Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom kinda Sucks.
Getting it disclaimer
In recent times, and probably preceding them, a popular psychological defence is some variation of "the haters" just don't get it. The root of all disagreement is mere ignorance.
I hate puns, alas, I don't hate puns because I do not understand the punning game. The satisfaction of making someone cringe with a bad pun, I get it. I get it and it sucks.
Puns out-and-out suck, they suck so hard that the English language has the ubiquitous idiom "no pun intended" so people can distance themselves from this base form of "humour". "No pun intended" might make puns the first abstract victim of cancel culture.
So I want to take away from you this psychological defence, that I'm saying Tears of the Kingdom (henceforth totk) sucks, because I don't get it. I missed some kind of point that "it isn't about the destination, it's the journey. The meandering, aimless journey in a beautiful world, the escapism of an open world sandbox, it's about getting lost in Hyrule's seamless biomes, discovering, creating and making the game your own." or something like that. Hopefully covers all the variations.
No. I get that, and have still arrived at the conclusion that TotK kind of sucks. I got it in TotK predecessor, Breath of the Wild (henceforth BotW), and that's a huge contributor to TotK's suckiness.
Don't get me wrong, there is a good game, maybe even a great game, inside of TotK, certainly there's a great game inside of BotW. There's also a meandering escapism available to those who are into that sort of thing, and if you are into that sort of thing, then it may be one of the greatest escapism mediums created on a video game platform.
"Gamer" a bullshit identity
What the fuck even is it? Here is a wikipedia article that suggests to me "gamer" is an identity anyone can apply to themselves for the purposes of aggrandizing their mediocrity.
It is an identity we should suspect is trite if we are familiar with Wittgenstein's epiphany that there is no common characteristic to every example of what we call a game. He even concluded that the presence of rules is not a common characteristic to all games.
The wikipedia article appears to exclude for example, people who do crosswords and other word puzzles.
What I suggest is that identifying as a "real gamer" is also a psychological defence and a conversational dead-end. Nobody can kick you in or out of this club with any degree of confidence on account of any criteria that would hold up to cross examination by Pheonix Wright.
You can denigrate someone as a "filthy casual" but you cannot prevent such acts from denigrating yourself as some kind of chauvinist. You merely enter the realm of religiosity, where owing to the incoherence of the foundations - like the incoherence of what constitutes a "gamer" you have infinite recourse to designating anyone you disagree with as "no true" gamer, or unreal, or impure.
It seems likely to me that you persist with an illusion that you belong to some community that has a broad consensus, just like a Christian attending church might think they are part of a community of Christians, but apply any scrutiny and you will realize no two members of that community actually believe the same thing.
I assert this identity is irrelevant. It is not an in-game unlockable that would change my opinion.
There is nothing new under the Hyrule Sun.
Really all I'm doing is taking the specific example of TotK to validate Stigler's Law of Eponymy and also The Matthew Effect, basically I'm suggesting that if you feel TotK is mind-blowing, game-changing quantum revolution, it is likely that the gravitational pull of a large brand like Zelda has you overlook the giant's shoulders it is standing on, or even made you forget them.
I had a similar experience when I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road, because a significant number of my female friends gave me the impression that Furiosa was the strong female character they had long been starved of, and I was going to see something new. As I watched the film, my impression of Furiosa was an almost redundant character to Max, as in they were both the same character, and more likely Max was the functionally redundant one, contrived into the plot of Fury Road to create continuity. But I was wracking my brains thinking "has it really been that simple a nut to crack - just take Mad Max and make him a woman? Surely this is precedented." But I had a kind of mental block, and I couldn't remember the precedents. Ironically the coming attraction trailer that aired before Fury Road was "Terminator Genysis" or whatever it was called, I don't know anyone to this day that saw that movie.
That should have been enough to jog my memory, and eventually it was - Cameron's leading ladies are all Furiosa - Sarah Conner, Ellen Ripley plus Tarantino's women Beatrice/The Bride, Jackie Brown, the Death Proof girls... A big brand plus competent execution can make you feel like you are experiencing something wholly new and earth shattering because in general people are risk averse and that means they don't try new things and put their trust in big brands, and thus you can get sucked into the hype and think it is going to change everything which doesn't happen because what you think of as crossing into a new frontier is to the world, familiar.
One of my personal peeves stimulated by working with a bunch of art school undergrads, is that often "original" is treated as a synonym for "creative" by creative types. I am pro a much lower threshold, that to be creative is merely to "create" something, and if I am no fan of an identity like "gamer" then I am more so, not a fan of identities like "creative" which in the early 2010's I often came across as an arbitrary way to build a kind of coalition between writers, musicians and visual artists professions as different as the big three of Seattle grunge Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Sound Garden.
Alas, the identity is bullshit because it's antonym doesn't work - "creative" aptly describes what musicians, writers and artists do, but does "uncreative" aptly describe accountants, athletes, laboratory technicians?
No.
So obviously TotK draws heavily from BotW but I'll address that later. Riding horses is a throwback to Ocarina of Time, in an open world context it is preceded by Red Dead Redemption first released in 2010, likely before BotW was even conceived. "The Depths" being a late game, underground area is almost a carbon copy of Don't Starve's caves. Floating sky islands is a trope, one populated with constructs and ancient technology is straight out of studio Ghibli's "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" Flying arks that generate storms were seen in One Piece's Skypia story arc. "Fusion" weapon systems have been seen, and executed better, in games like Transistor. Building usable machines is out of the Lego Movie, and it's basically another game that has been acquired and put into BotW in some kind of genre-mash up, probably hoping for some kind of sandbox synergy.
It is within my experience for people to get a bit caught up in the hype, and think that BotW was the first truly open world game ever, which is far from true. It isn't even really true of the Zelda series, given Wind Waker, maybe even Ocarina of Time. BotW maybe innovated the seamless loading process where it is possible to traverse the worldmap without coming across a highlightable wall that leads to a load screen as per a game like Borderlands, or the Bethesda instalments of the Fallout franchises. But load times reappear when you use the fast travel feature.
TotK, perhaps best demonstrated by the three maze biomes, has a kind of new thing in that you can dive from the sky through the Hyrule surface into the depths, meaning not only can you traverse the topography of Hyrule laterally but also vertically without a load screen. Load screens are annoying, and yeah it is neat that you can sail through the sky and see from one end of the map the other end of the map without whole mountains popping in and out of the GPUs rendering range. It is a pity given tedious grinding tasks like collecting bits of dragon, that one cannot soar into the sky and look around Hyrule to locate said dragon and where it is in it's long circuitous route around the whole map.
Speaking of dragons, they were probably my favourite aesthetic from BotW, and it feels like the developers mined enough data to conclude that my experience was a common one. This seems like a good segue into...
A Perfect Sequel
TotK is a perfect sequel, but I don't necessarily count that as a positive. The game-play preview shared with me, didn't exactly excite me but it did set me up for disappointment.
In demonstrating new mechanics, and having the action take place on one of the sky islands, it gave the impression to me that the setting of TotK was mostly new. Probably in some statistical sense it is - The Depths + Sky archipelagos + Wells and Caves > Hyrule.
But it was misleading; the sky is a very very small part of the game. Almost skippable. A cursory inspection of the map had me estimate that there are 30 things in the sky. 3 of them are dungeons, and the sky setting is almost arbitrary when compared to setting them in the sacred beasts of BotW. Probably 4 or 5 of them are platforms with stuff on them to build flying contraptions to get to other platforms with stuff on them. There's a few shrine quest, that take the form of "RaaRaa the Furry's Blessing, which is to say, the shrine puzzle or challenge is on the outside of the shrine instead of the inside of the shrine.
So the sense in which TotK is a "perfect" sequel, is based on an observation I once read out of a guide to writing for TV, which I'll attempt to paraphrase "audiences don't tune in next week to see a new episode, they tune in to see last weeks episode for the first time again."
The observation about TV somewhat changed - I'm thinking of Louis, Louis CK's second crack at a tv show, where I would say fans tuned in because they didn't know what they would get based on last week. That said it was reliably punctuated by Louis' sets in the comedy cellar. Now there's a small genre of shows that are unformulaic, the appeal being you don't know what will happen, or even what kind of show the next episode will be. Even a sketch show like "I Think You Should Leave" I love because it is impossible to tell what each sketch is actually about or when it will end.
This is the sequel drive, why audiences go to see sequels - it is a paradox. I find it easier to employ a concrete example - people gave "The Matrix" a chance, and it was really good, they found they liked it. What they really really want, is to erase their memory of "The Matrix" and then see it again, so they can get that feeling of satisfaction again. Nobody can do this, what you can try to do, to satisfy the audience demand is make a sequel simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.
So think the Back To The Future Trilogy. Those movies have scenes that play out beat for beat, like Biff winding up in manure, or Marty beating a shooting arcade game across all three films, and revisiting scenes from previous films. They remix the familiar into novelty, they are cinematic perfect sequels.
This is what TotK I think is, with one alternative theory.
I'll start talking about my playing experience. In BotW you start of on a plataeu that serves as the tutorial, to escape the plateau you need to acquire a glider, which only comes after you've acquired the minimum necessary mechanics to do everything else in the game. That is what makes BotW open world, you can leave the tutorial area and proceed straight to the endboss and finish the game, or you can go literally anywhere else and do anything in any order and finish the game whenever you like. They had condensed the rails down to an hour or two of introductory game play, then you had everything you needed to do anything else. My impression is that this was what was celebrated as the achievement of BotW.
So familiarly in TotK, you wake up revived not on the plateau of BotW but an analogous sky island, again you are guided by a ghost king to complete temples that give you the near-minimal mechanics you need for the game and then you can dive off the great sky island into a pond and...
I made a false analogy, and this is the first thing that sucks about TotK. It was a dilemma, because I was going to inevitably discover two things that suck about TotK. The first was the rail. The second was that TotK is mostly just a mod of BotW. It isn't a new game. It's more of a remix, or directors cut. Like Zack Snyder got given an extra few million to go finish his vision of BotW.
The rail is the big thing, my false analogy was that I had finished the tutorial level, but I hadn't. In BotW there is no way to leave the tutorial level without dying (or maybe speedrunners have found a glitch by now) this is not true of TotK. You have to go to the location the game nudges you in, to get the glider and unlock the towers.
I am not sure if these things are strictly necessary to finish the games. It could be possible to assemble the flight suit, and get to the end boss and beat him without ever acquiring the glider, because the upgraded flight suit eliminates all fall damage, alternately one could maybe use zonai devices to beat the game without the glider.
While this is possibly a real option, it is more akin to the kind of meta-game "gamers" have invented for themselves in the past like speed running, or no-hit runs, boss rushes etc. that have later been embraced by developers as often a cheap way to get customers to perceive greater value in the products they buy. ("Sure you beat the game in 28 hours, but can you do it without getting hit?")
That rail, or invisible hand is new. It breaks the achievement of BotW and it sucks.
I feel a need to emphasize what I just tried to say - BotW achieved something in making a game where you could march straight to the endboss and with some skill finish the game in an hour or less or you could never finish it, living some "second life" as a resident of a village, retired and spending your days travelling around Hyrule and generally jacking off. Being achieved it didn't need reachieving and BotW, week on story and character, perhaps uniquely so for the Zelda franchise with an antagonist who was more of an abstract concept than a character, an asexual duo in Zelda and Link leaving only the past and present tribe heroes as the only real personalities in the game.
So there was a way to back down the frontier between open-world and barely interactive movie, that could have made TotK more enjoyable as a playing experience. Alas, they diminished the open world freedom, and gave us rails and invisible hands that sucked instead.
I got a long way doing a bunch of shrines and completing quests I could basically fast travel anywhere in Lanayru, Necluda and Akkala, including making it to the Zora's Domain and beginning one of the main quests, before relenting and returning to the...let's call it "Tutorial+" zone of Lookout Landing.
But a big part of why I was able to function for so long without unlocking the glider or the sky towers, was because I spent over a 100+ hours playing BotW. I didn't need the maps, because Hyrule is a barely modded map. Nothing is different beyond superficial cosmetics. Some things, like great fairy fountains, were moved, and there's caves and wells now but that is close to literally it.
What of the Depths? Well, the depths are a great way to give players new content at a very low cost - the Depths are basically the upside-down Castle Dracula from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, where if you are a game developer, you can double the content with minimal effort, all you have to do is build mechanics that ensure an upside-down version of the map can be traversed.
The depths are literally just a blander iteration of the BotW map, but more repetitive and less diverse. Nevertheless, probably the depths were what I enjoyed the most. The thing about the depths though is that I feel a member of the fandom could have made them and released a mod for BotW.
In this sense, it feels like TotK is just a BotW remix. I need to make a diversion.
What's the Point of That Then?
There's an old BBC sketch show "The Fast Show" that had a skit where two farmers are chatting, one farmer has a novel new product which were the then contemporary novelty of single serve yogurts that came with compartments. He explains to his friend that you can peel the lid off, and then fold the plastic to tip the fruit compote into the yogurt. With the gag being that the other farmer asks him what the point of that is and the first farmer doesn't have an answer.
Pretty simple, there's not much of a joke in there, I guess simple farmers with funny accents trying to explain city gimmicks is meant to be inherently funny, but it made an impression none-the-less.
Decades later, George RR Martin's epic fantasy series got adapted by HBO into "Game of Thrones" and I gave it a whirl and decided it was trash by HBO's usual high standards. My trash verdict came from the infamous "sexposition" scene where Littlefinger just explains all his plots to two prostitutes because TV audiences are dumb and impatient presumably. The breaking point was watching Tyrion's trial at the Airie, which for all I know is a word for word adaptation of the book, but gave me the impression that as fine an actor as Peter Dinklage is, the production felt they could improve upon the source material by pushing it further.
So that was the last I ever watched of GoT, the most popular show in the world. Months later I was at a dinner party, where I opined that I found GoT to be trash, but allowing it was because I had read the books and not everyone has the time for that and each to their own.
Then a couple tried to explain to me, that Ned Stark gets killed at the end of the first season! They killed the main character!! That was why I had misjudged the show. I was incredulous, but stopped myself from asking in the most condescending way possible "you know, that also happens in the books right?"
So the big thing here, is that someone eventually is going to ask "So what?" and this can lead to the epiphany that your brain just got stuck on something. You became illusioned, and I would argue, in so far as one can be disillusioned, it is healthy to want to be disillusioned. A more accessible and contemporary example (contemporary compared to a turn of the century BBC sketch show that predates "Little Britain") is the episode of How I Met Your Mother where the gimmick was glass shattering revelations about bad habits.
This should apply to TotK, because so much doesn't work in this game. But I feel it entirely plausible that people could play it for hours never having the realisation that they are bored, or not really enjoying themselves, or that the game is largely a time consuming chore, rise to the level of conscious knowledge. I think adding "the Sky" and "the Depths" to BotW is worthy of a "so what?" the answers to which are the sky gameplay is pretty, but negligibly small and the depths is just stuff to do. Like it's just more stuff, and less more stuff than it appears to be. It isn't really different from BotW, hence TotK feels like an expansion, even more so than the pioneering Blizzard Expansions like Starcraft: Brood War.
Blizzard (perhaps) innovated a convention that a game set in the same world with the same engine is an expansion, not a sequel, "true" sequels required a new game engine, and perhaps a new generation of console.
Familiar...Like Mashed Potatoes?
TotK begins with a tedious prologue. A prologue where I waited patiently for a flock of Keese to kill me, to try and escape Zelda's company (more on Zelda just sucks later). Once it becomes clear that there is no escape from Zelda's exposition, that the only way out is through, we are presented with a cut scene that exists at the intersection of gameplay and storytelling that serves to restore the status quo.
Link's master sword is broken, as corruption takes all his health and arm. Zelda plunges mercifully into the abyss, and Link awakes in the false analogy to tutorial level of BotW. Such plot contrivances are not new, many a game has had to come up with a narrative way to depower your avatar because gameplay demands you start from level 0 and build up to level 20 again, the player wants this to happen.
In the same sequence however, we get a narrative device to explain why Hyrule's geography has changed, we see Gannon's corrupting gloom uprooting Hyrule castle and lifting it into the sky.
This gave me the impression of a broken world, with everything rearranged and thus a pretext for rediscovering Hyrule. In a way it is, because you have to reveal the map by surveying the sky with the aesthetically displeasing smart phone and...
No.
Hyrule is not different. If you had sunk 100+ hours into BotW, then you can navigate TotK with your eyes closed. In fact, it's even easier than BotW because Goron Mountain no longer burns you alive, and Zora's domain has replaced a guantlet of electro powered lizard men attacking you with some mildly inconvenient sludge.
At this point, it might be worth diverting into a video about how BotW solved the "Open World Problem" which I would contend, it didn't. This is blowing smoke up arses, pissing in pockets. However it is a solution, or optimisation, to allow players to be more diverted rather than feeling like they are just following straight lines from tower to tower.
The Depths defeats this solution. The exact, intuitive way I played the depths was to march from one light root bulb (that illuminates the area and fills in the map) to the next. Yeah, I could have chosen not to do that, but I am going to bet almost nobody adopts a different approach, unless they hate the depths and only do the bare minimum to complete the main quest. Because the depths are dark, a lot of the ground hurts you to simply walk on it, and you can either painstakingly throw one of your 999 bright bloom seeds after another in free exploration of patches of dark each as intriguing as everywhere else you look, not knowing if you are going to run into a wall or merely a tree trunk, if you have almost reached the top of a cliff or are climbing a cavern wall with no ledge to arrive at.
Or after the 30 minutes it should take anyone to deduce that the Depths are just an inversion of the surface, you switch your map to surface hyrule and make your way toward light shrines discovered there because that is where the light roots will be.
And vice versa, because often it is easier to spot a light root in the depths as the only visible destination, than it is to find the corresponding shrine on the surface or sky.
The depths are in my opinion, a failed variation of the inverted castle dracula from Symphony of the Night. The evil ninja storyline is 80% of the depths and 80% of the new content offered by the depths. By and large though, there are no cities underground (there are two dungeons) there are coliseums where one can get loot, the lion-centaur coliseum probably representing the ultimate challenge in an otherwise trivially easy game. There are also areas where one can replay the dungeon bosses after unlocking them through the main quest, giving you access to powerful components for fusion weapons.
Otherwise, the depths are stark, monotonous and repetitive and monotonous and repetitive and redundant. They aren't even that dangerous as a mid-to-late game area. The gloom and the damage done by enemies in the depths simply reduces your capacity to heal. It doesn't actually do the damage that kills you. I routinely explored and illuminated whole regions of the depths with 1 and a half hearts in my life bar, because the gloom damage came off the empty part of my meter. I was more often killed by falling off a frustrating cliff than I was by anything in the depths.
After playing most of the game with three energy cells to power Zonai device constructions, I quickly accumulated enough resources to have 24 energy cells. A completely superfluous acquisition as anywhere it is necessary to use the zonai devices it's usually in a shrine challenge where power is infinite, or there are batteries sitting around. Energy cells allow the player to realize that with sufficient energy the device you are using will start flashing and disintegrate long before your power runs out, I guess to prevent a player from flying from one end of the sky to the other and trivializing the challenge.
The two new layers added to the Hyrule map are more an illusion of difference from BotW, and they break the triangle design principle that inspired players to get diverted.
Fallout 1 + 2 How to reuse locations and provide novelty
Fallout 2 came out in 1998, it is older than most gamers who play BotW and TotK. Like TotK it was a sequel. Like TotK narrative intersected gameplay to contrive a way to reset the playing experience.
In fallout 2, you are a descendent of the Vault Dweller protagonist of the first game, who wandered North and founded a tribe that now reveres the Vault 13 uniform as a garment for it's champion.
Here is the map for Fallout 1:
Here is a map of Fallout 2:
Granted they are not that legible, but betwixt the first and second games in this franchise, the top of the first game's worldmap becomes the bottom row of the second game's worldmap. Shady sands is now "NCR" this is a great way to incorporate familiarity and novelty into a sequel, whilst preserving exploration.
TotK is a big fail. The only location in my opinion that significantly changed between titles is Tarry Town, the town you can optionally construct in the first one. But it's still superficial. Like the Gerudo city now having an underground bomb shelter.
Majorca's Mask relative to Ocarina of Time, changed the setting completely while preserving many assets and mechanics, it added mask mechanics including transforming your avatar and built the game around that. TotK feels predominantly like the developer wanting another crack at BotW and needing to trick it's fanbase into playing the first game again with the patches.
This mattress because I'm guessing your favorite part of BotW was reading text exchanges with NPCs, you don't mash B to skip through vapid exchanges about where my cuckoos at. Because that is, if not the major component that makes TotK a fully fledged sequel rather than an expansion or DLC or patch, it is at least as significant as wells, caves and skydiving.
Most of the new areas are kind of reverse Tardis situations, they are smaller on the inside than they appear. The first time I shot myself into the sky and noticed I could island skip across to a massive mechanical sphere was kind of exciting. Upon discovering it was a mini-dungeon shrine puzzle, the novelty of its appearance wears off.
Play Conditioning vs Developer Insecurity
The Brunswick Street Gallery is a large gallery that often hosts multiple artists works at a time. One time a friend of mine had works exhibited there so I went to check them out and have a chat. The thing is, art doesn't take that long to take in, and often the exhibiting artist can only chat so long, because someone else will cut in to ask a question or say something or needs to say goodbye.
That same time, I wandered around checking out the other rooms, and wandered into a room where the artist, a stranger to me immediately started explaining his work to me. He had painted trays of meat from a supermarket, and told me it was a reference to some dutch master that had painted meat hanging in the butcher's shop.
This lowered the artist in my esteem. This was someone trying to be clever, but worried I wouldn't apprehend his cleverness because the cut was too deep, having to tell me how clever he really was, which is stupid. (In his defense, there was no chance I would look at his paintings of meat trays and say "how inspired, a modernising of Rembrandt [or whoever]")
TotK overwhelmingly feels like that to play. It feels like the developers put all these collectibles into BotW that most players don't need to use, so they got rid of fire, ice, bomb and electric arrows, and put in a mechanism where you can attach eyeballs that make your arrows homing arrows, and...electric, ice, bomb, and fire arrows...but but but there is also homing electric, ice and fire arrows.
And they saw that a lot of people didn't explore all the recipe and tonic options that BotW provided so, the added a gloom element that means it is very difficult to beat the final boss unless you cook some meals...
TotK is still, like it's predecessor riddled with features you don't need to use, like horses, recipes, zonai devices, arrow attachments, a dodge and parry combat system.
TotK though, has way more invisible rails to force you to use tedious features.
I think I had it from a Maximillion Dude video, that once upon a time in the history of Street Fighter III, one of the capcom developers came out to E3 or some convention, and he demonstrated the intent with which Urien had been designed to be played. Setting up traps to catch opponents in, that did satisfying amounts of damage. It just had never occured to American "gamers" to play him that way presupposing he was like Ryu or Ken or alternatively Zangeif, so they didn't use the features.
Sure, sometime that can be necessary, and there is the somewhat famous video-essay by youtuber hbomberguy on Bloodborne where he explores the concept of "play conditioning" where the director of Dead Souls appraised his creation and realized players used shields to adopt a passive form of play. So bloodborne would have no shields. Hbomberguy explores play conditioning as Bloodborne teaching him how to go back and replay the Dead Souls games more aggressively and with more enjoyment.
Another example that comes to mind, is the Batman Arkham series of games, where there was a feature called "detective mode" that allows the player to see enemy NPCs through walls and highlights objects of interest. It was meant to be this thing that you switched on to detect clues like fingerprints etc. The developers didn't realize that there was no real incentive to ever turn detective mode off, and would play the whole game seeing enemy skeletons.
It likely didn't break the game, it just highlighted a design flaw "why turn it off?" and to be honest, even though I played the sequels in that franchise I can't remember what if anything, they did to fix it.
So TotK has a new basic function of "fuse" in some ways it fixes problems that I had with BotW. For example, in BotW you had to be carrying in a weapon slot a massive leaf, that could be used to generate wind that allowed you to sail a raft. The leaf is what Good Eats host Alton Brown would call a "unitasker", it uses up an inventory slot which is scarce and it is good for pretty close to one thing and one thing only. The fuse function solves that by making anything potentially capable of carrying out that function, and far more objects can be used to generate gusts of wind by fusing them to a handle.
But there are other problems I didn't have, until I watched the above video about how BotW solved the open world problem, I didn't realize after 100+ hours playing BotW, that the enemy bases littered throughout the land were supposed to be enticing they were supposed to be something that would pique my curiosity and move towards so I could obtain weapons.
TotK uses the narrative that all weapons decay, to essentially force players to use the fuse function. That feels kind of like play conditioning - your weapon does almost no damage and it breaks, but fuse a rock to it and it doubles the damage and lasts longer.
It feels like play conditioning, but because you can fuse one object to one handle, there's actually not much you can do with fusion. It is the same with recipes - these combination features have low power laws. Which is to say, you can attach a spring to your sword and now at the end of a combo you don't just knock an enemy over you can send them flying. But you can't attach a lizard tail to a spring to your sword, which is to say, you can't get really creative with crazy combinations, and build a weapon that sends your opponent flying and then lassoos them back in, or allows you to flail a lazer around etc.
With the low power law, you have weapons you can thrust and weapons you can swing. Then you can thrust a blunt object or a sharp object or something that shoots out fire, or a beam, or a gust of wind. Most of these functions, aren't useful or at least are not necessary. Thus there's an appearance of opening up a world of possibilities and no real delivery of those possibilities. It's just a feature you are forced to use.
There is no non-tedious way to heal in TotK and Breath of the wild. It's not tedious to open up your inventory and eat 16 apples mashing the a button 32 times, or eat a meal, but you have to prepare that meal by holding a bunch of ingredients and dropping them into a cook pot. (Not to mention the tedium of collecting 16 apples). Or you can teleport to a hot spring you have located and then wait around for 3 minutes while you heal half a heart every 3 seconds. Or you teleport to a stable, walk inside and wait for the NPC to walk to the hotel side of the counter, choose a sleeping option and a short cutscene that heals you to full health or full health + some extra.
Catching fairies is tedious, teleporting to somewhere you can sleep is tedious, sitting in a hot spring is tedious, cooking meals are tedious. The new function of gloom makes cooking meals necessary, but only really for the end boss. Well one of two things is necessary - you either prepare a bunch of meals that can heal the specific damage done by the end boss, or Dark Souls like "git gud" and learn to read his telegraphed attacks and master the dodge-parry mechanic, that nowhere else helps you overcome the trivially easy opponents.
The thing is, this is only true of the first 3 phases of the endboss. The final battle is trivially easy, which is often what endboss final phases need to be for the middle part of the player skill curve to ever realistically finish the game.
I could have spent hours practicing fighting Gannon, because the first time I faced him I hadn't prepared enough meals that could heal gloom damage. Or I could reload, teleport out, spend 30 minutes preparing meals necessary for that one fight, and then go back and face him.
This sort of shit, doesn't come across to me as play conditioning, teaching me how to get more out of the game, through gameplay. It comes across as developer insecurity, making dud redundant features then lying awake at night wondering if anyone will ever use these dud redundant features so putting one thing in the game that mandates their use.
Nothing says developer insecurity more in TotK than schema stones and Zonai schematics, combined with the auto-build function. It screams to me "don't you realize what we've built here? How creative you could get, you could build an automated sprinkler system, or a tank! A tank you can drive for 30 seconds before the terrain renders it useless!" it is TotK having it both ways:
They want players to explore what they can build using the vehicle construction feature they imported into BotW, but they don't want it to be a subculture of people who play the game, who do not play it for 200 hours, or whatever is necessary to fully explore the worldmap and complete all the main quests, but for 800 hours and lift every rock and complete every minigame and just spend hours in the game jacking off doing things.
I feel like TotK want it to be a sensation, and that means not just the kind of freaks that figure out any % speed runs and glitches and optimized runs. They want every player to really embrace building vehicles to do specific things.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Hyrule I left a horse and never used the function again.
Princess Zelda just sucks.
This may be english voice actor specific. But I suspect, with Link being a silent protagonist, even in cutscenes there is just no chemistry between Link and Zelda. Zelda is a character, our protagonist is forced to be around, and her captivity in both BotW and TotK aren't not symbolic of Link's freedom to explore the world, but are literally Link's liberation.
In TotK Zelda is more present, because the developers "fixed" the memories function of BotW. In BotW Link inherited a camera with photos around Hyrule that you had to find, this was difficult even with a travelling painter giving you clues, so it really was an optional extra.
Zelda feels more present in this game, because memories are now unlocked via massive "geoglyphs" This time there are massive arrows literally visible from space that say "memory here stupid!" plus travelling old lady that tells you if one is nearby, or one you've missed.
The backstory to TotK is for the most part, disjointed and incoherent. More so than the story of BotW which managed to tell more in less time. Zelda has been de-sexualized, with shorter hair and asexual attire, so if there was any chemistry between her and Link in BotW, she is now a sexual non-entity.
Furthermore, in the past that she is zapped back to in the opening of the game, she embraces the fashions of the time and spends the game with tears painted on her face.
This requires context, specifically this context:
Japanese media has entered a new era of the "crying worm" protagonist. In the 90s through 2010s the archetype was "Kid Hungry" as described by the book "How *Not* to draw manga" a young boy who was very pure, always hungry and determined to triumph. With roots in Astro boy, we had Goku from Dragonball inspiring Luffy from One Piece, to Naruto of Naruto and a bunch of others.
These characters often do cry at some point, some point later in the story when beset by tragedy, like Luffy cries over the death of his brother etc.
The new trope, is to introduce a protagonist that better reflects the 21st centuries sensative new age boys, Japanese creators in great numbers feel it is the height of character development to give readers/watchers a protagonist who spends most of the first chapters crying about how useless and helpless he is. Snivelling weaklings and cowards, I guess because it is then viewed as rewarding when they become superhero baddasses later on after they stop feeling sorry for themselves.
(Like everyone's favorite character arc in Saving Private Ryan, the guy who cowers as Nazi's head up the stairs to kill his brave companions, including a soldier he had previously spared the life of. Having gotten better men than he killed through his own inaction, when the battle is done he finds his vindictiveness and kills the soldier he had previously spared.)
Princess Zelda fits this mould. That's where I think it has come from. BotW had something as you approached the end game, there was something about NPCs in unison asking you to go end Zelda's century of constant battle against the abstract calamity Gannon.
TotK has something as well, in that Zelda makes the ultimate sacrifice to restore and empower the Master Sword so the Link of the future can seal the demon king Gannon away. Except, that at no point did I believe that Zelda wouldn't be restored from the condition of being the Light Dragon. Zelda is such an awful personality, truth was I didn't dare hope the developers would have the balls to kill her off tragically and set Link free.
In BotW the reward for finding all the memories on the camera, is one final picture that is hard to find to uncover the final memory. It wouldn't surprise me if the data said this was an achievement that only 60% of players had unlocked.
In this one, after you unlock all the visible from space geoglyphs, puzzles that take literal seconds to solve by finding the filled in tear. The game literally tells you and shows you on the map where to find the final memory - which reveals that Zelda ate the magic thing and became the light dragon to restore the master sword and through some variation of the grandfather paradox wasn't the light dragon through BotW that could have descended and helped free herself from Calamity Gannon, but is the light dragon now. (The inconsistent continuity issues further bolster the case that TotK is not a sequel, but a patch people had to pay $70 for).
The game really wants you to uncover this plot twist, because there are so many redundant paths to discovering Zelda is the light dragon, that I had the master sword and 5th sage, before the game notified me that I needed to discover that this is the thing to do.
But it falls short of BotW. Zelda has been asleep since the past, not sufferring or locked in eternal conflict. She basically sleeps through most of the drama, and is already sad before Gannon kills queen Sonia.
BotW she whined about how useless she is, and resented Link for basically being able to do what he is supposed to, and I think we were supposed to identify with Zelda's frustration and impotence, and she somewhat takes responsibility for her personality defects by tying up Gannon while Link heals.
I'm sure some people will be like "I love her" but Zelda caused me visceral pain where I would hit skip habitually if she showed up in a cut scene.
Another contributing factor might be TotK trivial easiness. This game is rated E10+ for everyone, meaning this has to be a game that a dumbass ten year old can understand as well as grown ass adults. This means often Zelda and other NPC's are standing at the bottom of a ladder with an arrow next to it that says "UP HERE STUPID!" and before you can get on that ladder NPCs like Zelda interrupt and are like "look Link!" and the camera pans over to the sign that says "UP HERE STUPID!" in flashing letters and says "I think we are supposed to climb this ladder!" before giving control back to the player.
Like an overcorrection that feedback from BotW was "Too hard." or that developer insecurity that most players won't find the forgotten temple or even-tide island, so now they have leaned heavily on the rails guiding Link to using everything as intended.
Zelda is that girl in highschool that was a prefect or head of student council that nobody liked but that the school celebrated because they were the students they wished to churn out. People solely dedicated to padding their resume, lacking any personality or interests of their own.
One of the memories of BotW involves Zelda wanting Link to eat a frog as part of an experiment, the closest she ever comes to being playful, maybe someone you might actually voluntarily spend time with. Alas, there's nothing like this in TotK, make her character a 10 year old boy, and most people would question why they are supposed to care that Zelda is missing, and what happened to Zelda and how to rescue Zelda.
When the gods appear out of the machine to restore Zelda to her human form, we are given a final quicktime event where a-la "Predators" Link regains consciousness in the sky with his status quo arm and we are given one on game prompt "hold R to dive to Zelda".
So of course I wanted to see if I could let her fall to her death. I just sat there watching, avoiding the quicktime event. All I expected was that if you don't dive to rescue her it would give you a game over and option to try again. But no, at a certain altitude both Link and Zelda stop falling. If you try to dive, you remain suspended in mid air. All you can do is drift over to Zelda and rescue her as intended.
And this wasn't me bored during a heat wave trying to break a game I had already clocked and find easter eggs and hidden jokes. My first instinct, impulse was to see if there was any possible way to free Link permanently from the yoke of Zelda. It was just implausible that Link wouldn't request a transfer to the Twilight Kingdom or the land of Majorca's mask. Or seek permanent sanctuary behind the walls of Gerudo town where literally everyone, including the elderly Gerudo's is a better prospect of company than Zelda.
Zelda embodies Nassim Nicholas Taleb's aphorism "The height of wit is to insult somebody without offending them, nerdiness is the opposite." Zelda is a nerd, offending me without any malicious intent.
In these open-world games, Zelda is not a McGuffin. What Zelda is, is she's the cousin of the woman that lived across the street when I was five and my mother informs me 25 years later that she's had a baby, as though I would be interested or care. Zelda is an acquaintance in BotW and TotK because she can't participate in the actual game that Link plays. She has less utility than the master sword, which you might feel motivated to recover. But Zelda doesn't help you play the game in any way shape or form, her rescue in both games indicates literally that play time is over.
Twee Fail
Zelda isn't the only character that sucks. One Christmas, my Aunt brought a strawberry salad. It wasn't bad, it worked, yet I would guesstimate that most Australians go to their graves before combining strawberries and green leaves with balsamic. Similarly, when I first went to Japan I was presented with a "potato pizza" my best guess is still that Japanese chefs saw a photo of a Hawaiian pizza and guessed that the lumps on it were potato.
If you ever try Japanese potato pizza, you will probably say "you know what? It's not terrible."
The Japanese are also obsessed with cuteness. Just as you might never put potato on a pizza, if you were writing a neo-noir gritty murder mystery you would probably never think to include a twee little girl with a speech impediment as the partner of your hard boiled detective. I think a lot of westerners see these "kawaii" inserts into, basically everything and are surprised when they try it to say "this isn't terrible."
Then there's Toni-Toni Chopper:
I love One Piece, I've been reading it since 2001, in it's 4th year of publication. Chopper, a twee anthropomorphic reindeer is hugely popular in Japan. I hate him. I could gladly erase him from One Piece entirely, he has never really worked for me, and this is quite an achievement. This is an artist that can present you with character designs like this and this and this and whatever your initial impression you see the character designs work.
But Chopper never has, he remains this out of place twee gag, that in Japan is apparently mandatory and they cannot engage in a story without some insufferable twee character, but for me is at best "not terrible".
Zelda has numerous characters that make me cringe from their twee-ness. Purah whose cutscenes I reflexively skip like 1 second of Purah and I'll hit whatever button necessary to get away from Purah if the switch actually had a mechanism that locked up an arm with my only way to skip a Purah cutscene being to gnaw through my own flesh and bone I would be writing this post with one hand, Josha who appears to be a twee replacement for Purah's even more twee incarnation in BotW, Tulin who could be a knock off Paw Patrol character and curiously not Riju who has been sexulized since we saw her last in BotW in a strange contrast to Zelda. Yunobo is just sufferable, with his idiosynchratic "goro" on the end of each sentence meant to be a parody of insufferable teenage boys that end every sentence with "bro".
As stated, if there is something Japanese are good at when it comes to media, it is incorporating cutsie characters in a way that is surprisingly okay. Perhaps for the same reason they have paedophilia problems, the Japanese are good at having cute kid friendly characters deal with pretty heavy material like death, war, genocide, persecution, bullying etc.
Zelda in previous titles, has been an exemplar of such - Ocarina of Time has your character travel to and from a post apocalyptic future, Majora's Mask has a nightmarish moon decaying into the surface every three in-game days destroying all life until you can figure out a way to liberate skull-kid from his loneliness and the cursed Majora's Mask.
Windwaker is a story of two kids forced to grow up and face an ancient nihilistic Gannon who had previously destroyed the whole world. It can work, it's just a question of moderation.
TotK takes twee moderation and throws it out the window. The forest children are twee enough. Purah was arguably more insufferable in BotW, but she was literally off to the side of the story and the world map, where in TotK she has been aged up so sweaty faced mouth breathers can feel okay jacking off to fan arts of her but also placed in the center of the map and the main story line. Main quests in BotW were dispensed by Impa who is over a century old and looks like it, or an old potato, take your pick.
This is given to Purah, and there was some satisfaction that I had recovered the master sword and the 5th sage Mineru before facing phantom Gannon while she's suggesting clues to lead me to the big obvious storm cell in the sky that is clearly another dungeon.
So much of how I played the game, can be explained by the motivation to avoid twee characters like Purah, Josha, Robbie and Tulin and insufferable characters like Zelda and Hudson for as long as possible. I did the lightning temple first because every single Gerudo character is more likeable than every other character in the game. Master Kohga leader of the Yiga clan is the only joke character that works.
Master Kohga tries way too hard and is oblivious to his own shortcomings, that's his character. But Zelda, Purah, Josha, Robbie and Tulin are all characters written by someone trying too hard and oblivious to their own shortcomings.
Now, let's talk about the big problematic of Japanese media, embodied in TotK by Purah and Riju ~ paedophelia...
I can personally testify, that more than one Japanese person has asked me whether Australia has a widespread problem with paedophilia as Japan does. Basically the context I had, was male teachers asking me if Australia did anything to stop male teachers from grooming little girls and fucking them. These were frustrated people who had to sit by and watch as colleagues treated their place of employment as a harem.
There are many articles about Japan's normalization of paedophilia and I found at least one paper published doing thorough research on potential causes historic and contemporary.
It is one thing I really dislike about Japanese media in general - it's depiction not of women, but of little girls, and I wouldn't be that surprised if it turned out the whole world is as into it as Japan apparently is. It makes sense to me, that given as recently as the middle ages girls got married off to grown men at 12 years old, or as soon as they got their first period, and generally part of the civilizing process has been raising the legal age of marriage, requiring consent and raising the age of consent etc. I would not be surprised if a large number of men for biological reasons can find 12~13 year old's physically attractive, but not to the exclusion of women up to the age of 60 (basically whenever Madonna made her last disastrous cosmetic procedure decision) a kind of quasi paedophilia, subsequently able to live normal lives, but should the society permit it, enjoy a bit of Japanese illustrated pornography about tentacle monsters raping school girls.
My feeling would be, looking at the purported consequences for Japan, that the civilizing process of not sexualizing children and not infantilizing sexually mature women with "kawaii" aesthetics should probably continue. TotK is not the worst offender, but the treatment of Riju vs the treatment of Zelda is perplexing.
Complicating this, is that along with being sexualized, Riju just seems like a fun, confident, self assured and adventurous personality where Zelda is a fucking draaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag of a character. So while my sense is that Zelda is age appropriate for Link to be a love interest, and Link is a demon slaying, mountain climbing, sea faring, cave exploring adventurer aka has agency, and in the continuity of the plot Zelda is literally his only contemporary from the time they grew up in about 100 years before the events of BotW, it is a shame that Zelda is someone you ask for help locating a book in the library from, not a person one would ever choose to spend time with lacking a strong guilt motivation like you should relieve her of a century long battle with Gannon, or you should reverse her transformation into an immortal dragon.
The Open World-Narrative Trade Off
If you are the kind of person who's mind is blown by having a largish sandbox in which to play, here is my suggestion: throw away your switch and live your life. Life is an open sandbox and there's things you can do like form a meaningful connection with another player, or get laid. Sadly with the normalization of "gaming" as a life style, your best bet for getting laid may not be to play less video-games but more.
So, starting with the basics, you can watch a movie. A movie presents you with no choices as you consume media, movies are hit and miss. A lot of movies get made and the supply of good movies (excluding an archived backlog which has to be navigated) has never met the demand for good movies. Probably even including the backlog of great movies made since the Lumiere brothers or whatever.
Then you give a bit of agency to a movie viewer, and it becomes a kind of game - like there was a Black Mirror interactive episode and a Kimmy Schmidt interactive movie on Netflix, are they good? Well I'm guessing they will make nobodies top 10 lists, even for top 10 episodes of Black Mirror or top 10 episodes of Kimmy Schmidt.
I can't say that the concept of an interactive film is inherently bad because the sample size is so small. It is similar with choose-your-own-adventure books, we have this blip in the 80s & 90s of "Fighting Fantasy" stories set predominantly in a Tolkein-esque generic high fantasy setting. I read a bunch, I have some nostalgia, but even at the time they kind of didn't work, like was I going to start again if I lost a fight with a greater acid slug? Did I even get out pencil paper and dice? No.
And then you can have a pure game, which maybe doesn't exist yet, where you have so much agency you can essentially play a Calvin-Ball simulator but maybe think of a Tetris-simulator, that's a Tetris where you are unconstrained by the pre-determined shapes, you can build your own shapes and then play tetris with your own custom shapes, perhaps in your own custom field - 2d, 3d, spherical, moebius strip etc. That's a game, but there's no story, no cutscenes just gameplay to hold your attention.
From these points we can create a continuum of "pure game" to "pure narrative" and moving along that continuum involves a trade off. Every time you give a player agency, it costs you narrative. Every time you shore up the narrative it costs the player agency.
This is a total aside, but it is why I suspect video-game movie adaptations suck. The 2023 Mario movie is financially successful but my impression is that the broad adult consensus is that it sucks. The burden of narrative is lower in a videogame because you can hook the player in with agency. Nobody writes a book where most of the prose is given over to walking from A to B killing zombies (nor is this true for George Romero films or Sean of the Dead or Evil Dead movies), something that can be highly engaging and satisfying in a game. A story about hammering nails, will likely never be more engaging and entertaining than hammering nails.
At some point, you get a pretty basic and common game feature of "multiple endings" for me Bioshock is a good example - there's essentially one choice that leads to two endings - do you harvest the little girls or spare them? Harvesting drives you towards a "bad" ending, but rewards you in-game, and vice-versa. Neither endings are great in terms of being compelling, memorable or satisfying, they are mere serviceable endings that point back to the journey, not the destination being the point. Same deal with games like Dishonored, however the good-evil dilemma does change how characters in-game treat you and the atmosphere.
But building a narrative that truncates is costly, the more endings available the costlier it is, and the cost is usually at the depth of the narrative, hence whenever you get multiple endings, be it Bioshock, Dishonored or Bloodborne, you get short cut scenes that break down to "oh look he's happy!" or "oh look he's sad..." or "oh look he's a slug now."
Furthermore, consider the costs multiple endings impose upon a sequel. Did the avatar of the last game usurp the evil king and become the new tyrant, or did they depose the tyrant, install an anarcho-collective and retire to the countryside? Typically when producing a sequel a developer just picks one to be cannon. Fighting games are a great example, in Mortal Kombat II we learn the winner of the first and second games cannonically was Liu Kang, even though in all installments you can beat the game and get an ending with every character.
Bioshock infinite abandoned the multiple ending. It took agency away and created a better product - a more satisfying ending. A similar principle applies to Boss battle endings - having more ways to kill a boss, like deplete their health meter or knock them off a platform, or run down a clock generally sacrifices a quicktime event or cutscene that depicts a more dramatic/satisfying end to the boss fight. Agency up, narrative down.
One notable exception being the comparisons of Fallout 1 + 2 endbosses. For the record, I like both a lot. I enjoy most, the contrast between the two. In Fallout 1, for any build you made, the Vualt Dweller could defeat the master playing to those strengths. If you were big and tough you can just shoot it out and kill the master. If you were smart, you could alert the master to the futility of his grand plan and he commits suicide in his despair. If you were sneaky, you could not interact with the master at all and set off a nuclear device in his backroom.
My impression is, the consensus on Fallout 2's endboss, whom you have to fight to the death with every dialogue option leading to "enough talk, I'm going to kill you now" was disliked by most early Fallout fans.
Anyway, the state of affairs is, that if the agency-vs-narrative dichotomy isn't an ironclad one, it is a generally sound rule. Maybe large language AI's will provide the necessary horsepower to generate satisfying story consequences for every possible deviation a player can make.
TotK I feel, wanted to have it both ways. In my waters I feel it the case that the developers knew BotW had the weakest story in the entire Zelda franchise, that the story and characters were the game's biggest shortcomings, the natural product of giving players so much agency and non-linearity.
So TotK patches rails back in to shore up the story, at the cost of both player agency and storyline.
Looking to Gannon, Gannon is seemingly improved by once again being a personified character with motives and ambitions, rather than an abstract calamity or computer virus that can also for some reason summon Moblins.
But Gannon sucks in virtually the opposite way Zelda sucks. There's nothing wrong with his design, personality, characterization. He suffers from having to be contrived into the same endboss as BotW in a known location that a player can proceed to at a time of their choosing.
This means, that Gannon's story arc is that he is king of the Gerudo's thousands of years ago when the alien furries established the Kingdom of Hyrule. He attacks the furries and fails, so he joins them, gets close through deceptive magic and murders the queen to steal her stone and then summons an army of moblins that takes over the kingdom.
Then he is sealed away, only to be released by Link and Zelda in the introductory sequence. Once freed of his seal, he proceeds to wait in a cave in the bottom of a pit until Link comes and kills him.
The Game You Can't Imagine Playing
Now imagine instead, a sequel to BotW where instead of being a padded patch of the original game, it was substantially different. Imagine if the endboss Gannon was someone you could track down and confront at any time, but if you chose to save the Rito people from the blizzard, Gannon would take over the Gerudo people's, and if you chose to save the Gerudo people Gannon would enslave the Gorons of Goron city. Now if you went to liberate the people Gannon had overcome, this would have repurcussions that differed from if you went to help out a region that Gannon had not yet targeted.
TotK has phasing, if you beat the Wind Temple, the blizzard stops and that region becomes a lot easier to explore and traverse. But it is binary, on-off. Not conditional if-then. TotK could have been an open world game to track down and defeat or frustrate Colonel Kurtz.
This might be too complicated a change. Consider a simpler way that this game would have been better by having Townships or Cities in the sky or in the depths. It would have been better if this new calamity had seriously fucked with the geography of Hyrule, rather than being largely cosmetic.
It would have been a better game, if it indicated that something had been accomplished in BotW, between Fallout 1 + 2, and through to Fallout: New Vegas (the last time I hade any interest in the franchise) Shady Sands becomes a city, then a government that begins to annex tribal lands and recivilize the land of Fallout.
In this game, Goron city had an eruption that makes the surface now safe without elixirs or armor, there's a new establishment of "Lookout Landing" that I spent as little time as humanly possible in, another village has Mushrooms now, another has some ruins in the hills around it, and the beachside village has become the new Tarry Town that you can rebuild and improve.
The progress made by Zelda and Hyrule since BotW is basically nothing more than slapping a coat of paint on shit. There's no sense that Hyrule post Calamity Gannon was essentially different from Hyrule during the Calamity Gannon era. The roads might be safer, but the major trading merchant sells insects and a few arrows.
The reawakening of Gannon creates some abnormal climate events. Link hasn't rebuilt a Hyrulean army or defence force. Such that there's missions that are basically "we assumed when the calamity ended, that danger no longer existed, help us out Link, you are the only person who knows how to use a sword, bows and arrows."
Link is not an exceptional hero of Hyrule, he is literally the only guy capable of anything in Hyrule a kingdom of inept infants. Gannon's plans essentially require complete non-resistance to ever succeed.
Games I've Played Since that I Enjoyed Far More
Keeping in mind, that in so far as there is a game inside the game TotK, consisting of 4 dungeons and 1 endboss, unless you are in some minority of players that is going to "git gud" and charge to the endboss and get some abridged ending, I estimate that the game inside TotK probably lasts between 8 and 10 hours, those dungeons and endboss, but it might take a minimum of 80 hours to get there by grinding through easy puzzles to build up stats and collecting resources. Like if Batman: Arkham Asylum was 90% lockpicking minigame and 10% batman taking down henchmen and bosses.
I don't enjoy having to track down the Light Dragon 6 times to obtain the necessary regents to max out the new hero's tunic, it was hours of tedium. Compelling tedium.
So after I finished TotK and felt satisfied I'd done everything I wanted to in the game, and unfortunately that necessitated me doing so much more. I took a few days off to recover from RSI, and then I played Nobody Saves The World developed by Drinkbox Studio, who made platformers Guacamelee and Guacamelee 2, and are now venturing into RPG territory. And it was great, in two or three days I was done with it, I'd unlocked all the forms and upgraded the ones I enjoyed.
Then I played Roadwarden a largely text based RPG that I replayed twice once I got the hang of resource management. That game made me want to 100% it and it didn't take a fortnight to do so, while driving me to resent it.
Then after watching some of history's "Alone" series that my sister put me onto, and discovering a few survivalist Youtube channels, I got a craving to replay The Flame In The Flood, literally straightforward and even kind of repetitive, I enjoyed replaying it more than being absorbed into TotK.
If you cut away all the mechanical "solutions" that force you to actually play and explore TotK open world, collecting resources, learning recipes, taking photos of everything, solving trivially easy but time consuming puzzles to get inventory slots and health and stamina, and just turned it into Ocarina of Time, Windwaker obviously TotK would rate as one of the worst Zelda titles, down there with perhaps Zelda II on the NES, just because it is brief and largely contentless. But at least it would have been fun to play, before ending outrageously fast.
I should mention, that the game I played before TotK was "Return to Monkey Island" honestly one of the most joyless, worst gaming experiences I have ever played, so TotK smashes that out of the park. I can't get any sales figures on "Return to Monkey Island" on Steam it has just over 7K reviews that are somehow "Very positive". By contrast, and now that I think about it the game I was actually replaying when I started TotK Hollow Knight released in 2017, not only is a better game to replay than playing TotK (largely a replay of BotW) but has almost 270K reviews for all time. So as shit as Return to Monkey Island was, effectively nobody has ever played it, whereas there are autistic kids and adults the world over getting carpal tunnel syndrome trying to 100% the Korok seeds as we speak, because Zelda is a big brand.
Conclusion
TotK kinda sucks, unless bashing a log with a hammer is your jam. My final thought is more of a concern, that game developers are misfiring on this new feedback mechanism of video-essays. When I compare video-games to an actual game like basketball, both prompt a lot of youtube content that is people of no particular qualification doing in depth analysis as to what is going on. (Or worse, people with a social sciences qualification making a 5 hour plus video essay titled "Modern Odyssey - A literary analysis of One Piece" 3 seconds of this video-essayists voice and I know I don't give a shit about what he has to say.)
Basketball is helpful for me, because it is showing up the limitations of analysis, almost as we speak. Literal armies of scientists along with keen amateurs now pour over statistics trying to prove Lebron James is better than his career says it is, or that this year's number 1 draft prospect is going to be the best draft pick since Tim Duncan.
If we go back 8 years when Steph Curry changed the league by hammering in 3-pointer after 3-pointer you can bet there is a Youtube Archive of pundits proclaiming that the league is changed forever. Then flashforward 5 years and teams built around having 4 snipers around the 3 point perimeter bomb out and the precipitously deemed redundant big man is revived with two centers and one power forward being the top 3 contenders for MVP and all three of them having collected the last 5 MVP awards.
In the history of the Modern Era NBA (post 1976 merger with the ABA) draft, only 8 number one picks have won championships. Only one of them presently is in the discussion for greatest of all time (GOAT) being Lebron James who is currently in the process of being dropped from that discussion after almost 20 years of the media and teenagers trying to will that to be true. (See "Space Jam: A New...Legacy?")
Many of the number one draft pick players that have won championships - Dwight Howard, Andrew Bogut and Andrew Wiggins were not the best players on their teams when they won their rings, Dwight coming off the bench. 2 of the successful number 1 draft picks Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving both won their championships as part of Lebron "superteams".
My point being, that there's a whole industry of basketball scouts who essentially do what video-essayists do and generate opinions about products - in this context basketball prospects. And they aren't very good at their jobs. Taking Hakeem Olajuwon over Jordan isn't the most egregious miss, it's 2 championships to 6 (with Jordan handily retiring for one of those), and Kobe Bryant was a 17 year old kid drafted out of high school was a risky prospect worthy of the ominous 13th pick. Then there's Jordan picking Kwame Brown, and personally destroying his confidence, and Portland choosing Greg Odom over Kevin Durant that are just total fucking busts.
Furthermore, in the age of modern analytics, the NBA has gotten worse at identifying number 1 draft picks, not better. Kareem, Johnson, Worthy and Bird were all taken at number 1 and all dominated the 80s. Nor are regular season MVP awards good at predicting immanent or future leaders of championship teams, but MVP is more complicated.
And this is basically why I suspect TotK sucks. They listened to the fans as to how to improve a game they loved. Tears of the Kingdom embodies the words of Dale Carnegie (attributed without evidence to Henry Ford) "If I asked people what they wanted they would have said 'faster horses'" or maybe TotK embodies "A camel is a horse designed by a committee" with the modern committee being nerds on you tube, as evidenced by literal arrows that now point to hidden children of the forest, big visible from space signs to tell you where memories can be unlocked, a game set on the same fucking map with all major points of interest in the same fucking locations, with a direct corresponding inverted map for the depths and sparse sky islands that probably in retrospect exist in order to recycle the old game map ("Throw the 5% new map on top!") while simultaneously having no real continuity with BotW, it's like the anti-Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker trilogy that gave us entirely new non-linear open world maps while preserving story continuity. Beware time-travel I guess.
Game developers need to be pushed back into having to figure things out, and I guess take risks again. Selling fans the same game twice might be both safe and lucrative, but it doesn't make great games and TotK is not a great game. It kinda sucks.
