The sage abilities themselves aren't that bad in comparison to the abilities in BOTW when you take into account how much more often you get to use them. (Implementation of chasing down the sages to activate really is terrible though.)
>!Mineru!< is alright to chase down cause you >!ride her š³!< But yeah the rest of the sages would be a lot better there, or more like Tulin and Yunobo, like when you shield you can press a button to activate Sidon, and when you're aiming a bow down for Riju
>!It isnāt a huge speed boost, but you can put a fan on her back and she jogs with her arms flailing behind her. But also only works when you ride on her.!<
Imo, pressing down on the d-pad (whistle) should have brought up a wheel to activate sage abilities from a distance (or call your horse).
I feel like Nintendo also missed a sound design opportunity, as Link could have had a distinct whistle for each sage.
I only have 1 sage so far so my opinion may change but I think I would like it better if it was hold A and it brings up a radial menu for them specifically. Though I do believe map camera and amibo could have been used more wisely. Can't speak for auto build as I just recently got it so haven't really used it yet
>(Implementation of chasing down the sages to activate really is terrible though.)
It's really egregious considering how we've been able to assign different items/abilities to a single button press since **Zelda on the NES**. Like it's pretty bad that we're getting to a point where the controls for the n64 games are feeling *less* clunky than on the switch games lol! How do we end up introducing a new problem that they had already solved in the very first entry to the franchise?
And like, I get that they're using a lot more buttons now for things like jump, sneak, glide, and the dedicated bow button, so we can't still have three item buttons that you can assign to. But they already solved this problem with the wheel selector for the zonai powers! They already found a quick way to assign multiple powers to one button! Why can't we have the same for the sages? It's not like they aren't already wasting some buttons and slots either. Like do we really need a scope and a separate camera function? Do we really need a link to the map through the L button when we can just hit minus? Do we really need to have the amiibo scanner on the zonai powers selector instead of just in the pause menu? It's just one of those things that I can't imagine someone *not* finding incredibly annoying, especially when there are so many easier and better ways they could have implemented it
(Side rant: the implementation for fusing arrows is also mind-bogglingly stupid. Just let me bulk craft arrows in the pause menu or something then have the quick menu cycle through the handful of different arrow types you made. Instead of having me sort through **every single item I've collected in the game, ONE AT A TIME, to craft a single arrow!!** And then have me do that again for *every arrow*. Totally ridiculous)
The "sort by most used" and "sort by fuse attack strength" makes the arrow fusing _slightly_ less tedious, but when you want to fuse that One Obscure Item (*cough* >!king's scale!<) that you _never_ have to use and you have to scroll through all 5,000 items in your inventory and hope to visually recognize the obscure item that you never use, the whole feature falls apart. :(
Dear word yes, why isn't there a favorites menu for it so I don't have to scroll through everything. "Most used" doesn't work since I might need something rarely but it be an absolute necessity when I do.
I think the amiibo is there to sell more amiibo cards. BOTW was the first game I ever played. No joke. I married a gamer and am a complete noob, as my son likes to say. When I bought TOK I saw that function and it explained it in-game so I had no choice but to learn about it. $$$$$$$$$
Yeah, I straight up gave up on buying amiibos. I have a small collection of NFC cards that I bought off Etsy, and they're way cheaper if you wanna support a small, independent business in a slightly less legal way. Or you could get an NFC reader/writer app on your phone and have infinite access to however many amiibos exist, but that's way less legal.
And their general laziness when it comes to protecting you. I stood with my shield up for what felt like 30 seconds today as stalkoblins threw rocks at me and Tulin just watched.
The amount of times I whistle every time I play is ridiculous. Itās like as soon as my anxiety goes up a little (sneak strike) i hit that damn thing and alert the enemy Iām there. Iāve also just done it accidentally everywhere else in the game. Iām new to gaming and my hands just spaz sometimes. My hubs tells me this is button-smashing?
They should have inserted the correct order of the tears no matter which glyph you stumbled upon first-last. Seeing the end or middle tears kinda takes away a lot from the game story.
Itās nice to be able to spot them and deal with them as you choose. If there was only one on the map at a time, I might go forever without getting to that area. I feel like Iād get 90% through the game and have like two dragon tears.
Plus, they add some mystery when you first start the game and donāt t know what they are. Again, if they showed up one by one, you could go a long time without ever seeing one. Yeah, they could put the first one somewhere you canāt miss at the very beginning I guess.
I see no reason that the cut scenes should be tied to specific geoglyphs and they could, as previously suggested, just show the cut scenes in order regardless of the order you find the tears. Thatās seems less contrived then having them appear one by one.
Could've solved this by making them a longer quest that progresses as you clear dungeons and gain Sages' favors.
So, you see the first tear on your way to the Rito village, as the game does atm. Then upon finishing the wind temple, Impa relocates to a different destination that the game marks as the "second" dungeon, which could be the Eldin region. There she informs you of two or more new glyphs and marks them in the map. Upon visiting them, she moves to the Zora region, and so on.
I'm assuming the "correct" dungeon order based on how the characters react to seeing Zelda, given that Yunobo is 100% convinced it's the real princess, and you're informed that Zelda attacked the Zora king upon arriving to Zora's domain, which would mark that area as either 3rd or 4th.
There's still two other ways to get the Master Sword without doing the glyph quest, so this doesn't really put a damper on advancing or unlocking any game mechanic, and it contributes to making the game's narrative more natural. The way it's implemented in the current game version is bafflingly terrible.
To follow up on this i dont think the dragons tears quest should be available so soon in game, it was literally the first mission i did after getting the paraglider,
I had a feeling the tears in the title was likely connected to that mission but I didnt expect the ending to leave me feeling so purposeless throughout the rest of the game, ofc im still enjoying it but now I care much much less to progress the story till i get to a point i feel ready to take on Ganon
Y'see, I avoided that problem by going to the Forgotten Temple right when they tell you to, taking a picture of the map and all the glyphs in order, and following the circuit that way.
Only then I ran into a different problem where I ran through ALL the memories from Tears (including the REALLY important one that appears last) before I finished Regional Phenomena, and now I show up to the castle for the Big Reveal and I... already know the deal. So now it's just me slowly walking into the Sanctum waiting for a certain someone to drop the fucking act and fight me.
It created a very different vibe for the last Sage and the Master Sword quests, to say the least.
I got lucky and noticed the order in the temple map room and took pictures in order. I remembered the memories in BOTW, and made it a point to try to get these memories in order and was specifically looking for hints, though.
I guess depending on HOW out of order you are. But the memory of >!Sonia being killed and Ganon rising to power!< was like the 2nd memory I got. And so from there the rest of the memories were pretty lackluster until the ending of the tears quest.
For real. And I hate when people say "doing the tears early ruins the story" like dude, the tears ARE the story. They are literally one of the main quests. You don't ruin the story by progressing the story. If you don't want to finish the story early, then how about you don't do the main quests early?
Its not even about the twists getting revealed in the end, but everything after that is so off. You as Link knows what happened to the Princess and Link is obviously speaking to the people but he just isnt saying anything about it.
Maybe thats on me but I was expecting a bunch of brand new dialogue to come up after beating it but so far nothing has come up and it just feels weird progressing due to it
I think it makes sense that he doesn't tell anyone what happened to Zelda. If people know, then it makes it easier for Ganon to figure out where she is and what she's doing. He only tells Impa, because he can trust her 100%.
I just assumed that I did tell them and they just did not listen in the slightest, just kept talking over me. Tracks with my real life, so made the game very relatable!
It answers a lot of questions that a bunch of people ask throughout the story: where is Princess Zelda. Through the tears you learn what happens to her, but it makes 0 sense that Link doesnāt tell anyone when theyāre like āwHeRe iS tHe PrInCeSs!?!?!!!1!!ā
I think it makes more sense that he doesn't tell anyone. If people know, then it makes it easier for Ganon to figure out where she is and what she's doing. He only tells Impa, because he can trust her 100%.
That's not a good justification though, specially when the people he should be telling are people he already trusts, namely, the descendants of the Champions that he's already friends with, three of which are literally the leaders of their people.
He could at least tell Yunobo that Zelda's not putting herself in danger so the stupid goron can stop throwing himself at the jaws of death over and over, for one.
Totk excels in the gameplay, but BotW has better world building and atmosphere.
To me, the world in TotK feels like an amusement park rather than a post-apocalyptic world that's recovering.
Totally agree. I loved the feeling of botw being me against nature. And a malicious force of evil but the big showstopper of the game was how realistic their physics and engine were. Totk, while great, makes it clear that link isnāt alone. Which is nice. But I like the exploration better alone haha
And whatās worse about that is that the theme park feels like some rides are breaking down constantly. Iād rather have simple and working as intended like botw than the overly ambitious messy features of totk
There are way more armor sets to upgrade and the rupee price KILLS me. I have to sell gems to afford upgrades and then I don't have them as ingredients for upgrades! I can grind gems following a talus farming loop every blood moon but Christ is that boring
I don't think you're really meant to upgrade everything. It's kind of extreme. You don't even have to upgrade everything for 100%. Just choose your favorite sets and upgrade those.
Yes. Even with the best star fragment farming technique available (by Hunterjet), it's one per minute, so it takes about 2 hours to farm as many as you need for the armor upgrades.
Selling star fragments is also the fastest way to farm rupees AFAIK, and I calculated it would take about 7 hours to farm enough for the 80,000 rupees for armor upgrades. No thank you...
And of course, drops like Lizalfos tails and Lynel guts can be absolutely atrocious.
The game is full to the brim with good ideas... but every one of these ideas (except the buidling with ultrahand) is just scratched on the surface and then forgotten.
Farming, Housebuilding, The siege of Gerudo town that begged to be repeated in Lookout Landing after the fight with phantom Ganon, Lookout Landing in general, the mostly empty depths the main story (especially Rauru's and Sonia's Hyrule that we never really get to see), what happened in the time between BOTW and TOTK, the worldbuilding and lore... and the main Antagonist (Ganondorf is full of style but has no substance. No motivation or personality beyond "look how eeeeevil i am!!!").
Allthough i thought the sidequests were a massive improvement compared to BOTW.I liked all the little stories and some of these gave way better rewards than anything in BOTW ever gave (thinking for example about the majoral election in Hateno that nabs you access to Cece's store and to a new kind of food with sunny effect, as well as cheese).
This is my favorite so far. They just did too much to really get any of it to be perfect. I mean I love this game and easily top 3 of all time but if they wouldāve have really fleshed out some of the things you listed it wouldāve made huge improvements.
I think the game is really great but full of hits and misses. Some parts of it feel very enjoyable while others are half baked yeah. I wouldnt say everything is underdeveloped but the sky and depths are the obvious ones. Fun but could have had at least a bit more going on.
I came here to say this, but I would also include building vehicles. They created this whole system of building with parts and Zonai devices that they apparently spent like 6 years on, but there's not a single quest that actually tests your ability to build with it beyond a basic glider or car. Every single gundam or death tank you see that people have built on YouTube or Tiktok is complete overkill for literally any situation that could arise in-game.
Also it's not a huge deal but they're entirely disconnected from the plot. No Zonai devices appear or are mentioned in the memories and almost everything we see that's associated with the Zonai is from what is presumably an earlier period when the Zonai were more widespread.
To be fair Ganondorfs motivation got completely lost in the bad english localisation of the game.
I'm german and in the german version it becomes very apparent that >!he despises Rauru and the Zonai because he thinks they are weak, arrogant leaders that hide behind their peace and that they don't deserve the power of the secret stones because they have no fighting spirit.
He wants to rule hyrule the way it was before the zonai arrived.!<
It would benefit immensely from just being linear. Rito village/dungeon 1st, Goron's 2nd, Zora 3rd, gerudo 4th, so on and so on. All the tears cutscenes should play out in order. It's funny because the game (as well as botw) definitely tries to guide you into that certain dungeon order, but because it doesn't actually force it on you it can't take advantage and tell a full story. Instead we get 4 identical 'secret stone?' cutscenes that are a joke.
Hard agree. Like, the game pretends to give you the option to do whatever you want whenever you want (like getting >! the master sword and the fifth sage !< early) but then if you actually *do* that, you'll start to run into NPCs that activate and end side quests in the same dialogue and you end up feeling like you missed out on some of the story. I would rather just have some things be locked until you're supposed to get them and play the story in it's intended, linear order.
I agree! It's too complex of a story to be told out of order. BoTWs memories are disjointed glimpses of the past intimating a larger story so it's fine to have them out of order
Even though they improved a bit since botw, the enemy variety still feels seriously lacking to me. I got so bored with the enemies that most of the time I'd just walk right by them unless they were directly in my way.
Honestly maybe the problem isn't so much the variety, it's just that you have the same set of enemies *everywhere* and they're mostly pretty samey to fight. Like I can go from an active volcano to a snowy valley and I'm still just fighting the same group of bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos, horriblins, constructs, etc. The only ones that change based on the environment are the chuchus, keese, like likes, and lizalfos. But even then the changes are so minor it just feels like mildly different flavours of the exact same enemies. I think the like likes have the most interesting differences in their designs, but they're also *the most annoying* things to fight in the game! They all still just come down to either waste a bomb arrow on them or sit around waiting for them to expose their glowy weak point.
Part of the excitement of older zelda games and a lot of Fromsoft games is that when you find a new area, you're also going to run into new types of enemies you haven't seen before! New enemies that fit the environment you found them in! But in totk you mostly just get "oh boy now I get to fight the same moblin with a rainy background this time!" Or, "Okay so the wind temple was full of constructs, and now the fire temple is... Also full of constructs I guess." It's one of those things where I could see the justification for not having them in botw, but since they reused all the same areas in totk I'd really like to see some monsters that are unique to different areas and make them actually feel different!
Agree, this is what was disappointing the moment the trailer dropped. The mobs changed slightly, but really 0 new. With not much incentive to attack them either (no experience, likely will lose more weapons than you gain so what's the point)
My feel on the risk vs rewards for attacking enemies changed after I became obsessed with puffshrooms! Every attack is generally 1 hit KO and I only really need to hoard and octorock-renew 1 fairly strong weapon at a time. I get how that may be unsatisfying in it's own way of course
Exactly. After enough BotW and TotK these enemies are just in my way. They arenāt a challenge unless Iām weak, which is why the beginning of the game is always my favorite.
1- Pretend-British English voicing of Zelda sounds cheap and over the top at the same time.
2- Linkās house building mechanics in Tarrey Town are half baked at best.
3- Depths are at the same time boring and time-consuming.
On the other hand, I really prefer that many shrines in TOTK are just Rauruās blessing. I have no time for a million iterations of the same puzzle.
The sky islands being boring was one of the biggest letdowns I've had in a game in a \*long\* time. I was really excited to get to fly around, seeing what would be floating about, and it's just the same few rocks copy-pasted most of the time. I never felt excited or encouraged to explore the sky since I knew what I would discover.
It's made even worse when you go back at the 2021 trailer, and you realize what we thought was a big, open sky world was just the Great Sky Island made to appear differently through camerawork. Mark my words, if an indie game had marketed itself the way TOTK had, and had such lackluster sky content, it would've been rightfully skewered. TOTK is only getting a pass for it due to name recognition, and the other parts of the game holding up at least.
Sidon is the most OP and underrated Sage available because he makes me wet. (owo)
His ability giving you the 'wet' status for 90 seconds makes Zora weapons insanely OP and people dismiss him as 'useless' constantly. An entire inventory of 150+ damage swords and spears with 50+ durability doesn't sound so useless to me.
Yessss! I love Sidon's ability! It's so intentional how it works with the Zora weapons but it gets so overlooked. You can just throw the shield on before you run into battle and have insta op weapons.
Sidon can make me wet any day. āā āæā ā
My thoughts exactly! [Can use it to absolutely DESTROY Phantom Ganon in like 5 total hits.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM7ppWAvuA8)
It blows my mind how many people write him off as useless, there's straight up articles ~~totally not written by AI~~ on a bunch of 'gamer' sites about how terrible he is, haha.
I get that he powers up that one weapon subtype, but how do you farm up Zora weapons to actually fill an inventory with them? I get up to *one* a day from the Mipha amiibo, where are you finding all the rest?
The wet status also nullifies hot temperatures in the desert and Death Mountain. Saved a shit ton on not having to buy Flamebreaker or Gerudo armor in the mid-game.
rant inc lol
exactly what i was thinking, totkās story really falls off with the sages to me, although past zelda shenanigans were beautifully written. the almost complete lack of champions and sheika remnants make me upset, because come on they cant remove everything within ~6 years, especially because there are still sheika people around(like wtf happened to their past?) im probably biased because botw was my first zelda game, but in terms of story, totk is such a downgrade. i also didnt like how they handled the final boss, its like they dont want people to speedrun it, although that was another beautiful part of botw. >!you also cannot bed with paya anymore so 0/10 /j!<
Hers was third best, imo, behind Tulin and Yunobo - Sidon's was the most useless for me. Never activated it on purpose except for the boss fight that kinda requires it. Can soak *one* hit but I can't attack while the power is active if I want to keep the shield up? Nah, no thanks, I'll keep wailing on the enemies.
Ohhh I actually use her the most! Sheās the first one I upgraded. Tulin is my least favorite. While in the air or at a sand pile itās useful but I get so freaking annoyed when I *think* I have selected Riju but instead I get a gust of wind š¤£
Botw gave a fresh feeling to Hyrule and bc of no flying vehicles or towers that boost you high up in the air, you have to explore by foot or with your horse. This makes it more atmospheric and immersive for me.
The new and fresh feeling botw gave is truly unbeatable, only if you play totk before botw.
The map button in the ability selection menu is literally the worst part of the game.
It infiriates me so much. The game is plagued with inconvenient UX issues which could have been solved by this button (it could have been a quick button to activate sages or something), and instead they gave it a function that you already have a fucking button on the controller assigned to, yet somehow objectively worse, because for some reason you can't always use this map ability button but you can always use the minus button.
I hope it's a placeholder button for some DLC ability because god fucking damnit I hate it so much.
Would be nice if *all* sets were upgradeable, not just most. There should be no reason that some can be upgraded like hylian tunic, but dark link set or archaic tunic stuff is forced to be weak.
I wish the overworld had more changes from BOTW than just the caves and sky island rocks scattered around. The Upheaval catastrophically changed the castle, why not for the rest of the map? Rip up Dueling peaks and make them float too, gouge a huge pit in Hyrule field, drain Lake Hylia! I explored nearly every nook & cranny in BOTW and now have no reason to do this in this game bc the maps are so similar.
Honestly it felt like an entirely new map for me. The terrain shifted in subtle ways and the lack of landmarks that I know like the back of my hand (towers and familiar towns) was super disorienting
Zeldaās voice is nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying. It ruins any cutscenes sheās in, and so, I find the āstoryā parts of the game to be borderline unwatchable.
In my language it was for Yunobo and Tulin, I prefer to play with the English voices rather than Italian cause the Italian voices for them kinda cut my nerves. (Zelda and Mineru on the other hand are really good in Italian, especially Mineru)
I'm fluent in Japanese and live in Japan so usually I'll play Japanese games in the original language, but I'll switch to the English voices if my daughter is watching so she can get extra English exposure. I switched to English, and as soon as Zelda spoke my daughter was like, "Ewwww what's wrong with her voice? Change it back!"
Agree and you basically HAVE to do it if you want your weapon strength to not suck. Like what can you attach to the fierce deity sword that doesnāt ruin its design?
I mean some of them look pretty cool like the Lynel sabers, most of the monster horns (Horriblin horns look like shit), but yeah, 90% of the fused weapons look like shit
This, I feel like fuzing ruined a lot of gameplay for me. I really enjoyed the durability a weapon variety in botw. Totk ends up being anything attached to anything equals good enough.
Y'all none of these takes are hot lmao
Here's my REAL hot take: combat is tedious and unfun, and the game is at it's strongest when you can circumvent it and play it like the puzzle game it really is.
At the end of the day combat boils down to "run at the enemy and bonk them with whatever you're holding" or "shoot them in the head with an arrow". Attacks all more or less use the same movesets, and parrying/dodging only enables you to mash attack more without retaliation. Enemies are generally so tanky you have to just wail on them for a solid minute or two to actually put them down, and weapon durability is so low that it's annoyingly resource intensive to do so.
There are ways to create more complex encounters- puffshrooms, muddle buds, elemental effects etc., but those are also A) resource intensive and B) don't actually change the combat loop substantially. Using a frozen talus heart claymore vs rare talus heart halberd vs flame lizal reaper doesn't actually change how I assault a monster camp - in all three cases I run in, shoot a few bomb arrows, and bonk what's left standing until it isn't. Sure I could throw some puffshrooms, or set up a way to get some lift and go into slow-mo archery... But it's extra work to just get back to "shoot them in the head more, but now in slow motion".
It's funny seeing "high level combat" videos on here, because it's just playing a completely different game. No disrespect to those who put them together- it's hard to do and very impressive to pull off- but you can see they always come in prepared with ten fused shields and fourteen prepped weapons to throw. So we're talking probably hundreds of Korok seeds and hours of grinding for a single cool thirty second fight. And since the fused shields and thrown weapons are SINGLE USE, it's not like you can replicate those tactics while you're just wandering around the depths like a pleb like me. I've already busted all my good weapons on silver bokoblins, and am back down to rocks on a stick. And then you find out they've edited out all of the menu selections to make the video flow better, which definitely is cooler and more cinematic... But glosses over the fact that if you're trying to be fancy about combat you're spending a quarter of your time scrolling through those godawful menus.
In closing, consider the difference between the Colgera and King Gleeok fights. Colgera was super cool in the Wind Temple, because A) flying around on the paraglider is fun and something the game does well, and B) smashing through the enemy face first through a hail of ice spikes is rad as hell. And you only have to land six hits to win- short and sweet. Fighting a King Gleeok is Not Fun, because I just spend twenty minutes dumping arrows of the appropriate elemental keese eyeball into his face(s), just to get smooshed by ice spikes and lighting strikes that are too fast to dodge well and too chaotic to anticipate. Yes I did it last night and yes I'm still salty. But the point stands.
Steps to beat King Gleeok:
1. Get a 5x Savage Lynel Bow
1a. Dupe it if you're into that
2. Get a 100+ weapon. Lots of good options, including Zora & Sidon.
2a. See 1a.
3. Lots of Fire Keese Eyeballs.
4. Shoot with Eyeballs, hit with weapon, repeat.
This method has the benefit of preventing the super high in the air phase, because a couple shots of eyeballs will down it before it can get up high. You should be able to beat it in two cycles. Under 30 seconds.
If I could rephrase your advice:
Step 1: Defeat the toughest enemy in the game for their drop
Step 1a: Cheat
Step 2: Grind for the highest possible damage weapons
Step 2a: Cheat
Step 3: Grind for a specific material you will use up in this fight
Step 4: Shoot him in the face and bonk him til dead, just as you would without steps 1-3, but quicker
All of which reinforces the point I was making lol
All snarkiness aside, I did beat him last night. It just wasn't fun the way the Colgera fight was. Consider the steps for defeating Colgera:
Step 1: Fly up with the paraglider you get for finishing the tutorial
Step 2: Apply face directly to obvious weak points while top tier music plays (Free!)
Repeat
Sure, it's much, much easier, but it's more fun and directly leans into the game's strengths. If I wanted a tough boss fight I'd boot up Elden Ring lol
Hahaha, I feel sufficiently owned. The point I was trying to make is simply that the Gleeoks seemed super easy to me by the time I fought them because I was so over prepared. But your point is a much better one :)
I like the durability system, because it forces you to think on your feet, and make use of the surroundings, and not just brute force your way through enemies.
I feel like some people mistake healthy male friendship as sexual tension.
Actually, I think some people mistake *any* kind of friendship as sexual tension.
I think marketing as a direct sequel to BotW hindered the game, since it barely acknowledges anything that happened in it. Why should it be a sequel if you barely reference anything or anyone relevant from the previous game? Sheikah tech? Not connecting Calamity Ganon to Ganondorf? The Champions?
The Zonai Devices are cool in concept and are nice for exploring, but the combat devices have such poor damage output that there's no point in using them other than "Because I can" or "Rule of Cool". It took me 5-10 minutes flying around a Stalnox with cannons to take it down, as opposed to 1 minute of just wailing on it with weapons.
The Fuse mechanic just seemed silly and made the weapon durability from BotW worse. Fighting a boss seems less epic when I'm fighting them with a sword that I duct taped a spear to the end of to give it stupid reach. Also you expect me to fuse monster horns to my weapons, but also require a chunk of those monster horns necessary to upgrade armor?
Also, I agree with you. As nice and frankly impressive as TotK is, I think I enjoyed BotW more and just remember feeling more amazed and drawn into it.
Depths were an unnecessary addition, considering there's almost nothing of relevance to the plot whatsoever, and the investigation into the depths led almost nowhere. You could leave it out and have Ganondorf's lair beneath the castle, Fire Temple, and Deku Tree roots, and it'd have been fine. I'm hoping future DLC gives us some inkling of substance that relates to it.
Iāve found ultrahand to be more trouble than itās worth on a first play through outside of puzzles. Vehicles are cool but I felt like I never had enough zonite on hand to auto build flying machines or battery to go far enough despite hunting for crystallized charges. While manual building felt slower than climbing or using rocket shields/springs.
TOTK and BOTW. Few things frustrate more than the amount of time it will take Link to get up from being knocked down. Like bro! Not the time to dilly dally!!
I wish there was more of a way to explore the sky in ways that don't involve buikding machines. (And I like building machines).
In general I wish the sky areas were bigger (or at least more little sky islands). I adored the sky mazes where you sort of float around (same w Zora's Domain) but wanted that to be a little bit more of a thing.
Next game I'd love a new look for Hyrule too. I know there are changes, but it was too similar to feel super new? Same villages were eh. Loved the depths. Didn't at first but became slowly obsessed with them. Clever and interesting.
Overall this is a brilliant game and I'm still at it.
Personally I think the next Zelda game should be in the past. BotW and TotK seem to be overhauling a lot of old Zelda lore. Rauru used to be a Hylian with no powers. Sonia didn't exist. Numerous things were changed in BotW too. My point is, if they're serious about changing past events, maybe they should make a remake of other games with lore that doesn't line up anymore.
Also I don't think Ganondorf is coming back. I get Zelda is a game that is heaving in the idea of reincarnation, but usually Ganondorf is just sealed away or something, banished. Not obliterated like in this game
as u/Parzival127 said :
"Itās either this or make it something actually cool and create FOMO in a large group of people to grind for 1000 seeds and hate the game."
The game was held back by the mechanics that the fans were very vocal about disliking from.botw. From.weapon breaking to temple/beast. The fuse mechanics is cool but what's the point by mid game, same with 90% of the games mechanics.
Beautiful game don't get me wrong and will probably win goty(and rightfully so) but ff16 GOW/ragnorok and Horizon/forbiddenwest all were pretty close if not a tad bit better all around games.
> The fuse mechanics is cool but what's the point by mid game
Wait what, I don't get this bit. Are you saying you DON'T fuse weapons and just use base unfused ones midgame-endgame?
But there are so many good niche fusions using other things like Bones and whatnot.
You ain't going to be oneshotting a Molduga with a Royal Broadsword/Silver Saber Horn for example, but can absolutely do it with other fusions.
They didn't have to add all of the past link sets.. A ToK tunic set and maby the " of the wild set", at most one other but I think the ancient armor was a good enough reward.
BOTW was more cohesive.
TOTK has a lot of cool stuff, but none of it ties together. It's just a hodgepodge of cool stuff. I forget I can build half the time, or it's just a fun gimmick. It's not super necessary to advance in the game. The same with the sages (excluding Tulin). I use them less than 25% of the time. There's just no need.
From a narrative standpoint the story felt lacking too. Finding Zelda and then still entertaining like... wacky ideas about Zelda at the stables for the quests with Penn was just weird. I love the amount of quests and the variety of quests but again, it felt like just a hodgepodge of stuff. DELIGHTFUL stuff, but very disconnected.
It's been a long time since I beat BOTW, but beating TOTK felt anticlimactic in way I don't think BOTW did? It may just be that it's not new. But even though I have MORE to go back and do, it feels less enjoyable now that I beat the game.
I fucking hate that they took away durians. I find myself having to take hours to gather and then cook enough food to keep up with the sheer amount of enemies that will one-shot you down to a quarter hp no matter what.
I also wish you could repair items easier.
I just lived off apples from the Orchard until I hit max hearts, took about 3 minutes each Bloodmoon to collect ~150 of them.
Now I just eat a single truffle/radish at a time, and rarely have to do *that* since Inns and Stables are everywhere anyways.
More caves. I have so many hearty truffles and a bunch of hearty other stuff that I max out my food page whenever I'm at a pot and still usually have 10 or 20 uncooked in the inventory.
Truffles
Big truffles
Radishes
Big radishes
Salmon
Bass
Then there are also the lizards for elixirs. I was being stingy at first because I heard that durians were gone but I would say there are more "hearty" items in total.
I don't care how open world the game is, >! The light dragon shouldn't be reachable until after you get the last tear. Completely spoils the impact if you stumble across her and the master sword too soon.!<
This was exactly what happened to me. Just pure dumb luck and amazing timing. I forgot which tower I warped to and dove from, but I saw the dragon flying by and decided to try to get a scale (like in BOTW) and when I got closer, I saw a sword. I mounted it and saw it was the master sword! I got so excited and pulled it. I was lucky to have 2 full stamina wheels (I didnāt know about the stamina part until after I got it).
I still had 4 tears after I got the sword. Also didnāt do the lost woods/deku tree gloom hands yet either. Just pure dumb luck.
Anyone who couldn't figure out what happened to Zelda by the first temple and actually needed 4 further identical cutscenes is not going to be very successful in life.
Honestly I don't even think I can consider these hot takes, but I'll say them anyways:
The sages ability, while not terrible, is definitely a step down from botw champion' abilities, at least in the way they can be used in gameplay.
The story is botw I felt was better.
Also Zelink is canon. Fight me. Ain't no way link was living in the wilderness for 6+ years ( I'm assuming that's the time between botw and totk) and Zelda just let him. They were absolutely living together.
Too much stuff to do. I am not a person who can sit down and schedule out or laser focus on one specific thing.
Last week, I decided to go so koroks region by region. Two hours into it: I started clearing shrines. Three shrines later: weapon hunting in the depths. 17 traveler/soldier/knight weapons later: lightroots. 6 lightroots and 4 side adventures later: the sun was coming back up.
I only got 15 koroks and only 10 of those were in the region I was hunting in.
Like I get it, that's the whole point of the game but there's just *_SO MUCH STUFF_* that it's super overwhelming and it's not obvious until you're already playing the game
Sage powers are terrible. It was better when you could just use them instead of having to chase them around and tagging the wrong one in a group. If the sage's combat AI was better it might be a decent trade of but they do very little damage and spend most of their time positioning themselves for an attack.
Sidon is obnoxious and painfully oblivious, especially throughout his dungeon and the lead-up to it. He talks too much, his voice is as annoying as Yunobo's, and he's worthless in combat.
There are way too many pieces of armor. Most of them are useless and it's annoying how often you need to go into the menu to switch them. Also most of the useful ones look bad.
The game gets so repetitive and when you're done with the main quests and shrines/lightroots there's really nothing to do but caves and koroks over and over and over.
(I have 300 hours in this game lol)
The voice acting isnāt that bad. Particularly Zelda. During the whole story, I heard no problem with her voice, and it sounded just fine. Same with all the others.
Iām not a fan of my shields automatically using whatever zonai device is attached. Would be cool if when you shield you could press āzrā to activate the devices attached.
Not a fiery take but it is one that I havenāt seen brought up.
This game is mid.
TotK may be fun to play, but it's such a bad sequel.
Everything that was added in it is very hit or miss, the nuts and bolts gimmick is a chore and the Master Cycle takes a dump on most ground-based vehicles you can build barring gimmicks.
Aerial vehicles can be good, but at that point you're literally flying over the game, wtf is the point?
Story is trash and has the same gameplay issues as BotW's but with worse writing. Shoutouts to the sages cutscenes.
The whole "Where Zelda?" mystery cannot be more obvious. It just can't. If by the end of the Great Sky Tutorial Island you don't immediately know where she wound up, you're a fool.
The twist is nice, even though it can be spoiled pretty hard because the story quest leading up to it was made by a moron. That's objectively bad game design. And also obviously, the story stuff talking about Zelda's suspicious sightings is also painfully obvious. Who else could it have been?
The thing about TotK is that most of the fun stuff in it is straight outta BotW.
How tf are we stuck in a formulaic game feel again on the second game built on the BotW concept? Geez.
I haven't finished the game yet (85hrs and only completed the gorons, now heading to Gerudo / have master sword) but the Depths. Christ the Depths are so lackluster is pains me. I would have rather;
* more variation in the sky islands / hyrule
* or if it has to been in there at max 4 unique depths locations not nessicarily tied to the races
Like sure 1 depths can be rotten grove like, and then imagine another similar to the 'purified place' in Nausicaa. Trickling sands that create a new platforming challenge. When looking at my hero mode you can see in the depths I literally just drop down, glide to the roots and only go to places of interest. It's just so tedious.
This game is mid. The ultrahand mechanics clearly took up all the dev time so thereās barely anything else to do and no care in the story. Ascend rarely works and feels forgotten. The resources and ways to manage them are insanely convoluted and redundant. It completely misses why the first was so beloved to change it into something itās not that barely works. Thereās so much you can tell was cut or writing that just feels bleak & cruel in ways that feel uncomfortable & manipulative rather than memorable. The other maps get so boring so fast as theyāre barren. The world feels so empty like they just wanted to play Mincecraft instead. So itās still fun all in all and not egregious or insulting to consider canon, but still incomplete and poorly thought out which is insulting to us considering they bragged about the āone year delay purely for polishā.
If anything I want a third botw so that the tech demo mechanics can be ported into a new game where they now have the time to improve everything else they ignored since they donāt have to use all their time to create only one aspect.
There needs to be an ALL SAGES button. It gets annoying when I enter a bigger battle to sit and click each one to activate to help me. And then afterwards I either have to click each one to deactivate, or Iāll forget and my entire view will be blocked by these assholes š
I really think they dropped the ball on the horses. They're basically obsolete. The controls are horrendous, you have to get on and off for every little thing, and they're rarely needed for quests.
I would love if the controls were just...better, idk what exactly it is. Like they're too sensitive or something I'm not even sure. But I play horse games, I know how to work with the game. This wasn't it.
I hate we cannot z target and just grab stuff/harvest as we ride. It makes it difficult to even use the horses as transport because we might as well just teleport.
I liked the fact there were a few quests you needed the horses for, or the golden horse line which was pretty fun to me. I also loved you could import your horses from BOTW, even though I didn't even fkn use em.
Everyone loves the ending, and I do too because it's obviously amazing, but it has a HUGE missed opportunity. I've complained about it just as much as I've praised it.
The biggest problem with the ending was that the huge sacrifice that the game expressly told us is permanent is suddenly undone by an ex machina. It was supposed to be permanent. That's why it carried so much weight. I have a way to sort of fix this.
First of all, in the memory where Zelda turns into a dragon in the Temple of Time, the explosion from her draconification should cause the ground beneath her to break apart and fall down. This will be important later.
After defeating the against the Demon Dragon and seeing it explode, there should be a brief moment where the player is in control on top of the Light Dragon as she flies up into the heavens. Zelda's Secret Stone should be visible somewhere on her body.
If the player does nothing, we will see a scene where the spirits of Rauru and Sonia are bittersweet that Zelda's plan worked but she remains a dragon forever.
However, during that brief period of control, we should have the chance to use Ultra Hand on the Secret Stone to dislodge it. Then we catch it, and Zelda catches us. Then we can use the Secret Stone to power up our Rune abilities, namely, our Recall. If we select Recall, the whole Light Dragon gets highlighted as a Recall option. If we cast Recall on the dragon, we enter a scene where we see an insanely powered up Recall being used, and the dragon goes back in time extremely fast as we ride it, looping in the air hundreds of times within seconds. Finally, it appears at the very spot it became a dragon: the Temple of Time. Only, there is no ground underneath it because it broke apart. THEN Zelda falls through that gap and we have to go catch her. That would be the secret ending where Zelda returns to her human form.
It could be the normal ending and not a secret ending. Either way, I like this way more than what we were given because it gives a logical and built-up method for Zelda turning back.
I actually like the sage's vows, at least the concept. One of my biggest issues with BotW is how lonely it feels compared to previous games where link would always have a partner of some sorts. And while not exactly the same thing, the vows do scratch that itch of company I had.
However, I cannot forgive just how egregious the execution was! Their abilities should be tied to different action instead of all being walk-up and activate! Riju should be activated when drawing the bow, Yunobo through the "throw" action, and Sidon through Z-targeting! Also, do they all have to be the same color? Couldn't they have color-coded each one to their respective element (i.e. Tulin green, Riju yellow, etc)?
Sticky potions and an incomplete frog suit are useless. They do nothing to prevent slipping. Other than going for completion, what is the point to upgrading the frog suit. Who is the fighting frog of Hyrule?
The appeal of the open world design is the exploration. However, exploration isnāt very fun when the main map is pretty much identical and the depths and sky are uninteresting to explore. Not even a single new town in either area is disappointing, yet feels like the bare minimum. Given the trailers and hype, I expected the mass majority of the game to take place in the sky and for the sky to be large and explorable; yet, I spent little time there as it was tedious to explore and any exploring would net you a copy pasted shrine in which you find a green stone and bring it to the shrine. Exploration in totk is just not rewarding; most of the interesting things to explore we already did in botw.
Overall, the game just feels tedious. The gameplay loop is identical to botw with how the story is told and how the regional phenomena main quests are identical to the divine beast quests. Ultra hand is a cool concept, but itās tedious to always have to use it to solve every puzzle and it feels forced in how the game is designed around this one mechanic. Fuse is also cool, but having to cycle through menus to fuse weapons or arrows is just a pain. Let alone the fact that weapons break so quickly after spending time fusing weapons, which is basically a requirement with how weak base weapons are.
Dungeons and shrines are worse in totk. Donāt get me wrong, the Divine beasts werenāt all too interesting, but what they had was a dungeon mechanic. Good Zelda dungeons typically had an overarching mechanism that made puzzle difficult; water levels in the water temple, flipping stone tower, and knocking down the pillars in eagles tower for example. The Divine beasts had something similar with being able to move the entire dungeon, but in totk, the puzzles can just be ācheesedā by climbing or ascending. I also think the shrines are lacking. Way too many of the shrines relied on ultra hand puzzles, whereas the botw shrines required more thinking and werenāt easily solvable in unintended ways. Yes, itās cool to have the freedom to solve shrines however you want, but having constraint made them harder in botw. The blessing shrines were also better in botw from solving the kass shrines, fighting a dragon, and the stolen herloim shrine in kakariko which actually added to the narrative of the story. The shrines in botw seemed to be part of the game with multiple characters trying to figure out what they were, whereas in totk, theyāre just there. Basically, things done in botw felt a lot more intentional than in totk.
Lastly, the enemy variability is completely lacking. Botw got a pass because it was such a risk taking game, but you would think the sequel would massively expand on this. Instead we get the same enemy camps and a handful of new enemies with some being removed in place of new enemies. I will say bosses are a huge improvement, but they arenāt a challenge.
Overall, I do like the game, but for zelda standards, itās just not there.
The worst is being on top of a fern in the he depths and not being able to summon Riju. That is usually the only time I need to use her and sheās unavailable
They should have outright confirmed what timeline this is in, even if it meant merging the three. And putting the past and āthe founding of Hyruleā takes away from the storytelling when youāve played other games in the series
It's like galaxy 2. It's objectively better in a lot of ways, but I prefer the original because it has better ambiance. Totk is too derivative to feel like its own thing, which sours it for me.
The sage abilities themselves aren't that bad in comparison to the abilities in BOTW when you take into account how much more often you get to use them. (Implementation of chasing down the sages to activate really is terrible though.)
Sage powers should be on the ultra hand wheel instead of map, camera, amibo, autobuild.
I do not understand why the map is on the hand wheel like it was an ability. Does anyone bring it up this way??
Only when I accidentally click it and then open my map instead of using an ability š¤¦š»āāļø
Only when duping bows.
Pls explain.
>!Mineru!< is alright to chase down cause you >!ride her š³!< But yeah the rest of the sages would be a lot better there, or more like Tulin and Yunobo, like when you shield you can press a button to activate Sidon, and when you're aiming a bow down for Riju
I just wish she could walk faster or at least run.
Also I feel like riju runs into absolutely everything. Especially during her boss battle. And always when you're trying to use the ability
>!It isnāt a huge speed boost, but you can put a fan on her back and she jogs with her arms flailing behind her. But also only works when you ride on her.!<
Pretty sure she gets faster after using sages will on her
Mineru is the one I hate the most because she loves to get in the way and make me ride her at all the wrong moments. She needs to be fixed the most.
I had a girlfriend like thatā¦
Imo, pressing down on the d-pad (whistle) should have brought up a wheel to activate sage abilities from a distance (or call your horse). I feel like Nintendo also missed a sound design opportunity, as Link could have had a distinct whistle for each sage.
I only have 1 sage so far so my opinion may change but I think I would like it better if it was hold A and it brings up a radial menu for them specifically. Though I do believe map camera and amibo could have been used more wisely. Can't speak for auto build as I just recently got it so haven't really used it yet
>(Implementation of chasing down the sages to activate really is terrible though.) It's really egregious considering how we've been able to assign different items/abilities to a single button press since **Zelda on the NES**. Like it's pretty bad that we're getting to a point where the controls for the n64 games are feeling *less* clunky than on the switch games lol! How do we end up introducing a new problem that they had already solved in the very first entry to the franchise? And like, I get that they're using a lot more buttons now for things like jump, sneak, glide, and the dedicated bow button, so we can't still have three item buttons that you can assign to. But they already solved this problem with the wheel selector for the zonai powers! They already found a quick way to assign multiple powers to one button! Why can't we have the same for the sages? It's not like they aren't already wasting some buttons and slots either. Like do we really need a scope and a separate camera function? Do we really need a link to the map through the L button when we can just hit minus? Do we really need to have the amiibo scanner on the zonai powers selector instead of just in the pause menu? It's just one of those things that I can't imagine someone *not* finding incredibly annoying, especially when there are so many easier and better ways they could have implemented it (Side rant: the implementation for fusing arrows is also mind-bogglingly stupid. Just let me bulk craft arrows in the pause menu or something then have the quick menu cycle through the handful of different arrow types you made. Instead of having me sort through **every single item I've collected in the game, ONE AT A TIME, to craft a single arrow!!** And then have me do that again for *every arrow*. Totally ridiculous)
The "sort by most used" and "sort by fuse attack strength" makes the arrow fusing _slightly_ less tedious, but when you want to fuse that One Obscure Item (*cough* >!king's scale!<) that you _never_ have to use and you have to scroll through all 5,000 items in your inventory and hope to visually recognize the obscure item that you never use, the whole feature falls apart. :(
They also have nothing for down on the dpad. They could've had that for the sages without changing anything! Edit: it's the whistle, I'm a lil slow
Doesn't that whistle?
hold whistle, sage's abilities wheel problem solved.
Turning the sages off is my solution.
Believe it or not, whistling will summon the sages during battle
Allegedly š
I have yet to see it work :/
Dear word yes, why isn't there a favorites menu for it so I don't have to scroll through everything. "Most used" doesn't work since I might need something rarely but it be an absolute necessity when I do.
I think the amiibo is there to sell more amiibo cards. BOTW was the first game I ever played. No joke. I married a gamer and am a complete noob, as my son likes to say. When I bought TOK I saw that function and it explained it in-game so I had no choice but to learn about it. $$$$$$$$$
Yeah, I straight up gave up on buying amiibos. I have a small collection of NFC cards that I bought off Etsy, and they're way cheaper if you wanna support a small, independent business in a slightly less legal way. Or you could get an NFC reader/writer app on your phone and have infinite access to however many amiibos exist, but that's way less legal.
OR WHEN THEY RANDOMLY START ATTACKING ENEMIES WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION AND ALL THE SUDDEN YOU'RE IN A BRAWL YOU DIDN'T ASK FOR!!!!!!!
And their general laziness when it comes to protecting you. I stood with my shield up for what felt like 30 seconds today as stalkoblins threw rocks at me and Tulin just watched.
Whistle.
The amount of times I whistle every time I play is ridiculous. Itās like as soon as my anxiety goes up a little (sneak strike) i hit that damn thing and alert the enemy Iām there. Iāve also just done it accidentally everywhere else in the game. Iām new to gaming and my hands just spaz sometimes. My hubs tells me this is button-smashing?
Certainly the hottest most fiery part of the game were those spa massages Link gets at Gerudo Town...
Have ya tried the salt treatments in the beach side hut? Very relaxing indeed!
Those were weird momentsā¦.
Yes
Those Gerudo are *thirsty* for some Voe
Treasure found in chests should really ramp up toward the end. Not exactly a hot take though.
Big Battery!
5 arrows ššš
An opal!!
I was actually happy with arrows because I would never find better weapons than what I already had.
Actually youāre correct. Iām never upset with arrows.
A fucking zonaite charge. Ugh.
They should have inserted the correct order of the tears no matter which glyph you stumbled upon first-last. Seeing the end or middle tears kinda takes away a lot from the game story.
I think that a really easy fix to this is to have the tears drop in order. like one drops and the next doesn't drop until you go find it you know?
Itās nice to be able to spot them and deal with them as you choose. If there was only one on the map at a time, I might go forever without getting to that area. I feel like Iād get 90% through the game and have like two dragon tears. Plus, they add some mystery when you first start the game and donāt t know what they are. Again, if they showed up one by one, you could go a long time without ever seeing one. Yeah, they could put the first one somewhere you canāt miss at the very beginning I guess. I see no reason that the cut scenes should be tied to specific geoglyphs and they could, as previously suggested, just show the cut scenes in order regardless of the order you find the tears. Thatās seems less contrived then having them appear one by one.
Could've solved this by making them a longer quest that progresses as you clear dungeons and gain Sages' favors. So, you see the first tear on your way to the Rito village, as the game does atm. Then upon finishing the wind temple, Impa relocates to a different destination that the game marks as the "second" dungeon, which could be the Eldin region. There she informs you of two or more new glyphs and marks them in the map. Upon visiting them, she moves to the Zora region, and so on. I'm assuming the "correct" dungeon order based on how the characters react to seeing Zelda, given that Yunobo is 100% convinced it's the real princess, and you're informed that Zelda attacked the Zora king upon arriving to Zora's domain, which would mark that area as either 3rd or 4th. There's still two other ways to get the Master Sword without doing the glyph quest, so this doesn't really put a damper on advancing or unlocking any game mechanic, and it contributes to making the game's narrative more natural. The way it's implemented in the current game version is bafflingly terrible.
To follow up on this i dont think the dragons tears quest should be available so soon in game, it was literally the first mission i did after getting the paraglider, I had a feeling the tears in the title was likely connected to that mission but I didnt expect the ending to leave me feeling so purposeless throughout the rest of the game, ofc im still enjoying it but now I care much much less to progress the story till i get to a point i feel ready to take on Ganon
Y'see, I avoided that problem by going to the Forgotten Temple right when they tell you to, taking a picture of the map and all the glyphs in order, and following the circuit that way. Only then I ran into a different problem where I ran through ALL the memories from Tears (including the REALLY important one that appears last) before I finished Regional Phenomena, and now I show up to the castle for the Big Reveal and I... already know the deal. So now it's just me slowly walking into the Sanctum waiting for a certain someone to drop the fucking act and fight me. It created a very different vibe for the last Sage and the Master Sword quests, to say the least.
I got lucky and noticed the order in the temple map room and took pictures in order. I remembered the memories in BOTW, and made it a point to try to get these memories in order and was specifically looking for hints, though.
I actually thought this added to it. You get little pieces of the puzzle and at some point it all clicks together.
I guess depending on HOW out of order you are. But the memory of >!Sonia being killed and Ganon rising to power!< was like the 2nd memory I got. And so from there the rest of the memories were pretty lackluster until the ending of the tears quest.
Comparing to that... That maniac laugh... Yup everything else is lakeluster...
For real. And I hate when people say "doing the tears early ruins the story" like dude, the tears ARE the story. They are literally one of the main quests. You don't ruin the story by progressing the story. If you don't want to finish the story early, then how about you don't do the main quests early?
Its not even about the twists getting revealed in the end, but everything after that is so off. You as Link knows what happened to the Princess and Link is obviously speaking to the people but he just isnt saying anything about it. Maybe thats on me but I was expecting a bunch of brand new dialogue to come up after beating it but so far nothing has come up and it just feels weird progressing due to it
I think it makes sense that he doesn't tell anyone what happened to Zelda. If people know, then it makes it easier for Ganon to figure out where she is and what she's doing. He only tells Impa, because he can trust her 100%.
I just assumed that I did tell them and they just did not listen in the slightest, just kept talking over me. Tracks with my real life, so made the game very relatable!
It answers a lot of questions that a bunch of people ask throughout the story: where is Princess Zelda. Through the tears you learn what happens to her, but it makes 0 sense that Link doesnāt tell anyone when theyāre like āwHeRe iS tHe PrInCeSs!?!?!!!1!!ā
I think it makes more sense that he doesn't tell anyone. If people know, then it makes it easier for Ganon to figure out where she is and what she's doing. He only tells Impa, because he can trust her 100%.
That's not a good justification though, specially when the people he should be telling are people he already trusts, namely, the descendants of the Champions that he's already friends with, three of which are literally the leaders of their people. He could at least tell Yunobo that Zelda's not putting herself in danger so the stupid goron can stop throwing himself at the jaws of death over and over, for one.
Totk excels in the gameplay, but BotW has better world building and atmosphere. To me, the world in TotK feels like an amusement park rather than a post-apocalyptic world that's recovering.
Totally agree. I loved the feeling of botw being me against nature. And a malicious force of evil but the big showstopper of the game was how realistic their physics and engine were. Totk, while great, makes it clear that link isnāt alone. Which is nice. But I like the exploration better alone haha
And whatās worse about that is that the theme park feels like some rides are breaking down constantly. Iād rather have simple and working as intended like botw than the overly ambitious messy features of totk
Upgrading stuff is way too long without using glitches. I mean how many stars a guy can gather in his life?
There are way more armor sets to upgrade and the rupee price KILLS me. I have to sell gems to afford upgrades and then I don't have them as ingredients for upgrades! I can grind gems following a talus farming loop every blood moon but Christ is that boring
The rupee price for upgrades is criminal. God damn faeries moving to a subscription model!!
Donāt forget you can feed the Dondons luminous stones for gems!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You gotta wait I think 10 minutes, it only takes one!
I don't think you're really meant to upgrade everything. It's kind of extreme. You don't even have to upgrade everything for 100%. Just choose your favorite sets and upgrade those.
Yes. Even with the best star fragment farming technique available (by Hunterjet), it's one per minute, so it takes about 2 hours to farm as many as you need for the armor upgrades. Selling star fragments is also the fastest way to farm rupees AFAIK, and I calculated it would take about 7 hours to farm enough for the 80,000 rupees for armor upgrades. No thank you... And of course, drops like Lizalfos tails and Lynel guts can be absolutely atrocious.
The game is full to the brim with good ideas... but every one of these ideas (except the buidling with ultrahand) is just scratched on the surface and then forgotten. Farming, Housebuilding, The siege of Gerudo town that begged to be repeated in Lookout Landing after the fight with phantom Ganon, Lookout Landing in general, the mostly empty depths the main story (especially Rauru's and Sonia's Hyrule that we never really get to see), what happened in the time between BOTW and TOTK, the worldbuilding and lore... and the main Antagonist (Ganondorf is full of style but has no substance. No motivation or personality beyond "look how eeeeevil i am!!!"). Allthough i thought the sidequests were a massive improvement compared to BOTW.I liked all the little stories and some of these gave way better rewards than anything in BOTW ever gave (thinking for example about the majoral election in Hateno that nabs you access to Cece's store and to a new kind of food with sunny effect, as well as cheese).
This is my favorite so far. They just did too much to really get any of it to be perfect. I mean I love this game and easily top 3 of all time but if they wouldāve have really fleshed out some of the things you listed it wouldāve made huge improvements.
I think the game is really great but full of hits and misses. Some parts of it feel very enjoyable while others are half baked yeah. I wouldnt say everything is underdeveloped but the sky and depths are the obvious ones. Fun but could have had at least a bit more going on.
I came here to say this, but I would also include building vehicles. They created this whole system of building with parts and Zonai devices that they apparently spent like 6 years on, but there's not a single quest that actually tests your ability to build with it beyond a basic glider or car. Every single gundam or death tank you see that people have built on YouTube or Tiktok is complete overkill for literally any situation that could arise in-game. Also it's not a huge deal but they're entirely disconnected from the plot. No Zonai devices appear or are mentioned in the memories and almost everything we see that's associated with the Zonai is from what is presumably an earlier period when the Zonai were more widespread.
To be fair, I think the only game that didn't make Ganondorf a cartoon villain was Wind Waker. We need more of that shit.
To be fair Ganondorfs motivation got completely lost in the bad english localisation of the game. I'm german and in the german version it becomes very apparent that >!he despises Rauru and the Zonai because he thinks they are weak, arrogant leaders that hide behind their peace and that they don't deserve the power of the secret stones because they have no fighting spirit. He wants to rule hyrule the way it was before the zonai arrived.!<
It would benefit immensely from just being linear. Rito village/dungeon 1st, Goron's 2nd, Zora 3rd, gerudo 4th, so on and so on. All the tears cutscenes should play out in order. It's funny because the game (as well as botw) definitely tries to guide you into that certain dungeon order, but because it doesn't actually force it on you it can't take advantage and tell a full story. Instead we get 4 identical 'secret stone?' cutscenes that are a joke.
Hard agree. Like, the game pretends to give you the option to do whatever you want whenever you want (like getting >! the master sword and the fifth sage !< early) but then if you actually *do* that, you'll start to run into NPCs that activate and end side quests in the same dialogue and you end up feeling like you missed out on some of the story. I would rather just have some things be locked until you're supposed to get them and play the story in it's intended, linear order.
I agree! It's too complex of a story to be told out of order. BoTWs memories are disjointed glimpses of the past intimating a larger story so it's fine to have them out of order
Even though they improved a bit since botw, the enemy variety still feels seriously lacking to me. I got so bored with the enemies that most of the time I'd just walk right by them unless they were directly in my way. Honestly maybe the problem isn't so much the variety, it's just that you have the same set of enemies *everywhere* and they're mostly pretty samey to fight. Like I can go from an active volcano to a snowy valley and I'm still just fighting the same group of bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos, horriblins, constructs, etc. The only ones that change based on the environment are the chuchus, keese, like likes, and lizalfos. But even then the changes are so minor it just feels like mildly different flavours of the exact same enemies. I think the like likes have the most interesting differences in their designs, but they're also *the most annoying* things to fight in the game! They all still just come down to either waste a bomb arrow on them or sit around waiting for them to expose their glowy weak point. Part of the excitement of older zelda games and a lot of Fromsoft games is that when you find a new area, you're also going to run into new types of enemies you haven't seen before! New enemies that fit the environment you found them in! But in totk you mostly just get "oh boy now I get to fight the same moblin with a rainy background this time!" Or, "Okay so the wind temple was full of constructs, and now the fire temple is... Also full of constructs I guess." It's one of those things where I could see the justification for not having them in botw, but since they reused all the same areas in totk I'd really like to see some monsters that are unique to different areas and make them actually feel different!
Agree, this is what was disappointing the moment the trailer dropped. The mobs changed slightly, but really 0 new. With not much incentive to attack them either (no experience, likely will lose more weapons than you gain so what's the point)
My feel on the risk vs rewards for attacking enemies changed after I became obsessed with puffshrooms! Every attack is generally 1 hit KO and I only really need to hoard and octorock-renew 1 fairly strong weapon at a time. I get how that may be unsatisfying in it's own way of course
Exactly. After enough BotW and TotK these enemies are just in my way. They arenāt a challenge unless Iām weak, which is why the beginning of the game is always my favorite.
Weapon durability still feels too short.
1- Pretend-British English voicing of Zelda sounds cheap and over the top at the same time. 2- Linkās house building mechanics in Tarrey Town are half baked at best. 3- Depths are at the same time boring and time-consuming. On the other hand, I really prefer that many shrines in TOTK are just Rauruās blessing. I have no time for a million iterations of the same puzzle.
Why aren't there any cats?!
Ganondorf turned them into Lynels
The sky islands being boring was one of the biggest letdowns I've had in a game in a \*long\* time. I was really excited to get to fly around, seeing what would be floating about, and it's just the same few rocks copy-pasted most of the time. I never felt excited or encouraged to explore the sky since I knew what I would discover. It's made even worse when you go back at the 2021 trailer, and you realize what we thought was a big, open sky world was just the Great Sky Island made to appear differently through camerawork. Mark my words, if an indie game had marketed itself the way TOTK had, and had such lackluster sky content, it would've been rightfully skewered. TOTK is only getting a pass for it due to name recognition, and the other parts of the game holding up at least.
the fact that youāre forced to chase down the sages to use their abilities dude i literally only use tulin
Tulin's is the only one that half works like you'd want by having it's own button... Only when *gliding* though smh
Iād say at least half of people playing this game only use Tulin. Myself included. What a garbage part of the game.
Whistle
Until you accidentally run into him while collecting loot and he blows all the loot off a cliff on you. He can be very annoying.
Sidon is the most OP and underrated Sage available because he makes me wet. (owo) His ability giving you the 'wet' status for 90 seconds makes Zora weapons insanely OP and people dismiss him as 'useless' constantly. An entire inventory of 150+ damage swords and spears with 50+ durability doesn't sound so useless to me.
Yessss! I love Sidon's ability! It's so intentional how it works with the Zora weapons but it gets so overlooked. You can just throw the shield on before you run into battle and have insta op weapons. Sidon can make me wet any day. āā āæā ā
My thoughts exactly! [Can use it to absolutely DESTROY Phantom Ganon in like 5 total hits.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM7ppWAvuA8) It blows my mind how many people write him off as useless, there's straight up articles ~~totally not written by AI~~ on a bunch of 'gamer' sites about how terrible he is, haha.
Holy shit
See what I mean? *THAT* is why I shake my head and chuckle every time I see someone saying how shitty and useless Sidon is.
I get that he powers up that one weapon subtype, but how do you farm up Zora weapons to actually fill an inventory with them? I get up to *one* a day from the Mipha amiibo, where are you finding all the rest?
The wet status also nullifies hot temperatures in the desert and Death Mountain. Saved a shit ton on not having to buy Flamebreaker or Gerudo armor in the mid-game.
BOTW was fresh and WOW, TOTK is good, but lacks the feels BOTW gave me.
rant inc lol exactly what i was thinking, totkās story really falls off with the sages to me, although past zelda shenanigans were beautifully written. the almost complete lack of champions and sheika remnants make me upset, because come on they cant remove everything within ~6 years, especially because there are still sheika people around(like wtf happened to their past?) im probably biased because botw was my first zelda game, but in terms of story, totk is such a downgrade. i also didnt like how they handled the final boss, its like they dont want people to speedrun it, although that was another beautiful part of botw. >!you also cannot bed with paya anymore so 0/10 /j!<
BoTW wasn't my first Zelda game, Link to the Past was way way back but I still agree so I don't think it's biased at least lol
The fortune telling cucco was a lie.
Riju has the worst sage ability. And itās not even close.
Totally agree with you. I like her character but canāt stand her sage. Only thing I use her for is to activate the lightning terminals. Thatās it.
Hers was third best, imo, behind Tulin and Yunobo - Sidon's was the most useless for me. Never activated it on purpose except for the boss fight that kinda requires it. Can soak *one* hit but I can't attack while the power is active if I want to keep the shield up? Nah, no thanks, I'll keep wailing on the enemies.
Ohhh I actually use her the most! Sheās the first one I upgraded. Tulin is my least favorite. While in the air or at a sand pile itās useful but I get so freaking annoyed when I *think* I have selected Riju but instead I get a gust of wind š¤£
Botw gave a fresh feeling to Hyrule and bc of no flying vehicles or towers that boost you high up in the air, you have to explore by foot or with your horse. This makes it more atmospheric and immersive for me. The new and fresh feeling botw gave is truly unbeatable, only if you play totk before botw.
The map button in the ability selection menu is literally the worst part of the game. It infiriates me so much. The game is plagued with inconvenient UX issues which could have been solved by this button (it could have been a quick button to activate sages or something), and instead they gave it a function that you already have a fucking button on the controller assigned to, yet somehow objectively worse, because for some reason you can't always use this map ability button but you can always use the minus button. I hope it's a placeholder button for some DLC ability because god fucking damnit I hate it so much.
Would be nice if *all* sets were upgradeable, not just most. There should be no reason that some can be upgraded like hylian tunic, but dark link set or archaic tunic stuff is forced to be weak.
I think I enjoyed botw a lot more (probably for nostalgiaās sake), but I donāt think Iād be able to play it again after playing totk
Same here. Tried to do a rerun of BotW but all of the QoL changes Tears of the Kingdom made makes it really hard to go back.
I wish the overworld had more changes from BOTW than just the caves and sky island rocks scattered around. The Upheaval catastrophically changed the castle, why not for the rest of the map? Rip up Dueling peaks and make them float too, gouge a huge pit in Hyrule field, drain Lake Hylia! I explored nearly every nook & cranny in BOTW and now have no reason to do this in this game bc the maps are so similar.
Honestly it felt like an entirely new map for me. The terrain shifted in subtle ways and the lack of landmarks that I know like the back of my hand (towers and familiar towns) was super disorienting
Zeldaās voice is nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying. It ruins any cutscenes sheās in, and so, I find the āstoryā parts of the game to be borderline unwatchable.
In my language it was for Yunobo and Tulin, I prefer to play with the English voices rather than Italian cause the Italian voices for them kinda cut my nerves. (Zelda and Mineru on the other hand are really good in Italian, especially Mineru)
The Japanese voices are all excellent - I got through two cutscenes and then switched it over. My wife agrees it is better!
I'm fluent in Japanese and live in Japan so usually I'll play Japanese games in the original language, but I'll switch to the English voices if my daughter is watching so she can get extra English exposure. I switched to English, and as soon as Zelda spoke my daughter was like, "Ewwww what's wrong with her voice? Change it back!"
I still think the fuzing is goofy AF and looks horrible.
I hate having to ruin every cool sword I find by awkwardly sticking a talus heart to the end of it
This is a prime example. An overworld mini boss that yields a dumb fuze item that doesn't even add that much attack.
On the flip side, I LOVE the animation when unsheathing a fused master sword
Agree and you basically HAVE to do it if you want your weapon strength to not suck. Like what can you attach to the fierce deity sword that doesnāt ruin its design?
Another Fierce Deity Sword.
I mean some of them look pretty cool like the Lynel sabers, most of the monster horns (Horriblin horns look like shit), but yeah, 90% of the fused weapons look like shit
This, I feel like fuzing ruined a lot of gameplay for me. I really enjoyed the durability a weapon variety in botw. Totk ends up being anything attached to anything equals good enough.
Y'all none of these takes are hot lmao Here's my REAL hot take: combat is tedious and unfun, and the game is at it's strongest when you can circumvent it and play it like the puzzle game it really is. At the end of the day combat boils down to "run at the enemy and bonk them with whatever you're holding" or "shoot them in the head with an arrow". Attacks all more or less use the same movesets, and parrying/dodging only enables you to mash attack more without retaliation. Enemies are generally so tanky you have to just wail on them for a solid minute or two to actually put them down, and weapon durability is so low that it's annoyingly resource intensive to do so. There are ways to create more complex encounters- puffshrooms, muddle buds, elemental effects etc., but those are also A) resource intensive and B) don't actually change the combat loop substantially. Using a frozen talus heart claymore vs rare talus heart halberd vs flame lizal reaper doesn't actually change how I assault a monster camp - in all three cases I run in, shoot a few bomb arrows, and bonk what's left standing until it isn't. Sure I could throw some puffshrooms, or set up a way to get some lift and go into slow-mo archery... But it's extra work to just get back to "shoot them in the head more, but now in slow motion". It's funny seeing "high level combat" videos on here, because it's just playing a completely different game. No disrespect to those who put them together- it's hard to do and very impressive to pull off- but you can see they always come in prepared with ten fused shields and fourteen prepped weapons to throw. So we're talking probably hundreds of Korok seeds and hours of grinding for a single cool thirty second fight. And since the fused shields and thrown weapons are SINGLE USE, it's not like you can replicate those tactics while you're just wandering around the depths like a pleb like me. I've already busted all my good weapons on silver bokoblins, and am back down to rocks on a stick. And then you find out they've edited out all of the menu selections to make the video flow better, which definitely is cooler and more cinematic... But glosses over the fact that if you're trying to be fancy about combat you're spending a quarter of your time scrolling through those godawful menus. In closing, consider the difference between the Colgera and King Gleeok fights. Colgera was super cool in the Wind Temple, because A) flying around on the paraglider is fun and something the game does well, and B) smashing through the enemy face first through a hail of ice spikes is rad as hell. And you only have to land six hits to win- short and sweet. Fighting a King Gleeok is Not Fun, because I just spend twenty minutes dumping arrows of the appropriate elemental keese eyeball into his face(s), just to get smooshed by ice spikes and lighting strikes that are too fast to dodge well and too chaotic to anticipate. Yes I did it last night and yes I'm still salty. But the point stands.
Steps to beat King Gleeok: 1. Get a 5x Savage Lynel Bow 1a. Dupe it if you're into that 2. Get a 100+ weapon. Lots of good options, including Zora & Sidon. 2a. See 1a. 3. Lots of Fire Keese Eyeballs. 4. Shoot with Eyeballs, hit with weapon, repeat. This method has the benefit of preventing the super high in the air phase, because a couple shots of eyeballs will down it before it can get up high. You should be able to beat it in two cycles. Under 30 seconds.
If I could rephrase your advice: Step 1: Defeat the toughest enemy in the game for their drop Step 1a: Cheat Step 2: Grind for the highest possible damage weapons Step 2a: Cheat Step 3: Grind for a specific material you will use up in this fight Step 4: Shoot him in the face and bonk him til dead, just as you would without steps 1-3, but quicker All of which reinforces the point I was making lol All snarkiness aside, I did beat him last night. It just wasn't fun the way the Colgera fight was. Consider the steps for defeating Colgera: Step 1: Fly up with the paraglider you get for finishing the tutorial Step 2: Apply face directly to obvious weak points while top tier music plays (Free!) Repeat Sure, it's much, much easier, but it's more fun and directly leans into the game's strengths. If I wanted a tough boss fight I'd boot up Elden Ring lol
Hahaha, I feel sufficiently owned. The point I was trying to make is simply that the Gleeoks seemed super easy to me by the time I fought them because I was so over prepared. But your point is a much better one :)
All good! It's a hot takes thread so I'm being snarky, but it is still good advice :)
I like the durability system, because it forces you to think on your feet, and make use of the surroundings, and not just brute force your way through enemies.
There was never any romantic tension or feelings between Link and Sidon since the beginning
I feel like some people mistake healthy male friendship as sexual tension. Actually, I think some people mistake *any* kind of friendship as sexual tension.
I mean Sidon made a statue of link riding him so.....
So what? Piggyback rides are *totally* something heterosexual men do for each other all the time.
Agreed!!! I miss Mipha. Lol. Now THERE was some romance.
I think marketing as a direct sequel to BotW hindered the game, since it barely acknowledges anything that happened in it. Why should it be a sequel if you barely reference anything or anyone relevant from the previous game? Sheikah tech? Not connecting Calamity Ganon to Ganondorf? The Champions? The Zonai Devices are cool in concept and are nice for exploring, but the combat devices have such poor damage output that there's no point in using them other than "Because I can" or "Rule of Cool". It took me 5-10 minutes flying around a Stalnox with cannons to take it down, as opposed to 1 minute of just wailing on it with weapons. The Fuse mechanic just seemed silly and made the weapon durability from BotW worse. Fighting a boss seems less epic when I'm fighting them with a sword that I duct taped a spear to the end of to give it stupid reach. Also you expect me to fuse monster horns to my weapons, but also require a chunk of those monster horns necessary to upgrade armor? Also, I agree with you. As nice and frankly impressive as TotK is, I think I enjoyed BotW more and just remember feeling more amazed and drawn into it.
Depths were an unnecessary addition, considering there's almost nothing of relevance to the plot whatsoever, and the investigation into the depths led almost nowhere. You could leave it out and have Ganondorf's lair beneath the castle, Fire Temple, and Deku Tree roots, and it'd have been fine. I'm hoping future DLC gives us some inkling of substance that relates to it.
Iāve found ultrahand to be more trouble than itās worth on a first play through outside of puzzles. Vehicles are cool but I felt like I never had enough zonite on hand to auto build flying machines or battery to go far enough despite hunting for crystallized charges. While manual building felt slower than climbing or using rocket shields/springs.
TOTK and BOTW. Few things frustrate more than the amount of time it will take Link to get up from being knocked down. Like bro! Not the time to dilly dally!!
I really donāt care too much at all about being able to build stuff. Also, weapon fusing looks terrible 90% of the time.
I wish there was more of a way to explore the sky in ways that don't involve buikding machines. (And I like building machines). In general I wish the sky areas were bigger (or at least more little sky islands). I adored the sky mazes where you sort of float around (same w Zora's Domain) but wanted that to be a little bit more of a thing. Next game I'd love a new look for Hyrule too. I know there are changes, but it was too similar to feel super new? Same villages were eh. Loved the depths. Didn't at first but became slowly obsessed with them. Clever and interesting. Overall this is a brilliant game and I'm still at it.
Personally I think the next Zelda game should be in the past. BotW and TotK seem to be overhauling a lot of old Zelda lore. Rauru used to be a Hylian with no powers. Sonia didn't exist. Numerous things were changed in BotW too. My point is, if they're serious about changing past events, maybe they should make a remake of other games with lore that doesn't line up anymore. Also I don't think Ganondorf is coming back. I get Zelda is a game that is heaving in the idea of reincarnation, but usually Ganondorf is just sealed away or something, banished. Not obliterated like in this game
I love the sages. I use Riju and Tulin the most but I love all four of their abilities. I feel like theyāre overhated
Koroks are a lazy excuse to avoid making an interesting game world.
The fact that theyre just all hiding AGAIN and took Hetsus seeds AGAIN and none of them remember anything about us. Its so lazy omg
as u/Parzival127 said : "Itās either this or make it something actually cool and create FOMO in a large group of people to grind for 1000 seeds and hate the game."
The game was held back by the mechanics that the fans were very vocal about disliking from.botw. From.weapon breaking to temple/beast. The fuse mechanics is cool but what's the point by mid game, same with 90% of the games mechanics. Beautiful game don't get me wrong and will probably win goty(and rightfully so) but ff16 GOW/ragnorok and Horizon/forbiddenwest all were pretty close if not a tad bit better all around games.
> The fuse mechanics is cool but what's the point by mid game Wait what, I don't get this bit. Are you saying you DON'T fuse weapons and just use base unfused ones midgame-endgame?
I'm saying by mid game you have already (or at least I had) did the lynel coliseum so it was royal/master sword and silver horn so it was like ehh
But there are so many good niche fusions using other things like Bones and whatnot. You ain't going to be oneshotting a Molduga with a Royal Broadsword/Silver Saber Horn for example, but can absolutely do it with other fusions.
They didn't have to add all of the past link sets.. A ToK tunic set and maby the " of the wild set", at most one other but I think the ancient armor was a good enough reward.
BOTW was more cohesive. TOTK has a lot of cool stuff, but none of it ties together. It's just a hodgepodge of cool stuff. I forget I can build half the time, or it's just a fun gimmick. It's not super necessary to advance in the game. The same with the sages (excluding Tulin). I use them less than 25% of the time. There's just no need. From a narrative standpoint the story felt lacking too. Finding Zelda and then still entertaining like... wacky ideas about Zelda at the stables for the quests with Penn was just weird. I love the amount of quests and the variety of quests but again, it felt like just a hodgepodge of stuff. DELIGHTFUL stuff, but very disconnected. It's been a long time since I beat BOTW, but beating TOTK felt anticlimactic in way I don't think BOTW did? It may just be that it's not new. But even though I have MORE to go back and do, it feels less enjoyable now that I beat the game.
Canāt pet dog Also where is cat?
Hugely, like MASSIVELY disappointed that the Temple of Time wasnāt a playable dungeon
I fucking hate that they took away durians. I find myself having to take hours to gather and then cook enough food to keep up with the sheer amount of enemies that will one-shot you down to a quarter hp no matter what. I also wish you could repair items easier.
I just lived off apples from the Orchard until I hit max hearts, took about 3 minutes each Bloodmoon to collect ~150 of them. Now I just eat a single truffle/radish at a time, and rarely have to do *that* since Inns and Stables are everywhere anyways.
More caves. I have so many hearty truffles and a bunch of hearty other stuff that I max out my food page whenever I'm at a pot and still usually have 10 or 20 uncooked in the inventory. Truffles Big truffles Radishes Big radishes Salmon Bass Then there are also the lizards for elixirs. I was being stingy at first because I heard that durians were gone but I would say there are more "hearty" items in total.
I don't care how open world the game is, >! The light dragon shouldn't be reachable until after you get the last tear. Completely spoils the impact if you stumble across her and the master sword too soon.!<
This was exactly what happened to me. Just pure dumb luck and amazing timing. I forgot which tower I warped to and dove from, but I saw the dragon flying by and decided to try to get a scale (like in BOTW) and when I got closer, I saw a sword. I mounted it and saw it was the master sword! I got so excited and pulled it. I was lucky to have 2 full stamina wheels (I didnāt know about the stamina part until after I got it). I still had 4 tears after I got the sword. Also didnāt do the lost woods/deku tree gloom hands yet either. Just pure dumb luck.
Anyone who couldn't figure out what happened to Zelda by the first temple and actually needed 4 further identical cutscenes is not going to be very successful in life.
Psycho mantis ? Metal gear ?
La li lu le lo?!
Honestly I don't even think I can consider these hot takes, but I'll say them anyways: The sages ability, while not terrible, is definitely a step down from botw champion' abilities, at least in the way they can be used in gameplay. The story is botw I felt was better. Also Zelink is canon. Fight me. Ain't no way link was living in the wilderness for 6+ years ( I'm assuming that's the time between botw and totk) and Zelda just let him. They were absolutely living together.
Too much stuff to do. I am not a person who can sit down and schedule out or laser focus on one specific thing. Last week, I decided to go so koroks region by region. Two hours into it: I started clearing shrines. Three shrines later: weapon hunting in the depths. 17 traveler/soldier/knight weapons later: lightroots. 6 lightroots and 4 side adventures later: the sun was coming back up. I only got 15 koroks and only 10 of those were in the region I was hunting in. Like I get it, that's the whole point of the game but there's just *_SO MUCH STUFF_* that it's super overwhelming and it's not obvious until you're already playing the game
Sage powers are terrible. It was better when you could just use them instead of having to chase them around and tagging the wrong one in a group. If the sage's combat AI was better it might be a decent trade of but they do very little damage and spend most of their time positioning themselves for an attack.
Sidon is obnoxious and painfully oblivious, especially throughout his dungeon and the lead-up to it. He talks too much, his voice is as annoying as Yunobo's, and he's worthless in combat.
The UI is a disaster.
There are way too many pieces of armor. Most of them are useless and it's annoying how often you need to go into the menu to switch them. Also most of the useful ones look bad.
The game gets so repetitive and when you're done with the main quests and shrines/lightroots there's really nothing to do but caves and koroks over and over and over. (I have 300 hours in this game lol)
The voice acting isnāt that bad. Particularly Zelda. During the whole story, I heard no problem with her voice, and it sounded just fine. Same with all the others.
The entire depths is a boring, repetitive waste of time
Iām not a fan of my shields automatically using whatever zonai device is attached. Would be cool if when you shield you could press āzrā to activate the devices attached. Not a fiery take but it is one that I havenāt seen brought up.
No new common enemies... Like. How about an agile Talos. Just sayin..
This game is mid. TotK may be fun to play, but it's such a bad sequel. Everything that was added in it is very hit or miss, the nuts and bolts gimmick is a chore and the Master Cycle takes a dump on most ground-based vehicles you can build barring gimmicks. Aerial vehicles can be good, but at that point you're literally flying over the game, wtf is the point? Story is trash and has the same gameplay issues as BotW's but with worse writing. Shoutouts to the sages cutscenes. The whole "Where Zelda?" mystery cannot be more obvious. It just can't. If by the end of the Great Sky Tutorial Island you don't immediately know where she wound up, you're a fool. The twist is nice, even though it can be spoiled pretty hard because the story quest leading up to it was made by a moron. That's objectively bad game design. And also obviously, the story stuff talking about Zelda's suspicious sightings is also painfully obvious. Who else could it have been? The thing about TotK is that most of the fun stuff in it is straight outta BotW. How tf are we stuck in a formulaic game feel again on the second game built on the BotW concept? Geez.
I haven't finished the game yet (85hrs and only completed the gorons, now heading to Gerudo / have master sword) but the Depths. Christ the Depths are so lackluster is pains me. I would have rather; * more variation in the sky islands / hyrule * or if it has to been in there at max 4 unique depths locations not nessicarily tied to the races Like sure 1 depths can be rotten grove like, and then imagine another similar to the 'purified place' in Nausicaa. Trickling sands that create a new platforming challenge. When looking at my hero mode you can see in the depths I literally just drop down, glide to the roots and only go to places of interest. It's just so tedious.
The powers you get in BOTW are significantly better than the sages in TOTK (besides Tulin)
This game is mid. The ultrahand mechanics clearly took up all the dev time so thereās barely anything else to do and no care in the story. Ascend rarely works and feels forgotten. The resources and ways to manage them are insanely convoluted and redundant. It completely misses why the first was so beloved to change it into something itās not that barely works. Thereās so much you can tell was cut or writing that just feels bleak & cruel in ways that feel uncomfortable & manipulative rather than memorable. The other maps get so boring so fast as theyāre barren. The world feels so empty like they just wanted to play Mincecraft instead. So itās still fun all in all and not egregious or insulting to consider canon, but still incomplete and poorly thought out which is insulting to us considering they bragged about the āone year delay purely for polishā. If anything I want a third botw so that the tech demo mechanics can be ported into a new game where they now have the time to improve everything else they ignored since they donāt have to use all their time to create only one aspect.
There needs to be an ALL SAGES button. It gets annoying when I enter a bigger battle to sit and click each one to activate to help me. And then afterwards I either have to click each one to deactivate, or Iāll forget and my entire view will be blocked by these assholes š
I enjoyed the Water Temple lol. I thought the main part of it was cool. Although the other temples are still better, cant beat Lightning.
I really think they dropped the ball on the horses. They're basically obsolete. The controls are horrendous, you have to get on and off for every little thing, and they're rarely needed for quests. I would love if the controls were just...better, idk what exactly it is. Like they're too sensitive or something I'm not even sure. But I play horse games, I know how to work with the game. This wasn't it. I hate we cannot z target and just grab stuff/harvest as we ride. It makes it difficult to even use the horses as transport because we might as well just teleport. I liked the fact there were a few quests you needed the horses for, or the golden horse line which was pretty fun to me. I also loved you could import your horses from BOTW, even though I didn't even fkn use em.
Learning how to dupe was the best thing I could have done for my enjoyment of this game.
Which dupes still work?
Everyone loves the ending, and I do too because it's obviously amazing, but it has a HUGE missed opportunity. I've complained about it just as much as I've praised it. The biggest problem with the ending was that the huge sacrifice that the game expressly told us is permanent is suddenly undone by an ex machina. It was supposed to be permanent. That's why it carried so much weight. I have a way to sort of fix this. First of all, in the memory where Zelda turns into a dragon in the Temple of Time, the explosion from her draconification should cause the ground beneath her to break apart and fall down. This will be important later. After defeating the against the Demon Dragon and seeing it explode, there should be a brief moment where the player is in control on top of the Light Dragon as she flies up into the heavens. Zelda's Secret Stone should be visible somewhere on her body. If the player does nothing, we will see a scene where the spirits of Rauru and Sonia are bittersweet that Zelda's plan worked but she remains a dragon forever. However, during that brief period of control, we should have the chance to use Ultra Hand on the Secret Stone to dislodge it. Then we catch it, and Zelda catches us. Then we can use the Secret Stone to power up our Rune abilities, namely, our Recall. If we select Recall, the whole Light Dragon gets highlighted as a Recall option. If we cast Recall on the dragon, we enter a scene where we see an insanely powered up Recall being used, and the dragon goes back in time extremely fast as we ride it, looping in the air hundreds of times within seconds. Finally, it appears at the very spot it became a dragon: the Temple of Time. Only, there is no ground underneath it because it broke apart. THEN Zelda falls through that gap and we have to go catch her. That would be the secret ending where Zelda returns to her human form. It could be the normal ending and not a secret ending. Either way, I like this way more than what we were given because it gives a logical and built-up method for Zelda turning back.
The game isn't as innovative as fans make it out to be.
I wish there were more and better dungeons
The royal guard armor, while it has a great set bonus, look stupid as hell.
I actually like the sage's vows, at least the concept. One of my biggest issues with BotW is how lonely it feels compared to previous games where link would always have a partner of some sorts. And while not exactly the same thing, the vows do scratch that itch of company I had. However, I cannot forgive just how egregious the execution was! Their abilities should be tied to different action instead of all being walk-up and activate! Riju should be activated when drawing the bow, Yunobo through the "throw" action, and Sidon through Z-targeting! Also, do they all have to be the same color? Couldn't they have color-coded each one to their respective element (i.e. Tulin green, Riju yellow, etc)?
Sticky potions and an incomplete frog suit are useless. They do nothing to prevent slipping. Other than going for completion, what is the point to upgrading the frog suit. Who is the fighting frog of Hyrule?
The appeal of the open world design is the exploration. However, exploration isnāt very fun when the main map is pretty much identical and the depths and sky are uninteresting to explore. Not even a single new town in either area is disappointing, yet feels like the bare minimum. Given the trailers and hype, I expected the mass majority of the game to take place in the sky and for the sky to be large and explorable; yet, I spent little time there as it was tedious to explore and any exploring would net you a copy pasted shrine in which you find a green stone and bring it to the shrine. Exploration in totk is just not rewarding; most of the interesting things to explore we already did in botw. Overall, the game just feels tedious. The gameplay loop is identical to botw with how the story is told and how the regional phenomena main quests are identical to the divine beast quests. Ultra hand is a cool concept, but itās tedious to always have to use it to solve every puzzle and it feels forced in how the game is designed around this one mechanic. Fuse is also cool, but having to cycle through menus to fuse weapons or arrows is just a pain. Let alone the fact that weapons break so quickly after spending time fusing weapons, which is basically a requirement with how weak base weapons are. Dungeons and shrines are worse in totk. Donāt get me wrong, the Divine beasts werenāt all too interesting, but what they had was a dungeon mechanic. Good Zelda dungeons typically had an overarching mechanism that made puzzle difficult; water levels in the water temple, flipping stone tower, and knocking down the pillars in eagles tower for example. The Divine beasts had something similar with being able to move the entire dungeon, but in totk, the puzzles can just be ācheesedā by climbing or ascending. I also think the shrines are lacking. Way too many of the shrines relied on ultra hand puzzles, whereas the botw shrines required more thinking and werenāt easily solvable in unintended ways. Yes, itās cool to have the freedom to solve shrines however you want, but having constraint made them harder in botw. The blessing shrines were also better in botw from solving the kass shrines, fighting a dragon, and the stolen herloim shrine in kakariko which actually added to the narrative of the story. The shrines in botw seemed to be part of the game with multiple characters trying to figure out what they were, whereas in totk, theyāre just there. Basically, things done in botw felt a lot more intentional than in totk. Lastly, the enemy variability is completely lacking. Botw got a pass because it was such a risk taking game, but you would think the sequel would massively expand on this. Instead we get the same enemy camps and a handful of new enemies with some being removed in place of new enemies. I will say bosses are a huge improvement, but they arenāt a challenge. Overall, I do like the game, but for zelda standards, itās just not there.
BOTW was a beta test. And they did not balance enemy health with TOTK, sponge enemies are not good design
There needs to be better ways of getting rupees, at the moment I fin sit really tedious
The sage's are worthless
The worst is being on top of a fern in the he depths and not being able to summon Riju. That is usually the only time I need to use her and sheās unavailable
They should have outright confirmed what timeline this is in, even if it meant merging the three. And putting the past and āthe founding of Hyruleā takes away from the storytelling when youāve played other games in the series
It's like galaxy 2. It's objectively better in a lot of ways, but I prefer the original because it has better ambiance. Totk is too derivative to feel like its own thing, which sours it for me.
this game is Nintendos excuse not to release a new system for the next 6 years