in case anyone else is annoyed at how aggressively this game likes to despawn your zonai creations, you can at least prevent this from happening during exploration when you venture too far from your vehicle on foot by attaching a dragon part to it. apparently the game has a different despawning radius for item types and the dragon parts have an astronomically higher distance than anything else in the game. it apparently even works if you replicate the dragon part using autobuild and zonaite, so you can include it in your blueprint if you want. you’ll still lose your vehicles entering and exiting shrines, unfortunately, but this makes air-based exploration so much smoother.
Footage of clearing a shrine as intended https://twitter.com/DaNinjaManZ/status/1662208885602783233
Dragon part here meaning like the various heads with mouths that spew stuff? Fire, cold, electric, beam?
Oh wait there’s claws and horns and stuff from actual dragons nm
yeah sorry from the great dragons.
an added benefit of using real dragon parts is that they glow brightly from a great distance making it extremely easy to locate your vehicle if you lose it
I guess it’s a testament to how well built all of this game is that even utilizing an in-game exploit like this for a basic QoL enhancement feels coherent with the narrative, like it actually works because the dragon parts can function as a magical protective charm or something
the “lakitu holds the camera” nintendo of the 90s would’ve came up with a weird little guy who you sometimes catch sweeping up contraptions
keep seeing clips and screenshots and stuff where people have all of this sick armour and 20 hearts and stuff and i’m like 45 hours in somehow and feel like i’m barely scratching the surface
some kind of weird post-twitch fomo
Big plot spoiler and associated screenshot
I really liked the direction they took with the memories this time around since it actually leads to a sacrifice of consequence. Early in the game I assumed they’d resolve Zelda’s time-isekai with some sort of similar magic and the ‘false Zelda’ certainly sets this up but instead they take a pretty weird direction which feels nice for a game of this scale. Immortality prisons are a thing that really stick in my head from fiction and this is a really well done one that actually makes the weird prophesied legends in Zelda kinda fucked in TotK’s perspective. Not only is Zelda alive in this dragon form for countless millennia, she presumably lives through a significant amount of other Ganon defeats, powerless to do anything about them. That is, assuming the Zonai Hyrule is really the start of the kingdom. Who knows, lore is fucked in this series.
My favourite screenshot so far:
This was probably the best narrative moment for me and likely won’t be topped by much else.
IMHO that twist is the only part of the main quest that felt like a human thought it up and not a table of brand managers.
Trying to play the game without the paragliderkeeps getting me into increasingly hilarious situations, and the game does a bang-up job of making it seem as if you can improvise your way around its absence (figuring out how to leave the fish-shaped isletwas fun) until you hit a brick wall–or more likely floor. Sorry, Sidon, you’re going to have to wait a hundred hours or two until I can get back to you.
for what it’s worth, there is at least one way to fully negate fall damage that I’m aware of. and I think it’s less of a bug than an exploit
putting it in spoiler text just in case:
as long as you are operating a steering stick, even if it’s attached to nothing, you will not take any fall damage from any height
I have played 40 hour, cleared one (1) dungeon, and gotten maybe 3 memories back, but i’ve also got 10 hearts and 2 stamina bars and a bunch of good weapons including the master sword as of last night (which was really fucking cool to do), so i guess i’m well prepared
I went in to get the master sword long before I was prepared for it, and boy howdy, I got smacked around hard.
I gotta say I appreciate how this game flips the script and requires stamina instead of hearts to pull the master sword this time around, because I always put all my points into stamina first and I felt burned by botw for it. but now I feel seen 
Stamina is also just a little less valuable with the advent of zonai vehicles. Just make an air bike you can get just about anywhere. I feel let down by how little I had to open heart gated doors after the introduction making it feel like it was gonna be something you’d see more of. Right now I’m what I would imagine is a point of no return but I’ve decided to polish a few things off before taking the last leap.
I’m still clapping and applauding how its much more fun to complete the depths map and it is it’s own progression metric for shrine completion at least. Not that I feel the need to complete them all for some gold star but i am compelled to at least find them and have them in reach when I feel like finishing them. I’ll say again how much i hated sniffing out the edge shrines with nothing but a beeper and refusing to hunt down NPCs that might have the hint to get to it.
yeah the depths alone is making this game for me. I’ve done the four main dungeons now; they still feel kinda thin but still significantly better than botw, and they feel more like “real” zelda dungeons, mostly in a good way. I liked the desert dungeon the most. but I love spelunking the most. I wish there were more massive cave complexes like the secret passage between lookout landing and hyrule castle
i kind of find the depths a bummer for some reason. they’re not very interesting to me, it’s just like one environment and it’s annoying to navigate. maybe i haven’t been down there enough though
What I like the most about the depths are finding the lightroots and shooting brightbloom seeds everywhere to push back all the darkness. I wish there was a similar way to unfog the surface and sky maps but I will settle for tracking down the towers.
Been playing this for about a week now. Really liking how it seems to reward exploration even more than BotW. So far I’ve done the wind temple and fire temple, currently heading towards what I’m guessing is the water temple, in the Zora territory. Game’s good. Better than BotW. The building and weapon fusing stuff is great.
The puzzling is maybe a little too easy and the combat is maybe a little too hard but I don’t really know what the sweet spot would be. My opinion might change after a couple dozen hours. This is how I remember BotW being though so whatever.
This time I’m going to make an effort to actually check out those labyrinths at the corners of the map that I never got around to in BotW. But probably not until after I’ve hit those other two dungeons and upgraded my health/armors.
I feel like the combat is better here than in botw but I can’t put my finger on why? I’m just enjoying it much more than I did in that game. maybe the weapon fusing is part of that. fights feel a lot more improvised in a fun way here
I actually think they just cranked up the defense on a lot of the regular enemies and made flurry rush a little less turnkey because of crowd control etc so that you have to improvise more
it’s one of many things about this game that’s both better than botw and better than it had to be… the combat is frequently really good and challenging for being very straightforward / not especially beef gated / not as weighty or commitment-heavy as a soulslike