Zelda: Cries of the Commonwealth

[Arus]

This game is exhausting to play. It’s so dense with systems and ideas and its all really engaging and cool but also sort of driving my brain into overdrive. Maybe a few extended breaks will alleviate this fatigue.

[jsnlv]

For flying enthusiasts: apparently, if you want to build a flying device that incorporates a wing, you can mount the wing backwards to prevent it from automatically despawning when you travel too far. It should still provide the gliding effect, as well.

[L]

OK, seriously, after the Ganondorf fight, why does he turn into a creature looking exactly like Calamity Ganon in its cloudy serpent form, only for A) that creature to turn into an entirely different creature immediately afterward, B) that creature to be destroyed entirely, even though uniting Calamity Ganon and Ganondorf would tie both "Ganon"s together succinctly and mirror the original plot arc of OoT Ganondorf, AND in a game that explicitly has time travel in it allowing this causation to actually make sense?

This HAS to be an awkward pivot in development. Either that or an extremely clunky sequel hook (“turns out he wasn’t REALLY destroyed!”). I’m still upset nonetheless. Like, come ON.

[Cerium]

Doing everything but the korok seeds for both, my switch tells me I played BOTW for 140 hours and TOTK for 210 which does little to dispel the whole GOTY edition + DLC content feeling here.

There was an article around the time of BOTW’s release that logged how long it took each successive zelda entry to become Open World, noting an exponential growth that zenithed at skyward swords 5+ preamble. Nintendo themselves even commented on this and you can tell this was taken to heart with the last game practically SCREAMING at you early on until you get the paraglider.

TOTK’s response to this widely acclaimed section being to backtrack the fuck out of it and chiseling a series of hand holding tutorials that do nothing to foster any kind of experimentation is a good microcosm of the game itself; a game so gleeful to undo any innovations that BOTW made to a more digestible slurry that once you start noticing it, it appears everywhere.

After a few decades of depreciating level designs in dungeons Aonuma et al tried something a bit different with Divine Beasts and rather than improve on then the game rehashes older dungeon instead with no coherent design in the name of Open World. Rather than rebalance weapon degradation so the series could have the closest sense of danger since the original a Get Out Of The Jail free card was made with fusing in one of the worst QoL examples in recent memory resulting in scale tipping in levels FromSoft often gets accused of but never accurately. This is even reflected in the world itself where rather than building on density, giving something worthwhile to do in such a large map, the area is stretched thrice providing THREE barren plains of empty air with Movement As Fun as an empty promise of anything to explore.

If the sky plane feels like another developer intended cheat code in cast your Fast Travel wasn’t FAST enough (something Gravity Rush 2 included with a mechanical purpose nearly a decade ago!) the true oversight comes with the cave system which could have been once of the best idea’s nintendos had in years with a sense of interconnected subterrarian networks beneath the surface but instead these are only done in isolation in favour of a flatter, sterile plane that mimics lightroot locations in case you thought there might be any fresh ideas here (compare this to Elden Ring which eases you into a mini map that increases by GIGANTIC proportions as you explore and THEN dumps an entire sublevel that’s a different space to anything the game’s shown you at that point).

Not even going into the abysmal hit rate of Interesting Shrine to Number Shrine that feels much more skewed in BOTW’s favour but after 350 hours of these I can’t be bothered to confirm that or the cooldown timers on abilities that mimic the worst excesses of platinum’s last decade. Heard some grumbles about that recent Link’s Awakening remake which I haven’t played but given the remake BOTW got, maybe they should try something else.

[extrabastardformula]

Feel like the temples really are pretty much old school zelda dungeons with the main difference being that you walk in the front door with the key treasure in the form of the sage, instead of finding the treasure in a Big Chest. Other big differences is downgrading the Yiga clan from the loathesome assassins of BOTW to the Zelda equivalent of Team Rocket

[extrabastardformula]

Beat the main quest, so time for gripes despite me otherwise being harmed by this game.

Fuck silver bokoblins. I thought the whole point of bokoblins was to have these sort of popcorn enemies that you have to deal with swarms of. These damage sponges are the opposite of fun, transforming a headshot from a satisfying way to pick off one or two monsters before the alert sounds into a farce where it flops to the ground like an Italian footballer before getting up and reaching for the horn, only to be hit with another obligatory headshot and repeat the cycle five or six times. Bleh.

I haven’t played a large chunk of the Zelda series so I’m not sure what this chapter was a throwback to, but it definitely felt like it was meant to make me feel something for a previous part of the series, the way that BoTW had vibes like the first entry in the series.

I know it’s metagaming and not playing as intended, but I tried not to kill more than I had to to keep the enemy types from leveling up, but the main quest line sort of required it. Still, it made me notice how absolutely packed the overworld is with monsters and how there are pretty clear boundaries they won’t cross.

Conversely the depths are empty as heck until late game areas, outside of yiga clan bozos.

Weapon degradation still blows, even if they’ve given an in game reason that all of the weapons suck. The need to stock up because they keep breaking meant that collecting at least some korok seeds was important

Feel like I missed a lot in the skyrealms (is this a wind waker throwback with every single island having a BIG THING but all the islands are so far apart?) especially in the stormy region where there was just no visibility.

[MimeParadox]

@extrabastardformula

I haven’t played a large chunk of the Zelda series so I’m not sure what this chapter was a throwback to, but it definitely felt like it was meant to make me feel something for a previous part of the series, the way that BoTW had vibes like the first entry in the series.

Ocarina of Time, with such specificity that it feels as if the game is actually trying to overwrite it, to a degree–which is not something I’d felt the series had attempted, before. Like, the series had been doing call-backs or call-forwards ever since OoT, but it had always kept a distance that allowed the series to play inconsistencies as the stuff of legend. Here there’s just too much for that to really work.

[u_u]

There’s probably a Korok seed down there if anyone needs one

[RT-55J]

scalding hot take from the world’s greatest up-and-coming game’s critic

✂️ New Game's Journalism

[doolittle]

i cannot believe i’m saying this but the final boss is underwhelming after the sonic frontiers take on a flying wyvern colossus. glacially paced like shadow of the colossus without any of the wounded animal pathos. limiting kit to the glider after a game of building vehicles… idk!

[GherkinForce]

Getting frustrated with how practically every enemy still one-shots me 40 hours in no matter how many hearts I have. Are we just supposed to have a endless stockpile of defense up and hearty meals?

[Cerium]

Upgrade your armour if you can.

[Felix]

I was very impressed by how low your defense is by default, pretty bold move that makes the combat stakes work much better

also how I never have the patience to have more than a few meals on me at once

[Mr_Mechanical]

I’ve now played this about 60+ hours, which is about as much as I played BotW, and I’ve only just now made my way to get the fourth sage/do the Gerudo desert dungeon. By this point in BotW I had done my fill of adventuring and went and finished the game then never really went back to it but here I feel like maybe I’m halfway through the main quest (?) and nowhere near seeing the majority of side quests and other stuff that I want to do and find.

It’s a really easy game to play for like 20 minutes to an hour. I’ve fallen out of gaming as a main hobby for a few years now but this one has pulled me back in to playing on a regular basis. Sometimes I manage to play for three or four hours straight on a weekend and then I need to take a break for a few days but whenever I come back I’m always ready to head off in a direction to do a quest or whatever and let myself get distracted along the way.

I did figure out how to upgrade my battery. I think I have two or three batteries now. Spent some time in the depths finding those statues and collecting poes to get depths clothes. I have partial sets of the two outfits you get down there. Unless they don’t have head pieces in which case I have both depths outfits. But every outfit has three pieces right? I hope so I love finding all the clothes. Still haven’t found any fairies yet so I haven’t upgraded any gear yet.

Combat is really good compared to BotW. Fusing stuff to weapons to make them really powerful and then using sage abilities almost makes you OP but enemies hit hard enough now to drop me in two or three hits (I have 11 hearts at this point) so I kind of feel like a glass cannon which feels about right. Like that’s how a Zelda game should feel. Like I can kill most things in one or two hits and most things can kill me in two or three except certain things like mini bosses that can just one shot me. There’s good tension there. I love the combat shrines that take away all your gear.

Sometimes I wonder if Nintendo will make a traditional, more puzzle-y Zelda again or if the series is just open world with light puzzle elements from now on. I never played Skyward Sword so I can always check that out if I want to have a new classic Zelda experience One More Time but it would be kind of disappointing if they never figured out a way to go back to that style of game without making it so played out. I love what the open world format has done for the series but it’s only two games into it and they’re already pretty similar. The way I see it they can only improve on it if they keep adding areas/land masses to explore and new powers/abilities to toy with and design puzzles around.

[GherkinForce]

I like that the difficulty forces me to think creatively about every encounter so I end up going in with cannons on my shields and whatnot, but getting respawned right next to an enemy after death and dying immediately again is a bit annoying

I’m also probably slightly pissed because I thought the brambles surrounding one of the towers were indestructible so I spent hours trying to get to the area in the chasm underneath and found that the ascend power doesn’t work on the cave ceiling there, only to find that you can just burn the brambles with bombs or zonaite cannons.

(except it was raining and putting out the flames, so I spent what felt like an hour trying to use wooden planks to build a shelter that kept falling over and it took that entire hour before the rain stopped. Also why the hell does it rain so frickin’ much??)

[skelephone]

ohhh I remember this one. I got frustrated trying to build a shelter too so I took a big piece of wood, held it above the fire for a bit, dropped it, reversed its motion with the hand power, and then shot a fire arrow underneath it while it was hovering in the air. Lasted long enough to clear the door. Went online to brag about this and almost immediately discovered that someone I follow had posted about doing this during the previous day and I must have subconsciously just absorbed that idea and stolen it without realizing lol.

Now one of you can steal it from me

[ArOne]

I do feel like there should’ve been a phase that some how involved chasing or running from the final form in the actual fields of hyrule by either horse or device. Something to recontextualize all the terrain you’ve spent most of the game getting intimate with to drive home that you are the hero of the land.

[toups]

yeah it’s weird bc the final boss is like simultaneously underwhelming but still much better than botw. that kind of sums this whole game up. and yeah, I wish they gave you more options to use your own vehicle builds outside of the master kohga fights. I mean you can always cruise around and fight lynels (which I did a ton), but still.

[jsnlv]

I really liked this take I saw on another forum regarding the Depths. It’s long, though, so I’m putting it

behind this Hide Details element.

@Afterward

Dear Zelda Diary,

I got all the shrines in Tears of the Kingdom. It turns out this is the best puzzle in the game. I recommend the task to anyone who has the game and the time to spare—and I recommend it over reading the spoilers below. Do all the shrines. It’s worth it.

I forget how hard it was to find all the shrines in Breath of the Wild. I assume I had to look up the locations of the last few. But I barely found any cause to look for outside help for Tears of the Kingdom.

The attentive player eventually learns that the area called the “Depths” mirrors the surface world in more ways than the game initially lets on. Maybe first you realize that each shrine on the surface corresponds to a lightroot at the same XY coordinates in the Depths. The game teaches you fairly directly that wherever there’s a town on the surface, there’s an abandoned mining operation in the Depths. After you find one or two treasure maps, you start to notice that the best treasures of the Depths are directly beneath major landmarks of the surface. Maybe a little later on, you realize that wherever there’s deep water on the surface, there’s an impassable barrier in the Depths. Or you may figure these things out in some other order. But I think many players will realize last of all that elevations are inverted in the Depths: Where there’s a deep valley on the surface, there’s a mountain range in the Depths. The tall, narrow pillar of Akkala Citadel on the surface corresponds to a deep, narrow pit in the Depths.

As you accumulate this knowledge, you solve the puzzle of how to navigate the Depths, which mostly lack the visibility and clear landmarks of the surface. Without activating nearby lightroots, your map of the Depths is useless—but you can still find your way around the underground by consulting your map of the overworld. When you figure this out, you feel like a genius. And it becomes easier to track down lightroots, which obviously contribute to your Depths map and the surrounding visibility.

After I beat the game, I saw a spoiler of the reward for finishing all 152 shrines. I wish I hadn’t seen it. I wish someone had just told me, “Do all the shrines. It’s worth it,” the way wise people will tell you not to find all the Koroks. (I also was spoiled on the fact that there are 152 shrines, but that turned out to be indispensible information—the game really should tell you this after you beat it. It is against my better judgment that I spoiler tag it here.)

As soon as I saw that spoiler, I started working on finding all the shrines. I had skipped a bunch of them, only registering them as fast travel points before running off to continue more urgent quests. When I finished those, I had logged roughly 75 shrines. About half. I said to myself: Here comes the hard part.

I pulled up the map of the Depths and checked all the lightroots I had activated to see if I had found their corresponding shrines. There were also a few lightroots I had marked from afar, but hadn’t personally visited; I was able to mark their corresponding locations aboveground as shrines as well, and hunt those down. It wasn’t frustrating or tedious; I was just checking off a list of navigational tasks that I didn’t know I had been accruing during the main game.

I want to say “I logged another 30 shrines this way, and then I tried a new strategy” or something like that, but really the stages of this process overlapped quite a bit. I found several shrine locations that needed to be uncovered with puzzles I didn’t feel like solving just then, or they were underground and I couldn’t find a cave entrance right away. We all know the great thing about these games is that there’s always something else to do.

But eventually I started running out of shrines whose locations I could deduce from map data I’d already gathered. I said to myself: Here comes the hard part.

This was when I started really leveraging my understanding of the Depths. Activating a lightroot fills in the map and illuminates the surrounding area up to a distance where it would be overlapping the “zone of darkness” around another lightroot. Put another way, when you see the map area revealed by a lightroot, you know there are no other lightroots in that area. That means there are no more shrines in the area above!

This answers/solves/dovetails with a gameplay problem/question/issue/technique from Breath of the Wild, something that arises in many similar games: When you’re searching for shrines, one of your most valuable tools is your metagamey knowledge that the shrines should be spread out to some degree over the map. There shouldn’t be too big an area with no shrines in it, and no two shrines should be too close together. The reasoning is intuitive, but not exactly reliable, since no game is really obligated to obey these unspoken laws of design.

But the way lightroots behave brings this notion of “distribution of interestingness” to the surface (!!!so to speak!!!) and let me hunt for shrines in a way that made me feel incredibly efficient and smart. Now that my map of the Depths was mostly filled in, each remaining area of darkness stuck out as a lead on a new lightroot. When I found it, not only did I have the coordinates for its corresponding shrine, but I got to wipe away more of the darkness and possibly reveal more probable lightroot locations. Consulting my map of the surface was the best way to navigate the Depths, and now a full map of the Depths was the best way to locate shrines on the surface.

I got to the point where I had only eight or nine shrines left. I said to myself: Here comes the hard part. Then I identified some likely-looking blank spots on my map of the Depths, found their lightroots, and found their shrines. It wasn’t hard. It was really satisfying.

Now I was missing three shrines. I had lit up almost all the lightroots, and all remaining areas of darkness in the Depths were accounted for by shrines I’ve already found on the surface. If it wasn’t a matter of something evading my notice in the map screen, I had to be missing a few shrines up in the sky. This would probably be the hard part.

Well, I applied the “distribution of interestingness” principle to the sky, and found two more shrines without too much trouble. One shrine left.

This was in fact the hard part. I couldn’t see anywhere in the sky that a shrine could be. I couldn’t see any lightroot I hadn’t matched to a shrine on the surface.

It was at this point that I got kind of desperate. I started chasing down leads that I really knew had nothing to do with shrines. I started activating all the lightroots, just to see if I’d somehow reveal a new one, anomalously close to a known location. When I activated the last one, the game gave me a very stupid little prize, as if to confirm that I had wasted my time.

I should have been paying closer attention. I should have sat back and thought about it harder. When the game told me all the lightroots were activated, I was able to see that the total number of lightroots (and thus the number of shrines on the surface) was 120. The game probably should have given me that information more directly somewhere earlier on, but I also should have puzzled it out for myself without actually visiting all the lightroots.

That meant that there must be 32 shrines in the sky. This was based on my knowledge from outside the game that there were 152 shrines in all, which again is something the game should have told me at some point. Knowing the total number of shrines was absolutely vital to how much fun I had with this whole quest.

I counted the shrines I had found in the sky: 32. I counted them again to be sure. I must have missed one on the surface.

I checked my surface map against my Depths map, as I had so many times during this quest. If I had been a little more careful and observant, I would have seen it days ago: The one lightroot without a corresponding shrine. I got it.

I solved the big puzzle! The very last step wasn’t a transcendent moment of catharsis, but the overall process was incredibly satisfying.

And it taught me a lesson about design. When I had those first few realizations about the Depths, I wasn’t excited about it. It seemed a bit disappointing—uncreative, “unrealistic”—for the underworld to match the surface in so many ways. But soon I noticed that understanding these correspondences was really enriching my experience. Like the intersecting entries of a crossword, everything I knew about one map was a clue to something on the other map. And it gave me a feeling of proficiency with the world of Hyrule that was extremely, sorry I don’t have a better word, satisfying.

I’ve often tried to avoid that sort of matchiness/symmetry/patterning in things I’ve designed, because I worry the audience will see through it and find out how “lazy” I’m being. But I should have known that being lazy would never let me down.

[Mr_Mechanical]

I’ve taken to exploring the Depths using the surface map on my minimap. Did you know you can do this? When you open the map which ever map you exit from will stick on the minimap wherever you are in the world.