I’m pretty sure the item doesn’t awaken until you get further in the Ring ruins, which is likewise hard locked behind getting past a point in the main questline. It would be like trying to do the temples without ever meeting the temple’s companion. You can go through the motions, but you won’t actually get anywhere.
Hmm that’s weird, i don’t remember doing anything that pointed me towards that spot, but it i stumbled upon it and it let me activate it. I’ve done 3 of the temples though so i thought it might just be a general progression thing
To contextualize a bit on the circumstances behind that screenshot, I got that there after having completed four temples and obtained most Hyrule glyphs, but done almost no questline stuff–at this point, the game is more or less yelling at me to go to Lookout Landing any time I complete anything mainplot related, and I haven’t done anything with the glyphs plot thread aside from meeting with Impa and collecting tears as I find them (although I imagine there aren’t actually that many steps between those two). So I’m not exactly surprised I’m running up against limits, as much as I’m surprised by this one’s particular shape–especially coming directly after a “you must have x hearts to proceed” lock.
That said, it’s one of the things that makes this game feel more rigid than Breath of the Wild: the amount of stuff that feels designed to only be available at certain points feels way greater. Most entrances to the depths are not intuitively traversable without the paraglider, and the sky towers are all unusable without first talking to the right NPC (and, again, the paraglider). Additionally, the endgame path feels way less intuitive, insofar as I have no idea what concrete steps it involves. Could I do it right now? I have no idea!
This is quite annoying! Like, I understand not wanting to bring up the divine beasts, given that they seem like they’d make the new regional crises considerably more trivial, and the towers, at least, can be explained away as them disappearing just as quickly as they appeared (although it’d then be cool to see them in the caverns or even the depths) but the guardians and associated tech are the sort of thing that feels easy to explain away or incorporate into the new narrative, so it feels lazy to see them erased so thoroughly.
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for me it was more in a “just do it to be caught up on what on god’s green earth the characters are talking about in the second one” but i do agree that the handling of the story in botw is just disastrous, especially the fact that the main story happens a 100 years before any events in the game so you have zero bearing on it which they somehow managed to do again in totk which drvies me insane
and somehow they still did not take the opportunity to craft any meaningful dungeons and we’re still stuck with the structure of sporadic little puzzle rooms haphazardedly tossed out throughout the main map
that and honestly all of it (the absence of the towers and shrines, divine beasts and guardians and all the rest of them) could have so easily been explained by like two lines of dialogue.
opening of the game, zelda says:
“this gloom stuff is really strange, i don’t get what’s happening but we’ve got to go investigate this, link! especially since it started appearing right after the divine beasts lost all power and stopped functioning. thank goodness we managed to get rid of every last one of the remaining guardians because it seems like this gloom thing could’ve done a real number on them”
boom, end of story
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Well, I finally finished this off last night. I had a really good time with it! Not as impactful as Breath of the Wild was for me, but I also spent nearly 200 hours with this game on my first playthrough, whereas I only spent 40 and change on the last one. There’s a wild amount of stuff in this game, and the openness of how it’s presented makes it more satisfying than most open worldish games I’ve bothered to try. In both games, I played them until I felt satisfied. A game that held my enaged attention this long is pretty neat.
I wish the story was better. It has its moments. The reveal of where Zelda’s been all this time was the high point for me. Overall, just a little bit less… dippiness… would do the game a real favor. Zelda will always be cornball, but sometimes it’s a little too… dippy.
Final final final fight was not especially thrilling in terms of challenge—as fun as combat was in this game, very few of the boss fights were really very exciting, actually—but it was spectacular. I enjoy good spectacle. Could’ve done with something a bit more inventive than “land on thing and hit 5 weak spots” but also it worked.
There’s some real weirdness with how the game tries to mostly keep the do-what-you-want-when-you-want-ness of BotW with a more linear story. I definitely did some sequence breaking in terms of how the game expected me to do stuff, leading to some real weird moments where everyone’s acting like things haven’t happened that have very much happened. Showing you the same cutscene with very light variation after you meet each sage was real weak.
Speaking of, is it actually possible to finish the game before you’ve got all the spirit buddies and that whole questline? I stumbled across the endgame area before I’d done the fourth temple, but after I’d gotten the Master Sword, and I think I triggered the stuff that kicks off the ending sequence, just without my last friends. I’ll look into this. Interesting choice if so.
I’ve spent more time with this than any other game on a first playthrough, but I’m still hoping there’s some DLC or whatever that does some more fun stuff with the puzzle mechanics. I did all the shrines. As I mentioned above, I think there’s untapped potential there.
Between this and FFXVI, I never want to see a screen that says “Quest complete” again. I just want to play videogames.
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This was so unintentionally funny to me though. Demon King? Imprisoning war?
Also I have been using Japanese audio so now I will never forget how to say demon king and imprisoning war in Japanese
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i remember reading the notes on a chrono trigger re-translation patch that was like “actually Magus is a bad name coz it doesn’t preserve the wordplay of the original Japanese Maou”
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Wait what is the word play
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uhhhhhh. like. maybe coz 魔 is used in ‘magic’ and ‘demon’???
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Ooooh
Just like the most memorable playing Breath of the Wild was my partial infiltration of Hyrule Castle early in the game, and subsequent escape, the memorable moments of Tears of the Kingdom come from forging forward under-equipped or on the cusp of being so. Using a device to ascend to the Wind Temple without having to rely on updrafts was a big earlier one, making my way to what I assume is the endgame (kudos to Nintendo for the fake-out if it’s not) is another: the lack of paraglider–and the consequent dramatic increase in the amount of work it takes to traverse the area–does a fantastic job of making the atmosphere oppressive and increasing the sense of dread a good endgame should have, while at the same time making me wish the game were shorter. Right now the section has enough points of no return of the sort that make me wish–and I keep harping on this–that warping weren’t always a possibility. Like, if this game were like the first Resident Evil (or REmake, really), and getting stuck due to lack of equipment were a) a possibility and b) something that at worst means losing < 15 hours of gameplay–that’d be great. Alternatively, I would appreciate a way of escaping that weren’t effortless, but also didn’t feel like an unbearable slog the way brute forcing my way back would obviously be; that leaving Hyrule Castle in Breath of the Wild was always possible but required effort was one thing I quite appreciated about it.
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Aaaaaaamen
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I didn’t realize it until just now, but those translator notes make a good point. You never see Magus until you enter his throne room and his minions are mostly green imps, not humans.
You’re supposed to expect a giant green demon king, but then it turns out it’s just a dude who knows how to cast Fire2.
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number one problem with like a hundred different games imo
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god has really graced this earth with so many different kinds of gamer
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It’s kind of hilarious how often I am doing things in this game and I get New Quest, Quest Updated, Quest Complete appear in rapid succession. It’s kind of annoying but a replacement would require letting people take notes in game, and that’s not happening
FF16 does actually take this approach for hunts. I’ve taken screenshots to track them but it is a bit of a pain
I feel they should at least handle the special case of you already having completed a quest when it’s given to you since they do detect it and adapt dialogue, and just not bother with all the popups in one go but I guess some players crave the popups.
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It hadn’t occured to me before reading these posts that leaving the “New Quest… Quest Complete” exactly as is in the case of sequence breaks wasn’t an intentional decision for the comedy of it.
The immediate doubling of fanfare was hilarious to me every time it happened. Feeling responsible for ruining the game’s little ceremony was always more of a reward than the obligatory “Oh, but I see you’ve already done that. How industrious! Anyway,” postscript appended to every quest dialogue.
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