1. having to wear specific armor to do get a specific thing: question: do you use a plier to hammer in a nail? it can but do you REALLY want to unless you have no other option? not really. to wear gear for a specific job is what was missing in games for a long while. changing skins perhaps after beating the mains tory is a nice bonus but this wear anyskin for any stats is not a novel or great as it turns out to be. in fact it being abused to leech money out of peoples pockets. Also i makes sense for the general mainstream audience: oh its cold? let's wear something warm. it's hot outside! wear the dessert garbs. I need to swim? let's wear swimming gear. need to climb? GLIMBING GEAR 2. cutscenes dialog. while for a regular MLG Gamer TM this is true you forget that general audiences aka mainstream players, or also known as trend tourists, NEED those. i can garantee you give a game that just drops items in your inventory without a cutscene and the normies get hella confused if he even got something 3. whistle and sages: the whistle button call the sages to you btw. also they HAD to make the champions clunky as the prior champion abilities essentially made mechanics obsolete: why climbing if you can revali up? why have health items or armor at all if you get revived instantly with fish waifu? why get good with parry and shield blocking if you can just daruk everything even guardians? why utilize skill in combat if you can just urbosa the lightning into bokoblin ass. they essential fought against the very game systems. so the sage abilities are majorly nerfed and clunky on purpose to not interfere with the zonai devices. edit: 4. and you have a quick select for cooking meaning only having to select one item and then choose a recipe for it. so kind of less time spend in the menu
@@MikePhantom 1. I kind of agree about your side about needing specific armor for specific situations, that's what equipment variety is about, but your argument falls apart in regards to cosmetics. Yes, the idea of "wear any skin with any effect" *is* being used for microtransactions, DLC and other scummy tactics. It does not *have to* be, however, and you bringing it up like that clinches the whole argument is fairly disingenuous. 2. The average person isn't that stupid, and it would be trivial to fix this problem while still removing the cutscenes. Finish the shrine, fade to white, inventory jingle and "item get" notification plays. It communicates the same information without forcing the player to skip through two custcenes every time they finish a shrine. 3. No. A system never HAS to be clunky, that's just lazy. If the champion abilities broke the game's systems, they should've made different champion abilities, not made them annoyingly difficult to use. Any solution to a game design problem that is achieved by making the game less fun to play is a poorly conceived one. 4. That's a bandaid solution, you still need to navigate the menus, find the item you want the recipe for, have already cooked the recipe, select the recipe, throw it into the pot, skip the cooking animation and close out of the "item get" notification. Every time you want a new dish. At the very least they could've added an option to turn off the cooking animation instead of having to manually skip it every time.
Breath of the wild never had issues to begin with, so the points you are making for tears of the Kingdom is worthless. You are simply not good at the games.
@@aldar8240 1.that is however the rule recently. its was actually brought up in the ps4 spider man that you can only have specific effects with specific outfits. only if reaching in long term goal you can use them all with what ever skin, but i think that included owning all and upgrading them not so sure anymore. but it remains a novelty to have NOT money involved with skins 2. you HIGHLY overestimate the capability of a general audiences player, a trend tourist. any hand holding UI or pop up that would any somewhat competent hobby gamer question if the devs think the Players are utter morons are being made because of these people. not because of the wishes of devs but CEOs and managers whos goal is to EXPAND if possible limitlessly and maximize profits. and you can only do that if even the more brain dead person can play the game. TBF nintendo's reason may not be as cynical and money driven but they do use the same ideas to appeal to as many as possible as the toy company they are. 3. I never argued it has to be but thats whats clearly being done here. WHY ELSE would they make it worse when they had it intuitive and seemingly perfect in the prior game? because nintendo has more or less a streak of wanting to dictate how people play their games. thats why even after 1 and a half months they still remove dupping glitches in a game that most people ALREADY have finished (and not BOTW as much surprisingly) and thats ALSO why they made the champion abilities NOT useable during the champions ballad DLC rematches 4. not saying its perfect but at this bullet point i merely wanted to tell that this is possible as he was not aware of it in the part of the video. his assessment would be only more accurate if he considers that in as well, he could ahve made suggestions to improve THAT feature and not suggest a feature that is is already there be it though improvement worthy, and make his assessment kind of....inconsequential
I'm surprised you didn't mention how this game seems to want to gaslight me into believing BotW never happened. The whole time I was thinking, "you know, those giant, weather-controlling, death-beam shooting divine beasts would be really handy.... where are they? Where are all the guardians? Where are the giant shiekah pillars around the castle? Purah, Robbie, why do you refuse to so much as mention the fact that almost every trace of the shiekah tech representing YOUR LIFE'S WORK have suddenly disappeared without a trace?" When I got to the shrine of resurrection and saw that even the freaking walls were gone... legit felt like some 1984 shit. "There was never a shrine here, Link. Ancient sheikah? Who? Do you mean the Zonai? Why don't you go with the nice doctor, you're clearly not feeling well." Also can't get over the fact that Zelda spent 100yrs in Hyrule Castle holding back Calamity Ganon only to realize there was a spare Ganon in the basement.
It’s one of my biggest issues of the game and it’s story, like WHY do these things from the previous game not exist? Like what happened to the Sheikah Slate? You know the thing Link used the entirety of his adventure? And if it’s supposedly the “Purah Pad” then why didn’t they mention that it is in some way? Why don’t they mention anything and pretend like the Guardians and Divine Beasts didn’t exist?
@@SpoonyBard-mx1ve I know why they did it, doesn't make it any less of a problem. Nintendo has really weird, orwellian rules regarding any reference to their existing products. Basically, the devs of TotK aren't allowed to make any reference to BotW that would impact someone's first time playing it, so basically nothing of substance. Nothing that could make a player feel left out for not playing another game, nor influence them to not buy it later because they've already experienced parts of it vicariously thru the sequel. You might notice that this basically makes it impossible to have any sequel to any story in a nintendo product, and you'd be correct. That's why Majora's Mask and Link's Awakening are "sequels" that immediately send Link to a new land with new characters and no meaningful reference to anything that happened in the games they are supposedly sequels to. Yet in TotK they decided to stay in the same place with the same characters while STILL being completely disconnected from the game it is supposed to be a sequel to, which obviously feels absolutely bizarre.
@@samwellcheck562So the Pokemon mindset? "No, we can't have Mega evolutions, Gigantomax and Z Moves in any future games! We don't carry over major mechanics here!" type of shit.
Yes! This! This right here! With all the interaction with old sheikah tech in BOTW, I was super curious to see how it had been used in the years since. Using shrines as new homes or storage facilities? Using the tech to find new ways for quicker transport beyond horses? Or maybe it was the opposite, and there was a harsh rejection of old sheikah tech and disdain for any use of it because it had been used to betray everyone despite calamity ganon being cast out. The closest we get to the shiekah stuff is the bits of it that can be seen in Purah's towers. But no, such an interesting part of the world not only ignored, but actively deleted. Every interaction with characters that we once knew feeling incredibly awkward, like a giant invisible elephant is in the room and sucking up all the oxygen. Any location punctuated by the unnerving presence of those black and faded golden embroidering just bleached clean. It's made even worse because the Zonai ruins are slap-dashed sprinkled around and are so much more dull and jarring to look at.
My issue with the story was the titular Tears side quest. Link discovers these secrets and they alter no interactions with anyone or anything after you complete it.
The sad part is that the story is actually quite nice, and likely would have had more impact if Zelda's draconification had been more of a surprise. If some story progression (Temples, freeing the deku tree, etc.) was required to unlock more geoglyphs and you had to view them in order somehow, it might have been much cleaner.
If you do them early enough and get the master sword early Purah gives you a throwaway line asking when you planned to tell her. Only Impa even seems broken up about it.
@@NinjaPiParadox I did this. I had maxed out my stamina wheels by the point I completed the Tears sequence. Later both the Great Deku Tree and Purah give you the side quest to find the Master Sword. Only for both to immediately be completed. It's weird how little Impa has to do with the plot beyond the Tears side quest too.
Worse than that, it makes the entire subplot of fake Zelda entirely pointless. Especially if you are like me and the first 4 tears you got made you figure out the entire draconification subplot. So everytime the fake Zelda appeared, Link either came across as unbelievably dense, or as an unbelievable dickhead for not explaining things to other characters. I know you can't reasonably expect the developers to know how much of the story you have figured out on your own until you get all tears but... Well, that's the issue, isn't it? If the developers can't know how much information you have in any given moment, they are designing the narrative with both hands tied behind their backs. Honestly, the memories system from BotW just should have been abandoned altogether. It creates more problems than it solves. It's just not worth it.
One of my minor complaints with TOTK is how it doesn't do anything interesting with the places it reuses from BOTW. Like sometimes it's pretty good but than there's areas like the Thunder Plateau, an area that was made just to host a shrine quest in BOTW now is just purposeless in TOTK.
You'd imagine since the big new addition to the overworld this time were interiors and caves, they'd have made a cool mini dungeon inside the Akkala Citadel, especially since there's already a model and map for it in Age of Calamity.@@quibquiberton4184
The way totk handles weapon durability does solve a core issue I had with botw. The few unique experiences with weapons in botw where exceedingly rare and simply gone when they expired. I came across one fire sword in botw and I did not want to experiment with it for fear of losing it and it's capabilities but in totk I can slap a fire horn on a spear and go nuts. I am far more likely to engage random groups of enemies because often they supply far more and better resources than the ones I used up. Not perfect but a move that let's that particular goblin in my brain be quiet.
They could just not have weapons break and it would be a non-issue in the first place. Weapons all still shatter like glass in TOTK, and you're still limited to only three terrible movesets. The combat is still awful.
@pukerat7562 It's literally no worse than the combat in every other game in the series. I'd argue it even has a leg up on them because the way every object interacts uniquely with the environment means that you can approach engagements in more ways than just running in swinging your sword like a spastic. If you play the game using more than one brain cell, weapon durability becomes a non-issue. In fact, in both Wild AND Kingdom, it ended up cause the opposite problem where I couldn't burn through my weapons faster than the game was throwing new ones at me.
@@wilnich592 Thank you, the only argument in favor I can understand with getting rid of weapon durability is that it isn't bad enough, I ALWAYS have more weapons than I need, never once in either game was I without a good weapon to use, cus as long as you're smart and actually using everything durability is a complete non issue, and on THAT angle i can understand people saying durability isn't worth keeping as a mechanic cus it doesn't change the game enough including it. I'm always so baffled when I see people upset that weapons break as if you aren't constantly getting good weapons all the time as long as you're doing the story/shrines you come across so that the invisible world level is constantly going up (so good weapons/materials are dropping all the time.)
@@pukerat7562 then theres no point in having multiple weapons in the first place, might as well make it like every other zelda game and give you like one, MAYBE two swords max to use for the entire game! boring. boring. and fusing is fun! and isnt hard at all. you'll almost always have something on hand to turn into a new weapon, no need to lose something forever and have to go hunting thru the overworld for new weapons like in botw.
@@Dan_the_Druid It's a small thing, but finding amiibo armor in the Depths is one of my favorite changes in TOTK. Being able to explore Hyrule in a green hat without beating 90% of the game first is really wonderful.
Honestly, I'm glad you can get the costumes without amiibo, but I absolutely hate finding them in the depths. Just a me thing, but I would have rather had unique armor in the chests and have the poe statues give out costumes.
I remember the time Yonobu ran in front of me as I was spamming the A button to grab bomb flowers. He then launched into said bomb flowers and burned one of my fairies.
i keep a cannon on mineru so i dont have to deal with all the bullshit rock mining segments, but that generally leads to her shooting enemies while they're near TNT barrels and getting me blown up in the process
Assigning sage abilities to the down button would've been such an easy way to improve the way they work It's kind of funny when you think about how that is already sort of the case, with the sages running towards you when you whistle
I’m sorry to hear your father passed Plague. This is the first I’ve heard of it so I’m sorry if I’m bringing up old news, but I just hope you’re doing well man and I’m sorry for your loss
@@jobdylan5782 lol i was thinking something similar. Me: Isn't his dad the one who didn't believe in covid then got it. Near death he was screaming for God/Jesus. IIRC the entire time plague had very dry or vitriolic tone.
@@m.czandogg9576 Yeah but he listens to conspiracy podcasts so he deserved it and that must be added to a video game video essay and also one about naruto. RIP Pop
@@jobdylan5782 Eli was the guy who had to drag them to the hospital and scream at them to get medical care. Whatever your thoughts are, Eli clearly cared and wanted the best for those around him. Regardless of personal differences he lost family and making light of that or shrugging it off is tactless.
Yes. Shrines should absolutely fade to white and teleport you out once you reach the end. That said, a streamer I watch actually refuses to skip the blessing orb cutscenes at the ends of shrines because he's infatuated with the "beautiful singing". The solution? Implement an option that automatically skips to white at the ends of shrines. If you like the singing, just don't tick the option. Everybody wins.
Or ignore idiots that love listening to "singing." At some point the logic of 'you can't please everyone' turns into trying to please a handful of crazy persons.
@@PlagueOfGripes You're calling someone crazy for simply enjoying the song when they complete a shrine? Also why is "singing" in quotations? You skipped them all and didn't know about it? This makes you look very petty and ignorant.
@PlagueOfGripes That's going too far. You're getting uppity about someone enjoying something while being completely impatient that you have to spend a couple of seconds pressing a button three times? What they like may seem crazy to you, your complaint sounds crazy to others.
I like the Spiderman PS4 gave you the suit bonus after you unlocked the suit so you can choose the suit you want to wear along with the power you wanted to equip seperately.
Honestly, pretty valid points there. One more small gripe I have to add is that the house building itself is rather... Limited, there's not many modules, and not even enough space to have 1 of every module. I feel like they could have loosened the limits on it a bit.
yea that was by far one of the most disappointing aspects of the game, which is ironic since this game is supposedly so big on "building what you want."
It wasn't just limited. The building interface was a god damned nightmare and had no way of customizing the pieces so that they would fit together without leaving the room open to the outside.
I am honestly just going to avoid this pointlessness in TotK should I drag my motivation back up to beat the main story. It it one of the least rewarding experiences for time investment I've ever had and I used to play MMOs at end games like WoW and GW2 for years.
Glad i'm not the only one who thought they could've done a better job with the tutorial this time around. The good thing about BotW's was that you got pretty much everything at the start which meant when you left, you'd probably only miss out on things like the camera and inventory upgrades from the Korok elder which were largely inconsequential. The way it is in this game makes it feel like the game is railroading you in one direction and kills some of the freedom the first game had.
I've beaten BOTW twice and my wife has beaten it three times, and a big part of why it's enjoyable to revisit is the fact that the tutorial is fun and relatively short. Who knows if I'll replay TOTK any time soon because I know I'll need to slog through HOURS of tedium before I can start having fun again.
I really felt like they could have divided the amount of shrines by 4 but each shrine should have 4 puzzles to give you the same amount of orbs for HP, each puzzle is progressively more difficult but they are all contained in a single location
I also was hoping that they'd make the armor sets, sets, like the reward for completing all the shrines, if they had more like that piece (or if purchasing the full set just gave you it, with an option to wear individual pieces) it'd be great
Imagine getting taught about ice in relation to fire, water and slipperiness, then having to use that learning in a combat encounter (just pulling from a few recent shrines I did)
I'm glad the puppy love phase of this game is coming to an end. It was impossible to discuss the things we didn't like without people raging for a while. I love Tears of the Kingdom, but there are some issues that deserve to be talked about especially since this is the new Zelda formula going forward. I haven't finished the story yet, I've done all the main quests, just haven't gone to the final boss yet. But the story so far was honestly pretty mediocre in my opinion, it felt like more of the same. Each Dungeon felt so similar gameplay and story-wise. There were no twists or surprises, nothing really to pique an interest, it was very straightforward. The dialogue was incredibly cringe-inducing, I think that's partly the problem of the English dub. The game really holds your hands especially in the dungeons. You can't progress through them without talking to the sage a few times and everytime you open a door by solving a basic puzzle a minute long camera transition forces you to look at the door you just obviously opened. Then the sage will say "Look, Link! The door is open now! You can go through it!". Every. Time. Gameplay is still fun, improved from BOTW. Weapon degradation never bothered me so the addition of fusion is just a great bonus. However, most combat scenarios are best avoided especially if you have good gear. Honestly, why break 3 decent weapons and shields to beat a fortress if you're just going to get 5 arrows from a chest. Especially considering I used more arrows on the miniboss alone. When they said they'd use the same map, with some new areas I was kind of disappointed. Zelda games have reused assets before but in exciting new ideas. I was expecting Tears to be the Majora's Mask to BOTW's Ocarina of Time. Instead it really would be the equivalent of Ocarina of Time with a bunch of new items and some new smaller maps. The sky islands are cool in theory but they're mostly the same tiny islands with the same enemies save for a few good areas, like the starting Sky Island. The Depths are cool in theory but in practice it's just a big open ugly wasteland with scattered ruins that are mostly empty save for one armor chest in some. There are big empty spaces in the overworld but at least there's some variety with biomes and enemy types. I can go on all day. The game is great. But not perfect by any stretch, and the problems aren't just minor nitpicks.
I'm on my second playthrough right now and the "tell-don't-show"-ness of the dialogue in the cutscenes is...*very* annoying. It was annoying the first time around because of its tell-don't-show-ness, but now that I'm having to hear it a second time it feels borderline condescending "Furthermore, I sense that we share a blood connection" REALLY?? "You bind my heart and steal my magic. You plan to hold me here" FRIKKIN' REALLY??? *the Sages having their motivational speeches during the final fight* Gee ain't it nice that the Demon King's Army let them get their monologues out before they resumed trying to kill us all
It sounds like the game is bad: - combat is not worthwhile - dungeons are mediocre - voice acting is poor - story is poor Sounds like a not great game. Speak your truth
@@coolfool183 despite how bad the game can be in terms of random problems, the issue is the game is still somewhat enjoyable to play through. I really don't like tears in many many ways, but I can't lie and say that it didn't somewhat bring me enjoyment in just going into it blind and playing the core gameplay loop
@@coolfool183im the kind of person who plays zelda games for the dungeons and combat and yeah im not that much of a fan. I feel like a lot of people just dont want to say the game is more addictive than it is all that amazing. I like skyward swords dungeons but the combat is pretty shit though part of that is because im a lefty and they give me no option to make link left handed again. In this game flurry rush is so easy that i was beating lynels with no effort or upgraded armor. Majoras mask and twilight princess will always be my favorite 3d zeldas because of this
21:40 I think the compendium should offer rewards, a bit like Bioshock. You've defeated and documented every type of bokoblin? You get a permanent 20% damage bonus against them.
Taking pictures already rewards you with the sensor ability. Other than that its taking pictures. Why cant that be its own reward if thats something that interests you. Having some stat padding just for the sake of some extrinsic reward is unnecessary.
That would also make sense in the game and it should contribute to some kind of knowledge stat. That or the reward is a chance at getting a critical hit when your weapon doesn’t have the multiplier or you aren’t getting a headshot in. So Link in this case will have went out of his way in the field to study and document this specific kind of monster in detail. He’s photographed every variation as well as the weapons they use, and he’s fought x amount of them. So of course it makes sense that Link has an in-depth amount of knowledge about their weaknesses and overall physiology so he “knows” the correct places to hit in order to do more damage. And this can be a stat buff or it can just be a random chance at getting a critical hit.
@@Tamacat388 Because most people aren't completionists trying to waste their time for the "reward" of having wasted their time? If you like collecting stamps, that's fine, I'd rather paint minis I may use (probably never will in a lot of cases) in future games, personally.
Besides anything with zombie Ganon, story was the weakest part for me. Waking up after the kingdom was wrecked by calamity ganon and avenging the dead champions was much more engaging than just finding each sage and hearing the SAME DIALOGUE about the imprisoning war. Felt like a missed opportunity to have made this a successor to Majora’s Mask given how ominous the opening is. But there never seemed to be an actual world-ending threat since Ganon doesn’t even show up again until the last quarter of the game unless you skip straight to the final fight
It feels utterly random sometimes whether a shrine is a Blessing or not. Sometimes a shrine 10 ft in a cave with no enemies or puzzle is a Blessing, sometimes you run through a gauntlet of likelikes and black/silver horriblins carrying a crystal only to STILL have to a do a 4-room puzzle in the shrine itself.
Regarding finding shrines in caves, it's worth noting that you can always just switch your scanner to search for Blupees, since there will always be one near the entrance. That, combined with the lightroot thing, makes underground shrines pretty easy to find. There's also the cherry blossom tree thing, of course, but that requires stopping what you're doing to find/go to the tree, and is a lot harder to figure out organically.
I really liked the Sage spirits, annoying and unhelpful as they could be at times, it was nice to actually have a world that felt like they were all fighting to defeat the evil and not just expecting Link to do everything (that said I agree, it was a fun idea that needs to be tightened and improved in any future iterations -- which I hope they do.) Otherwise I wouldn't mind this Zelda being a trilogy but as much fun as I had with ToTK I am ready to move on to a new take on Classic Zelda. Give us some of the things in this game like Sage spirits and the glider as an item in a 'old school' Zelda game, I'd love that personally. as I too am tired of the weapon durability, and 'crafting/cooking systems'.
Rose-tinted glasses can make people do crazy things. Nintendo has a lot of really dedicated adult fans who really don’t want to admit their favorite childhood well … anything isn’t as good as they want it to be.
@@Getloose360 a multimillion dollar video game in a 35 year old multibillion dollar earning franchise that's literally made several people household names and inspirations in game development
By accident, I learned you could call the Sages to you by whistling at them. The same mechanic you use for horses. They are your little magical ghost horses.
Open World design is paradoxical. The best open world game I've ever played is Shadows of the Colossus, specifically because the game world is entirely empty and leaves exploration entirely to the player. If you don't want to admire the scenery, the game doesn't force it. I had a lot of fun with MGSV's open maps for the same reason - there's very little busywork and the world is just there if you want to look around. Just like real life.
I think something that helped MGSV a lot is that it's not "open" world and the objective is combat. It's a series of interconnected roads with bases blocking them, in the Afghan area. In the African map, it's again interlinked enemy camps interspersed with more enemy outposts. You can play stealth, go loud, abduct people or roll over them in a tank. No collectables, just dense combat options mixed with robust core gameplay. No koroks. Not much menuing either.
Open world is a cancer of a genre. Devs got all excited with new technology they can't even use well and they had crappy visions of how to utilize it. It doesn't matter how big a world is or where you can go when there's nothing substantial to do and traveling is a chore. I admit that Zelda Breath of is a halfway decent example of the genre, but that's because the bar is super low. MGSV was barely open world and completely fell apart once you discovered that enemies can only see you if you stand up or move in their view under 30 meters. You can do pretty much anything you want, even sprint at them full force in daylight with no cover as long as you crouch by the 50 or 60 meter mark. I can't remember which.
For similar reasons, Oblivion is the best I've played. Nothing telling you to go off the beaten path generally ever, and modding allows it to suit other tastes. Gonna play Morrowind soon.
@@PlagueOfGripesEhh... Not so much on there being no menus. The game has a million different weapons and suits and upgrades to make, map objectives, setting up units in the base, sending out units for mercenary battles... And this is ignoring all of the needless pauses to the game, such as the helicopter rides in and out of stages and needing to go up to the helicopter between missions and the base. There's a ton of needless and complicated downtime in MGSV.
Criticism is necessary, even for great products. Nothing is perfect, even what you'd consider a 10/10, and you can always push things that little bit further, sharpen the experience just that little bit more.
if a individual considers something a 10 out of 10, then that becomes a personal issue... not a media problem. being critical is important to survive, not as important as Media Enjoyment.
@@acetrigger1337if your understanding of being a 10/10 is “being LITERALLY 100% perfect and therefore you could never rank something any higher than a 9/10” that’s a you problem
Not when said Critic is from a Souls born nut who gets upset when characters talk about the lore instead of having to read it on a monsters left testicle that it dropped at 1% chance
I'd say the open air of the dungeon's in TotK make it feel less polished only because of how much movement you have in this game. The sky Temple in Twlight Princess for example is really open air yet feels dangerous because of how grounded Link is in that game. TotK Link however can just save himself with his lizard hands and easily cheese the dungeon with his base abilities, which is probably why there aren't any actual keys or locked doors in the main temples. I think the Wind temple had the best layout with Link's abilities in mind. Fire was too easy to cheese and the Lightning Temple should have had more rooms for how large the structure is. The water temple was just sad and actually felt really unpolished. It could have had another level or something. I guess they thought the treck up there was part of the dungeon.
@@tyranitararmaldo I would have disabled Link's abilities as a programmer due to the "aura of evil" emanating from the temple/dungeon, which would have given Link an extra layer of challenge.
@@stuartdparnellThey already do this for shrines. The consciously chose this poor design because they are being super purists towards "player choice" (except when it vomes to fixing their crappy default control scheme or terrible menu sorting).
There was a lot they could have done to improve the unlisted quests. For example if you curser over the skyview towers and press R3 a list of tasks could pop up for the region. X mini-boss remaining X Koroks remaining X Signs remaing Etc. Not too hand-holdy but still allow you to keep better track of what you've done. A few more stamp types wouldn't have hurt either. Specifically mini-boss related or like the caves when you find one it is automatically added to the map and like shrines there's a visual indicator of if you've defeated it or not.
Thanks for making this Plague! I dislike reviews that solely stay in the comfortable territory of unending praise. Even for properties I enjoy I still like to hear critiques as it’s kind of a creative exercise to view media critically through someone else’s perspective. I think that comes from my background of art histories and critiques, where viewing something critically is not a personal thing but merely attempting to use objective logic to improve or understand better pieces typically only rated subjectively as a whole piece rather than the total of it disparate parts. The one thing I definitely agree with right of the bat is the map/quest marker. Some quests where you could use a bit of a hint will just hover the quest marker over the quest giver giving no help in where it wants you to go next, not even a general direction to head in. Yet some quests like the one with a labyrinth in the sky it’ll give you multiple markers pointing out exactly where to go despite the whole point of a labyrinth is that it’s a maze, so you shouldn’t know exactly where to go but oh well. So the game arbitrarily decides how much it wants to leave exploration up to the player and it feels like there was never an agreement in design philosophy among the quest developers on how much to assist the player. Also maybe I’m a crazy person but another thing that bugged me about exploration and the maps was how limited you were in placing personal stamps on the map. You get 300 such stamps to place on the map before it’ll ask you to delete some to make room for more and while that sounds like a lot, it’s really limiting if you like to fill in your map with more information, like adding skulls for all monster camps and boss monster locations, hearts to mark fairy ponds, stars to mark shrine locations and towers you haven’t explored yet. I don’t always want to explore areas I’ve seen and marked right away and the map doesn’t give you much information by default about what is actually at said areas besides a name, only shrines and the like getting marked on the map by default once explored. So I found that by the time I had explored roughly half of the total world I had to constantly choose what stamps to delete to make way for new ones. Seems like they should of at the very least had the option for twice of what they give you, considering they added the depths and sky islands yet your stamp limit is shared for all 3 levels. Another issue with the stamping map feature is the fact there is no map layer for caves. Despite the map having layers it condenses caves onto the same layer as the surface world so if you find a boss to farm or fairies underground and want to mark them for later, if you return after a while and forgot your stamp was for something underground in a cave you’ll be very confused if you go to that stamps exact location on the surface. They should of least given some way of marking stamps that are for above or below the surface such as a little triangle up or down next to it or differentiate by colour. Just some way to note it for visual clarity later. Or just make the caves it’s own layer on the map screen. I’m curious if anyone else has had this specific issue with stamping or am I just the one crazy person who uses it too much.
Seeing people criticize this game feels so good. I have a lot of critiques of it story-wise (why is everything from Breath of the Wild gone? Why do some of the things in place of former shrines make no sense?) and some people take that like a personal insult. And yeah, a solid portion of the fanbase doesn't even know what the old games played like. Saw a post floating around insta captioned "the first three hours of every Zelda game" showing OOT Link trying to climb a slide with a depleting stamina wheel.
The absence of the Divine Breast and Guardians was explained in BotW itself: they were decommissioned because they were no longer needed after beating Calamity Ganon and because they didn't want to have that technology being corrupted and turned against them again.
@@lukejones7164erm...... in the extended ending, Zelda notes that Vah Ruta has stopped working and it should be investigated. If they had been decommissioned by choice, why would they need to investigate a Divine Beast that had stopped working? As someone who has put over 3000 hours into BOTW, I can say for certain that what you're saying here just isn't in BOTW's flimsy story.
@@MarilynMonRover Its called using basic logic bro lol. If the Divine Beasts and other technology stopped working and already completed their purpose then obviously they must have had them decommissioned after BotW.
@@lukejones7164 Basic logic is what tells me that that's bullshit. Again, what you said just isn't in the story. It's an assumption. Nintendo loves it when people speculate and come up with fan theories; it's part of their strategy. Also, why would they be decommissioned in the first place? They were around for 10k years because the ancient people knew Ganon would return. They had an ongoing purpose, not a one-and-done purpose. I could maybe see dismantling the shrines, as they really did have a singular purpose, but the Divine Beasts did not. For the love of the Zora, please don't make excuses for Nintendo's sloppy-ass writing.
@@MarilynMonRover You clearly fail at logic lmao. "Why would they be decommissioned in the first place?" The same reason why the previous King had them decommissioned after the First Calamity 10,000 years ago: they served their main purpose and there was no sign of Ganon returning (they weren't just kept around for 10,000 years afterwards, it was only a few years before the 2nd Calamity when they were rediscovered and put back in service). Also considering how easily Calamity Ganon was able to completely gain control over them and all of the Guardians, it would be really stupid to just have them laying around where they could easily be taken over by another dark force. Since when is using basic logic to answer the obvious "making excuses for bad writing"? As if a video game needs to literally spell everything out for you like your in special ed.
What personally struck me the most is that since I make getting new outfits and wanting to see their set bonuses a high priority, I try to save as many critters and monster parts as I can, just in case I need them as upgrade materials. Therefore the intended experience of having a bag full of fuseable materials on me just absolutely didn't happen for me. That's not a bag of potential weaponry, that's a bag of inert upgrade materials I must hold on to at any cost. Stone Talus hearts and those Zonai grinders got a lot of appreciation from me in contrast.
I feel it's safe to say the novelty that breath of the wild had ( which was incredibly massive back then ) has waned since its release . I'm not knocking the games but it feels like too much for me while I prefer the more through line with branching options experience
Hell yeah, some of my favorite videos were your Gripes Balls, so this is a welcome surprise. As for TOTK, it's after the honeymoon period that you really start to see how much of the game is an "expansion" and how much is a sequel. It feels like when they were done with the main new mechanics they just assumed repeating and expanding the previous approaches was more than fine, because the new way of interacting with the environment would make it novel again. In practice, sometimes it does, but since I've already had a similar experience before, the returns are diminishing faster. At least for me, who am not interested in building mechas.
TOTK is a weird game because I find it to be equally as enjoyable as BOTW was, but at the same time I find it to be significantly more unimpressive or even disappointing. I've loved my time with it because I loved BOTW, but I was also constantly shocked by the things they didn't change, or even the things they made worse. I know COVID probably delayed TOTK for at least a year but it's hard to believe such a samey, safe sequel took SIX YEARS to make.
3:30 Yep. Happened to me. Missed the Lookout Landing and spent 20 hours going to Kakariko and Hateno for pants then back and over to stables before my friend told me the glider was available after not realizing my quest tracker had changed.
I kind of wonder if that was a deliberate choice to encourage players to keep experimenting with zonai stuff to fill the void of the glider. Either way, totally baffling decision to just stick it at Lookout like it was the obvious place to go.
@@asparagusoffice If it was, it failed for me. I got SO frustrated with my wagons disappearing if I went too far away or entered a shrine. I HATE using the Ultrahand and I didn't realize how powerful 2 fans and a stick could be until I saw someone make the trash bike. I still haven't motivated myself to complete the game and I bought it opening week. Have the regional events complete at least and haven't touched the game in about a month.
The thing that's crazy to me about the healing system is that they had real-time potion consumption that could be interrupted in Skyward Sword and went back on it for some reason.
the way i see it in that regard is to cut down on complexity of food in general since stamina food probably wouldn't be very useful in real time, as well as the animations needed or other issues needed to be accounted for each food item.
I would much prefer if the Switch Zelda games had you mixing potions that you had to physically drink in real time, but I think the devs went with pause menu healing for two reasons: it makes the game easier for young/casual players, and also Skyrim did it and that game sold like 60 million copies.
and they also *have* animations of link eating, which play when he eats. All they'd have to do is make it so that happens in the overworld instead of the pause menu, and make it get interrupted if he gets hit while eating
Okay, for those "real time"ers... how can i drink/eat stamina food when I'm climing/gliding (i.e. when I actually need it)? Stamina food is useless otherwise.
Ill note that in dark souls, the problem is at least alleviated by just having way fewer materials needed for upgrading weapons. Everything uses titanite [shards/fragments/chunks/slabs] or it uses Twinkling/Fire/Lightning Titanite (and thats only given to the rare weapons). The games iirc also just have straight up material vendors so the only restricted item usually is the Titanite Slab (and even in dks1 you can waste time grinding it.) BOTW and TOTK just run into having so much utter junk items for upgrading that effectively require you to just start stalking the specific tiny regions those materials grow in for hours and that sucks.
I think my biggest problem with this game is that rather than saying that they understand why people enjoy the older games and still want that style, Nintendo has said that those people are nostalgia blind and don't get why they want to go back to the linear style
To be clear that was Aonuma in a specific interview, in a translated transcript to it may lack some subtlety. However they did mention how they weren't concerned with previous games to make new ones. I don't think he ignores what some linearity can do, and I'm not the only one to ask for a refinement of linear segments _within_ the open setting. I think he was kinda dismissive because they were still promoting TOTK which doubled down on BOTW's extreme non-linearity for better and worse. I think (at least hope) they can see that while you can't please everyone, there is a "best of both worlds" approach.
I mean, people weren't buying the linear games by the time skyward sword came around. and now botw and totk are selling like crazy. totally get why nintendo would be keen on ignoring any voices telling them to backtrack.
"I'm not angry about these issues, I just saw them... except the armor upgrade thing, I'm angry about that." You and me both. That and the companion issue. It was GREAT feeling like I had my own small army that could roll up and really take the fight back to the monsters. ...Right up until I spent more time yelling, "Riju, could you get the FUCK OVER HERE?!" and "Sidon, buddy, could... could you not?" than actually enjoying them coming along. ...which they didn't. Was mildly put out that they had to come up with a weird avatar projection system rather than 'What you are doing is important, I will join you!'
it would be hard to program the actual characters in, except Tulin, with all the different type of traversal you’re doing. However I do agree I wish the party system felt better. So many times they would run away from me when I needed their abilities, and it would’ve been cool to have them talk so it’s not so quiet you know.
I wish there were just a hotkey for activating the sage powers remotely. Maybe instead of dpad down being a dedicated horse button, it could be where you quick select all the sage powers, *and* the horse call, and just flick through the 6 item menu with a hold, to make it your activated ability on a tap. Something like that. I hate running for the braindead AI if I want their abilities, that alone makes them so much less useful than the botw champion powers were.
This is exactly why I really dislike when open world games try to have some sort of grand, rigid story, but refuse to make it linear. Open world is fine for general exploration sandbox choose your own adventure type of thing. But you need that linearity. You need plot to force you to go places, to restrict you, to make sure you're progressing in controllable manner. Here we have progression hidden behind mindless grind. An exploration that is arguably way too thorough to be enjoyable for most.
you make a good point about controlled progression, but I wouldn't say progression in totk and botw is hidden behind anything new. shrines fuel the bulk of progress and function similarly to heart pieces. heart pieces never had plot significance to guide you to them, and whether or not you needed to mindlessly grind for them was a matter of choice (informed by dying more often). you could always speed through more linear zelda titles without getting a single heart piece, and it usually made later dungeons imbalanced. the fact that you can go to any dungeon you want in these newer games does make it harder to tell when you're behind on hearts, but it's the same basic dilemma we've had for decades. and yeah, getting even close to max hearts in any zelda title is usually too grindy to be enjoyable for most. in a game with 150 "heart pieces" that grind is dialed to 11 for anyone who needs the full healthbar.
For finding shrines in caves, it’s easier to first find the light root in the depths that corresponds to it. If you have trouble finding the caves, offering a fruit to a cherry blossom tree’s alter will reveal every cave in the area.
Phantasy Star Universe had my favorite armor system. Everything was just casual clothes. (If you can call the extremely over-the-top Japanese sci-fi aesthetic "casual") .. but the armor you wore would make your outfits light up. Basicly protective E-wire. With different colors representing the different elements. Yes, you were forced to wear a particular highlight color depending on the armor you used. But you got to wear whatever you wanted and the armor didn't change as you got more powerful sets. My favorite thing to do was actually turn the armor off when just hanging out in the lobby. It was a subtle thing that made me really stand out from everyone else.
can we talk about all the annoying fucking rock mining segments in this game? filling entire goddamn hallways with rocks and making me break them is not FUN
@@juicejooos really? On my feeds the fans are so rabid that one of them asked if they could sue the guy who took a video of himself beating the 3rd boss with one hand.
@@Shadar22Journalists have been really unfair towards it in a way that is reminiscent of the IGN God Hand review. That guy with the one hand for example admitted now that he did that on east mode and people took that video and people have been pretty disingenuous over it.
I agree with basically everything in this video with the exception of what you said regarding the relative uselessness of Ascend. My experience with it was pretty much the exact opposite of yours, where I found myself constantly shocked and impressed by how often I could use the ability to essentially break the game or creatively circumvent certain sections or problems. It was way more useful than I ever imagined it would be.
Noticing flaws in something good isn't 'sanity.' It's common god damn sense. Cut this pretentious shit out. What makes Eli's video 'the sane one?' Because it just so happens to line up with YOUR experience with the game and makes you feel like some free thinker in a sea of sheep or something? Get your head out of your ass. He's giving his take; there's nothing profound about having an opinion on something.
I'm genuinely appreciative that Eli takes a similar approach to media that I do: "I love this thing, here are its flaws. Let's discuss how it could have been better."
Same here, and it makes me wish some folks at Nintendo had that philosophy. I'm enjoying TOTK because I enjoyed BOTW, but I'm constantly baffled by the things that didn't change and the problems that weren't fixed. It is a shockingly safe, samey sequel for the Zelda series -- one made by developers who didn't fix obvious minor issues because they were either too stubborn, too proud, too scared, or too clueless.
@@QuintessentialWalrus Use that brain of yours. Breath of the wild was the best selling zelda game in the franchise by a huge margin. Why wouldn't they attempt to go for the same success?
I'm so disappointed that "The Legend of Zelda: Nuts and Bolts" is the best they could come up with after six years. I just want something that actually feels like a Zelda game again.
I really like how someone on the dev team thought that player could have enough light motes fore more than one container and so animation would play only once, but not for inventory slots and armor upgrades.
Yeah the armor upgrade thing is really annoying. And the ferry literally molest you every time you want better armor. And since it takes so much supplies I ended up duping stuff just to upgrade
It’s annoying that they fixed the repeated upgrade system with the light orbs. If you have multiple, you get the longer cut scene once and then a message for all of them after. It still very slowly show you the heart or wheel increasing so a partial improvement.
On the durability i dont understand why they didn't add the blacksmith and his gimp from majoras mask. You already mine ore just add some iron to its loot table and bring it to a blacksmith. Side note my auto correction keeps trying to make blacksmith blackface and thats just amazing thank you technology
I'm shocked you thought Ascend was useless. I thought the same at first, but the longer I played the game the more versatile I realized it was. In a game that's often about climbing and gliding, having a button to climb faster is amazingly powerful and I'm surprised it's not nerfed more than it is. You can climb Stone Talus bosses with it! It breaks just as many puzzles as Rewind does.
Oh it's not useless. You can just tell they were absurdly careful about it, which harmed a lot of the rest of the game's design. The ability itself is very useful. Assuming you want to waste the time to assemble what you need to exploit it, or find the exact spot that will enable it.
Yeah idk why you are not allowed to ascend through the ceiling of the depths except in specific spots. If I jerry rig my way up climbing a light root for 10 minutes I expect to not be punished by "sorry no you just can't go through that"
@TotalBlazing That seems like a super specific nitpick to get upset over. Who would waste time going all the way up there when you could just teleport to the surface and walk to where you wanted to go way easier?
@@EmberBlaze99 I mean there are shrines above the light roots and that raises questions about how you can ascend through paradoxical tardis-like bigger on the inside buildings. The other problem is if you can ascend through lightroots you could skip some shrine quests or discovery since you just teleport right to them as opposed to going through a cave. While I agree with someone else that it’s kind a nitpicky I can sympathize that I had the same thought at one point but I do get the idea of not allowing it.
Link Between Worlds had it right! They combined traditional and new elements and it worked! They even let you know what vicinity and how many MaiMais were in a certain area! 😊
a friend of mine rented every piece of equipment from Ravio, died, and then quit the game in disgust I'm convinced some people just don't play these games correctly
Your armor gripes are done perfectly in Marvel's Spiderman, you unlock suits that have specific suit powers that come with them, but you can just equip suit powers individually while wearing any suit you prefer
49:10 If you look up the old advertisement for the Atari 2600 version of Pitfall you'll see that was one of the fist acting gigs that Jack Black ever got.
It was sort of wild hearing him mention Pitfall. The only time I have heard or seen that game was when I was talking with my Dad about the games he played growing up and how the industry has changed and he was swearing up and down over a video of a Pitfall playthrough on UA-cam that it was the most hype mindblowing sh"t back in the day. Otherwise not even the older millenial UA-camrs I watch mention it (though tbf my Dad is Gen X and it seems like Plague is somewhere between super late Gen X and Super Early Millenial).
The main reason I haven't updated my game past the day one patch is the fact that I can dupe materials and I find that it's helped tremendously to mitigate the tedium of upgrading armour and it makes me more likely to try recipes. Just a thought.
The way just plain bypassing certain mechanics only improves the game is definitely a thought worth having. I don't think I'm ever touching either of these games again without an infinite durability mod.
my favorite way they made weapon durability even more annoying is having endless rock barriers inside caves that need you to go through 3 or 4 weapons to get to the other side, and the reward is, like, one of the 762 bubbulfrogs left after you've already collected all the bubbulfrog rewards in the first three days you play the game
The consumable nature of the game, weapon degradation speed, zonai consumable items to create vehicles that don't last long on purpose, the flying stone part that's on a timer to vanish or be consumed after a set number of seconds of flight, is the main issue i have with the game. the battery systems for the vehicles..etc. i just want to enjoy the weapons and vehicles i find and make .
I’m fine with my gear breaking, and I’m even fine with not being able to use them when broken, but for the love of all that is holy leave the broken shit IN my inventory and let me repair or restore them. The fact I can lose a one of a kind elemental weapon means I refuse to use the thing and it wastes my fucking time and energy
@@malikoniousjoe Personally I hated BotW verison of it as you would be left with nothing GOOD to fight black or silver enemies without using cheese or hoarding. I finally got to the point where Silver Bokolins are spawning in normally so I can kill them and fuse a actually decent weapon together, add in you can buy diamonds (and d u p e them incase) to make the Champion Weapons as a backup and gluing stuff to the Master Sword to make it do even more dmg makes me like it more. Sure I still keep a fire and ice wand, those "Oh Shit" bows and shields but compared to my time in BotW, i was fucking at north akkala beach crying in despair as all my shit broke and i didnt want to farm crap to just play the game. I just feel like you can find systems or things in other games that can be worst then this but people are already "got gud" so they tell you to buzz off.
I replayed skyward sword, majoras mask and twilight princess recently, and one thing I really missed was finding hearts in jars and grass, and having to find bottles to get health, making it a limited quantity rather than being able to fully create something at will. I remember one scene in particular where I was in a dungeon in skyward sword and I was on one or two hearts, the stakes were low since at worst I'd just be taken back to the entrance of the room but that didn't stop it from being incredibly tense and having an amazing sense of relief when I eventually did find a couple of hearts to put me at a better place, I say this because I never felt that in breath of the wild or tears of the kingdom, that incredible experience has been lost, and I'd love it to be back, either in the form of bottles, limited cooking slots that can only be upgraded through certain things, or forcing the food to be eaten on some kind of hunger system, where you can only eat if your hunger meter is at a certain point, and eating more filling foods will fill your hunger meter as well, making healing ineffective if your hunger meter is full. I'd also love a "make X amount" button, so trying to cook 30 batches of 5 apples won't take 15 minutes of pressing X, the game just doesn't respect the players time in that regard
I definitely benefitted from exploring casually. I fused cool rare shit to my weapons, and if I happened to be able to upgrade armor, I just do it whenever it crosses my mind. Having to actually grind or complete stuff in this game sounds like it really takes the fun out
The entire underground is kinda empty too. The Yiga camps give you schematics that you don't really need, most of which have 2 Yiga guarding them, and the lightroot don't even give you a reward aside from marking the map. Maybe a random duplicate boss, or a helmet that makes you lose your set bonuses if you actually use them.
At last, a Yuno enjoyer. But my biggest issue was the story writing in TotK, the Dragon's Tear quest line showing all the issues. You learn very important information in that questline, but are given no way to share that information. Then there is also the fact they present us with major events with no context around them. Spoilers below: Our first look at Ganondorf is just an invasion. He is just invading Hyrule with moldugas. We are given no information if this was a surprise, if one of several invasions or how the King Rauru knew about the attack. Another is the Zelda Clone. She literally comes out of nowhere. Sonia and Zelda seem to know it is a fake given they set up a trap to expose it. How did they know this? how did Ganondorf copy Zelda? I'd ask why, but the answer is he needs Zelda to cause problems in Present Hyrule. A simple scene of Zelda confronting Ganondorf or one of his guards would be a good way to set it all up. I find there is so much context missing I question if Rauru and Sonia had kids. I mean, obviously they did given Zelda exists, but the issue remains that I questioned it. Like Mineru, she has a two scenes to just drop exposition. But Zelda is quite upset when she moves on to the afterlife, implying more than just these two conversations. But we aren't given that, just the "important" exposition.
Just like how the champions in botw felt very underbaked until the dlc came out and sort of fixed them. I feel like alot of the story is being held back for the eventual story dlc.
Why didn't the opening cut sceen show Link's arm shattering as a result of trying to grab Zelda? That way we could have immediately seen a first hand (lol) example of how the Gloom eats away at everything, weapons and people alike. Were they afraid of showing Link losing a limb? Would that have raised the game's rating too much? I felt it was cowardly to not even be willing to show mild, magic induced gore.
Japan has a weird thing about missing limbs. I remember in every Dragon Ball Z game with Future Gohan, his model still has both arms, despite fighting like he only has one.
Probably. Japan has a strong stigma against disfigurement and body desecration. I think The Dark Souls games in Japan have ragdolling turned off for that reason.
Im guessing they wanted to keep the hand holding imagery. They do it at the beginning of the game, at the end of the tutorial, and at the end. Its a cool image to be cool.
@@Thirteen13551355Whenever anyone talks about how “Dark”tm a Nintendo property gets it always seems very, precious? Like you can’t just surface level imply the possibility of something serious and call that “Dark”. I’m not looking for edge mind you, but these people think the implication that your character can die in the game makes it super adult and heavy emotionally.
In 1999 a game came out named Drakan: Order of the Flame. The weapon durability system made you use your stronger weapons more strategically. It also periodically provided you with progressively stronger, unbreakable weapons. That gave you more strategic options and made you appreciative of those special items. Those weapons tied into the lore and gave then a special coolnes factor. In 2000 a game came out named Nox. There you had your staves, fists, magic and the story weapon to reliably deal with barrels and opening hidden paths (and sometimes NPCs to see what happens). All your other gear had limited durability, which made you cherish your high value gear with special properties, and punished you for beig a bad gamer by taking damage or using your weapons improperly. But you could repair damaged gear at a vendor, at a price. Or buy new gear to replace it, or that dope spell book that makes you feel like a god. But choose wisely because the combat system ties into the durability system that ties into the economy system that ties into the roleplaying system. In 2023 a game came out called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo couldn't figure out how to make a durability system engaging after all this time.
I believe Nintendo said something along the lines of if the Master Sword didn't break, then players wouldn't be tempted to try out other weapons... 1. That's not true 2. Even if it was, who cares? No one, absolutely no one who's played previous Zelda title games said "gee, I wish my weapons would break that's what this game needs"
6:35 ?? You can easily find the locations of underground shrines by mapping out lightroots in the depths, and then giving an offering to cherry blossom trees to reveal the entrance to all caves.
Before we really heard anything about TotK, one idea I hoped they'd use was repurposed Guardians: that instead of them all fucking off, we'd find the AI part mostly taken out and them modified so the Hylian forces could use their firepower as _manned_ tanks and turrets, and we'd have the Big Damn Heroes moment of NPCs all over the kingdom riding as an absolute _swarm_ of fighters, like in that tapestry, with them doing the anime explosion barrage thing to whittle down Ganon's transformation while Link's still putting on the main hurt.
A thought occured to me near the end of the video, relating to the whole "let players break the game" mentality that the devs took with TotK. I had this thought where in theory it wouldn't be that hard to limit players just a little bit, not dissimilar to what elden ring does. Have a game where the player is free to go wherever they want 90% of the time, but with a few areas that are locked behind progression for them to place harder challenges (with that you could have some more advanced iterations of shrines or korok puzzles or bosses or whatever, with more substantial rewards to suit their increased difficulty). If they knew what skills they player would need to reach those areas, they could then design around that to make for a more tight gameplay experience. But the problem that occured to me is that this type of game is so open, doing something like this in advance sounds nearly impossible. There's so many ways to approach the game that it's impossible for the devs to assume anything of the player or anticipate how they'll ultimately end up playing the game. And that openness means that often, the moment they try to actually limit the player in some way, take away our ability to break the game, we'll simply find a way around because we have so many options available to them. Glitches are probably what most people think of when it comes to this, but I think the best example of this is actually the hoverbike. The devs explicitly tried to nerf flying machines preemptively, as wings and balloons are the only zonai parts with a short enough time limit to affect normal gameplay. They wanted to limit players so that we couldn't just use wings or balloons to fly indefinitely, but this limitation ultimately ended up with everyone using the same hoverbike design to fly around. Once you remove the other options you're just left with that as the most optimal thing left, and the game was ultimately made worse because of it (once you have even a decent amount of battery there's no practical use for wings or balloons). For them to properly design around players and add in limits that enhance the game rather than hurt it, they'd have to know how players end up playing the game. And only now am I really thinking about just how much of an impossible task it is to do that in a game as open as tears of the kingdom, especially before the game actually launches
From someone who likes having a big health bar and gripes that every Zelda game from Ocarina of Time onward that 99% of enemies do I heart at most.... I have to say while I am glad things actually do damage now, I think we don't need 30 heart containers, let alone 40. Everything outside of a basic goomba enemy outright one-hit kills you. Once you upgrade with the fairy everything goes back down to nothing. Silver and Gold enemies are just damage sponges with lots of attack power, i.e. glorified pallet swaps. In Link to the Past there are enemies that can deal 2 hearts right after you leave the sanctuary and enemies in the Dark world did 2-3 hearts right out of the gate, and you didn't get the Blue Mail until the last half the Dark World. I want a reason to have lots of health but I don't want to take 9 hearts from a mid level enemy.
Thanks for this video Mr Gripes. Seems like all the major problems I had with BotW are amplified here, and the parts I actually liked are even less pronounced. This knowledge saves me hours of my time of not playing this game that I can now waste otherwise.
For a game that HEAVILY relied on Ganondorf for its marketing, we only see him like 3 times, not counting flashbacks, and rehydrated Ganondorf only shows up in person at the very end for a (admittedly cool) bossfight. Was rather disappointed by his lack of actual presence. While i do like Matt Mercer, i always imagined Ganondorf would have had a much deeper voice, Matt's voice just doesn't have the weight it needs to intimidate me. Also why is Ganondorf Japanese, they really just never explain the katana or any of his other, CLEARLY Japanese weapons and clothes. It clashes A LOT with the Gerudo's aesthetic... **Spoilers, for an almost entirely inconsequential character, but still spoilers, I suppose** Also Momm- i mean Sonia should have survived, maybe crippled. cause unless there's a little hybrid-freak baby lying around somewhere, there shouldn't be a Royal bloodline to pass down to Zelda.
As someone who has sunk 300+ hours into Tears of the Kingdom, I think I'd have to say that one of my biggest problem with the structure of the game is how it lacks a feeling of fun player progression. Let me see if I can explain this right. Know how you need to switch clothes to deal the weather temperatures. It's annoying and personally I could have done without it, but seeing as we have it, they COULD have opted to make it something that makes you feel weak at the beginning, but lets say every time you upgrade your health/stamina, you subtly build up a +3% immunity/resistance. It'll probably be a while before you even start to realize but then at some point it hits you... You've gotten stronger and you no longer have to deal with Link's earlier shortcomings. Same thing with slippery surfaces (Really,I wish they ha just complete removed rain in this game) you could grow more proficient at climbing. A huge problem with TotK is how the game despite it's massive length seem to insist on wasting your time with tedious stuff like switching clothes, grinding resources and such. Make the Master Sword's base attack get a +5-10 boost for every sages you've recruited. I also feel that abilities should definitely have been tied to all of these dumb outfits that you have to switch around. Like you said, there is very little reason to not just go with the Fierce Diety or Barbarian armor at all time. I do find it annoying how the game will also force you to waste your head slot if you want to use the Korok Mask which cannot be upgraded and should again just have been an ability you unlock and can toggle on and off. Just give us some feeling of growth that'll make traversing the map more fun and fast-paced when you're at a point where you've already seen most of it anyway without having to resort to the hoverbike. And bring back Revali's Gale while they're at it. I also just hate the durability system with a passion. I hated it in BotW as well as very little seem to have been done to address it. Oh, I can fuse things to prolong its durability a little... Well, that just means that I now will be wasting both a good weapon AND a good resource when it breaks. If I hadn't learned early on about the Octorok repair system, I would have been even more miserable with my time. And still, having to take a break every 1-2 and spend 10-20 minutes on going to Death Mountain to do slow repairs is not really my idea of fun. But it beats me never actually wanting to use any of my worthwhile weapons cause I don't want to every break them and just let them sit in my inventory forever. I was watching a friend of mine playing the game on an emulator where he had turned off the whole durability system, and my goodness, he was having SO much more fun with the combat than I was. I get that some people actually like the durability system but to me it was just a constant pain in the arse and made me actively avoid combat cause I didn't want to wear down my weapons on useless encounters. Majora's Mask was one of my favorites in the Depths cause it let me just walk right into enemy territory and farm Zoneite without having them attack me. (Though it would still force me to waste a head space) And while we are on the combat anyway, the game felt complete and utterly unbalanced with how much damage enemies were able to deal to you, especially in the early game. 1-Hit kills were so common even from bottom of the barrel enemies. I was having more trouble with even basic enemies than I had with higher tier enemies from a regular Zelda game. Not only that but I also just found it so bloody difficult to read some of the enemies and some of those flurry dodges felt almost random in when they would trigger. In the end, I have to admit that while I enjoyed the exploration in the game I utterly loathed and often hated my time with the combat and anything related to it. Another thing found baffling is how the game really tries to sell the whole fun factor of creating and constructing things, yet will only give you a misely 8 slots to favorite stuff... I feel like this should have been closer to 50 at least. Hell, just get rid on the majority of the Zonai and Yiga blueprints. I'd happily sacrifice those to make room for more of my own stuff so I could experiment more. Overall, I really enjoyed this game but holy crap the game has a lot of problems that could SO easily have been fixed if Nintendo weren't so damn proud and unwilling to admit to mistakes or show any willingness to change unpopular mechanics or at least give options. Like a survival mode where weapons permanently break as well as a classic mode where you can either repair a broken weapon or even a casual mode where they just run out of energy like the Master Sword that'll then recharge. Give us options This game has so much wasted potential and it's killing me why Nintendo would purposely prevent this rough gem from reaching it's full potential. Cause unlike the more traditional Zelda games, even tho I've overall had a good time, I just can't see myself every wishing to go back and play it ever again as 95% of the game is just it being a timesink.
I cannot stress enough how having infinite durability and stamina in an emulated copy makes the game SOOOO much better. I personally like to keep durability at 10x instead of fully infinite but even that is soooooo much better. I found myself actually having fun when it was just misery in the base game. So many hidden secrets and areas I never touched on my switch playthrough because I honestly couldn't be bothered to make 10 stamina potions to climb a ridiculous cliff
@@jase276 the thing is that this whole tedious duribility issue was just Nintendo insisting on you having "fun" THEIR way. Didn't like it in BotW? Well, you are wrong, we won't change it. Same in how they messed up Paper Mario with Sticker Star yet refused to listen to any criticism and just chose to do the same unpopular thing again in Color Splash. I'm sure some people actually like the duribility and micromanaging systems of TotK but I still feel like the vast majority would rather be without it or at the very least not be so extreme as it is when even the best weapons +best materials will only last you 20-30 hits. Reminds me of that sword upgrade you could get in Majora's Mask you could get but would break after 100 hits. Nobody really wanted to bother but when you could do the upgrade that made it permanent, that was something you wanted. They could also have made it so the higher your stamina/hearts, the more proficient you would be with weapons and get more duribility out of them. That would actually give you some long term goal and satisfaction of feeling yourself grow from weak in the early game to actually have more fun the more you play. Its just so dumb that pirates are literally the ones getting the better experience here due to Nintendo's hubris and unwillingness to make some small changes for the people who'd prefer to enjoy the game without so much BS -_-
*Count Dooku voice* I've been looking forward to this. But seriously I was waiting for this since this game was announced especially after your... Qualms with the inventory system in the last game so exciting. Can't wait Plague.
Originally in botw, I didn’t actually complete the whole game because of the control scheme. I’m a partial left hand amputee and the frustration of not being able to the cool parry or blocking while moving, among other things, really deterred me from the game. Especially for thunder blight, it was just very difficult. But with the accessibility control scheme added to switch now, I feel like the game has kinda been ruined for me a little bit.
Always appreciate hearing a more measured opinion on things. I played like, 200 some hours of the game (mostly because I had a lot of time to kill lately), but when a friend asked me "is this not a 10/10 for you?" my instinctual answer was "god no," haha. I did definitely enjoy it a lot, but I'm not going to pretend like the game was anything more than Distractions: The Game, with such an emphasis on breaking things, that once I understood the mechanics going on, nothing felt rewarding or challenging, despite me using maybe like 5% of my total resources throughout the game. I did definitely enjoy the game a lot more than Breath of the Wild, but I also wasn't super crazy about Breath to begin with. The most fun I had in Breath was when I immediately (after leaving the tutorial plateau) went to Hyrule Castle and tried to fight Ganon. Sneaking through the dangerous zone with nothing to my name, creatively and stealthily dealing with enemies so that I can get their equipment, which helped me deal with more enemies, gave a very fun and rewarding sense of progression. Then I got to the final boss room, slowly figured out all the bosses it made me fight, until I got to Thunderblight Ganon and got one-shot by super fast attacks like a dozen times. Then I stopped playing the game for literally years before I eventually went back and beat it normally (where I found the game annoying, had it slowly grow on me, and then finished with 95 hours, having been very ready to be done with it). I did the same thing in Tears of the Kingdom, using the skytower plus a little stamina food to glide to Hyrule Castle, started at the final boss room from Breath, and was excited at the prospect of this time slowly working my way down, except..... I was pretty disappointed, as there's pretty much nothing of note in Hyrule Castle at that point. The most fun I had there was fusing a bookcase to my sword and beating enemies over the head with it. I did figure that this meant the final boss was probably in the tunnels below the castle, went there, got to the final boss room, grinded my face into it until I got to the third boss (Mucktorok to be specific) until I decided the whole endeavor was more tedious than it was worth. Which, let me tell you, digging through tunnels, especially without any of the companions, is grueling and tedious, and all the tunnels on the way to the boss room are very samey, so I'd be lying if I said I got much of any enjoyment out of it (although finding the glyphs on the wall Zelda looks at during the intro was a fun moment of "oh hey, I'm here again... oh shit, that means Ganon's just downstairs"). I did pretty immediately go on to do the rest of the game normally, though... more or less. Which, man, this game actually doesn't do well with you doing things out of order. I found two dungeons before interacting at all with the NPCs attached to them, which was fun, but you can't really do much in them, as the main mechanic of the dungeons that lead to the boss all just give you a big error message if you don't have the NPC with you. There's also the fact that there were a LOT of big, game-spanning quests that I just, didn't interact with because I went off the beaten path, only to find them 40+ hours in and realize I could've progressed through the majority of them had I simply gone to Kakariko and the Rito village first (specifically, the floating star islands, the stables, and to an extent, even the geoglyphs). All said though, my biggest issue was definitely how unrewarding the treasures of this game are. I genuinely felt more satisfaction when weapons broke than when I found them, as knowing that I had a free inventory slot to mess with felt much more meaningful than picking up some random weapon to fuse another random silver enemy part to. The armor was a nice reward, at least until I realized it was 90% amiibo costumes from the first game, which were kinda cool, but I can only pick up so many different versions of the same green tunic + hat + boots before it loses meaning. I definitely went into the game thinking I'd get all the armor and upgrade them to at least level two to see their set bonuses, but that definitely grew way too tedious way too fast, which I was willing to put up with for a while, until I realized every set bonus was... really not that interesting. The Glider one (no fall damage) was pretty funny, but generally useless with how easy to avoid fall damage is, the frog suit was useful but slipping really shouldn't even be a mechanic in the game (except maybe in areas where it's specifically meant to be slippery all the time, like areas where it's ALWAYS raining, icy caves, etc.), the stuff that made you immune to status effects was kinda useful but not particularly interesting, especially in a world where I can just eat something to deal with the status/weather if I really need to, then there were a couple that made you faster at night, which was, alright I guess, and then everything else was just some variation of attack up. So yeah. There isn't really much worth finding, especially after a certain point. Oh yeah, there were also the fancy weapons from previous games, except all of them do nothing and even lose their unique looks the instant you fuse something to them. So, yeah, that's why I almost forgot they were even in the game. Also, just want to reiterate your point on how bad the spirit partners you have following you around are implemented. I was looking forward to having a small army of shitlords killing stuff and going crazy with their powers, but by the time I got to that point, I rarely used their powers because of how much of a pain they are to use on purpose (they literally could've just made it, hold a shoulder button + a D-pad direction, or something along the lines of what you said). I did appreciate that they actually did damage and you could upgrade them, although the difference in the damage they do wasn't super noticeable (making yet another treasure feel very underwhelming). So, yeah, much like yourself, this is just a lot of words to say: I enjoyed the game, but man did it really drop the ball in some areas.
I just wanna add to the armor upgrade complaint by saying I hate how they charge you Rupees for it now. Unless you mentioned that and I missed it; watchin’ this at work.
I remember thinking at one point "oh, but they charged rupees before to open the petals". But then thought...wait, it only cost 1100 to get the first 2 open. But to upgrade even one set to level 2, it costs 180 rupees. Now, do that for the 30(!!!!) armor sets and that's 5 times as many. Now, you won't do all of them, but when 1/4 of the sets costs more than before, now we have a problem. And let's not ignore how lv3 costs 200 a pop...
Great insight and explanation dude. This iteration I was hoping for tighter design, but the pendulum sung the other way to what we have now. We'll see about next game.
as much as I'm enjoying TotK so far (to be fair, I'm not binging it like I thought I would be doing five years ago when it first got revealed), I really really hope they decide to go a different route with the next game. I do enjoy open-world Zelda and the world of BotW and TotK, but I'm not sure it's actually sustainable, for many of the reasons mentioned in the video. I keep finding myself thinking "Well, I hope they don't keep trying to do this *forever*..." Part of what makes Zelda so special to me is the fact that all of its games have very distinct identities (art direction, world design, etc) from each other, despite sharing recurring facets of lore and gameplay, and I'd hate to see that come to an end.
Another problem, from my perspective as someone with Korok Insanity, is the constant flood of random encounters you get, particularly when traveling at night. I have, so many times, just been picking up a rock, or am building a vehicle for the backpack idiots, or looking around for wherever the bastards are hidden, when 2 stalmoblins, a Yiga Bowfucker, a few keese and/or a wolf pack will want to have a go. And I wouldn't mind but they're not even threats! They just pop in, get one shot, and you try to move on. But you have to take care of them if you're trying to do anything because getting hit, even for the quarter-heart they're doing each hit, cancels every action. And because they're all running on separate timers, they might overlap or come in sequence and I just want to put a fucking rock into a circle of rocks. Anyway that said game's a perfect 12/10 and anyone who would rate it less deserves to be cast into Mt Doom for being paid by Sony to disagree with me.
Honestly I find it funny seeing a complaint about random encounters in a game that isn't a turn-based rpg for once. They even added a whole new type of small nuisance enemy with the mini-froxes...
Pro tip the next time you're ambushed: skeletons can be instantly defeated by dazzlefruit. I don't know why the game never mentions this but it makes them 100% more tolerable.
I really hope we get a side series that's based on the Ocarina-ish Zelda games. Because if this is gonna be the "blueprint" for the main series I'm gonna struggle to stay on the Zelda train. Totk was what Botw should've been to start with in my eyes, but we did wait 6 years for a game that largely left alot of issues the first game had in tact. I also don't see how having the ability to glitch or bypass game design is somehow inherently better than the traditional Zelda games were to the point where this is gonna be the future of the series. I just wish they gave us traditional dungeons in TOTK to at least give fans of that style something. The dungeons here were fine, but I'm gonna forget about them in a few months, whereas, the Spirit Temple, and Ancient Cistern are forever burned into my brain and I only played the latter once.
I'm with you on this. Unfortunately big, open world games are what sell these days. For some reason the majority of people would rather have a massive, visually impressive, grind of repetitive uninspired content, than a concise 40-50 hour experience of unique, and memorable content. They would rather keep people playing for longer, than beat the game once and stop playing.
I agree. I'm open (no pun intended) to free roaming maps and new things to keep a franchise relevant and fresh but that shouldn't mean getting rid of what made the franchise great to begin with. It's like the devs were trying so hard to not put anything in previous Zelda titles into BotW or TotK. No mention of the triforce, no companion character (which I feel Rauru would have been nice to have but I digress), little to no linearity story wise or dungeon design wise, no Epona (if you didn't get the chance to snag an amiibo well sucks to be you because they're sold out), weapons that don't break. Honestly TotK felt like a DLC rather than an actual sequel and I feel as though $70 wasn't worth my experience with the game. If this is how Zelda is going to be in the future then count me out
I wish that the champion weapons had infinite durability. The Rito bow, the Gerudo sword and shield, the Zora spear, and the Goron two hander. One of each type that wouldn't break as a reward for doing dungeons.
At the very least, making it less of a pain in the ass to remake the Champion weapons after they break would encourage people to actually use them instead of putting them in Link's house for the entire game. I use the classic weapons all the time because you can just buy new ones for a pitiful amount of Poes in the Depths. An unbreakable Master Sword would've been nice too, although I understand why they didn't do that.
My main gripe is about the total erasure of Sheika tech. I get that they might deem it too dangerous to keep the guardians around just incase the same happens, but absolutely all of it has been whipped off the planet somehow. The sheika slate doesn't exist anymore even though a tool that can create ice, lift large metal objects and create infinite bombs would be very useful in the setting. You get the Purah Pad which is just a Sheika Slate with less features. Also remember those monks who meditated for over 100 years to give you a power up? Yea, screw them, all those years get thrown away instantly in tears of the kingdom. It's that lamb in the Simpsons that they shove out of the way to look at the new hotness, Zonai.
To be fair all those monks essentially turn to dust and evaporate after giving you there orbs, so it isn't like they are just sitting around waiting for Link by the time of totk. Also the shrines are essentially empty after link finishes them so there really isn't a point to them anymore.
I recently started replaying BotW and found out Robbie spent pretty much his entire life researching and reverse engineering the ancient tech. Its the reason he is able to sell you all that ancient armour and weapons. For all that to just be gone in TotK is insane to me. Literally his life's work just gone.
My biggest problem with the game is that it feels like a DLC. Yes, the depth, ultrahand, etc. But so little is done to actually make this world feel different from BOTW. There are still a lot of things to discover but honestly, I just wish I did not play BOTW, so I could get the full discovery with this one.
As much stuff as I really like about totk. Nintendo. Get yourself some actual fucking writers. I dont know why they dont but I do know that a lot of fans seem to think professional writers make word mountains. No. Effective brevity is a skill and nintendo doesn't have it in the main story of totk. Do we really need two cinematics of ganon summoning minions and attacking? Four cinematics of the exact same revelation instead of something interesting and specific to the people you're helping? Does every character need to grate out their exact intentions dry of any character whatsoever in those dragon tear cinematics? The side quest cast has some damn character so why dont all of these poorly directed MAIN CHARACTERS have some? Its not like the story is made of bad ideas (other than why 6 good rocks < 1 bad rock). Its all in the execution.
This ironically shows how in their attempt to create as much freedom as possible, they severely limit the story and characters. They can’t have a meaningful story or characterization because it may get in the way of you going and doing whatever you want at any time. So to try and have some semblance of a story they have a bunch of disjointed or repetitive c-tier anime cutscenes sprinkled around to try and remind the player that they supposedly aren’t playing Zelda:Nuts and Bolts.
Nintendo fell short of even that. Open world has massive weaknesses but its more that nintendo ignores or avoids leaning into those weaknesses that fucks them over. Elden ring shows what a strong step in finally advancing outside the same sandbox can accomplish and totk seized too few opportunities. Personally I blame hand holding. Making a whole world level scaled and every side objective the same but slightly not is the first thing Elden ring tossed out and by god it worked. The real irony is that the freedom doesn't matter. Why have so much variety of build and tools when you're fighting starter enemies all game? Freedom means something in a game that's more exploitable or rewarding for knowing it.
@@Unf0rget Personally I’m not a huge from-soft fan and the games bore me a bit. I am a bigger fan of good stories and characters and don’t mind some handholding structurally if it means I get those. The problem that I think we can both agree on is that not only is BotW’s and TotK’s structure poorly thought out, but the story and characters it delivers are disappointing at best and barely even worthy of the name at worst.
Yeah, handholding is just another thing that can be taken too far. Botw/Totk go to an extreme of not adding anything really new beyond the initial monsters. No real mid or late game stuff aside from those dragons which are designed to be obvious and avoidable. My main theory on the gameplay failings of new zelda ties into that. A reluctance to put the players at any disadvantage that would necessitate them abandoning a direction. Older zelda mechanics fulfilled pacing purposes that new zelda does not, yet elden ring does through being willing for players to encounter adversity beyond their means. And story wise? Its just too much to get into specifics. Nintendo really could have done much better without a large shift in word count or run time. They made awful use of what they put in.
My other Little Gripe on weapon durability in Breath of the Wild:
ua-cam.com/video/MGacJlH96_I/v-deo.html
1. having to wear specific armor to do get a specific thing: question: do you use a plier to hammer in a nail? it can but do you REALLY want to unless you have no other option? not really. to wear gear for a specific job is what was missing in games for a long while. changing skins perhaps after beating the mains tory is a nice bonus but this wear anyskin for any stats is not a novel or great as it turns out to be. in fact it being abused to leech money out of peoples pockets.
Also i makes sense for the general mainstream audience: oh its cold? let's wear something warm. it's hot outside! wear the dessert garbs. I need to swim? let's wear swimming gear. need to climb? GLIMBING GEAR
2. cutscenes dialog. while for a regular MLG Gamer TM this is true you forget that general audiences aka mainstream players, or also known as trend tourists, NEED those. i can garantee you give a game that just drops items in your inventory without a cutscene and the normies get hella confused if he even got something
3. whistle and sages: the whistle button call the sages to you btw. also they HAD to make the champions clunky as the prior champion abilities essentially made mechanics obsolete: why climbing if you can revali up? why have health items or armor at all if you get revived instantly with fish waifu? why get good with parry and shield blocking if you can just daruk everything even guardians? why utilize skill in combat if you can just urbosa the lightning into bokoblin ass. they essential fought against the very game systems. so the sage abilities are majorly nerfed and clunky on purpose to not interfere with the zonai devices.
edit: 4. and you have a quick select for cooking meaning only having to select one item and then choose a recipe for it. so kind of less time spend in the menu
@@MikePhantom 1. I kind of agree about your side about needing specific armor for specific situations, that's what equipment variety is about, but your argument falls apart in regards to cosmetics. Yes, the idea of "wear any skin with any effect" *is* being used for microtransactions, DLC and other scummy tactics. It does not *have to* be, however, and you bringing it up like that clinches the whole argument is fairly disingenuous.
2. The average person isn't that stupid, and it would be trivial to fix this problem while still removing the cutscenes. Finish the shrine, fade to white, inventory jingle and "item get" notification plays. It communicates the same information without forcing the player to skip through two custcenes every time they finish a shrine.
3. No. A system never HAS to be clunky, that's just lazy. If the champion abilities broke the game's systems, they should've made different champion abilities, not made them annoyingly difficult to use. Any solution to a game design problem that is achieved by making the game less fun to play is a poorly conceived one.
4. That's a bandaid solution, you still need to navigate the menus, find the item you want the recipe for, have already cooked the recipe, select the recipe, throw it into the pot, skip the cooking animation and close out of the "item get" notification. Every time you want a new dish. At the very least they could've added an option to turn off the cooking animation instead of having to manually skip it every time.
That was a fun video!
Breath of the wild never had issues to begin with, so the points you are making for tears of the Kingdom is worthless. You are simply not good at the games.
@@aldar8240 1.that is however the rule recently. its was actually brought up in the ps4 spider man that you can only have specific effects with specific outfits. only if reaching in long term goal you can use them all with what ever skin, but i think that included owning all and upgrading them not so sure anymore. but it remains a novelty to have NOT money involved with skins
2. you HIGHLY overestimate the capability of a general audiences player, a trend tourist. any hand holding UI or pop up that would any somewhat competent hobby gamer question if the devs think the Players are utter morons are being made because of these people. not because of the wishes of devs but CEOs and managers whos goal is to EXPAND if possible limitlessly and maximize profits. and you can only do that if even the more brain dead person can play the game. TBF nintendo's reason may not be as cynical and money driven but they do use the same ideas to appeal to as many as possible as the toy company they are.
3. I never argued it has to be but thats whats clearly being done here. WHY ELSE would they make it worse when they had it intuitive and seemingly perfect in the prior game? because nintendo has more or less a streak of wanting to dictate how people play their games. thats why even after 1 and a half months they still remove dupping glitches in a game that most people ALREADY have finished (and not BOTW as much surprisingly) and thats ALSO why they made the champion abilities NOT useable during the champions ballad DLC rematches
4. not saying its perfect but at this bullet point i merely wanted to tell that this is possible as he was not aware of it in the part of the video. his assessment would be only more accurate if he considers that in as well, he could ahve made suggestions to improve THAT feature and not suggest a feature that is is already there be it though improvement worthy, and make his assessment kind of....inconsequential
There's actually 1,000 problems to find in TOTK, if you collect them all Eiji Aonuma will fly to your house and punch you in the face.
^ This deserves to be the top comment
ya-ha-ha!
*Kick you in the balls.
Unfortunately, no. You just get another Hestu turd from a lame repeat joke.
I got 99 problems and a tear ain't one.
I'm surprised you didn't mention how this game seems to want to gaslight me into believing BotW never happened. The whole time I was thinking, "you know, those giant, weather-controlling, death-beam shooting divine beasts would be really handy.... where are they? Where are all the guardians? Where are the giant shiekah pillars around the castle? Purah, Robbie, why do you refuse to so much as mention the fact that almost every trace of the shiekah tech representing YOUR LIFE'S WORK have suddenly disappeared without a trace?" When I got to the shrine of resurrection and saw that even the freaking walls were gone... legit felt like some 1984 shit. "There was never a shrine here, Link. Ancient sheikah? Who? Do you mean the Zonai? Why don't you go with the nice doctor, you're clearly not feeling well."
Also can't get over the fact that Zelda spent 100yrs in Hyrule Castle holding back Calamity Ganon only to realize there was a spare Ganon in the basement.
It’s one of my biggest issues of the game and it’s story, like WHY do these things from the previous game not exist? Like what happened to the Sheikah Slate? You know the thing Link used the entirety of his adventure? And if it’s supposedly the “Purah Pad” then why didn’t they mention that it is in some way? Why don’t they mention anything and pretend like the Guardians and Divine Beasts didn’t exist?
@@SpoonyBard-mx1ve I know why they did it, doesn't make it any less of a problem. Nintendo has really weird, orwellian rules regarding any reference to their existing products. Basically, the devs of TotK aren't allowed to make any reference to BotW that would impact someone's first time playing it, so basically nothing of substance. Nothing that could make a player feel left out for not playing another game, nor influence them to not buy it later because they've already experienced parts of it vicariously thru the sequel.
You might notice that this basically makes it impossible to have any sequel to any story in a nintendo product, and you'd be correct. That's why Majora's Mask and Link's Awakening are "sequels" that immediately send Link to a new land with new characters and no meaningful reference to anything that happened in the games they are supposedly sequels to. Yet in TotK they decided to stay in the same place with the same characters while STILL being completely disconnected from the game it is supposed to be a sequel to, which obviously feels absolutely bizarre.
@@samwellcheck562So the Pokemon mindset?
"No, we can't have Mega evolutions, Gigantomax and Z Moves in any future games! We don't carry over major mechanics here!" type of shit.
Yes! This! This right here! With all the interaction with old sheikah tech in BOTW, I was super curious to see how it had been used in the years since. Using shrines as new homes or storage facilities? Using the tech to find new ways for quicker transport beyond horses? Or maybe it was the opposite, and there was a harsh rejection of old sheikah tech and disdain for any use of it because it had been used to betray everyone despite calamity ganon being cast out. The closest we get to the shiekah stuff is the bits of it that can be seen in Purah's towers.
But no, such an interesting part of the world not only ignored, but actively deleted. Every interaction with characters that we once knew feeling incredibly awkward, like a giant invisible elephant is in the room and sucking up all the oxygen. Any location punctuated by the unnerving presence of those black and faded golden embroidering just bleached clean. It's made even worse because the Zonai ruins are slap-dashed sprinkled around and are so much more dull and jarring to look at.
Maybe the reason the divine beasts weren't there is because if they were then they could literally destroy the main bosses and there'd be no game?
My issue with the story was the titular Tears side quest. Link discovers these secrets and they alter no interactions with anyone or anything after you complete it.
The sad part is that the story is actually quite nice, and likely would have had more impact if Zelda's draconification had been more of a surprise. If some story progression (Temples, freeing the deku tree, etc.) was required to unlock more geoglyphs and you had to view them in order somehow, it might have been much cleaner.
If you do them early enough and get the master sword early Purah gives you a throwaway line asking when you planned to tell her. Only Impa even seems broken up about it.
@@NinjaPiParadox I did this. I had maxed out my stamina wheels by the point I completed the Tears sequence. Later both the Great Deku Tree and Purah give you the side quest to find the Master Sword. Only for both to immediately be completed.
It's weird how little Impa has to do with the plot beyond the Tears side quest too.
Worse than that, it makes the entire subplot of fake Zelda entirely pointless. Especially if you are like me and the first 4 tears you got made you figure out the entire draconification subplot. So everytime the fake Zelda appeared, Link either came across as unbelievably dense, or as an unbelievable dickhead for not explaining things to other characters.
I know you can't reasonably expect the developers to know how much of the story you have figured out on your own until you get all tears but... Well, that's the issue, isn't it? If the developers can't know how much information you have in any given moment, they are designing the narrative with both hands tied behind their backs. Honestly, the memories system from BotW just should have been abandoned altogether. It creates more problems than it solves. It's just not worth it.
@@XanderVJ The Tears side quest should have at least been a narrative flag for NPC's. It does represent the title of the game, after all.
One of my minor complaints with TOTK is how it doesn't do anything interesting with the places it reuses from BOTW. Like sometimes it's pretty good but than there's areas like the Thunder Plateau, an area that was made just to host a shrine quest in BOTW now is just purposeless in TOTK.
Gut Check Rock, Forgotten Temple if you don't include the map room in the back, the lame ass generic caves in Akkala Citadel. And on and on. Bleh.
You'd imagine since the big new addition to the overworld this time were interiors and caves, they'd have made a cool mini dungeon inside the Akkala Citadel, especially since there's already a model and map for it in Age of Calamity.@@quibquiberton4184
The way totk handles weapon durability does solve a core issue I had with botw. The few unique experiences with weapons in botw where exceedingly rare and simply gone when they expired. I came across one fire sword in botw and I did not want to experiment with it for fear of losing it and it's capabilities but in totk I can slap a fire horn on a spear and go nuts. I am far more likely to engage random groups of enemies because often they supply far more and better resources than the ones I used up. Not perfect but a move that let's that particular goblin in my brain be quiet.
They could just not have weapons break and it would be a non-issue in the first place. Weapons all still shatter like glass in TOTK, and you're still limited to only three terrible movesets. The combat is still awful.
@pukerat7562 It's literally no worse than the combat in every other game in the series. I'd argue it even has a leg up on them because the way every object interacts uniquely with the environment means that you can approach engagements in more ways than just running in swinging your sword like a spastic.
If you play the game using more than one brain cell, weapon durability becomes a non-issue. In fact, in both Wild AND Kingdom, it ended up cause the opposite problem where I couldn't burn through my weapons faster than the game was throwing new ones at me.
It created a new problem... I go back to Tarrey town every hour or so to break down my weapons and keep the components before they break.
@@wilnich592 Thank you, the only argument in favor I can understand with getting rid of weapon durability is that it isn't bad enough, I ALWAYS have more weapons than I need, never once in either game was I without a good weapon to use, cus as long as you're smart and actually using everything durability is a complete non issue, and on THAT angle i can understand people saying durability isn't worth keeping as a mechanic cus it doesn't change the game enough including it.
I'm always so baffled when I see people upset that weapons break as if you aren't constantly getting good weapons all the time as long as you're doing the story/shrines you come across so that the invisible world level is constantly going up (so good weapons/materials are dropping all the time.)
@@pukerat7562 then theres no point in having multiple weapons in the first place, might as well make it like every other zelda game and give you like one, MAYBE two swords max to use for the entire game! boring. boring. and fusing is fun! and isnt hard at all. you'll almost always have something on hand to turn into a new weapon, no need to lose something forever and have to go hunting thru the overworld for new weapons like in botw.
All the Amiibo armor can be just found underground to my understanding.
Yeah every Amiibo item except for Epona and glider fabrics can be found in the game this time, which is much better than BotW.
@@Dan_the_Druid It's a small thing, but finding amiibo armor in the Depths is one of my favorite changes in TOTK. Being able to explore Hyrule in a green hat without beating 90% of the game first is really wonderful.
@@QuintessentialWalrus Agreed, that green hat matters a lot.
Honestly, I'm glad you can get the costumes without amiibo, but I absolutely hate finding them in the depths. Just a me thing, but I would have rather had unique armor in the chests and have the poe statues give out costumes.
@@QuintessentialWalrusive been looking for green hats for hours and hours i just keep finding pants
I remember the time Yonobu ran in front of me as I was spamming the A button to grab bomb flowers. He then launched into said bomb flowers and burned one of my fairies.
got it, i’m turning off Yonobu when I get him
@@wesshiflet2214 the only one worth keeping on is Tulin and you even have to be careful with him sometimes.
i keep a cannon on mineru so i dont have to deal with all the bullshit rock mining segments, but that generally leads to her shooting enemies while they're near TNT barrels and getting me blown up in the process
Sounds like a You Problem.
@@kjk607yeah Tulin is a problem when collecting drops from enemies
Assigning sage abilities to the down button would've been such an easy way to improve the way they work
It's kind of funny when you think about how that is already sort of the case, with the sages running towards you when you whistle
You don't even need to get rid of the whistle button either, just tap to whistle and hold to use a sage ability.
I’m sorry to hear your father passed Plague. This is the first I’ve heard of it so I’m sorry if I’m bringing up old news, but I just hope you’re doing well man and I’m sorry for your loss
He very clearly hates him
@@jobdylan5782 lol i was thinking something similar.
Me: Isn't his dad the one who didn't believe in covid then got it. Near death he was screaming for God/Jesus.
IIRC the entire time plague had very dry or vitriolic tone.
@@m.czandogg9576 Yeah but he listens to conspiracy podcasts so he deserved it and that must be added to a video game video essay and also one about naruto. RIP Pop
@@jobdylan5782 Eli was the guy who had to drag them to the hospital and scream at them to get medical care. Whatever your thoughts are, Eli clearly cared and wanted the best for those around him. Regardless of personal differences he lost family and making light of that or shrugging it off is tactless.
@@malikoniousjoe I'm not making light of it, i consider it about as serious an issue as i can for a stranger on the internet.
Yes. Shrines should absolutely fade to white and teleport you out once you reach the end.
That said, a streamer I watch actually refuses to skip the blessing orb cutscenes at the ends of shrines because he's infatuated with the "beautiful singing".
The solution? Implement an option that automatically skips to white at the ends of shrines. If you like the singing, just don't tick the option. Everybody wins.
Or ignore idiots that love listening to "singing." At some point the logic of 'you can't please everyone' turns into trying to please a handful of crazy persons.
@@PlagueOfGripes You're calling someone crazy for simply enjoying the song when they complete a shrine?
Also why is "singing" in quotations? You skipped them all and didn't know about it?
This makes you look very petty and ignorant.
@@SymmetricalDocking I mean tbf I put it in quotations too. We're all just quoting each other lol
@@The_Endless_Now Fair enough
@PlagueOfGripes That's going too far. You're getting uppity about someone enjoying something while being completely impatient that you have to spend a couple of seconds pressing a button three times?
What they like may seem crazy to you, your complaint sounds crazy to others.
I like the Spiderman PS4 gave you the suit bonus after you unlocked the suit so you can choose the suit you want to wear along with the power you wanted to equip seperately.
Honestly, pretty valid points there. One more small gripe I have to add is that the house building itself is rather... Limited, there's not many modules, and not even enough space to have 1 of every module. I feel like they could have loosened the limits on it a bit.
yea that was by far one of the most disappointing aspects of the game, which is ironic since this game is supposedly so big on "building what you want."
Probably the entire Zelda franchise's worst carpenters. Ugly UGLY shoebox houses.
also there are no windows, and the whole house is this same shade of green. It makes it feel too gamified and less "this is my perfect house".
It wasn't just limited. The building interface was a god damned nightmare and had no way of customizing the pieces so that they would fit together without leaving the room open to the outside.
I am honestly just going to avoid this pointlessness in TotK should I drag my motivation back up to beat the main story. It it one of the least rewarding experiences for time investment I've ever had and I used to play MMOs at end games like WoW and GW2 for years.
Glad i'm not the only one who thought they could've done a better job with the tutorial this time around. The good thing about BotW's was that you got pretty much everything at the start which meant when you left, you'd probably only miss out on things like the camera and inventory upgrades from the Korok elder which were largely inconsequential. The way it is in this game makes it feel like the game is railroading you in one direction and kills some of the freedom the first game had.
I've beaten BOTW twice and my wife has beaten it three times, and a big part of why it's enjoyable to revisit is the fact that the tutorial is fun and relatively short. Who knows if I'll replay TOTK any time soon because I know I'll need to slog through HOURS of tedium before I can start having fun again.
I really felt like they could have divided the amount of shrines by 4 but each shrine should have 4 puzzles to give you the same amount of orbs for HP, each puzzle is progressively more difficult but they are all contained in a single location
I also was hoping that they'd make the armor sets, sets, like the reward for completing all the shrines, if they had more like that piece (or if purchasing the full set just gave you it, with an option to wear individual pieces) it'd be great
Imagine getting taught about ice in relation to fire, water and slipperiness, then having to use that learning in a combat encounter (just pulling from a few recent shrines I did)
Some of the shrines were really clever. But by the end of the game, I kept hoping they would just be a Rauru's Blessing instead.
only issue is that’d mean fewer warp locations
@@wesshiflet2214 Limit warp locations to important areas. Not just a warp location to the top of a frozen mountain.
I'm glad the puppy love phase of this game is coming to an end. It was impossible to discuss the things we didn't like without people raging for a while. I love Tears of the Kingdom, but there are some issues that deserve to be talked about especially since this is the new Zelda formula going forward.
I haven't finished the story yet, I've done all the main quests, just haven't gone to the final boss yet. But the story so far was honestly pretty mediocre in my opinion, it felt like more of the same. Each Dungeon felt so similar gameplay and story-wise. There were no twists or surprises, nothing really to pique an interest, it was very straightforward. The dialogue was incredibly cringe-inducing, I think that's partly the problem of the English dub. The game really holds your hands especially in the dungeons. You can't progress through them without talking to the sage a few times and everytime you open a door by solving a basic puzzle a minute long camera transition forces you to look at the door you just obviously opened. Then the sage will say "Look, Link! The door is open now! You can go through it!". Every. Time.
Gameplay is still fun, improved from BOTW. Weapon degradation never bothered me so the addition of fusion is just a great bonus. However, most combat scenarios are best avoided especially if you have good gear. Honestly, why break 3 decent weapons and shields to beat a fortress if you're just going to get 5 arrows from a chest. Especially considering I used more arrows on the miniboss alone.
When they said they'd use the same map, with some new areas I was kind of disappointed. Zelda games have reused assets before but in exciting new ideas. I was expecting Tears to be the Majora's Mask to BOTW's Ocarina of Time. Instead it really would be the equivalent of Ocarina of Time with a bunch of new items and some new smaller maps. The sky islands are cool in theory but they're mostly the same tiny islands with the same enemies save for a few good areas, like the starting Sky Island. The Depths are cool in theory but in practice it's just a big open ugly wasteland with scattered ruins that are mostly empty save for one armor chest in some. There are big empty spaces in the overworld but at least there's some variety with biomes and enemy types. I can go on all day. The game is great. But not perfect by any stretch, and the problems aren't just minor nitpicks.
I'm on my second playthrough right now and the "tell-don't-show"-ness of the dialogue in the cutscenes is...*very* annoying. It was annoying the first time around because of its tell-don't-show-ness, but now that I'm having to hear it a second time it feels borderline condescending
"Furthermore, I sense that we share a blood connection" REALLY??
"You bind my heart and steal my magic. You plan to hold me here" FRIKKIN' REALLY???
*the Sages having their motivational speeches during the final fight* Gee ain't it nice that the Demon King's Army let them get their monologues out before they resumed trying to kill us all
It sounds like the game is bad:
- combat is not worthwhile
- dungeons are mediocre
- voice acting is poor
- story is poor
Sounds like a not great game. Speak your truth
@@coolfool183 despite how bad the game can be in terms of random problems, the issue is the game is still somewhat enjoyable to play through. I really don't like tears in many many ways, but I can't lie and say that it didn't somewhat bring me enjoyment in just going into it blind and playing the core gameplay loop
@@coolfool183im the kind of person who plays zelda games for the dungeons and combat and yeah im not that much of a fan. I feel like a lot of people just dont want to say the game is more addictive than it is all that amazing. I like skyward swords dungeons but the combat is pretty shit though part of that is because im a lefty and they give me no option to make link left handed again. In this game flurry rush is so easy that i was beating lynels with no effort or upgraded armor. Majoras mask and twilight princess will always be my favorite 3d zeldas because of this
The game is for children and low IQ people
21:40 I think the compendium should offer rewards, a bit like Bioshock. You've defeated and documented every type of bokoblin? You get a permanent 20% damage bonus against them.
Taking pictures already rewards you with the sensor ability. Other than that its taking pictures. Why cant that be its own reward if thats something that interests you. Having some stat padding just for the sake of some extrinsic reward is unnecessary.
That would also make sense in the game and it should contribute to some kind of knowledge stat. That or the reward is a chance at getting a critical hit when your weapon doesn’t have the multiplier or you aren’t getting a headshot in.
So Link in this case will have went out of his way in the field to study and document this specific kind of monster in detail. He’s photographed every variation as well as the weapons they use, and he’s fought x amount of them.
So of course it makes sense that Link has an in-depth amount of knowledge about their weaknesses and overall physiology so he “knows” the correct places to hit in order to do more damage. And this can be a stat buff or it can just be a random chance at getting a critical hit.
@@Tamacat388 Because most people aren't completionists trying to waste their time for the "reward" of having wasted their time? If you like collecting stamps, that's fine, I'd rather paint minis I may use (probably never will in a lot of cases) in future games, personally.
Besides anything with zombie Ganon, story was the weakest part for me. Waking up after the kingdom was wrecked by calamity ganon and avenging the dead champions was much more engaging than just finding each sage and hearing the SAME DIALOGUE about the imprisoning war.
Felt like a missed opportunity to have made this a successor to Majora’s Mask given how ominous the opening is. But there never seemed to be an actual world-ending threat since Ganon doesn’t even show up again until the last quarter of the game unless you skip straight to the final fight
Does it help that nearly a third of the shrines are Rauru's Blessings, even when there's little to no preamble to reach it?
It feels utterly random sometimes whether a shrine is a Blessing or not. Sometimes a shrine 10 ft in a cave with no enemies or puzzle is a Blessing, sometimes you run through a gauntlet of likelikes and black/silver horriblins carrying a crystal only to STILL have to a do a 4-room puzzle in the shrine itself.
Regarding finding shrines in caves, it's worth noting that you can always just switch your scanner to search for Blupees, since there will always be one near the entrance. That, combined with the lightroot thing, makes underground shrines pretty easy to find.
There's also the cherry blossom tree thing, of course, but that requires stopping what you're doing to find/go to the tree, and is a lot harder to figure out organically.
Yeah expecially with the amount of shrines it sounds like hes mad that he has to avtively search and look for things to 100% the game (shrines)
I really liked the Sage spirits, annoying and unhelpful as they could be at times, it was nice to actually have a world that felt like they were all fighting to defeat the evil and not just expecting Link to do everything (that said I agree, it was a fun idea that needs to be tightened and improved in any future iterations -- which I hope they do.) Otherwise I wouldn't mind this Zelda being a trilogy but as much fun as I had with ToTK I am ready to move on to a new take on Classic Zelda. Give us some of the things in this game like Sage spirits and the glider as an item in a 'old school' Zelda game, I'd love that personally. as I too am tired of the weapon durability, and 'crafting/cooking systems'.
banger video, as a certified totk hater it’s always fun to see people calling out its many many flaws
I'm glad we have people like Eli who can recognize that even things that are good can also have some really bad shit in them
You know that's not a particularly rare trait, right.
@@wilnich592it’s not, but people don’t want to admit it: or sometimes just don’t notice it. So it’s nice to acknowledge
Rose-tinted glasses can make people do crazy things. Nintendo has a lot of really dedicated adult fans who really don’t want to admit their favorite childhood well … anything isn’t as good as they want it to be.
Relax folks it’s a video game 😂
@@Getloose360 a multimillion dollar video game in a 35 year old multibillion dollar earning franchise that's literally made several people household names and inspirations in game development
By accident, I learned you could call the Sages to you by whistling at them. The same mechanic you use for horses.
They are your little magical ghost horses.
That makes sense... I figured they were like an extension of Wolf Link's code, who also appears to respond to your whistling.
RIP him btw
*little magical ghost pikmin
Ironically, they don't give you a ghost horse, which would have been marginally useful.
Wow. Didn't know that, but it's definitely something you'd only learn by accident.
@@zetsubou1v1 Stalhorses ARE marginally useful if you can find one in the depths. They'd be much more so if they were more accessible than hoverbikes.
Open World design is paradoxical. The best open world game I've ever played is Shadows of the Colossus, specifically because the game world is entirely empty and leaves exploration entirely to the player. If you don't want to admire the scenery, the game doesn't force it.
I had a lot of fun with MGSV's open maps for the same reason - there's very little busywork and the world is just there if you want to look around. Just like real life.
I think something that helped MGSV a lot is that it's not "open" world and the objective is combat. It's a series of interconnected roads with bases blocking them, in the Afghan area. In the African map, it's again interlinked enemy camps interspersed with more enemy outposts. You can play stealth, go loud, abduct people or roll over them in a tank. No collectables, just dense combat options mixed with robust core gameplay. No koroks. Not much menuing either.
Elden Ring proves there's a balance that can be struck.
Open world is a cancer of a genre. Devs got all excited with new technology they can't even use well and they had crappy visions of how to utilize it. It doesn't matter how big a world is or where you can go when there's nothing substantial to do and traveling is a chore. I admit that Zelda Breath of is a halfway decent example of the genre, but that's because the bar is super low. MGSV was barely open world and completely fell apart once you discovered that enemies can only see you if you stand up or move in their view under 30 meters. You can do pretty much anything you want, even sprint at them full force in daylight with no cover as long as you crouch by the 50 or 60 meter mark. I can't remember which.
For similar reasons, Oblivion is the best I've played. Nothing telling you to go off the beaten path generally ever, and modding allows it to suit other tastes. Gonna play Morrowind soon.
@@PlagueOfGripesEhh... Not so much on there being no menus.
The game has a million different weapons and suits and upgrades to make, map objectives, setting up units in the base, sending out units for mercenary battles...
And this is ignoring all of the needless pauses to the game, such as the helicopter rides in and out of stages and needing to go up to the helicopter between missions and the base. There's a ton of needless and complicated downtime in MGSV.
Criticism is necessary, even for great products. Nothing is perfect, even what you'd consider a 10/10, and you can always push things that little bit further, sharpen the experience just that little bit more.
if a individual considers something a 10 out of 10, then that becomes a personal issue... not a media problem.
being critical is important to survive, not as important as Media Enjoyment.
@@acetrigger1337if your understanding of being a 10/10 is “being LITERALLY 100% perfect and therefore you could never rank something any higher than a 9/10” that’s a you problem
@@fusionfountain Yeah, that was quite the unhinged presumption. I wish people could choose not to obliterate the utility of basic concepts.
fucking WOOOSH!
Not when said Critic is from a Souls born nut who gets upset when characters talk about the lore instead of having to read it on a monsters left testicle that it dropped at 1% chance
I'd say the open air of the dungeon's in TotK make it feel less polished only because of how much movement you have in this game. The sky Temple in Twlight Princess for example is really open air yet feels dangerous because of how grounded Link is in that game. TotK Link however can just save himself with his lizard hands and easily cheese the dungeon with his base abilities, which is probably why there aren't any actual keys or locked doors in the main temples.
I think the Wind temple had the best layout with Link's abilities in mind. Fire was too easy to cheese and the Lightning Temple should have had more rooms for how large the structure is. The water temple was just sad and actually felt really unpolished. It could have had another level or something. I guess they thought the treck up there was part of the dungeon.
I 100% agree. Being able to climb and ascend through everything cheapens any depth the dungeons have
Agree. The temples were jokes. And I wonder if they were so bland because they were worried about stuff like ascend breaking them in half.
@@tyranitararmaldo I would have disabled Link's abilities as a programmer due to the "aura of evil" emanating from the temple/dungeon, which would have given Link an extra layer of challenge.
@@stuartdparnell
Boom, stellar solution right there.
@@stuartdparnellThey already do this for shrines. The consciously chose this poor design because they are being super purists towards "player choice" (except when it vomes to fixing their crappy default control scheme or terrible menu sorting).
There was a lot they could have done to improve the unlisted quests.
For example if you curser over the skyview towers and press R3 a list of tasks could pop up for the region.
X mini-boss remaining
X Koroks remaining
X Signs remaing
Etc.
Not too hand-holdy but still allow you to keep better track of what you've done.
A few more stamp types wouldn't have hurt either. Specifically mini-boss related or like the caves when you find one it is automatically added to the map and like shrines there's a visual indicator of if you've defeated it or not.
damn this is the first "yona is hot" take ive ever heard
WHY DO THE FISH HAVE TITS!?
@@TheDirtbaggrifbecause anthro and to attract furries
saying that with her head shape is insane
Thanks for making this Plague!
I dislike reviews that solely stay in the comfortable territory of unending praise. Even for properties I enjoy I still like to hear critiques as it’s kind of a creative exercise to view media critically through someone else’s perspective. I think that comes from my background of art histories and critiques, where viewing something critically is not a personal thing but merely attempting to use objective logic to improve or understand better pieces typically only rated subjectively as a whole piece rather than the total of it disparate parts.
The one thing I definitely agree with right of the bat is the map/quest marker. Some quests where you could use a bit of a hint will just hover the quest marker over the quest giver giving no help in where it wants you to go next, not even a general direction to head in. Yet some quests like the one with a labyrinth in the sky it’ll give you multiple markers pointing out exactly where to go despite the whole point of a labyrinth is that it’s a maze, so you shouldn’t know exactly where to go but oh well. So the game arbitrarily decides how much it wants to leave exploration up to the player and it feels like there was never an agreement in design philosophy among the quest developers on how much to assist the player.
Also maybe I’m a crazy person but another thing that bugged me about exploration and the maps was how limited you were in placing personal stamps on the map. You get 300 such stamps to place on the map before it’ll ask you to delete some to make room for more and while that sounds like a lot, it’s really limiting if you like to fill in your map with more information, like adding skulls for all monster camps and boss monster locations, hearts to mark fairy ponds, stars to mark shrine locations and towers you haven’t explored yet. I don’t always want to explore areas I’ve seen and marked right away and the map doesn’t give you much information by default about what is actually at said areas besides a name, only shrines and the like getting marked on the map by default once explored. So I found that by the time I had explored roughly half of the total world I had to constantly choose what stamps to delete to make way for new ones.
Seems like they should of at the very least had the option for twice of what they give you, considering they added the depths and sky islands yet your stamp limit is shared for all 3 levels. Another issue with the stamping map feature is the fact there is no map layer for caves. Despite the map having layers it condenses caves onto the same layer as the surface world so if you find a boss to farm or fairies underground and want to mark them for later, if you return after a while and forgot your stamp was for something underground in a cave you’ll be very confused if you go to that stamps exact location on the surface. They should of least given some way of marking stamps that are for above or below the surface such as a little triangle up or down next to it or differentiate by colour. Just some way to note it for visual clarity later. Or just make the caves it’s own layer on the map screen. I’m curious if anyone else has had this specific issue with stamping or am I just the one crazy person who uses it too much.
A lot of this kind of just boils down to "open world games bad" and i agree
Seeing people criticize this game feels so good. I have a lot of critiques of it story-wise (why is everything from Breath of the Wild gone? Why do some of the things in place of former shrines make no sense?) and some people take that like a personal insult. And yeah, a solid portion of the fanbase doesn't even know what the old games played like. Saw a post floating around insta captioned "the first three hours of every Zelda game" showing OOT Link trying to climb a slide with a depleting stamina wheel.
The absence of the Divine Breast and Guardians was explained in BotW itself: they were decommissioned because they were no longer needed after beating Calamity Ganon and because they didn't want to have that technology being corrupted and turned against them again.
@@lukejones7164erm...... in the extended ending, Zelda notes that Vah Ruta has stopped working and it should be investigated. If they had been decommissioned by choice, why would they need to investigate a Divine Beast that had stopped working? As someone who has put over 3000 hours into BOTW, I can say for certain that what you're saying here just isn't in BOTW's flimsy story.
@@MarilynMonRover Its called using basic logic bro lol. If the Divine Beasts and other technology stopped working and already completed their purpose then obviously they must have had them decommissioned after BotW.
@@lukejones7164 Basic logic is what tells me that that's bullshit. Again, what you said just isn't in the story. It's an assumption. Nintendo loves it when people speculate and come up with fan theories; it's part of their strategy. Also, why would they be decommissioned in the first place? They were around for 10k years because the ancient people knew Ganon would return. They had an ongoing purpose, not a one-and-done purpose. I could maybe see dismantling the shrines, as they really did have a singular purpose, but the Divine Beasts did not. For the love of the Zora, please don't make excuses for Nintendo's sloppy-ass writing.
@@MarilynMonRover You clearly fail at logic lmao.
"Why would they be decommissioned in the first place?"
The same reason why the previous King had them decommissioned after the First Calamity 10,000 years ago: they served their main purpose and there was no sign of Ganon returning (they weren't just kept around for 10,000 years afterwards, it was only a few years before the 2nd Calamity when they were rediscovered and put back in service). Also considering how easily Calamity Ganon was able to completely gain control over them and all of the Guardians, it would be really stupid to just have them laying around where they could easily be taken over by another dark force.
Since when is using basic logic to answer the obvious "making excuses for bad writing"? As if a video game needs to literally spell everything out for you like your in special ed.
What personally struck me the most is that since I make getting new outfits and wanting to see their set bonuses a high priority, I try to save as many critters and monster parts as I can, just in case I need them as upgrade materials. Therefore the intended experience of having a bag full of fuseable materials on me just absolutely didn't happen for me. That's not a bag of potential weaponry, that's a bag of inert upgrade materials I must hold on to at any cost. Stone Talus hearts and those Zonai grinders got a lot of appreciation from me in contrast.
I feel it's safe to say the novelty that breath of the wild had ( which was incredibly massive back then ) has waned since its release . I'm not knocking the games but it feels like too much for me while I prefer the more through line with branching options experience
Hell yeah, some of my favorite videos were your Gripes Balls, so this is a welcome surprise.
As for TOTK, it's after the honeymoon period that you really start to see how much of the game is an "expansion" and how much is a sequel. It feels like when they were done with the main new mechanics they just assumed repeating and expanding the previous approaches was more than fine, because the new way of interacting with the environment would make it novel again. In practice, sometimes it does, but since I've already had a similar experience before, the returns are diminishing faster. At least for me, who am not interested in building mechas.
TOTK is a weird game because I find it to be equally as enjoyable as BOTW was, but at the same time I find it to be significantly more unimpressive or even disappointing. I've loved my time with it because I loved BOTW, but I was also constantly shocked by the things they didn't change, or even the things they made worse. I know COVID probably delayed TOTK for at least a year but it's hard to believe such a samey, safe sequel took SIX YEARS to make.
3:30 Yep. Happened to me. Missed the Lookout Landing and spent 20 hours going to Kakariko and Hateno for pants then back and over to stables before my friend told me the glider was available after not realizing my quest tracker had changed.
I kind of wonder if that was a deliberate choice to encourage players to keep experimenting with zonai stuff to fill the void of the glider.
Either way, totally baffling decision to just stick it at Lookout like it was the obvious place to go.
@@asparagusoffice If it was, it failed for me. I got SO frustrated with my wagons disappearing if I went too far away or entered a shrine. I HATE using the Ultrahand and I didn't realize how powerful 2 fans and a stick could be until I saw someone make the trash bike. I still haven't motivated myself to complete the game and I bought it opening week. Have the regional events complete at least and haven't touched the game in about a month.
The thing that's crazy to me about the healing system is that they had real-time potion consumption that could be interrupted in Skyward Sword and went back on it for some reason.
the way i see it in that regard is to cut down on complexity of food in general since stamina food probably wouldn't be very useful in real time, as well as the animations needed or other issues needed to be accounted for each food item.
people probably didn't like it
I would much prefer if the Switch Zelda games had you mixing potions that you had to physically drink in real time, but I think the devs went with pause menu healing for two reasons: it makes the game easier for young/casual players, and also Skyrim did it and that game sold like 60 million copies.
and they also *have* animations of link eating, which play when he eats. All they'd have to do is make it so that happens in the overworld instead of the pause menu, and make it get interrupted if he gets hit while eating
Okay, for those "real time"ers... how can i drink/eat stamina food when I'm climing/gliding (i.e. when I actually need it)? Stamina food is useless otherwise.
Ill note that in dark souls, the problem is at least alleviated by just having way fewer materials needed for upgrading weapons. Everything uses titanite [shards/fragments/chunks/slabs] or it uses Twinkling/Fire/Lightning Titanite (and thats only given to the rare weapons).
The games iirc also just have straight up material vendors so the only restricted item usually is the Titanite Slab (and even in dks1 you can waste time grinding it.)
BOTW and TOTK just run into having so much utter junk items for upgrading that effectively require you to just start stalking the specific tiny regions those materials grow in for hours and that sucks.
I needed this video. Felt like I was going crazy being the only one that felt this way. Thank you.
I think my biggest problem with this game is that rather than saying that they understand why people enjoy the older games and still want that style, Nintendo has said that those people are nostalgia blind and don't get why they want to go back to the linear style
To be clear that was Aonuma in a specific interview, in a translated transcript to it may lack some subtlety. However they did mention how they weren't concerned with previous games to make new ones. I don't think he ignores what some linearity can do, and I'm not the only one to ask for a refinement of linear segments _within_ the open setting. I think he was kinda dismissive because they were still promoting TOTK which doubled down on BOTW's extreme non-linearity for better and worse. I think (at least hope) they can see that while you can't please everyone, there is a "best of both worlds" approach.
I mean, people weren't buying the linear games by the time skyward sword came around. and now botw and totk are selling like crazy.
totally get why nintendo would be keen on ignoring any voices telling them to backtrack.
"I'm not angry about these issues, I just saw them... except the armor upgrade thing, I'm angry about that."
You and me both. That and the companion issue. It was GREAT feeling like I had my own small army that could roll up and really take the fight back to the monsters.
...Right up until I spent more time yelling, "Riju, could you get the FUCK OVER HERE?!" and "Sidon, buddy, could... could you not?" than actually enjoying them coming along. ...which they didn't. Was mildly put out that they had to come up with a weird avatar projection system rather than 'What you are doing is important, I will join you!'
it would be hard to program the actual characters in, except Tulin, with all the different type of traversal you’re doing. However I do agree I wish the party system felt better. So many times they would run away from me when I needed their abilities, and it would’ve been cool to have them talk so it’s not so quiet you know.
I wish there were just a hotkey for activating the sage powers remotely. Maybe instead of dpad down being a dedicated horse button, it could be where you quick select all the sage powers, *and* the horse call, and just flick through the 6 item menu with a hold, to make it your activated ability on a tap. Something like that. I hate running for the braindead AI if I want their abilities, that alone makes them so much less useful than the botw champion powers were.
This is exactly why I really dislike when open world games try to have some sort of grand, rigid story, but refuse to make it linear.
Open world is fine for general exploration sandbox choose your own adventure type of thing. But you need that linearity.
You need plot to force you to go places, to restrict you, to make sure you're progressing in controllable manner.
Here we have progression hidden behind mindless grind. An exploration that is arguably way too thorough to be enjoyable for most.
you make a good point about controlled progression, but I wouldn't say progression in totk and botw is hidden behind anything new. shrines fuel the bulk of progress and function similarly to heart pieces. heart pieces never had plot significance to guide you to them, and whether or not you needed to mindlessly grind for them was a matter of choice (informed by dying more often). you could always speed through more linear zelda titles without getting a single heart piece, and it usually made later dungeons imbalanced. the fact that you can go to any dungeon you want in these newer games does make it harder to tell when you're behind on hearts, but it's the same basic dilemma we've had for decades.
and yeah, getting even close to max hearts in any zelda title is usually too grindy to be enjoyable for most. in a game with 150 "heart pieces" that grind is dialed to 11 for anyone who needs the full healthbar.
For finding shrines in caves, it’s easier to first find the light root in the depths that corresponds to it. If you have trouble finding the caves, offering a fruit to a cherry blossom tree’s alter will reveal every cave in the area.
Phantasy Star Universe had my favorite armor system. Everything was just casual clothes. (If you can call the extremely over-the-top Japanese sci-fi aesthetic "casual") .. but the armor you wore would make your outfits light up. Basicly protective E-wire. With different colors representing the different elements. Yes, you were forced to wear a particular highlight color depending on the armor you used. But you got to wear whatever you wanted and the armor didn't change as you got more powerful sets. My favorite thing to do was actually turn the armor off when just hanging out in the lobby. It was a subtle thing that made me really stand out from everyone else.
8:35 it's simply glorious.
>five minutes to dig up a treasure; it's 20 rupies
can we talk about all the annoying fucking rock mining segments in this game? filling entire goddamn hallways with rocks and making me break them is not FUN
Babe wake up, the plague is gripeing
Stop .. meme is cringe
"Many people place more importance on shared excitement than discussion"
Seeing that big time with FF16 right now.
Say Gex
@@uhoh7545Gex
I mostly see people complaining about every aspect of it.
On the other hand, I see very little critique of ToTK.
@@juicejooos really? On my feeds the fans are so rabid that one of them asked if they could sue the guy who took a video of himself beating the 3rd boss with one hand.
@@Shadar22Journalists have been really unfair towards it in a way that is reminiscent of the IGN God Hand review.
That guy with the one hand for example admitted now that he did that on east mode and people took that video and people have been pretty disingenuous over it.
It would be nice if finding a lightroot with no known shrine just highlighted the shrine in red or something on the map
I feel like they should have a small light pillar appear if you havent beat it but found the Lightroot.
That’s what the beacons on your map are for
I agree with basically everything in this video with the exception of what you said regarding the relative uselessness of Ascend. My experience with it was pretty much the exact opposite of yours, where I found myself constantly shocked and impressed by how often I could use the ability to essentially break the game or creatively circumvent certain sections or problems. It was way more useful than I ever imagined it would be.
I'm glad sanity still exists.
🙏
Noticing flaws in something good isn't 'sanity.' It's common god damn sense. Cut this pretentious shit out. What makes Eli's video 'the sane one?' Because it just so happens to line up with YOUR experience with the game and makes you feel like some free thinker in a sea of sheep or something? Get your head out of your ass. He's giving his take; there's nothing profound about having an opinion on something.
For now.
Im sure all these people who like it are just deranged
I'm genuinely appreciative that Eli takes a similar approach to media that I do: "I love this thing, here are its flaws. Let's discuss how it could have been better."
Same here, and it makes me wish some folks at Nintendo had that philosophy. I'm enjoying TOTK because I enjoyed BOTW, but I'm constantly baffled by the things that didn't change and the problems that weren't fixed. It is a shockingly safe, samey sequel for the Zelda series -- one made by developers who didn't fix obvious minor issues because they were either too stubborn, too proud, too scared, or too clueless.
@@QuintessentialWalrus Use that brain of yours. Breath of the wild was the best selling zelda game in the franchise by a huge margin. Why wouldn't they attempt to go for the same success?
I'm so disappointed that "The Legend of Zelda: Nuts and Bolts" is the best they could come up with after six years. I just want something that actually feels like a Zelda game again.
I really like how someone on the dev team thought that player could have enough light motes fore more than one container and so animation would play only once, but not for inventory slots and armor upgrades.
Bless that person. If only you could skip that cutscene
More mini plague-casts hell yeah!
Would it kill them to at least let the master sword not break this time? Or at least not against gloom based enemies
Yeah the armor upgrade thing is really annoying. And the ferry literally molest you every time you want better armor. And since it takes so much supplies I ended up duping stuff just to upgrade
It’s annoying that they fixed the repeated upgrade system with the light orbs. If you have multiple, you get the longer cut scene once and then a message for all of them after. It still very slowly show you the heart or wheel increasing so a partial improvement.
On the durability i dont understand why they didn't add the blacksmith and his gimp from majoras mask. You already mine ore just add some iron to its loot table and bring it to a blacksmith. Side note my auto correction keeps trying to make blacksmith blackface and thats just amazing thank you technology
Yeah fr. I was hoping you would be able to forge the master sword again at the springs
I'm shocked you thought Ascend was useless. I thought the same at first, but the longer I played the game the more versatile I realized it was. In a game that's often about climbing and gliding, having a button to climb faster is amazingly powerful and I'm surprised it's not nerfed more than it is. You can climb Stone Talus bosses with it! It breaks just as many puzzles as Rewind does.
Oh it's not useless. You can just tell they were absurdly careful about it, which harmed a lot of the rest of the game's design. The ability itself is very useful. Assuming you want to waste the time to assemble what you need to exploit it, or find the exact spot that will enable it.
Yeah idk why you are not allowed to ascend through the ceiling of the depths except in specific spots. If I jerry rig my way up climbing a light root for 10 minutes I expect to not be punished by "sorry no you just can't go through that"
Tbh, I kept forgetting I even had the ability.
@TotalBlazing That seems like a super specific nitpick to get upset over. Who would waste time going all the way up there when you could just teleport to the surface and walk to where you wanted to go way easier?
@@EmberBlaze99 I mean there are shrines above the light roots and that raises questions about how you can ascend through paradoxical tardis-like bigger on the inside buildings. The other problem is if you can ascend through lightroots you could skip some shrine quests or discovery since you just teleport right to them as opposed to going through a cave. While I agree with someone else that it’s kind a nitpicky I can sympathize that I had the same thought at one point but I do get the idea of not allowing it.
Link Between Worlds had it right! They combined traditional and new elements and it worked! They even let you know what vicinity and how many MaiMais were in a certain area! 😊
a friend of mine rented every piece of equipment from Ravio, died, and then quit the game in disgust
I'm convinced some people just don't play these games correctly
Your armor gripes are done perfectly in Marvel's Spiderman, you unlock suits that have specific suit powers that come with them, but you can just equip suit powers individually while wearing any suit you prefer
I really should go back and finish that game. I got bogged down by all the collectables and challenges. Very similarly to BotW.
How it should be.
49:10 If you look up the old advertisement for the Atari 2600 version of Pitfall you'll see that was one of the fist acting gigs that Jack Black ever got.
It was sort of wild hearing him mention Pitfall. The only time I have heard or seen that game was when I was talking with my Dad about the games he played growing up and how the industry has changed and he was swearing up and down over a video of a Pitfall playthrough on UA-cam that it was the most hype mindblowing sh"t back in the day.
Otherwise not even the older millenial UA-camrs I watch mention it (though tbf my Dad is Gen X and it seems like Plague is somewhere between super late Gen X and Super Early Millenial).
The main reason I haven't updated my game past the day one patch is the fact that I can dupe materials and I find that it's helped tremendously to mitigate the tedium of upgrading armour and it makes me more likely to try recipes. Just a thought.
Same I hate resource management like botw and since I suffered through that once duping actually allows me to simply play the game in totk
The way just plain bypassing certain mechanics only improves the game is definitely a thought worth having. I don't think I'm ever touching either of these games again without an infinite durability mod.
my favorite way they made weapon durability even more annoying is having endless rock barriers inside caves that need you to go through 3 or 4 weapons to get to the other side, and the reward is, like, one of the 762 bubbulfrogs left after you've already collected all the bubbulfrog rewards in the first three days you play the game
The consumable nature of the game, weapon degradation speed, zonai consumable items to create vehicles that don't last long on purpose, the flying stone part that's on a timer to vanish or be consumed after a set number of seconds of flight, is the main issue i have with the game. the battery systems for the vehicles..etc.
i just want to enjoy the weapons and vehicles i find and make .
Feels a bit skinner box dunnit
Idk why but the Glider is ass but using a cart, platform or steering stick as your base and you can go on pretty much forever.
I’m fine with my gear breaking, and I’m even fine with not being able to use them when broken, but for the love of all that is holy leave the broken shit IN my inventory and let me repair or restore them. The fact I can lose a one of a kind elemental weapon means I refuse to use the thing and it wastes my fucking time and energy
@@malikoniousjoe Personally I hated BotW verison of it as you would be left with nothing GOOD to fight black or silver enemies without using cheese or hoarding.
I finally got to the point where Silver Bokolins are spawning in normally so I can kill them and fuse a actually decent weapon together, add in you can buy diamonds (and d u p e them incase) to make the Champion Weapons as a backup and gluing stuff to the Master Sword to make it do even more dmg makes me like it more.
Sure I still keep a fire and ice wand, those "Oh Shit" bows and shields but compared to my time in BotW, i was fucking at north akkala beach crying in despair as all my shit broke and i didnt want to farm crap to just play the game.
I just feel like you can find systems or things in other games that can be worst then this but people are already "got gud" so they tell you to buzz off.
@@Subject_Keter it's much heavier than the vehicle platforms with wheels
I replayed skyward sword, majoras mask and twilight princess recently, and one thing I really missed was finding hearts in jars and grass, and having to find bottles to get health, making it a limited quantity rather than being able to fully create something at will. I remember one scene in particular where I was in a dungeon in skyward sword and I was on one or two hearts, the stakes were low since at worst I'd just be taken back to the entrance of the room but that didn't stop it from being incredibly tense and having an amazing sense of relief when I eventually did find a couple of hearts to put me at a better place, I say this because I never felt that in breath of the wild or tears of the kingdom, that incredible experience has been lost, and I'd love it to be back, either in the form of bottles, limited cooking slots that can only be upgraded through certain things, or forcing the food to be eaten on some kind of hunger system, where you can only eat if your hunger meter is at a certain point, and eating more filling foods will fill your hunger meter as well, making healing ineffective if your hunger meter is full.
I'd also love a "make X amount" button, so trying to cook 30 batches of 5 apples won't take 15 minutes of pressing X, the game just doesn't respect the players time in that regard
I definitely benefitted from exploring casually. I fused cool rare shit to my weapons, and if I happened to be able to upgrade armor, I just do it whenever it crosses my mind. Having to actually grind or complete stuff in this game sounds like it really takes the fun out
The entire underground is kinda empty too. The Yiga camps give you schematics that you don't really need, most of which have 2 Yiga guarding them, and the lightroot don't even give you a reward aside from marking the map. Maybe a random duplicate boss, or a helmet that makes you lose your set bonuses if you actually use them.
At last, a Yuno enjoyer. But my biggest issue was the story writing in TotK, the Dragon's Tear quest line showing all the issues. You learn very important information in that questline, but are given no way to share that information. Then there is also the fact they present us with major events with no context around them. Spoilers below:
Our first look at Ganondorf is just an invasion. He is just invading Hyrule with moldugas. We are given no information if this was a surprise, if one of several invasions or how the King Rauru knew about the attack.
Another is the Zelda Clone. She literally comes out of nowhere. Sonia and Zelda seem to know it is a fake given they set up a trap to expose it. How did they know this? how did Ganondorf copy Zelda? I'd ask why, but the answer is he needs Zelda to cause problems in Present Hyrule. A simple scene of Zelda confronting Ganondorf or one of his guards would be a good way to set it all up.
I find there is so much context missing I question if Rauru and Sonia had kids. I mean, obviously they did given Zelda exists, but the issue remains that I questioned it. Like Mineru, she has a two scenes to just drop exposition. But Zelda is quite upset when she moves on to the afterlife, implying more than just these two conversations. But we aren't given that, just the "important" exposition.
Just like how the champions in botw felt very underbaked until the dlc came out and sort of fixed them. I feel like alot of the story is being held back for the eventual story dlc.
@@sup1602 Probably, or have to wait for Hyrule Warriors 3.
This video made me laugh. It’s hard to genuinely find that in a video these days.
Why didn't the opening cut sceen show Link's arm shattering as a result of trying to grab Zelda? That way we could have immediately seen a first hand (lol) example of how the Gloom eats away at everything, weapons and people alike. Were they afraid of showing Link losing a limb? Would that have raised the game's rating too much? I felt it was cowardly to not even be willing to show mild, magic induced gore.
Japan has a weird thing about missing limbs. I remember in every Dragon Ball Z game with Future Gohan, his model still has both arms, despite fighting like he only has one.
Probably. Japan has a strong stigma against disfigurement and body desecration. I think The Dark Souls games in Japan have ragdolling turned off for that reason.
"It's the darkest Zelda ever!" Yeah no.
Im guessing they wanted to keep the hand holding imagery. They do it at the beginning of the game, at the end of the tutorial, and at the end. Its a cool image to be cool.
@@Thirteen13551355Whenever anyone talks about how “Dark”tm a Nintendo property gets it always seems very, precious? Like you can’t just surface level imply the possibility of something serious and call that “Dark”. I’m not looking for edge mind you, but these people think the implication that your character can die in the game makes it super adult and heavy emotionally.
The best thing you can do for yourself is playing this game on an emulator/hacked Switch and apply the mod for skipping repeating cutscenes.
In 1999 a game came out named Drakan: Order of the Flame. The weapon durability system made you use your stronger weapons more strategically. It also periodically provided you with progressively stronger, unbreakable weapons. That gave you more strategic options and made you appreciative of those special items. Those weapons tied into the lore and gave then a special coolnes factor.
In 2000 a game came out named Nox. There you had your staves, fists, magic and the story weapon to reliably deal with barrels and opening hidden paths (and sometimes NPCs to see what happens). All your other gear had limited durability, which made you cherish your high value gear with special properties, and punished you for beig a bad gamer by taking damage or using your weapons improperly. But you could repair damaged gear at a vendor, at a price. Or buy new gear to replace it, or that dope spell book that makes you feel like a god. But choose wisely because the combat system ties into the durability system that ties into the economy system that ties into the roleplaying system.
In 2023 a game came out called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo couldn't figure out how to make a durability system engaging after all this time.
I believe Nintendo said something along the lines of if the Master Sword didn't break, then players wouldn't be tempted to try out other weapons...
1. That's not true
2. Even if it was, who cares? No one, absolutely no one who's played previous Zelda title games said "gee, I wish my weapons would break that's what this game needs"
Damn Nox is a blast from the past. Loved that game as a kid
6:35 ?? You can easily find the locations of underground shrines by mapping out lightroots in the depths, and then giving an offering to cherry blossom trees to reveal the entrance to all caves.
Thank you for posting this today plague, you made my graduation day even better!
Congratulations!
@@PlagueOfGripes Thank you, I hope you have a good rest of your day!
CONGRATS!!
Playing new zelda is like scrolling short form video forever. Its endlessly massive but when you realise youve wasyed your time its super hollow
Before we really heard anything about TotK, one idea I hoped they'd use was repurposed Guardians: that instead of them all fucking off, we'd find the AI part mostly taken out and them modified so the Hylian forces could use their firepower as _manned_ tanks and turrets, and we'd have the Big Damn Heroes moment of NPCs all over the kingdom riding as an absolute _swarm_ of fighters, like in that tapestry, with them doing the anime explosion barrage thing to whittle down Ganon's transformation while Link's still putting on the main hurt.
A thought occured to me near the end of the video, relating to the whole "let players break the game" mentality that the devs took with TotK. I had this thought where in theory it wouldn't be that hard to limit players just a little bit, not dissimilar to what elden ring does. Have a game where the player is free to go wherever they want 90% of the time, but with a few areas that are locked behind progression for them to place harder challenges (with that you could have some more advanced iterations of shrines or korok puzzles or bosses or whatever, with more substantial rewards to suit their increased difficulty). If they knew what skills they player would need to reach those areas, they could then design around that to make for a more tight gameplay experience.
But the problem that occured to me is that this type of game is so open, doing something like this in advance sounds nearly impossible. There's so many ways to approach the game that it's impossible for the devs to assume anything of the player or anticipate how they'll ultimately end up playing the game. And that openness means that often, the moment they try to actually limit the player in some way, take away our ability to break the game, we'll simply find a way around because we have so many options available to them.
Glitches are probably what most people think of when it comes to this, but I think the best example of this is actually the hoverbike. The devs explicitly tried to nerf flying machines preemptively, as wings and balloons are the only zonai parts with a short enough time limit to affect normal gameplay. They wanted to limit players so that we couldn't just use wings or balloons to fly indefinitely, but this limitation ultimately ended up with everyone using the same hoverbike design to fly around. Once you remove the other options you're just left with that as the most optimal thing left, and the game was ultimately made worse because of it (once you have even a decent amount of battery there's no practical use for wings or balloons). For them to properly design around players and add in limits that enhance the game rather than hurt it, they'd have to know how players end up playing the game. And only now am I really thinking about just how much of an impossible task it is to do that in a game as open as tears of the kingdom, especially before the game actually launches
From someone who likes having a big health bar and gripes that every Zelda game from Ocarina of Time onward that 99% of enemies do I heart at most.... I have to say while I am glad things actually do damage now, I think we don't need 30 heart containers, let alone 40. Everything outside of a basic goomba enemy outright one-hit kills you. Once you upgrade with the fairy everything goes back down to nothing. Silver and Gold enemies are just damage sponges with lots of attack power, i.e. glorified pallet swaps. In Link to the Past there are enemies that can deal 2 hearts right after you leave the sanctuary and enemies in the Dark world did 2-3 hearts right out of the gate, and you didn't get the Blue Mail until the last half the Dark World. I want a reason to have lots of health but I don't want to take 9 hearts from a mid level enemy.
Thanks for this video Mr Gripes. Seems like all the major problems I had with BotW are amplified here, and the parts I actually liked are even less pronounced. This knowledge saves me hours of my time of not playing this game that I can now waste otherwise.
For a game that HEAVILY relied on Ganondorf for its marketing, we only see him like 3 times, not counting flashbacks, and rehydrated Ganondorf only shows up in person at the very end for a (admittedly cool) bossfight. Was rather disappointed by his lack of actual presence. While i do like Matt Mercer, i always imagined Ganondorf would have had a much deeper voice, Matt's voice just doesn't have the weight it needs to intimidate me.
Also why is Ganondorf Japanese, they really just never explain the katana or any of his other, CLEARLY Japanese weapons and clothes. It clashes A LOT with the Gerudo's aesthetic...
**Spoilers, for an almost entirely inconsequential character, but still spoilers, I suppose**
Also Momm- i mean Sonia should have survived, maybe crippled. cause unless there's a little hybrid-freak baby lying around somewhere, there shouldn't be a Royal bloodline to pass down to Zelda.
Funnily enough like 80% of the things you said you don’t like are stuff I really enjoyed lol
As someone who has sunk 300+ hours into Tears of the Kingdom, I think I'd have to say that one of my biggest problem with the structure of the game is how it lacks a feeling of fun player progression.
Let me see if I can explain this right.
Know how you need to switch clothes to deal the weather temperatures.
It's annoying and personally I could have done without it, but seeing as we have it, they COULD have opted to make it something that makes you feel weak at the beginning, but lets say every time you upgrade your health/stamina, you subtly build up a +3% immunity/resistance.
It'll probably be a while before you even start to realize but then at some point it hits you... You've gotten stronger and you no longer have to deal with Link's earlier shortcomings.
Same thing with slippery surfaces (Really,I wish they ha just complete removed rain in this game) you could grow more proficient at climbing.
A huge problem with TotK is how the game despite it's massive length seem to insist on wasting your time with tedious stuff like switching clothes, grinding resources and such.
Make the Master Sword's base attack get a +5-10 boost for every sages you've recruited.
I also feel that abilities should definitely have been tied to all of these dumb outfits that you have to switch around. Like you said, there is very little reason to not just go with the Fierce Diety or Barbarian armor at all time.
I do find it annoying how the game will also force you to waste your head slot if you want to use the Korok Mask which cannot be upgraded and should again just have been an ability you unlock and can toggle on and off.
Just give us some feeling of growth that'll make traversing the map more fun and fast-paced when you're at a point where you've already seen most of it anyway without having to resort to the hoverbike.
And bring back Revali's Gale while they're at it.
I also just hate the durability system with a passion. I hated it in BotW as well as very little seem to have been done to address it.
Oh, I can fuse things to prolong its durability a little... Well, that just means that I now will be wasting both a good weapon AND a good resource when it breaks.
If I hadn't learned early on about the Octorok repair system, I would have been even more miserable with my time. And still, having to take a break every 1-2 and spend 10-20 minutes on going to Death Mountain to do slow repairs is not really my idea of fun.
But it beats me never actually wanting to use any of my worthwhile weapons cause I don't want to every break them and just let them sit in my inventory forever.
I was watching a friend of mine playing the game on an emulator where he had turned off the whole durability system, and my goodness, he was having SO much more fun with the combat than I was.
I get that some people actually like the durability system but to me it was just a constant pain in the arse and made me actively avoid combat cause I didn't want to wear down my weapons on useless encounters.
Majora's Mask was one of my favorites in the Depths cause it let me just walk right into enemy territory and farm Zoneite without having them attack me. (Though it would still force me to waste a head space)
And while we are on the combat anyway, the game felt complete and utterly unbalanced with how much damage enemies were able to deal to you, especially in the early game. 1-Hit kills were so common even from bottom of the barrel enemies.
I was having more trouble with even basic enemies than I had with higher tier enemies from a regular Zelda game.
Not only that but I also just found it so bloody difficult to read some of the enemies and some of those flurry dodges felt almost random in when they would trigger.
In the end, I have to admit that while I enjoyed the exploration in the game I utterly loathed and often hated my time with the combat and anything related to it.
Another thing found baffling is how the game really tries to sell the whole fun factor of creating and constructing things, yet will only give you a misely 8 slots to favorite stuff... I feel like this should have been closer to 50 at least. Hell, just get rid on the majority of the Zonai and Yiga blueprints. I'd happily sacrifice those to make room for more of my own stuff so I could experiment more.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game but holy crap the game has a lot of problems that could SO easily have been fixed if Nintendo weren't so damn proud and unwilling to admit to mistakes or show any willingness to change unpopular mechanics or at least give options.
Like a survival mode where weapons permanently break as well as a classic mode where you can either repair a broken weapon or even a casual mode where they just run out of energy like the Master Sword that'll then recharge. Give us options
This game has so much wasted potential and it's killing me why Nintendo would purposely prevent this rough gem from reaching it's full potential.
Cause unlike the more traditional Zelda games, even tho I've overall had a good time, I just can't see myself every wishing to go back and play it ever again as 95% of the game is just it being a timesink.
I cannot stress enough how having infinite durability and stamina in an emulated copy makes the game SOOOO much better. I personally like to keep durability at 10x instead of fully infinite but even that is soooooo much better. I found myself actually having fun when it was just misery in the base game. So many hidden secrets and areas I never touched on my switch playthrough because I honestly couldn't be bothered to make 10 stamina potions to climb a ridiculous cliff
@@jase276 the thing is that this whole tedious duribility issue was just Nintendo insisting on you having "fun" THEIR way.
Didn't like it in BotW? Well, you are wrong, we won't change it.
Same in how they messed up Paper Mario with Sticker Star yet refused to listen to any criticism and just chose to do the same unpopular thing again in Color Splash.
I'm sure some people actually like the duribility and micromanaging systems of TotK but I still feel like the vast majority would rather be without it or at the very least not be so extreme as it is when even the best weapons +best materials will only last you 20-30 hits.
Reminds me of that sword upgrade you could get in Majora's Mask you could get but would break after 100 hits.
Nobody really wanted to bother but when you could do the upgrade that made it permanent, that was something you wanted.
They could also have made it so the higher your stamina/hearts, the more proficient you would be with weapons and get more duribility out of them.
That would actually give you some long term goal and satisfaction of feeling yourself grow from weak in the early game to actually have more fun the more you play.
Its just so dumb that pirates are literally the ones getting the better experience here due to Nintendo's hubris and unwillingness to make some small changes for the people who'd prefer to enjoy the game without so much BS -_-
Sages following you: hope you're good 👍 we're going the exactly opposite side.
Grantéson: 🏃🏼🏃🏼🤸🏼🏃🏼🏃🏼🏃🏼
*Count Dooku voice* I've been looking forward to this.
But seriously I was waiting for this since this game was announced especially after your... Qualms with the inventory system in the last game so exciting. Can't wait Plague.
"Your a Tree my man" I love your dry humor.
Nice to see your having fun. I remember your saying, you dont get angry if your not invested in something.
Please make more videos where you gripe. They’re always good!
Originally in botw, I didn’t actually complete the whole game because of the control scheme. I’m a partial left hand amputee and the frustration of not being able to the cool parry or blocking while moving, among other things, really deterred me from the game. Especially for thunder blight, it was just very difficult. But with the accessibility control scheme added to switch now, I feel like the game has kinda been ruined for me a little bit.
Always appreciate hearing a more measured opinion on things. I played like, 200 some hours of the game (mostly because I had a lot of time to kill lately), but when a friend asked me "is this not a 10/10 for you?" my instinctual answer was "god no," haha. I did definitely enjoy it a lot, but I'm not going to pretend like the game was anything more than Distractions: The Game, with such an emphasis on breaking things, that once I understood the mechanics going on, nothing felt rewarding or challenging, despite me using maybe like 5% of my total resources throughout the game.
I did definitely enjoy the game a lot more than Breath of the Wild, but I also wasn't super crazy about Breath to begin with. The most fun I had in Breath was when I immediately (after leaving the tutorial plateau) went to Hyrule Castle and tried to fight Ganon. Sneaking through the dangerous zone with nothing to my name, creatively and stealthily dealing with enemies so that I can get their equipment, which helped me deal with more enemies, gave a very fun and rewarding sense of progression. Then I got to the final boss room, slowly figured out all the bosses it made me fight, until I got to Thunderblight Ganon and got one-shot by super fast attacks like a dozen times. Then I stopped playing the game for literally years before I eventually went back and beat it normally (where I found the game annoying, had it slowly grow on me, and then finished with 95 hours, having been very ready to be done with it).
I did the same thing in Tears of the Kingdom, using the skytower plus a little stamina food to glide to Hyrule Castle, started at the final boss room from Breath, and was excited at the prospect of this time slowly working my way down, except..... I was pretty disappointed, as there's pretty much nothing of note in Hyrule Castle at that point. The most fun I had there was fusing a bookcase to my sword and beating enemies over the head with it.
I did figure that this meant the final boss was probably in the tunnels below the castle, went there, got to the final boss room, grinded my face into it until I got to the third boss (Mucktorok to be specific) until I decided the whole endeavor was more tedious than it was worth. Which, let me tell you, digging through tunnels, especially without any of the companions, is grueling and tedious, and all the tunnels on the way to the boss room are very samey, so I'd be lying if I said I got much of any enjoyment out of it (although finding the glyphs on the wall Zelda looks at during the intro was a fun moment of "oh hey, I'm here again... oh shit, that means Ganon's just downstairs").
I did pretty immediately go on to do the rest of the game normally, though... more or less. Which, man, this game actually doesn't do well with you doing things out of order. I found two dungeons before interacting at all with the NPCs attached to them, which was fun, but you can't really do much in them, as the main mechanic of the dungeons that lead to the boss all just give you a big error message if you don't have the NPC with you. There's also the fact that there were a LOT of big, game-spanning quests that I just, didn't interact with because I went off the beaten path, only to find them 40+ hours in and realize I could've progressed through the majority of them had I simply gone to Kakariko and the Rito village first (specifically, the floating star islands, the stables, and to an extent, even the geoglyphs).
All said though, my biggest issue was definitely how unrewarding the treasures of this game are. I genuinely felt more satisfaction when weapons broke than when I found them, as knowing that I had a free inventory slot to mess with felt much more meaningful than picking up some random weapon to fuse another random silver enemy part to. The armor was a nice reward, at least until I realized it was 90% amiibo costumes from the first game, which were kinda cool, but I can only pick up so many different versions of the same green tunic + hat + boots before it loses meaning.
I definitely went into the game thinking I'd get all the armor and upgrade them to at least level two to see their set bonuses, but that definitely grew way too tedious way too fast, which I was willing to put up with for a while, until I realized every set bonus was... really not that interesting. The Glider one (no fall damage) was pretty funny, but generally useless with how easy to avoid fall damage is, the frog suit was useful but slipping really shouldn't even be a mechanic in the game (except maybe in areas where it's specifically meant to be slippery all the time, like areas where it's ALWAYS raining, icy caves, etc.), the stuff that made you immune to status effects was kinda useful but not particularly interesting, especially in a world where I can just eat something to deal with the status/weather if I really need to, then there were a couple that made you faster at night, which was, alright I guess, and then everything else was just some variation of attack up.
So yeah. There isn't really much worth finding, especially after a certain point. Oh yeah, there were also the fancy weapons from previous games, except all of them do nothing and even lose their unique looks the instant you fuse something to them. So, yeah, that's why I almost forgot they were even in the game.
Also, just want to reiterate your point on how bad the spirit partners you have following you around are implemented. I was looking forward to having a small army of shitlords killing stuff and going crazy with their powers, but by the time I got to that point, I rarely used their powers because of how much of a pain they are to use on purpose (they literally could've just made it, hold a shoulder button + a D-pad direction, or something along the lines of what you said). I did appreciate that they actually did damage and you could upgrade them, although the difference in the damage they do wasn't super noticeable (making yet another treasure feel very underwhelming).
So, yeah, much like yourself, this is just a lot of words to say: I enjoyed the game, but man did it really drop the ball in some areas.
Always a treat when you upload a gripe. To this day your dragonball gripes are some of my favorite videos.
I just wanna add to the armor upgrade complaint by saying I hate how they charge you Rupees for it now.
Unless you mentioned that and I missed it; watchin’ this at work.
I remember thinking at one point "oh, but they charged rupees before to open the petals". But then thought...wait, it only cost 1100 to get the first 2 open. But to upgrade even one set to level 2, it costs 180 rupees. Now, do that for the 30(!!!!) armor sets and that's 5 times as many. Now, you won't do all of them, but when 1/4 of the sets costs more than before, now we have a problem.
And let's not ignore how lv3 costs 200 a pop...
Great insight and explanation dude. This iteration I was hoping for tighter design, but the pendulum sung the other way to what we have now. We'll see about next game.
as much as I'm enjoying TotK so far (to be fair, I'm not binging it like I thought I would be doing five years ago when it first got revealed), I really really hope they decide to go a different route with the next game. I do enjoy open-world Zelda and the world of BotW and TotK, but I'm not sure it's actually sustainable, for many of the reasons mentioned in the video. I keep finding myself thinking "Well, I hope they don't keep trying to do this *forever*..." Part of what makes Zelda so special to me is the fact that all of its games have very distinct identities (art direction, world design, etc) from each other, despite sharing recurring facets of lore and gameplay, and I'd hate to see that come to an end.
Another problem, from my perspective as someone with Korok Insanity, is the constant flood of random encounters you get, particularly when traveling at night. I have, so many times, just been picking up a rock, or am building a vehicle for the backpack idiots, or looking around for wherever the bastards are hidden, when 2 stalmoblins, a Yiga Bowfucker, a few keese and/or a wolf pack will want to have a go.
And I wouldn't mind but they're not even threats! They just pop in, get one shot, and you try to move on. But you have to take care of them if you're trying to do anything because getting hit, even for the quarter-heart they're doing each hit, cancels every action. And because they're all running on separate timers, they might overlap or come in sequence and I just want to put a fucking rock into a circle of rocks.
Anyway that said game's a perfect 12/10 and anyone who would rate it less deserves to be cast into Mt Doom for being paid by Sony to disagree with me.
Honestly I find it funny seeing a complaint about random encounters in a game that isn't a turn-based rpg for once.
They even added a whole new type of small nuisance enemy with the mini-froxes...
The first few Yiga encounters were unexpected and fun. But I did get sick of fighting _Team Rocket,_ especially in the Depths.
Pro tip the next time you're ambushed: skeletons can be instantly defeated by dazzlefruit. I don't know why the game never mentions this but it makes them 100% more tolerable.
@@pious83I thought they only ambushed on the surface?
@@Isuream6331 No, they can be “disguised” as Zonai Survey Team members in the depths too.
I really hope we get a side series that's based on the Ocarina-ish Zelda games. Because if this is gonna be the "blueprint" for the main series I'm gonna struggle to stay on the Zelda train. Totk was what Botw should've been to start with in my eyes, but we did wait 6 years for a game that largely left alot of issues the first game had in tact. I also don't see how having the ability to glitch or bypass game design is somehow inherently better than the traditional Zelda games were to the point where this is gonna be the future of the series. I just wish they gave us traditional dungeons in TOTK to at least give fans of that style something. The dungeons here were fine, but I'm gonna forget about them in a few months, whereas, the Spirit Temple, and Ancient Cistern are forever burned into my brain and I only played the latter once.
I'm with you on this. Unfortunately big, open world games are what sell these days. For some reason the majority of people would rather have a massive, visually impressive, grind of repetitive uninspired content, than a concise 40-50 hour experience of unique, and memorable content. They would rather keep people playing for longer, than beat the game once and stop playing.
I agree. I'm open (no pun intended) to free roaming maps and new things to keep a franchise relevant and fresh but that shouldn't mean getting rid of what made the franchise great to begin with. It's like the devs were trying so hard to not put anything in previous Zelda titles into BotW or TotK. No mention of the triforce, no companion character (which I feel Rauru would have been nice to have but I digress), little to no linearity story wise or dungeon design wise, no Epona (if you didn't get the chance to snag an amiibo well sucks to be you because they're sold out), weapons that don't break. Honestly TotK felt like a DLC rather than an actual sequel and I feel as though $70 wasn't worth my experience with the game. If this is how Zelda is going to be in the future then count me out
I wish that the champion weapons had infinite durability. The Rito bow, the Gerudo sword and shield, the Zora spear, and the Goron two hander. One of each type that wouldn't break as a reward for doing dungeons.
At the very least, making it less of a pain in the ass to remake the Champion weapons after they break would encourage people to actually use them instead of putting them in Link's house for the entire game. I use the classic weapons all the time because you can just buy new ones for a pitiful amount of Poes in the Depths. An unbreakable Master Sword would've been nice too, although I understand why they didn't do that.
@@QuintessentialWalrusnah, fffuck that. 10,000 years + of hoarding sacred power, and it amounts to breaking in about 15 hits. Fuck that shit.
My main gripe is about the total erasure of Sheika tech. I get that they might deem it too dangerous to keep the guardians around just incase the same happens, but absolutely all of it has been whipped off the planet somehow. The sheika slate doesn't exist anymore even though a tool that can create ice, lift large metal objects and create infinite bombs would be very useful in the setting. You get the Purah Pad which is just a Sheika Slate with less features. Also remember those monks who meditated for over 100 years to give you a power up? Yea, screw them, all those years get thrown away instantly in tears of the kingdom. It's that lamb in the Simpsons that they shove out of the way to look at the new hotness, Zonai.
To be fair all those monks essentially turn to dust and evaporate after giving you there orbs, so it isn't like they are just sitting around waiting for Link by the time of totk.
Also the shrines are essentially empty after link finishes them so there really isn't a point to them anymore.
On one hand: Maz Kosha's battle music was goddamned fire.
On the other fap: Mineru.
I recently started replaying BotW and found out Robbie spent pretty much his entire life researching and reverse engineering the ancient tech. Its the reason he is able to sell you all that ancient armour and weapons. For all that to just be gone in TotK is insane to me. Literally his life's work just gone.
My biggest problem with the game is that it feels like a DLC. Yes, the depth, ultrahand, etc.
But so little is done to actually make this world feel different from BOTW. There are still a lot of things to discover but honestly, I just wish I did not play BOTW, so I could get the full discovery with this one.
As much stuff as I really like about totk. Nintendo. Get yourself some actual fucking writers. I dont know why they dont but I do know that a lot of fans seem to think professional writers make word mountains. No. Effective brevity is a skill and nintendo doesn't have it in the main story of totk. Do we really need two cinematics of ganon summoning minions and attacking? Four cinematics of the exact same revelation instead of something interesting and specific to the people you're helping? Does every character need to grate out their exact intentions dry of any character whatsoever in those dragon tear cinematics? The side quest cast has some damn character so why dont all of these poorly directed MAIN CHARACTERS have some? Its not like the story is made of bad ideas (other than why 6 good rocks < 1 bad rock). Its all in the execution.
This ironically shows how in their attempt to create as much freedom as possible, they severely limit the story and characters. They can’t have a meaningful story or characterization because it may get in the way of you going and doing whatever you want at any time. So to try and have some semblance of a story they have a bunch of disjointed or repetitive c-tier anime cutscenes sprinkled around to try and remind the player that they supposedly aren’t playing Zelda:Nuts and Bolts.
Nintendo fell short of even that. Open world has massive weaknesses but its more that nintendo ignores or avoids leaning into those weaknesses that fucks them over. Elden ring shows what a strong step in finally advancing outside the same sandbox can accomplish and totk seized too few opportunities. Personally I blame hand holding. Making a whole world level scaled and every side objective the same but slightly not is the first thing Elden ring tossed out and by god it worked. The real irony is that the freedom doesn't matter. Why have so much variety of build and tools when you're fighting starter enemies all game? Freedom means something in a game that's more exploitable or rewarding for knowing it.
@@Unf0rget Personally I’m not a huge from-soft fan and the games bore me a bit. I am a bigger fan of good stories and characters and don’t mind some handholding structurally if it means I get those. The problem that I think we can both agree on is that not only is BotW’s and TotK’s structure poorly thought out, but the story and characters it delivers are disappointing at best and barely even worthy of the name at worst.
Yeah, handholding is just another thing that can be taken too far. Botw/Totk go to an extreme of not adding anything really new beyond the initial monsters. No real mid or late game stuff aside from those dragons which are designed to be obvious and avoidable.
My main theory on the gameplay failings of new zelda ties into that. A reluctance to put the players at any disadvantage that would necessitate them abandoning a direction. Older zelda mechanics fulfilled pacing purposes that new zelda does not, yet elden ring does through being willing for players to encounter adversity beyond their means.
And story wise? Its just too much to get into specifics. Nintendo really could have done much better without a large shift in word count or run time. They made awful use of what they put in.