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mZuzek on 30 June 2023
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Zarkho said:P.S.II: I forgott to mention another terrible design choice. In BotW, they purposely built the world so players wouldn't go from tower to tower in a straight line avoiding the game essence: exploration and experimentation. In TotK, however, towers bouncing you to the sky cause the completely opossite effect: you are somehow inclined to reach the next "objective" (be it a new Tower, Shrine or Point ot Interest) in the easiest way possible: flying in a straight line from point A (a Tower) to point B (your objective), often missing all the wonder that BotW provided in form of landscape exploration during your ground travels from place to place. With TotK I feel Nintendo has made a step back in terms of game progression, being now much more similar to these Ubisoft titles where you simply choose an icon in the map and go straight for it. In TotK you still don't have so many icons in the map, but the new Towers make you do the same: pick a goal in the distance and go straight for it glidding from the air. A step back from what BotW achieved (but otherwise, in some terms, logical, since having the same map would make walking the same paths way too familiar/repetitive for these who already spent hundreds of hours in Hyrule).

This.

This isn't talked about enough. There's no wonder or mystery in TotK and it's not just because it's the same map, but especially because of how trivial they made it to traverse the map. Every time I need to get somewhere I just fast travel to a tower and put on the gliding gear. The game is essentially telling me that exploring its world is pointless.

Also all the new devices and ultrahand and stuff are cool and all, but they only add to this feeling that traversal is trivial. It's like the developers kept watching those twitter videos of the crazy things people could do in BotW, and decided to design the whole game around it. But then suddenly it's not exciting anymore.

To put it simply... BotW felt like an adventure. TotK feels like a sandbox.

IcaroRibeiro said:
Zarkho said:

P.S.: Have I mentioned how ANOYING are the new battle companions, how dislikeable are Tulin 

How dare you to slander my boy like that? Reported

Thank you.

Tulin is literally the only character I like in this game.

Ljink96 said:

I agree with a lot of what you said here. But I think overall, I'm just ready to move on from this era of Zelda. Breath of the Wild is in my top 3 games of all time and TotK improved on a lot of what BotW did. But somehow...I just don't feel the same way about Tears as I do Botw. I guess I just value completely new experiences more than familiar ones. While the sky islands and the depths were vast, they became really repetitive along with Hyrule which is changed but not in the ways I would have hoped.

The new enemies that were introduced kinda sucked ass. I don't think I ever took damage from a Horriblin, Boss Moblin, Gibdo, Like Like or the new flying things. The Gleeok and Gloom Hands were the only ones I really enjoyed fighting. The Flux Constructs were cool too. But man am I also tired of Bokoblin and Moblin camps. I too thought "oh my, there are gonna be pirates in Lurelin Village, let's go!" and then yeah it's just more lame enemies. The Yiga Clan thing got really old really fast too. I also wish the real companions followed you throught the entire game (and not the blue ghosts) but yeah they did get annoying at times.

Tears has some amazing gameplay ideas and features but I think overall it's an unbalanced experience. I'm just not a fan of the sidequests, doing silly expeditions just to unlock something that was already there in Botw, most enemies are not threatening a few hours in, the story is again a cutscene collect-a-thon, the 4 "dungeons" were kinda underwhelming, and I feel the music just isn't as strong as it could be. In terms of combat, while it is extremely varied, I wish using the weapons felt more impactful. In Twilight Princess for example, it felt so nice to use the Swords. They felt weighty and chunky if that makes sense. Botw and Totk has this thing where the weapons feel like putty moving through an enemy.

I hate to have to be so critical of Zelda, it's my favorite franchise. But I want the series to be better. When I played FFXVI I kept asking myself "why can't Nintendo make a compelling Zelda story like this"? Or while playing Elden Ring I asked "why can't Nintendo make more varied enemies or have more neat gauntlets to explore"?" And this is not to say what Nintendo did with Tears wasn't innovative, but I hope story, music, and combat are changed/improved in the next game more so than from Botw to Totk.

I am glad the game has been such a huge success and I enjoyed my time with the game. But as you said there is much room for improvement and that's exciting. I know I probably sounded like a whiny biyatch but I'm just being honest about how I felt about Totk.

PS: PLEASE NINTENDO, NO MORE KOROKS!

Pretty much agree with everything you said.

I've been really tired of gaming in general lately, I hoped TotK would bring me back but it's failing. I'm starting to think that it's not all of gaming I'm uninterested in, and moreso the kinds of games I get to play in the Nintendo 'circle', which is where I put myself in... Because I can't remember a single Nintendo game that I've actually gotten into since my playthrough of Guardians of the Galaxy. It's not a coincidence. Guardians opened my eye to how far storytelling has come in gaming, it blew me away, and going back to anything Nintendo is painful because the writing and voice acting and direction of their narratives in general is just awful in comparison.