on the great sky island, but then there came the 4th one, we were guided by a ghostly king of Hyrule, we go back to Hyrule, I've seen it all for years, Sheikah tech is without anyone batting an eye gone, no one even mentions it, new towers were built, my thought was why tear down the other towers to rebuild new ones, but then recently Nintendo announced that "sheikah tech disappeared of its own accord, perhaps since its duty was done" shamelessly, in my opinion, ignoring BotW and the Sheikah tech having been around, even though it had already fullfilled its purpose 10,000 years prior to the events of BotW. Why disappear now? Every step I took in TotK felt more and more like an alternate universe, where BotW just never happened. Nintendo, in my opinion, completely disrespected not only all of Zelda 3D, but its very own prequel. And I spoke out about it, since you ask why now, people were shredding me, which normally doesn't really bother me, but they were telling me that I was not a real Zelda fan, like the past 25 years of me investing way too much of my free time into everything Zelda! It felt like I felt during the playthrough of TotK, like Nintendo and now these other Zelda fans, of whom I am convinced have never actually played any other 3D Zelda, were ignoring my existence, like TotK did BotW. THAT is why I believe BotW to be the better game, for the sole reason of exploration was the reward. I agree with you and I had the same idea and conclusion of them having better put out heart pieces and stamina vessel pieces all over Hyrule, than reintroducing shrines. If I had never played BotW, TotK would be great, but most of us did, and I'm talking about 100s of hours of BotW. Some people even found all the Korok seeds. We didn't speak out before because of the hate, but we have grown now that the "honeymoon" phase is over and that we realize 'that's odd, BotW I played for months everyday for hours, even years, but... ever since I finished TotK, I haven't touched it' that's how you know after a while, okay this game was not worth $70, highest price for a Zelda game ever, to play a DLC that actively denies its prequel.
The turnover is so absurd honestly. Seeing the Twitter discussion on this subject makes me mad
Many nintendo games suffer from this turnover, Mario Odyssey for example
@@arturocastroverde3349 even BotW had this turnover, although its now considered "so much better" than TotK with its empty world, 12 enemies, lack of dungeon variety, and nothing to do with monster parts. LOL!
@@kirbyupspecial and we can't forget how in botw weapons are all the same, there are absolutely no bonuses depending on which kind you use. No incentive to fight for them unlike in totk. Oh what's this? "The durability is worse in totk?" Well that's why they gave almost every weapon Durability Up+. So on top of the unique bonuses weapons now have, they also last a long time ESPECIALLY fused with monsters parts.
And people seem to have forgotten how a 3rd of the Shrines were tests of strengths which are almost universally hated. Proving grounds are actually fun because they aren't copy paste mindless 1v1 fights.
And somehow the 3 caves are better than the 147 ones in totk? Not all of totk's have something special but a lot of them do, especially in the desert. I can think of some that straight up felt like natural mini dungeons. Something people wanted instead of Shrines in botw.
Speaking of natural puzzles, remember how botw was supposed to be full of them? Like if there's a large gap you can fell a tree and walk across. That didn't happen once after leaving the Great Plateau. In totk I'm using all kinds of tricks with the environment now because it actually forces you to.
@@kirbyupspecial true, many people call it "not a true zelda". To be fair the story and dungenons are pretty lacking.
@@SonicGamerLord also the divine beasts are garbagr
In terms of gameplay they should’ve added more sky islands with more variety and a couple of larger ones like the great sky island, and the depths being smaller would’ve been better so that they could make it look more unique, and there were way too many blessing shrines but besides that it was very fun and the addition of the ultrahand powers were awesome
In terms of the story(Massive spoilers): it was a mess, sure botw’s story wasn’t perfect but at least it picked one aspect of the story to focus on and execute it very well, that being Zelda’s character development
The memories worked to great effect in the first game because you already know the outcome of everyone losing to the Calamity so seeing the memories in different orders doesn’t hinder their effect too much since each memory builds on her character, the same goes for the champions as they had their own memories to establish their personalities and goals which is a lot more than anything the sages ever got in totk
Totk’s memories aren’t character focused stories as they’re about the mystery of what happened to Zelda so seeing it in the wrong order(which is practically guaranteed to happen unless you know which ones to see first) would ruin your investment in seeing the other memories
And we never learn anything about Ganondorf beyond him being the king of the Gerudo and that he’s evil for the sake of being evil
The secret stones are also very inconsistent since Ganondorf having one stone somehow makes him extremely OP, but other characters get very minor buffs in comparison just for the sake of keeping all of them together weaker than Ganondorf
Ganondorf’s plan to get Sonia’s secret stone was very stupid considering that he just tried to take over Hyrule a day ago but Rauru still accepts him “just to keep him close” and Sonia, despite having no abilities that would make her strong in a 1 v 1 fight, thinks that luring Ganondorf away from Rauru is a good idea when she should’ve just had Rauru hide somewhere than blast Ganondorf to smithereens the moment he shows up
I could go on but my overarching point here is that Totk’s gameplay is great, especially the Ganondorf boss fight which is a top tier boss fight but the story is more than lacking, despite that I still had a great experience with the game and I wouldn’t call it a bad game by any means
Exactly! I was so excited when ganondorf dodged my sword swings and did a flurry rush. But all of the motivations he has are pathetic
I love Tears of the Kingdom, but there are two things they should have done to make it better. Introduce both the steering stick and auto-build a lot sooner and more easily once you arrived on the surface. And make it that the story clips go in order no matter what dragon tear you go to.
The steering stick was a big problem for me. I was looking in every one of those dispensers and I only found one after I was more than halfway done with the game. So I didn’t really have access to the vehicles until that point.
As for the tears, the game does give you the order right at the beginning of the quest.
@@Caleb_Bravo99 You have to see and talk to Impa first, though. It could be easily missed.
All your suggestions actually make the game worse. Go replay the game. You have no clue what you’re talking about and don’t know what brilliant game design is all about.
@@DanielMazahreh damn, speaking of totk, your ass sounds like purah rn, very snarky and holier than thou. it's a lot less endearing when you're not in a video game.
They should have made the dragon's tears more linear in that when you unlock one the light dragon appears to show you the nexts. In BOTW, the memories made sense as they're mostly just random events in Link and Zelda's lives leading up to the return of the Calamity so they don't necessarily need to be linear. TOTK has more of a linear story with its memories so having them scattered can make things a little cross eyed.
I have said it before. I love both games, and i take them at face value. They brought their own unique style of play and adventure! The dungeons were an improvement, however the traditional Legend of Zelda dungeons had mini bosses in them where you had to defeat them to get the key items in the game. Then you fought the boss and earned the temple's new weapon to use forever! The finding of switches in these temples wad a different approach to the solution and I liked it! Sure I wished there was more, but I had fun anyway! Overall i love both games and I personally treat it like it was a part one and part two of the Legend of Zelda experience!
I think the fights you have before each dungeon are meant to be the new minibosses. They aren't quite what people want but hey its more than what BotW had!
I love both games too. Everyone has an opinion. Not everyone is going to like something. Both stories and gameplay are great. I spent so many hours on Botw. I can always go back to the world and see if I missed anything or just explore because the world is unique and cool. My mind hasn’t changed. Both games are good.
@@NoSpoilers-wd4vv And these fights indeed force you to use the main "item" before you enter the dungeon. The climb to the wind temple forces you to use the wind sage ability and the trampoline ships, for example.
@@GerardMenvussa wow nice catch :0
Because it's just more BotW and doubles down on all of the criticisms people had with that game. Instead of ditching weapon durability they made it even more fidily and resource intensive. Instead of giving you an active story happening in real time you're still just piecing together a much more interesting story that happened in the decent past, except now with plot twists that can be completely spoiled if you dont go out of your way to get the memories in order. Instead of actual dungeons we just got re-skinned divine beasts with the environmental manipulation that actually made those interesting ripped out. The draw of exploration in BotW is non existent because it's the same world map from before and the new additions are underwhelming. Both the sky and the depths are mostly empty space devoid of substantial content. There is much more repetitive content. Sages are a massive downgrade from champion powers. Theres no mystery left in the game because everything has just been attributed to the Zonai. The villian is still absent and void of personality, which is unforgivable since they used an established popular character instead of the mindless raging calamity Ganon. The game is completely stifled by its complete commitment to total non-linearity. This game doubles down so hard on every fault BotW had that it even hurts that game retroactively...and all of this came in a package sold to us for $70 dollars. It is the most derivative entry in the entire franchise and opinions will only get worse from here the longer people have to ruminate on that fact.
Here's the reason for the weird delay on people's opinions, I think - It's a big game, thus it takes many, many hours of gameplay to come to any real conclusions about it.
This happened with me. It took me 120+ hours or so of playing the game to realize I had quite a few problems with it. The first few dozen hours is really fun, it feels like a new experience and rediscovering Hyrule since BotW was interesting... at first. 20-30 hours in I started developing a slight sinking feeling of deja vu and disappointment that I was mostly in denial of. 60-80 hours in, I started noticing repeating patterns; the same Shrine challenges, the same lame quest rewards, and a whole hell of a lot of repeated content held over from BotW. 100+ hours in, I had done most of the main story quests, which were all samey and unsatisfactory.
120+ hours in, I had completed the main story and done most of the main side quests and whatnot, and had to admit to myself that, yes, this really is just Breath of the Wild Again. Beat for beat, it is just BotW again - same characters, same world, same basic plot, same shrine structure, same dungeon structure, even the same problems like weapon durability and insta-healing in the pause menu. I waited six years and spent $70 on what amounted to the same damn game I'd already played. Needless to say, that's a little disappointing.
My point is, it takes a long time to realize this, hence why you get so many people praising the game at first, and now many of them are complaining they don't like it. It especially takes a while when you're in denial for a long time like I was, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who wanted to believe that the big new Zelda game wasn't this much of a rehash of the previous one as it ended up being.
No, it’s just a really bad pointless sequel/ rehash of BOTW.
It retcons so much, while adding more plot holes
“Zelda fans angry that Tears of the Kingdom is rehash of greatest game of all time” is a stellar headline
@@Caleb_Bravo99Botw is not the greatest game of all time. There’s many game that are way better than it
@@Caleb_Bravo99you think people would be happy if they rehashed the exact same game in the exact same world with the exact same assets for Witcher 3, Skyrim, red dead redemption 2 etc?
A rehash is not good. People want new products.
My relationship with this game is pretty unique in that I loved it to death while playing it, but then entirely stopped thinking about it once I finished it. It had no staying power in my memory like other games this year. I think that says something, it was sort of like video game junk food in my opinion.
I might not agree with how they developed the established Lore/ contradicted it, but the Gameplay and the Map are amazing!
Having well over 300 hours into both games id like to have a say, I have been playing zelda since NES. When you love something, you stick with it through good and bad. i remember playing at 6 years old for the first time. I remember when i first played it on the 64, OOT and majoras mask were INCREDIBLE, i could go on, with that being said i also have enjoyed it on every system since then and have never really thought in the sense that any of them were garbage, i have loved every single zelda game ive played. I cannot say that about any other game series, including pokemon, there are even crappy pokemon versions. That is something to me. People can complain all they want, I will forever love zelda. Both botw and totk are incredible games and just add to the legacy. Are there flaws, sure, everything has flaws. But people should enjoy the games for their own unique individualality instead of trying to act like they are all the same dang game. Geez.
I mean yes we should appreciate that zelda kept such high standards but with botw/totk they took the og zelda formular from us aswell as the lore and then you look at fromsoft which made a similar open world concept while keeping everything the fans like and i ask myself why nintendo cant do that, like atleast give us normal dungeons
@erikin they can't deliver the classic experience in an open world because of the lack of linearity. Classic Zelda has items in dungeons that are required for future puzzles and dungeons. That way they can iterate on each other and have a smooth difficulty curve, something impossible to do in a world where any challenge can be faced in any order. Even the more classically designed Link Between Worlds had this issue since you could face dungeons in any order as you rented your items to use from the shop and upgraded them in the shops. Early game felt hard, late game felt easy, cause the difficulty curve was flat. Once you understand the types of puzzles in the game, you can do any of the dungeons cause there isn't much new to figure out after that point. Traditional Zelda does not mix well with open world.
Personally, I wish they'd tier out access to dungeons and puzzles and even the story to allow them to create some amount of a building curve. They should make the game more like Ocarina of Time. You have child dungeons, then adult dungeons after those child dungeons, and some adult dungeons require accomplishing some things as an adult before you can do them. Imagine if only the Ruto dungeon was available at first, or Ruto and Zora, then Goron and Gerudo came after you beat those 2, and then the 5th dungeon was only accessible after all 4 of those and you couldn't just stumble upon it and they designed the difficulty around that. They should honestly have done that with access to the tears to make sure you didn't find Zelda's final memories before the early ones, and every 3 or 4 memories do what they did with the final memory and make the payoff memories act as checkpoints for the player.
The problem is, this goes directly against their design philosophy that they wanted to follow for these games. They didn't want to restrict the player at all in these games. Problem is, Zelda is a franchise built on the limiting of what players can do and making them work out their way through those limitations. This is why so many people will say BotW and TotK aren't Zelda games. They're basically a new franchise wearing the skin of Zelda. That's not necessarily bad, but it's something that means these games aren't for all of the old fans. Some old fans, sure. It just depends on what people went to the franchise for. For me, classic 3D and 2D Zelda were my favorite franchises, next to Pokemon and Xenoblade. After dropping Tears some 50 hours in, I can safely say this new Zelda format is a pass from me going forward. I'm sure I'll buy the next one praying it's more like the classics, but I'm also fairly confident I'll end up dropping it partway through too.
@@Chronoflation ill read your whole comment another day, sry i dont have time rn but i just wanna say its def possible not giving us all items/abilities right at the start of the game, just like previous zelda games where you had to go back to some places after getting a certain item like bombs and other open world games do that aswell and i think its cool unlocking the whole world by progress and not just braindead exploration
ESPECIALLY Pokémon. They are really hit and miss.
Its just natural that people compare every game to the other games even if they are different, since, you know, not everyone has money or time to spend on every single game, so they just have to make the choice of what theyll enjoy more
I've seen this 95% of the time from people trying to discredit it for GOTY season because they're fans of xyz more
tbf it legitimately doesn't deserve it. the most impactful game this year is by far bg3, wether you like it or not. totk was huge, and ultrahand is an incredible mechanic, but bg3 gave AAA studios a fucking existential crisis bc of how much stuff they packed in there, some devs literally had tantrums on twitter over it. it wins.
Didn't play it so I can't speak on it. But to say TOTK doesn't deserves to be discredited in the conversation is ridiculous @@DumplingDoodle
@@10-5playz it doesn't deserve to be discredited, but it also doesn't deserve to be overcredited either. it's a good game, and in a world where bg3 released just a few months later, it probably would be goty. but now that's looking much less likely.
I'd say it deserves all the praise it's received. Same with BG3 since enough people feel that way. I'm not gonna ride either one especially since I've only played one but I wouldn't be mad if either one won.@@DumplingDoodle
The reason for this change is bc when the game realeased everyone was in the honeymoon phase with the game, now that all the people can see it in an objective way they see what totk really is, a big dlc
So about the story of totk being better than botw. I personally believe so, but it's not because I necessarily love botw's story. When botw came out it disappointed me, I had expected more from the story of a zelda game and it made me concerned for future games if they're all going to take on this simple approach. I was delighted to learn that totk would have a more involved plot. The thing is...after playing totk I have come to appreciate botw's story more for being extremely well suited to the open world formula.
Tears of the Kingdom's story is fine (I wouldn't say it's anything special, it didn't make me feel anything really, but it's not bad), but the way it is presented to the player is *horrible*. Like I was literally putting my controller down and looking at my phone during the 'imprisoning war' cutscenes. The fact that you don't get your paraglider until you do a bunch of linear running to and from Hyrule Castle is Awful, like I felt personally like it completely went against the ethos of the game to force me to watch a story cutscene instead of letting me do what I wanted immediately. There are good elements, of course, even great ones. But they're bogged down by so much of the story being horribly presented.
I don't like botw's story any more after playing totk, but I do think that I understand better why it was constructed in the way that it was. Because the way Totk went about it does *not* work
Also side note, I personally do not think that the opinion on totk changed on a dime because of haters or anything, I think it is a natural consequence of the fact that totk is really fun to play for the first couple of hours, but the game doesn't have that much staying power. The issues that people are bringing up are in my opinion entirely legitimate, but a lot of it isn't something that you notice until you've almost finished the game. Such as the story, the broken reward structures in the game, etc. I think most people really wanted to like TOTK, I know I did, and so when everyone first started playing people were really optimistic, perhaps to the point of disregarding some flaws.
1. I thought TotK was overhyped, but it was still really good. However, I was one of the few who loved BotW's story, so I'm probably biased.
2. A lot of the Tears haters are just being pessimists for pessimism's sake.
I think TOTk has a few problems that were not a thing in BOTW, the memories for instance, since the player already know the results of what happened 100 years, anyone can pick up the memories in any order that really doesn't matter, in TOTK the memories have a more linear approach and if you pick up the ones that happened later, getting the earlier ones seems pointless, not only that, but despite you have all the memories unlocked, Link will still act like he doesn't know that Zelda in the human form is fake and the real one is a dragon.
Another thing that is a common complain is that, if you decide to skip a few enemies like Boss Bokoblin, Captain Construct and Lynel, and if you advance the game for like 2 or 3 temples, you will have a very hard time to find horns from these monsters to upgrade your armor, since most of those scale, their 1st form becomes much rarer to find, so you need to rely and waiting for many bloodmoon so you can finally have enough materials to upgrade your stuff. Those are a few common complains that I was able to find in forums, and they certainly do have the point. Those issues I presented were absent in BOTW, but I am not saying TOTK is worst than BOTW overall, what I am saying is that, despite TOTK fix issues with BOTW, the developers created new issues in the game that, really didn't need to be there IMO.
TOTK has other issues that I think are annoying, but I still like this game better than BOTW.
While I don't deny some people are simply being contrarians the thing that soured me on TotK is that it feels like it runs out of steam really early.
The first few hours where amazing. Exploring and figuring out the great sky island. Discovering the depths. Fighting the new enemies and bosses.
The problem is that that's kind of where it ends. All the other sky islands are the same 3 or 4 copypasted ones. The entire depths is all the same homogenous slop. Those few new enemies and bosses are basically the ONLY new enemies and bosses. Everywhere you go it's the same stuff over and over and over again.
That coupled with the still lackluster dungeons and clunky storytelling led to this growing feeling of dissapointment the more I played. BotW felt like a great stepping stone for a new era of Zelda while TotK just feels like Botw, but again, even if it is a better game in a vacuum.
tl,dr: While TotK IS better in a lot of ways, it just isn't enough of an improvement when compared to what Botw did for the franchise
What I think you may not get is Tears is, in almost 0 ways, an actual SEQUEL to Breath. As someone who played both games, I grew to hate TotK by the ending because it took everything I loved from the last game and just wiped it all from existence. No Guardians, no Sheikah Slate, no Divine Beasts…just a boring rehash with weaker replacements. The Guardians are more threatening machines than the Zonai scraps, the Sheikah tech looks more fitting of this reality than the out of place Zonai parts and this Ganondorf is somehow as predictable as any other Ganon. What they should’ve done was keep everything from BotW in tact and, I dunno, make a true follow-up that explores more into what the first game talked about. The Shrines don’t matter, the “Ultra Hand” powers didn’t matter, the story is not a great one…it’s just not a”good game”.
And I personally have no reason to believe we’re getting any kind of “Switch 2” or any kind of new console unless Nintendo THEMSELVES say it. To me, everyone is just blind sighted about this game and can’t admit that it doesn’t work as a sequel for Breath of the Wild or as a game worthy of all this praise. I legit hated Tears by the end and want to still say Age of Calamity was the BETTER game.
Some of it is, people are upset there's no DLC. Specifically no master mode and trial of the sword. Bottom line the game is still amazing.
Yeah, I think things turned especially negative on the announcement there would be no DLC. That and a boring first half of the year saw it cruising to GOTY with people openly rooting for the game that would most likely win. Now that there are actually more likely candidates, people jumped off so they wouldn't be seen backing a loser.
Nintendo chose not to do DLC on purpose. Everyone complains about DLC in games anyway lmfao
No, there is no switch up. The people who are complaining are NOT the same people who say it's great. It's not new either. These people were complaining from day one.
I didn’t like the game from the start. The moment zelda said “this means the zonai founded hyrule” they lost me. I wasn’t vocal about this because the hype was still alive and I would’ve been crucified. Plus I still had fun. Months later I’ve come to realize the fun was mindless and hollow. Its tedious fun that has no replayability. The story is the worst zelda story I’ve ever played. If this is the direction the franchise is going I hate it. Now that the hype has died down others are coming to the same conclusion. Its not a switch up to have an idea marinate over time. But sure defend nintendo because that billion dollar company totally needs it. Its us fans who want better that are totally in the wrong here
Facts. It had no suave. Everything was just shoehorned in with no tact. I felt the same way at the Zonai “reveal”. My hopes for this game completely died when jumping back down to the surface directly after the gsi, that’s when it became the exact same game as BotW.
I was one of those who, when I started playing, thought that TOTK was the "definitive" version while BOTW was the beta. But that impression didn't last long, to be honest, and after having played 150+ hours in each of the games, I still think BOTW is a good game, but I hate TOTK.
I can see that you're amazed by this change in people's opinions, but this is something quite common that happens with many cultural products. Time filters products and it's not uncommon for things that are considered big "hits" to fall by the wayside after a few months or years, while other products survive (even if they weren't so successful before). The idea is that over time people are more likely to reflect on the true quality of something, more people with different perspectives will evaluate it, the fleeting emotions that can affect how people view a product are left behind, etc. That last reason is quite relevant, by the way, mainly because of marketing that creates expectations that can distort our perception of a game.
I admit that the change of heart about TOTK is going too fast, but I don't doubt that it's genuine, because it happened to me, I was sure that TOTK was an excellent game, but the more I delved into it, the more disappointed and annoyed I became.
I'll just cite a quick example: the story. Yes, BOTW has a vague background story, which makes people disappointed and wanting more, but at least it's told well.The memories make sense, you're a hero who has woken up after 100 years and no longer knows where you are, and now you have the chance to recover some of your roots in that world, with the other heroes, etc. It works perfectly in that game, but why the hell is this same method used in TOTK?In TOTK, none of it works, the story contradicts itself and spoils itself, the story is selective conveniently leaving out things from the previous game , the same cutscene is repeated several times when you kill the bosses, etc. It's a total disaster.
And this is just one of the points worth criticizing. There are several others. People expected TOTK to build on BOTW and offer a more complete and complex adventure. The reality is that Nintendo decided to re-release BOTW, but now focusing on a different gimmick.They didn't just copy and paste the world of BOTW, they copied and pasted the entire structure of the game, from the tutorial to the final boss, without worrying in the slightest about whether it would make sense in the new reality. A copied+pasted game based on gimmicks that get old quickly... I mean, who still thinks it's funny to crucify Koroks? Yeah...
I find it odd how you can like BotW but hate TotK? I understand that you could have a preference but TotK is basically BotW+. It has almost everything that made BotW great with new additions. As you said it’s basically the same game structure. So, story aside, how can you like one and hate the other?
@@amysteriousviewer3772 I don't like BOTW, I just think it's a good game and that opinion remains even after I got tired of it and quit it for good. I can't say the same for TOTK, I don't think it's a good game, in fact despite minor improvements over BOTW, it didn't address the major problems of that game (in fact it doubled down on basically everything that didn't work well in the first one), and it killed one of the few things about BOTW that I find really valuable, which is the exploration of that vast unknown world. The world is no longer unknown in TOTK, and the new parts are not worth exploring. Worse: the act of exploring itself has made Link's basic options, including climbing and riding horses, totally secondary since you now have about 10 different ways of flying accessible from the first moment you descend into the overworld.
I never disliked the game, but it had the same issue of botw that after the dungeons, nothing has the same kick to it, all the enemies fell less interesting to fight, since you defeated the main bosses. The overworld in my opinion feels almost as barren as the first game, most of it is just wandering around, which gets kinda stale after a while.
It's because of two things:
1. modern gamers are more mainstream. They are hype driven. Their dopamin kicks when they can be part of a trend. They confuse this joy with the actual game itself. But this is a volatile emotion, like the mainstream audience is by nature.
2. Mainstream TH-camrs are pretenders. They pretend opinions, which they align with the opinion of the masses, because they are affraid of backlash. They pretend positive emotions because a) they sell better and b) doesn't make the companies angry.
The game wasn't good in first place. But people tried to silence critics, who were first. Like always in human history.
We're a particular group of Zelda fans who liked BOTW for being different but preserving the spirit and hates TOTK for changing things a bit too much.
I personally did not care about crafting at all, even if it was astonishing on a tecnical level.
I thought Ganondorf was way more enjoyable and deeper as a character BEFORE TOTK (BOTW clearly made it even more subtly deeper and complex, but TOTK reboots the shit out of everything).
I thought the story was not structured to be experienced nonlinearly. I discovered the entire plot twist around Zelda and exactly where she is with the very first tear I casually found while I was chasing the lightdragon because I was curious when I saw it. Entire story lost its mistery right at the start of the game, for me.
Characters can look really dumb with that perspective.
I personally was fed up with the weapon breaking system, and thought attaching blades to the hilts was cool the first 10 times. Then, it became a chore I was obligated to go through every 10 swings.
It felt worse than BOTW.
It slowed down the action A LOT.
I think we are also, as a group, particylarlt hating how they clearly rebooted the entire franchise without saying a word. And they did it very badly.
TOTK is not only incoherent with the rest of the Zelda games, but with BOTW too. Its direct prequel. And that is unacceptable.
Also, the series with Skyward Sword had reached a comfortable level of complexity in its lore. Characters had clear dilemmas and motivations, Ganondorf was the enemy AND a victim. The role of the goddesses seemed more gray, and there was a mistery around the origin of "demons" and who was the tecnically rightful inhabitant of the planet.
All very cool things, that could have been expanded subtly (BOTW) or just left there from title to title, without imoeding gameplay in anyway.
They had managed to strike a balance in this 30 years.
TOTK, just by itself, convolutes and simplify EVERYTHING. Now the nature of everything is a weird mix between old lore and new lore (and often can't make sense), and a bunch of things are way less interesting. Ganondorf went from a deep but not intrusive character, to an obnoxious banal simple bad guy who wants to be powerful and fight strong guys...
Why the heck did they thought about rebooting him into GOKU of all chatacters?!
Japan has an unhealthy obsession with obsessed fighters as characters lately.
P.S.
I want to say that I don't think the game is bad. It's super good. Game of the Year. It's just very different from what I think Zelda could be, and I like BOTW a lot more
It’s not bad it’s just average. It is a bit overwhelming in a couple negative ways but it’s fun to mess around in the world for a bit.
My take on it is... you're talking about two different groups of people. You had this huge positive outpouring in the beginning, and these players were your average fan, swings by, plays the latest game, wow 10/10 I liked the part where you built the stuff. And in that group of course, you had your fans for whom Breath was their first game, they're not interested in the rest of the franchise. So you have all these guys who pick up the newest title, smash through it for a couple months, then drop it and they're onto the next thing. And they're not concerned about the narrative or the reused assets or anything else. They're on the hype train and they're riding it into the sunset. Then you have the other group, who was drowned out by that ocean of players. They were basically not allowed to share their opinions because anyone saying anything negative was met with overwhelming criticism from folks who didn't want to hear any of it, didn't want to see anyone pointing out the flaws in their shiny new toy. This didn't happen with Breath of the Wild because, while it was a departure from the Legend of Zelda as we knew it, it had a lot of promise for greater things in the future, and for what it was, it's a very solid standalone experience. But you throw Tears into the mix and now it's clear they're just doubling down on everything Breath was with only the most token effort to visit anything that Zelda was before Breath. And unfortunately, that puts the writing on the wall for the future of the franchise. So that's where I think this switch up is coming from... Those who aren't that invested have moved on already, and that just leaves you die-hards and us bitter old fucks. There's your tl;dr.
Literally just pay attention to what people are saying.
ToTK's story sucks because it disregards Zelda lore while sprinkling in nostalgia bait like Lon-Lon ranch for no reason. Since BoTW was so barebones it left lore-building up to mystery. ToTK retroactively ruined that mystery.
The rest of the game is a menu-fest. Not fun. Rehashed combat on a rehashed world. When BoTW put so much emphasis on exploration this ToTK made the mistake of rehashing the world.
Most of the scores were hype anyway. This game sucked.
Saying it’s a bad game is a very hard reach
There was a Lon Lon Ranch reference in TOTK? Where? I didn't notice.
@@viruschris3160 It's some ruins in hyrule field. Was there in BotW too
The reason is TOTK uses a lot of cheap mechanics to keep the player occupied: koroks, blupees, caves, mining in the depths, building pointless contraptions.
TOTK began to felt cheap after about 20 hours... Going to the four phenomena, seeing fake Zelda, having repeated sage dialogue 😖
People don't like having their time wasted. All this game was was: save the 4 races (again), get Mineru, fighting Ganondorf. That's probably a 30 hour game that gets spread to 200 hours because of pointless mining in a world we already traversed.
Honestly makes me feel sick... And I went balls in for TOTK. Oled, amiibo, collectors edition, pro controller, switch case
🤢
You obv didn’t have any emotions with exploring the caves, finding the hidden amiibo clothing chests with the treasure maps in the dark depths was really fun to me. The abilities are much better we can all agree on that, and time wasted? The game has like 200 more good missions and adventures to do then botw, building your own house was fun, and finding hidden temples in caves and hidden buildings in caves and underground was truly amazing. You obv skipped through the game and didn’t take time to really do much…
@@BonkyBoko9 wrong.i did them all. And they were all meaningless. I spent over 300 hours.
@@IntrovertMaxxing you did what all? You completed all shrines? Got the hidden achievements? Invaded the yiga hideout? Upgrade all armor to get hidden abilities? Fight the hidden boss battle in the depths? Complete the mine cart challenges? Find and complete all 15 coliseums? Explore the abandoned forgotten hidden room in one of the temples? The way you said it was all “meaningless” just proves that you didn’t really explore lol. If you really did spend 300 hours you wouldn’t of even played those 300 hours, you would’ve stopped at like 100 if you feel this way, you clearly didn’t really play the game if you did “everything” and all was meaningless, cause I’ll tell you everything had a purpose in this game 😂
I still love the game, finished it and am itching to go at it again to 100% it. People are weird man, this game runs perfectly on the Switch.
wanted to go for that 100% aswell until i realised it pointless and how much work it is. I had sum frame drops several times but never was it unplayable, it was literally frame drops down to 24 or so for 3 secs, nothing that seemed like a porblem to me
Its basically just 1 or 2 "content creators" say something about something and all their fan boys just copy what was said this is how it works on any subject nowadays
Yeah, Scott the woz talked some shit and now people are hatin
I think it's more general than that, some commenters gave good explanations of how it can work in phases. Zelda always had these cycles of criticism overall. Also TOTK comes at the peak of the franchise's popularity after its biggest success yet, so more eyes in an age with more vocal social networks means more noise, that doesn't mean it's all criticism in bad faith. The game does have flaws, IMO what matters is to express it fairly if there's even a small chance that Nintendo will take that into account.
Nah, many casuals just don't enjoy the game either and there are many which just didn't like the game from the beginning.
zelda fans when someone has an unpopular opinion: 🤯😭😭🤯🤯🤯
@@YamuThatcher that ain't scott the woz, your ass is watching steve the wiz or smth. he makes fun of things worth making fun of, he's got a fucking comedy channel lmao. only game i've seen him bash repeatedly is like, chibi robo ziplash.
I've had mixed opinions on TotK after beating it myself. I avoided watching opinion videos on TotK, and to me, it's just people finally catching on to the same issues I had with the game. It was fun, but got repetitive after some time, and I was overall not that into the game as a whole compared to BotW. It started off really strong, but I think the people who have this negative opinion was just trying to prove to themselves they like the game more than they did because they waited 6 years, but ultimately realized they didn't like it as much as BotW. That's not to say BotW is the better game. For me, the issue is the fact TotK reuses the same map as BotW while adding not enough new things that are interesting enough. The sky and depths got repetitive because they look the same all the time. Hyrule was interesting because each area had different biomes. Take any screenshot in the depths and most people can't point out where in the depths it is, unless you're in the lava area under Death Mountain. The caves were great, but caves can only be interesting for so long before it feels repetitive.
The main issue is the story. That's not to say BotW has a better story, but rather, BotW's story suits this "open air" gameplay better than TotK. BotW's story is non-linear. TotK's story is linear. Linear story doesn't work when you can view it out of order. In addition, the opening of TotK made it feel like the story is going to be more important, but it really isn't. They reused the same story structure as BotW. Using memories that can be seen out of order, which isn't effective for a linear story. Using the same 4 regions to place their Not-Divine-Beast-Temples-But-Still-Uses-The-Same-Puzzle-Gimmick-As-The-Divine-Beasts. Don't get me started on the same 4 cutscenes of, "Demon King? Secret Stone?" It feels more of the same. It feels repetitive. The story being in the past, yet again, and Zelda is not involved in the present story, yet again, is dissatisfying. The story had 2 cool moments. When Link finds the Master Sword, and when Zelda turns into the dragon. But the story is so sparse that it doesn't make up for the terrible pacing in the rest of the scenes. And it's also disappointing that the narrative is inconsistent with even BotW. NPCs that should know Link doesn't know him, and it's not like it's a timeline reset or anything. Certain NPCs definitely know Link, like Hudson, and yet NPCs like Bolson and Hestu has no idea who Link is. And it is so frustrating figuring out that Zelda is the dragon and the "Zelda" running around is fake, but the game acts like "WhY iS zElDa DoInG tHiS?" as if we can't figure it out after the first time that she's not real. It created a narrative dissonance between me as the player and the game. I know the truth and the game refuses to let Link tell the NPCs that truth and repeats the same "mystery" 4 times. 5 if you include Purah being confused on why Zelda is in Hyrule Castle.
Most people need a few months to play such a game. And many report that at some point the burned out and take a break. Happened to me too after finishing 3 dungeons. It was supposed to be 10x better than BOTW according to the hype, but it felt like BOTW but with less structure, just littered with content. It just didn't have the "completely new experience" thing going on. I never really engaged with the dungeons, like no need to use the rails, no need to use the water bubbles. Just hit the switches and kill the boss. In BOTW each beast had puzzles I had to do, and the fight to get into the beast was always epic. I liked revisiting the old places and see how they changed. I didn't like the political conflict story in Hateno village at all. Also the gray style of shrines now is less appealing to me than the blue high tech style in BOTW.
It's a good DLC
But it doesn't deserve game of the year
You have no idea what DLC is
At least the story has a reason why the story takes place in the past but yeah they could have centered it around the present. I really like the story in this game, with the shrines I loved how goofy you could be with quite a bit of em I can just remember me laughing to myself just trying to build this fucked answer to a puzzle that didn’t need to be over the top lol, and I like 3 of the 6 boss fights in TOTKs main story. What I don’t like is how small and repetitive a lot of the Sky Islands are, the lack of change on the land, the Zonai not being fleshed out more, and the inconsistencies the world building has. In conclusion I have never felt so conflicted with how I feel about a game I have always been able to say how I feel about a game but with TOTK I love it but so disappointed with pieces of this game.
I hated it day 1, I beg to differ. I'm glad people are coming to their senses.
In into 2 mins of the vid, but the reason why people are saying botw had a great story because totk story was truly bottom of the barrel and made everyone appreciate botw story, now I’m not invalidating that everyone said that the story wasn’t good in botw. It was decent story but people felt disappointed for the potential it could’ve had. Now that totk managed to have a even worse story, people now appreciate the “good enough” story
It's just not engaging to explore a place you've already seen nearly the exact same way. And this makes every step you take feel tedious, especially when every step takes longer too compared to BotW. Lots more menuing, a lot more busywork in order to progress. There's nothing inspired or surprising about this game. It's repetitive.
And yeah, TotK executes its story very poorly.
Its like this for every video game, like just make up your mind already
Switch 2 has been "immanent" since even before the switch even launched. This year has been fantastic for switch games.
I think because now the hype is over and people see the game for what it really is. more than half of the game is taken 1:1 from botw, and the new additions are quite mediocre, like the small copy-pasted islands in the sky or the empty underground with only one biome. the side missions are just delivery boy missions and the story is poorly written without any attention. sure they improved the physics and added a building system but the game is literally botw again.
I think its a minor but extremely loud group of fans that will never ever be satisfied with anything.
Edit: Fun fact for some people, I hated BOTW on release for alot of the reasons yall hate this game (I've warmed up to it since, but i still.wouldnt say its a top 10 zelda game for me), however I felt TOTK fixed every issue I had with it for the most part.
No it’s fans of the entire series, the classic games. I’m satisfied with good games that present a challenge. I’m not satisfied with a six year sequel that feels like it could have been a dlc release in 2017. It’s ok if botw is the only zelda title you’ve played, go play a few of the classics and see if your opinion changes.
@7milesdavis Been playing for 25 years bro 🤣🤣. Change is a good thing, like how they changed everything I disliked about BOTW. So if that's "Dlc" I'm cool with it. 😎
There were people who shit on tears before they even announced the title or _anything_ about the game. Some people, like the man commenting above, probably just don’t like change and they want the same formula of games that they remember growing up with. It’s the safety of it that keeps them so attached, at least that’s what I believe.
But Nintendo cannot keep producing the same types of games over and over, why would they? If they did that, they wouldn’t break through the molds like they did with botw and show what is possible in games. But this is sadly going to be a thing with every fandom out there. Change is inevitable, and so is criticism!
It's what happens when hype dies down and people see more clearly. I still love the game but I'm heavily critical of it after 100% completion. they brought the most monotonous pure time wasting activity from botw (korok seeds) and doubled down on it. besides more koroks now there are bubble gems, light roots, wells.etc all time wasting activities with no end rewards because "oh the devs never intended for all of them to be found"
Other opinion= wrong. Zelda fans are in the mud😂😂
Switching opinions is not always a sign of lacking of confidence or being lost in your thoughts not being able to find an answer, it is also very very very often a clear sign of growth and better understanding of things, things we couldn't see deeper because we were believing too much and put too much trust, hope or higher expectations than needed, or because of lack of experience. On the other hand not switching opinions not always confirms that our beliefs are right, sometimes we do it just for the sake of it painfully showing fear to see the truth, arrogance, or child-like behavior (precisely because a child would need from time to time some experience to get knowledge and therefore switch an opinion OR not), mainly when reality is showing clear as day before our eyes, but its fair to say that for some people it could take more time than for others. Point is: switching opinions is not intrinsically good or bad, is an action that can only be put into question on a context (and then talk, have a conversation), never by itself. I've been playing 250+ hours, I don't care about the story, I don't care about those boring characters, and I hate those long long conversations with all those lame NPCs. Game play is great and fun, I believe gameplay was nintendo's one and only goal here, and later, the story was just adapted and glued to the sandbox. Personally, I don't feel the story driving nor motivating the experience at all. Today, for nintendo, the story on a Zelda game has the same value as the story on a Mario game. I don't know if that's ok, but it certainly didn't stop me from playing. It is a weird mixture of fun gameplay and non interesting elements. I often say BOTW is a demo, and TOTK is the actual game, and for a newcomer, I recommend skipping BOTW cause all together with the changes to the map added areas and game-play-wise TOTK is definitely better. Cheers!
For me, my opinion of the game has slowly formed over the last few months after having time for my own excitement to die down, having time to fully digest the story/content and then playing through it a couple of times in different ways.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s things that botw did way better than Totk. And then there’s things that Totk did way better than botw. I did notice I got burnt out on tears pretty quickly compared to breath, but that could be because I was deeply looking forward to a DLC and that was shut down. Which is ok! To me, it is a second game to botw. That’s what it was meant to be, and that’s what it did for me. It made me cry, which was surprising. I respect those who don’t like it, because there are some valid issues. There are things I disliked, things I liked, things I loved. And I found things that I loved overwhelmingly more than things I didn’t.
I hear what you're saying. In fact, I think it's a problem with all sorts of media now. Something comes out that is not actually as bad as people claim, yet everyone says it is trash.
Although it seems distant, I feel like the root problem of this occurrence is the consumption of media. We are used to bigger budgets, better CGI, better elsewhere it leads us to care less because something "newer" just came out and that was better than the latter.
This phenomenon is weird for games in general but normal for Zelda. I'm a longtime Zelda fan but I'll be the first to admit the whole fanbase has this crazy toxic positivity vibe. Every game that comes out has to get a 10 right away and if you speak ill of the game at all you get shut down and buried by fans, a negative review will get you death threats, etc.
So you have to wait a few months before you can criticize a Zelda game for your words to see the light of day. I thought TOTK was underwhelming within the first 20 hours, it was great fun but I knew it didn't solve some of BOTWs biggest issues and actually was a step backwards in some ways, such opinions could never be voiced at the start. I especially agree with your point at 5:33 that BOTW had a better atmosphere and mood, but saying that at launch could get you shot.
Every game goes through this cycle! The game is good, then it sucks, then people come back and think it’s amazing.
I'm so sick of the "enlightened" Nintendo fans. I appreciate your views. Everyone believes they have the secret, inside story because of something they read on Twitter. I couldn't even tell you how many videos I've seen about Switch 2, Twilight Princess, & Wind Waker. It's really annoying because we can't just enjoy the new thing anymore. If the "Switch 2" was released tomorrow, they would immediately begin a new rumor about the next console or "Switch 3." When totk came out, there were 100's of videos speculating on what the next zelda game will be like. At least finish THIS game before wishing for another. Online insanity is killing everything from gaming to politics & I am so sick of it. Excellent video! ☕️👍🏻
Super Mario wonder will also lose it's luster. You'll see.
I think most Zelda fans coming from Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Twilight Princess simply want another Zelda game in that traditional way, with darker tones and more interesting characters with more depth.
You are totally right, As a zelda fan I want a great balance between this new era and the traditional one, I like tears of the kingdom but I feel like something is missing, maybe the bad story or exploring the same map
Demon King? Secret Stone?
Demon King? Secret Stone?
Demon King? Secret Stone?
Demon King? Secret Stone?
Why would'nt anybody think this isn't a better story?
it was always bad. i unfortunately never had the pleasure of enjoying this game, and i didnt even pay for it. i pirated it 3 weeks early and was extremely disappointed with it from start to finish. i felt frustrated and upset the whole time i played it.
I hated TotK on the day it came out. It was fun for about two hours and then it became an insanely boring slog. I livestreamed it on the day it came out. It's complete ass and I actually had people dropping off of my livestream the more frustrated I got with its bullshit. I knew the Zelda fanbois were gonna be hyping it up for ages and it would be awhile before the real reviews started coming out. I saw it for its overwhelming flaws from the start and everyone hated me for it.
I love this game but I feel like it didn’t have the replay value of botw. I kept going back to that one. Haven’t gone back to tears yet. Maybe when the new switch comes out and I can play it in that again and see if I feel the same
I always thought it was bad
This seems to be the cycle with ALL Zelda games. Windwaker is the most infamous example considering how much HATE it got until they re-made. Now everyone loves it, I guarantee the day BOTW/TOTK gets its remake the opinions are going to SWITCH. Because as all these other franchises get bogged with micro-transactions, and Games as Service Zelda will hold up at series that pushes critical thinking, adventure, and creativtiy, standing as a test to its timelessness
I actually liked TotK more than BoTW. But that could mainly be due to be not 100% completing it & getting myself fatigued, even though I spent countless hours slaying Golden Lynels for 5 Burst Shot Bows but it never got tiring. I had a hiatus from August-October due to no Master Mode/DLC being released but I recently started playing again. My only gripe is Nintendo forcing my console to update from 1.1.2 to 1.2.1, so no more (fun) duping.
TOTK does a lot of things better than BOTW. Its shrines offer more creative solutions with Ultra hand, there are more characters with bigger side quests, there are more locales with the sky islands, caves, and depths, and the story, I think, is better as well. By itself, anyway.
BOTW told the story it needed to; its Hyrule was largely desolate in its design, so telling a story about an almighty foe (Calamity Ganon) destroying it long ago (as the player is exploring the desolate aftermath) seems like all they could do, since there needed to be an explanation as to WHY this Hyrule was so empty. TOTK went further to tell of the origin of this kingdom, its ruler, and allowed more characters, especially Zelda, to have a stronger presence in the story.
There's the Zonai parts people have had fun with, the new fuse mechanic that satisfied many players who despised the weapon system in BOTW, I could go on. In a side by side comparison, TOTK, I think, is obviously the superior game.
With all that said, I personally hate TOTK. The way I see it, all these things that make it superior to BOTW simply needed to be there to justify the game's existence. The Zelda team took six years and charged us $70 for this game. And was the result really worth that time and effort? They could have moved on to the next big project, one that didn't reuse BOTW's assets. An all new adventure in an all new Hyrule. THAT'S the game we could have been waiting for. And what kind of legacy will TOTK have? BOTW's is undeniable. For years, it's been hailed as one of the finest open world games you can play. There was just a sense of magic in exploring that world for the first time. TOTK is the game that mostly just threw more toys into the same sandbox.
So in a way, maybe Breath of the Wild is the superior game after all.
I think this is something that happens frequently in games. I loved both Majora's Mask and Wind Waker when they came out, but was surprised to find out they were disliked on release, and now they are seen fondly. I think it's the fact that the more you spend time with something, the more you notice it's flaws and strengths. Same thing happened with Starfield, it was liked by many on release but now a lot of those find the game boring. I've seen this kind of thing too many times with a lot of games.
Nintendo manipulating their fans into believing that cell shading is an art style they chose because it’s like watercolours when the real reason is because the switch can’t handle anything realistic.
it's called working within system limitations
After 2 times 100% the game the second one was more fun and I did a lot of things and the most weird possible way lol
I explored in phases: only depths, only sky and then, the surface, using the official book and a online map. Was a awesome experience, a lot better than blindly doing 100% like I did in my first 100%.
We love TotK; Breath of the Wild is good too. I think people are hating on TotK because it's hard to duplicate your weapons now. Subpar gamers just can't handle it. But the greater reason... was no hope of a DLC. That was what everyone was holding out hope that the best game ever would get better. But since it can't get better it's just sub par now. We just made an new TotK recording today actually at CandA Gaming. Thanks for your channel and commentary!
I feel like a large contingent turned against it when news there would be no additional content came out. When people could think "it'll get a content addition or two like BotW did" they built a picture in their mind of the game with the added weight of some additional content, and when they found out that wasn't coming the game no longer felt like "enough".
Personally I like the game but would still like... any kind of addition down the line aside from patching out exploits
Wake up honey, Switch 2 shadowdrop coming "soon" 🎀
I'd say that tears of the kingdom is bad not because of the game itself, but because of the fact that it reuses so much of botw and because what it implements to compensate for the reused assets is repetitive or not executed well (for example the depths). If totk was released instead of botw it would be received much better than botw the timing of totk gave us a lot that we were already familiar which took away a lot of the adventurous aspect that made botw so good, also the format of totk is incredibly blatant and not fun (intro, 5 temples, boss.) edit: also we NEED to remember that the Nintendo switch is INSURMOUNTABLY limited, the switch already set itself up for failure, the devs have as much skill as the Elden ring devs do they simply had the wrong resources.
The stakes are not higher in the slightest, they are MUCH MUCH lower.
I think the biggest issue with TotK is that it's way too ambitious for the aging hardware and they might have conceded many compromises in order or to work more or less smoothly. I wish it were delayed to the next gen system so they could've made the sky islands and the depths way more substantial in content
This is the same thing people said about BotW, but they did hold off until the next system, but nothing changed.
@@Caleb_Bravo99 no it isn't. We only had the one map in BotW. We learned of a brand new are in the sky islands so of course we expected some actual content. There wasn't any.
01:00 There's your answer... Better get used to it...
One: nostalgia, all of six years' worth. Two: now there's a need to rethink that familiar world, and some things are more difficult, and others are easier.
I like both games. My complaint is the lack of continuity between the *three* games (there are very worthwhile bits of story tucked away in HW:AOC) ... Too much "who's the Link guy?" in TotK, waay to much "oops, no Sheikah tech left, no comment". They could have capitalized so much on the situation...
And so on.
Having no guardians kinda sucked
I get the lore reason, but having a powerful and creepy boss-like enemy scattered around Hyrule added a lot to BotW.
I was disappointed from the jump tbh it’s decent but I wanted more story
I’ve noticed that some Zeldatubers believe that if they want to be smart or unbiased, that mean they have to be super critical of Totk. The main complaints are about plot points like “why Zelda didn’t remain a dragon”, “why Link recovered his arm”, “why the whole sheika tech disappeared”, and the like. I really don’t get the need of feeling let down because a story didn’t went as you wanted it to be.
"i don't get why people feel let down when something they were anticipating disappoints them" huh??
Lol, those complaints aren't the story not going the way you wanted, they're literally plotholes in the story. Especially the shieka tech thing, the game almost goes out of its way to never bring up anything of that nature, which is really weird since Zelda was obsessed with it and this game's story pretty heavily involves shieka scientists. It's just weird writing at best, and bad writing at worst. The game wants to have the emotional beats of Zelda sacrificing herself and then undoes it at the end with no explanation. And sure, it's pretty easy to understand she's recovered using her own time power to rewind her physical state and same for Link's arm. But it's not rewarding because the game doesn't foreshadow that at all. Have you heard of Checkov's gun? It's a writing mechanic of "if you introduce something to the reader, you better use it", like how they bring up the secret stones turning people into dragons. But they also bring up it being permanent, and then don't deliver on that. They bring up Mineru saying she'll research how to reverse it, but they don't have her deliver any information on her discoveries, if any before they just do it. So they failed to deliver on 1 Checkov's gun while resolving something that would've been fixed with that resolution. And it only would've taken 1 scene, even just one sentence to fix, which is what makes it so annoying. It also resolved an emotional sacrifice without sacrificing anything else. It makes it feel unearned. There's a lot of simple writing techniques and philosophies that help make scenes like this feel more rewarding it earned for the characters that can be resolved with 1 or 2 simple additions to the narrative, and not having those can be the difference between a story that leaves many people feeling unfulfilled and satisfied.
That said, story is basically a footnote to most complaints I've heard. It annoys people who pay more attention to their stories, but isn't game breaking. The delivery of said story is a much bigger issue, and how the world lacks any response to it. You get the memories of Ganon's fake Zelda and the real Zelda turning into the light dragon but Link doesn't inform anyone, it doesn't affect the present timeline plot or dialogue in any way. That's an issue and makes Link look incompetent. The dungeons basically being prettier divine beasts that you can easily hack your way through with zonai devices is an issue. Most shrines having their "challenges" be outright skippable is an issue. There being no permanent rewards for quests other than armor and some stable stuff is a problem. Especially when the quest for things like the stable is "sleep at a stable". Like, just sell a diamond and sleep at a stable 25 times, congrats, you got the pony rewards, feel accomplished? The game is big for the sake of being big, it does very little with it and the zonai mechanics are basically designed to have you find your best way to skip over all that land anyways, so it's basically just a traversable loading screen between points of interest.
For a more objective issue, the item quick access/bow fusion menu can easily take 20-30 seconds to scroll through every time you need to find a new item to use, flurry rush bullet time activation can happen with some attacks long after they miss you (like when horriblins stab the ground) while other times you can do a frame perfect dodge and it won't activate, the tutorial lasts way too long and even after you get off the tutorial sky island you still need to go through another hour or more through lookout landing and the castle talking to people just to get the paraglider and unlock the ability to access Skyview towers, making this opening far longer than even Twilight Princess, which has historically been seen as the most long-winded opening in the franchise and a big complaint for it. And, quite frankly, the game didn't really fix any of the issues from BotW. The somewhat tried with the dungeons, they are kinda better than Divine Beasts, at least some are, but zonai devices also make them more broken and cheeseable than the Divine Beasts ever were, so it gives and takes away. A lot of TotK is like that, giving and taking away. And a lot of that is cause Zelda is a franchise, prior to BotW, built on limiting the player and making them work through those limitations. BotW and TotK have the opposite design philosophy, so players who want the game to "feel like Zelda" can't get it. Not really. Not if that gameplay aspect of overcoming limitations and solving puzzles that can't be brute forced is what you loved about it
Well..if a story isnt good and it has several logical problems, of course sensible people would be bothered/let down. The game was 70-damn-dollars after all; For that price, i expect a little more than middle-school, Wattpad-level writing.
They aren't complaining that the story isn't what they wanted they're complaining that it DOESNT MAKE SENESE. That's a completely different thing
I think it's just because of what kind of game TotK is. Both it and BotW are games that give the most amazing first impressions ever, possibly the best of any game, and then only go downhill the longer you keep playing them once you hit a certain point. On some level this backlash was present for BotW, but people gave it a pass for how new and different it was. Now with Tears of the Kingdom being a sequel with many of the same issues, people are a lot more harsh in critiquing that
This is a really great point.
Amazing what happens when the Recency and Nintendo bias hits someone. lol. Glad to see people are formulating genuine opinions now.
This is news to me. I dont use social media like that. However, now that the honeymoon phase is over with the game, I'm starting to see some really bad game design that I didnt notice the first few go-rounds playing it.
both zelda games botw and totk had some let downs like,
the rito can fly up to the sky isles but you don't meet any up in the sky.
the depths could have had twili looking building.
well the over world in both could have.
had not just blessings in shrines but rare weapons or gear like wind waker shield in the lost forest shrine
or bosses that guard the pedestal in botw where you receive a blessing
gear breaking well why not have a secret great fairy XD
these are just my thoughts both games are fine for a single playthough
Organize your points next time and stop rambling.
Yeah.. there is no switch up buddy
When TOTK first launched, it was so exciting to explore new map layers, story elements, and abilities. After getting used to the abilities and finishing the story, there is nothing left to do that wasn’t there in BOTW. The new map layers add nothing to the map IMO, because the depths are the exact same terrain over and over again and the sky islands are tiny with nothing to do on most. When the majority of the map is one that you’ve explored for 8 years, I don’t feel excited to look for landmarks and completionist things
It really has nothing to do with the Switch 2 this has happened before with other Zelda games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword when Skyward Sword first came out they were are like this game is good has a good story decent gameplay has better dungeons than Twilight Princess and then later they do a complete one eighty and start trashing the game. the same also happened with Wind Waker and Twilight Princess.
I just jumped into a second playthrough after 400 hours of my first playthrough. I get the problems some people have and I have my gripes too but the game is just too much fun that it's pros far outweigh the cons. Zelda really redefined ope world sandboxes with these last two games and I hope they stick with this formula wile making the necessary changes to keep things fresh.
Agreed, like someone else said, games can be flawed and still be amazing overall. Cons aren't as big of a deal when there are so, SOO many things that make up for them.
Honestly I super disagree bro. I genuinely hope that with the next Zelda game they go back to the OG formula, cause TOTK just wasn’t it (I played Breath Of The Wild and loved it but I can’t find anything for this game but genuine disappointment and distain)