It's funny that you mentioned the specific blue flame shrine. I had a very similar initial experience to it, entering without any arrows, but I was stubborn. I resolved to solve the shrine with only the torch I was provided. With some tricky timing, throwing the torch, and using stasis throughout the shrine, I was able to solve it. That still is my favorite experience from my entire playthrough of the game.
weirdly, BotW and TotK both shine when you don't have anything to your name. As you progress through the game, everything gets smoother because of your buildup of resources-as KingK eloquently put it, keys to locks meant to be picked-but also losing sort of some uniqueness. Everyone loves Eventide Island stripping you back to being vulnerable, but pretty much every puzzle in the game can feature an interesting set of solutions if you (admittedly) force yourself to take the dumbest path possible
@@nicocchiExactly why weapon durability is a necessary evil. If, in this example, arrows were an infinite resource once acquired, this shrine would have been completely uneventful to OP.
There was this one puzzle where you had to carry a block of ice up a path with flame throwers and flame walls in the way which would melt the ice and you would get through by using giant boxes as cover but the very last wall of fire I could not figure out how to get past. Hate using guides but I looked up a video and the guy just throws the ice block through the fire and that "solved" the puzzle. Now realistically, yeah that makes sense a block of ice passing through fire for half a second wouldn't melt but after playing every Zelda game prior I assumed the ice would instantly melt in video game fashion because the goal was to find a way around it. Hard to explain but to basically to just brute force a puzzle felt very not Zelda. I thought the goal was "you have this thing, it can't touch this stuff and you have to get it there, figure it out." Felt like a super lazy puzzle. I miss the old Zeldas.
even when i don’t agree with things in your videos, they’re always phrased very well. i like that particularly in more recent ones, you’re more focused on expressing your point of view than being “right.” that’s the kind of approach i prefer. it helps to see where someone is coming from and why they feel the way they do. it’s like starting a conversation instead of trying to say everything yourself
This. This right here. I couldn't have disagreed more with his original stance on BOTW. I absolutely loved every second of that game, and I am loving every second of TOTK. But the fact that he stated it as," This is how I feel about it, this is what I thought about it," not," This is how it is," sold me. Alright, not everyone is going to have liked BOTW. That is just fine.
Same. I honestly don't have much overlap as far as game tastes or whatever, but the presentation here is pretty well good enough for me to watch whenever something drops.
This video makes me rethink the problem I had with Super Mario Bros. Wonder. I thought the new artstyle feels out of place and not Mario, the wonder flower and wonder seed mechanic doesn’t contribute to the gameplay and definitely broke the spirit of 2D Mario. I expect it to polish 2D Mario to the modern era on par with games like DKC: Tropical Freeze but what we got is dramatically different
Agreed. Wonderful presentation on these vids. It made me watch them even though I found the old ones to be very negative. But the presentation is just top-notch.@@davemccombs
something i think could’ve improved Breath of The Wild is more dungeons, but instead of actual game-like dungeons, i mean more things like the forgotten temple, a place you go to and explore because of your interest in the location rather than because you were lead towards it
Totally. Since they seemingly wanted the game to feel more organic than the previous entries, it's pretty baffling they went with the most inorganic version of dungeons imaginable. They legit feel like Aperture Science made them. Tell me you can't imagine a Shrine starting with Cave Johnson on the intercom: "Welcome, gentlemen, to Aperture Quest. Adventurers, heroes, elf boys in green tunics: you're here because the incarnation of evil itself once again looms over Hyrule. So, who's ready to earn some Spirit Orbs?"
YES!!!! The Forgotten Temple was one of the biggest disappointments of the game because there it was to discover, but it was just one or two really big rooms with Guardians in it. Finding that place was like burning the bush that covers the entrance to level 8 in the first game, except there was no dungeon there. That was a huge missed opportunity.
Weird thing is this feels like the most shinto-buddhist zelda game. From the very atmosphere to the design of the game. It felt very sublime in the sense that alot more dramatic and cinematic moments were more like passing scenes.
That's a big part of why this game feels to me like such a perfect follow up to Skyward Sword in a thematic sense. I'm not even that huge a fan of Skyward Sword, but the spiritual aspects of that game have always stuck with me in a profound way.
i do feel like it's not a bad idea to find a balance between new and old. after ocarina of time, we still got 2d zeldas on the handhelds, despite getting demoted to secondary releases. i don't know if that workload is nearly as comparable, but i could see the classic 3d zelda style getting a similar demotion, with nintendo releasing smaller-scale titles in between the big mainline releases. i wouldn't expect them to be nearly as big as something like twilight princess, maybe closer to the scale of majora's mask.
i've said this before, but i honestly don't think botw is gonna last, least not as the entire future of the franchise. not because of any fundamental flaws that means it can't, no; simply because that's not what nintendo does and you've pointed it out yourself. even after oot blew everyone away and was a clear contender for the direction of the series going forward, nintendo never stopped making games in the style of a link to the past. hell, even well after a link to the past was by and large relegated to the archives of the series, they still made a _direct successor_ to it out of nowhere. mario's success was carried by games in the style of 64 for a long while, and then suddenly we got a new 2d platformer playing off the older games and suddenly that kept getting sequel after sequel, and then they made a game that tried to strike a middle ground by being 3d but maintaining the level design and progression of the 2d games and even _that_ got a sequel. kirby's branches are a lot more subtle and kinda hard to really comb through in a way that's meaningful for people who don't already know about 'em, but they've nonetheless halted and regrown and interwoven in the exact same ways if nintendo wants to reinvent how their franchises go, they'll do it. if they look back and have new ideas for how they used to do things, they'll do it. botw in and of itself is evidence of that, as despite what people say about it, it _is_ a return to form of the very beginning of the franchise - it just takes a different direction with the structure, where instead of the world being a giant puzzle that you have to solve and streamlining it by cutting down on the openness and thus the potential to get stuck just trying to find the next step, the puzzle is cut down to an almost abstract degree so that it never interrupts nor looms over the sense of wonder and mystery drawn from exploring the fantastic world of hyrule. it's nintendo going back to the dna of the franchise, and seeing what happens when it's given a chance to evolve anew and it clearly works. even if it's not universally loved, botw is clearly a successful branch of zelda. so many people adore it and wanted more and nintendo looked at what they've done and saw that there was still a lot more they could do with it. and thus, we got a direct sequel, built with all the experience and insight drawn from the creation of the first. and now ... i mean, there could be a third botw, i guess. it's kinda an open-ended design formula and one that doesn't really have to worry about feature creep all that much. but, like, does the team really have much more to add at this point? they've done their experiment and it worked and saw the chance to refine it further and it also worked, so i can't imagine there's much fuel for another game in the style. if anything, i'd imagine the team is absolutely _itching_ to take everything they've learned from making both games and see how they can apply it to the stuff botw's design didn't really allow for. i don't know how much the next zelda game will directly resemble the typical 2d or 3d zeldas we've grown to expect, but i fully imagine we won't see a full-on botw 3 for quite a long while
@@hi-i-am-atangreat perspective. You nailed it with your OoT point: Nintendo don’t stick to a style for long. Judging by some people’s comments, you’d think the entirety of the franchise will be BotW sequels and only those. No way. I don’t buy it. It’s just another (awesome) flavor of Zelda. It doesn’t mean you throw the other flavors away.
As a Zelda fan who grew up in the early 00s, I think this is what irks me about the franchise right now. BOTW by itself isnt a problem- it's a great game and I liked it enough to put over 100 hours into it. The issue is that pretty much all Zelda has been since 2015- the better part of a decade is solely BOTW, TOTK, and a handful of remasters. I'm used to there being more kinds of Zeldas, a constant flow of games in various styles, and now the only thing going on with the franchise is just this one radical departure. I don't mind the series changing...I wouldnt be a fan if the series didn't change from what it was at its root, but the era I'm from had something for everyone.
@@sgtdrfunk i think the main thing that's going on is just something you can eke out from the exact details of the recent releases. sure, on the surface, it's been nothing but botw and remasters, and tri force heroes, but two of those remasters are substantially more involved than they first sound. majora's mask 3d had a _lot_ more going on with it than either twilight princess or skyward sword hd, and the link's awakening remake is practically its own 2d zelda release with how much effort was put into it. meanwhile, it kinda goes without saying that both botw games were _major_ undertakings, and as such siphoned a lot of the major talent for a substantial amount of time i mean obviously i can't claim to have any real certainty towards what's coming next, because i'm not even convinced if nintendo has that figured out yet. i just don't see anything substantial enough to see as the start of a trend, esp. since, when you get down to it? it's honestly been a p. solid few years of zelda for peeps who haven't already played all that games. remasters aren't the most exciting things, but it's hard to deny that fresh eyes have had quite the variety to acquaint themselves with zelda. and tri force heroes
I feel like Elden Ring proved that you can do Open World with big linear dungeons and so I disagree to give up on bringing that element back to the zelda franchise.
Those are just combat rushes, there are very few puzzles in them. And the major boss areas are still quite open and exploitable so I really don’t know what you are talking about. And from a game design standpoint, having a freedom obsessed world containing classic linear dungeons is extremely disruptive, it creates a dissonance within the design that didn’t need to be there.
It also proved you can do fantasy open world without your weapons exploding into fine powder after a few swings. In fact, ER removed durability entirely. And I've experimented with all sorts of weapons types, incantations, spells and craftable items, so it's not like destroying my weapons did anything special here.
Zelda is about 3 things in my view ; -wonder/whimsy - exploration - environmental puzzles Each game does these things to varying degrees but they all have these in common. I look forward to them continuing to try to reinvent the experience.
@@Cuddlesworth220 Agree, it just feels like with BoTW... they "reinvented the wheel" but made it a square, fundamentally making it so its original usefulness is gone in the name of "innovation".
@Labyrinth1010 how tho? twilight princess and ocarina of time are so depressing and somber a lot of the time. they have their funny moments but they're very minimal and that's a good thing. wind waker is probably the one you're thinking about where the style of that game makes it to unique
I think we could see dungeon items return and it wouldn't conflict with this new format. And there are 2 ways of doing this, one of which is already exemplified in totk 1. New areas aren't locked behind items, but rather items provide an alternate, easier or functionally different path to. Totk has the zora armor which allows you to climb waterfalls. In botw this was an opportunistic shortcut to climbing, but in totk these waterfalls are found on their own without a cliff behind them. It would be possible to go up to anywhere these waterfalls are but it would be costly in zonai devices and charges. The zora armor now provides a faster, costless way to get somewhere you would probably avoid going otherwise. Tulin's gust also fits this to a degree 2. Items could unlock areas you would have no idea even existed before obtaining the item. Think the dominion rod statues in TP's overworld. Most of these look like simple set dressing. It isn't until after you move statues in the temple of time that youre tipped off to try it on these. Totk also plays with this idea though not through items but rather information. One can do the spirit temple first but only through progressing the story will you even know it exists.
small correction, i discoverd the spirit temple in totk while i was still doing the four regions, i got excited and wanted to start it but you cannot in fact do it early, you can just discover it
I definitely appreciate your point of view on this. Interestingly, I think my own experience of the game has followed a nearly opposite path to your own. When I first played the game, it felt to me like the best Zelda title I had ever experienced. I soaked in every view, reveled in the self-directed discovery, and fell in love with the environment and how much creativity I was allowed to explore it. As time has gone on though, I have felt the least desire to replay it out of any of the games prior. And I think it is actually NOT because of all the bells and whistles of the previous games. Rather, it was more WHY the previous games were meaningful to me as a child. I did not grow up in a particularly emotionally safe environment, as I'm sure many can relate to. My own experience of reality felt like something I had to bottle up inside so as not to shake the reality of my family. I spent hundreds of hours maladaptively daydreaming, imagining that I would get whisked away to Hyrule and get to experience being Link for myself. And I definitely could not have articulated why at the time. Was it the dungeons? No, when looked at objectively the dungeons of twilight princess and ocarina of time would be painful, frustrating, and highly dangerous experiences if a real person had to go through them. (In fact, although I missed the larger dungeon experience in BotW, the dungeons were strangely sometimes my least favorite part of classic Zelda games). Was it the spectacle of story? Maybe to some extent, and I may have said that was it at the time, but on further reflection I can't help but doubt that was what I was truly after. No, I suspect it was because I was crushingly lonely. I'll take Twilight Princess in particular, as it probably stands out as the game that had the largest emotional impact on me. In TP, there is always someone with you, through every arduous and terrifying experience, who could (theoretically) verify everything you experienced. And even besides Midna herself, there are many characters in the game who truly see Link, and even through their gratitude seem to hold some space for the tragedy of how much Link has to sacrifice in his own life to fight for change. Rusl, Renaldo, The Hero's Shade, and Telma and her cat come to mind. There were children who looked up to you, and who I genuinely came to care about, such that when they were endangered my motivation was fully intrinsic to GO SAVE THEM AND GET THEM OUT OF DANGER! And as time passed in the game, and your actions led to changes within the world, so to did your relationships with these characters. And especially in Midna's case, it was not a 1-step process. Her relationship to you changed very gradually across the course of the entire game, going from being a begrudging and spiteful ally to being a true friend. Their separation at the end of the game breaks my heart every time in a way that I don't think books or movies will ever quite be able to touch. In contrast, in BotW I am left feeling that crushing loneliness, rather than mitigated, amplified. Everything Link experiences, he experiences alone. Anyone he could have truly considered a friend died 100 years ago, and the most we can interact with them is through scattered, disorganized memories and disembodied commanding voices. Of the new people Link meets, through the design of the game, none of them get close to having a full picture of understanding Link's experiences, and there is no room for ongoing development of relationship. You either don't know them yet, or you've just met and they don't trust you yet, or you've done the one thing for them that the game has scripted for you to do and then you're in a state of friendly stasis with them for the rest of the game. Granted, the old Zelda games would run into this same stasis problem eventually in the latter third-to-quarter of the runtime, but it was never quite so instantaneous as it is in BotW. My experience of the beautiful landscape and near-infinite creative potential of BotW reflects my experience of my own life, in that no beautiful view can counter the desolation of isolation. To be clear, I'm not trying to convince anyone to change their mind on BotW. I'm genuinely glad that people are still finding the enjoyment in the game that I got to experience for a limited time when I first got to know it. Rather, I just wanted to make sure that, as one of the people most disappointed by the title today, that my disappointment is not misconstrued as simply missing a railroad track experience, pretty songs, and a gameplay formula. What I lost in the new iteration of Zelda goes much deeper than that. The old Zelda formula was a tool for me to manage my own trauma, and the new formula is not a tool shaped so that I can use it like that anymore, to the point where I've felt no urge to pick up Tears of the Kingdom at all, much to my own chagrin. Yes, the old games will always exist, but I've played them so many times that I see the stasis coming too far in advance of when it actually arrives. I'm not saying my expectations of these games are fair, either. Clearly, a videogame cannot take the place of therapy and of finding a loving and caring community to be a part of. (I'm in the first, but still working on the second). I'm more just hoping for more understanding from the broader zelda community that it would be equally unreasonable to expect me to be able to just take a deep breath and move on from what's been lost, and that what's been lost might be more loss than I can accept to continue forward as an active fan of the series. And even though it's nobody's fault, and it is a natural part of change, it still massively sucks, and is a tragedy. Which I guess ironically means it still holds the spirit of zelda for me. What's more thematically consistent with Zelda than victory marred by tragedy for the people who fought hardest for it? Anyway, I love your work KingK, thank you for this very thoughtful and beautiful video about a very beautiful game.
Hey, thanks for sharing your experiences and your thoughts on BotW! I wanted to comment and let you know I played Tears of the Kingdom and actually think Link has a lot more allies/companions and is a lot less lonely in this game. Maybe it's not like past 3D Zeldas where there was Navi/Midna/Tatl always at your side, but in this game Link has a LOT more recognition. All characters from previous games recognize Link and chat with him like Robbie, Purah, Sidon, Riju, Teba, Yunobo, the Tarrey Town people. But in addition, there are a lot of NPCs who recognize Link as the hero that saved them from Calamity Ganon, and Link is known and respected as a highly-competent and capable warrior by all the soldiers. Without spoilers, certain individuals assist a lot more in Tears of the Kingdom and feel like they're with you more than the champions did in BotW. So I would recommend giving Tears of the Kingdom a shot! I personally wasn't a big fan of how no one knew Link in BotW but I felt that was well addressed in Tears of the Kingdom.
I have to disagree with the premise in your intro. Ideas don’t have a shelf life, they don’t die out naturally, they are snuffed out or killed. The idea of old paper Mario is still alive that’s why we are getting a paper Mario 2 remaster. The desire old final fantasy still alive, that’s why so many people were upset with FF7 remake. The desire for old Tetris is very much alive and still being fulfilled. The idea can’t die unless the desire is. And we also get fan games like Bug Fables. The idea of 2D metriod has been alive and well for the decade and a half it took metriod dread to come out and was filled by stuff like shovel knight and Hollow knight. Ideas don’t die until everyone who holds them dear has died and failed to pass them on. The idea of old 3D Zelda is absolutely not dead and absolutely doesn’t have a shelf life.
Agreed. Just because Skyward Sword wasn't a masterpiece all a sudden a beloved best selling franchise needs to completely scrap everything and change because.. why? Skyward Sword was almost a good game. Had great characters, a fun story, great dungeons and bosses. It was just the clunky controls and recycled maps and that dumb repetitive boss fight with the toes that wasn't great.
@@Roflcrabs I’d argue Skyward Sword was a good game. A great story and great characters. Really good dungeons. It’s just some of the controls and items feel short. And repeating bosses was a big bummer. Still a great Zelda game imo, but it’s problems are way bigger than Windwaker’s Triforce quest and Twilight Princess’s tears of light.
@@princestarfy4098oh I meant to say Skyward Sword is good and it could have been great. Just needed to ditch the motion controls or at least have the option to not use it, and add a few new areas instead of reusing old ones. Better controls and add flesh out the world a little, it felt small. Besides that it could have been a 9 or 10/10. Still enjoyed what we got but it felt rushed.
@@Roflcrabs absolutely could be a 9/10 if it wasn’t for the clunky motion controls. The story is the best in the series imo and it has some of the best dungeons. TP used to be my least favorite Zelda game then I played the TP HD without motion controls, and it became my second favorite Zelda. But I feel like a lot of bosses in SS, and especially the mini bosses, would be very boring. I think they would have to do some work to make it enjoyable.
Hard disagree. Its clear the zelda team werent sure were to go after Skyward Sword. And they idea to do something different from 3D classic zelda, to go back to the first game, clearly came from their understanding that moving this series forward requires change, and not just the same games over and over again.
I don't understand how I never really got into BOTW. I barely ever made it through the opening shrines before losing interest. Then with TOTK, I felt a need to push on through the opening shrines. And then once I reached the surface, I was completely enamored. I had never played a game like that where if you saw someone you liked, you could just go there. I got lost for hours on end doing nothing in particular. I had never had an experience like that before, it made me feel like a kid with the childlike wonder leading wherever the wind blew. Heck I'm on my second playthrough now experiencing a lot of the places I missed the first time around. I was pretty scared of the depths and actively avoided going there 😅 Considering how BOTW laid out that groundwork I really feel like I missed out. I don't even know if I could go back and try to play it again considering that all the comparisons that have been made really make it look like TOTK upgraded nearly every aspect.
I had similar issues with Botw, and they persisted in totk. If we had more temples and potentially more cutscenes, I'd potentially enjoy it more. Oh, and I really want some weapons to be undestroyable, I worked hard on getting the Gerudo sword quest done only to tuck it away and never use it (since it will break eventually).
@ 21:31 -- Breath of the Wild is a game you can play however you want... As long as you play it however you want *in the right way*. This defense always bothers me whenever it comes up. I didn't realize that the problem people had with the fact that the shrines all look the same was that it goes against tradition. I always thought it was because they were visually repetitive and boring! Peanut gallery snark aside, I feel like a lot of the criticism around the Breath of the Wild duology originates from the games just giving you a lot of foot-guns to bore yourself to death with. The whole passage about meditation feels like a tacit admission that there's just not enough going on in the game moment-to-moment to keep your mind engaged, so you end up daydreaming. Daydreaming can be alright, but it's not exactly what I'd call "thrilling entertainment", and certainly not "invigorating art". It's merely... Nice. I'm not gonna pretend like Breath of the Wild and neo-Zelda in general is entirely without merit, but I cannot understand the overall reluctance to just "own" your original criticism. This feels more like it's originating from guilt over being an "older" fan (i.e. not wanting to imply that you feel like the series "owes" you anything, for lack of a better term) than from any place of reason. If that's the case, I can understand, because I feel that same reluctance. However, after going back and revisiting some of the older entries in the series following Tears of the Kingdom, I strongly feel that Zelda used to be, just, on a whole other level (particularly during the years Aonuma was still working as a director). That is most certainly-- *probably*-- not just the nostalgia talking-- there really is something markedly different about those games in conception and design philosophy. Maybe. Probably. At the very least, they are all much more tightly-paced. The Breath of the Wild games are fine, but I find them to be, creatively, very conservative, and overall just pretty uninteresting as a result. This series used to be way weirder! Remember Tingle? We'd never get something as strange as Tingle in the new games! I feel like that's what people want when they call for a return to form more than anything-- not necessarily a *literal* regression, although some may articulate it as such, but just a restoration of the old vibrancy and general "weirdness"-- the inspired spark that ran through the series during that golden middle era. There's still a little bit of that in the new games, but it's pretty diluted and hard to find, which is persistently my greatest disappointment with them.
I know exactly where you're coming from. It's almost as if the smaller scope allowed them to put more thought and consideration into crafting unique and tailored environments, locales, characters, items, etc. The art style of Majora's Mask alone feels more inspired than the latest offerings. Not sure how to properly word this but Zelda needs more imaginative themes, settings, and aesthetics. Something that gives it a distinct personality and compelling atmosphere. BOTW/TOTK isn't bad in this regard but it definitely feels safe compared to previous entries.
Hudson's pretty weird. Other than that, I think just moving out of hyrule into new locales would be a stellar move on the devs' part, especially since we know this new approach sells--they shouldn't be afraid to mix up asthetics.
Open world Zelda was fun for a change, but when the games set a linear path, it let the devs craft more detail in the experiences you would have, since they were scripted and the devs could plan exactly what you would see, engage with, and predict what you’d try to do in a given situation. When you have limitless options, the devs can’t cater to each and every thing you may try the same way
on the flip side when it becomes scripted and pre-determined it can also limit replayability and experimentation. a good balance would be to allow some options where players can improvise but at the same time have boundaries. figuring out that some item or ability interactions to solve a challenge in an unintuitive way (as long as no cheesing is involved) can feel very satisfying. the problem is that botw and tears allow short cuts where you can skip the challenges making them pointless. i have to go on self imposed runs which can give a frustrating experience to not break the game because of how easy it is to gain access to a savage lynel bow or how the paraglider trivializes vertical exploration but at the consequence of finnicky, yet treacherous and tedious climbing down walls. the first zelda did have boundaries and limitations despites its simplistic nature and copy paste level design, but one thing that helped was that it was not obscenely massive and did not treat each square as its own but rather part of an interconnected whole (dungeons may have been sloppy but they had a foundation for its time that was not bad). botw and tears however really dropped the ball by taking concepts that felt like showcases or just simply regressing to a form on a much larger scale while stripping those boundaries. i am for an open world zelda, but it needs to be handled properly and the previous 2 entries sadly failed to deliver that experience for me.
Different strokes for different folks. There is also a ton of value in letting the player do whatever they want and go wherever they want. It becomes THEIR adventure.
@@juantsu2000 that is one thing i will give credit to how it is designed. it makes players go on a self imposed run however i do think it could have done more in terms of substance instead of feeling so repetitive with low enemy variety and copy paste level design.
@@juantsu2000That’s not an argument though. If ”THEIR adventure” just mean ”implement no game-design what so ever”, then why even make a game? Hell, considering how empty these two latest games are, why not just slap a ”sandbox” onto a normal game, where the people who prefer to play non-games can mess around?
@@juantsu2000 I don't want it to by MY adventure. There's a lot of value also in letting it be Link's adventure that I'm following and guiding him through.
this was nice to watch, seeing how you phrase that playing a game as a checklist leads to burnout hit me really hard. I can see why I haven't finshed alot of new games recently (Stardew valley,A wonderful life,and Tears of the Kingdom) I only saw them as things to do and finsh 100%.
Great video! I love BotW, but I didn't enjoy TotK after finding all shrines, mapping everything, and finishing the game. The problem I had with it was that it didn't feel like a new game. Shrines, koroks, champions, memories, straight to Ganon, an aversion to linerity... we've seen this before, and it felt more like remake or BotW+. I felt like I was punished for putting in so much time in BotW. I understand why people love this game, but my experience was like playing DLC after fatigue from a game I've been playing for 6 years. After 6 years, I would of liked some more significant changes with what TotK became, as it seems intrinsically tied to BotW with very little identity of it's own
In what way were you punished for playing BotW lol that’s copium to the max. You’re rewarded so often for having played BotW. The game is 1) a direct sequel 2) all important characters to link remember him and what he did last game 3) environments and locations you know to a T from the last game have twists built on your knowledge of the last game making them more engaging and interesting than they were in the previous game. There is no conceivable way a human being with a functioning brain came out of breath of the Wild and was mad at Tears for being better 😂
@@SecretFantasyConsole I don't think TotK is better. You can go anywhere and choose your own path, but who cares? It's a larger yet emptier experience for me with a world that seems more awkward because the map was built for BotW. It introduces more padding and more tedium without adding anything truly distinctive. Ancient tech, shrines, four areas of interest with champion centric narratives, a straight to Ganon option, koroks, a great plateau of sorts... I mean, could go on I'm not going to try to convince you of anything. If you like the game, that's great. To me it just maintains a standard I've already had enough of, and to me it just feels like a reimagining of BotW rather than a new game. Mind you, I've put close to 300 hours trying to discover the new The sequel argument is also pretty tired... I don't know what to tell you... I believe that for a series that redifines its experience with every new entry (even with sequels) this one lacked imagination and felt like a giant copy/paste job. They practically copy/pasted cutscenes. But who cares if you had a good time? These are just my experiences and opinions
I think you're definitely correct botw is a game where it's better to appreciate it on it's own terms or else you get sick of it but I think the big problem of this game is that it's impossible to know when to stop on your first playthrough, so you spend a lot of time in menu's and out looking for ways to continue progressing instead of casually playing the game. So the lack of big end game challenges outside of hyrule castle feels like a suckerpunch
BotW and TotK are kind of frustrating as they are the definition of ocean wide puddle deep. Even with the huge improvement in the amount of content in TotK I can't help but feel how repetitive that game gets when I'm in the latter part of my playthrough when I'm just completing everything. Though at the same time the beginning of every playthrough I've had of BotW and the one playthrough I've had of TotK I couldn't help but have fun exploring the worlds of these games and initially filling out the map for the first half of my playthrough. Heck the Depths was such a genius inclusion in TotK that I rarely if ever got bored exploring them even when I got in that completionist mindset in the latter half of my playthrough. I think what helped a lot with that was Zonaite and Pos because there was an incentive to attack Bokoblin camps and go out of my way to collect Po souls. To be very honest the reason why these work is probably the same reason why item pickups work in the Xenoblade series. Yes a lot of those pickups were pointless, but I think there's some reptile part of my brain that just finds following a breadcrumb trail of item pickups as I'm going towards my destination satisfying. What's really frustrating to me is that Xenoblade X was so much more fun to explore than these 2 games and it's basically a prototype for them. I think what made that game better for that was that there were high level areas where you would get wrecked if you weren't careful. Not to mention story progression and beating the game were locked behind filling out a certain amount of the map as well as doing some quests. Granted I think it was frustrating to want to move on with the story and being told "Oh you need to fill out 50% of Oblivia's map" when I only had 10% of it filled out, but that gave me way more of a reason to explore that area of the game than BotW and TotK's the world is your oyster approach. I think if they're going to continue with this approach they need to gate progression to some extent and drop being able to beat the final boss from the start if the player wants to. The fact that you can go anywhere from the start means that every area has to be at the same level of difficulty instead of there being a sense of difficulty progression between the areas. Make it so some areas have enemies that hit really hard and that requires you to upgrade your armor or for you to git gud at the combat. Also have some areas inaccessible unless you have a particular item or skill. I think a big problem with the current formula is the removal of the Metroidvania like elements and it would be nice to reincorporate them into this formula. Also instead of 150 shrines have 20 to 30 dungeons that expand upon certain concepts, puzzles, or abilities. I think the dungeons in TotK were a step up from the Divine Beasts, but they were still fairly shallow compared to dungeons you'd see in previous games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword.
@29:15 - Oooooh I diametrically disagree with everything you’re about to say; BotW enemy encounters are cool until about 1/3rd-1/2 way through, then they become nuisances that are best left avoided at all costs. They take more resources from you than they give, they usually devolve into bomb-spam just to keep your good gear intact, and no chest ever offers you anything better than what you’re currently carrying. Ever. The amount of times I break some multishot 15x3 bow just to find a travelers bow that does basically no damage…? There’s quite literally no reason to enter an enemy camp at that point, because the rewards are worse than the resources lost. No reason exists to engage with any enemies, unless you specifically hunting for armor upgrades. Chests don’t scale with you. Enemy gear doesn’t scale with you. They just get progressively more HP while using “soldier” level equipment. BotW VERY quickly becomes “how little BotW can you play while still enjoying yourself” and that’s my biggest gripe with every open world game. The novelty wears off, and that’s that. Once that’s gone, it’s gone. Traditional Zelda’s might have a consistent formula, but it works for a reason. That reason, IMO, is that the gameplay loop is less about resource management, and more about the obstacle. BotW is more about resource management and less about the obstacle. 900 korok puzzles but they’re all the same things over and over again. Yeah, sure, instead of playing a minigame where you shoot targets, now the minigame is a bunch of balloons you gotta destroy from a stump. And sure, in the past that minigame let’s you win a bigger quiver or something and upgrade your inventory, whereas now you upgrade your available inventory slots… Being able to hold an extra bow for 15 korok puzzles is kinda cool, but it feels like less of an upgrade because the bows are the real consumables now. The slot just lets me hold more breakables, not stretch my capabilities. I would honestly rather have a mid-grade weapon or bow that never breaks be a mid-late game unlockable item than get more weapon slots for breakable temporary everything. The combat in BotW and TotK is the single most dissatisfying experience in each of those games and nothing you are about to say will change my mind. Period. Also I love you and you’re like my top 5 favorite youtube channels of all time, so I ain’t mad at ya I swear 😅
I don't know how else you feel about the game but I've gone on massive tangents on how frustrating the game is. Could spend paragraphs on one specific tangent. I agree the first few hours are great but once everything starts to repeat the magic dies. Objectively it's a competent game but as a Zelda fan I hate it. Like an idiot I'm playing through Totk because I want to complete every Zelda game (even though it isn't a Zelda game) mostly out of morbid curiosity to see what a Botw sequel would look like. Anyways I'm playing Totk and I avoid most fights like the plague, especially moblin camps because like you said the juice is never worth the squeeze and it's disturbing how there are people out there who played Botw and then went to Totk and were still like "oh boy! Moblin camps!"
I think it did break some things, but if we look at Kintsugi, broken things can become more than they were to start. I don't think it needs to be frankensteined, I think the new and old can be merged to make something better. There is a balance to strike between "total unlimited freedom" and "LoZ: Hallway of Fate". I have never quite meshed with the idea that you get all the powers to start and don't develop. I genuinely find that is the biggest harm done to the gameplay for me. I adore finding a thing and going "WTF is this!? What am I supposed to do!?" and then finding a new tool later to handle it. I think breaking the idea of "go anywhere do anything" as fundamental good is the next break I wanna see. Limitations can be fun and interesting if done well. Go anywhere do anything can make the game feel flat and aimless for me, so I think it'd be neat to see that be a level of change and breaking norms.
That ending was exactly what I felt after spending over 200hrs combined between WiiU and Switch BotW...and not even getting to Kakariko Village in either version. This New Zelda format isn't for me, and that's OK. I've accepted it and moved on. Not every video game or experince in life needs to made, just for me and my tastes. Video games are some what unique; if I crave an old emotion, I can go back and play a game again. Granted I'll have knowledge on beating said game but sometimes, playing a game itself is more than finishing a game.
I don't think that its ok cus i think these are badly designed games and a lot people who like them haven't actually played another zelda game, look at the switch install base compared to other systems that had zelda games on them also the time from skyward sword to botw. You see people comment all the time about botw being their first zelda game; they don't know any better.
@@zacharybecker8228 That's a very good point. A large portion of BotW players are new to Zelda and it could be their first title in the series. Whilst the game being good or bad is subjective, the only positive outcome I can really think of; on the Switch itself, there's a decent selection of older Zelda titles available. Granted, most require a subscription to NSO/NSO+Expansion, but they are available to new and old fans alike. The back catalogue could be better for sure. I hope newer fans take the opportunity to play the older Zelda games. Many probably won't, and they'll be the ones to miss out. Nintendo will very likely stick with this newer format, as it's popular amongst many and most importantly to them, it sells very well. Maybe going forward more, of the classic Zelda tropes we adore come back. Perhaps, we can live in a world where we get this new BotW format Zelda, and a traditional Zelda game too. That's what I personally would want.
@@zacharybecker8228 I've played nearly every single zelda game and love nearly every single one of them, including BOTW. This "argument" is presumptuous at best and insulting at worst.
My biggest “problem” with breath and tears is that the storyline suffers. Link serves as a blank slate for the player and doesn’t engage them in any sort of character arc. Perhaps it would have been too hard with too many branching paths but it would have been neat if link’s character changed depending how and what you do. Maybe if you play link as someone who helps everyone his dialogue changes to being more compassionate. Or maybe if you only fight more of the overworld bosses your dialogue choices and responses are more aggressive. I think the biggest unexplored territory in the legend of Zelda is the ability to engage in what exactly link’s character is. One of the reasons I loved windwaker was how link was not a hero of prophecy but had to prove his courage. It’s a coming of age story. You literally start the game on links birthday
@@UltimateTobi it’s one thing if it’s text it’s another if it’s in the dialogue and story. That’s more what I would want. I know a lot of people think link having a voice would end up with “excuse me princess “ but if link was written well I think him having dialogue could work
Most times I would solve a shrine puzzle in BotW or TotK, I would watch a solution video afterward to see what the "common" solution was. One of the funnest parts of these games was how many times I would watch that UA-cam solution after the fact and think, "I'm not sure if I'm really smart or really stupid."
In Botw there was this one puzzle with an elaborate winding raised platform with fans around it you had to rotate which would guide a ball along the path into a hole which would raise a platform off in the distance. Basically you had to put the ball on a path being blown along by fans and you'd run to the rising platform before the ball gets to its destination. Thing is there's a big bowl shape roughly 2 meters in diameter around the hole to guide the ball into place. On my first playthrough without even thinking I went straight to the hole, threw the ball into place, understood it raised the platform, took it out, placed it on the lip of the bowl, hit stasis on it locking it in place, ran to the platform, the stasis ability wore off and the ball rolled into place, the platform went up and that was it, the shrine was complete. All this in under a minute. This all happened at launch in my first few hours of the game and though I was enjoying it this was a big red flag. Zelda puzzles shouldn't be so easy to cheese. I didn't like the game by the end and this moment was a huge blow. It felt wrong, dirty and unearned. I wasn't trying to be cheap I was just experimenting and using the tools at my disposal. I assumed that was the first part of the puzzle but then the monk guy was already putting a spirit orb in my face.
I generally like your videos but I'm going to have to disagree with the framing of why people disklile aspects of botw. I understand it's idyllic to look at botw without any expectations but in practice i don't think thats entirely reasonable. The series has built up over 30 yrs of expectations and expecting people not to walk away disappointed with neutered verisons of what we had before is akin to going to a restaurant you've been a regular at for 30yrs and being fine with them altering all of your favorite dishes. I generally do like the new zelda formula but i am hoping for more classic elements to return
Darksiders II is a great “traditional” Zelda style game with its own unique elements, story, & gameplay mechanics. For those who are looking for that type of experience I would play that game. Although, I too hope that the main Zelda series keeps evolving how ever the developers see fit to do that.
I think the point you made at 23:22 was the reason I enjoyed BoTW a lot more compared to ToTK. When it became apparent that ToTK would play out more or less the same as BoTW, coupled with the lack of novel discovery as a result of treading the same world - the experience just became a letdown compared to its predecessor
I think TOTK overdid it a bit. I think it was a fun game, I sure put a lot of time on it, but... it's not a game I will ever play again. The build anything motif was cool on paper, but 100% of everything I built was made of at most like 10 objects because while I am creative, I am not inventive. On top of that, the game was trying to do too much with its controls and even after 100 hours it was hard to not fumble with the controls. Specially if you're playing any other video game alongside it. I don't hate the open world Zelda style, I like exploring and getting lost in the world, but that only goes so far. I do prefer the old style of 3d Zelda games. I didn't consider them broken. I love cool dungeons and wacky items.
Good video KingK. Honestly, I get your perspective, and I see we have a common ground at the end there. It's weird because I do like both TotK and BotW, and I think they are by far the only open world games I've been able to get into (maybe because they're Zelda idunno.) But as someone that was raised on Ocarina, Majora, Twilight Princess, etc in all of my formative years, these games are really important to me, so I feel that disappointment HARD. Especially when series like Golden Sun died, Sonic long veered away from my tastes, etc. I'm personally not really a fan of series that make RADICAL shifts like this, and Zelda avoided it for a long time, so guess I can be grateful for that. I do think the devs have the right to make whatever they want, and clearly this resonates way more with a broad modern audience. I just hope we at least get more 2D games like Link Between Worlds because I ADORED that game's approach to an open structure. But yeah I'll probably play newer Zelda games but I have no expectations for them to be among my favorite games anymore.
I never had an issue with weapon durability, it always gave it a good challenge. The raining when climbing issue though, while ok at first, it quickly got annoying. At least now they have the frog suit.
ikr... People HATE weapon durability because they don't treat weapons as they are. They're _consumable resources_ that you can easily get more of. I think the main source of frustration for people is they think of the weapons as they are in other games, as permanent upgrades, when the ones in Botw and Totk simply aren't meant to be treated that way.
I remember as a kid the first time I went to a friends house. His family had a large property and they gave us permission to fully explore the land. My parents were somewhat restrictive and never let me adventure much so I never got to really roam the woods as much as I'd like. My friend took me to one of his favorite spots in the forest where he'd lounge about, find sticks that resembled swords and fight invisible ninjas. That's also where I saw a stream with flowing drinkable water clear as glass for the first time. The sun was shining throught the trees and its light was beaming off the ripples in the water. I was enthralled by the beauty of it all. So much in fact that I picked pebbles out of the stream for hours and kept a few to bring home with me simply because i believed they had "magical properties". I was 8 years old and now Im in my late 20s. That moment makes a boring tale to say the least and wasnt particularly interesting to most people, but I still remember that day simply because I was just there experiencing it. Yeah...thats what Zelda is supposed to emulate, and thats what Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are trying to achieve. I have hope that they can get better in future titles because of course they arent without their flaws, but hey that doesnt stop me from climbing my 500th mountain just to see the vista or riding on Dinraals head for 2 hours to cook in my Zonai "easy-bake oven" just cause I can. Eventually I have hope the team behind Zelda will bring a satisfying experience to most players that include this philosophy along with the intricate dungeon and level design we all love from the games before it. When they do crack that code, it will certainly be legendary...
Breath of the Wild really feels to me like an attempt by Nintendo to reignite Zelda's prestige in the video game industry. From 1986-1998 Zelda was one of the most influential video game series, boldly leading by example for how action-adventure games should be made. But throughout the 2000s to 2010s that influence faded as other developers became the new standard bearers and Zelda just became one of many critically acclaimed legacy series. As much as I love Twilight Princess and Wind Waker the fact is that outside of the Nintendo faithful they didn't make that big an impact on the gaming industry at large. And when you're Nintendo who is in the market of selling not just games but consoles you need your flagship series to be more than that. I'm honestly more optimistic that we'll one day get a linear Zelda game again. Open world is the current fad everyone is chasing but it will eventually die down when the market has grown tired of them and wants a more story-focused Zelda game again.
Open world versions of existing games was very much a fad. Imagine if Zelda had gone with the battle royale lol. (I would actually like that, I enjoy battle royales)
Sure Zelda was formulaic, but it's also pretty much always been the single video game series with that formula. What's sad is not only for Zelda to change but for it to simultaneously mean the death of a genre of game we loved.
Fantastic video! It's great to see discourse about Breath of the Wild that centers more around what it *is* instead of what it *isn't* . Thanks for letting me talk about Buddhism with you for the video! I always love helping people learn more about it. :)
I do have to say… the world DOES reveal everything about itself pretty early on. You can solve just about any mystery in the game like this: Is the thing you’re interacting with cool or good? It was probably made by the shiekah. Is the thing you’re interacting with bad? It probably has something to do with calamity Ganon. I just immediately solved about 90% of the game’s mysteries.
I think Breath of the Wild is very impressive and a fresh new direction for the series, but I also felt like it just wasn't quite for me. It has a lot of interesting ideas that it doesn't utilize in the best way in my opinion. There are a few basic changes I would make to Breath of the Wild to tailor it to what I want from this new Zelda format. 1.) Space out acquiring the Shieka-Slate tablets and maybe replace some of them. For me the intro to BOTW was the best part because my resources and abilities were limited. I had to use some ingenuity and planning to reach each shrine on the Plateau. With each now Slate power I didn't so much gain access to new areas as gain easier access to areas I could already reach. Once I left the Plateau I had all these tools and the whole map was open. On the surface this sounds like a good thing but it means there is no sense of progression or, more importantly, ANTICIPATION. In Zelda, Zelda 2, A Link to the Past, or Ocarina of Time, something I enjoyed was reaching the end of a bath blocked by some novel obstacle I could not overcome right then, but could see that at some point I would gain a tool that would allow me to continue to progress into a new area of the map. This was exciting and it provided a lot of motivation to keep finding my way through the various dungeons and such. It made it exciting to finally get the Magic Hammer and smash down the posts blocking the way to the Village of Outcasts, or the Flippers to let me swim up an unknown river, or Roc's Feather to let me jump over a gap. Breath of the Wild however does not have this. Clearing a Divine Beast or some side quests didn't really change too much about how I played the game. They didn't open up new areas just at best new methods of travel, maybe. So, I would have the player acquire all the Slate powers on the Plateau but then have them lost in some event once that area is completed. So the player then drops down Hyrule proper but is now starting at square one again (in terms of powers) but on a much wider map. I'd design the map to maybe be a bit more restrictive in terms of reaching the depths of the very cold or hot regions. Not entirely lock the player out, but I would definitely make certain areas or quests and such inaccessible until the player has acquired the right abilities and skills. Related to this, I would not have made Bombs a power. I found that very strange. To me the game play is more consistent if bombs are a resource you need to purchase and/or find or even improvise with certain items you harvest from enemies and/or the environment. Bomb Flowers from OOT would be great for this in certain regions. I also think an item like the Hook Shot should totally made an appearance. I think it's application to the climbing mechanic is obvious and intuitive. It was MADE for this. Speaking items... 2.) I would rework the item degradation. I think it is a bit too extreme. Proper weapons, that aren't rusted or made of fragile materials, should last a bit longer. The Player should be able to visit Blacksmiths in the towns or at horse stables to have weapons and armors tempered; improving their quality and health-value. Maybe a Soldier's Sword or whatever can be tempered a certain number of times, and after that the weapon is too old to be improved again and will break for the final time. The player should also be able to scavenge certain rocks and hammers and things to temper weapons a little bit in the field, to let them last longer. Encourage the player to get attached to a favorite sword, shield, or spear, or what-have-you. To balance this, just make the non-rusted proper weapons rarer. Most weapons the player will find and use are improvise weapons and Beast weapons, making those rare proper weapons more valuable. A good sword will last several fights against groups of enemies or through at least one boss fight. As it stands, a weapon lasts a half a minute in combat at most? 3.) I would add an eating and sleeping mechanic to the game. I mean know Link already can eat and sleep, but I would had a relatively small but noticeable debuff to Link if he does not eat and sleep in 24 or maybe 36 hour period. If you sleep for 6 hours each day Link gets a bonus to Stamina. If he eats in that same period he gets a bonus to health. In both cases these would last a lot longer than food buffs, lasting most of an entire day, say. I think that it would be that much more immersive if the player was encouraged to make a camp and rest and eat periodically. It shouldn't be intrusive enough to be like Survival Mode or Frostfall in Skyrim or something. Not a hardcore realism simulator, just a light touch to reinforce the idea of surviving in this vast monster-haunted wilderness.
The way I see it, we now have 3 flavors of Zelda that can (and I hope will) be developed concurrently: 2D 3D And open world 3D. All three have fantastic games and deserve further development.
I wish they gave 2D side scrolling another go. A Nintendo-made Zelda Metroidvania would be sick! They could even do pixel art or cel shading! Go nuts, its already a crazy proposition!
@@dango2917ah, I’m not so sure. Every single 3D game before BotW was awesome. They’d really be throwing away an opportunity to continue that line. The open world games don’t negate how great the structured ones are and still can be. They should be able to coexist. Nintendo can pass them off line they did with the Oracle games.
This video made me think about botw and totk in a different way. I think I appreciate them a bit more now, but it did make me realize that I did have a period of time where I tried to be meditative with the experience of playing and just go with the flow. I wasn't able to stick with that because of the enemy encounters though, which make playing them both really frustrating to me. In both botw and totk they were constant and irritating when I just wanted to wander and explore. It's especially bad in totk since like every other enemy 1 or 2 shots me even with some armour upgrades and things have way too much health.
My issue with Totk is that it stops you every 5 seconds , for a quest objective (I’m talking about the main story) but there’s always something blocking your progress that you have to go get side tracked by and I found that extremely frustrating. Wanna go to this dungeon? Too bad here’s 2 random quests stopping you. I’m on my second play through and it’s not really an issue now because I know how to prepare / what I need but it’s still frustrating to me
As someone who likes both formulas, there is nothing wrong with wanting old zelda, and still liking the new zelda. I truly believe there is a balance to be had. They could easily just make games in both styles. That's not much different from how they were making 3d zeldas and 2d zeldas simultaneously before. I think the idea that every zelda should break the mold is flawed. Both could exist simultaneously if nintendo decided that. I mean, they made the link's awakening remake while working on current zelda. Not like they don't have more than one team working on it.
The lack of balance in concepts with BOTW and TOTK is what has turned me off. It feels very much like they explicitly took everything that made zelda what it was away in order to reinvent it. It lost it's soul, if you ask me.
Look no further than the Zelda moding community. Although still in its infancy, its been proven that fans might understand the strength of old school Zelda better than Nintendo.
@@xuto2693you misunderstood what they meant by balance. They meant that they can still make new old 3D Zeldas and stagger their releases with new new 3D Zeldas
I do not believe King was trying to say that every Zelda from here on out needs to break the mold. At least, that is how I have interpreted his thoughts in this video. Breath of the Wild was a monumental change for the series and I am pretty sure this video is just his thoughts about the game now almost 7 years later.
One of my favourite parts of BOTW was rediscovering this new version of hyrules map compared to its map on games like OOT. You have a vague sense of familiarity but the exploration and sense of wonder keep you engaged and excited to learn more.
@@Roflcrabs I don't agree, and I'd go as far as to say Zelda as a whole never had that much enemy variety to begin with. At least it's never been something I expected or payed much attention to in any Zelda.
@@Funchal99weird. Obviously there's more to a Zelda game than just combat but I just think in Botw or Totk if you're not running across a barren, lifeless map you're probably swinging at something, likely a moblin, bokoblin or lizalfos. There are supposedly puzzles in Botw/Totk but I've yet to find them. I've completed shrines but those weren't puzzles, they were equivalent to rat tests trying to get to the cheese. Simple, insulting braindead concepts, not puzzles.
Hi, guilty as charged! 😅 I frequently use your older videos as "comfort food" to keep on in the background when I need a good night's rest. Your voice is very relaxing, and your sound levelling is consistent! thank you so much for your multipurpose videos 😁 Bewildebeest (a Twilight Princess speedrunner) is also really good for this.
I don’t know whether or not this is an unpopular opinion, but Tears Of The Kingdom really left me wanting a linear/story-focused Zelda game again. I prefer those types of Zelda games, that IS Zelda to me.
totally agree! In particular, for me, Twilight Princess is really like the peak of "classic" Zelda. The absolute best story and a focused, linear structure. I need more of this kind of Zelda again
@@WhyUHaf2BeMad Even TOTK felt worse than BOTW did, but that might just be that I last played BOTW years ago, whenever I was a lot less exhausted with the open-world genre. TOTK primarily annoys me with the fact that it WANTS you to explore the world, but seemingly punishes you for it with the overwhelming amount of over-powered enemies that will one shot you everywhere you go. The shrines generally take up like 30 minutes to complete with no guide (which a lot of those shrine puzzles left me thinking “how could you expect anyone to figure that out on their own?”) which KILLS the flow of the game -> which makes me then put off doing a lot of shrines -> which then exasperates the issue of getting one-shot everywhere because shrines are the sole method through which you get hearts. I don’t have even one ounce of fun while playing TOTK lol
@@galaxsija4591 Completely agree, Twilight Princess and Wind Waker are my favorite Zelda games, and one of the only reasons I still play my Wii U regularly lol. In TOTK, whenever I’d get an item or piece of clothing that’s from, or a reference to, an older Zelda game, I would just think, “I would way rather play THAT Zelda game”.
You did a good job putting to words WHY I dislike BOTW so much, and why, to others, these things are strengths. I haven't played TOTK yet, donno when, or if, I ever will, but You're right, it's important to remember that the games will continue to change, and that the old entries aren't going anywhere. I do find it funny that, in BOTW, I got frustrated at a world that (to me) felt devoid of any real purpose or meaning. So much world to cover, yet i felt no desire to see any of it. Yet the one zelda game I've come close to 100%ing, is the one with the smallest world. Majora's Mask. MM compelled me to explore and do things far better than BOTW did.
That’s a good point, and that’s probably another reason why I don’t like BotW. If you can do whatever you want, and all of it is optional, is any of it meaningful? For me, it didn’t feel like it was.
They really hype up the game as people having their own adventures but all they're doing is engaging with the same recycled content in different orders. They're still fighting hundreds of the same 6 enemies and completing the same uninspired shrines, defeating the same divine beast bosses. Not sure how doing it in different orders transforms the experience. I just remember lots of aimless running and lots of nothing. It was sad finding some grand old ruins which looked like it had a story behind it, then you search inside out and all you find is two chests, one with 50 rupees and another with a scimitar as you're met with "you cannot carry any more weapons." I hate how linear became a bad word. I'm not opposed to the idea of open world so long as it doesn't result in a reduction in content. Copy pasting every asset hundreds of times over (with the exception of 5 bosses and a handful of nps) isn't content.
@@viktorthevictor6240 Yeah, I go through REALLY short bursts with Minecraft. I'll play it for like 24 hours straight and build a lighthouse or a greenhouse or something, then get bored, and won't pick it back up for like a couple years.
BotW and TotK has some of the best music in thr franchise and has the most versatile soundtrack compared to all past titles. From the quietest momments to the most energetically charged challenges, it covers a vast range of musicality. BotW's Dark Beast Ganon music was definitely a highlight of all the battle music in the game even though the boss itself was lackluster. That piano goes hard. It is also great to have those quieter moments when I'm just hanging around collecting apples or something. The music matches the gameplay. I don't want to constantly listen to dramatic music when what I am doing is not dramatic in the slightest. I enjoy those quiet moments and it makes the bombastic music stand out more.
I miss the compact themes in zelda. Things in every corner yet holding on to it's story telling and theming. Biggest loss of todays zelda is that smaller thought of detail. Thinking on a grand scale you lose focus of what your truly striving for.
@@Ianmar1 I swear people does not think about this marketing tactic. NO, it's not a return to form, because that actually let you explore from the let-go and still demands you to play the dungeons to progress. If it was a return to form they would care about dungeon design and you wanting to do them.
They could've kept it the exact same but they would've just put normal dungeons in the game (even Tears of the Kingdom) and it would've massively been better, at least to me. They're not bad games but to go so far away from what we all knew was a very drastic change.
I'd have liked to see even better dungeons in TotK, but they did improve both shrines and dungeons, and it's not as simple as just dropping, say, the Ocarina Water Temple into the game. The Temples in TotK are pretty close to traditional dungeons - you go through, needing a new ability to complete the dungeon, you solve puzzles and ultimately face and defeat a boss, and you get rewarded by keeping the new ability, getting a heart container, and getting some story. About the only differences are that where traditional Zelda dungeons tend to be pretty linear (with some exceptions), the TotK ones present you with a bunch of small puzzles to solve in any order, and you enter the TotK dungeons using the new ability (which is then not required for anything outside of the dungeon and dungeon approach). You could make the TotK dungeons more substantial and more linear, but that still wouldn't do anything to address the fact that they can't really unlock any new access in the rest of the world since they're intended to be skippable, and that their story has to fit into the non-linear sequence in which you could encounter them.
@@rmsgreythe totk dungeons are exactly the same as the Botw dungeons. Don't know what you see that's very different gameplay wise. Short dungeon in which you need to activate 5 terminals to kill a very easy boss
@@LZMP60 The main gameplay change is the use of the "dungeon item". They're also much more distinct architecturally, which, while not directly a gameplay change, does make them more interesting to explore than the BotW ones. And the bosses also have more varied themes (though the blight-ganons were fine when it comes to gameplay variation) There's still plenty of room for improvement - Hyrule Castle in BotW is still the best dungeon-like thing across both games - but TotK's temples did improve upon the Divine Beasts.
To me, there was 2D Zelda and 3D Zelda. Both had their merits. BoTW and ToTK represent a 3rd Zelda iteration for me. I’d like there to exist all 3 but it may not be possible
I miss the dungeons being puzzling, I got nothing out of totk dungeons. there were 0 puzzles and it made me hate them. the shrines were...meh in fact I decided instead of finishing them the way they intended, I would go out of my way to finish it an alternative and harder way
I had to pause and comment about the “checklisting” and point out that this part is completely optional. The beauty of Breath/Tears is that you can engage as deeply as you want to. I beat Tears with no armor upgrades and 17 hearts, for example. And then after doing so felt free to explore at my own pace and do whatever upgrades I wanted. Gamers today for some reason act like they are COMPELLED to do every single thing in the game when the game is so clearly not designed that way. The old games had some good game design aspects, but the gameplay and immersiveness is much higher in the new open-air style. Exploring Hyrule in the past didn’t feel like exploring at all, it felt like walking through a story book. I don’t want to go back to that. Arbitrary limitations of where you can go, being guided through a linear story. The open-air games need to incorporate story arcs so that they can tell a linear story in an open format. They took strides towards this in Tears. Again gamers want everything now!!! I said it when Breath came out but it is such an exciting jumping off point for Zelda. People ignore that fans and gaming discourse at large thought Zelda was getting stale until Breath came out and revitalized the series. I wish fans of the older style games would get their stick out of the mud online and stop acting like the new games are “not Zelda enough.” I think acting as though Zelda games in the past had very riveting stories is being generous. Breath/Tears don’t have the strongest stories, but they are present and your own adventure is more of your story than it was before. Just as I was with Breath, now after Tears I am really excited to see where they go next. They will continue incorporating the old with the new in amazing ways.
45:20 "What is inherently wrong with a minimalist soundtrack?" "If the answer is any variation of 'that's not how it used to be'..." As someone who never played the prior Zelda games, I still love their soundtracks. Their strong musical motifs are beautiful. I loved the music in 'That Tralier'™ for BotW, and was disappointed to never find it in the many hours I poured into it. The ambient solitude of its soundtrack fits BotW and its vast contemplative wilderness, yet I can't help but feel like I was robbed of the joy of an epic boss theme or hard-hitting and catchy town theme. N64 Gerudo desert is a banger to be sure, and though I understand that such an upbeat track might take away from the themes BotW is trying to convey, in a world so large and full of diverse life, surely the space exists for a few memorable tracks? Off the top of my head, I can only really recall Kass's theme and the guardian theme. BotW's soundtrack is great as background to the gameplay, yet that comes at the cost of making it suffer in isolation. I don't wish BotW had returned to the way things used to be, but I wish it had strived to push its soundtrack further than before. Making it more dynamic perhaps. Anyhoo, wonderful video :)
The musical swell and hit when I glided into the wind temple tempest was amazing in ToTK. I cannot remember a similar HIT from botw, even while it had lovely music in different ways, as you say.
I'm generally on board with minimalist music isn't great, but I want to point out that the 'vs. Ganon' track, Hyrule Castle, Tarrey Town are excellent. And--good Lord--Hateno Village is such a world-class track. They all hit that good Zelda music for me. The issue is mostly in implementation. 80% of the game is in the overworld. 15% is in Shrines. The remaining 5% *may* have one of those banger tracks. Having overworld variety (even just like OoT's own Hyrule Field) would have gone far. (Yes, it does technically work dynamically in BotW too but it doesn't feel that way.)
@@ArtemisWasHere Rito Village is a bit cheating since it's a remix from WW. I agree with the others, but can I ask that you go on? I can't think of any others.
It's so weird that a lot of people wanted MORE of a lot of things from this game. I think Tears of the Kingdom proves the strengths of Breath of the wild. The game had a unique feeling of emptiness, of living after the apocalyps. That made it really relaxing. Even in this video you captured it brilliantly. Some people named TOTK the most underwhelming 10/10 they've ever played. Recognizing that the game is perfection, did everything better and bigger, and missing something. I think i I'm having more fun with TOTK now that I've finished it and am just messing around, then when I had all those times getting sidetracked from the main objective. I feel that game must age, I must replay it one day. Just to truly admire how fun it is!
I am one of those disappointed ppl - and to me ToTK is nowhere near a 10/10 game, BoTW was close to that (9/10) but ToTK is legit 6/10 for me because of how bloated and recycled it feels there's a great 20-30 hour game hidden in ToTK, but the other 100 hours it makes you do legit made me feel like I am losing so much time and actually not having great fun
Literally do not understand the perspective of some of these comments. Like, it’s valid, I’m not saying you’re not allowed to be disappointed, but… I will always love BOTW and TOTK, and I’m a lifelong Zelda fan. I’ve loved every 3D Zelda. And BOTW and TOTK are my favorites.
Same. And yet there are people out there who honestly think these two games are so radically different from everything that came before that they should have been a new IP... I would have to assume that in the alternate universe these folks pine for, the Zelda series remains decidedly traditional as it rapidly fades into irrelevancy.
After experiencing TOTK, I’m definitely open for a change, whether it’s open world or not. BOTW felt like a brand new experience and changed my perception of open world games for the better. TOTK felt like a rom hack of BOTW that reused assets overall had the exact same fundamental gameplay of BOTW with the same locations minus the amazing quality of life changes BOTW DLC created. I hope Zelda keeps innovating to once again reshape our views of what Zelda truly is.
I stopped playing TotK after the fifth “temple”; I just found myself doing exactly the same things as in BotW. The story, progression and overall structure of the game hadn’t really changed.
@@samuelviden7412yep same here after the 2nd temple, depths, sky and same hyrule exploring for 20 hours I knew I’ve seen it all. Sold my copy on eBay and bought some weed.
This new format is old after two games vs the previous archetype lasting through multiple console generations. I REALLY hope they don't stubbornly cram this new format down our throats cause I'll be done with this series if the next one is the same... I def won't be buying the next one day 1 without knowing what it consists of.
@@chrisej5987 I didn’t buy TOTK day one and only bought the game after people were giving this game 10/10s across the board. I felt so disgusted to find out what kind of game this was after looking through its old skeleton.
To be honest, I would like a return to OoT style 3d Zelda. While I loved BotW, I really got burnt out on TotK. There was just too much, even for someone like me who tries to do most of the side content in a game. Plus, open world design does not lend itself very well to experiencing a story. Especially with the way BotW and TotK are based around freedom.
OoT style is past. It wont return in any new game. OoT is one of the prime examples of a vision ahead of technological capability. The massive limits in OoT were not by design, they were by lack of technology to implement full ideas. I'm personally, much more of the 'let me do my own thing' kind of player and the early 3d Zelda's (and even the later 2d ones) and their ultra hand-holdy way of doing things, is a big put off for me. Playing BotW i thought "yep, this is where 3d Zelda needed to go.. Hell, its where they WANTED to go all the time". I get people are nostalgic for games of the past, and they "think" they want 'updated' versions of them, but it rarely works out that what people think they want, is actually what they really want when they do get it because that newer version, never gives that same feeling of re-igniting that experience from the older game that people hoped it would. Just like BotW. I LOVED my first playthough of it. I thought it was fantastic. But i didnt get that same feeling from TotK because, i had already experienced it and TotK is, effectively, an "updated" version of BotW. While it had new elements, and areas were changed, it didnt really give me that sense of 'awe' and wonder that BotW did on the first playthough. Times change.
@@lyianxan OoT style of game will return. That format may be past, but it’s not done. Still plenty you can do with that format. Many linear-ish Zelda games have been immensely successful.
"We prefer the old way and want it back." - Likely because what was given in return was not of equal value. True Freedom, doesn't feel as good as an Earned Victory. Yes, you are free to cheese and skip and break everything with this new physics system, but after a while, cheating on tests feels hollow when the real accomplishment and feeling of earned victory comes from solving an complex, intricate, intentional challenge the correct way. "What is inherently wrong with the idea of a world that doesn't reveal everything about itself?" - Nothing, but just because it isn't inherently wrong doesn't mean it shouldn't be criticized or disliked. I'm not sure what the purpose of this question is or who it is for, maybe for the folks who dislike botw or totk and dont articulate good enough reasons for why. Regardless, while previous Zelda games revealed more about itself, and left special details hidden, reserved only for those who sought it out or paid close attention. Everything told a story, and it was coupled with meaningful intentional music. It was giving you a narrative and the author crafted it specifically so you would see their intention and either appreciate it or not. It was like reading a J.R.R. Tolkien book. The new formula doesn't do anything better, the world doesnt reveal everything about itself, because 90% of the time when you do go wander somewhere there's no story to tell there. It's either 'ah these are ruins with nothing left here to tell a tale', or 'a peaceful village is here, despite it being a post apocalyptic world.' It's lack of intentional narrative or artisanship is like handing you a book, with 80% of its contents missing and saying, go ahead fill it in yourself.
"What is inherently wrong with a minimalist soundtrack?" - Nothing, it's simply missing something really important to the identity of the series. The original zelda, didnt really have any strong musical motifs, but as time went on we got hymns. We go musical instruments, we got moments of stillness, thought, reflection, beauty and reverence in Link's or another characters ability to convey feelings through music alone. And Link is MUTE. That's powerful. Majora's Mask gave us: The song of Healing. I could sing all day about this one. Wind Waker gave us: The feeling of leaving home, and growing up as we waved goodbye to our grandmother. Molgera, at this point in the adventure, youre not just a sleepy kid in his pajamas. Link would be completely in the right to believe he has imposter syndrome, given where he came from to where he is now and what eldritch abomination he is not only tasked with facing, but courageously willing to defeat. Twilight Princess gave us: Riding at night while listening to Malon's voice. A melancholy but beautiful remix. Howling hymns to heroes past. Before learning a technique from Shade. The music that plays when you rescue Colin, the kid who looked up to you as the hero of Ordon village, truly solidifying that you, yes YOU are a hero that did something specific and are worthy of your title. No amount of Orchestra or instruments is going to capture that same feeling when you can just cheese or skip that sort of set piece like you can in botw.
"What is inherently wrong with dungeons that fit the uniformist aesthetic of the tribe who made them?" - Nothing, the difference between these dungeons and the previous ones are that we had variety & depth. The Goron Mines told a story, the Zora's Domain told a story, Snow Peak mountains told a story, the lost woods told a story, The Great Bay told a story, Ikana Canyon told a story, you get it. What story does shrine number #69 tell that is substantially different that Shrine #71? When people talk about previous Zelda dungeons they often leave Ganon's castle for last. It's basically just a test of everything we have learnt. There isnt much to tell there, we are at the book's end. We got Ganon's castle in botw, but the story behind all that is vacuous, hollow, and skippable. They didnt create amazing set pieces and narratives that they were okay with the player skipping or missing. They just created stuff and camps and basic, forgettable music that they were okay with the player skipping or missing. The stuff you could miss in Dark Souls 3 told a story, had unique music. The stuff you can miss in botw is just another camp that'll drain your resources and break your weapons. or it's the 3rd lightning sword that'll break in 40 swings. Tell me, would folks have preferred the LOTR or Game of Thrones, or The Elder Scrolls or Dark Souls or any High Fantasy Medieval media if it were a 'make it up yourself' affair?
@@KyngD469yes yes oh lawdy yes. I know Dark Souls is a more appropriate comparison thematically but Bloodborne was my first Souls game. I played through it once blindly, really liked it then didn't touch it for a year. Then my friend with more time on his hands played it and he completes everything. He introduced me to the fun of getting all trophies in games. Anyways he played Bloodborne a year after I had and we talked about how awesome it was but he was like "so did you beat this boss?" And I'm like "wait what? There's more?" And then he showed me how I missed like 6 to 8 optional bosses (and then like 14 more in the chalice dungeons.) Bloodborne went from a great game to a perfect masterpiece. That's so ballsy and bold to make unique content and lots of it that people might not see. Meanwhile in Botw you've already seen every single enemy within the first 20 hours with the exception of maybe a boss or two and Ganon. I know the blight ganon boss fights at the end of divine beast dungeons play differently but they look identical, offer the same difficulty in gameplay and.. to me they're the same fight. They look ugly, launch elemental projectiles, take roughly two minutes to take down. Rinse repeat. Botw/Totk both feel like homework assignments phoned in at the last minute. Copy paste paste paste paste paste paste paste *Totk comes out* paste paste paste paste paste. Recurring enemies and assets is nothing new in games but Botw/Totk take the piss with it. Nothing is special or unique. At launch for Botw I was genuinely and naively invested in the first 10 hours expecting a Zelda game in this open world. I remember seeing this huge majestic dragon flying across the sky and it was awesome. It felt like a special moment. 2 hours later I saw another one, same model, same animation, different color. The magic was wearing off. I tracked it to see if it would land or do something unique and as I was tracking it it just instantly snapped out of existence. It didn't fly out of sight, it just popped out of existence. The game was done with it. After that moment like 10-15 hours into my first Botw playthrough in 2017 doubt began to sink in rapidly. "What if this Zelda game sucks?" I thought. Pushed on and by the end hated it. The games are insultingly hollow and repetitive which pains me to say because I loved Zelda games.
I have a lot of thoughts regarding Zelda and its recent entries. I've even contemplated writing my own essay on it. In ahort though it's been a journey of letting go recently. And by that I don't mean letting go of the love I hold for the old titles but of the series. Botw was a long playthrough for me. Every couple days or weeks I'd hop in and finish some sidequests or koroks. I also only loosely followed the narrative throughline. As such I think my playthrough was quite close to the intended vision. Of course going for 100% drove me quite close to burnout despite me being quite used to the grind. However it never captured me. I tend to have a problem with open world games in general. I like structure. I like the narrow focus of items. I don't like the atmospheric lack of density compared to old Zelda games (and various other games). For me it was too open. Tol broad. And therefore too watered down. However it was meditating at times. And totk made me appreciate that aspect and the novelty of it all back then. In contrast to botw, totk was almost painful to play at times. Ironically I think the current formula has grown stale already. And as brave as botw was in breaking conventions the same can't be said for totk. It seems like a game that despite its sandbox like nature is oddly constrained by its predecessor. What I'm trying to say is that I've learned that change is inevitable (personally I hadn't tired of the old formula, I love Skyward Sword and I jumped on Link's Awakening in a heartbeat (I know there are significant differences between the two). However change is not a moral or qualitative good. I get the sense that many people view it as such though. "Times change", "This is the original vision" and similar statements often feel like you're being talked down to, like your love for the series is in some sense invalid. Change might happen and some change might be necessary. However all change must not necessarily be good and for me in the context of Zelda it isn't. If this is the direction of the series totk is the last (new) game I will have played. Making my peace with that has been surprisingly easy considering the Zelda before was my favorite video game franchise. I guess we have all grown up one way or another.
TotK being as it was felt like a particular circumstance related to the obscenely high popularity of BotW even by series standards (even winning Goty at the Geoff Awards) and the Switch’s technical limitations as a console in conjunction with the bigger and better necessity affecting any game worth its salt now. Personally the new abilities it added made interfacing with the world more exciting, but I also think the next game will benefit from being on something the same level of power that ran Kingdom Hearts III and the Final Fantasy VII Remake. Something different to really push that new power with some elbow grease, like how Wind Waker’s sea felt like something only possible on the GameCube compared to the segmented areas in the N64 Zelda’s.
Great video and I can appreciate your view, but just can't find myself getting there. I just do not care for BotW as is. I don't just think it's a bad Zelda game, rather that it's just a bad game that was made worse by the fact it is a Zelda game. It was as you said, going in to the game I was expecting Skyward Sword in an open world, and what I got handed was a mashup of all my least favorite gaming conventions in a game by a franchise I had come to trust. It had felt like a betrayal. Nowadays, that feeling of betrayal has lessened and if I squint my eyes I can see where the Zelda is in the game and I can acknowledge where people can have fun with it's freeform sandbox, but that doesn't really improve my opinion of the game at all
I guess I just feel everything BOTW does in terms of exploration and discovery and relaxing in the world at your own pace was all done way better in another Nintendo open workd exclusive that came out first, Xenoblade X. Not only was BOTW my least favorite Zelda game (aside from the two NES titles I also am not a fan of), but I already experienced its greatest strengths (to me) in a game that already came out on the same console.
Playing TotK really made me aware of all of this game’s flaws. BotW had really fun exploration, but TotK reuse of the map takes the best quality away from the game. And no, the copy paste sky island puzzles and repetitive and bland underground doesn’t make up for that. What you have left is a frustrating weapon system that loses any appeal after a few hours when you’re just tossing away good weapons, a bland combat system, a severe lack of enemy variety (even worse in BotW), lack of interesting dungeons, and little reward for exploring outside of increasing hearts or stamina.
Tbh I don't like the changes, I always liked standard zelda games and I'm sad they said they'll stick to this open world formula :S doing one thing once (twice this time) doesn't mean it's the best way to do it or that it should always be this way from now on, but aight
Committing to Breath of the Wild the way it is meant to be played sounds like a great idea for some day when I'm retired. And I do think they should continue to make games like these. But I would also like games that bring new variations on the older formulas. It could be smaller, lower budget (perhaps 3DS) and so not interfere with these as mainline games.
"If you ignore the circumstances, the game is amazing" "The game is boring and repetitive, but I like that because it's relatable" Come on dude botw is majorly flawed and has little to no replayability or relevance now due to totk. I'm tired of hearing fanboys defend this garbage.
There is an argument to be made that a game can be too big. I replayed BOTW just these past two weeks, just because TOTK would have been so much longer to get going.
Im happy ToTK came along and proved this formula as successful on its own merits. After Elden Ring released, it was compared heavily to BoTW, and led to discussions that were overly-critical of BoTW just because Elden Ring is also an amazing game. But when ToTK released, despite being too similar to BoTW to warrant a $70 price it was a smash hit, drawing praise and comparisons to Elden Ring which ironically criticized the FROM Soft instant-classic unfairly.
I find it very disappointing that Zelda will turn this game into a formula. Won't this lead to stagnation again? Won't the franchise feel stuck and the games blurred together after Breath of the Wild 26, just like many people felt it was with the previous formula? The answer to feeling formulaic is not to simply exchange one formula with another.
Exactly. BotW formula fans can't just accuse traditional Zelda fans of being scared of change and then go on to advocate against changing the BotW formula.
The sad thing is that personally the new formula became stale with 2 games for me. Totk is definitely my least favorite 3d Zelda, by a huge margin. At least Oot's one was able to hold 4 games well.
it wasn't really stuck before or stagnant. Twilight princess was their best selling game up to that point. alot of people didnt like skyward sword cus of motion controls, not the story.(hell the switch remake sold more than the original wii version most likely due to regular control options) The switch having such a huge install base with botw being alot of peoples first time helped it be so popular. Twilight princess sold about 1/3 of the copies as botw whiles its system had less than 1/5 the isntall base of the switch
@@athorem LOL, but you guys wanna put it right back to what it was. The last two games weren't perfect by any means, but they were giant leaps in the right direction back toward the series' roots. They didn't take it far enough.
@@zacharybecker8228 I liked the concept of motion controls, but it was executed extremely poorly. What made me stop playing Skyward Sword was that stupid bitch Fi who keeps stopping the gameplay every five minutes to tell me some shit I already know. She's like Navi on crack and PCP.
My problems with BotW don't come from its new formats for everything. I think it's a fantastic foundation for the future. My problems come from HOW things were done. Some stuff like exploration and character progression aren't so much an evolution, rather they're a step in a different direction. But something like swordplay was certainly a step back from TP's moves you could unlock. The story didn't really have much to tell, but it could have been mended by utilizing a different format to tell it instead. Open-ended puzzles that aren't related to one another are a great idea for an open world, but so many of them were barely even puzzles such as the ones where you just glide across a gap. One way they could have handled shrines would have been to give them a set order, as in you could enter any shrine and get the corresponding number of shrine to solve
If it was widely recognized that a lot of people arent hating on botw or totk simply as a barbaric, babyish cry at the sight of change, then a ton of healing will come to the zelda fanbase
From one perspective, swordplay doesn't have as many combos now. From another, now you can make your swords shoot bombs, fireballs, balls of lightning, gusts of wind and icy wind, you can make them slash or pierce or crush. You have SO much more you can do with swords now than you ever had in a Zelda game.
@@RSanchez111And what is gained from that, exactly? You could probably do that in gmod, 10 or so years ago, if you wanted to. I really don’t get that mentality. Preference is one thing, but how does weapon variety actually make the game better? Quantity =\= quality.
all the time I was playing totk I was thinking about how they were going to get out of this open world mess. Most of the people I know who like zelda wont play tokt because they are fed up with these type of games. Warcraft , Farcry 3 , Skyrim , fallout , FFXV , Witcher 3 , All the ass creed, Cyberpunk etc, Its just another shore for them. Just like you said I just Cant Imagine Zelda next gen at this point.
While there’s certainly value in embracing change, and examining how our willingness (or lack thereof) to do so affects our experiences, I think it’s a bit far to imply that the older style is obsolete, or lesser. BotW/TotK accomplish things the older games couldn’t, but fall short in areas those older games shone. A return to the old wouldn’t be a regression, but a shifting of focus. And just like this new style, returning to the old style wouldn’t have to be forever. And I do believe that if the will is there, Nintendo is capable of making a hybrid of the two that works. As important as it is to embrace the new, it’s just as important not to disregard the value of what came before.
He states in the video how he recently played all the old Zelda games and how they still hold up for what they are. That they are still worth playing and fulfilling the role of what they are supposed to do. While watching this video, no where do I believe he even implies that the older style is obsolete or lesser.
@@danielmontero9953 Its likely @Sonnance wasn't referring to KingK here but moreso alot of newer Zelda fans who, at least a good chunk of the ones I personally have interacted with, have kinda told me, with a straight face, that the older games are trash and BotW and TotK are what Zelda and should have always been. Granted these types are a minority and I know other newer players accept both the old and the new, its just a mindset thats abit too common unfortunately.
@@GinraiPrime666 If these types are a minority, and at the same time it should be pretty clear that KingK is not making such a claim in his video, then I believe the Sonnance should have made that clearer. I believe the vast majority of Zelda fans still value the old very, very much. I would totally look at those kinds of individuals you mention and ask them who the fuck they think are lol. I also have to mention that I do not believe I have ever seen any Zelda fan try to discredit the old. Based on my also only anecdotal evidence, I tend to find more people discussing BotW in comparison to the past. There's actually a good way to see what I mean, as we can find that here in the comment section of this very video. Despite what you say, this comment still feels like a response to KingK's video in general. I would give the benefit of the doubt, but I don't really believe there is a spot for that. KingK still mentions how valuable the old Zelda games are.
@@danielmontero9953 I don’t think KingK is trying to devalue traditional 3D Zeldas, and from what I’ve seen he seems to have a lot of love for them. My comment was more directed at two of the implications of his argument in this video (implications which may have been unintended, or that I may have misread): First, that the traditional Zelda style has been mined of all its potential, and so a Zelda game returning to it would only be a retread or regression. And second, and in turn, that the only way for the series to evolve is to leave that style, and its strengths, in the past and focus entirely on this new direction. I disagree with both of these, and think that the potential of the series would be severely hamstrung if they were to become the guiding philosophy going forward.
@@Sonnance I feel there are bits to what you mention about his video that KingK might also have strong feelings about or potentially even agree with. Perhaps he also really is making some of those points to a certain extent. The way I interpreted the video was someone who was coming to terms with BotW for what it is, rather than what it could have been. Probably also coming to terms with what the series will be going forward from here on out as well. There's a good reason the Wild games have sold incredibly well in the modern gaming landscape. Admittedly, this is a hard topic for me to discuss. The old 3D Zelda games are near and dear to my heart, but BotW is something else for me entirely (It also came out on my birthday.... yes, fine, I am extremely biased i guess hahaha). Since it's release I have always been comfortable with this new direction of Zelda in every facet. Definitely understand (to a degree) the problems a lot of people have with it though.
There really is something special about that first playthrough of BOTW that I don't quite think TOTK managed to match. BoTW became my favourite game fairly shortly after I finished it and it's the same with ToTK, it's now probably my favourite game. However it feels like something was missing I had an absolute blast playing it as it literally is a better BoTW in every way but BoTW just had this absolute magic to it during the time I played it that I don't think I'll ever forget.
I have a similar feeling towards BOTW compared to TOTK. And I think it's because BOTW with all the freedom it gave you, it also restricted you in a way that every achievement felt very satisfying. It made you proud every time you climbed a mountain. I remember reaching the top of Dueling Peaks and feeling like the best thing I've ever done in a videogame. But then you pick TOTK, you build a motorbike with two fans and ... ¡BOOM! You're on top of Hyrule Castle in two minutes. I felt too overpowered in TOTK to feel proud of my achievements... that's why I keep BOTW a little bit closer to my heart than TOTK.
I think it’s the vibe the world itself is giving off. In breath of the wild you explored a long dead kingdom, teeming with the ruins of once populated and lively settlements. In tears of the kingdom, the world is much more lively, with many of its residents actively working to bring it back to life. I actually do enjoy the distinction and think it necessary for totk to stand on its own. But as much fun as tears of the kingdoms recovering and lively world is- I think I preferred the quiet beauty the the ruins of this old kingdom gave in breath of the wild.
I remember being so eager for a new fresh experience, so taken in with change initially. I even went the extra mile and 100% BotW. But now, years later, thinking back. I can only think of it as ultimately being a unfulfilling and shallow experience that I have no interest in returning to. I've since played Skyward Sword for the first time in the Switch, and I am glad I waited until now. Its been a blast, and it has the Zelda charm that BotW and TotK lacked for me.
The other games are COMPLETELY different in gameplay from the these two.. I don't get why zelda fans cant just accept the two types of Zelda?? I could never play the old ones, I hated the game play.. Botw and tears of the kingdom works for me and LOTS of other people
@@sulex3491 it's way to early to know if this is how the games will be from now.. Tears of the kingdom started out as dlc that ballooned into a direct sequel.. Now they have already said they are working on the next one.. If THAT one is in the same style.. Then You can worry.. But I wouldn't be suprised if the next one goes back to a more traditional style.. And if they do I'll at least have two zelda games I can actually enjoy... I'm the same age as the franchise so I tried every single one growing up and for some of us those games are just so fucking boring.. I need the freedom of botw, with less focus on massive dungeons and just a bunch of smaller ones spread around
No, we can worry now because they spent so long on Tears and its engine they aren't just going ot throw it away. This is the status que for Zelda for the next few decades. @@mullaoslo
@@mullaoslo The original comment talks about a *balance* because it is okay to recognize that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are flawed in ways that the older games were not and that the newer games bring something new that the older games lack. There are lots of people the new games are for, and lots of people that the old games are for. To say fans should "just accept the two types of Zelda" when Nintendo hasn't even tried to marry the old with the new isn't helpful. Would you be happy if the next two Zelda games completely went back to the traditional style that you hate? Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom spans 11 years of development at least. We're probably gonna be waiting another 6 years before we get to see what the next iteration of Zelda will be. Can you see how disappointing that can be when Nintendo hasn't put the same kind of care in the story and dungeons like in past iterations?
I like your perspectives on this game- I felt about the same with most things you mention, especially the fact that the shrines kind of stand-in for the puzzle/exploration aspect of traditional dungeons the divine beasts lack. And yes, I was expecting an epic story that the trailer "appeared" to show off, only to find out it is scattered throughout the game world for you to find. While open world exploration is cool, there can be a balance found between telling a story while utilizing the game's expansive world to tell it. I only hope Nintendo finds a nice middle ground to take the series to next. Tears of the Kingdom was a decent move towards that direction.
Y'know. I respect the hell outta ya for doubling back on this review so many years later and taking a more...Well. "Artsy" approach, I suppose. We're similar in age by what I can gather, and this is something I've been working through, too. There's this "need" to finish content and COMPLETE the game. It reminded me of liking reading anything I could get my hands on in elementary school but always eyeing how far along the bookmark is to indicate I was getting close to finishing it, with very little regard for how much I actually genuinely enjoyed what I was reading. Completing it was the most important thing. Something I've tried doing more lately is "meeting games on their terms," or letting momentum sort of guide me. I've played games my whole life, I've got a knack for them I'd like to think, so I WILL complete it eventually. I definitely remember loving BOTW when it was new and I wasn't too concerned with doing every quest or every shrine or what had you. Eventually, the need to bring up that checklist arose, only for it to not be a "need" at all, but self inflicted desire to...Wring all the content possible out of something, I guess. Despite knowing ahead of time that Korok seed challenges are very easy and definitely not intended for you to do all of them or that side quests in BOTW really are SIDE quests. It's funny, too. Thinking back on the good dozen or so BOTW essays I must've watched at this point, all of them usually have a point for saying something along the lines of "it's great initially, when I was just doing stuff that I thought was fun and wasn't paying attention to what I felt I SHOULD be doing. Then I decided to make myself miserable for no reason."
I always hated Breath of the Wild, and like an idiot I let marketing and hype get to me and bought Tears of the Kingdom which is somehow worse. Getting up to the top of a digital mountain and slowly panning the camera around isn’t a substitute for a solid gameplay foundation and a dense world, two things BOTW lacks. Unless you consider korok seeds worthwhile content, that is. If I wanna gaze upon natural beauty I will go outside
Your mention of how the game is not to be taken as a checklist is what resonates the most with what I personally feel when someone tells me that breath of the wild is empty, or too overwhelming. The reason why it is my favourite video-game of all time resides mostly in the meditation that it puts you into, the ambiance, the landscapes, the music, the little ambient noises... It resonates just as much with your heart as it does with your brain, if not even more, and it is the first Zelda game to do it in such a way for me.
While I miss elements of the older 3d titles I don't need them to return. However there are plenty of things in the new formula I'd like to see adjusted on their own merits and I'd prefer the direction or solutions to be unique and not harkening back. The food system for health IMO the most notable and miserable aspect of the game. I'd also enjoy if enemy variety meant something more than their 3d models. For the smaller enemies that is, I think they did a fairly good job at improving bosses in TotK, but whenever I hear someone talking about all the various approaches to combat in these new games it just sounds convoluted for the sake of variety, I'd like the game to find more ways to encourage mixing up the ways each encounter goes. Just a couple of things off the top of my head.
It doesn't bother me that it changed, it bothers me that it's just like every other action adventure game out there. Zelda was different, now it's not. It was the removal of what made it special. I don't simply hate change for change's sake.
Change is good. Why do you hate change? When you order a pizza and open up the box to find old uncooked chicken thighs that's change! Think outside the box you square.
@Roflcrabs You keep responding to people with random non-sequitors, I assume in an attempt to mimic Botw/Totk fans, but I have seen practically nobody ever arguing the things you are implying. People like Botw/Totk and want to see more games like them. There's nothing wrong or weird about that.
I’ve spent hours in this game just cutting grass near Rito Village to collect hot footed frogs bc I like using hasty elixirs. But after awhile it just became relaxing. And I always had a blast doing it
I feel you and I had similar experiences, but went about it in different ways. I love structure and collecting things, so the way i went about things was collecting as many Korok and and shrines as i could before i even tackled the first dungeon. I event went about then weird and did the Ritos first and the Zoras last. But ultimately, my conclusion diverged from yours. Personally, i loved the shrine structure of segments solutions because i always felt another shrine later could expand on the concept, and many shrines held additional rewards behind a harder challenge, should the player choose to do so. My issues came with the issues all open worlds suffer, which is the transversal parts. Where it was kind of fun the first time, climbing regularly became tedious, and rain an absolute frustration. I also never could get over the weapons, despite how i tried. And ultimately concluded the game was not meant for me. Even coming back i just couldn't break my mindset, and really never got Tears of the Kingdom. This doesn't inherently make either game bad, but i personally, didn't like them. I still consider BotW a great game, and believe it deserves the praise it got, but I am satisfied to reserve myself to games I find more suited for me, and show others to enjoy a Zelda catered to them.
There absolutely is a way to provide balance to a story, to get both the freedom to do what we want, but to have a deep story. And Tears of the Kingdom is a little more of that. By all means, give players the chance to cheese their way through the whole thing, but provide a deep story for people who want to find it. I admit, the dungeons in TotK were not all to my taste - I like my dungeons to have extensive puzzles and I like them to have exploration that is tied to certain items. Having the new champions there to aid was nice, but they kinda felt like they themselves were the dungeon's treasure. I like having the ability to traverse spaces open as I'm playing, rather than it all be available from the start. I also think that TotK could have had more to it. The depths are missing a lot of detail - for example, the only people who seem to have dwelled in the depths are the Gorons and the Zonai - this seems a bit odd, because if anything, the one other race that could have done so is the Zora. The fact that there isn't an ability to explore the vast deep waters makes it feel like there's something missing. And there is. There's a lot of potential, but the capacity for it is sorely lacking. Personally, I'd have liked to have seen what became of all the old tech that was disposed of. Four giant mechanical beasts can't really just up and disappear when it's been shown that physically they are a lot sturdier than the buildings, and indeed the kingdom, they were built to protect. If Nintendo does what they usually do, and re-release the previous game on the next system, I'd like to see more of that connective tissue to the previous game, which for some reason, Aonuma decided to turf out. It would be really cool to see the ruins that those beasts had become, and maybe even include some of the still functioning guardians.
You would understand complaints elsewhere on the internet about "lack of change" and "they keep making the same game." That doesnt help. Contradictory statements all over the internet which each person being dictative. Breath of the Wild has its own fanbase that used to dox anyone that dared complain. Similar to Baldurs Gate 3 fans. There are just too many internet contradictions.
Point is, if Nintendo returns to classic Zelda, there will be internet riots all the same. Since BOTW has their own rabid fans on different UA-cam channels. Which is why Nintendo is better off ignoring internet comments.
a few days ago I read that they want a new direction for the next zelda game. I am happy about that like crazy. botw and totk are cool, but they lacked so much good old fashioned stuff and were more like physics simulators
I don't particularly enjoy the direction Zelda took, but it's not like it's my series to steer as I wish it. I suppose I am just a sucker for the more traditional format but now that Nintendo knows it can make gangbusters, I feel this is the foreseeable future for the series. At least people ARE enjoying it, better than none at all.
I made it half way through TotK before giving up. Why am I going to hike up all these mountains, sky islands, depths tunnels for a treasure chest with 5 arrows or a temporary sword? All the rewards for exploring are combat upgrades but its not a game about combat any more than OoT was.
I don't know much about Zelda, don't care for it much, yet I know that this is a video worth watching because it ends it's depressing paragraphs with the narrator yelling into the microphone and roasting me on something completely unrelated. I love how you keep finding ways to make your videos (and you) something worth listening to.
Botw was such a piece of art, many people hate the story but I think it was really great and emotional, however with totk I feel like that magic has gone and now the word of hyrule feels overwhelming, as a big zelda fan I don't like tears of the kingdom, It was really overwhelming and the story was really really bad, I never feel this way with a zelda title and now I want The Zelda team to find a great balance between the old 3d Zelda and the new formula, I don't want another Botw 2.0 please
The problem i have with BOTW is how it tells you it's story. It seems like it really wants to do a story structured like OoT, where you have the past and the future working together to tell an interesting story. In OoT you are a force within the story in the past. You were there as a player. In BOTW you, as a player, never interacted with a single thing in the past. You "lost your memories". If BOTW let us play through the past story and fail against ganon, it would make the events of the future feel like much more interesting and I might actually feel something when I see my old allies again as powers I can use.
It would be fine if these huge zelda games didn't take 6 years to make, we got majoras, wind waker, and twilight princess in roughly the time it took to develop TotK. Even the most ardent open world zelda fan has to admit that's not a good tradeoff at all
Game development across the industry takes far longer these days. Zelda isn't unique in that regard. Even if they ditched the open world, we would still likely be waiting 4 or more years between games. I would argue Zelda is actually making better use of that development time than most other games.
@amandaslough125 Keep in mind that the gap between Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword was also 5 years. Do you really think being open world is the only reason these games take so long?
And now we're risking waiting yet _another_ 5 years to see a third game in the "Era of the Wild" before we see a brand new game detached from the last 2 we've already played. Here's to hoping old fans will get "something" good in the close future.
I loved the video but I also have to say that part of the reason I loved it so much was the contrast between the solemnity of the narration and the "speaking of broken, your sleep schedule, amirite?" sponsor introduction 😂😂 thank you
Breath of the Wild, is the least amount of fun I've had with a Zelda -- Despite that, my first ten hours, were unlike any other experience I've had in gaming. My problem doesn't come from Breath of the Wild failing to meet the expectations I have for the series, the writing was on the wall, Zelda was going to change, it was said in every interview leading up to the game, that the conventions must be broken -- I knew this wouldn't be like the previous games, at the time: I was excited. I wanted to see what this new game would be. The problem is, what we got, was in my opinion, a game that only offers you a reward by playing it, if you want to play it. You can only climb a mountain once, before you realize that climbing the Mountain was the reward for doing so. You can only do so many shrines, before you don't have a reason to do them. You can only explore for so long, before exploration becomes a chore. When everything you find is nothing but more nothing, what's the point? _It was amazing, stepping into that world for the first time -- Wondering what I can find next._ But that wonder was soon replaced with apathy, as I realized that I'd be finding more of the same, often in a new coat of paint. More mountain tops, more trees, more Bokoblins. I've never played Wind Waker, and wanted to spend my time sailing across the sea -- I want to find something interesting, to be solving a fun puzzle, or be trapped around enemies that I hadn't seen before. With Breath of the Wild, the puzzles all feel the same, the enemy encounters never change. The story doesn't push me to move forward so I can see something new -- It's asking me to wander aimlessly until I feel ready to defeat the final boss. I never felt challenged by Breath of the Wild. The combat is bland, to the point that I never wanted to fight, and just avoided it entirely. The puzzles are simple, and the solutions feel fabricated rather than discovered. I don't need to think about _how_ I can get through a puzzle in the game, when I have a hundred options, I just need to chose the simplest one and be done. I enjoy combat in Elden Ring, not because I feel _rewarded_ by what the game offers, but because the combat itself is rewarding. You have to master it to get through the game, no brute forcing your way through a boss, you have to learn its patterns, and you have to understand your strengths. Zelda, is not about combat, not like the Souls games. And yet, I've never complained about combat in previous Zelda games, because the enemies felt like puzzles, parts of the world that you need to interact with to continue. In Breath of the Wild, I only want to avoid combat, to the point that I spent most of my original playthrough with neither a shield or sword equipped, I was just going to run past the enemies anyway, why bother keeping them on my back, making those clanging sound effects? Breath of the Wild, disappointed me not because I expected it to be like the old games, but because it was thanks to this game that I realized what it was about Zelda that made it my favorite franchise of all time, and Breath of the Wild, had _none of it._ It wasn't a game that I would ever be destined to enjoy -- And it took years of me trying to enjoy this game, coming back to it and becoming bored shortly after. I never felt compelled to complete the shrines, or look for Koroks, once the main story was over, I was done. I tried making new files, even on hard mode, only to realize I just didn't care anymore. I still replay Ocarina of Time every few months, and it isn't even my favorite Zelda. Yet I haven't touched Breath of the Wild since early 2019 when I tried making a new file, and honestly the thought of playing it ever again bores me. Tears of the Kingdom, evolved on Breath of the Wild in many ways. By the time I finished it, I am willing to call it my third favorite Zelda, just behind Twilight Princess. But, by the time I put down Tears of the Kingdom for the last time, only seeing about thirty percent of its content -- I was done. Not just with Tears of the Kingdom, but this style of Zelda. I made the claim that not even new DLC could bring me back, and still stand by that. I love Tears of the Kingdom, many of my problems with Breath of the Wild were fixed, I enjoyed the bosses, I enjoyed the story, I enjoyed the dungeons and even the shrines, I enjoyed exploring, I enjoyed the characters, the sky, the depths. But it was a game, that I know I can only enjoy once -- I won't try to pick it up again, like I did with Breath of the Wild. Every time I played Breath of the Wild after I'd considered myself done with that game, I found more reasons to _hate_ that game, not because it isn't Zelda, but because I just don't have fun with it. I'd rather preserve the memory I have of Tears of the Kingdom -- And accept that I won't find more enjoyment in it if I just force myself to see what else it has to offer. If the next Zelda game, is just another Breath of the Wild -- I won't play it. I don't care, if what we get returns to what _I_ love from Zelda anymore, in fact I know that it won't -- I've come to peace with that. What I want, is a game that defies expectations yet again, that I can play, and be surprised at every corner. I don't want to play another Breath of the Wild sequel, I want them to go in another new direction, because I truly don't believe that this formula can entertain me again. But, whatever the next Zelda game is, it probably won't be for me. _In the end, my disappointment doesn't come from Breath of the Wild failing to meet my expectations of the Zelda franchise,_ it comes from it failing to meet what I expected from _Breath of the Wild._ I wanted a world that was fun to explore, with enemies and bosses littered about, I expected to find dungeons all about, not pocket universes that have just a single puzzle or two. I expected to reach the top of a mountain, and see a world _littered with surprises,_ but that never happened. When I discovered what the game _was,_ all I could think about was what this game _wasn't._ And it wasn't, fun -- Not for me. Ultimately, the game I _wanted_ Breath of the Wild to be, ended up being realized by Elden Ring -- When that happened, I realized Zelda, _wouldn't be what I wanted it to be anymore._ It made me think about all the things I loved from the series, that were replaced by a hollow shell that doesn't matter to me. Tears of the Kingdom didn't become the game I wanted Breath of the Wild to be, it was a different experience, that I can't even accept that it shares the series namesake. It was fun, unlike Breath of the Wild. But I can't bring myself to call it Zelda, because what I enjoyed about Tears of the Kingdom, has not been in any other Zelda game in any capacity. Whenever I see this game again, all my disappointment comes back to me, and I can never not feel that. I will never be happy with the state of the series, not if it continues to release games like Breath of the Wild. But, by the time the next game releases, my frustrations will likely be replaced by apathy -- And in the end, that's all I can hope for -- To not care about Zelda anymore.
It is funny how different experiences can be for people. Unlike you, I grew up with 3D Zelda, Windwaker being my first one. Throughout my teens, I played all of them, and had somewhat of a gaming slumber during the Wii U times (I never owned a Wii U or a 3DS), where I moved to a larger city to study and had less time. Breath of the Wild was my gateway back into gaming and the Switch in general held that flame alive. I played Dark Souls, Hollow Knight and a whole bunch of indies, got a PS4 during the Corona times to play Bloodborne and the other souls games. I think Elden Ring stays behind Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne for me (It has some issues towards the last third of the game), but I think Tears of the Kingdom might be my favorite Zelda of all time. I recently started a replay of Skyward Sword a month after I've beaten Tears and it really cemented for me how stale the old 3D Zelda approach has actually become to me. You almost do nothing for the first 3 hours of the game! Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love those games and will come back to them from time to time, but I do think that the kind of evolution the Zelda series undertook is one of the best things that has ever happened to gaming. If Breath of the Wild had been another old-school 3D Zelda title, I believe Zelda could have become a niche series just like Metroid or Pikmin have been (until their recent releases). And I don't even want to think about a world where the Switch hadn't been the same raving success that it is right now.
@@georglehner407 I share much of OP's feelings on this. Despite its issues, I can say without a doubt I enjoyed Skyward Sword much more than BotW/TotK. The "old-school 3D Zelda" has always been my preferred "flavor" of Zelda if you will - I had fun with the 2D titles too but nothing else in the series holds a candle to OoT, TP, etc for me. If other people find it stale, that's not really surprising to me. Most of the games I enjoy are "stale"/niche games. I know well the feeling of series being mostly abandoned or changing into something I don't like. PMD hasn't seen a new entry in almost a decade (apart from a remake), Paper Mario got Sticker Star'd.
id like to see zelda return to a semi-linear story structure taking what they've learned from these last two games. if theres anything totk taught us, its that botw's story structure does not work with poor foundations.
It's funny that you mentioned the specific blue flame shrine. I had a very similar initial experience to it, entering without any arrows, but I was stubborn. I resolved to solve the shrine with only the torch I was provided. With some tricky timing, throwing the torch, and using stasis throughout the shrine, I was able to solve it. That still is my favorite experience from my entire playthrough of the game.
weirdly, BotW and TotK both shine when you don't have anything to your name. As you progress through the game, everything gets smoother because of your buildup of resources-as KingK eloquently put it, keys to locks meant to be picked-but also losing sort of some uniqueness. Everyone loves Eventide Island stripping you back to being vulnerable, but pretty much every puzzle in the game can feature an interesting set of solutions if you (admittedly) force yourself to take the dumbest path possible
@@nicocchiExactly why weapon durability is a necessary evil. If, in this example, arrows were an infinite resource once acquired, this shrine would have been completely uneventful to OP.
My reaction was oh thank god I can just skip this one cus wtf 😭
There was this one puzzle where you had to carry a block of ice up a path with flame throwers and flame walls in the way which would melt the ice and you would get through by using giant boxes as cover but the very last wall of fire I could not figure out how to get past. Hate using guides but I looked up a video and the guy just throws the ice block through the fire and that "solved" the puzzle.
Now realistically, yeah that makes sense a block of ice passing through fire for half a second wouldn't melt but after playing every Zelda game prior I assumed the ice would instantly melt in video game fashion because the goal was to find a way around it. Hard to explain but to basically to just brute force a puzzle felt very not Zelda. I thought the goal was "you have this thing, it can't touch this stuff and you have to get it there, figure it out." Felt like a super lazy puzzle. I miss the old Zeldas.
even when i don’t agree with things in your videos, they’re always phrased very well. i like that particularly in more recent ones, you’re more focused on expressing your point of view than being “right.” that’s the kind of approach i prefer. it helps to see where someone is coming from and why they feel the way they do. it’s like starting a conversation instead of trying to say everything yourself
This. This right here. I couldn't have disagreed more with his original stance on BOTW. I absolutely loved every second of that game, and I am loving every second of TOTK. But the fact that he stated it as," This is how I feel about it, this is what I thought about it," not," This is how it is," sold me. Alright, not everyone is going to have liked BOTW. That is just fine.
Agreed. His old videos were kinda just nitpicky and for lack of a better word, almost petty. But people ate that shit up.
Same. I honestly don't have much overlap as far as game tastes or whatever, but the presentation here is pretty well good enough for me to watch whenever something drops.
This video makes me rethink the problem I had with Super Mario Bros. Wonder. I thought the new artstyle feels out of place and not Mario, the wonder flower and wonder seed mechanic doesn’t contribute to the gameplay and definitely broke the spirit of 2D Mario. I expect it to polish 2D Mario to the modern era on par with games like DKC: Tropical Freeze but what we got is dramatically different
Agreed. Wonderful presentation on these vids. It made me watch them even though I found the old ones to be very negative. But the presentation is just top-notch.@@davemccombs
something i think could’ve improved Breath of The Wild is more dungeons, but instead of actual game-like dungeons, i mean more things like the forgotten temple, a place you go to and explore because of your interest in the location rather than because you were lead towards it
Totally. Since they seemingly wanted the game to feel more organic than the previous entries, it's pretty baffling they went with the most inorganic version of dungeons imaginable. They legit feel like Aperture Science made them. Tell me you can't imagine a Shrine starting with Cave Johnson on the intercom:
"Welcome, gentlemen, to Aperture Quest. Adventurers, heroes, elf boys in green tunics: you're here because the incarnation of evil itself once again looms over Hyrule. So, who's ready to earn some Spirit Orbs?"
YES!!!! The Forgotten Temple was one of the biggest disappointments of the game because there it was to discover, but it was just one or two really big rooms with Guardians in it. Finding that place was like burning the bush that covers the entrance to level 8 in the first game, except there was no dungeon there. That was a huge missed opportunity.
more? botw doesnt have any
Definitely appreciate the Zelda deep dives recently with all the discourse around the series post TOTK.
Weird thing is this feels like the most shinto-buddhist zelda game. From the very atmosphere to the design of the game. It felt very sublime in the sense that alot more dramatic and cinematic moments were more like passing scenes.
That's a big part of why this game feels to me like such a perfect follow up to Skyward Sword in a thematic sense. I'm not even that huge a fan of Skyward Sword, but the spiritual aspects of that game have always stuck with me in a profound way.
i do feel like it's not a bad idea to find a balance between new and old. after ocarina of time, we still got 2d zeldas on the handhelds, despite getting demoted to secondary releases. i don't know if that workload is nearly as comparable, but i could see the classic 3d zelda style getting a similar demotion, with nintendo releasing smaller-scale titles in between the big mainline releases. i wouldn't expect them to be nearly as big as something like twilight princess, maybe closer to the scale of majora's mask.
We need all three.
2D
3D
Open world.
They’re all great.
i've said this before, but i honestly don't think botw is gonna last, least not as the entire future of the franchise. not because of any fundamental flaws that means it can't, no; simply because that's not what nintendo does
and you've pointed it out yourself. even after oot blew everyone away and was a clear contender for the direction of the series going forward, nintendo never stopped making games in the style of a link to the past. hell, even well after a link to the past was by and large relegated to the archives of the series, they still made a _direct successor_ to it out of nowhere. mario's success was carried by games in the style of 64 for a long while, and then suddenly we got a new 2d platformer playing off the older games and suddenly that kept getting sequel after sequel, and then they made a game that tried to strike a middle ground by being 3d but maintaining the level design and progression of the 2d games and even _that_ got a sequel. kirby's branches are a lot more subtle and kinda hard to really comb through in a way that's meaningful for people who don't already know about 'em, but they've nonetheless halted and regrown and interwoven in the exact same ways
if nintendo wants to reinvent how their franchises go, they'll do it. if they look back and have new ideas for how they used to do things, they'll do it. botw in and of itself is evidence of that, as despite what people say about it, it _is_ a return to form of the very beginning of the franchise - it just takes a different direction with the structure, where instead of the world being a giant puzzle that you have to solve and streamlining it by cutting down on the openness and thus the potential to get stuck just trying to find the next step, the puzzle is cut down to an almost abstract degree so that it never interrupts nor looms over the sense of wonder and mystery drawn from exploring the fantastic world of hyrule. it's nintendo going back to the dna of the franchise, and seeing what happens when it's given a chance to evolve anew
and it clearly works. even if it's not universally loved, botw is clearly a successful branch of zelda. so many people adore it and wanted more and nintendo looked at what they've done and saw that there was still a lot more they could do with it. and thus, we got a direct sequel, built with all the experience and insight drawn from the creation of the first. and now ... i mean, there could be a third botw, i guess. it's kinda an open-ended design formula and one that doesn't really have to worry about feature creep all that much. but, like, does the team really have much more to add at this point? they've done their experiment and it worked and saw the chance to refine it further and it also worked, so i can't imagine there's much fuel for another game in the style. if anything, i'd imagine the team is absolutely _itching_ to take everything they've learned from making both games and see how they can apply it to the stuff botw's design didn't really allow for. i don't know how much the next zelda game will directly resemble the typical 2d or 3d zeldas we've grown to expect, but i fully imagine we won't see a full-on botw 3 for quite a long while
@@hi-i-am-atangreat perspective.
You nailed it with your OoT point: Nintendo don’t stick to a style for long. Judging by some people’s comments, you’d think the entirety of the franchise will be BotW sequels and only those.
No way. I don’t buy it. It’s just another (awesome) flavor of Zelda. It doesn’t mean you throw the other flavors away.
As a Zelda fan who grew up in the early 00s, I think this is what irks me about the franchise right now. BOTW by itself isnt a problem- it's a great game and I liked it enough to put over 100 hours into it. The issue is that pretty much all Zelda has been since 2015- the better part of a decade is solely BOTW, TOTK, and a handful of remasters. I'm used to there being more kinds of Zeldas, a constant flow of games in various styles, and now the only thing going on with the franchise is just this one radical departure. I don't mind the series changing...I wouldnt be a fan if the series didn't change from what it was at its root, but the era I'm from had something for everyone.
@@sgtdrfunk i think the main thing that's going on is just something you can eke out from the exact details of the recent releases. sure, on the surface, it's been nothing but botw and remasters, and tri force heroes, but two of those remasters are substantially more involved than they first sound. majora's mask 3d had a _lot_ more going on with it than either twilight princess or skyward sword hd, and the link's awakening remake is practically its own 2d zelda release with how much effort was put into it. meanwhile, it kinda goes without saying that both botw games were _major_ undertakings, and as such siphoned a lot of the major talent for a substantial amount of time
i mean obviously i can't claim to have any real certainty towards what's coming next, because i'm not even convinced if nintendo has that figured out yet. i just don't see anything substantial enough to see as the start of a trend, esp. since, when you get down to it? it's honestly been a p. solid few years of zelda for peeps who haven't already played all that games. remasters aren't the most exciting things, but it's hard to deny that fresh eyes have had quite the variety to acquaint themselves with zelda. and tri force heroes
I feel like Elden Ring proved that you can do Open World with big linear dungeons and so I disagree to give up on bringing that element back to the zelda franchise.
Those are just combat rushes, there are very few puzzles in them.
And the major boss areas are still quite open and exploitable so I really don’t know what you are talking about.
And from a game design standpoint, having a freedom obsessed world containing classic linear dungeons is extremely disruptive, it creates a dissonance within the design that didn’t need to be there.
It also proved you can do fantasy open world without your weapons exploding into fine powder after a few swings. In fact, ER removed durability entirely. And I've experimented with all sorts of weapons types, incantations, spells and craftable items, so it's not like destroying my weapons did anything special here.
Zelda is about 3 things in my view ;
-wonder/whimsy
- exploration
- environmental puzzles
Each game does these things to varying degrees but they all have these in common.
I look forward to them continuing to try to reinvent the experience.
I hope they go back to the classic formula it worked way better
The wonder/whimsy is what’s missing (to some degree) in BotW/TotK. They’re quite serious compared with the older ones.
@@Cuddlesworth220 Agree, it just feels like with BoTW... they "reinvented the wheel" but made it a square, fundamentally making it so its original usefulness is gone in the name of "innovation".
@Labyrinth1010 how tho? twilight princess and ocarina of time are so depressing and somber a lot of the time. they have their funny moments but they're very minimal and that's a good thing. wind waker is probably the one you're thinking about where the style of that game makes it to unique
oh and I forgot about majoras mask that one has got to be one of the most depressingly somber games I've played yet enjoyed it so so much
I think we could see dungeon items return and it wouldn't conflict with this new format. And there are 2 ways of doing this, one of which is already exemplified in totk
1. New areas aren't locked behind items, but rather items provide an alternate, easier or functionally different path to.
Totk has the zora armor which allows you to climb waterfalls. In botw this was an opportunistic shortcut to climbing, but in totk these waterfalls are found on their own without a cliff behind them. It would be possible to go up to anywhere these waterfalls are but it would be costly in zonai devices and charges. The zora armor now provides a faster, costless way to get somewhere you would probably avoid going otherwise. Tulin's gust also fits this to a degree
2. Items could unlock areas you would have no idea even existed before obtaining the item. Think the dominion rod statues in TP's overworld. Most of these look like simple set dressing. It isn't until after you move statues in the temple of time that youre tipped off to try it on these. Totk also plays with this idea though not through items but rather information. One can do the spirit temple first but only through progressing the story will you even know it exists.
Why can’t areas be locked behind access to an item? Why not? That’s what makes it fun. Realizing that this item gives me access to ______
small correction, i discoverd the spirit temple in totk while i was still doing the four regions, i got excited and wanted to start it but you cannot in fact do it early, you can just discover it
I definitely appreciate your point of view on this. Interestingly, I think my own experience of the game has followed a nearly opposite path to your own. When I first played the game, it felt to me like the best Zelda title I had ever experienced. I soaked in every view, reveled in the self-directed discovery, and fell in love with the environment and how much creativity I was allowed to explore it.
As time has gone on though, I have felt the least desire to replay it out of any of the games prior. And I think it is actually NOT because of all the bells and whistles of the previous games. Rather, it was more WHY the previous games were meaningful to me as a child.
I did not grow up in a particularly emotionally safe environment, as I'm sure many can relate to. My own experience of reality felt like something I had to bottle up inside so as not to shake the reality of my family. I spent hundreds of hours maladaptively daydreaming, imagining that I would get whisked away to Hyrule and get to experience being Link for myself. And I definitely could not have articulated why at the time. Was it the dungeons? No, when looked at objectively the dungeons of twilight princess and ocarina of time would be painful, frustrating, and highly dangerous experiences if a real person had to go through them. (In fact, although I missed the larger dungeon experience in BotW, the dungeons were strangely sometimes my least favorite part of classic Zelda games). Was it the spectacle of story? Maybe to some extent, and I may have said that was it at the time, but on further reflection I can't help but doubt that was what I was truly after.
No, I suspect it was because I was crushingly lonely. I'll take Twilight Princess in particular, as it probably stands out as the game that had the largest emotional impact on me. In TP, there is always someone with you, through every arduous and terrifying experience, who could (theoretically) verify everything you experienced. And even besides Midna herself, there are many characters in the game who truly see Link, and even through their gratitude seem to hold some space for the tragedy of how much Link has to sacrifice in his own life to fight for change. Rusl, Renaldo, The Hero's Shade, and Telma and her cat come to mind. There were children who looked up to you, and who I genuinely came to care about, such that when they were endangered my motivation was fully intrinsic to GO SAVE THEM AND GET THEM OUT OF DANGER! And as time passed in the game, and your actions led to changes within the world, so to did your relationships with these characters. And especially in Midna's case, it was not a 1-step process. Her relationship to you changed very gradually across the course of the entire game, going from being a begrudging and spiteful ally to being a true friend. Their separation at the end of the game breaks my heart every time in a way that I don't think books or movies will ever quite be able to touch.
In contrast, in BotW I am left feeling that crushing loneliness, rather than mitigated, amplified. Everything Link experiences, he experiences alone. Anyone he could have truly considered a friend died 100 years ago, and the most we can interact with them is through scattered, disorganized memories and disembodied commanding voices. Of the new people Link meets, through the design of the game, none of them get close to having a full picture of understanding Link's experiences, and there is no room for ongoing development of relationship. You either don't know them yet, or you've just met and they don't trust you yet, or you've done the one thing for them that the game has scripted for you to do and then you're in a state of friendly stasis with them for the rest of the game. Granted, the old Zelda games would run into this same stasis problem eventually in the latter third-to-quarter of the runtime, but it was never quite so instantaneous as it is in BotW. My experience of the beautiful landscape and near-infinite creative potential of BotW reflects my experience of my own life, in that no beautiful view can counter the desolation of isolation.
To be clear, I'm not trying to convince anyone to change their mind on BotW. I'm genuinely glad that people are still finding the enjoyment in the game that I got to experience for a limited time when I first got to know it. Rather, I just wanted to make sure that, as one of the people most disappointed by the title today, that my disappointment is not misconstrued as simply missing a railroad track experience, pretty songs, and a gameplay formula. What I lost in the new iteration of Zelda goes much deeper than that. The old Zelda formula was a tool for me to manage my own trauma, and the new formula is not a tool shaped so that I can use it like that anymore, to the point where I've felt no urge to pick up Tears of the Kingdom at all, much to my own chagrin. Yes, the old games will always exist, but I've played them so many times that I see the stasis coming too far in advance of when it actually arrives.
I'm not saying my expectations of these games are fair, either. Clearly, a videogame cannot take the place of therapy and of finding a loving and caring community to be a part of. (I'm in the first, but still working on the second). I'm more just hoping for more understanding from the broader zelda community that it would be equally unreasonable to expect me to be able to just take a deep breath and move on from what's been lost, and that what's been lost might be more loss than I can accept to continue forward as an active fan of the series. And even though it's nobody's fault, and it is a natural part of change, it still massively sucks, and is a tragedy. Which I guess ironically means it still holds the spirit of zelda for me. What's more thematically consistent with Zelda than victory marred by tragedy for the people who fought hardest for it?
Anyway, I love your work KingK, thank you for this very thoughtful and beautiful video about a very beautiful game.
Hey, thanks for sharing your experiences and your thoughts on BotW! I wanted to comment and let you know I played Tears of the Kingdom and actually think Link has a lot more allies/companions and is a lot less lonely in this game. Maybe it's not like past 3D Zeldas where there was Navi/Midna/Tatl always at your side, but in this game Link has a LOT more recognition. All characters from previous games recognize Link and chat with him like Robbie, Purah, Sidon, Riju, Teba, Yunobo, the Tarrey Town people. But in addition, there are a lot of NPCs who recognize Link as the hero that saved them from Calamity Ganon, and Link is known and respected as a highly-competent and capable warrior by all the soldiers. Without spoilers, certain individuals assist a lot more in Tears of the Kingdom and feel like they're with you more than the champions did in BotW. So I would recommend giving Tears of the Kingdom a shot! I personally wasn't a big fan of how no one knew Link in BotW but I felt that was well addressed in Tears of the Kingdom.
I have to disagree with the premise in your intro. Ideas don’t have a shelf life, they don’t die out naturally, they are snuffed out or killed.
The idea of old paper Mario is still alive that’s why we are getting a paper Mario 2 remaster. The desire old final fantasy still alive, that’s why so many people were upset with FF7 remake. The desire for old Tetris is very much alive and still being fulfilled. The idea can’t die unless the desire is. And we also get fan games like Bug Fables. The idea of 2D metriod has been alive and well for the decade and a half it took metriod dread to come out and was filled by stuff like shovel knight and Hollow knight. Ideas don’t die until everyone who holds them dear has died and failed to pass them on. The idea of old 3D Zelda is absolutely not dead and absolutely doesn’t have a shelf life.
Agreed. Just because Skyward Sword wasn't a masterpiece all a sudden a beloved best selling franchise needs to completely scrap everything and change because.. why? Skyward Sword was almost a good game. Had great characters, a fun story, great dungeons and bosses. It was just the clunky controls and recycled maps and that dumb repetitive boss fight with the toes that wasn't great.
@@Roflcrabs
I’d argue Skyward Sword was a good game. A great story and great characters. Really good dungeons. It’s just some of the controls and items feel short. And repeating bosses was a big bummer. Still a great Zelda game imo, but it’s problems are way bigger than Windwaker’s Triforce quest and Twilight Princess’s tears of light.
@@princestarfy4098oh I meant to say Skyward Sword is good and it could have been great. Just needed to ditch the motion controls or at least have the option to not use it, and add a few new areas instead of reusing old ones. Better controls and add flesh out the world a little, it felt small. Besides that it could have been a 9 or 10/10. Still enjoyed what we got but it felt rushed.
@@Roflcrabs absolutely could be a 9/10 if it wasn’t for the clunky motion controls. The story is the best in the series imo and it has some of the best dungeons. TP used to be my least favorite Zelda game then I played the TP HD without motion controls, and it became my second favorite Zelda. But I feel like a lot of bosses in SS, and especially the mini bosses, would be very boring. I think they would have to do some work to make it enjoyable.
Hard disagree. Its clear the zelda team werent sure were to go after Skyward Sword. And they idea to do something different from 3D classic zelda, to go back to the first game, clearly came from their understanding that moving this series forward requires change, and not just the same games over and over again.
I don't understand how I never really got into BOTW. I barely ever made it through the opening shrines before losing interest. Then with TOTK, I felt a need to push on through the opening shrines. And then once I reached the surface, I was completely enamored. I had never played a game like that where if you saw someone you liked, you could just go there. I got lost for hours on end doing nothing in particular. I had never had an experience like that before, it made me feel like a kid with the childlike wonder leading wherever the wind blew. Heck I'm on my second playthrough now experiencing a lot of the places I missed the first time around. I was pretty scared of the depths and actively avoided going there 😅
Considering how BOTW laid out that groundwork I really feel like I missed out. I don't even know if I could go back and try to play it again considering that all the comparisons that have been made really make it look like TOTK upgraded nearly every aspect.
TOTK is an improved video game on every single level of its design.
I had similar issues with Botw, and they persisted in totk. If we had more temples and potentially more cutscenes, I'd potentially enjoy it more. Oh, and I really want some weapons to be undestroyable, I worked hard on getting the Gerudo sword quest done only to tuck it away and never use it (since it will break eventually).
@@hayalmatnu9919you do realize you can just go to octoroks and have the durability back to what is was once you first got it right?
@ 21:31 -- Breath of the Wild is a game you can play however you want... As long as you play it however you want *in the right way*. This defense always bothers me whenever it comes up.
I didn't realize that the problem people had with the fact that the shrines all look the same was that it goes against tradition. I always thought it was because they were visually repetitive and boring!
Peanut gallery snark aside, I feel like a lot of the criticism around the Breath of the Wild duology originates from the games just giving you a lot of foot-guns to bore yourself to death with. The whole passage about meditation feels like a tacit admission that there's just not enough going on in the game moment-to-moment to keep your mind engaged, so you end up daydreaming. Daydreaming can be alright, but it's not exactly what I'd call "thrilling entertainment", and certainly not "invigorating art". It's merely... Nice.
I'm not gonna pretend like Breath of the Wild and neo-Zelda in general is entirely without merit, but I cannot understand the overall reluctance to just "own" your original criticism. This feels more like it's originating from guilt over being an "older" fan (i.e. not wanting to imply that you feel like the series "owes" you anything, for lack of a better term) than from any place of reason.
If that's the case, I can understand, because I feel that same reluctance. However, after going back and revisiting some of the older entries in the series following Tears of the Kingdom, I strongly feel that Zelda used to be, just, on a whole other level (particularly during the years Aonuma was still working as a director). That is most certainly-- *probably*-- not just the nostalgia talking-- there really is something markedly different about those games in conception and design philosophy. Maybe. Probably. At the very least, they are all much more tightly-paced.
The Breath of the Wild games are fine, but I find them to be, creatively, very conservative, and overall just pretty uninteresting as a result. This series used to be way weirder! Remember Tingle? We'd never get something as strange as Tingle in the new games! I feel like that's what people want when they call for a return to form more than anything-- not necessarily a *literal* regression, although some may articulate it as such, but just a restoration of the old vibrancy and general "weirdness"-- the inspired spark that ran through the series during that golden middle era. There's still a little bit of that in the new games, but it's pretty diluted and hard to find, which is persistently my greatest disappointment with them.
I know exactly where you're coming from. It's almost as if the smaller scope allowed them to put more thought and consideration into crafting unique and tailored environments, locales, characters, items, etc. The art style of Majora's Mask alone feels more inspired than the latest offerings. Not sure how to properly word this but Zelda needs more imaginative themes, settings, and aesthetics. Something that gives it a distinct personality and compelling atmosphere. BOTW/TOTK isn't bad in this regard but it definitely feels safe compared to previous entries.
Hudson's pretty weird. Other than that, I think just moving out of hyrule into new locales would be a stellar move on the devs' part, especially since we know this new approach sells--they shouldn't be afraid to mix up asthetics.
Open world Zelda was fun for a change, but when the games set a linear path, it let the devs craft more detail in the experiences you would have, since they were scripted and the devs could plan exactly what you would see, engage with, and predict what you’d try to do in a given situation. When you have limitless options, the devs can’t cater to each and every thing you may try the same way
on the flip side when it becomes scripted and pre-determined it can also limit replayability and experimentation. a good balance would be to allow some options where players can improvise but at the same time have boundaries. figuring out that some item or ability interactions to solve a challenge in an unintuitive way (as long as no cheesing is involved) can feel very satisfying. the problem is that botw and tears allow short cuts where you can skip the challenges making them pointless. i have to go on self imposed runs which can give a frustrating experience to not break the game because of how easy it is to gain access to a savage lynel bow or how the paraglider trivializes vertical exploration but at the consequence of finnicky, yet treacherous and tedious climbing down walls. the first zelda did have boundaries and limitations despites its simplistic nature and copy paste level design, but one thing that helped was that it was not obscenely massive and did not treat each square as its own but rather part of an interconnected whole (dungeons may have been sloppy but they had a foundation for its time that was not bad). botw and tears however really dropped the ball by taking concepts that felt like showcases or just simply regressing to a form on a much larger scale while stripping those boundaries. i am for an open world zelda, but it needs to be handled properly and the previous 2 entries sadly failed to deliver that experience for me.
Different strokes for different folks.
There is also a ton of value in letting the player do whatever they want and go wherever they want. It becomes THEIR adventure.
@@juantsu2000 that is one thing i will give credit to how it is designed. it makes players go on a self imposed run however i do think it could have done more in terms of substance instead of feeling so repetitive with low enemy variety and copy paste level design.
@@juantsu2000That’s not an argument though. If ”THEIR adventure” just mean ”implement no game-design what so ever”, then why even make a game?
Hell, considering how empty these two latest games are, why not just slap a ”sandbox” onto a normal game, where the people who prefer to play non-games can mess around?
@@juantsu2000 I don't want it to by MY adventure. There's a lot of value also in letting it be Link's adventure that I'm following and guiding him through.
this was nice to watch, seeing how you phrase that playing a game as a checklist leads to burnout hit me really hard. I can see why I haven't finshed alot of new games recently (Stardew valley,A wonderful life,and Tears of the Kingdom) I only saw them as things to do and finsh 100%.
Great video!
I love BotW, but I didn't enjoy TotK after finding all shrines, mapping everything, and finishing the game.
The problem I had with it was that it didn't feel like a new game. Shrines, koroks, champions, memories, straight to Ganon, an aversion to linerity... we've seen this before, and it felt more like remake or BotW+. I felt like I was punished for putting in so much time in BotW.
I understand why people love this game, but my experience was like playing DLC after fatigue from a game I've been playing for 6 years. After 6 years, I would of liked some more significant changes with what TotK became, as it seems intrinsically tied to BotW with very little identity of it's own
And we paid more for it... 😒
In what way were you punished for playing BotW lol that’s copium to the max. You’re rewarded so often for having played BotW. The game is 1) a direct sequel 2) all important characters to link remember him and what he did last game 3) environments and locations you know to a T from the last game have twists built on your knowledge of the last game making them more engaging and interesting than they were in the previous game.
There is no conceivable way a human being with a functioning brain came out of breath of the Wild and was mad at Tears for being better 😂
@@chrisej5987it’s worth the money you simple Jack
@@SecretFantasyConsole I don't think TotK is better. You can go anywhere and choose your own path, but who cares? It's a larger yet emptier experience for me with a world that seems more awkward because the map was built for BotW. It introduces more padding and more tedium without adding anything truly distinctive. Ancient tech, shrines, four areas of interest with champion centric narratives, a straight to Ganon option, koroks, a great plateau of sorts... I mean, could go on
I'm not going to try to convince you of anything. If you like the game, that's great. To me it just maintains a standard I've already had enough of, and to me it just feels like a reimagining of BotW rather than a new game. Mind you, I've put close to 300 hours trying to discover the new
The sequel argument is also pretty tired... I don't know what to tell you... I believe that for a series that redifines its experience with every new entry (even with sequels) this one lacked imagination and felt like a giant copy/paste job. They practically copy/pasted cutscenes. But who cares if you had a good time? These are just my experiences and opinions
@@Ophmar4stop licking paint that’s a LOT of absolute nonsense
I think you're definitely correct botw is a game where it's better to appreciate it on it's own terms or else you get sick of it but I think the big problem of this game is that it's impossible to know when to stop on your first playthrough, so you spend a lot of time in menu's and out looking for ways to continue progressing instead of casually playing the game. So the lack of big end game challenges outside of hyrule castle feels like a suckerpunch
BotW and TotK are kind of frustrating as they are the definition of ocean wide puddle deep. Even with the huge improvement in the amount of content in TotK I can't help but feel how repetitive that game gets when I'm in the latter part of my playthrough when I'm just completing everything. Though at the same time the beginning of every playthrough I've had of BotW and the one playthrough I've had of TotK I couldn't help but have fun exploring the worlds of these games and initially filling out the map for the first half of my playthrough.
Heck the Depths was such a genius inclusion in TotK that I rarely if ever got bored exploring them even when I got in that completionist mindset in the latter half of my playthrough. I think what helped a lot with that was Zonaite and Pos because there was an incentive to attack Bokoblin camps and go out of my way to collect Po souls. To be very honest the reason why these work is probably the same reason why item pickups work in the Xenoblade series. Yes a lot of those pickups were pointless, but I think there's some reptile part of my brain that just finds following a breadcrumb trail of item pickups as I'm going towards my destination satisfying.
What's really frustrating to me is that Xenoblade X was so much more fun to explore than these 2 games and it's basically a prototype for them. I think what made that game better for that was that there were high level areas where you would get wrecked if you weren't careful. Not to mention story progression and beating the game were locked behind filling out a certain amount of the map as well as doing some quests. Granted I think it was frustrating to want to move on with the story and being told "Oh you need to fill out 50% of Oblivia's map" when I only had 10% of it filled out, but that gave me way more of a reason to explore that area of the game than BotW and TotK's the world is your oyster approach.
I think if they're going to continue with this approach they need to gate progression to some extent and drop being able to beat the final boss from the start if the player wants to. The fact that you can go anywhere from the start means that every area has to be at the same level of difficulty instead of there being a sense of difficulty progression between the areas. Make it so some areas have enemies that hit really hard and that requires you to upgrade your armor or for you to git gud at the combat. Also have some areas inaccessible unless you have a particular item or skill. I think a big problem with the current formula is the removal of the Metroidvania like elements and it would be nice to reincorporate them into this formula. Also instead of 150 shrines have 20 to 30 dungeons that expand upon certain concepts, puzzles, or abilities. I think the dungeons in TotK were a step up from the Divine Beasts, but they were still fairly shallow compared to dungeons you'd see in previous games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword.
@29:15 - Oooooh I diametrically disagree with everything you’re about to say;
BotW enemy encounters are cool until about 1/3rd-1/2 way through, then they become nuisances that are best left avoided at all costs.
They take more resources from you than they give, they usually devolve into bomb-spam just to keep your good gear intact, and no chest ever offers you anything better than what you’re currently carrying. Ever. The amount of times I break some multishot 15x3 bow just to find a travelers bow that does basically no damage…?
There’s quite literally no reason to enter an enemy camp at that point, because the rewards are worse than the resources lost. No reason exists to engage with any enemies, unless you specifically hunting for armor upgrades. Chests don’t scale with you. Enemy gear doesn’t scale with you. They just get progressively more HP while using “soldier” level equipment.
BotW VERY quickly becomes “how little BotW can you play while still enjoying yourself” and that’s my biggest gripe with every open world game.
The novelty wears off, and that’s that. Once that’s gone, it’s gone.
Traditional Zelda’s might have a consistent formula, but it works for a reason. That reason, IMO, is that the gameplay loop is less about resource management, and more about the obstacle. BotW is more about resource management and less about the obstacle.
900 korok puzzles but they’re all the same things over and over again. Yeah, sure, instead of playing a minigame where you shoot targets, now the minigame is a bunch of balloons you gotta destroy from a stump. And sure, in the past that minigame let’s you win a bigger quiver or something and upgrade your inventory, whereas now you upgrade your available inventory slots…
Being able to hold an extra bow for 15 korok puzzles is kinda cool, but it feels like less of an upgrade because the bows are the real consumables now. The slot just lets me hold more breakables, not stretch my capabilities.
I would honestly rather have a mid-grade weapon or bow that never breaks be a mid-late game unlockable item than get more weapon slots for breakable temporary everything.
The combat in BotW and TotK is the single most dissatisfying experience in each of those games and nothing you are about to say will change my mind. Period.
Also I love you and you’re like my top 5 favorite youtube channels of all time, so I ain’t mad at ya I swear 😅
I don't know how else you feel about the game but I've gone on massive tangents on how frustrating the game is. Could spend paragraphs on one specific tangent. I agree the first few hours are great but once everything starts to repeat the magic dies. Objectively it's a competent game but as a Zelda fan I hate it.
Like an idiot I'm playing through Totk because I want to complete every Zelda game (even though it isn't a Zelda game) mostly out of morbid curiosity to see what a Botw sequel would look like. Anyways I'm playing Totk and I avoid most fights like the plague, especially moblin camps because like you said the juice is never worth the squeeze and it's disturbing how there are people out there who played Botw and then went to Totk and were still like "oh boy! Moblin camps!"
I think it did break some things, but if we look at Kintsugi, broken things can become more than they were to start. I don't think it needs to be frankensteined, I think the new and old can be merged to make something better. There is a balance to strike between "total unlimited freedom" and "LoZ: Hallway of Fate". I have never quite meshed with the idea that you get all the powers to start and don't develop. I genuinely find that is the biggest harm done to the gameplay for me. I adore finding a thing and going "WTF is this!? What am I supposed to do!?" and then finding a new tool later to handle it.
I think breaking the idea of "go anywhere do anything" as fundamental good is the next break I wanna see. Limitations can be fun and interesting if done well. Go anywhere do anything can make the game feel flat and aimless for me, so I think it'd be neat to see that be a level of change and breaking norms.
That ending was exactly what I felt after spending over 200hrs combined between WiiU and Switch BotW...and not even getting to Kakariko Village in either version.
This New Zelda format isn't for me, and that's OK. I've accepted it and moved on. Not every video game or experince in life needs to made, just for me and my tastes.
Video games are some what unique; if I crave an old emotion, I can go back and play a game again. Granted I'll have knowledge on beating said game but sometimes, playing a game itself is more than finishing a game.
I made it to Kakariko Village and stopped when Impa told me to go and take pictures around the world. I was so bored that I couldn't continue further.
I don't think that its ok cus i think these are badly designed games and a lot people who like them haven't actually played another zelda game, look at the switch install base compared to other systems that had zelda games on them also the time from skyward sword to botw. You see people comment all the time about botw being their first zelda game; they don't know any better.
@@zacharybecker8228 That's a very good point. A large portion of BotW players are new to Zelda and it could be their first title in the series.
Whilst the game being good or bad is subjective, the only positive outcome I can really think of; on the Switch itself, there's a decent selection of older Zelda titles available. Granted, most require a subscription to NSO/NSO+Expansion, but they are available to new and old fans alike. The back catalogue could be better for sure.
I hope newer fans take the opportunity to play the older Zelda games. Many probably won't, and they'll be the ones to miss out.
Nintendo will very likely stick with this newer format, as it's popular amongst many and most importantly to them, it sells very well. Maybe going forward more, of the classic Zelda tropes we adore come back. Perhaps, we can live in a world where we get this new BotW format Zelda, and a traditional Zelda game too. That's what I personally would want.
@@zacharybecker8228 I've played nearly every single zelda game and love nearly every single one of them, including BOTW. This "argument" is presumptuous at best and insulting at worst.
My biggest “problem” with breath and tears is that the storyline suffers. Link serves as a blank slate for the player and doesn’t engage them in any sort of character arc. Perhaps it would have been too hard with too many branching paths but it would have been neat if link’s character changed depending how and what you do. Maybe if you play link as someone who helps everyone his dialogue changes to being more compassionate. Or maybe if you only fight more of the overworld bosses your dialogue choices and responses are more aggressive. I think the biggest unexplored territory in the legend of Zelda is the ability to engage in what exactly link’s character is.
One of the reasons I loved windwaker was how link was not a hero of prophecy but had to prove his courage. It’s a coming of age story. You literally start the game on links birthday
Link gets characterized in the original Japanese in the journal. This is completely lost in the English localization.
I know that this was true for BOTW, is it still true for TOTK?@@UltimateTobi
@@faith.W It is.
@@UltimateTobi wow. Thats really disappointing. I am playing the german version and its the same as the english one
@@UltimateTobi it’s one thing if it’s text it’s another if it’s in the dialogue and story. That’s more what I would want. I know a lot of people think link having a voice would end up with “excuse me princess “ but if link was written well I think him having dialogue could work
Most times I would solve a shrine puzzle in BotW or TotK, I would watch a solution video afterward to see what the "common" solution was. One of the funnest parts of these games was how many times I would watch that UA-cam solution after the fact and think, "I'm not sure if I'm really smart or really stupid."
In Botw there was this one puzzle with an elaborate winding raised platform with fans around it you had to rotate which would guide a ball along the path into a hole which would raise a platform off in the distance. Basically you had to put the ball on a path being blown along by fans and you'd run to the rising platform before the ball gets to its destination.
Thing is there's a big bowl shape roughly 2 meters in diameter around the hole to guide the ball into place. On my first playthrough without even thinking I went straight to the hole, threw the ball into place, understood it raised the platform, took it out, placed it on the lip of the bowl, hit stasis on it locking it in place, ran to the platform, the stasis ability wore off and the ball rolled into place, the platform went up and that was it, the shrine was complete. All this in under a minute. This all happened at launch in my first few hours of the game and though I was enjoying it this was a big red flag. Zelda puzzles shouldn't be so easy to cheese. I didn't like the game by the end and this moment was a huge blow. It felt wrong, dirty and unearned. I wasn't trying to be cheap I was just experimenting and using the tools at my disposal. I assumed that was the first part of the puzzle but then the monk guy was already putting a spirit orb in my face.
I generally like your videos but I'm going to have to disagree with the framing of why people disklile aspects of botw. I understand it's idyllic to look at botw without any expectations but in practice i don't think thats entirely reasonable. The series has built up over 30 yrs of expectations and expecting people not to walk away disappointed with neutered verisons of what we had before is akin to going to a restaurant you've been a regular at for 30yrs and being fine with them altering all of your favorite dishes.
I generally do like the new zelda formula but i am hoping for more classic elements to return
I’m very excited for this. I’m glad you’re taking your time with these, every video is beginning to look more and more polished! Keep it up King ❤️
Only problem I had was the story. Twilight Princess's story and characters will never leave my mind.
Darksiders II is a great “traditional” Zelda style game with its own unique elements, story, & gameplay mechanics. For those who are looking for that type of experience I would play that game. Although, I too hope that the main Zelda series keeps evolving how ever the developers see fit to do that.
The Depths in TotK is basically the Darksiders II overworld built underneath the main world
I think the point you made at 23:22 was the reason I enjoyed BoTW a lot more compared to ToTK. When it became apparent that ToTK would play out more or less the same as BoTW, coupled with the lack of novel discovery as a result of treading the same world - the experience just became a letdown compared to its predecessor
I was told I was crazy for feeling that way when TOTK came out 😅
I think TOTK overdid it a bit. I think it was a fun game, I sure put a lot of time on it, but... it's not a game I will ever play again. The build anything motif was cool on paper, but 100% of everything I built was made of at most like 10 objects because while I am creative, I am not inventive. On top of that, the game was trying to do too much with its controls and even after 100 hours it was hard to not fumble with the controls. Specially if you're playing any other video game alongside it.
I don't hate the open world Zelda style, I like exploring and getting lost in the world, but that only goes so far. I do prefer the old style of 3d Zelda games. I didn't consider them broken. I love cool dungeons and wacky items.
I agree, TOTK is great but aside of the sky islands, the wow factor of BOWT is missing
Good video KingK. Honestly, I get your perspective, and I see we have a common ground at the end there. It's weird because I do like both TotK and BotW, and I think they are by far the only open world games I've been able to get into (maybe because they're Zelda idunno.)
But as someone that was raised on Ocarina, Majora, Twilight Princess, etc in all of my formative years, these games are really important to me, so I feel that disappointment HARD.
Especially when series like Golden Sun died, Sonic long veered away from my tastes, etc.
I'm personally not really a fan of series that make RADICAL shifts like this, and Zelda avoided it for a long time, so guess I can be grateful for that.
I do think the devs have the right to make whatever they want, and clearly this resonates way more with a broad modern audience.
I just hope we at least get more 2D games like Link Between Worlds because I ADORED that game's approach to an open structure.
But yeah I'll probably play newer Zelda games but I have no expectations for them to be among my favorite games anymore.
I never had an issue with weapon durability, it always gave it a good challenge. The raining when climbing issue though, while ok at first, it quickly got annoying. At least now they have the frog suit.
ikr... People HATE weapon durability because they don't treat weapons as they are. They're _consumable resources_ that you can easily get more of. I think the main source of frustration for people is they think of the weapons as they are in other games, as permanent upgrades, when the ones in Botw and Totk simply aren't meant to be treated that way.
I remember as a kid the first time I went to a friends house. His family had a large property and they gave us permission to fully explore the land. My parents were somewhat restrictive and never let me adventure much so I never got to really roam the woods as much as I'd like. My friend took me to one of his favorite spots in the forest where he'd lounge about, find sticks that resembled swords and fight invisible ninjas. That's also where I saw a stream with flowing drinkable water clear as glass for the first time. The sun was shining throught the trees and its light was beaming off the ripples in the water. I was enthralled by the beauty of it all. So much in fact that I picked pebbles out of the stream for hours and kept a few to bring home with me simply because i believed they had "magical properties". I was 8 years old and now Im in my late 20s. That moment makes a boring tale to say the least and wasnt particularly interesting to most people, but I still remember that day simply because I was just there experiencing it.
Yeah...thats what Zelda is supposed to emulate, and thats what Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are trying to achieve. I have hope that they can get better in future titles because of course they arent without their flaws, but hey that doesnt stop me from climbing my 500th mountain just to see the vista or riding on Dinraals head for 2 hours to cook in my Zonai "easy-bake oven" just cause I can. Eventually I have hope the team behind Zelda will bring a satisfying experience to most players that include this philosophy along with the intricate dungeon and level design we all love from the games before it. When they do crack that code, it will certainly be legendary...
Breath of the Wild really feels to me like an attempt by Nintendo to reignite Zelda's prestige in the video game industry. From 1986-1998 Zelda was one of the most influential video game series, boldly leading by example for how action-adventure games should be made. But throughout the 2000s to 2010s that influence faded as other developers became the new standard bearers and Zelda just became one of many critically acclaimed legacy series. As much as I love Twilight Princess and Wind Waker the fact is that outside of the Nintendo faithful they didn't make that big an impact on the gaming industry at large. And when you're Nintendo who is in the market of selling not just games but consoles you need your flagship series to be more than that.
I'm honestly more optimistic that we'll one day get a linear Zelda game again. Open world is the current fad everyone is chasing but it will eventually die down when the market has grown tired of them and wants a more story-focused Zelda game again.
Open world versions of existing games was very much a fad. Imagine if Zelda had gone with the battle royale lol. (I would actually like that, I enjoy battle royales)
@@whoknows4780 Well after F-Zero 99, The Legend of Zelda 99 doesn't seem all that unlikely.
Sure Zelda was formulaic, but it's also pretty much always been the single video game series with that formula. What's sad is not only for Zelda to change but for it to simultaneously mean the death of a genre of game we loved.
Fantastic video! It's great to see discourse about Breath of the Wild that centers more around what it *is* instead of what it *isn't* . Thanks for letting me talk about Buddhism with you for the video! I always love helping people learn more about it. :)
I do have to say… the world DOES reveal everything about itself pretty early on. You can solve just about any mystery in the game like this:
Is the thing you’re interacting with cool or good?
It was probably made by the shiekah.
Is the thing you’re interacting with bad?
It probably has something to do with calamity Ganon.
I just immediately solved about 90% of the game’s mysteries.
Except for that neato Zonai stuff but that's been solved/retconned by TotK's opening moments.
I think Breath of the Wild is very impressive and a fresh new direction for the series, but I also felt like it just wasn't quite for me. It has a lot of interesting ideas that it doesn't utilize in the best way in my opinion. There are a few basic changes I would make to Breath of the Wild to tailor it to what I want from this new Zelda format.
1.) Space out acquiring the Shieka-Slate tablets and maybe replace some of them. For me the intro to BOTW was the best part because my resources and abilities were limited. I had to use some ingenuity and planning to reach each shrine on the Plateau. With each now Slate power I didn't so much gain access to new areas as gain easier access to areas I could already reach. Once I left the Plateau I had all these tools and the whole map was open. On the surface this sounds like a good thing but it means there is no sense of progression or, more importantly, ANTICIPATION.
In Zelda, Zelda 2, A Link to the Past, or Ocarina of Time, something I enjoyed was reaching the end of a bath blocked by some novel obstacle I could not overcome right then, but could see that at some point I would gain a tool that would allow me to continue to progress into a new area of the map. This was exciting and it provided a lot of motivation to keep finding my way through the various dungeons and such. It made it exciting to finally get the Magic Hammer and smash down the posts blocking the way to the Village of Outcasts, or the Flippers to let me swim up an unknown river, or Roc's Feather to let me jump over a gap. Breath of the Wild however does not have this. Clearing a Divine Beast or some side quests didn't really change too much about how I played the game. They didn't open up new areas just at best new methods of travel, maybe.
So, I would have the player acquire all the Slate powers on the Plateau but then have them lost in some event once that area is completed. So the player then drops down Hyrule proper but is now starting at square one again (in terms of powers) but on a much wider map. I'd design the map to maybe be a bit more restrictive in terms of reaching the depths of the very cold or hot regions. Not entirely lock the player out, but I would definitely make certain areas or quests and such inaccessible until the player has acquired the right abilities and skills.
Related to this, I would not have made Bombs a power. I found that very strange. To me the game play is more consistent if bombs are a resource you need to purchase and/or find or even improvise with certain items you harvest from enemies and/or the environment. Bomb Flowers from OOT would be great for this in certain regions. I also think an item like the Hook Shot should totally made an appearance. I think it's application to the climbing mechanic is obvious and intuitive. It was MADE for this.
Speaking items...
2.) I would rework the item degradation. I think it is a bit too extreme. Proper weapons, that aren't rusted or made of fragile materials, should last a bit longer. The Player should be able to visit Blacksmiths in the towns or at horse stables to have weapons and armors tempered; improving their quality and health-value. Maybe a Soldier's Sword or whatever can be tempered a certain number of times, and after that the weapon is too old to be improved again and will break for the final time. The player should also be able to scavenge certain rocks and hammers and things to temper weapons a little bit in the field, to let them last longer. Encourage the player to get attached to a favorite sword, shield, or spear, or what-have-you. To balance this, just make the non-rusted proper weapons rarer. Most weapons the player will find and use are improvise weapons and Beast weapons, making those rare proper weapons more valuable. A good sword will last several fights against groups of enemies or through at least one boss fight. As it stands, a weapon lasts a half a minute in combat at most?
3.) I would add an eating and sleeping mechanic to the game. I mean know Link already can eat and sleep, but I would had a relatively small but noticeable debuff to Link if he does not eat and sleep in 24 or maybe 36 hour period. If you sleep for 6 hours each day Link gets a bonus to Stamina. If he eats in that same period he gets a bonus to health. In both cases these would last a lot longer than food buffs, lasting most of an entire day, say. I think that it would be that much more immersive if the player was encouraged to make a camp and rest and eat periodically. It shouldn't be intrusive enough to be like Survival Mode or Frostfall in Skyrim or something. Not a hardcore realism simulator, just a light touch to reinforce the idea of surviving in this vast monster-haunted wilderness.
The way I see it, we now have 3 flavors of Zelda that can (and I hope will) be developed concurrently:
2D
3D
And open world 3D.
All three have fantastic games and deserve further development.
lmfao they're not ever going to be developing two 3D Zeldas at once. That's insanity.
I wish they gave 2D side scrolling another go. A Nintendo-made Zelda Metroidvania would be sick! They could even do pixel art or cel shading! Go nuts, its already a crazy proposition!
structured 3D will never come back its a sad reality
one day we may get a open world 2d zelda.(i don't if A link between worlds would count)
@@dango2917ah, I’m not so sure. Every single 3D game before BotW was awesome. They’d really be throwing away an opportunity to continue that line.
The open world games don’t negate how great the structured ones are and still can be. They should be able to coexist.
Nintendo can pass them off line they did with the Oracle games.
I’m a simple man. King K posts a video, I drop whatever I’m doing immediately
Agreed.
This is so so true. Man have a vice grip on my attention span
Going through some trauma? Drop it immediately.
Have an important meeting to get to? Drop it immediately.
Holding a baby? Drop it immediately.
Same
The addict
This video made me think about botw and totk in a different way. I think I appreciate them a bit more now, but it did make me realize that I did have a period of time where I tried to be meditative with the experience of playing and just go with the flow. I wasn't able to stick with that because of the enemy encounters though, which make playing them both really frustrating to me. In both botw and totk they were constant and irritating when I just wanted to wander and explore. It's especially bad in totk since like every other enemy 1 or 2 shots me even with some armour upgrades and things have way too much health.
Additionally, TOTK multiplies the number of enemy camps by 3
My issue with Totk is that it stops you every 5 seconds , for a quest objective (I’m talking about the main story) but there’s always something blocking your progress that you have to go get side tracked by and I found that extremely frustrating. Wanna go to this dungeon? Too bad here’s 2 random quests stopping you.
I’m on my second play through and it’s not really an issue now because I know how to prepare / what I need but it’s still frustrating to me
I just hope Zelda-likes make a resurgence. Both on the indie scene, and maybe even with a new IP from Nintendo.
A port of Ever Oasis to the Switch would be a great start
a port of star fox adventures
Perhaps with breath of the wild they can bring 2D Mario without being overshadowed by the 3D ones.
OR spin this new game style into its own new IP and make Zelda feel like Zelda again...
@@eddiedead2702 That’s some wishful thinking bub. Zelda is substantially more successful in this state.
As someone who likes both formulas, there is nothing wrong with wanting old zelda, and still liking the new zelda.
I truly believe there is a balance to be had. They could easily just make games in both styles. That's not much different from how they were making 3d zeldas and 2d zeldas simultaneously before.
I think the idea that every zelda should break the mold is flawed. Both could exist simultaneously if nintendo decided that. I mean, they made the link's awakening remake while working on current zelda. Not like they don't have more than one team working on it.
The lack of balance in concepts with BOTW and TOTK is what has turned me off. It feels very much like they explicitly took everything that made zelda what it was away in order to reinvent it. It lost it's soul, if you ask me.
Look no further than the Zelda moding community. Although still in its infancy, its been proven that fans might understand the strength of old school Zelda better than Nintendo.
@@xuto2693you misunderstood what they meant by balance. They meant that they can still make new old 3D Zeldas and stagger their releases with new new 3D Zeldas
I do not believe King was trying to say that every Zelda from here on out needs to break the mold. At least, that is how I have interpreted his thoughts in this video. Breath of the Wild was a monumental change for the series and I am pretty sure this video is just his thoughts about the game now almost 7 years later.
@@Gloomdrake
Perhaps. Either way, you're not going to get it from a dev team who's primary goal is "what if zelda but no zelda".
One of my favourite parts of BOTW was rediscovering this new version of hyrules map compared to its map on games like OOT. You have a vague sense of familiarity but the exploration and sense of wonder keep you engaged and excited to learn more.
I just like the older formula more. That's not to say the new one is bad, far from it. I just wish the older formula still had a place. Oh well.
You can say the new formula is bad. Fighting the same 6 enemies copy pasted 10,000 times across a big lifeless map isn't fun.
@@Roflcrabs I don't agree, and I'd go as far as to say Zelda as a whole never had that much enemy variety to begin with. At least it's never been something I expected or payed much attention to in any Zelda.
@@Funchal99weird. Obviously there's more to a Zelda game than just combat but I just think in Botw or Totk if you're not running across a barren, lifeless map you're probably swinging at something, likely a moblin, bokoblin or lizalfos. There are supposedly puzzles in Botw/Totk but I've yet to find them.
I've completed shrines but those weren't puzzles, they were equivalent to rat tests trying to get to the cheese. Simple, insulting braindead concepts, not puzzles.
Hi, guilty as charged! 😅 I frequently use your older videos as "comfort food" to keep on in the background when I need a good night's rest. Your voice is very relaxing, and your sound levelling is consistent! thank you so much for your multipurpose videos 😁 Bewildebeest (a Twilight Princess speedrunner) is also really good for this.
Breath of the Wild was my second Zelda, and I had a lot of fun with it. My only problem was the story, but game play great
Wind Waker is a great one if you havent played it yet.
I loved the story it was simplistic intentionally to enable you to learn about it at your own pace and at your discretion.
Rather tragic that the sequel would suffer the same mistake as Breath of the Wild in the story department.
@@KiomonDuck I would love to play windwaker 😤
I don’t know whether or not this is an unpopular opinion, but Tears Of The Kingdom really left me wanting a linear/story-focused Zelda game again. I prefer those types of Zelda games, that IS Zelda to me.
i agree 100% , with botw and totk it felt like everything i liked about zelda games was just ripped away and set on fire
totally agree! In particular, for me, Twilight Princess is really like the peak of "classic" Zelda. The absolute best story and a focused, linear structure. I need more of this kind of Zelda again
@@galaxsija4591 Totally agree on TP being peak. It and OoT are my absolute favorites
@@WhyUHaf2BeMad Even TOTK felt worse than BOTW did, but that might just be that I last played BOTW years ago, whenever I was a lot less exhausted with the open-world genre. TOTK primarily annoys me with the fact that it WANTS you to explore the world, but seemingly punishes you for it with the overwhelming amount of over-powered enemies that will one shot you everywhere you go. The shrines generally take up like 30 minutes to complete with no guide (which a lot of those shrine puzzles left me thinking “how could you expect anyone to figure that out on their own?”) which KILLS the flow of the game -> which makes me then put off doing a lot of shrines -> which then exasperates the issue of getting one-shot everywhere because shrines are the sole method through which you get hearts. I don’t have even one ounce of fun while playing TOTK lol
@@galaxsija4591 Completely agree, Twilight Princess and Wind Waker are my favorite Zelda games, and one of the only reasons I still play my Wii U regularly lol.
In TOTK, whenever I’d get an item or piece of clothing that’s from, or a reference to, an older Zelda game, I would just think, “I would way rather play THAT Zelda game”.
You did a good job putting to words WHY I dislike BOTW so much, and why, to others, these things are strengths. I haven't played TOTK yet, donno when, or if, I ever will, but You're right, it's important to remember that the games will continue to change, and that the old entries aren't going anywhere. I do find it funny that, in BOTW, I got frustrated at a world that (to me) felt devoid of any real purpose or meaning. So much world to cover, yet i felt no desire to see any of it. Yet the one zelda game I've come close to 100%ing, is the one with the smallest world. Majora's Mask. MM compelled me to explore and do things far better than BOTW did.
Clown
That’s a good point, and that’s probably another reason why I don’t like BotW. If you can do whatever you want, and all of it is optional, is any of it meaningful? For me, it didn’t feel like it was.
They really hype up the game as people having their own adventures but all they're doing is engaging with the same recycled content in different orders.
They're still fighting hundreds of the same 6 enemies and completing the same uninspired shrines, defeating the same divine beast bosses. Not sure how doing it in different orders transforms the experience. I just remember lots of aimless running and lots of nothing. It was sad finding some grand old ruins which looked like it had a story behind it, then you search inside out and all you find is two chests, one with 50 rupees and another with a scimitar as you're met with "you cannot carry any more weapons." I hate how linear became a bad word. I'm not opposed to the idea of open world so long as it doesn't result in a reduction in content. Copy pasting every asset hundreds of times over (with the exception of 5 bosses and a handful of nps) isn't content.
@@Road_to_Dawn
I assume you're not a fan of minecraft then?
@@viktorthevictor6240 Yeah, I go through REALLY short bursts with Minecraft. I'll play it for like 24 hours straight and build a lighthouse or a greenhouse or something, then get bored, and won't pick it back up for like a couple years.
BotW and TotK has some of the best music in thr franchise and has the most versatile soundtrack compared to all past titles. From the quietest momments to the most energetically charged challenges, it covers a vast range of musicality.
BotW's Dark Beast Ganon music was definitely a highlight of all the battle music in the game even though the boss itself was lackluster. That piano goes hard.
It is also great to have those quieter moments when I'm just hanging around collecting apples or something. The music matches the gameplay. I don't want to constantly listen to dramatic music when what I am doing is not dramatic in the slightest. I enjoy those quiet moments and it makes the bombastic music stand out more.
I miss the compact themes in zelda. Things in every corner yet holding on to it's story telling and theming. Biggest loss of todays zelda is that smaller thought of detail. Thinking on a grand scale you lose focus of what your truly striving for.
I commented this before watching the video but I feel I'm spot on. I grew up with zelda since I was a baby boy :/
@@GamingThesisHave you played Zelda 1?
@@Ianmar1doubtful.
@@GamingThesisBotW has little, bordering on nothing, to do with Zelda 1.
@@Ianmar1 I swear people does not think about this marketing tactic. NO, it's not a return to form, because that actually let you explore from the let-go and still demands you to play the dungeons to progress. If it was a return to form they would care about dungeon design and you wanting to do them.
They could've kept it the exact same but they would've just put normal dungeons in the game (even Tears of the Kingdom) and it would've massively been better, at least to me. They're not bad games but to go so far away from what we all knew was a very drastic change.
I'd have liked to see even better dungeons in TotK, but they did improve both shrines and dungeons, and it's not as simple as just dropping, say, the Ocarina Water Temple into the game.
The Temples in TotK are pretty close to traditional dungeons - you go through, needing a new ability to complete the dungeon, you solve puzzles and ultimately face and defeat a boss, and you get rewarded by keeping the new ability, getting a heart container, and getting some story. About the only differences are that where traditional Zelda dungeons tend to be pretty linear (with some exceptions), the TotK ones present you with a bunch of small puzzles to solve in any order, and you enter the TotK dungeons using the new ability (which is then not required for anything outside of the dungeon and dungeon approach).
You could make the TotK dungeons more substantial and more linear, but that still wouldn't do anything to address the fact that they can't really unlock any new access in the rest of the world since they're intended to be skippable, and that their story has to fit into the non-linear sequence in which you could encounter them.
@@rmsgrey the problem with the totk dungeons is that they're too short and lack theming
@@rmsgreythe totk dungeons are exactly the same as the Botw dungeons. Don't know what you see that's very different gameplay wise. Short dungeon in which you need to activate 5 terminals to kill a very easy boss
@@LZMP60 The main gameplay change is the use of the "dungeon item".
They're also much more distinct architecturally, which, while not directly a gameplay change, does make them more interesting to explore than the BotW ones. And the bosses also have more varied themes (though the blight-ganons were fine when it comes to gameplay variation)
There's still plenty of room for improvement - Hyrule Castle in BotW is still the best dungeon-like thing across both games - but TotK's temples did improve upon the Divine Beasts.
@@rmsgrey you only use the items to unlock the terminal, it's not that impressive tbh
To me, there was 2D Zelda and 3D Zelda. Both had their merits. BoTW and ToTK represent a 3rd Zelda iteration for me. I’d like there to exist all 3 but it may not be possible
I miss the dungeons being puzzling, I got nothing out of totk dungeons. there were 0 puzzles and it made me hate them. the shrines were...meh in fact I decided instead of finishing them the way they intended, I would go out of my way to finish it an alternative and harder way
I had to pause and comment about the “checklisting” and point out that this part is completely optional. The beauty of Breath/Tears is that you can engage as deeply as you want to. I beat Tears with no armor upgrades and 17 hearts, for example. And then after doing so felt free to explore at my own pace and do whatever upgrades I wanted. Gamers today for some reason act like they are COMPELLED to do every single thing in the game when the game is so clearly not designed that way.
The old games had some good game design aspects, but the gameplay and immersiveness is much higher in the new open-air style. Exploring Hyrule in the past didn’t feel like exploring at all, it felt like walking through a story book. I don’t want to go back to that. Arbitrary limitations of where you can go, being guided through a linear story. The open-air games need to incorporate story arcs so that they can tell a linear story in an open format. They took strides towards this in Tears. Again gamers want everything now!!!
I said it when Breath came out but it is such an exciting jumping off point for Zelda. People ignore that fans and gaming discourse at large thought Zelda was getting stale until Breath came out and revitalized the series. I wish fans of the older style games would get their stick out of the mud online and stop acting like the new games are “not Zelda enough.” I think acting as though Zelda games in the past had very riveting stories is being generous. Breath/Tears don’t have the strongest stories, but they are present and your own adventure is more of your story than it was before.
Just as I was with Breath, now after Tears I am really excited to see where they go next. They will continue incorporating the old with the new in amazing ways.
45:20 "What is inherently wrong with a minimalist soundtrack?" "If the answer is any variation of 'that's not how it used to be'..." As someone who never played the prior Zelda games, I still love their soundtracks. Their strong musical motifs are beautiful. I loved the music in 'That Tralier'™ for BotW, and was disappointed to never find it in the many hours I poured into it. The ambient solitude of its soundtrack fits BotW and its vast contemplative wilderness, yet I can't help but feel like I was robbed of the joy of an epic boss theme or hard-hitting and catchy town theme. N64 Gerudo desert is a banger to be sure, and though I understand that such an upbeat track might take away from the themes BotW is trying to convey, in a world so large and full of diverse life, surely the space exists for a few memorable tracks? Off the top of my head, I can only really recall Kass's theme and the guardian theme. BotW's soundtrack is great as background to the gameplay, yet that comes at the cost of making it suffer in isolation. I don't wish BotW had returned to the way things used to be, but I wish it had strived to push its soundtrack further than before. Making it more dynamic perhaps. Anyhoo, wonderful video :)
The musical swell and hit when I glided into the wind temple tempest was amazing in ToTK. I cannot remember a similar HIT from botw, even while it had lovely music in different ways, as you say.
@@whoknows4780 It just seems like missed potential with BotW sadly :(
Tarry town, ganon’s theme, the dragons, hateno village, rito village. Need I go on? There is plenty of extremely memorable music in this game
I'm generally on board with minimalist music isn't great, but I want to point out that the 'vs. Ganon' track, Hyrule Castle, Tarrey Town are excellent. And--good Lord--Hateno Village is such a world-class track. They all hit that good Zelda music for me.
The issue is mostly in implementation. 80% of the game is in the overworld. 15% is in Shrines. The remaining 5% *may* have one of those banger tracks. Having overworld variety (even just like OoT's own Hyrule Field) would have gone far. (Yes, it does technically work dynamically in BotW too but it doesn't feel that way.)
@@ArtemisWasHere Rito Village is a bit cheating since it's a remix from WW. I agree with the others, but can I ask that you go on? I can't think of any others.
I hope they do what they did with pokemon legends and make a separate series for the original 3d Zelda formula.
It's so weird that a lot of people wanted MORE of a lot of things from this game.
I think Tears of the Kingdom proves the strengths of Breath of the wild. The game had a unique feeling of emptiness, of living after the apocalyps. That made it really relaxing. Even in this video you captured it brilliantly.
Some people named TOTK the most underwhelming 10/10 they've ever played. Recognizing that the game is perfection, did everything better and bigger, and missing something.
I think i I'm having more fun with TOTK now that I've finished it and am just messing around, then when I had all those times getting sidetracked from the main objective.
I feel that game must age, I must replay it one day. Just to truly admire how fun it is!
I am one of those disappointed ppl - and to me ToTK is nowhere near a 10/10 game, BoTW was close to that (9/10) but ToTK is legit 6/10 for me because of how bloated and recycled it feels
there's a great 20-30 hour game hidden in ToTK, but the other 100 hours it makes you do legit made me feel like I am losing so much time and actually not having great fun
Literally do not understand the perspective of some of these comments. Like, it’s valid, I’m not saying you’re not allowed to be disappointed, but… I will always love BOTW and TOTK, and I’m a lifelong Zelda fan. I’ve loved every 3D Zelda. And BOTW and TOTK are my favorites.
Same. And yet there are people out there who honestly think these two games are so radically different from everything that came before that they should have been a new IP...
I would have to assume that in the alternate universe these folks pine for, the Zelda series remains decidedly traditional as it rapidly fades into irrelevancy.
After experiencing TOTK, I’m definitely open for a change, whether it’s open world or not. BOTW felt like a brand new experience and changed my perception of open world games for the better. TOTK felt like a rom hack of BOTW that reused assets overall had the exact same fundamental gameplay of BOTW with the same locations minus the amazing quality of life changes BOTW DLC created. I hope Zelda keeps innovating to once again reshape our views of what Zelda truly is.
TotK is a sequel. We need to wait for the next non-sequel Zelda and see what the lasting effects are
I stopped playing TotK after the fifth “temple”; I just found myself doing exactly the same things as in BotW. The story, progression and overall structure of the game hadn’t really changed.
@@samuelviden7412yep same here after the 2nd temple, depths, sky and same hyrule exploring for 20 hours I knew I’ve seen it all. Sold my copy on eBay and bought some weed.
This new format is old after two games vs the previous archetype lasting through multiple console generations. I REALLY hope they don't stubbornly cram this new format down our throats cause I'll be done with this series if the next one is the same... I def won't be buying the next one day 1 without knowing what it consists of.
@@chrisej5987 I didn’t buy TOTK day one and only bought the game after people were giving this game 10/10s across the board. I felt so disgusted to find out what kind of game this was after looking through its old skeleton.
To be honest, I would like a return to OoT style 3d Zelda. While I loved BotW, I really got burnt out on TotK. There was just too much, even for someone like me who tries to do most of the side content in a game. Plus, open world design does not lend itself very well to experiencing a story. Especially with the way BotW and TotK are based around freedom.
It's also a struggle for folks that actually DO like completing objectives and a linear progression.
OoT style is past. It wont return in any new game. OoT is one of the prime examples of a vision ahead of technological capability. The massive limits in OoT were not by design, they were by lack of technology to implement full ideas.
I'm personally, much more of the 'let me do my own thing' kind of player and the early 3d Zelda's (and even the later 2d ones) and their ultra hand-holdy way of doing things, is a big put off for me. Playing BotW i thought "yep, this is where 3d Zelda needed to go.. Hell, its where they WANTED to go all the time".
I get people are nostalgic for games of the past, and they "think" they want 'updated' versions of them, but it rarely works out that what people think they want, is actually what they really want when they do get it because that newer version, never gives that same feeling of re-igniting that experience from the older game that people hoped it would. Just like BotW. I LOVED my first playthough of it. I thought it was fantastic. But i didnt get that same feeling from TotK because, i had already experienced it and TotK is, effectively, an "updated" version of BotW. While it had new elements, and areas were changed, it didnt really give me that sense of 'awe' and wonder that BotW did on the first playthough.
Times change.
@@lyianxan OoT style of game will return. That format may be past, but it’s not done. Still plenty you can do with that format.
Many linear-ish Zelda games have been immensely successful.
"We prefer the old way and want it back."
- Likely because what was given in return was not of equal value.
True Freedom, doesn't feel as good as an Earned Victory.
Yes, you are free to cheese and skip and break everything with this new physics system, but after a while, cheating on tests feels hollow when the real accomplishment and feeling of earned victory comes from solving an complex, intricate, intentional challenge the correct way.
"What is inherently wrong with the idea of a world that doesn't reveal everything about itself?"
- Nothing, but just because it isn't inherently wrong doesn't mean it shouldn't be criticized or disliked.
I'm not sure what the purpose of this question is or who it is for, maybe for the folks who dislike botw or totk and dont articulate good enough reasons for why.
Regardless, while previous Zelda games revealed more about itself, and left special details hidden, reserved only for those who sought it out or paid close attention.
Everything told a story, and it was coupled with meaningful intentional music. It was giving you a narrative and the author crafted it specifically so you would see their intention and either appreciate it or not. It was like reading a J.R.R. Tolkien book.
The new formula doesn't do anything better, the world doesnt reveal everything about itself, because 90% of the time when you do go wander somewhere there's no story to tell there.
It's either 'ah these are ruins with nothing left here to tell a tale', or 'a peaceful village is here, despite it being a post apocalyptic world.'
It's lack of intentional narrative or artisanship is like handing you a book, with 80% of its contents missing and saying, go ahead fill it in yourself.
"What is inherently wrong with a minimalist soundtrack?"
- Nothing, it's simply missing something really important to the identity of the series. The original zelda, didnt really have any strong musical motifs, but as time went on we got hymns.
We go musical instruments, we got moments of stillness, thought, reflection, beauty and reverence in Link's or another characters ability to convey feelings through music alone. And Link is MUTE. That's powerful.
Majora's Mask gave us:
The song of Healing. I could sing all day about this one.
Wind Waker gave us:
The feeling of leaving home, and growing up as we waved goodbye to our grandmother.
Molgera, at this point in the adventure, youre not just a sleepy kid in his pajamas. Link would be completely in the right to believe he has imposter syndrome, given where he came from to where he is now and what eldritch abomination he is not only tasked with facing, but courageously willing to defeat.
Twilight Princess gave us:
Riding at night while listening to Malon's voice. A melancholy but beautiful remix.
Howling hymns to heroes past. Before learning a technique from Shade.
The music that plays when you rescue Colin, the kid who looked up to you as the hero of Ordon village, truly solidifying that you, yes YOU are a hero that did something specific and are worthy of your title.
No amount of Orchestra or instruments is going to capture that same feeling when you can just cheese or skip that sort of set piece like you can in botw.
"What is inherently wrong with dungeons that fit the uniformist aesthetic of the tribe who made them?"
- Nothing, the difference between these dungeons and the previous ones are that we had variety & depth. The Goron Mines told a story, the Zora's Domain told a story, Snow Peak mountains told a story, the lost woods told a story, The Great Bay told a story, Ikana Canyon told a story, you get it.
What story does shrine number #69 tell that is substantially different that Shrine #71?
When people talk about previous Zelda dungeons they often leave Ganon's castle for last. It's basically just a test of everything we have learnt. There isnt much to tell there, we are at the book's end. We got Ganon's castle in botw, but the story behind all that is vacuous, hollow, and skippable. They didnt create amazing set pieces and narratives that they were okay with the player skipping or missing. They just created stuff and camps and basic, forgettable music that they were okay with the player skipping or missing.
The stuff you could miss in Dark Souls 3 told a story, had unique music.
The stuff you can miss in botw is just another camp that'll drain your resources and break your weapons. or it's the 3rd lightning sword that'll break in 40 swings.
Tell me, would folks have preferred the LOTR or Game of Thrones, or The Elder Scrolls or Dark Souls or any High Fantasy Medieval media if it were a 'make it up yourself' affair?
@@KyngD469yes yes oh lawdy yes. I know Dark Souls is a more appropriate comparison thematically but Bloodborne was my first Souls game. I played through it once blindly, really liked it then didn't touch it for a year. Then my friend with more time on his hands played it and he completes everything. He introduced me to the fun of getting all trophies in games.
Anyways he played Bloodborne a year after I had and we talked about how awesome it was but he was like "so did you beat this boss?" And I'm like "wait what? There's more?" And then he showed me how I missed like 6 to 8 optional bosses (and then like 14 more in the chalice dungeons.) Bloodborne went from a great game to a perfect masterpiece. That's so ballsy and bold to make unique content and lots of it that people might not see. Meanwhile in Botw you've already seen every single enemy within the first 20 hours with the exception of maybe a boss or two and Ganon. I know the blight ganon boss fights at the end of divine beast dungeons play differently but they look identical, offer the same difficulty in gameplay and.. to me they're the same fight. They look ugly, launch elemental projectiles, take roughly two minutes to take down. Rinse repeat.
Botw/Totk both feel like homework assignments phoned in at the last minute. Copy paste paste paste paste paste paste paste *Totk comes out* paste paste paste paste paste. Recurring enemies and assets is nothing new in games but Botw/Totk take the piss with it. Nothing is special or unique. At launch for Botw I was genuinely and naively invested in the first 10 hours expecting a Zelda game in this open world. I remember seeing this huge majestic dragon flying across the sky and it was awesome. It felt like a special moment. 2 hours later I saw another one, same model, same animation, different color. The magic was wearing off. I tracked it to see if it would land or do something unique and as I was tracking it it just instantly snapped out of existence. It didn't fly out of sight, it just popped out of existence. The game was done with it. After that moment like 10-15 hours into my first Botw playthrough in 2017 doubt began to sink in rapidly. "What if this Zelda game sucks?" I thought. Pushed on and by the end hated it. The games are insultingly hollow and repetitive which pains me to say because I loved Zelda games.
i dont know man, using upscaled emulated footage seems like lying, especially when its obviously modded with a type of shader
I have a lot of thoughts regarding Zelda and its recent entries. I've even contemplated writing my own essay on it. In ahort though it's been a journey of letting go recently. And by that I don't mean letting go of the love I hold for the old titles but of the series. Botw was a long playthrough for me. Every couple days or weeks I'd hop in and finish some sidequests or koroks. I also only loosely followed the narrative throughline. As such I think my playthrough was quite close to the intended vision. Of course going for 100% drove me quite close to burnout despite me being quite used to the grind. However it never captured me. I tend to have a problem with open world games in general. I like structure. I like the narrow focus of items. I don't like the atmospheric lack of density compared to old Zelda games (and various other games). For me it was too open. Tol broad. And therefore too watered down. However it was meditating at times. And totk made me appreciate that aspect and the novelty of it all back then. In contrast to botw, totk was almost painful to play at times. Ironically I think the current formula has grown stale already. And as brave as botw was in breaking conventions the same can't be said for totk. It seems like a game that despite its sandbox like nature is oddly constrained by its predecessor.
What I'm trying to say is that I've learned that change is inevitable (personally I hadn't tired of the old formula, I love Skyward Sword and I jumped on Link's Awakening in a heartbeat (I know there are significant differences between the two). However change is not a moral or qualitative good. I get the sense that many people view it as such though. "Times change", "This is the original vision" and similar statements often feel like you're being talked down to, like your love for the series is in some sense invalid. Change might happen and some change might be necessary. However all change must not necessarily be good and for me in the context of Zelda it isn't. If this is the direction of the series totk is the last (new) game I will have played. Making my peace with that has been surprisingly easy considering the Zelda before was my favorite video game franchise. I guess we have all grown up one way or another.
I couldn’t have worded this any better, you took the thoughts out of mind, I couldn’t put together in word format. Thank you.
TotK being as it was felt like a particular circumstance related to the obscenely high popularity of BotW even by series standards (even winning Goty at the Geoff Awards) and the Switch’s technical limitations as a console in conjunction with the bigger and better necessity affecting any game worth its salt now.
Personally the new abilities it added made interfacing with the world more exciting, but I also think the next game will benefit from being on something the same level of power that ran Kingdom Hearts III and the Final Fantasy VII Remake. Something different to really push that new power with some elbow grease, like how Wind Waker’s sea felt like something only possible on the GameCube compared to the segmented areas in the N64 Zelda’s.
Great video and I can appreciate your view, but just can't find myself getting there. I just do not care for BotW as is. I don't just think it's a bad Zelda game, rather that it's just a bad game that was made worse by the fact it is a Zelda game. It was as you said, going in to the game I was expecting Skyward Sword in an open world, and what I got handed was a mashup of all my least favorite gaming conventions in a game by a franchise I had come to trust. It had felt like a betrayal. Nowadays, that feeling of betrayal has lessened and if I squint my eyes I can see where the Zelda is in the game and I can acknowledge where people can have fun with it's freeform sandbox, but that doesn't really improve my opinion of the game at all
I guess I just feel everything BOTW does in terms of exploration and discovery and relaxing in the world at your own pace was all done way better in another Nintendo open workd exclusive that came out first, Xenoblade X.
Not only was BOTW my least favorite Zelda game (aside from the two NES titles I also am not a fan of), but I already experienced its greatest strengths (to me) in a game that already came out on the same console.
Playing TotK really made me aware of all of this game’s flaws. BotW had really fun exploration, but TotK reuse of the map takes the best quality away from the game. And no, the copy paste sky island puzzles and repetitive and bland underground doesn’t make up for that.
What you have left is a frustrating weapon system that loses any appeal after a few hours when you’re just tossing away good weapons, a bland combat system, a severe lack of enemy variety (even worse in BotW), lack of interesting dungeons, and little reward for exploring outside of increasing hearts or stamina.
Tbh I don't like the changes, I always liked standard zelda games and I'm sad they said they'll stick to this open world formula :S doing one thing once (twice this time) doesn't mean it's the best way to do it or that it should always be this way from now on, but aight
Committing to Breath of the Wild the way it is meant to be played sounds like a great idea for some day when I'm retired. And I do think they should continue to make games like these. But I would also like games that bring new variations on the older formulas. It could be smaller, lower budget (perhaps 3DS) and so not interfere with these as mainline games.
"If you ignore the circumstances, the game is amazing"
"The game is boring and repetitive, but I like that because it's relatable"
Come on dude botw is majorly flawed and has little to no replayability or relevance now due to totk. I'm tired of hearing fanboys defend this garbage.
Imma level with you, I loved BotW, but I think TotK taught me that open world games just aren't for me.
TOTK taught me that while I am very creative. I am not very inventive.
There is an argument to be made that a game can be too big.
I replayed BOTW just these past two weeks, just because TOTK would have been so much longer to get going.
Im happy ToTK came along and proved this formula as successful on its own merits. After Elden Ring released, it was compared heavily to BoTW, and led to discussions that were overly-critical of BoTW just because Elden Ring is also an amazing game. But when ToTK released, despite being too similar to BoTW to warrant a $70 price it was a smash hit, drawing praise and comparisons to Elden Ring which ironically criticized the FROM Soft instant-classic unfairly.
Loved this video and your take. Really goes off to show how much you've grown as a person and as reviewer. Kind regards to you
This was one of my favourite games I enjoyed the game but I prefer the older titles but this was a really refreshing Zelda game.
I find it very disappointing that Zelda will turn this game into a formula. Won't this lead to stagnation again? Won't the franchise feel stuck and the games blurred together after Breath of the Wild 26, just like many people felt it was with the previous formula? The answer to feeling formulaic is not to simply exchange one formula with another.
Exactly. BotW formula fans can't just accuse traditional Zelda fans of being scared of change and then go on to advocate against changing the BotW formula.
The sad thing is that personally the new formula became stale with 2 games for me. Totk is definitely my least favorite 3d Zelda, by a huge margin. At least Oot's one was able to hold 4 games well.
it wasn't really stuck before or stagnant. Twilight princess was their best selling game up to that point. alot of people didnt like skyward sword cus of motion controls, not the story.(hell the switch remake sold more than the original wii version most likely due to regular control options) The switch having such a huge install base with botw being alot of peoples first time helped it be so popular. Twilight princess sold about 1/3 of the copies as botw whiles its system had less than 1/5 the isntall base of the switch
@@athorem LOL, but you guys wanna put it right back to what it was. The last two games weren't perfect by any means, but they were giant leaps in the right direction back toward the series' roots. They didn't take it far enough.
@@zacharybecker8228 I liked the concept of motion controls, but it was executed extremely poorly. What made me stop playing Skyward Sword was that stupid bitch Fi who keeps stopping the gameplay every five minutes to tell me some shit I already know. She's like Navi on crack and PCP.
My problems with BotW don't come from its new formats for everything. I think it's a fantastic foundation for the future. My problems come from HOW things were done. Some stuff like exploration and character progression aren't so much an evolution, rather they're a step in a different direction. But something like swordplay was certainly a step back from TP's moves you could unlock. The story didn't really have much to tell, but it could have been mended by utilizing a different format to tell it instead. Open-ended puzzles that aren't related to one another are a great idea for an open world, but so many of them were barely even puzzles such as the ones where you just glide across a gap. One way they could have handled shrines would have been to give them a set order, as in you could enter any shrine and get the corresponding number of shrine to solve
If it was widely recognized that a lot of people arent hating on botw or totk simply as a barbaric, babyish cry at the sight of change, then a ton of healing will come to the zelda fanbase
From one perspective, swordplay doesn't have as many combos now. From another, now you can make your swords shoot bombs, fireballs, balls of lightning, gusts of wind and icy wind, you can make them slash or pierce or crush. You have SO much more you can do with swords now than you ever had in a Zelda game.
I actually think the story in botw fit the structure of the game perfectly, but totk got a little carried away
@@TheGalaxyWings the story structure fits enough, though I dont know if it does much with it
@@RSanchez111And what is gained from that, exactly?
You could probably do that in gmod, 10 or so years ago, if you wanted to.
I really don’t get that mentality. Preference is one thing, but how does weapon variety actually make the game better?
Quantity =\= quality.
all the time I was playing totk I was thinking about how they were going to get out of this open world mess.
Most of the people I know who like zelda wont play tokt because they are fed up with these type of games.
Warcraft , Farcry 3 , Skyrim , fallout , FFXV , Witcher 3 , All the ass creed, Cyberpunk etc, Its just another shore for them.
Just like you said I just Cant Imagine Zelda next gen at this point.
While there’s certainly value in embracing change, and examining how our willingness (or lack thereof) to do so affects our experiences, I think it’s a bit far to imply that the older style is obsolete, or lesser.
BotW/TotK accomplish things the older games couldn’t, but fall short in areas those older games shone. A return to the old wouldn’t be a regression, but a shifting of focus. And just like this new style, returning to the old style wouldn’t have to be forever. And I do believe that if the will is there, Nintendo is capable of making a hybrid of the two that works.
As important as it is to embrace the new, it’s just as important not to disregard the value of what came before.
He states in the video how he recently played all the old Zelda games and how they still hold up for what they are. That they are still worth playing and fulfilling the role of what they are supposed to do. While watching this video, no where do I believe he even implies that the older style is obsolete or lesser.
@@danielmontero9953 Its likely @Sonnance wasn't referring to KingK here but moreso alot of newer Zelda fans who, at least a good chunk of the ones I personally have interacted with, have kinda told me, with a straight face, that the older games are trash and BotW and TotK are what Zelda and should have always been. Granted these types are a minority and I know other newer players accept both the old and the new, its just a mindset thats abit too common unfortunately.
@@GinraiPrime666 If these types are a minority, and at the same time it should be pretty clear that KingK is not making such a claim in his video, then I believe the Sonnance should have made that clearer. I believe the vast majority of Zelda fans still value the old very, very much. I would totally look at those kinds of individuals you mention and ask them who the fuck they think are lol.
I also have to mention that I do not believe I have ever seen any Zelda fan try to discredit the old. Based on my also only anecdotal evidence, I tend to find more people discussing BotW in comparison to the past. There's actually a good way to see what I mean, as we can find that here in the comment section of this very video.
Despite what you say, this comment still feels like a response to KingK's video in general. I would give the benefit of the doubt, but I don't really believe there is a spot for that. KingK still mentions how valuable the old Zelda games are.
@@danielmontero9953 I don’t think KingK is trying to devalue traditional 3D Zeldas, and from what I’ve seen he seems to have a lot of love for them.
My comment was more directed at two of the implications of his argument in this video (implications which may have been unintended, or that I may have misread):
First, that the traditional Zelda style has been mined of all its potential, and so a Zelda game returning to it would only be a retread or regression.
And second, and in turn, that the only way for the series to evolve is to leave that style, and its strengths, in the past and focus entirely on this new direction.
I disagree with both of these, and think that the potential of the series would be severely hamstrung if they were to become the guiding philosophy going forward.
@@Sonnance I feel there are bits to what you mention about his video that KingK might also have strong feelings about or potentially even agree with. Perhaps he also really is making some of those points to a certain extent. The way I interpreted the video was someone who was coming to terms with BotW for what it is, rather than what it could have been. Probably also coming to terms with what the series will be going forward from here on out as well. There's a good reason the Wild games have sold incredibly well in the modern gaming landscape.
Admittedly, this is a hard topic for me to discuss. The old 3D Zelda games are near and dear to my heart, but BotW is something else for me entirely (It also came out on my birthday.... yes, fine, I am extremely biased i guess hahaha). Since it's release I have always been comfortable with this new direction of Zelda in every facet. Definitely understand (to a degree) the problems a lot of people have with it though.
There really is something special about that first playthrough of BOTW that I don't quite think TOTK managed to match. BoTW became my favourite game fairly shortly after I finished it and it's the same with ToTK, it's now probably my favourite game. However it feels like something was missing I had an absolute blast playing it as it literally is a better BoTW in every way but BoTW just had this absolute magic to it during the time I played it that I don't think I'll ever forget.
I have a similar feeling towards BOTW compared to TOTK. And I think it's because BOTW with all the freedom it gave you, it also restricted you in a way that every achievement felt very satisfying. It made you proud every time you climbed a mountain. I remember reaching the top of Dueling Peaks and feeling like the best thing I've ever done in a videogame. But then you pick TOTK, you build a motorbike with two fans and ... ¡BOOM! You're on top of Hyrule Castle in two minutes. I felt too overpowered in TOTK to feel proud of my achievements... that's why I keep BOTW a little bit closer to my heart than TOTK.
I think it’s the vibe the world itself is giving off. In breath of the wild you explored a long dead kingdom, teeming with the ruins of once populated and lively settlements.
In tears of the kingdom, the world is much more lively, with many of its residents actively working to bring it back to life.
I actually do enjoy the distinction and think it necessary for totk to stand on its own.
But as much fun as tears of the kingdoms recovering and lively world is-
I think I preferred the quiet beauty the the ruins of this old kingdom gave in breath of the wild.
I remember being so eager for a new fresh experience, so taken in with change initially. I even went the extra mile and 100% BotW. But now, years later, thinking back. I can only think of it as ultimately being a unfulfilling and shallow experience that I have no interest in returning to.
I've since played Skyward Sword for the first time in the Switch, and I am glad I waited until now. Its been a blast, and it has the Zelda charm that BotW and TotK lacked for me.
They need to find a balance of open world/shrines and dedicated dungeons like the other games in the series.
The other games are COMPLETELY different in gameplay from the these two.. I don't get why zelda fans cant just accept the two types of Zelda?? I could never play the old ones, I hated the game play.. Botw and tears of the kingdom works for me and LOTS of other people
@@sulex3491 it's way to early to know if this is how the games will be from now.. Tears of the kingdom started out as dlc that ballooned into a direct sequel.. Now they have already said they are working on the next one.. If THAT one is in the same style.. Then You can worry.. But I wouldn't be suprised if the next one goes back to a more traditional style.. And if they do I'll at least have two zelda games I can actually enjoy...
I'm the same age as the franchise so I tried every single one growing up and for some of us those games are just so fucking boring.. I need the freedom of botw, with less focus on massive dungeons and just a bunch of smaller ones spread around
@@mullaosloSome people like elements of both styles and would like to see a game nail a good middle ground
No, we can worry now because they spent so long on Tears and its engine they aren't just going ot throw it away. This is the status que for Zelda for the next few decades. @@mullaoslo
@@mullaoslo The original comment talks about a *balance* because it is okay to recognize that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are flawed in ways that the older games were not and that the newer games bring something new that the older games lack. There are lots of people the new games are for, and lots of people that the old games are for.
To say fans should "just accept the two types of Zelda" when Nintendo hasn't even tried to marry the old with the new isn't helpful. Would you be happy if the next two Zelda games completely went back to the traditional style that you hate? Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom spans 11 years of development at least. We're probably gonna be waiting another 6 years before we get to see what the next iteration of Zelda will be.
Can you see how disappointing that can be when Nintendo hasn't put the same kind of care in the story and dungeons like in past iterations?
I like your perspectives on this game- I felt about the same with most things you mention, especially the fact that the shrines kind of stand-in for the puzzle/exploration aspect of traditional dungeons the divine beasts lack. And yes, I was expecting an epic story that the trailer "appeared" to show off, only to find out it is scattered throughout the game world for you to find. While open world exploration is cool, there can be a balance found between telling a story while utilizing the game's expansive world to tell it. I only hope Nintendo finds a nice middle ground to take the series to next. Tears of the Kingdom was a decent move towards that direction.
Y'know. I respect the hell outta ya for doubling back on this review so many years later and taking a more...Well. "Artsy" approach, I suppose. We're similar in age by what I can gather, and this is something I've been working through, too. There's this "need" to finish content and COMPLETE the game. It reminded me of liking reading anything I could get my hands on in elementary school but always eyeing how far along the bookmark is to indicate I was getting close to finishing it, with very little regard for how much I actually genuinely enjoyed what I was reading. Completing it was the most important thing.
Something I've tried doing more lately is "meeting games on their terms," or letting momentum sort of guide me. I've played games my whole life, I've got a knack for them I'd like to think, so I WILL complete it eventually. I definitely remember loving BOTW when it was new and I wasn't too concerned with doing every quest or every shrine or what had you. Eventually, the need to bring up that checklist arose, only for it to not be a "need" at all, but self inflicted desire to...Wring all the content possible out of something, I guess. Despite knowing ahead of time that Korok seed challenges are very easy and definitely not intended for you to do all of them or that side quests in BOTW really are SIDE quests.
It's funny, too. Thinking back on the good dozen or so BOTW essays I must've watched at this point, all of them usually have a point for saying something along the lines of "it's great initially, when I was just doing stuff that I thought was fun and wasn't paying attention to what I felt I SHOULD be doing. Then I decided to make myself miserable for no reason."
I always hated Breath of the Wild, and like an idiot I let marketing and hype get to me and bought Tears of the Kingdom which is somehow worse.
Getting up to the top of a digital mountain and slowly panning the camera around isn’t a substitute for a solid gameplay foundation and a dense world, two things BOTW lacks. Unless you consider korok seeds worthwhile content, that is.
If I wanna gaze upon natural beauty I will go outside
Your mention of how the game is not to be taken as a checklist is what resonates the most with what I personally feel when someone tells me that breath of the wild is empty, or too overwhelming. The reason why it is my favourite video-game of all time resides mostly in the meditation that it puts you into, the ambiance, the landscapes, the music, the little ambient noises... It resonates just as much with your heart as it does with your brain, if not even more, and it is the first Zelda game to do it in such a way for me.
While I miss elements of the older 3d titles I don't need them to return. However there are plenty of things in the new formula I'd like to see adjusted on their own merits and I'd prefer the direction or solutions to be unique and not harkening back. The food system for health IMO the most notable and miserable aspect of the game. I'd also enjoy if enemy variety meant something more than their 3d models. For the smaller enemies that is, I think they did a fairly good job at improving bosses in TotK, but whenever I hear someone talking about all the various approaches to combat in these new games it just sounds convoluted for the sake of variety, I'd like the game to find more ways to encourage mixing up the ways each encounter goes. Just a couple of things off the top of my head.
I think the food system works great until you get enough hearts that it's a slog
The temporary weapons and tedious armor upgrades were definitely a negative aspect. one of the best parts of an RPG is earning rare gear
It doesn't bother me that it changed, it bothers me that it's just like every other action adventure game out there. Zelda was different, now it's not. It was the removal of what made it special. I don't simply hate change for change's sake.
Change is good. Why do you hate change? When you order a pizza and open up the box to find old uncooked chicken thighs that's change! Think outside the box you square.
@Roflcrabs You keep responding to people with random non-sequitors, I assume in an attempt to mimic Botw/Totk fans, but I have seen practically nobody ever arguing the things you are implying. People like Botw/Totk and want to see more games like them. There's nothing wrong or weird about that.
I’ve spent hours in this game just cutting grass near Rito Village to collect hot footed frogs bc I like using hasty elixirs. But after awhile it just became relaxing. And I always had a blast doing it
I feel you and I had similar experiences, but went about it in different ways. I love structure and collecting things, so the way i went about things was collecting as many Korok and and shrines as i could before i even tackled the first dungeon. I event went about then weird and did the Ritos first and the Zoras last.
But ultimately, my conclusion diverged from yours. Personally, i loved the shrine structure of segments solutions because i always felt another shrine later could expand on the concept, and many shrines held additional rewards behind a harder challenge, should the player choose to do so.
My issues came with the issues all open worlds suffer, which is the transversal parts. Where it was kind of fun the first time, climbing regularly became tedious, and rain an absolute frustration. I also never could get over the weapons, despite how i tried. And ultimately concluded the game was not meant for me.
Even coming back i just couldn't break my mindset, and really never got Tears of the Kingdom.
This doesn't inherently make either game bad, but i personally, didn't like them. I still consider BotW a great game, and believe it deserves the praise it got, but I am satisfied to reserve myself to games I find more suited for me, and show others to enjoy a Zelda catered to them.
There absolutely is a way to provide balance to a story, to get both the freedom to do what we want, but to have a deep story. And Tears of the Kingdom is a little more of that. By all means, give players the chance to cheese their way through the whole thing, but provide a deep story for people who want to find it. I admit, the dungeons in TotK were not all to my taste - I like my dungeons to have extensive puzzles and I like them to have exploration that is tied to certain items. Having the new champions there to aid was nice, but they kinda felt like they themselves were the dungeon's treasure. I like having the ability to traverse spaces open as I'm playing, rather than it all be available from the start. I also think that TotK could have had more to it. The depths are missing a lot of detail - for example, the only people who seem to have dwelled in the depths are the Gorons and the Zonai - this seems a bit odd, because if anything, the one other race that could have done so is the Zora. The fact that there isn't an ability to explore the vast deep waters makes it feel like there's something missing. And there is. There's a lot of potential, but the capacity for it is sorely lacking.
Personally, I'd have liked to have seen what became of all the old tech that was disposed of. Four giant mechanical beasts can't really just up and disappear when it's been shown that physically they are a lot sturdier than the buildings, and indeed the kingdom, they were built to protect. If Nintendo does what they usually do, and re-release the previous game on the next system, I'd like to see more of that connective tissue to the previous game, which for some reason, Aonuma decided to turf out. It would be really cool to see the ruins that those beasts had become, and maybe even include some of the still functioning guardians.
A zelda video!?! Thought i wouldn’t see those anymore 😭
I almost wish there was one more “classic” Zelda before BOTW.. you never truly understand what you’re missing until it’s gone
You would understand complaints elsewhere on the internet about "lack of change" and "they keep making the same game." That doesnt help. Contradictory statements all over the internet which each person being dictative.
Breath of the Wild has its own fanbase that used to dox anyone that dared complain. Similar to Baldurs Gate 3 fans. There are just too many internet contradictions.
Point is, if Nintendo returns to classic Zelda, there will be internet riots all the same. Since BOTW has their own rabid fans on different UA-cam channels.
Which is why Nintendo is better off ignoring internet comments.
@@Zeldafan-zy1pb Honestly, its true. Its hard to know what is the right direction, when everyone says they have the right direction in mind.
@@Zeldafan-zy1pb so? Fffffffffffffffffffffuck 'em. Screw the Botw fans and make Zelda great again.
a few days ago I read that they want a new direction for the next zelda game. I am happy about that like crazy. botw and totk are cool, but they lacked so much good old fashioned stuff and were more like physics simulators
Nice would love that, do you remember where you read it?
Great! In 6 more years they'll make something Elden Ring did more than a year ago 😑😑😑
@@samf.s.7731 lets wait what ai also brings to it. Pretty sure even nintendo wont hestitate to use it
Who the fuck would play games made by ai?!
Maybe it could do some of the backgrounds bit full on gmaes?!
Hell no!
@@samf.s.7731 I think Botw is much better than Eldin Ring. But, they are very different experiences.
I don't particularly enjoy the direction Zelda took, but it's not like it's my series to steer as I wish it. I suppose I am just a sucker for the more traditional format but now that Nintendo knows it can make gangbusters, I feel this is the foreseeable future for the series.
At least people ARE enjoying it, better than none at all.
I made it half way through TotK before giving up. Why am I going to hike up all these mountains, sky islands, depths tunnels for a treasure chest with 5 arrows or a temporary sword? All the rewards for exploring are combat upgrades but its not a game about combat any more than OoT was.
I don't know much about Zelda, don't care for it much, yet I know that this is a video worth watching because it ends it's depressing paragraphs with the narrator yelling into the microphone and roasting me on something completely unrelated.
I love how you keep finding ways to make your videos (and you) something worth listening to.
Botw was such a piece of art, many people hate the story but I think it was really great and emotional, however with totk I feel like that magic has gone and now the word of hyrule feels overwhelming, as a big zelda fan I don't like tears of the kingdom, It was really overwhelming and the story was really really bad, I never feel this way with a zelda title and now I want The Zelda team to find a great balance between the old 3d Zelda and the new formula, I don't want another Botw 2.0 please
The problem i have with BOTW is how it tells you it's story. It seems like it really wants to do a story structured like OoT, where you have the past and the future working together to tell an interesting story. In OoT you are a force within the story in the past. You were there as a player. In BOTW you, as a player, never interacted with a single thing in the past. You "lost your memories". If BOTW let us play through the past story and fail against ganon, it would make the events of the future feel like much more interesting and I might actually feel something when I see my old allies again as powers I can use.
It would be fine if these huge zelda games didn't take 6 years to make, we got majoras, wind waker, and twilight princess in roughly the time it took to develop TotK. Even the most ardent open world zelda fan has to admit that's not a good tradeoff at all
Game development across the industry takes far longer these days. Zelda isn't unique in that regard. Even if they ditched the open world, we would still likely be waiting 4 or more years between games. I would argue Zelda is actually making better use of that development time than most other games.
@@jacobmonks3722Or maybe they're just making realistically too big of games.
@amandaslough125 Keep in mind that the gap between Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword was also 5 years. Do you really think being open world is the only reason these games take so long?
And now we're risking waiting yet _another_ 5 years to see a third game in the "Era of the Wild" before we see a brand new game detached from the last 2 we've already played. Here's to hoping old fans will get "something" good in the close future.
@@javiervasquez625I thought it was confirmed there wouldn’t be a third game in this series.
I loved the video but I also have to say that part of the reason I loved it so much was the contrast between the solemnity of the narration and the "speaking of broken, your sleep schedule, amirite?" sponsor introduction 😂😂 thank you
Breath of the Wild, is the least amount of fun I've had with a Zelda -- Despite that, my first ten hours, were unlike any other experience I've had in gaming. My problem doesn't come from Breath of the Wild failing to meet the expectations I have for the series, the writing was on the wall, Zelda was going to change, it was said in every interview leading up to the game, that the conventions must be broken -- I knew this wouldn't be like the previous games, at the time: I was excited. I wanted to see what this new game would be.
The problem is, what we got, was in my opinion, a game that only offers you a reward by playing it, if you want to play it. You can only climb a mountain once, before you realize that climbing the Mountain was the reward for doing so. You can only do so many shrines, before you don't have a reason to do them. You can only explore for so long, before exploration becomes a chore. When everything you find is nothing but more nothing, what's the point?
_It was amazing, stepping into that world for the first time -- Wondering what I can find next._ But that wonder was soon replaced with apathy, as I realized that I'd be finding more of the same, often in a new coat of paint. More mountain tops, more trees, more Bokoblins. I've never played Wind Waker, and wanted to spend my time sailing across the sea -- I want to find something interesting, to be solving a fun puzzle, or be trapped around enemies that I hadn't seen before. With Breath of the Wild, the puzzles all feel the same, the enemy encounters never change. The story doesn't push me to move forward so I can see something new -- It's asking me to wander aimlessly until I feel ready to defeat the final boss.
I never felt challenged by Breath of the Wild. The combat is bland, to the point that I never wanted to fight, and just avoided it entirely. The puzzles are simple, and the solutions feel fabricated rather than discovered. I don't need to think about _how_ I can get through a puzzle in the game, when I have a hundred options, I just need to chose the simplest one and be done.
I enjoy combat in Elden Ring, not because I feel _rewarded_ by what the game offers, but because the combat itself is rewarding. You have to master it to get through the game, no brute forcing your way through a boss, you have to learn its patterns, and you have to understand your strengths. Zelda, is not about combat, not like the Souls games. And yet, I've never complained about combat in previous Zelda games, because the enemies felt like puzzles, parts of the world that you need to interact with to continue. In Breath of the Wild, I only want to avoid combat, to the point that I spent most of my original playthrough with neither a shield or sword equipped, I was just going to run past the enemies anyway, why bother keeping them on my back, making those clanging sound effects?
Breath of the Wild, disappointed me not because I expected it to be like the old games, but because it was thanks to this game that I realized what it was about Zelda that made it my favorite franchise of all time, and Breath of the Wild, had _none of it._ It wasn't a game that I would ever be destined to enjoy -- And it took years of me trying to enjoy this game, coming back to it and becoming bored shortly after. I never felt compelled to complete the shrines, or look for Koroks, once the main story was over, I was done. I tried making new files, even on hard mode, only to realize I just didn't care anymore. I still replay Ocarina of Time every few months, and it isn't even my favorite Zelda. Yet I haven't touched Breath of the Wild since early 2019 when I tried making a new file, and honestly the thought of playing it ever again bores me.
Tears of the Kingdom, evolved on Breath of the Wild in many ways. By the time I finished it, I am willing to call it my third favorite Zelda, just behind Twilight Princess. But, by the time I put down Tears of the Kingdom for the last time, only seeing about thirty percent of its content -- I was done. Not just with Tears of the Kingdom, but this style of Zelda. I made the claim that not even new DLC could bring me back, and still stand by that. I love Tears of the Kingdom, many of my problems with Breath of the Wild were fixed, I enjoyed the bosses, I enjoyed the story, I enjoyed the dungeons and even the shrines, I enjoyed exploring, I enjoyed the characters, the sky, the depths. But it was a game, that I know I can only enjoy once -- I won't try to pick it up again, like I did with Breath of the Wild. Every time I played Breath of the Wild after I'd considered myself done with that game, I found more reasons to _hate_ that game, not because it isn't Zelda, but because I just don't have fun with it. I'd rather preserve the memory I have of Tears of the Kingdom -- And accept that I won't find more enjoyment in it if I just force myself to see what else it has to offer.
If the next Zelda game, is just another Breath of the Wild -- I won't play it. I don't care, if what we get returns to what _I_ love from Zelda anymore, in fact I know that it won't -- I've come to peace with that. What I want, is a game that defies expectations yet again, that I can play, and be surprised at every corner. I don't want to play another Breath of the Wild sequel, I want them to go in another new direction, because I truly don't believe that this formula can entertain me again. But, whatever the next Zelda game is, it probably won't be for me.
_In the end, my disappointment doesn't come from Breath of the Wild failing to meet my expectations of the Zelda franchise,_ it comes from it failing to meet what I expected from _Breath of the Wild._
I wanted a world that was fun to explore, with enemies and bosses littered about, I expected to find dungeons all about, not pocket universes that have just a single puzzle or two. I expected to reach the top of a mountain, and see a world _littered with surprises,_ but that never happened. When I discovered what the game _was,_ all I could think about was what this game _wasn't._ And it wasn't, fun -- Not for me.
Ultimately, the game I _wanted_ Breath of the Wild to be, ended up being realized by Elden Ring -- When that happened, I realized Zelda, _wouldn't be what I wanted it to be anymore._ It made me think about all the things I loved from the series, that were replaced by a hollow shell that doesn't matter to me. Tears of the Kingdom didn't become the game I wanted Breath of the Wild to be, it was a different experience, that I can't even accept that it shares the series namesake. It was fun, unlike Breath of the Wild. But I can't bring myself to call it Zelda, because what I enjoyed about Tears of the Kingdom, has not been in any other Zelda game in any capacity.
Whenever I see this game again, all my disappointment comes back to me, and I can never not feel that. I will never be happy with the state of the series, not if it continues to release games like Breath of the Wild. But, by the time the next game releases, my frustrations will likely be replaced by apathy -- And in the end, that's all I can hope for -- To not care about Zelda anymore.
It is funny how different experiences can be for people. Unlike you, I grew up with 3D Zelda, Windwaker being my first one. Throughout my teens, I played all of them, and had somewhat of a gaming slumber during the Wii U times (I never owned a Wii U or a 3DS), where I moved to a larger city to study and had less time. Breath of the Wild was my gateway back into gaming and the Switch in general held that flame alive. I played Dark Souls, Hollow Knight and a whole bunch of indies, got a PS4 during the Corona times to play Bloodborne and the other souls games. I think Elden Ring stays behind Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne for me (It has some issues towards the last third of the game), but I think Tears of the Kingdom might be my favorite Zelda of all time. I recently started a replay of Skyward Sword a month after I've beaten Tears and it really cemented for me how stale the old 3D Zelda approach has actually become to me. You almost do nothing for the first 3 hours of the game! Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love those games and will come back to them from time to time, but I do think that the kind of evolution the Zelda series undertook is one of the best things that has ever happened to gaming. If Breath of the Wild had been another old-school 3D Zelda title, I believe Zelda could have become a niche series just like Metroid or Pikmin have been (until their recent releases). And I don't even want to think about a world where the Switch hadn't been the same raving success that it is right now.
@@georglehner407 I share much of OP's feelings on this. Despite its issues, I can say without a doubt I enjoyed Skyward Sword much more than BotW/TotK. The "old-school 3D Zelda" has always been my preferred "flavor" of Zelda if you will - I had fun with the 2D titles too but nothing else in the series holds a candle to OoT, TP, etc for me. If other people find it stale, that's not really surprising to me. Most of the games I enjoy are "stale"/niche games. I know well the feeling of series being mostly abandoned or changing into something I don't like. PMD hasn't seen a new entry in almost a decade (apart from a remake), Paper Mario got Sticker Star'd.
id like to see zelda return to a semi-linear story structure taking what they've learned from these last two games. if theres anything totk taught us, its that botw's story structure does not work with poor foundations.
If TotK taught us anything, it's that BotW felt like beta 🤷♀️