Kestrel

I'd say TotK is in the running for the least scary Zelda game. It's waaaaaay too empowering for the player ever really feel threatened for more than that initial moment. The only thing that really shifts that dynamic is the darkness in the depths, but that goes away as soon as you light it up, and then it's just another open world map, only much more boring.

@GamingFan4Lyf Yeah, the grind is pretty crazy. I spent several hours up in Hebra grinding those big elk for their delicious, delicious meats (to cook and sell for profit). The "Hero's Path" of that region isn't even a cluster of lines now, it's just one big, solid green mass.

I earned around 10k rupees after all that, which allowed me to buy all of two armor sets.

Well, TotK has the same asinine level scaling as BotW, and I'm already at the point where I'm encountering enemies that even my strongest weapons take 40+ hits to kill. Will definitely be duping a lot of the better fusion parts so I can avoid as much of that tedium as possible.

I dunno, I feel like 10 years doesn't really qualify as a "long time" to support a product. That's pretty much just one console generation.

@Tyranexx Ahaha... no problem.

One very last thing for you to consider (or at least keep tucked away in the very back of your mind): the second game of each duology (all the way up to CS4) winds up reusing the vast majority of the assets from the first game (like 95%). And if you push on through to The 3rd... there's that same re-use. So it's generally better (IMHO) to put some space in-between the games to avoid burnout.

If you've played the Yakuza games, where nearly every one has you spending most of your time in a very slightly modified version of Kamurocho, it's kinda like that.

(And I should also hasten to add that you shouldn't feel the need to commit yourself to the series as a whole beyond the first two games. Everything after SC is increasingly YMMV, and the series takes a hard-turn after Azure from being primarily character-driven to primarily plot-driven. A lot of people really love the Cold Steel games regardless, and I do think the gameplay is an enormous improvement over the older games, and the character writing remains good, but the plot? Well, I'll just say that if SC is in the #1 spot on my list, none of the CS games would crack the top 50. (And yes, I am precisely autistic enough to have an actual list.)

The point is: well, despite my effusion of praise, maybe don't set your expectations too high for the series as a whole. Ah, well, I suppose that's applicable for everything in life.

Actually, the real point is TEARS OF THE KINGDOM IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN IT HAS ANY RIGHT TO BE, and it is going to devour our collective free time in the coming days to the point that every other game may as well not exist.

I mean, goddamn.

@KayFiOS It wouldn't exactly be unprecedented (still waiting on that Mario Odyssey DLC) but, man, it'll suck if we don't get any for TotK, either. Might be something for them to hold onto for an updated rerelease on the next generation console, though.

@Tyranexx Yeah, I can already tell Tears of the Kingdom is gonna dominate a lot of my gaming time over the next few years... truly a monstrous game.

Anyway, yeah, that mixed feedback isn't entirely undeserved. FC is very much a slow burn, low-stakes story (which is something I love, but even as someone who loves it... it can be a bit too slow at times) and this was greatly exacerbated in the original (overseas) PSP release which also had very slow combat that took a while to load in and out of. Subsequent editions have sped things up quite a bit across the board, and even have a "turbo mode" that doubles the animation speed for combat. Makes the game faaaaaaar more tolerable.

But some of that mixed reception also comes from misplaced expectations. This isn't an RPG where you'll save the world or defeat some great evil... nor is it one where you'll spend much time diving into dungeons (apart from the final dungeon, the only proper dungeon areas are those 4 towers — of which, again, three are entirely optional).

As you might guess from my whole vibe here, the Trails series is a set of games I hold on very high regard. I even consider Trails in the Sky SC to be the finest JRPG ever made — but the first time I played FC? I bounced off it. Played for maybe a half dozen hours (at most) and then lost interest.

Couple years later, I came back, gave it another go. Then I finished it, and while I liked it, I didn't love it. A solid 7/10. But on the post-SC replay? More like an 8 or 9.

The point is: this series requires an enormous investment to get into — time, attention, money — and, especially at first, it can come across as... not that great. In light of my own comments here, you might think it underwhelming, or overhyped. But I think that if you keep going, there's a very good chance you could wind up thinking of the Trails in the Sky games as highly as I do.

Tried this several times and only got it to work once... when I was experimenting w/ a different sequence (IE not following instructions)... and then I promptly forgot what I'd done.

For rupee farming, I'm thinking Zelda Amiibo will be more efficient, as their gear sells for 600 apiece.

@blindsquarel I can't say that's the only reason I'm subbed to NSO at the moment... but honestly I don't find MK8 online all that much better than playing versus AI.

Also, PSA: you can only buy these things with an active, paid subscription. Can't do it w/ the free trial.

Neat, actual details.

Can't wait to lose myself in the game come tomorrow... though I may be stuck waiting. Turns out that the human body can be a real crap vessel, huh? Today I've gone through an unusually high dosage of painkillers (I'm disabled, not an addict) and the pains on,y just now receding to the point where I feel normal. I suspect I'll be pretty out of it all weekend (side-effects from the heavier stuff are pretty awful: exhaustion, extreme drowsiness, difficulty focusing, difficulty w/ memory, and, of course, extremely grotesque nighttmarea).

Am I oversharing? I dunno. Maybe. Probably. I'm bad at this. Got plenty of problems and the above ain't even the top one.

Anyway, the point is: y'all, please. I am begging you — all of you — please be excited and ecstatic and have the time of your life running around Hyrule setting things on fire tomorrow in my stead.

@Tyranexx No shame in a belated reply (unless you're gonna be a weirdo like that one guy). Glad I could help. I love Falcom games but, man, they can be hard to recommend due to how intimidating they can appear to be. Even the pretty simple, straightforward, mostly standalone games like Ys can seem impenetrable to newcomers with the nonlinear timeline and various remakes and what have you.

Anyway, I hope I'm responding to this quickly enough — and that you'll see it quickly enough — that I can give you one piece of crucial advice for FC. Basically, there are a bunch of optional (sometimes easily missable) quests and dialog sequences. On your first playthrough? You don't really need to worry about 'em. Except for one. During the tutorial, you'll climb up a big ol' Zemurian Tower and meet a certain NPC at the top (Professor Alba, iirc). There are three other similar towers in the game, and you're not required to visit any of them — they're all optional. Further, if you climb to the top of them at the right time (usually as soon as you can first access them) you'll meet that NPC again at their summits. Those sequences will provide you with most of the "deep lore" worldbuilding stuff, and you'll get a LOT more out of the ending if you see all of those sequences than if you don't.

So I'd highly advise making an effort to see those. And maybe save often, in multiple slots, because sometimes those windows are very narrow and easy to miss.

Beyond that, don't worry about optional content. Trails in the Sky FC is one of the very few games — very few pieces of media in general, I'd say — where it actually gets better on a subsequent playthrough. Put simply, Trails in the Sky SC does a whole heckuva lot to recontextualize a lot of FC's content, imbuing what maybe at first seemed to be fairly innocuous characterization (or even padding) with layers of additional meaning and context. If you enjoy SC, I would highly recommend playing through FC again afterwards, only then aiming for 100%.

(EDiT: just for some further personal context... I can count on one hand the number of media I'd actually recommend playing/watching/reading/listening to more than once. It is not something I suggest often or lightly, especially for something that's as huge of a time commitment as a 60-hour RPG.)

(Also don't be too disappointed if FC doesn't immediately click for you. My experience with the duology was that FC felt like a 7/10 the first time through, then SC an awesome 10/10 that elevated FC to a 9/10 for me on my second playthrough.)

The King of Red Lions is the only good Royal because he's the only one actually providing a benefit to society — transportation.

@molkom Yeah, no. Copyright doesn't work that way. If it did, the entire video game industry would've collapsed decades ago.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2014-15/march-april/its_how_you_play_game_why_videogame_rules_are_not_expression_protected_copyright_law/#

@Varkster I mean, one of the most common complaints of BotW was the lack of "rewards" to find while exploring — basically just Korok Seeds and weapons, or the occasional rare ingredient. Zonai parts would seem to be a very handy solution to that complaint.

@carlos82 I'm thinking of it this way: the gacha machines are, in and of themselves, something that rewards exploration — you have to find them before you can use them, yeah? And for that exploration you're rewarded with vehicle parts. But there can only be so many machines (they are quite big) — and there will certainly be far more treasure chests scattered throughout Hyrule (and, who knows, maybe we'll finally see a second type of container) — and vehicle parts would add some really nice variety to the expected weapons/rupees/ingredients.

If the reception to BotW has taught us anything, I think it's that many players care a weirdly extreme amount about extrinsic rewards.

@epicgamner the heck? So you can only store the gacha parts? That... doesn't make much sense to me. Are there two versions of each part, then? One you can only use once, and other you can pick up and re-use whenever ya' like? Seems kinda redundant.

It doesn't seem like the gacha will be a bad thing in TotK... but I don't really see how it's a good thing, either. If the parts are already in the world, why do we need vending machines? And if the answer is that it gives you more parts and a greater variety of parts to play around with... doesn't that disincentivize exploration?

They ever get around to finishing KOTOR2?

@Ara Gotta love people who go on social media to talk about how much they hate and/or never use social media.

I don't know that it's fair to call her a bad voice actor due to her portrayal of Zelda. I think the issues with her performance are more likely a result of how she was directed. She's definitely affecting a kind of very high-pitched, regal tone which isn't something that just happens by accident.

Gotta keep in mind that these performances are always directed. If any of y'all have played many JRPGs, you're probably (very) familiar with the English voiceovers completely butchering Japanese nouns... which, on the face of it, is very odd, since Japanese is a phonetic language and the correct pronunciation is always gonna be right there on the page. Is it because the actors are ignorant or apathetic? Maybe sometimes, but I've seen enough of 'em on Twitter specify that they were specifically instructed to mispronounce things by the Voiceover director(s).

And at least in terms of Zelda's pitch, that very light, high-pitched voice is very closely associated with the Yamato Nadeshiko archetype, and I could easily see it being mandated from the Nintendo higher-ups who simply don't understand how that association does not exist outside of Japan.

I've never been one to care about spoilers, so I looked into a few of the leaks. All I can say is that TotK looks like exactly the game you'd reasonably expect it to be as a sequel to Breath of the Wild and based on the gameplay demo. Folks who've spent that past 6 years moaning about various pet-peeves in BotW are unlikely to be much happier with TotK, everyone else will be ecstatic.

So basically I don't know anything now that I didn't already know before I spoiled myself.

Just beat BotW a few minutes ago. Wonder if TotK will last me 6 years, too?

@DavidMac It's not "tricks" it's just optimization, and it's what every developer ought to be doing. When you see 100GB+ download sizes, it's because the developers aren't bothering to even compress the files — which is really the bare minimum. BRDs can fit that much data, so they don't bother. Any shortcut they can take, they will take.

Eh, given how low-effort the existing PC interaction is, I think it might be a better idea for them to just axe that whole concept entirely — just keep every character story separate from the others, like LAL. This could even allow them to do some more interesting things within those narratives, as they could have NPCs refer to what the other characters are up to on their routes. Like maybe PC1 is an apothecary visiting a town that's been damaged by some disaster, and then part of PC2's story involves causing that disaster (or attempting to mitigate it).

I dunno. Obviously it would be nice if we could form a proper 8-character PARTY in these games, but they seem so actively disinterested in that I don't see much hope for it ever happening. And it's not like there aren't various NPCs in the Octo2 routes, for example, that could become party members for those stories. Or, hell, they could even just do a Mercury system that let ya' hire out whoever — faceless, voiceless mercs are always easier to swallow than fully-realized characters who spend all of their time together pointedly NOT talking to each other.

Something like the FF Pixel Remasters might be cool — taking the game and just modernizing the visuals and UI to feel a bit more in line with modern sensibilities.

But a full-on remake? I dunno. I feel like fully half of the games in the series could qualify as remakes, or at least reimagining, of the original game. But also Breath of the Wild is pretty much exactly what Zelda 1 would look like if it were remade today... which probably explains why the BotW prototypes were made in the NES style.

@romanista Maybe not, they're using the word incorrectly. A denouement is a part of dramatic storytelling structure referring to the "winding down" part of a story between the climax and conclusion — or in RPG terms, the denouement is everything between the death of the final boss and the credits rolling.

If this DLC added to or modified XC3's vanilla ending in any way, it might be an appropriate word to use, but from the context of the review it sounds like it's 100% a separate, self-contained prequel story. A prequel story that by itself may contain a denouement, but cannot in and of itself be a denouement to the game proper.

I suspect there were some crossed wired as they meant to say something like "capstone" or "swan song" since it's the grand(?) finale(?) of the trilogy.

@Deemo37 Amazing how confident you are that you were able to correctly interpret both my personal standards game performance as well as how excited I am for TotK from a post that was about neither.

Please don't make assumptions like that. It's really annoying.

Poor performance is never due to hardware — it's only ever a (very predictable) outcome of sloppy optimization. Optimization is something that should be worked on constantly, starting on day 1, but all too often it winds up being a low-priority and devs don't start working on optimizing their builds until very late in development — at which point options are limited.

Blaming hardware is just deflecting responsibility. The Nintendo Switch could absolutely handle BotW/TotK at 60fps — if Nintendo chose to make that target a priority (friendly reminder that ALBW on the 3DS managed a silky-smooth 60fps). But they don't, because 30fps is "good enough" for most consumers, even with dips.

That mentality isn't going to change with more powerful hardware — if the bare minimum will suffice, then there's little incentive to invest in aiming higher. Nintendo knows it's consumers will tolerate poorly optimized games, so they've little reason to view that as a significant problem.

I was holding out hope they'd (finally) latch in an XP bank, but I guess not, huh? Too bad.

@N00BiSH Right? How long has it been? 2 years? 3? Been waiting forever.

@Everythingnotsaved lol, yeah, they look really weird and goofy. It's gonna be really funny when it inevitably turns out the weapons sprouting out of their heads do more damage than the ones in their hands.

@Krysus I mean, Square-Enix has had a pretty troubled history with Final Fantasy Games since the merger, you really SHOULD doubt their ability to deliver. But has Nintendo ever really failed to deliver with ANY of their flagship series? IE, Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc.?

Yeah, there's no contest here. BotW's trailer was showing off an astonishingly beautiful open world unlike anything we'd ever seen before, absolutely brilliant scoring, and promised a dramatic, emotional story lending new weight to familiar beats.

I get folks riding high on the hype for TotK, but... no, the trailers are nowhere near comparable. TotK's trailer is showing us... a somewhat modified version of a (still drop-dead gorgeous) world we've already thoroughly explored, and only sort of gestures at its narrative. It's more of a teaser than a trailer, despite its length.

@blindsquarel I may be letting my myself get a bit carried away be hopeful thinking here, but what I suspect/want to be the case is that Link won't have the Sheikah Slate abilities from the start — that they'll be replicated later, with (dungeon?) items — so that your default abilities are just the TK hand and crafting skill, which wouldn't need quite as much tutorialization.

Like I'm imagining the tutorial basically being oriented around Link having to craft a glider (or similar thing) to get down to the surface.

The only thing that really disappointed me in BotW was the absence of any caves. Really hoping we get some real deep labyrinths to explore in TotK.

I hope so. I keep checking the Steam page every few weeks hoping they'll let me buy the damned thing already. They already have my money — they just haven't taken it yet.

My most coherent thought was, "In 200 hours of BotW I only collected 70 or so rubies...." after seeing Link attach one to an arrow. So wasteful! Hoard them rocks, Link!

G-gyaru Zelda? Again?

Anyway, I think y'all maybe missed one: right before the trailer shows Hyrule Castle raising up out of the ground we see another huge structure begin to rise up out of the desert — looks like a giant step pyramid. This would seem to (further) indicate the return of more elaborate dungeons.

@Lebest What is this inane, word salad reply? Are you drunk? High? Suffer a recent blow to the head?

I miss those old snowboarding games. 1080 was great, but SSX 3 would be my personal favorite. Shame they don't really make games like that any more... tried a couple "spiritual successors" on Steam and then immediately went back to my Gamecube.

@Yaycandy I'm a bit late to have ever done that, but as a kid on the 00s I definitely remember putting tape on the TV screen to mark the weak points for those annoying Walls in Okami.

I'm still bitter about that whole XC3 fiasco.

I think it's probably a good time for me to start going out of ,y way to avoid any and all things Zelda. I see this list of questions and all I can think is that I really do NOT want to know the answers. I'll leave that for the game, which'll be out in just a few more blinks of the eye.

Somewhere between a 4 and a 6 for me. Combat is fine — adequate. Story, characters and setting do nothing for me at the best of times, and are actively annoying at the worst of times. Music is pretty decent.

I'd rank it below Fates overall, but above Fates Conquest, specifically.

I picked up a bunch of Final Fantasy games on sale (Steam copies via GOG) so, you'd think, I'd be playing one of those.

Instead I've mostly just been fiddling with my music library on MusicBee — which, in fairness, has like 30 different FF albums — and playing Vampire Survivors in the odd moments in-between.

Switch doesn't feel old to me at all — middle-aged, maybe, sure.

What does feel rather long in the tooth these days is the perpetual assumption so many people seem to have that new hardware will magically resolve all the performance issues we're stuck dealing. Sorry, folks, but the people who can't be bothered to optimize their games for the Switch ain't gonna spontaneously manifest the will to do so for the Switch's successor.

@Jhena Er... not sure what makes you think I'm unhappy with anything. Quite the opposite. Between the the damage to the industry caused by smartphones, earthquakes and HD development costs, the 2010s were a pretty bad era for JRPGs — there's a reason why so many classic series suddenly died in the PS3 era.

The Japanese development scene has only really recovered from that in the past few years, but high development costs are still gonna keep the genre from even approaching those old heights simply due to how much longer it takes to build a game, and how fewer studios still have the budget to do so. It's cool that we're seeing so many remasters and remakes, and that helps shore things up a bit, but I wouldn't really factor those in whether or not it's a "golden age."

It's not about being happy or unhappy (and seriously, dude, do NOT go around making assumptions about other people's mental states, that's really annoying — among other things) and more that the SNES-->PS2 (or NDS) era is so strong for the genre that it's hard to consider any other era as coming even remotely close to it.

You could definitely call what we're seeing now a resurgence, or Renaissance. Everything post-Persona 5 has been quite pleasant to see.

@Jhena Not so much a new Golden Age as that we've finally recovered from a dark age.

@JeanPaul Haha... yeah, it's a lot to get into. But very interesting, especially if you're interested in the history of the genre. Falcom is notable for being one of the oldest PC game developers on the planet, since it started in 1989 (IIRC) the Legend of Heroes series also winds up being one of the longest-running RPG series out there, right alongside your Dragon Quests and Final Fantasies. Basically, there's a ton of history here that's largely unknown outside of Japan for various reasons.

Anyway, yeah, Zero is an excellent starting point. It will spoil some stuff from Sky, but despite what some fans will loudly insist, I really think the main appeal of the Trails series in the characters, not the plot. So even if you know certain twists ahead of time, if and when you are able to go back to the Sky games, I'm certain you'll still enjoy them immensely, despite the spoiler.

@BulbasaurusRex Really baffled why you'd think I haven't played the game, or own a WiiU. Like... did you not read any of my posts here? I think it's pretty obvious I own the game and have played it. Quite thoroughly, I might add.

Also baffled why you, or anyone, really, would ever think it would be a GOOD thing for a game to be kept confined to an obsolete platform. If you actually love a game, surely you'd want more people to play it than just yourself?

Also also baffled why you think that tapping a button to bring up a screen would be any more disrupting that physically turning your whole head to look at a different screen; or why you assume that any port would inevitably be of poor quality — you know the NS has better hardware than the WiiU, right? And that there's eventually gonna be an NS2; and further baffled that you think the map was such an integral part of the game that you'd need to be referring to it frequently. At least for my part I didn't find myself pulling up XCX's map any more frequently than I did the map in Breath of the Wild, or RDR2.

The former of which is actually a really good example here. Breath of the Wild was a tablet-dependent WiiU game ported to the Switch. And it runs better on the NS than on the WiiU. Breath of the Wild was also built around constantly being able to refer back to the world map/inventory menus on the tablet's second screen. That functionality got axed... and, you know what? No one missed it. XCX is not so fundamentally different that the same would not be possible here.

In short, I find your whole stance here unnecessarily pessimistic.

Literally the WORST thing about Trails is how much explanation is required to introduce it to (potential) new fans. I mean, Jesus. Look at all that text. That's the SHORT version. And it omits so, so, so much.

Like I didn't even get into Dragon Slayer.