I’ll gladly take the quest accepted/quest complete gag over how ffxvi does things bc it at least respects player agency. I’d have had substantially less fun with totk if they didn’t just let you stumble upon and complete questlines without manually triggering them first when you’re “supposed to”. like yeah it’s a minor annoyance to sit through those screens but I’ll take that over zelda reverting to the handholdy adventure games for babies model
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‘Problems don’t materialise unless I tell a hero about them’ has some interesting rhetorical implications
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Yeah, all fair. And also, Zelda doesn’t put an unremovable task list on the right side of your screen reminding you about the dumb fucking sidequest to go talk to an NPC until you complete it or delete the game.
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spoilers are for stuff that happens immediately after the ‘four regional phenomena’ quest is over & all the geoglyphs
most of the execution of the main quest stuff in the game is fairly uninspired, which is fine because i think it’s interesting enough in a kind of moment by moment way that it’s not really necessary to take any big swings wrt stuff from the plot you need to be keeping track of in order to figure out what to do next. but i did think it was kind of clever how after finishing the four regional phenomena they don’t just say ‘go to kakariko village’ but instead expect you to have already been there and remember that something was up w/ the fifth ruin, so that when purah tells you to investigate ancient ruins you’re not just forced to revisit every single location looking for some obscure clue you missed before. i know it’s probably possible to just sequence break this whole section, but i wonder though what would happen if you just went to the ruins in the southeast jungle instead of going to kakariko first? bc i also remember encountering those and figuring something would happen with them later.
one of the problems of never playing botw though is it’s sometimes hard to tell which locations ‘feel’ significant because you will eventually return to them as a major part of this game, and which have that feeling just because they’re leftover sites of importance from the first game. that does make it feel less predictable, though.
on a similar note, even though the repetition in the cutscenes after the four main temples is irritating, i do think there is some weird possibility for emergent narrative stuff depending on when you see the final ‘dragon’s tears’ related cut scene. i like that it basically tells you where you will find the master sword even though i am sure there is still more to that quest than i am able to understand right now. i spent a few minutes frantically racing across the map trying to jump on the ‘light dragon’ immediately after it appeared after that cutscene finished, only to conclude that the game wouldn’t make doing something quite so impractical an integral part of the main quest. but having done that kind of gives me some interesting ‘character motivation’ for like… role playing purposes. i gotta find that dragon…
also, having done this just before going to hyrule castle to hunt down the ‘imposter zelda’ is funny, because presumably link knows even more than everyone else there’s something off about her but doesn’t really say anything to anyone about it.
i kind of like when things like that happen even more than i appreciate it when they have taken the time to actually write unique dialogue to account for what you’ve already done, like you just fill in the blanks with your imagination and it makes the story more interesting
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kinda surprised there’s apparently not gonna be any dlc for this game, though the thing’s already so massive that it would be hard for anything additional to not just feel like excess. and i can imagine after 12 years of working on games that were essentially breath of the wild, the team is ready for something else (still, passing up the opportunity to make an extra $20 out of a huge number of the $70 copies that have already been sold to players is kind of surprising to see in 2023)
as i’ve said at least once here, i do kind of wish there would be an expansion with some really tightly, meanly designed puzzle levels for the powers in this game, but i understand that that’s probably a pretty niche want. they were a lot of fun, but i feel like there were a lot of concepts introduced in the shrines that could have been more exhaustively and interestingly explored.
wonder if this is happening shortly before the direct to tamper down any expectations of new totk stuff. wouldn’t be surprised if this is when nintendo announces wind waker and/or twilight princess coming to switch
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salivating at the thought of TotK kaizo romhacks
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i would be so bad at those, but i would love them dearly
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I do find it a little shocking that Nintendo doesn’t have a plan to fleece us further. The shrine puzzles in this game where good but I found them weirdly easier than those in the previous game. TotK shrines I felt I already new the solution after a good look and it was just tinkering to fill in the gaps towards the solution. BotW shrines usually had some obtuseness to them that made it more difficult to sniff out the answer. Modded shrine puzzles would probably be the driving force for me to mod my switch or figure out switch emulation.
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Have to wonder if no DLC for this because Switch 2 is imminent and they’re on to The Next One already
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yeah this is weird bc honestly totk is the first time in my life that I’ve actually been excited for potential DLC. like at least give us new zonai gizmos or extra shrine challenges.
on the other hand I kinda love this for the devs, and I’m more intersted in the next zelda game. given how botw and totk were the first time zelda actually outsold mario, I’m sure they’re sticking with the open world format. but will the next game still be heavily focused on constructing war crime machines?
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yeah, never thought i’d say this but “what next for zelda?” is one of the most interesting questions right now
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idk given this one feels like the world’s biggest DLC i’m ok with them calling it
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physically restraining Aonuma as he rushes to the whiteboard to try to illustrate how he’s going to fit two more map layers on top of the BOTW map
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I never really really thought this was gonna happen, but as the Zelda-in-the-past story was developing, I briefly got excited about the potential of having a fourth (and maybe fifth) similar-but-not-quite-the-same Hyrule layer to run around when Link opens a time-travel passage to that era.
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i think Link could/should go to space
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BotW 3: Link Goes to Space to Figure Out What’s the Deal with the Blood Moon
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As soon as you land on the moon, 20 yellow dots pop up on the map.
Main Quest: The Moon Towers
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I mean, based on how Kohga actually ended up in the underground before everyone else due to how his fight ended in BotW, space does seem to be the logical next step since he’s in orbit now.
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Kerbal… I mean Hyrule Space Program is a heck of a pitch. Make it a big chain of big rig hauling quests to assemble all your rockets.