Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

@JaxonH hmm. I love the HD 2-D aesthetic, so I feel like I'd be into this one. I ended up starting D3 anyway to see what the fuss is about. Only an hour in, but so far so good. I'll stick with this until i either finish it, or until AEW Fight Forever comes out.

A bit of the ending got spoiled for me and I don't really want to beat Ganon now after what happens.

Well, I was paragliding up high and I realized, "oh, crap, I think I can fly into that storm cloud".... So I did!😆 It was almost complete darkness in the cloud, but with the lightning flashes, I could see the silhouette of a sky island, so I landed there. And then I saw the green spiral of a shrine, dropped in, got the shrine where you have to transport the green stone down to the surface, and that lead me to the mineru quest to assemble mineru then get her secret stone. I completed that part, and that was it. The thunderstorm clouds are still there. I figured something would lead me back there later.

TotK is definitely like BotW in the sense that there's meaningful content, and then content that exists to facilitate the game's radically open structure.

I'm sure completionist neuroticism ruins the game for some, but IMO that's an issue on the user's end.

@Xyphon22 The thing about BotW's story is that it's structured in such a way that it perfectly harmonizes with the open world structure of it. Meanwhile, the memories are also brilliantly integrated, as they're based on locations that were significant to Link and his experiences with Zelda prior to the Calamity, which is why going to them reawakens snippets of his remembrances.

Comparatively, finding giant symbols on the ground to experience memories he'd never have any reason to remember just makes no sense to me. They're literally just cutscenes disconnected from the character.

I really liked how the end goal of BotW was in sight the entire time, and finding and conquering the various Divine Beasts directly tie into this goal, whereas, in TotK, you're travelling to these various locations to investigate mysteries for seemingly no reason beyond 'maybe you'll find some clues about where the princess is.' Which you don't, of course.

BotW's structure all goes back to becoming stronger and remembering more of your past so that you can help the princess. Every element of the game ties back in with that end-goal, and makes the game a uniquely cohesive experience.

Whereas I'm mostly done with the main story in TotK and am still not really sure why Link is bothering to do half of what he's doing. Stuff seems to exist purely for gameplay purposes. It makes the narrative element of this game far less engaging.

the tears are quite well explained. They’re Zelda’s memories, being brought back by using Recall on her dragon tears.

Impa even theorizes that the geoglyphs were created by other people who must have found and experienced the memories, then marking them with icons based on the visions, probably not quite understanding what they were about.

Not that I think the tears are the superior option, compared to the memories from BotW, but the pictures on the sheikah slate are also weirdly out of place. They do not fit in as actual pictures taken by Zelda, because… What, did Zelda return after the Calamity and carefully took each picture right before confronting Ganon hoping these specific places would work? How is hyrule castle the only place that looks different? Did none of the plants or trees in the pics die, grew or reproduce in 100 years?

They must have been taken before or after the events happened, because at least one of them would’ve been taken during their escape on a rainy night, and the picture looks normal and sunny.

To me they also seem purely “for the gameplay”, anachronistic in a way.

The Purah Pad has another vaguely related issue that kinda bothers me. They took the time to load it up with the three pictures Zelda took before going back in time, but somehow neither Zelda nor Mineru bothered taking any pictures in the past. We know Zelda would’ve been like a crazy tourist trying to document everything she saw, and Mineru would probably be fascinated by it.

Imagine how cool it would’ve been having these seemingly random pictures of the distant past that would only make sense after watching the memories and reading the monuments.

Maybe there were more pictures but they got erased because the Purah Pad is a bit like the Wii U and the NAND flash starts to go when it's not been used for a while? 🙂

You do have to get Robbie to re-enable the camera, after all.

@Matt_Barber but then there would be no pictures! And we do get the first three

@Eel Not necessarily. It's usually possible to extract at least some files from a dying flash memory.

On a completely different topic, I just had to share this very exciting clip

@blindsquarel Ah ok, I haven’t done any dungeons yet. Almost made it up the top of the sky to the first one but didn’t manage it and decided to explore and expand the map first and build up hearts etc.

@WoomyNNYes Hmm, I will pay more attention next time, but yeah maybe it’s just too subtle for me and I was hoping for actual melodies like in earlier Zelda games?

@Ralizah I wasn’t expecting much from the narrative in this game, since BOTW’s felt very underwhelming and straightforward to a fault. This still isn’t top shelf material in any way, but it’s an improvement in many ways. The type and variety of sidequests are also more interesting than I expected.

I would agree with you in that the world is dense with things to do but not enough of it is unique. The underworld is cool for a bit but it is all one biome. The sky islands are really uninteresting because they didn’t even bother building any settlements there. There is the Temple of Time but there are basically no landmarks. Just similar types of shrine quest and Zonai gotcha machines.

But it’s hard to deny that the unique content on offer isn’t good. I like the shrines and fighting those Gleeoks is fun, but much of the overworld activities start to feel stale after the 75th hour. Cave and wells are samey, bokoblin camps are aren’t interesting anymore, korok seeds lose utility since you already have 8 weapons with 40+ damage. Time to dust off the remaining interesting quests and fight the big bad. Now I know that, so my second 5-6 heart playthrough (several years from now) will cut the fat and focus on the good aspects of the game.

@JaxonH I certainly agree with this perspective, it’s just a shame it all can’t be interesting. The game is in desperate need of an editor to whittle down the experience slightly, so the content on offer here feels more special and memorable. Like I said to Ralizah above, I love the game but only to a certain point and on the second playthrough I’ll know what I’d like to experience again.

You know… I’m not sure I want any lock and key dungeons exactly, I’d just like the dungeons to be longer and have more “head scratch moments where only one solution is viable. The shrines can remain shorter and have a “whatever works” approach, but I’d like the dungeons to be more challenging and not as flexible with solutions to problems. I just don’t get many “eureka” moments in these new Zelda games, and that’s one of best sensations when playing some of those older games. These dungeons aren’t bad, they just aren’t as memorable as those in past games and there isn’t any reason why they can’t be.

Honestly, I thought I was the only person who kind of had an ehh feeling about the content in this game, but it's nice to see more people who also feel the same in a way. I like what they added, and think a good few things were cool, but at the same time I just wish they either toned down the scope a bit more, or changed things up. The sky islands feel like there's only a few that actually matter, with the rest being the same copied and paste shrine puzzle or boss arena. The unique islands that did exist were fun, but everything else just felt like filler in a way. The depths are much better imo, but even then there's still things that disappoint me there.

I like how it's meant to be an open world take on the Dark World from A Link to the Past or Link Between Worlds, but at the same time it lacks in variation. There's two biomes in the depths, and that's about it, and there's little places of actual interest down there as well. Sure, you have the zonaite forges, or the poe statues, or the abandoned mines, but outside of those, there doesn't really feel like there's much else to look forwards to down there? The Yiga hideout exists, but if you don't care about Autobuild, they don't really feel important. Same with the monster camps, which are only useful until you get enough Zonaite to refine to fully upgrade the batteries.

Shrines felt like a mixed bag to me in a way. Some were absolutely great, but then most felt forgettable. Sure didn't help that a lot had lackluster quests that are constantly repeated, instead of what BotW did where nearly each quest for a Shrine was actually unique for the most part.

Definitely this. I feel like they spent a lot of time on the initial islands you open the game on, then got bored with the idea afterwards. What I find funny is I thought they would of learned the lesson from Skyward Sword as the islands in that game had a similar issue but apparently not.

The depths are much better imo, but even then there's still things that disappoint me there.

I like how it's meant to be an open world take on the Dark World from A Link to the Past or Link Between Worlds, but at the same time it lacks in variation. There's two biomes in the depths, and that's about it, and there's little places of actual interest down there as well. Sure, you have the zonaite forges, or the poe statues, or the abandoned mines, but outside of those, there doesn't really feel like there's much else to look forwards to down there? The Yiga hideout exists, but if you don't care about Autobuild, they don't really feel important. Same with the monster camps, which are only useful until you get enough Zonaite to refine to fully upgrade the batteries.

Building on top of that, I think beyond the Yiga, there isn't really much in the way of a living civilisation down in the depths, which I guess kind of makes sense, but at the same time, I feel the depths would be more interesting if there was a people who lived in the depths who you could interact with. They were people in the Dark World in A Link to the Past (distorted by the Golden Power as they were), and they had shops and other things going on. Would have been interesting to interact with people like that in the depths rather than just the Zonai constructs. Heck, after you complete the Fire Temple in the depths, why couldn't the Gorons at least start roaming around or something. They used to have civilisation done there.

Shrines felt like a mixed bag to me in a way. Some were absolutely great, but then most felt forgettable. Sure didn't help that a lot had lackluster quests that are constantly repeated, instead of what BotW did where nearly each quest for a Shrine was actually unique for the most part.

Rauru had an awful lot of Blessings to give. I felt like they made up a majority of the shrines. Some of them did have some sort of environmental puzzle to complete outside first to reach them, but it felt like most of them were just gifted to you without any hard work.

@Ralizah
finding giant symbols on the ground to experience memories he'd never have any reason to remember just makes no sense to me

When you frame it like that it doesn't make sense. But that's not how I see it. The tears are not his memories, nor are they meant to be. They're a message, sent to him from the past by Zelda herself. We call them memories because of their similarity from a gameplay perspective. But they're definitely not memories (at least, not Link's memories). They're messages in a corked bottle.

And that makes perfect sense.

Not that I particularly care about the nuances of cutscene gamer lore. As far as I'm concerned, they're just cutscenes to find, same as BotW. At the end of they day, they're much more engaging to find than in BotW because tracking them down isn't an exercise in frustration.

@JaxonH Zelda's memories.

For me, the thing is that Link's memories in BotW felt like actually unlocking aspects of his past, which made finding them more exciting and intimate, and strengthened his connection to the world around him.

The tear memories really do just feel like unlockable cutscenes to me. And because the focus isn't as tight (the memories in BotW were laser-focused on the relationship between Link and Zelda, including Zelda's own struggles to live up to the expectations placed on her), I find them less engaging overall.

Maybe I'll feel differently by the end. I've taken a multi-week break from the game after basically devouring it day and night for a while and getting a tad burnt out, so I've not beaten it yet.

I've willing to grant, that, purely as an explorable open-world experience, TotK is more fun, and I'll get a lot more out of it than I did BotW before I've exhausted its worthwhile content. I do think it's an amazing experience. The degree of worthwhile optional content dwarfs BotW, so I'm taking it slower and enjoying my time with it fully.

But, from a holistic game design perspective, BotW just feels like the better experience to me.

One thing I do dislike about the “memories” in this game, is how every sage repeats the exact same story and cutscene.

I wish they had given them some more unique point of view or made them tell different parts of the story.

@Eel That is probably the worst part about the story for me. It’s so repetitive and boring that I’ve just skipped them after watching two of them and realizing they were exactly the same. I wish they would have offered unique perspectives or gave you more information about the war, but it’s the exact same thing every time.

“Imprisoning War? Secret stone?”

A pretty big oversight, especially because in my book this game tells its story in a much better way compared to BOTW.

The monster is a servant of the Demon King. He wished to prevent you from obtaining my secret stone.

Demon King? Secret stone?

Let me tell you about the destiny of our people and the Imprisoning War!

x4

I do find it funny how when they chat with Zelda, they speak in muffled mumbles because the masks clearly don’t let them talk.

They go from having this echoing etherial voice, that sounds suspiciously like the Champions, to sounding like kenny from southpark.