great game kind of undersells it to me. personally, i think ToTK is an utterly genius thing. its failings for some as a “traditional video game” aren’t necessarily downsides to me. it’s a more inspired game than nearly any other released in 2023, and has legitimately new ideas and syntheses.
8 Likes
I didn’t think the underground really worked great though
8 Likes
the building stuff was too fussy vs. the chemistry system in botw for my taste but also i am tired
the set pieces with low gravity in the sky were magical though no doubt
the narrative did not work for me. much preferred amorphous noncharacter blight ganon in botw to ganondorf again and i liked botw’s huge timeskip after failure. i found it easy to empathize with scientist zelda fucking up in botw vs. specifically hating when people transform into large monsters. the zonai being just a precursor race of furries was the most boring answer possible. my headcanon about hyrule running on woe-begotten stolen magic using ganondorf as a battery was better hmph
playing wind waker first has probably skewed my expectations about the implied/explicit narrative here
10 Likes
It wasn’t perfect but it was a nice change of pace now and again to go inching around in the dark, setting up a network of lights along the way.
apart from the depths the reused map + vehicles are also unfortunate because rather than a hiking sim that’s very very deliberately paced with careful point-of-interest design it turns into an optimization game for getting from A-Z as the crow flies
i loved just cresting hills in botw or just pushing as far in one direction of the map as i could
9 Likes
I found the master sword quest moving, apparently they undo that at the end though. I like to imagine the botw/totk link is a mute frankenstein super killer freak made or unfrozen by the machine you wake up in at the beginning when hyrule has an emergency. some failed clone of some guy mad scientist zelda had a crush on one time or something.
11 Likes
YES yes you get the vision
6 Likes
I can’t wait to try totk having not played or barely even seen footage of botw
1 Like
It worked out well for me!
3 Likes
BotW felt more breezy. TotK feels more crunchy.
In both I largely ignored riding horses. Also, shield surfing was the best way to travel in either. I went back to replay TotK and it’s almost too big. I remember the tutorial section of BotW taking about 30 minutes, while in TotK it’s almost four hours before you get the paraglider and actually open up the world. I’m not really into the vehicle building stuff as much, None of them feel as good as the bike from BotW.
Gloom hands still feel spooky even though I’m at the point I can rip and tear. Meanwhile the Yiga feel like they’ve been downgraded from legit threat to pokemon villain team
9 Likes
It wasn’t entirely my cup of tea. Strictly speaking I don’t think it’s true that ToTK “rewards” creativity, because you can usually either brute force situations or rely on the same small bag of tricks, instead of bothering to come up with new ideas. It enables creativity, but actually making use of its options requires player initiative and a “creativity is its own reward” attitude.
Being able to go anywhere from the beginning also means I saw most of the biomes in the first 10 hours and after that what’s left to see is mostly variations of what I already saw.
Personally I value “openness” as such relatively less than most people, and I prefer exploratory experiences where most of the world is walled off behind some threshold of level-ups/skill/keys/ideas.
13 Likes
The fact that it took me several dozen hours to realize the paraglider was something I needed and that I was still able to complete the four main dungeons and arrive at (what I think is) the endgame without it makes it an A++ game. That the endgame loop is three minutes of me prepping for the final descent descent, followed by fifteen seconds of fighting before I die and have to start all over makes it an F game. I’m still not sure if the game’s isolated moments of “sequence breaking? not on my watch” are hilarious or the worst.
3 Likes
I think its a brilliant game with a hand full of momentum killing bummers.
I would have great play sessions full of wonder and nothing play sessions full of misery. Which isn’t totally a mark against it. Even when I had a bad time Id be thinking about the game when I wasn’t playing it, excited to try again.
So I’m sort of in awe of it as a thing but I don’t know if Id ever play it again without having an exacting plan going in.
I had the most consistent fun (7/10) when I knew the least and the most fun (10/10) when I knew the most.
My biggest most glaring gripe is that the underground trains you to make machines that if used above ground are the most efficient way to skip anything fun. And almost anything you build for the above ground is useless underground. Its too big and too dull and mining for autobuilder juice is the worst.
Bottom line is Nintendo put an entire game’s worth of work into a mod and its really fascinating.
11 Likes
there was definitely like an hour where i was like “oh my GOD it’s a while WORLD what am i gonna DO” before i realized it was the same world as totk mostly. entering the depths was the same vibe
the single most poignant moment in either of the games, for me, was when i’d just gotten off the great plateau in the first one, and i was stumbling through the forest and came on a lumberjack’s hut. he was inside and we spoke briefly, and then he turned in for the night, but i managed to press A on the bed with just the right timing that i slipped in there with him. he was gone when i woke up. i was really hoping for more of these furtive encounters during the game but i guess they only programmed the one
15 Likes
Link Strife…
I think this is the best way to experience it, because you’re not preemptively fatigued by the massive map
and I think TotK is a straight up improvement over BotW so there’s no reason to go back to that one
5 Likes
It’s a much improved upon Breath of the Wild. My switch tells me I spent over 40 hours on BotW (saw the ending even) whereas I’ve spent over 70 hours on TotK (not even close to seeing the ending). I’ve mostly ignored horses and building vehicles and just treated the game as a hiking simulator letting myself get distracted from whatever current objective I’m following every time I see something interesting in the distance along the way. Love finding new clothes and new side quests.
I opened the game up recently and unfortunately after spending several months playing 60 fps games on my Xbox I realized immediately I could no longer tolerate TotK’s chunky 30 fps. Hopefully the Switch 2 will run the game smoother. I’d even buy it again if I had to, would be absolutely worth it.
5 Likes
One of my favorite lil things is that you can upgrade the map to show every step youve ever taken. Its both a great memory jogger and indcates where you most often get stuck and where your blind spots are. Its just facinating.
Get that but skip the dungeon finder beeper. You cant turn it off and it sucks.
5 Likes
Pretty sure you can change what the beeper is tracking to something completely innocuous and rare as long as you’ve got a registered photo. If I’m remembering right, I changed mine to track Lynels.
7 Likes
I used mine to track undiscovered wells
5 Likes