Topic: A proper intro from one of NL's new writers 😎

@KateGray I think I put over 100 hours into fantasy life and there was still two jobs I hadn’t touched plus hundreds of side quests I hadn’t done. Other than Pokemon and monster hunter I don’t even play RPGs but fantasy life was just awesome.

@theJGG Bummer on the breaking technology. I try to be careful with my things, but I'm also a universal klutz. I haven't murdered any tech recently, but there's a reason I opted for a house with a lot of carpeting.

One QoL improvement I'd like to see in Skyward Sword would be to choose which hand Link uses. Ironically, many series interpretations of Link portray him as left-handed, but they've dropped this in some recent installments. If I recall, the change was made in SS to make Link's movements seem more "natural" for most players. An understandable decision, but one that bothers some of the remaining ~10%.

My plan is to complete a lot of BotW's content, but I don't plan on doing all the side quests or finding all the Koroks; just enough to obtain all item slots for the latter. I do wish to complete all 120 Shrines and unlock all memories (one left from the Sheikah Slate album!). I don't have the DLC yet; my plan is to take a break from the game before buying/diving into that to work on the additional content. I'm 110 hours in now. While I'm enjoying the game, I'm also beginning to get my "I should probably move on soon..." feeling. I like a lot of the changes, but my two (minor) complaints are 1. I'm not a fan of breakable weapons, and 2. While Shrines and the Divine Beasts are nice, I'd still like to experience proper dungeons. I can safely say at this point that it's one of my favorite Zelda games, though whether it takes first place is a VERY hard contest. I love so many of the other titles!

I do look forward to playing Age of Calamity. Not only for more Musou action, but also due to the fact that it's so closely tied to the game I'm currently enjoying in its lore, characters, and visuals. I'm very, VERY glad I played through BotW first as I feared spoilers. Hopefully Revali is less full of himself in AoC? I really enjoyed the first Hyrule Warriors on Wii U, but that was definitely a non-canon cocktail meant for the fans. I personally didn't mind the rock music, but that definitely wouldn't fit in with AoC's themes from what I've gathered. Sheik, Link, and Ganondorf were my favorite characters to play as in that game.

I actually quite liked Skyward Sword as well, sure the motion controls were finicky at times but it was a cool concept. The story was great and the gameplay was also quite good, the only parts that got on my nerves were the bird missions, the imprisoned, and things where you had to perfectly cut one direction. Other than that the game was quite an enjoyable experience for me even if I was never able to get through the final boss.

@KateGray A complete coincidence but I was talking to a friend earlier about what helped me get back into gaming in 2017 (I had been a lapsed gamer since the PS2) and I remembered that it was reading an article in the Guardian at the time (link below) about BOTW which had not even been on my radar (don't think the Switch was heavily marketed much in its early days) as I wasn't reading any gaming sites at the time. I had an N64 as a kid and still hold OOT as my favourite game of all time so had to dive in on this new adventure.

Anyway - just noticed that you wrote that article! So I wanted to say many thanks for perfectly describing what makes that game so special and reminding me how unique Zelda experiences can be.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/30/the-legend...

p.s. the comments under the article are also great even if a lot of them are incorrectly claiming Witcher 3 is better

Oh wow that is a good article

@GrailUK Thank you, Grail. I don't mind sass or cheek! I'm looking forward to it!

@BongoBongo wow, that's crazy! I don't even remember writing this 😅 I've probably written hundreds of articles in my career, but it's still so exciting when someone remembers one of them (even if I don't!) I'm so happy that my ramblings got you back in

@Slowdive heck YEAH I wanna play Skyward Sword again. What if they re-released it with Ring-Con controls???

@Commandervide0 I had to leave my 3DS behind when I moved (only temporarily! It's in storage!) but if I hadn't, I would be playing Fantasy Life RIGHT NOW.

Fantasy Life was awesome! Such a neat "little bit of everything" kind of game (definite Stardew vibes), that I should really nip back into since I dropped off shortly after I finished the main story.

@Slowdive It was proooobably the N64? We got one for the family for Christmas, along with a few games (I don't remember exactly which ones we got first!) We ended up with most of the good ones, though - Mario Kart, Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, Lego Racers 2...

Soon after that, I think I got a Game Boy Color, and I played a lot of Tetris, Link to the Past, and (my personal favourite, to this day) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which is a surprisingly good JRPG-style Hogwarts game, made after the first film, but before HP got CRAZY big. There's some great stuff in there that they would have ruined if it was made after all the hype!

@Slowdive I am genuinely baffled as to how there's not been a really decent Harry Potter game that's not set in the Harry Potter times. I know there's one in development, but... I do not have high hopes.

@KateGray You’re a really great writer (:

@BabyYoda71 thank you, Baby Yoda!

@Slowdive As someone who has worked in games, I can understand the frustration of a concept artist seeing their beautiful ideas get crushed and warped by marketing 😅

just popping in to say i love every single article you write, kate! always puts a smile on my face and i love the quirkiness and positivity ^^

@NikHogan thank you so much!! Nice to meet you

@KateGray I hope you're doing well. Before I pester you with a longer reply, I wanted to ask you:

Are any of the writers at NL working on an article about the annus mirabilis of 1986? The advent of Zelda, Dragon Quest, Metroid, Castlevania, OutRun, Darius and others (not to mention PC games like the first Might and Magic, a personal favourite of mine), when considered beside the broader North American release of the NES, makes this perhaps the seminal year in gaming.

I expect to see 35th anniversary releases or "celebrations" in most of these franchises. And we could all use the perspective on our hobby that this date brings...

There seems to be a ton of anniversaries this year. The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest and Metroid all do have their 35th birthdays this year, but games like Super Mario 64 (25), The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (15), The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (10) all have big milestones too. Considering what Nintendo did for Mario's 35th anniversary, a celebration that for me at least, didn't even mean that much compared to 30, 25, and 20, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Nintendo only does something as meagre as selling T-shirts and making a special YouTube video, rather than... doing the normal thing and releasing actual games.

@Tyranexx Breath of the Wild is one of my all time favourite games, ever. But I want to see more traditional Zelda put back in, because, ironically, despite BotW being one of the harder Zelda games on paper (you have enemies that can one shot you early on) I found it to be one of the easiest Zelda games in terms of puzzles and challenge. The shrines were too small and the Divine Beasts were so non-linear that it killed them. In one dungeon you could just glide to the terminal instead of using a carriage like the devs wanted you to. It's that freedom that really killed the dungeons.

Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword on the other hand deviated from this. TP had really tough dungeons, so difficult that it took me six years to be able to do the first seven dungeons without a guide. The combat was really slick, with some cool skills you learn from the Hero's Shade, though that made combat a little easy. Skyward Sword had tough combat and tough dungeons, and retrospectively feels like the best mix of old and new Zelda. Under that logic it would be my favourite Zelda game, and honestly I have little reason to doubt that anymore.

@FroZtedFlakerZz Oh god I forgot about The Imprisoned. If you skipped the second fight, or just... got rid of it, I would have enjoyed the idea of fighting it just a little bit more. The idea should have worked on paper but it's just ridiculous how unbelievably frustrating and unsatisfying it is to beat this guy. I had more fun doing the sealing swipes at the end than actually fighting him.

Any thoughts on these matter @KateGray? I've unironically been swayed to the Skyward Sword club. If my Wii U wasn't packed in a box thirty seconds away, I'd have started a new file.

@COVIDberry Hm, I'm not sure. We're working on some 35th anniversary stuff, but I don't know that anyone has a piece planned about 1986 yet! There's a lot of 2021 to go, though, so you never know. I won't be writing about it because, erm, I didn't exist yet back then, so I struggle to have opinions about it!

@TheJGG I feel like Nintendo's really not doing a great job of celebrating. I remember the 30th anniversary of Zelda had live concerts and stuff, and now Mario's 35th gets... cool games that they're going to delete for no reason??? Blergh.

I do also unironically love Skyward Sword. Yeah, the motion controls were fiddly and irritating at times, and every time you got a new ingredient it insisted on telling you what it was AGAIN, but the design of the game was beautiful. The watercolour-style art, the ruined remains of a kingdom, THE MUSIC, it was all just so incredible.

My favourite parts of Zelda games are the ones where I get to run around a playground made from the bones of the past, and it nailed that. It also nailed the future stuff, too - setting up the legend that would become, you know, The Legend of Zelda.

The boss design was what let it down most, I think. The Imprisoned was too goofy to be a boss. Ghirahim needs to be sealed inside a tupperware and buried in concrete. The dungeon bosses were cool but they reaaaaaally wanted to focus on the 3D motion swipes and that often just didn't work. Sigh.

Here's a secret, though: I never played Twilight Princess further than... the first dungeon, I think? I just couldn't get into the brown-on-brown, everything is super fuzzy look. Plus, fighting those weird shadow-monsters in the ring, the ones that keep regenerating if you don't kill them fast enough, is not my kinda fun. I have it on GameCube now, so maybe I'll give it another go?

@KateGray Twilight Princess is a true traditional Zelda, and an antithesis to Skyward Sword. I wholeheartedly recommend pushing through, the colours get better eventually.

@KateGray Yes, I totally get that too the first wolf part and just the very start of the game in general made me a little reluctant at first but that became my second favorite game of all time

@TheJGG I loved the first area! The character design was so unique, too, and there were so many elements that were totally new, like the grass whistle thingy thing. I'll give it a go when I've finished the three reviews I've got to write!

@FroZtedFlakerZz I really wasn't a big fan of Wolfy Link either, but if the rest of the game is that good, I really should get over it

@KateGray Judging from your other posts inthis thread, I agree with most of what you have said about Zelda

Two things I'm wondering about.
1. What is your favorite Ace Attorney game?
2. Do you like ecchi games? (I don't mean to start a debat or anthing, just wondering 😅)