Truth to be told I forgot there even is a minimap since I play without the HUD.
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need to test myself against lynels - still haven’t seen one in 70 hours
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The Lynel Coliseum was really fun
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Yeah! I had a grand old time there! By the time I got to the last few waves, I was totally out of healing items and mostly gloomed up. I needed to get creative. I ended up cheesing it by setting up this pattern:
- Lure the lynel into one of the alcoves that they initially come out of
- Wait until he starts a long attack animation, and immediately ascend through the ceiling into the bleachers above
- Jump off the bleachers as quickly as possible, and then shoot the lynel in the face with keese eyeball arrows super fast before he pulls out his bow (if you’re too slow, he’ll pull out his bow and start shooting impossibly accurate shots at you, and once he starts doing this he can’t be interrupted or stunned. This is why you get him into an attack animation first, cuz otherwise he pulls his bow out the instant you ascend)
- Land and run over to him while he’s stunned, jump on his back, and wail on him until he recovers
- Rinse and repeat
Even this cheese method was pretty challenging and required a ton of tries!
6 Likes
yeah this is an underrated aspect of the exploration and a major reason why it still feels so satisfying even though it’s the same world map as breath of the wild.
honestly, I occasionally felt similar feelings that outer wilds stirred in me and I think this part of the design is closest to what that game achieves, almost by accident. because the cynical take is that the depths are the way they are because it was substantially less work to basically make an enormous inverted castle… and that may be true, but the clever ways that it ties into the overworld elevate it into a very engaging macro-puzzle. honestly by the end of it I was expecting there to be some similar connection between the surface and sky worlds and I’m mildly disappointed that that wasn’t the case.
6 Likes
Some wrap-up thoughts. Spoilin’
Mineru’s Marvellous Mech adventure was a pretty great series of set pieces and all without very much dialogue or cut scenes dragging things down. In terms of this kind of thing (in Zelda) I’m not sure it’s been matched. You essentially do one long continuous dungeon made up of:
- Lightning island search for the laser mask
- Laser guided descent to the mech factory via a floating rock field
- ‘Assemble the mech’ dungeon
- Depths Mechscapades
- Mech cage match
Some of the mechanisms and puzzles in this final section feel like the peak of this kind of design. I imagine some of these puzzles were designed quite early but they’re paced appropriately in this back half. Like constructing a car to run across the 90° angle corner of a rotated cuboid, or to making a winch gate with a wheel.
Getting the robot on the other hand is a bit of a low point given how clunky the controls are and how fusing stuff to it is more fumbling than fighting. Once again, this game just has too much stuff in it. It is at once incredible and nauseating.
The Mineru shit fell flat for me because Mineru, I shit you not, looks almost exactly like my senior research colleague if they had a fursona. I was very distracted. I guess Mineru shares Zelda’s baggage of being effectively immortal but I guess she wasn’t conscious this whole time?
The final run-up to the final boss kinda just drives home my biggest problem with the game in that there is just too much fucking combat with spongey enemies. You aren’t required to use most of the original mechanics in this entire final section. Ganon, doesn’t require any of the core mechanics except flurry rush and diving. Dragon ganon was a big improvement from field ganon although it’s a low bar. Knocking hearts permanently off of you was neat though.
The Zelda Dragon stuff is some of the best plottings but Nintendo are cowards for rewinding her back to normal. Like why didn’t we do that earlier? We just needed her to help us stab Ganon I guess. Did the zonai foresee shit? Not really. Don’t think about it.
I do like that the entire game can be described as Link enacting the most complex chain of events to rescue Zelda from her initial fall.
I’m a person who likes when Zelda games do decent plotting but it’s so rare. Totk feels like it doesn’t really end on a great note. Ganondorf is kinda just evil for no reason and isn’t particularly smart either. He just disguises himself as Zelda to get most of his shit done and then decides to solo fucking Link. I would think the advantage of bringing a more human antagonist might be to theme out the game a bit more but there isn’t really a uniting theme other than, time sure is a sticky wicket huh?
The game has neat little touches that seem tailor-made for those kinds of YouTube videos that point them out. Like phantom Zelda disappears from the bloodmoon cutscene after you beat phantom Ganon. If you made it all the way to Dragon Ganon without getting the master sword, guess how you get it. When you descend to Ganon’s cave, the torch Zelda was holding at the beginning of the game can be found there. The logo of the game and many of the dragon motifs, in Final Fantasy fashion, could be seen as depicting the two dragons of the final fight. Did the zonai foresee shit? Not really.
I really wonder if other 3D Zeldas hold up. I know Skyward Sword doesn’t and the others are so largo and inflexible compared to Botw/Totk’s modularity that I think their remaining strengths are just atmosphere and level design as well as a handful of memorable scenes and bosses. So what is Zelda? A pluralistic mix of combat, exploration, and puzzles but in different proportions. Where do you go from TotK? Can they possibly cram in more mechanics and stuff than this? We’re almost certainly done with this world map. Mechanically it holds together like that wheel piece that always seems like it’ll break off its axle but instead carries the ridiculous contraption to the end of the shrine. Maybe they’ll do some weird narrative stuff in the next one? Nah, I have a feeling we’ll see engineering being converted into play for a while yet.
7 Likes
I liked how the game forecasts the final battle is going to be underwhelming, with the lil bird dude saying If he’s so powerful why didn’t he just kill us all now after the castle hyrule fight. It felt good how underwhelming it was, like the original Super Mario where gettinng through 8-3 was a big deal but Bowser has used up all of his tricks when you are facing him one on one.
Reminds me of the end boss of La Mulana in the remake being a boss rush type thing as opposed to the original La Mulana having an all original final encounter with cryptic puzzles to beat.
5 Likes
I spent too much time (like five minutes, but that’s still too much time) making this, so y’all gotta suffer it, too:
I think I’m pretty much done with this one! Credits rolled, loaded back in, and…I think I’m good for now. Might try to brave some of the labyrinths and coliseums, but otherwise I’m satisfied.
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https://twitter.com/bran8bit/status/1674424984561745920?t=T1Khf7Te-Uq6ci807lVqRQ&s=19
They’re making music now
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Omg the link grunt ad libs are too much
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i wasl ike ARGH I HATE THE HUPS I WANT A HUPLESS VERSION but they finally stop at about a minute and you can have peace
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this zora quest line is kind of goofy
i have really started to enjoy giving link a nice little ‘self care’ day after a particularly grueling trek. like after staying up day and night crawling over mountains and swamps and shit when you reach a stable and can just chill out, do meal prep, chase frogs and stuff. treat yourself to a nice rest at the inn. give the little man a little break, that’s all.
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In my live action adaptation of Tears of the Kingdom, Prince Sidon is portrayed by Nicholas Hoult (The Great, The Menu).
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Finally engineered my way into the Depths, and maybe it’s because I’m doing a degree of sequence breaking–still haven’t done whatever it is you were supposed to do after first dropping down from the sky–but it feels extremely unsettling, after the familiarity of Hyrule. For once, I have no idea what direction I’m going in, and I have no confidence that I’ll be able to get out. What’s more, with the autosaving, I’ll eventually really reach a point where I can’t savestate myself into safety. It’s scary! It’s great!
ETA: It just occurred to me that warping should be an option. But I don’t wanna.
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it’s technically possible to leave the depths without warping but the spots to do so are few and far between. i guess you could build a hot air balloon directly under a chasm?
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it’s possible to fly up chasms using an aircraft, but the game doesn’t really like you doing this. there’s a threshold between the depths and the surface where it loads and unloads everything and it’s usually seamless when going down but the game will freeze for up to 30 seconds on your way up.
incidentally, I managed to fly all the way up the chasm that you only unlock after starting mineru’s quest before I even knew that was a thing, and the game just froze when I tried to get all the way up to the surface. kind of disappointing, but also kind of awesome that you can just do that, like they didn’t even bother to put up an artificial barricade or anything. delightfully uncharacteristic for a nintendo game.
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Oh, well, boo, then. I guess it’s not surprising, given that the tutorial area forces you to warp to get back to the highest initial area, but given that one of my favorite parts of the game so far has been figuring out traversal, and the joy from seeing my janky-ass mechanisms work–wing+rocket+steering stick+weeble+cart for getting down into the chasm? Chef’s kiss.-- it feels wrong to have something that convenient be forced. Still, I’m glad not all hope is lost!
I haven’t finished the game. I’ve done about 70% of the shrines and think I’m gonna go for 100% of them.
Finding myself hoping there’s some DLC or something that adds a series of very challenging puzzle-platforming shrines with these mechanics. I like these mechanics! I want more! This deep in and I keep running into things that feel like introductory stages.
4 Likes
I used the last of my wings to get to the sky island enveloped in storm clouds, only to find that a) visibility is shit, and b) there’s a door requiring a certain number of hearts to open, which is a problem when I’d been avoiding collecting them. And so, without a reliable means of descent, I had to trial and error my way back to the surface, which works, as I manage to plummet into water. I got to Lurelin village to get extra hearts, and then make a dozen or so attempts to get back into the island, eventually succeeding, only to find that I still don’t have enough hearts.
And THEN I find the heart/stamina container statue next to the door.
4 Likes