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While it is annoying how minecraft this game is now, it is equally annoying to have losers pop in the thread talking about Nintendo always being lame to score cool points. Yes, you are the biggest adult. You win the loser award on the loser forum.
This game is world-class. I don't have much bad to say about it. They fixed pretty much everything I bitched about in BotW. I'm sure I'm over 40 hours in and have barely scratched the surface. I have not done much to advance the main quest yet I'm always discovering new fun stuff. Game is majestic.
They straight-up lied about the game having traditional zelda dungeons and it's just the four divine beasts again. That is a pretty big demerit, in my book.
I started playing the couch potato version, in Yuzu, and it plays great. The only issue so far is that the FPS drop noticeably when aiming with the bow or with a weapon to throw. Do you guys know how to fix that?
This is one of the details I really like about the first game. It takes the context into consideration when talking to NPCs. They expanded this a lot in Totk.
I decided to commit my weekend to finishing the game, and have gotten through it with 35 hours of playtime, and about 1/3rd of the shrines and mazes completed, probably less than that for side quests. I only had touched the surface but I was so bored and disappointed by the game that I rushed to the end.
Breath of the Wild was a very flawed game. Shrines and korok seeds and the divine beasts and the side quests all feel like they exist because Nintendo didn't have the time and budget to create more unique handcrafted content, they put all of their energy into Hyrule and the base mechanics so there was a trade off in the depth and breadth of content. It's a compromise, but it works because the games overall design and vision comes together around a core experience: immersing you in the post-apocalyptic yet beautiful Hyrule, and sending you on a journey.
The obvious direction after Breath of the Wild was to get rid of that compromise. They had assets and physics and a combat system and enemies, so the logical next step would be putting their time and budget into creating more unique content. Better dungeons, phasing out shrines for mini dungeons, better bosses, etc. (This is what From Soft does with their games btw, they reuse assets so that they can efficiently create new worlds.) Unfortunately it seems like they doubled down on the repetitive content of BOTW. Now you have the repetitive depths, the repetitive sky islands, more repetitive mazes. The game does have some improvements: the bosses are seriously improved, fusion is fun, quest lines are stronger, and I'm glad to see more enemy types; but there's just as many steps back. Vehicle building is extremely tedious (The construct factory bored me to tears,) and it requires an insane amount of grinding to get the resources required to build the awesome creations that you see videos of. The games puzzles are significantly worse, with shrines and temples being much easier than BOTW, and less varied with the focus on Ultrahand gluing, and while half of the temples are an improvement on Divine Beasts, the other half are completely mind-numbing, and the story is completely pedestrian and unearned. And in the end none of this really matters, because what made BOTW tick was the atmosphere and exploring Hyrule for the first time, and without that all TOTK has is the games mediocre systems and mediocre content.
The story in this game relied a lot on previous emotional connection to the characters from Breath of the Wild, which kind of feels like cheating. It never gives us any reason to care about anything except for our existing emotional investment in Zelda. I think her turning into a dragon had some potential, but any meaning or tragedy is lost because of the games saccharine ending. I'm fine with a sappy ending, but the game doesn't put in the work to make the events feel like a struggle that's been overcome, they're just plot beats happening point by point, and so when you get to the ending which is clearly intended to be very emotional, it again just feels like empty plot beats moseying on by. You might point out that Zelda spent 10000 years imprisoned as a dragon, which is fair, but the game does little to dwell on that tragedy. If we felt the weight of that imprisonment, then the rest of the game would've felt so much more meaningful.
This is the worst with Ganondorf. His entire presence as a villain relies on being threatening, and it's clear that Nintendo intended for him to come off that way because of how he single-handedly destroys everyone, including you in the opening. But Ganons actual actions in the game and cutscenes feel limp. He wins just ~because~ and becomes godlike once he steals a magatama just ~because~, and his presence in the game is worse. Gloom-spawn is terrifying at first but quickly ends up the easiest enemy in the game and is basically a loot pinata, and the way he affects Hyrule is sad. I mean seriously, he starts a crack epidemic and rains poop from the sky? The legendary immortal demon king who defeated the sages and was imprisoned for 10 000 years and destroyed the master sword and forced Zelda to become a dragon starts a crack epidemic and rains poop from the sky? He's not threatening, he's pathetic. And the final fight feels like taking candy from a baby. He does less damage than the bokoblins in front of his boss room and has a cumbersome and easy to dodge moveset. I didn't even need to eat any food to get through the fight with just 15 hearts.
Overall, I think Tears of the Kingdom is truly mediocre. If the only thing you expect out of a game is a bunch of mindless tasks to wind down after work with, then TOTK is a fine game. But if you want to feel deeply or think deeply or be challenged deeply by a game, you won't. Still better than post-Morrowind Bethesda though.
Vehicle building is extremely tedious (The construct factory bored me to tears,) and it requires an insane amount of grinding to get the resources required to build the awesome creations that you see videos of
Ehhh. Building them once is not a problem. If you wanna use them a lot you are going to run into resource problems. Constructs are at worst 3 zonaite per part, but you get something like 2-3 parts per lesser energy charge at the capsule stations (although you will also get lots of shitty parts you don't need).
I do agree it is pretty tedious though, the fact that save/load of builds is locked behind main quest progression is idiotic.
I finished this today (and it has an actual ending so you can't continue open world exploration after, kudos). Thoughts on the ending:
I liked the minigauntlet, I liked true ganons healthbar and I liked the fights in general. Being able to find the torch dropped in the intro was also a neat touch. The final stage was very dumb (why is ganon not an immortal dragon? Why is light dragon suddenly sapient?) though. And then the game just goes full bullshit with link regaining his original hand and zelda being restored to human form, completely undercutting any and all sacrifices made during the story.
As for the game in general. It has its flaws, but I think it's better than botw, but it is hard to escape the feeling that this is an expansion pack in terms of mechanics.
Like botw, I think they nailed the early game exploration, combat, resource management and so on, but none of the systems have sufficient depth to sustain the length of game they were going for, especially when there is so little high effort content (like traditional dungeons). Lategame exploring mostly feels punishing because it's hard to sustain your good weapons, and there's no worthwhile rewards. Lategame enemies often feel very spongy, but are still trivially stunlocked. And you have so much of every resource that you're never going to die.
The depths are pretty cool in how sadistic they are. Full of small mountain ranges and valleys, and then in pitch darkness so you can't see shit, and most of the time it doesn't matter that the important things have some light, because there's 12 mountains in the way. And hp loss is semipermanent. Tossing out light plants every few seconds gets tedious, but I still think it's a pretty cool inclusion (I've explored maybe a third of it though, and really not feeling like doing more). It is cool how you can make up for poor visibility by figuring out how the depths correspond to the surface.
My favorite part of the game was going to the flying stormcloud islands without any clue to what was in there.
Went down a well and found a BDSM costume with glowing bulbs all over. So I no longer need to drink anything that makes me glow or carry torches. Still haven't attempted a dungeon because of the heart-eating gloom.
I enjoyed BOTW and so enjoy this, but it is certainly mystifying as to what the hell they spent 5+ years on. There's lots of bits and pieces here that are done very well that could fuel a new Zelda built from the ground up, I suppose.
Fuse & ultrahand is pretty consequential & done well and there are many places where you can really enjoy yourself with them without spending ages grinding or building Death Stars. I don't grind at all and move on if X content is too tedious, and I've very rarely been left thinking I need to go gather 50 zonaites and come back. After all, you are usually either given what you need nearby or you can solve the problem in other ways.
Weapons.... are some people fighting every single enemy they come across and more? Because I regularly throw out spare weapons even with over a dozen spaces in the inventory, and I am never left wielding a substandard weapon.
The depths are nice but did not need to be so large - could have been restricted to a small portion like the Sky Islands are.
My prediction: Sometime in this fall Nintendo is going to announce the Switch 2/Pro/whatever. They'll show this game (and others) running at 60 fps on it and possibly 4k. You can screenshot this.
Not like the zelda team's artists would be doing engine work, nor is it likely that they would have taken more than a year or two to create TOTK's few art assets that weren't simply flipped over from BOTW.
It's far more likely that this game was already cooked years ago and then most of the zelda team moved on to the next zelda game while nintendo decided to delay TOTK's release to better suit the needs of its overall software release schedule.
Don't remember who said it, but yeah, creating vehicles is tedious after the first few times. You assemble the same ones over and over. I practically never rode a horse in Breath of the Wild. I do ride the skeleton horses here because of the gloom.
Weapons.... are some people fighting every single enemy they come across and more? Because I regularly throw out spare weapons even with over a dozen spaces in the inventory, and I am never left wielding a substandard weapon.
It really depends on the stage of the game. Early on its fine, later on enemies get a lot of hp. Killing a gleeok or lynel can easily eat up 2-3 60+ damage weapons from full for example.
I think the game seems to run a bit better, despite having a deeper physics engine (+ the time reversal thing). The credits also seem to have 30+ programmers for enemy ai, but I have no idea where all that time went. Still, I'd guess they spent a lot of time on optimization to get it to run at all.
Ye weapons are too much of a burden with silver monsters showing up, you can repair them but it's a pain, fusing diamonds also didn't really do much, they meant for players constantly reshuffle weapons and fuse with higher tier drops I guess but why even have unique weapons then? By the endgame it's really not comfortable playstyle anyway you put it, game needed some durability up stats somewhere, already in botw I felt like they looked at typical survival mechanics of constant eating etc, found them boring(they are) and then shifted this burden onto weapons.
Anyway it was nice enough to take 2 weeks of my time, I thought the ending would be in a dlc but apparently not, I might return later if the DLC is good and any good mods are around.
This might also be furry supremacist game in disguise BE CAREFUL!
You can?
Still hard to see how it's worth it. I guess maybe for a really good weapon like the biggoron sword (since it seems to have really good base durability and 36 damage).
