Your browser is holding you back. Level up here: operagx.gg/DarylTalksGames3 Thanks to Opera GX for sponsoring! What's been your favorite "cheat" you've pulled off in TOTK?
I really want to play games the intended way, that is the way developers intended. I don't enjoy cheap cheeses and even if I see opportunity to do them I refuse to. I just think it's common sense that you trust developers of the games to know how to bring you best experience. If you alter it there is too much third wall breaking and I don't like that. I like immersion way more over feeling like "smart person".
'MimIc TeAr Is ChEaTiNG' uses giant crusher with royal knights resolve ash of war with 16 buffs slamming the boss for 46000 damage per swing and calls it skill
@@matrixfull are you really playing 'as they intend' if you refuse to use over 50% of the mechanics and items they hand deliver to you? i.e. both in totk and any souls series naked with only sticks is not the intended way no matter how much the community tries to force feed you that b/s
@@matrixfullcheck the video at 17:42 Aonuma himself says you’re meant to “cheat” although cheat isn’t necessarily the best word for it. Think of it as creative solutions rather than cheating. All within the realms of what is allowed in game by the developers because otherwise they wouldn’t have added it. Cheating would be something like whistle running in BOTW. That was not intended by the devs that’s a glitch that breaks the games mechanics. THATS cheating. Whereas every creative solution your mind can fathom no matter how much it feels like cheating in Tears is just that. A creative solution thought up by you and provided by the devs.
if you think about the rocket jump shrine, it teaches you MULTIPLE shield things. It's actively showing you that there are lots of options for fusing stuff to shields that aren't just "more durability"
And its subtitle is something along the lines of "more than defense", which tells you right when you walk in that the lesson is about the versatility of shields.
My feeling has always been that the developers were watching how speed runners were breaking breath of the wild, and decided to make a game that was designed to be exploited like that
Inspired by, maybe. But I can't imagine myself being excited to see a speedrun until they find some way to clip through a wall that sends them half-way across the world. Part of what made exploits fun was that it was some absurd solution that seemingly appeared from thin air. Here, they're just handing you toys and telling you the experience they built isn't worth your time.
The speed runners in BotW were “cheating” in quite lame ways outside of the ‘rules’ of the game. Basically finding glitches. Like the whistle running and whatever that ‘bullet bounce’ is called (I’ve forgotten all the corny glitch names). All the creative solutions Ive seen in TotK are way better. Though I haven’t seen speed running videos and assume they’re packed with lame stuff.
@@leeshapon I’ve seen tons of speed runs. I found most of the ones involving glitches to be boring as it wasn’t someone beating the game quickly as I view beating the game. It would be like if someone found a random sequence of key presses that instantly teleport you to Gannon where you can then 1 shot and the process took 20 seconds To me that’s not “beating the game quickly”
I remember reading that the 'ascend' ability started off as a developer tool that one of the team members used to get out of caves when he was finished play testing them. He came to realize that having to backtrack out of the cave, now devoid of enemies and puzzles and loot, was not fun the same way it was to enter the unknown and discover - so this core ability of the game started off as a way for devs to 'cheat' themselves out of caves and realized it was way more fun.
I absolutely LOVE that story, because it's such a genius way of solving the question of "how do you make leaving a place more interesting?" The out of the box nature of Ascend as an answer to the question is a perfect reflection of how Nintendo wants the players to think outside the box too. I like to think about how that compares to how others have answered that same question, like how skyrim has one way shortcut exits at the end of basically all of the caves and dungeons so that you can leave in a different way than you came in, or the tomb loops back to the entrance with a false wall you can only open from the treasure room end, same thing.
I've also seen a lot of people treating the platform recall trick "cheating" as well, but several shrines demand that you know about it. There's one with a sagging bridge you have to ultrahand into place and then recall it back up so you can reach the other end. The devs know, and they want you to know too.
I'd honestly never thought of it until seeing it in this video. There was a backpack korok that would have gone WAAAAYYY faster if I'd though of that. instead I had to build some horrible stepladder bridge. XD
Boy did I feel smart when I discovered it. For me it was the very first shrine on the surface. It expected me to have the paraglider but because I had run off in the other direction than the game told me to, I didn't have it yet. There was the box that I was obviously supposed to shoot in the air, jump off and glide over the gap. And there was me glider-less and still pretty clueless about all the mechanics and stuff. Of course, you can leave shrines any time so I thought that was the safetly measure left by the devs if you come here when you can't complete it yet. And then the thought struck me: what if I float the cube over the gap, climb on and rewind? And obviously it worked! So personally, I felt like I worked for that trick and deserve to use it now.
Ascend ability was originally a cheat code during development for devs to get around quickly untill they realized how annoying getting out of caves is without it so they just made it a real thing 😂
I think a lot of the time when the “cheating” feels bad is just when the cheese is kinda trivial and lame. Like just happening to have a rocket shield and skipping the whole shrine incidentally feels kinda lame cause you basically didn’t do it at all. Whereas solving it with some random bullshit that just so happens to work out feels very fun
I agre, true cheese is when the correct way is easier than the cheese way, but you didn’t bother doing it the correct way so you chose the harder cheesy way
This is defintely how I feel. No amount on weird contraptions I build to make solutions make me feel bad for completing a shrine, because I applied creativity to use it. But if there is a complex puzzle in front of me for a chest, and I simply abuse recall, then it just feels like I robbed myself of doing something cool.
@@maxminton7861 Exactly. I think in some cases alternative solutions can be good puzzle design, in some others not so much. Like building your 1st makeshift bridge to skip something, using rockets to gain height, or bomb flowering a pressure pad is fun the 1st time, but when this solution can be repeated so many times I don't care that it's ''uNiNtEnDeD, omg so many solutions = good design'' at this point it's a non puzzle. And even the intended solutions are sometimes too easy because most of the shrines are not really all that hard. They usually introduce a concept, then make it a little bit more difficult, then they end the shrine abruptly before the can expand on the concept because they have to keep things bitesized. Doesn't help that in an open world everything has to be level 1 because they never know where you can go, so you're left with many disappointing shrines and alternative solutions are not really all that fun most of the time.
@@awayekevin3397 I agree with this 100%. I don't understand how people can say that the shrines have obtuse solutions. Even the "intended" way is super easy 90% of the time. I really miss the difficult puzzles in other Zelda's, but I don't think we'll ever get them back because of how much more widespread the series has gotten, and it must appeal to a wider audience that hasn't been playing Zelda for 20 years.
I’ve finished all the shrines by now, and since I always just carry rocket shields, there’s been a good number of them where I’ve seen the possibility for an easy cheese and chosen to do the intended puzzle anyway, because the puzzles are fun to solve and the cheese being there just gives me a safety net. The few times I’ve just used the cheese, it’s because I’ve been standing there like ‘ok, I know how to solve this, it seems annoying and tedious to get it exactly right, so I won’t bother’. Gets me the fun part of solving the puzzle without having to go through the actual work of executing the solution
The puzzles aren't engaging enough to make me do them by choice. Having some puzzles literally just raise a platform in a game where any number of banal things can shoot you upward is bad design.
I didn't use rocket shields much, but I did use my fair share of Recall Elevators and Bomb-Flower-Shields. It's just really rewarding to cheese yourself through a puzzle
Honestly every single hour with Totk I have spent so far has felt like i was cheating the game even if it's something as simple as fusing 2 strong weapons together to make something that even a lynel would fear or using reversal on a piece of metal i dropped from the air to give me height to jump and paraglide to the end of the shrine. However more often than not, I found myself being more proud of my efforts when they went against the designed structure of the game which is why it's really cool in my opinion that the devs have that "it's your game. Do something creative if you want" kind of attitude.
the game urges you to do that tho, hows that cheating? its like ppl like you assume that because you did something different, or saw a different solution its not "intended" but riddle me this, if it wasnt intended why is it allowed? cheating would be the dupe glitch, or hacking/modding the game, thats cheating, but thinking you cheated cuz the game allowed you to use a different solution to the puzzle is about the worst kind of gatekeeping ive seen gamers utter.
@@Aqsticgod "If it wasn't intended, why is it allowed?" That's not really how that works. In pretty much any game, even without glitches, there are ways to do things the game allows even though they aren't intended. It's a big part of why glitchless speedruns are just as entertaining as the glitch ones. TOTK and BOTW were likely built with each puzzle having at least one solution, maybe even a few, in mind, but the game still wants you to be able to find solutions they didn't consider. Plenty of solutions absolutely can be described as "cheating the puzzle," but it's not a bad thing to cheat them. I don't think anyone is gatekeeping this except the people actively against the cheese.
I love how they fully embraced open puzzle design. Finding creative ways around a puzzle is often just as fun as solving it. Plus it means you’re basically never stuck in the game, if you think hard enough there’s always a way forward
When I cheese a puzzle that appears to have an intended solution, I don’t always feel clever. I don’t feel like I cheated the game to win, or like I cheated myself out of the satisfaction of solving it “right”, instead I feel like the game won against me because I’m too poopoo brain to figure out the solution so I had to activate rocket shield easy mode.
I think the puzzles are the easy way out actually. I imagine if there's an absolute uncreative person that only wants to play by the rules enters a puzzle room, they can certainly find all the tools to solve it, like in the older games. But I fell like that's more of a failsave. If you're not creative enough to "cheese" your way through, you can go the old-fashioned way.
@@luka_8 Depends on the shrine. Bomb-shield-bouncing over the entire puzzle is unsatisfying. Fusing the stupid ball to a random stick you have, throwing it, missing, recalling it to yourself, throwing it at the target again, only to realize that you now have to jump 2 stories to get to the exit door, probably using the mechanic you already couldn't figure out when trying to solve the puzzle correctly. So, you check your inventory and don't have any bomb shields but do have a board shield (a shield with a 4x8 sheet of wood attached), so you drop it, ultrahand it up where you need to be, tilt it so you can make it all the way, bring it back, and hop on and recall. (anyone who's done this shrine probably knows which this is) That's satisfying.
I remember talking with a friend about the shrine where you learn about stablizers. At the end of it there's a massive pit you need to get over somehow. He has a clip of him managing to piece together a long chain of grates, use a stablizer to prop them upright at a 45° angle, then walk up it and glide the rest of the way across the pit. And by pure chance that was actually one of the shrines I *_also_* had saved a clip of me completing it, and I used the stablizer to create a catapult to shoot me across the pit.
As always I'm super impressed with the Zelda team. For a game so open-ended. I'm surprised that there are no major issues or bugs with it. I remember reading about how Shigeru Miyamoto would have nightmares that people would find bugs or cheats in the games, and it's cool that now everyone is like "fuck it" and "the point is to BS and cheat". It feels like it's both liberating to both the player and the game devs. Also, I used to be one of those people that needed everything to be done perfectly and to have collected everything when it comes to games. And now with big games like BOTW and TOTK, they've shown me that I don't need to have a perfect run through and I don't need to collect everything. It's shown me that I am more imaginative and creative than I thought I was and that it's okay to make mistakes and miss some things. That way, I always have something to look forward to no matter how many hours I've put into the game! If this is the start of a new era in Zelda games (and an already phenomenal start at that), can't wait to see what the future has in store!
The problem of those non-linear but open (sandbox-like) world games is sometimes the chaos which can unfold itself, especially with enemy spawns. Example from BotW as I am not too much into TOTK yet: Nighttime, kees swarm coming for you, Yiga Officer spawns and attacks, while stal-enemies spawn next to you to attack - everyone knows that situation if you've been to the late game. I am taking a great relief in knowing that I am always able to choose my fights - in linear games they are forced most of the times, especially in dungeons. If I had to drop into an enemy camp because I ran out of stamina while paragliding, it is good to know that you can always teleport yourself somewhere else, especially if there are really strong enemies presents. Same with your example: If you are low on weapons or most of your weapons are about to break, its good to have a hot air balloon at hand to just skip the fights you would have to do if you ascended the perceived intended way. In exchange you will miss out on loot and also some combat training. This is also part of the freedom which was advertised with Breath of the Wild and is even more prevalent with Tears of the Kingdom. Sometimes when I solve a shrine it feels cheap for me too. Usually I will go back and look for the "intended" solution - thats also fun for me, to toss aside my "obvious" "cheaty" solution and go for an alternative.
Here's the biggest thing I've learned about how interestingly and *differently* this game is designed, in my time. First, with the exception of shrines and the temples - and even half of those, honestly - fighting *constructs* is entirely optional. That enemy you were looking at as you took what was very clearly a built-in bypass? A construct. This was actually taught to me in the tutorial of the game, that initial sky island. See, there's nothing stopping you from going to the snowy part of the island second, after doing that first shrine and getting the Ultrahand. It even puts a bunch of spicy berries and a cooking pot right by the entranceway to the area from where you meet Rauru. With the exception of maybe one or two enemies on the way to that Ultrahand shrine, though (and even them you could probably bypass if you bothered to sneak), every enemy on that island is optional. Going to the snowy shrine this way, you encounter zero enemies on the actual route, and while the set of wings and the building there that lets them lift off smoothly is probably mainly to get you back to the gate to talk to Rauru again, it's also the perfect height to let you circle around and land at the foot of the shrine even without attaching any fans. Second, the game is very actively aware, if sometimes only vaguely, of how you can cheat. It doesn't particularly care, it just makes sure you always know. Those shrine tricks? You entirely know it's cheating. Sure. Only because you can see that it's giving you tools, though, and you're refusing to use them. And it's largely fine with this. This game was very clearly meant to enable you to use your brain to deal with challenges - and specifically, threats - that you don't have the skill to deal with. That's why there's so many specifically combat-based Zonai devices. Hell, the monsters will even respond to them. There's an entire shrine, I think with the title The Great Hunt, that revolves around the fact that not only do they react to and even try to fight Zonai devices, but also the fact that if you just throw enough Zonai devices at the problem, they will in fact successfully kill everything. A couple of the devices will get flipped over, but you can in fact defeat every construct in there without picking up a weapon.
I felt that way at first,but the more I played this game,the more game tought me about different possibilities. It's like the game whispers to you, encouraging you to think outside the box. You play,have access to new devices, expanding your battery became stronger and SMARTER. Not only it's satisfying when you found the way to bypass your problems, it's also helps to associate yourself with Link even more. You both learning how to use your new powers and knowledge is also a weapon that you must to master. That is also why I try not to watch other people play throughs a lot, because you start to use others ideas,and less of your own
When I fought that squid shark thing above Zora’s domain, I had a lot of trouble clearing up the much and fighting it at the same time. So, I built a robot designed to follow the enemy and squirt water everywhere. As a bonus, it also hit it sometimes. Also Prince Sidon’s water ghost thing was with me so I basically had 2 assistants in that boss battle. That *almost* seemed like cheating, but then later I got Autobuild, and the part where you right just then learned to instantly build robots and/or vehicles is immediately followed by a boss battle with a guy who keeps summoning trucks. If you weren’t supposed to use robots in boss battles, why was retrieving Autobuild immediately followed by a boss battle that emphisize autobuild? What you call “cheating” I would call “trying to outsmart the enemy”. Zelda has always involved using your brain to solve riddles. BotW and TotK are simply letting you think you’re outsmarting them. Nintendo are actually smiling and saying “OK, you do that. In fact, here, have a thing that lets you do that.”
I remember my first big cheese in TOTK. On the great sky island, I was in the snowy portion. I didn’t see an obvious path up, it was probably super late at night and I had played a long time. So instead of looking for the “right” way. I went across the swift water, cut down a bunch of trees, fused like 6-8 of them together, fused a board to the bottom, and transported it back to the tall spot that was too slick to climb. Getting my construct across the river and up the waterfall was fun. Then I simply climbed my tall tree 😊
burning my wood weapon and using ultrahand on it and burning something instead of using a torch that's quite literally right infront of me feels like cheating
now what does feel like cheating to me is looking up solutions to puzzles. It doesnt feel like it, it just is. I originally wanted to play through the game without any online help, but i found myself not wanting to play the game because i couldnt find anything out. but now i enjoy the game but still feel guilty for looking up solutions.
at 16:45, I actually cheesed that shrine by putting the pole on top of the platform, then using recall, and climbing on the pole. I had no idea what the actual solution was but I knew that what I did was not intended.
I did so many shrines without the paraglider. It always was so rewarding to beat one or even get so close to fail. For example A bouncy device shrine i spent 30 minutes on to fail on the final jump.( I didn't know about the rocket shield thing) I left but didn't feel defeated but happy that I got past the first three jumps.
One huge difference between old Zelda games and BOTW/TOTK is that in the old games you'd be receive explicit guidance towards your end goal and you got to feel clever when you managed to figure out what it was that you were supposed to do (because that was the only way to do it, progressing means "congrats! You solved it, you figured out the puzzle, you win!"), whereas in BOTW/TOTK you find yourself questioning your own intelligence and wondering whether or not you solved a puzzle "correctly" because you're not sure if your solution, one of many possible ways to progress, was the intended way or overly complicated (possibly even straight up dumb)...
The problem is the player tendency to "optimize the fun out of games." Even though cheating is satisfying up to a point, when you can completely bypass huge portions of almost any puzzle it becomes a problem. Its a non-puzzle and non-game at that point. Imagine if Portal 2 had a rocket shield and you could just jump up to the end of the chamber without engaging with the puzzle mechanics.
Yeah, as just one example, I built an airbike pretty early, and then the game shrank massively as I flew over every interesting piece of design. Maybe it feels nice to subvert the game a few times, but it definitely made the game worse when I did it every time. Oh, and add on that the subversion is often the same, so you dont even get the satisfaction of coming up with a new idea.
It is why I dislike Mario Odyessy, Mario's move set is literally this. So you're never facing a challenge with your movement in mind, you're doing something dull or skipping the entire thing.
Reminds me of my feelings towards Fallout: New Vegas. It's my favorite game of all time, but I know it like the back of my hand. It makes it incredibly hard to roleplay it it anymore because I know every objectively optimized pattern and playstyle. Never put anything into charisma, beeline to the strip without dying, I know the results of every speech outcome, etc.
i used the airbike to get all the lightroots, shrines and korok seeds. the increased mobility options made it far far more enjoyable than the shrines and koroks were in BOTW. especially when i managed to find the sweet spot of putting the korok on the front of the bike in such a way that it didnt offset the balance. saved that to autobuild as soon as i did.
This video was great and taught me some cool tricks as I haven't found certain shrines yet. I love how the game is and enjoy cheezing things. But my main takeaway is just to say thank you for using some music from The World Ends With You. I hardly ever see anyone acknowledge that game and it's absolutely one of my favorites. Definitely gonna check out more of your work now. You have great taste!
bomb arrows also work for the shrines btw also for the capsules just leave and drop the rockets out side to put them on shields (as i keep a few shields with rockets)
I solved the boat shrine without shooting through the bars. I didn't even know that was the intended solution lol. I think I landed on top of one of the "sticks" that go out of the boat (which gives you the necessary altitude) and ascended into the cage.
im one of those old school 3d zelda fans. I had all four 3d zeldas on gamecube and then mm and oot again on n64 and i played them endlessly throughout my childhood and teen years, those games mean more to me than i can say. I wasn't one who got mad about botws lack of temples or anything like that, i loved the new direction, and i REALLY enjoyed finding cheese in that game lol. but totk did have a few moments where i felt like i was cheating myself out of the intended experience. at the start. so i intentionally went out of my way to forego the solutions i had come up with, in order to figure out how the game "wanted" me to solve its puzzles. and those were easily the points where i was having the least fun. it wasnt until i came across that rocket shrine that i realized the game was encouraging my stupid, simple solutions, and everything from that point forward felt so much better. plus, the more you play the more you want to find new stupid solutions, and it's just a whole lot of fun to play with what the game gives you. they even added cheese as a food item so like edit: small thing, but i also rly like that im not forced to strap koroks to a contraption and launch then across the map, most of them i can tuck safely in a horse cart and walk to their destination lmao
As ex Beta tester/ex moderator (Tech help guy) and small serv admin from small steam indie dev team. and yeah been gaming since intel 8088/86 days. building PC since 90's. True I am no dev but have my eyes opened few years back when was helping them out. Have better understanding of development of games, At least on Pcs. Since TOTK /switch has such limited amount of ram. (4 Gb where Steam deck has 16 GB) They have too have things de-spawn once it hits a certain range, This is to help with game performance, but there is way around this, so if you ever build something like a glider or some monster creation you don't want too lose.. Drop a dragon scale and attached it to the device and it will stay where it is, but there still a limit HOW far you can go before It will de-spawn. but the distance is a lot further then if you just walked away from something you made. Yeah give a try. attached single dragon scale to anything you build.. Good Video man :) Btw Twilight Princess HD and Links to past are my two fav Zelda game. Wind Waker HD was good too, I even named my kitten and called her Zelda lol.
I absolutely do not agree with the people who think that building a vehicle to traverse the depths is cheap. In fact, it actually does feel like the intended solution. They give you little depots with parts to build vehicles all around the depths, and all of the Yiga hideouts have ready-made vehicles that you can steal and use to get around. All evidence points to vehicles being the intended means of traversal in the depths.
Admittedly, Gem puzzles are really annoying when transporting them and failing somehow. Just having to restart when your flying machine and gem fall off the edge is very annoying, but at least they don't force you to do a shrine as well, just a blessing shrine. Honestly the only really annoying part of the game. But I love the trick blessing shrine. It looks real, but why is there arrows on the ground and a fire fruit bush?
The key element of this is that the game is super ambitious but designed to run in a switch, a super underpowered device. It's a miracle it runs at all. If it had 32gb of ram we wouldn't have problems like despawning items.
The shrines in this game are like 10× better than in BOTW since they're all just "hey, you know you can use this cheesy technique in the over world, right? No? Well now you do".
Conundrum here: You gain a guilty freedom, but lost the perenity of the saintess weapons... No more missile boomerang, slingshot and eternel bow. no more Unbreakable overpowered ( once you have full hearth) sword that may( or not) evolve with you ... Only Link, using the last durable weapon( or liability) that may help him revail : His brain.
5:25 I felt like _such_ an idiot with that rail puzzle. I tried about five different versions of a shape that would balance the weight carefully enough to make it through that turn before I realised I could just... make a centreboard... so it never fell off... And yeah I do often wonder how the hell I was supposed to complete the puzzle. It's good to find other solutions but after a while 'recall' feels too much like an instant win rather than actually using my brain. BUT I prefer the open-ended approach, because it means you're relying on your own problem solving rather than trying to bend your brain into the shape the devs intended. Often I just never 'understood' video game puzzle logic and always got stuck looking at a walkthrough. With Totk I feel like if I hammer away enough at it, I'll come up with something. However sometimes I think it covers up lazy design. The wind temple was pretty good and I assume the fire temple had... some sort of logic to it, I just climbed everywhere when I felt my brain unable to conform to the intended solution. But _was_ there a way to get through the water temple without just climbing and jumping to different locations? It wasn't satisfying to solve at all. Also that hoverbike: It's honestly hard to use if you haven't got a LOT of battery power, by which point you've done some decent grinding to 'earn' it I feel. I haven't got nearly enough battery to make it viable.
My belief is that true intelligence is not memorization of hard facts, but the effective, and sometimes unorthodox use of available resources and perhaps abnormal critical thinking and problem-solving. I say there’s nothing wrong with finding abnormal ways of solving problems. One could argue that sticking to the established ‘correct way’ of solving a problem is actually the complete opposite of intelligence, as you’re just following a formula with no deviation.
I haven't played Tears of The Kingdom yet but I'll get around to it at some point. Honestly the more I see about it the more I feel like it is similar to GMOD or a game like it where the idea isn't to have the traditional Zelda experience where there is only 1 solution but where they tell you the rules and let you decide how to interpret them. As is showed in the video devs know the game and trust me they know it better than anyone other than a speed-runner will. They know what you can make and the small little angles you need to be on to glitch through that wall to bypass half the level. Nintendo especially knows exactly how their game works and I can assure you if they don't want you to do something they know the 75 ways to get over the wall you will try before giving up and learning how they actually want you to proceed. I think it's purely because of how the series has been people think of these things as cheating not because the devs didn't want you to do it. I mean after all, to do anything in a videogame it has to be programmed in...unless it is a side effect of that very code.
I think it's okay to feel cheap and it could be instinct or like you said how we are used to these games playing out. But I also think it's the natural evolution of game design. We're seeing game design, customization, and other aspects being tailored to the players/community such as early access or these complex building/creative systems for players to figure out and even take it further than devs imagined. The balance of amount of content vs player freedom has to be right or you can get either overly long and linear experiences OR feel like you're in a massive sandbox without all that much to really do.
Me: *Enters cave early in the game Gloom Hands: "Allow us to introduce ourselves." Me: "Alright, ima head out..." *Uses Ascend ability Gloom Hands: "...Well shucks. Guess I'll wait here." Me: *comes back later Gloom Hands: "So, you finally ready to throw some ha-" Me: *Nukes it with a million bomb flower arrows, including Shadow Ganon afterwards
Is anyone else kind of... alarmed by the idea that LoZ is moving on to a completely different type of gaming? I've always been fond of the old style of LoZ where you only had one way to do things, and that was it. Open world games can sort of overwhelm me because there's too much to do. I still love Tears of the Kingdom, I basically sped through it when it was released because I didn't want to lose interest before I finished and get spoiled (I can only like something for so long before I get bored of it). I liked the feeling of "cheesing" stages. But I also like the feeling of solving dungeons. I like the feeling of figuring out the "proper" way of doing things. I... I am honestly going to miss the old LoZ way. I am uncomfortable with the idea that we probably won't get anything like those again. I'm... honestly hoping for some sort of mix. The shrines in TotK felt a lot more like the old dungeons than BOTW's divine beasts did, and I kind of hope they expand that. I dont mind the open world as much if there is a set path I can take if I want to. I kind of hope that future LoZ games will have a mixture of an open ended experience like BOTW and TOTK, and dungeons where there is one set way of doing things like the old games. I am. Genuinely sad and uncomfortable that we will not get another game from LoZ that follows the OoT formula. And I feel like I am the only one. I enjoy TotK and BotW. But I still miss the "typical" Zelda formula. And I really feel like I am the only one who misses it.
I think it's interesting that when I find an obviously unintended solution, I *always* have a moment where I question "...wait, am I sure that wasn't intended" no matter how farfetched it was
Yeah…. Almost any shrine with movable objects you can ascend through after time warping and get into broken places. Or attach rockets to your shield before entering, etc. like the shrines are really fun but it’s so easy to cheese so so many of them
the shrine for ascend it surrounded by ice and ice is unclimbable naturally, so the obvious thing to do is make a tree wall and climb it to the shrine, i did that the first time i played through but on a new playthrough i wondered 'was that not the intended way?' and so i continued to circle the mountain and you have a short drop down with your way back up covered in unclimbable ice which led to me having to make a 45 minute treck back to the temple of time and all the way past every other shrine a second time because the closed loop cannot be backtracked with no glider no bombs no zonai materials they *intend* for you to build things its kind of the point of the game not *cheese*. you might think something isn't intended but it is, if its not youll painfully know as you make an hour long walk back or get a game over screen
@@Spyziy Can confirm. I've completed shrines that were CLEARLY intended to be completed AFTER getting the glider. Without the glider. Hell, I've mapped sky islands without the glider. That's how damn broken this game is, and I love it. It was a pain in the ass, but I did it lol.
@@thunderborn3231 My point isnt that they dont want you to build in creative ways to solve problems, it's that combining multiple abilties can completely bypass the entire shrine. By lifting up a plank you're supposed to put a ball on and fly across a massive ravine in a shrine in the right position, freezing it with time stop, then ascending through it, you can completely climb over the shrines walls and get straight to the blessing.
It's the TOTK variation of the Xanatos gambit. Gamer: Hah, I beat it in a way the devs thought couldn't or shouldn't be done. TOTK Devs: Yes, it's performing as designed. We won.
Where's the fun in walking? Why wouldn't you attach a korok to the bottom of your car's wheel so that it gets run over on every revolution, or glue them to the underside of your boat?
@@mckaygoodman6514 Eh, sometimes it's annoying and the whole point of the game is to have fun. If you want to challenge yourself by doing everything in your power to avoid the "preconceived" solution then all power to you. The video's point goes both ways, it's about how much challenge you want. If you want the most challenging experience in the game you disallow yourself to use builds and instead have to solve as many things as possible without them.
Since the beginning, I've felt like this game's shrines are intended as sparks of inspiration for the player. In the shrines, they teach general concepts. I definitely figured out a few awesome tricks thanks to the foundation that they formed for me
That's why i like those proving grounds shrines so much, they make you rely on experimenting with the mechanics the game gives for you, like that shield rocket boost, and teach you a lot about the deeper mechanics in a controlled envrionment. The shrines in this game are a lot better for experimentation in general tbh
I accidentally got the master sword early and thought that maybe I ruined the story experience a bit. In the end as I got the rest of the tears, it felt more like dramatic irony and honestly imo a better experience. So no one should feel bad about the way they play this game, I feel like its fully intended to be an individual experience. To tell a story with that ability is actually astounding.
@@eli9867you only need to do like 20 shrines to be able to get the sword, very early for most people. If someone did 20 shrines, went to go turn in 100 charges for a battery segment, and on their way out sees something eye-catching below them, it's reasonable they would get the master sword very early without glitches like 4 hours into the game.
@@ssgoko88 you don't even need the battery upgrade, I did it without just because I got a map marker telling me to go ride the dragon, so I went up to a tower that was really close to it and just jumped on it lol
The only weakness of the game's story imo was the dungeon end cutscenes becoming repetitive but given how much of the game you can do in any order, the fact that that's the only part that stood out to me is really impressive
I think giving Link a dedicated jump button in these games (vs the prior "run to ledge to auto jump") is a good indicator of what kind of approach Nintendo wants players to take. Before you could only do actions at specific points in specific ways at specific times. Now you can just kind of jump spam up odd slopes and crouch under weird half ledges and scam your way around little physics problems in tiny ways that can all add up to getting around problems the way you want, not just by the way the devs allow.
again, if the game allows it, then it was intended, lot of people dont get that if something is wrong with the game, or if they didnt want you to do or use certain things, they would just remove it like they did the dupe glitch in totk ver 1.1.1
@@Aqsticgod I don't know about that. There are plenty of glitches and exploits in BOTW that are clearly not intended yet were never patched. The specific instance I was thinking of when I made my comment was a shrine that had a switch in a large cube room that when struck it rotated the entire cube around you, moving the floor to the ceiling. It had holes in it to facilitate the puzzle. My solution (which crucially for my point didn't feel like the solution intended) was to stand on the lip of one of the wall holes (after gliding to it while the cube was already rotating), shoot an arrow at the switch, and then as the cube rotated again, I just of just walked at the wall until I would slide down and started spamming jump so I could make it onto the flatter outside ceiling, and thus walk to the goal. Not sure what specific shrine it was but the game wasn't buggy or anything and it was very easy, but it didn't feel like someone at nintendo said "then at this point the player needs to stand on this thin part of the hole, shoot the switch, and then jump at this odd angle to hopefully not slide off". There are basically 3 solutions to problems in this game. Built in, oddball, and exploit. Oddball solutions are fine but they aren't intended.
@@samwoodley1653 Thing is, that's fine. The developers probably realized that there would be some solutions they didn't see coming. If they didn't want you to be rewarded for that type of extremely creative or exploitative solution, they would have patched it when testing the shrines, or when seeing how it's played afterward.
Yeah, but speaking of jumping, the very first 3D game, OoT also had the side jump and back flip, and they absolutely allowed you to get to places that were (probably) unintended like heart piece above Dodongo Fortress and the guy sitting on a roof in Kakariko Village.
There's an interview with the Divinity: Original Sin director, where someone asked him if he's aware of an exploit that lets players stack dozens of status effects onto themselves before a hard fight. His reply was that not only did they know, but they chose not to fix it because it's so much fun to do
this falls in line with fromsoftwares philosophy, otherwise why put the ashes in the game? if they wanted you to play a certain way they wouldnt have those objects in game.
there's also the ability to use telekinesis to maul enemies with an object that weighs an absolute ton, letting you one shot most enemies with a bit of setup
Great video as always! My favorite TOTK hack is definitely "make a bigger bridge" It's truly staggering how many puzzles can be solved by building an aggressively large bridge 😂
Yes. I just did the shrine crystal puzzle today and landed it pretty well. However, I also brought out an extra fan, added two batteries nearby, a large battery and two rockets instead.
My go to "cheat" is rocket shields. Make them outside a shrine, and boom, anything not locked behind doors is done. Also, Rewind is amazing for making your own floating platforms
I still remember clearing the Fire Temple by almost completely ignoring the minecarts and just climbing the place and using Ascend on the little available spots on ledges.
That is EXACTLY what I did. I looked at those minecarts and realized my half-baked monkey brain would never get it. It's like that math problem in high school you accept you're just never gonna understand and move on.
yeah i saw the maze of tracks and i was like umm. i was scared to do them in the wrong order and have to backtrack. and then i came to an area where i couldn't figure out the intended strat so i put on my climbing gear and just scaled the outer wall lol
talking about ignoring the intended path for the path to the water temple I didn't realize the zora armor let you climb waterfalls by gliding into them (as opposed to starting at the bottom) in this game until the last one into the temple proper so the wind sage got a workout making sure I reached the side of those floating water dispensers to climb up them
Glad I'm not the only one who did this. I maxxed stamina really quickly and lucked into the climbing shirt early on, so I've just been spidering and gliding and ascending everywhere, which isn't too far off from what I did in BotW honestly.
tears of the kingdom is a game that makes me feel dumb and clever at the same time. dumb because there were puzzles that i to this day have no clue how to solve "properly", but clever because i found a solution anyway.
@@thegreatphantus1627 I've been having a lot of fun discussing the game with friends who are also playing and it is absolutely insane how different some of us are doing these shrines. I have a friend who didn't understand the shrine in Karikako Village was trying to teach you how stabilizers work so he managed to complete the shrine by making a huge tower and paragliding off of it
@@kacheek9101I also didn’t realize hitting them is what activates the stabilizers so instead I used ultra hand to pick up the item and rotated it quickly then dropped it and recalled it. Made a makeshift catapult lol
there's one shrine that actually teaches you the recall trick. you have to lift up some torches, go press a button elsewhere, and recall them to their lifted up state. It teaches you that recall works reverting things to their ultrahand state, and that it works from much further away than ultrahand. I had never even considered using recall in that way before, but from then on I was cheesing puzzles and challenges constantly. And to me, it felt great! I had acquired knowledge and now I was using it to surpass challenges in unintended ways. But I didn't learn that from the internet- I learned it from the game telling me.
Omfg i know exactly the shrine you're talking about I had NO idea how to solve it i just put hydromelons on this button and then fire arrowed the burners, like i solved it but i was frustrated i didn't learn what the game was trying to teach me you know?
omg I cheese so many shrines with the recall trick but it didn't occur to me there so I just grabbed the torch and put it next to the button, stood on the button and grabbed a bow, lighting the arrors with the torch. I knew it wasn't the intended way but that honestly felt better
so that’s how it’s supposed to be done… recall didn’t occur to me there so i dropped all my weapons to make a long stick and light the torches from the button
For the record, if you didn't know, rocket shield boosting was in the big trailer, the final huge one. They show link doing it for his advantage, we knew about this before we could even play the game; Nintendo was eager to show it off.
Plus, obviously it's a specific feature of the game, not some buggy exploit, if the devs didn't want it to be used they just wouldn't have implemented it/would have restricted it in shrines or any other specific locations, their whole thing is that you're always free to experiment with everything and solve problems in any way you can
@@GlitchDude yeah exactly and they gave it a separate animation and everything, they accounted for every possible fusion so i really don't get why some people call it a 'cheat' like the devs didn't explicitly add it as a feature
i think it feels a lot like its cheating, because if you try to take out a rocket (any of the gumball) out, the shrine won't let you. I had to get out of the shrine, put the rocket into the shield and go back. That's why it kind of is cheating. I'm sure they knew players could still do it anyways, at the end of the day they can only limit so much so they let it go for some of the shrines. Of course I try not to do it this way, IF i could truly figure it out, cause I am curious what is the intended solution.
@@aj-sz8mu by that logic using any weapons from outside the shrine are cheating, and you should treat each shrine like the ones that strip you of your gear. You're allowed to use what you have, there is tech to stop you and they don't implement it.
I remember feeling like I sequence broke the game when I did all the tears after doing only one temple. The final tear basically tells you where Zelda is. You can go to her any time you want. Yet that "Find Princess Zelda" main quest kept sitting in my adventure log, taunting me. It was like the game was telling me "you did not experience this story the right way."
I cant play the game without the Mastersword, so i flew up to Zelda and tickled her till she gave me the s w o r d. I found the memory that played afterwards to be "Ya I got it already after seeing your evil buttcheeks"
I'm starting the game, and please don't spoil me the end, but I do know where Zelda is. SPOILERS AHEAD THAT COULD BE WRONG SO DON'T CORRECT ME: . . . . . . . . . . She's in that hell hole below the Hyrule castle, right? I mean, for me, it's kind of pretty obvious she went there, or will end there. And I even tried to go down that toilet, get to the end, but I wasn't able to bypass the army of moronic goblins because I ran out of resources when I got there... But I'm pretty sure I can find her there. I haven't been able to reach the castle, but I'm sure as hell the castle is empty and the big bad boss has Zelda trapped in there. I also know that Ganon is disguised as Zelda walking here and there, because they kind of spoil the fun in Hyrule. So I know she's not walking free. And I also know that the imbecile of Zelda keeps speaking to your mind and instead of telling you where she is, she says "Find me." The Zelda version of "Guess what I want to eat today."
I always do a cheeky lil "heeheehee" anytime I ascend through a ceiling at JUST the right angle in a difficult spot. I feel like I'm outsmarting the game when I am, in fact, playing it exactly as intended.
it is satisfying to turn on ascend and it suddenly turns blue/green and goes ding on the edge of a cliff just slightly hanging above you lol. but then it turns to despair when you fall off the tiny piece of land you're standing on right when it happens.
My biggest "cheat" moment was when I was in the fire temple and I couldn't figure out how to get where I wanted with the minecarts and accidentally discovered that I could climb every wall in the temple and I ended up just climbing up and paragliding to where I wanted to be
The multitude of options for cheese also helps keep the open world more open. There are a lot of games where you can access more challenging areas early, but the expected response after getting eaten by a dinosaur or something is to backtrack and come back later. In BotW/TotK, you're encouraged to give it another try and think of something clever.
One of the best parts about totk in my opinion, is that if you find yourself losing you can quite literally just burn through materials to fuck up whatever you're fighting. Find yourself dying over and over again against an enemy camp? Welp, time to load that lynel bow with rubies to nuke the shit out of them
@@gabusdeux Or get good, like I had to do when I first played BotW and got trapped by the Zora's domain lynel, without knowing I could go back to an earlier save. Anyway, I died a few hundred times, but I managed to beat it!
@@idiotically-everythingI love the game gives you options tho!! I absolutely adore it, esp bc I’m not a gamer-gamer who’s got like, less than twenty game experiences under my belt. My brother (who I shit you not, has like 4 solid years by now of game time on Destiny/Destiny 2) was like “oh yeah all the bosses are super easy lol” and I’m like, thank god for that a little bit, bc it keeps me going through em… Those are necessary experiences that are made accessible so everyone, from pros to little 10-year old Timmy (I do find it hilarious tho bc it’s intended that way but in Australia at least, BOTW and TOTK are both rated M) can enjoy and complete the game. The optional enemies are what sell me though. Lynels, and I haven’t tried yet but Gleeoks? Genuinely difficult and skill requiring! Yes you could cheese them, but aside from duplicating (my game updated beyond it) it’ll drain your resources real quick I’d imagine. So esp if you wanna farm their parts for upgrades… it’s time to learn those mechanics a bit, cook some dishes that temporarily let you fight god, and nail your flurry time rushes in time with their attacks. I’ve done that for Lynels now, and breezed the Red variety so will be taking on blue and whites now. Hoping to fight a Gleeok soon once I restock on arrows LMAO. I should also give a big shoutout to the Fuse ability which MASSIVELY improves upon BOTW’s weapon system, just… literally game changing. Nothing beats the Hudson Shield! 😤
@@idiotically-everything lol, it sounds like you just got used to it's fighting patterns. That's fine and all, but you could have probably beaten it easier if you had a shit ton of materials y'know? Besides though, I was more referencing things like massive monster groups
I was absolutely mind bogged when I first played the game and learned all the new abilities the game gives you and it instantly made me think Nintendo has incredible faith in their level design, and I felt respected as a player to be trusted with the absolute amount of freedom
At times I really felt like I was missing some intended experience by hovering in the air bike in the underworld... so I tried to do it the "honest" way and got tired of it 10 minutes later, the game's mechanics are there for a reason. The only intention after all is to let you shape your own experience however you like. That is truly genius.
@@TheDapperDragon and where did u get the implication that they’re skipping anything? There’s nothing wrong with exploring how they want, that was a stupid assumption and take.
There was one shrine where you had to like connect these orbs together to roll a certain way on an S shaped slope to hit a target with enough speed. After like 14 failed attempts, I just tried shooting a bomb arrow, and funny enough it worked.
I wrote a comment about this same shrine, but I ended up attaching the ball to a spear and threw it at the target and it worked. And the spear didn't fall in the abyss so I got to keep it. Nice
Yeah, I also resorted to bomb arrow for that. I could not for the life of me figure out a way to get to roll fast enough and curve to the right. It just did not seem to have enough distance to hit that target no matter what I tried.
@@thunderbolt64_ Iun-orok shrine in the chasm beneath Tabantha Great Bridge. There's a cave in the little corner northwest of the bridge. "The Right Roll"
I’m so glad to see someone talk about this feeling! The game being made this way where solutions are vague or have so many solutions feels very difficult for me (my brain doesn’t work that way) and feeling like I’m not doing it RIGHT even if I did get it done robbed me of the satisfaction of beating it. Edit: I personally don’t feel like I outsmart the game because the solutions aren’t particularly novel, if I was exploiting a glitch I’d discovered I may get that feeling but I wouldn’t return to the glitch solution cos I personally find it very upsetting lol.
Seriously, right? Many of the “unintended” solutions are so dumb and janky, there’s nothing smart about them at all. Just brute forcing the puzzle with any random method, rather than actually having to think
We were talking about this in my DnD group earlier, how it seemed cool that this game really tries to give you the easy way out of most things...and how always offering the easy way out has inspired so many people to complete tasks/puzzles in some mind-bogglingly complicated ways.
ah ttrpgs. the most open game where there can really only be 2 unintended solutions. when the gm finds your proposal so absurd they don't know how to rule it or when the dice simply says you fail.
As a person who tends to play more building games and fewer RPG/shooter games, I love how you can solve problems in this game in an unintended way. It sort of adds an adjustable difficulty where more complex creative builds and plans save you time exploring.
I think they have solved a problem even rpg games have had for a while and that’s the creative aspect even in rpgs there is 1-2 ways to solve a problem like in Skyrim there was stealth and all guns blazing but TOTK just says here’s a puzzle and some stuff figure it out or do what you want with it
It’s also more satisfying for me to do it with some wacky solution I build vs. what they clearly want you to do. Most of the time I see what I’m SUPPOSED to do but I’m like “okay but can I do it this way?” And continue building my little goofy contraption, even if it takes an additional 25 minutes to work. I love it.
@@Not_Ciel I love playing that way too I feel like I get more out of the game beating it “my way” and it gives the temples a level of replay-ability I’ve replayed a few just to see if I can beat it in another way or without using what’s provided
This is why I love this game so much. Also... that shrine with the bouncy boats... I had no arrows for it and the enemy that drops them died at an edge and they fell into the void. Even with that the shrine was beatable with the tools the game gives you. It really is a game that promotes thinking your way around a puzzle when the obvious solution isn't viable, and I love that.
For a second, I was convinced you were describing the shrine as a beat table because of the variety of options it gives you to solve it. It took a few tries before my brain stopped auto swapping the word out and I realised you meant beatable.
The amount of times I’ve done a puzzle in this game and felt as though I did it incorrect and outsmarted the game is immense. There was a shrine once where I had to find a way to get across a rail to the end and just couldn’t figure out the puzzle so I ended up just fusing the mine cart it gave me to my shield and just rode across the rail. I also cheated the entire fire temple I’m pretty sure cause I hated the mine cart system, so I just used a ton of hover platforms and ascend and I was pretty much able to do the whole dungeon that way. It’s incredible just how much this game lets you choose how you do things
I’m a psychopath and I just climbed the entire temple. no stamina food, only had one and a half stamina wheels. i just really did not want to fuck with those minecarts
The best part of this imo is the fact that when I want to use a shortcut I end up spending more time trying to cheese it than I would’ve if I just did it their way. I feel like I’m not the only one who tries to come up with the funnest solution without caring how much time it’ll take.
I continued to blow myself up, reset saves, and stealth around a hinox to build a giant bomb that spells "die"... Fun is my only objective in this game
Ik! Just spent like 15-20 minutes and lots of resources making an army of freezing + fan auto robots that froze and pushed bokoblins to their death. It would've taken me less than 1 minute of killing them by hand, but that wouldn't be as enjoyable. In fact, the best thing about it was that i rescued a guy in a cage while every single Boko was still alive but freezing and colliding against spikes over and over again
I think a good way to view these "cheap" but intended solutions, is the way players view shortcuts in racing games. It gives you a massive advantage but it was placed there to reward players that explore routes thoroughly and remember the shortcuts.
I get that, but its not entirely accurate, you cant use a shortcut you found in the mute city course in the big blue course. in this game you can find one shortcut and apply it to like 300 puzzles.
Yeah but I was raised in a school system that stifled my creativity and taught me a fear of failure. If I'm not doing it "the right way" then I feel bad about it :(
@@secretlyditto7716 I can't help but remember Daryl talking about a puzzle in BotW where everyone found the non-intended solution and to me the intended solution was smacking me in the face... And the whole video was about how maybe the devs wanted creativity to shine and didn't have an intended solution... Flipside whenever I find a cheesy strat in TotK I hate myself. I remember one where I had to build a contraption that would climb a rail... I couldn't figure it out so I just dragged the thing up by hand, then rewound time to bring it back up after it fell and I climbed.
@@LethalLuggageomg i couldn't figure that one out either! I wasn't even smart enough to use reverse. I used the metal bars to build a bridge and walk up, then grabbed the ball after. I felt like I was too dumb for the game.
The way I make these ridiculously simple shrines more fun is to identify what they want you to do, then work very hard to find any alternative way to do it. I love it.
@@carotclan148i unironically was surprised when he did it with the shield to get through the fire since if its the same one I'm thinking of I just grabbed the metal plate and put it over the holes the fires came out to bypass it lol, also the shrine with the big wheel that you use to move a ball up to the top I cheeses by just joined 3 big plates together to make a bridge from the bottom floor to the top where the latter is and ultra hand carried the ball up to the hole lol
Honestly I suspect that, equally so, the built-in cheese _also_ exists so that the game does not have to provide hints to make sure everyone can complete the puzzle "properly", since providing too many hints feels like handholding. It is like a hidden difficulty setting in that way: people can skip a puzzle they are too stumped by without the game having to provide an explicit "I give up, do it for me" button.
@@orngjce223 I would guess you're right. It's brilliant game design to put in an "escape hatch." I remember in Demon's Souls how every boss had at least one cheese way to win, so if you really sucked and were stuck, you could go online, learn how, then cheese it.
I genuinely think I saw this video at the perfect time. TOTK has been overwhelming me (outside of the factof how much there is to do) because I'm diagnosed with OCD, and one of my big problems is called "Just Right" OCD. I've been constantly getting anxious and worried if I'm doing things the "right" way even moreso than usual people, which has been making it difficult for me to fully enjoy the experience. It's been causing genuine distress. Ironically, I watched this video to take a break from playing TOTK. I was on a massive mountain that would take forever to climb off from. Beside me was a bird glider, a cart, and a fan. Now, it may seem obvious what I was supposed to do (it was), but my OCD was to preoccupied by the idea that this was all a misunderstanding, and I'm not *supposed* to do that. After unsuccessfully trying to get the bird glider to take off by itself for 30 minutes, I got tired and decided to watch youtube. This is one of the first videos I see. Long story short, I am now off the mountain and can rest assured that I'm (most likely) not doing anything "wrong" for the rest of the game.:)
I feel this. I also have ocd (not Just Right OCD; my themes are more rumination, counting, touretic, etc) so I can imagine how stressful totk could get for you. I'm also autistic, so that may play a part, but I also have had moments of "oh, I could solve it like this. WAIT -- what if that wasn't the 'answer?' What if I'm missing something important??" and in doing so have lessened my own fun at times because every time I think of a solution, my brain yells at me to think of more until I find one that feels like THE solution This vid helps though
The only time you're ever outsmarting the puzzles in this game is when you get to the end of the shrine and don't hear the jingle. That's when you know you found an unintended solution
I love how many “teaching” shrines they have. I sometimes don’t use the first solution I find in case there’s some other mechanic it’s trying to teach me.
I just love the feeling of thinking like Link would, improvising, looking around, thinking, anticipating, planning, trying, failing, trying again. It's everywhere, in combat in puzzles in exploration it's all so great. Also when I fail it's funny, I can hear the Loony Tunes music and it's all in good fun. I think I enjoy failing even more than succeeding, especially when the failing surprises me. It's such a delightful game I want more games like this.
I always love when games make you feel like you’re outsmarting the developers, even if it’s exactly how they designed it and TOTK takes that idea to a whole new level.
i went into the sky temple before heading to rito village, and it was such a surreal experience to go through that temple knowing it was intended for me to go through it, yet without the power needed to complete the temple, it felt... empty in a sense. of course, naturally, i got pissed off and looked up what to do, but still, those few moments where i was just trying to figure it out are so memorable
I did something very similar except I had already done most of the Tulin quest...I just somehow lost him because I went to the wrong sky island to start climbing up??? Fast forward to me reaching the Wind Temple, sans Tulin, and then being very disappointed when I couldn’t activated the wind turbines with zonai fans lmao. I eventually figured it out, went back for Tulin, and climbed all the way up again... Just a very funny moment for me as well!
I did the same thing with the water Temple and was slowly going insane trying to solve the puzzles. My only gripe with the game is that things like that aren't immediately obvious.
Same haha i was looking for that one item that would create wind strong enough.... Till i remembered, oh forgot to find Tulin haha Later i lost him, went to the temple again and he wasn't there. After an hour of looking for him... Google where his spawn point was, it was simply looking right of a shrine 🤦
Same hat here, was going on along some sky islands thinking I was just doin some side stuff then found that I was heading right towards a big important story thing. I didnt have any context at that point that you needed companions to actually complete temples. Which with the fact that you don't get to activate the teleport at the temple *until* you bring tulin; it definitely felt like a kick in the butt that I came all this way but couldn't even attempt the temple. Honestly I think the temples themselves are one of the few parts of the game where the open ended implementation falls a little flat. If you're going to let players access temple areas without doing main quests, why punish them for that?
I feel like the cheating feeling more-so comes from discovering the rocket shield trick online rather than discovering it yourself because that would’ve been a really cool “aha!” moment for anyone.
This is why I stringently avoided looking up anything online until very late in the game. I've got three temples and about 100 shrines under my belt now, and interestingly, rocket shield was one of the earlier shrines I remember getting. I always keep a rocket shield or two on me now for "emergencies".
I definitely had one of those moments with a minecart shield, I fused it by mistake and just had it in my inventory for ages, and then at one point I was just like... "hmmm I wonder if I can use this as a skate board" and it actually worked. which was the first moment I had of "wait, what else can do weird things" which lead me down a few wacky rabbit holes. This is %100 the kind of game that I dont wanna know anything about when i play it, heck, I even avoid looking at the map most of the time. It's such a fun game to unravel on your own.
Its creative problem solving taken to the obvious comclusion they know most if not all the answers that you can use to get thrue a obstacle maybe block a few or force you to think about a creative idea or maybe even leaving a easier option open for people who know how to do that
There was a shrine where when you press a button in front of the door you need to unlock, the game forces you to watch the ball you need to unlock the door get send off to the other side of the shrine, so you are supposed to go through the whole shrine, fight the enemies on the way and get back to the door with the ball. Yet, my very first thought when I saw this was "... Can't I just use Recall ?". And I did. And it worked. And I found this hilarious. Loved this shrine because I felt clever solving it with stupidly simple solutions, even though the fact the ball isn't already at the other side of the shrine implies that the developers did think about this solution.
Ya, I feel like it more or less rewards you for doing stuff like this simply because you thought of a solution that the majority of casual players won't think of.
i would literally find myself doing things in ways i would realize were cheese, then figure out how it was intended to be solved and then be like "oh that was cool"
I can say with certainty that one of the best feelings I've gotten while playing TotK was spending hours on the great sky island stubbornly refusing to enter the temple of time, and managing to explore the entire island without any powers. Was I supposed to get up a large suspended minecart track by chaining 30+ shield hops? Probably not, but I'll be damned if it wasn't the most satisfying feeling to actually do it.
Me too! It wasn’t until I beat the flux construct and wasn’t able to pick up its core that I finally thought “okay, I’m clearly missing out on some things”
Yeah the same happened to me, I went around and killed a ton of enemies and got a lot of stuff but it felt like I was missing something the entire time, then I realized I probably should've gone to the intented destination first
Me too. I got sidetracked and then the next thing I know I find a bunch of useless rocks lying around, and there are minecart tracks that I can’t use. When it was to the point where I got stuck on the flux construct island, I just decided to start a new save file because I figured I wasn’t losing much. I used to have to walk across the minecart tracks.
I think it’s the difference between someone being good at problem solving, and good at passing a test. Or if you prefer to go Zelda-y, it’s the difference between wisdom and knowledge. There’s the person who has pride in getting A’s, likes feeling more knowledgeable and having a fixed tier system (at minimum for themselves and their improvement, and at worst that they like to judge others by); and there’s the person who is thinking how to make creative or efficient or unintended answers to problems, ‘it’s not stupid if it works’. And that’s actually what’s at the forefront of modern child education theory - in a world where you can look up the answers to single-answer ‘knowledge’ questions in three seconds, the educating is actually about learning how to think: basic jigsaw puzzle/learn-by-wrote tiering is useless, and the more creative you are in getting to an answer, the more you’ve probably learned anyway. Tl;dr: Link gets his wisdom Triforce when he realises ‘I could use a rocket to zoom through this shrine’.
Highly disagree that any education system, atleast public ones in America, are trying to teach children to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, and think outside the box. I'd say they're taught quite the opposite actually.
@@newjersey973yeah, they tell us to think outside the box, but then go "not THAT far outside the box!" And I could never figure out why. Seems they just wanted me to think inside a slightly bigger box
I found it interesting how portal and portal 2 don’t have much replayability since you already know all the puzzles solutions. But I have seen friends do the same temples/shrines in tears of the kingdom different ways and I realize that it definitely ups its replayability.
The biggest surprise with TOTK is that this game unironically feels like everything I've always wanted Portal 3 to be gameplay-wise if it ever came out. Solving shrines in TOTK feels like doing Portal test chambers, and I absolutely love it. I bought a Zelda game and unexpectedly got a new Portal game along with it!
Yes! I love a puzzle with a simple task (reach the shrine end, get past this monster group, take this gem to that spot), some basic limitations (walls, cliffs, lava) and a bunch of tools and says "aight, here's what you're working with, solve the puzzle". I come out feeling clever for having an idea, following through and succeeding. The "puzzles" with only one possible solution and the only challenge is spotting the (usually very obvious) hints the Devs left and following the path. There's no figuring out, no "ah-ha" moment, if you try something else the game just says "no, I don't want it that way". My only gripe with both Portal games is how easy they are, my very first playthrough of the OG portal took literally 70 minutes. I never so much as paused to think about the "puzzle" because there was only one path forward and spotting it is simple - though the writing and story holds up the flimsy puzzles so well I still had fun.
@@helplmchoking Did you have a lot of puzzle game experience before playing Portal? 70 minutes is really short for Portal 1. I believe the "canonical" first playthrough time is considered to be around 4 hours. I remember getting stuck a lot on my first Portal playthrough and having to repeatedly put down the game and come back to it before I had the a-ha moment of what the puzzle solution was.
@@AaronRotenberg I guess so? I played Portal 2 first (I think) so that probably gave me a good primer. I think there was one spot in Portal 2 (that big lake bit underground?) where I wasn't sure of the way forward, but that was more that I didn't spot the portal surface the game wanted. I didn't find either game challenging at all, though I don't play many puzzle games, I think 'cause they just match how my brain works - visualising spaces and spotting patterns - but I did find them great fun. Portal Reloaded is a very different story. Partly 'cause the "correct" solutions don't always feel correct like the main games did and partly 'cause it's just really hard
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What's been your favorite "cheat" you've pulled off in TOTK?
I really want to play games the intended way, that is the way developers intended. I don't enjoy cheap cheeses and even if I see opportunity to do them I refuse to. I just think it's common sense that you trust developers of the games to know how to bring you best experience. If you alter it there is too much third wall breaking and I don't like that. I like immersion way more over feeling like "smart person".
'MimIc TeAr Is ChEaTiNG' uses giant crusher with royal knights resolve ash of war with 16 buffs slamming the boss for 46000 damage per swing and calls it skill
@@matrixfull are you really playing 'as they intend' if you refuse to use over 50% of the mechanics and items they hand deliver to you? i.e. both in totk and any souls series naked with only sticks is not the intended way no matter how much the community tries to force feed you that b/s
I brought a frost emitter to the spirit temple boss and just didn't let it do anything
@@matrixfullcheck the video at 17:42 Aonuma himself says you’re meant to “cheat” although cheat isn’t necessarily the best word for it. Think of it as creative solutions rather than cheating. All within the realms of what is allowed in game by the developers because otherwise they wouldn’t have added it. Cheating would be something like whistle running in BOTW. That was not intended by the devs that’s a glitch that breaks the games mechanics. THATS cheating. Whereas every creative solution your mind can fathom no matter how much it feels like cheating in Tears is just that. A creative solution thought up by you and provided by the devs.
if you think about the rocket jump shrine, it teaches you MULTIPLE shield things. It's actively showing you that there are lots of options for fusing stuff to shields that aren't just "more durability"
my friend in botw I always do boe lift smuggling glitch that how I fly
And its subtitle is something along the lines of "more than defense", which tells you right when you walk in that the lesson is about the versatility of shields.
I had a Hydrant Shield, i used that
@@GamingRabbit17 I wish I realised this for the water temple LMAO
@@nujuat Didn't even think of that
My feeling has always been that the developers were watching how speed runners were breaking breath of the wild, and decided to make a game that was designed to be exploited like that
That makes sense. This is a sequel to Breath of the Wild.
Inspired by, maybe. But I can't imagine myself being excited to see a speedrun until they find some way to clip through a wall that sends them half-way across the world. Part of what made exploits fun was that it was some absurd solution that seemingly appeared from thin air. Here, they're just handing you toys and telling you the experience they built isn't worth your time.
The speed runners in BotW were “cheating” in quite lame ways outside of the ‘rules’ of the game. Basically finding glitches.
Like the whistle running and whatever that ‘bullet bounce’ is called (I’ve forgotten all the corny glitch names).
All the creative solutions Ive seen in TotK are way better. Though I haven’t seen speed running videos and assume they’re packed with lame stuff.
@@codycast >hasnt actually watched any speedruns
>insults them anyway
lmao
@@leeshapon I’ve seen tons of speed runs. I found most of the ones involving glitches to be boring as it wasn’t someone beating the game quickly as I view beating the game.
It would be like if someone found a random sequence of key presses that instantly teleport you to Gannon where you can then 1 shot and the process took 20 seconds
To me that’s not “beating the game quickly”
I remember reading that the 'ascend' ability started off as a developer tool that one of the team members used to get out of caves when he was finished play testing them. He came to realize that having to backtrack out of the cave, now devoid of enemies and puzzles and loot, was not fun the same way it was to enter the unknown and discover - so this core ability of the game started off as a way for devs to 'cheat' themselves out of caves and realized it was way more fun.
I absolutely LOVE that story, because it's such a genius way of solving the question of "how do you make leaving a place more interesting?" The out of the box nature of Ascend as an answer to the question is a perfect reflection of how Nintendo wants the players to think outside the box too. I like to think about how that compares to how others have answered that same question, like how skyrim has one way shortcut exits at the end of basically all of the caves and dungeons so that you can leave in a different way than you came in, or the tomb loops back to the entrance with a false wall you can only open from the treasure room end, same thing.
@@burnin8ablewario land 4 hurry up
@angelman69 so true. Pizza tower really did make the answer to that question central to its core gameplay
Basically the trope Door to Before, but on the demand.
"Oh you don't like walking? Well... how about you just go up?"
I've also seen a lot of people treating the platform recall trick "cheating" as well, but several shrines demand that you know about it. There's one with a sagging bridge you have to ultrahand into place and then recall it back up so you can reach the other end. The devs know, and they want you to know too.
I'd honestly never thought of it until seeing it in this video. There was a backpack korok that would have gone WAAAAYYY faster if I'd though of that. instead I had to build some horrible stepladder bridge. XD
Unless of course if you rocket shield over it. Or just use rewind to let you jump to the other end.
Boy did I feel smart when I discovered it. For me it was the very first shrine on the surface. It expected me to have the paraglider but because I had run off in the other direction than the game told me to, I didn't have it yet. There was the box that I was obviously supposed to shoot in the air, jump off and glide over the gap. And there was me glider-less and still pretty clueless about all the mechanics and stuff. Of course, you can leave shrines any time so I thought that was the safetly measure left by the devs if you come here when you can't complete it yet. And then the thought struck me: what if I float the cube over the gap, climb on and rewind? And obviously it worked! So personally, I felt like I worked for that trick and deserve to use it now.
The bridges happen so often too! Like, in the fire temple, tons of shrines. They teach us that it's possible. They even teach us to ascend through it!
I just feel like I'm cheesing most puzzles by doing that though
“If you aren’t cheating you aren’t trying” that’s my new motivation in life.
That was a hidden bit of wisdom we didn't know we needed
That’s how most ppl pass their final exams tbh
Living by the words of the late Eddie Guerrero
That's the Chinese philosophy.
Ascend ability was originally a cheat code during development for devs to get around quickly untill they realized how annoying getting out of caves is without it so they just made it a real thing 😂
Yeah it seems tailor made to solve that problem.
I think a lot of the time when the “cheating” feels bad is just when the cheese is kinda trivial and lame. Like just happening to have a rocket shield and skipping the whole shrine incidentally feels kinda lame cause you basically didn’t do it at all. Whereas solving it with some random bullshit that just so happens to work out feels very fun
I agre, true cheese is when the correct way is easier than the cheese way, but you didn’t bother doing it the correct way so you chose the harder cheesy way
Fantastic take
This is defintely how I feel. No amount on weird contraptions I build to make solutions make me feel bad for completing a shrine, because I applied creativity to use it. But if there is a complex puzzle in front of me for a chest, and I simply abuse recall, then it just feels like I robbed myself of doing something cool.
@@maxminton7861 Exactly. I think in some cases alternative solutions can be good puzzle design, in some others not so much. Like building your 1st makeshift bridge to skip something, using rockets to gain height, or bomb flowering a pressure pad is fun the 1st time, but when this solution can be repeated so many times I don't care that it's ''uNiNtEnDeD, omg so many solutions = good design'' at this point it's a non puzzle. And even the intended solutions are sometimes too easy because most of the shrines are not really all that hard. They usually introduce a concept, then make it a little bit more difficult, then they end the shrine abruptly before the can expand on the concept because they have to keep things bitesized. Doesn't help that in an open world everything has to be level 1 because they never know where you can go, so you're left with many disappointing shrines and alternative solutions are not really all that fun most of the time.
@@awayekevin3397 I agree with this 100%. I don't understand how people can say that the shrines have obtuse solutions. Even the "intended" way is super easy 90% of the time. I really miss the difficult puzzles in other Zelda's, but I don't think we'll ever get them back because of how much more widespread the series has gotten, and it must appeal to a wider audience that hasn't been playing Zelda for 20 years.
I’ve finished all the shrines by now, and since I always just carry rocket shields, there’s been a good number of them where I’ve seen the possibility for an easy cheese and chosen to do the intended puzzle anyway, because the puzzles are fun to solve and the cheese being there just gives me a safety net. The few times I’ve just used the cheese, it’s because I’ve been standing there like ‘ok, I know how to solve this, it seems annoying and tedious to get it exactly right, so I won’t bother’. Gets me the fun part of solving the puzzle without having to go through the actual work of executing the solution
just because your key also fits the lock doesn't mean its cheating to open the door
@@thunderborn3231 its not cheating if Nintendo wants players to solve the puzzles their own way.
The puzzles aren't engaging enough to make me do them by choice.
Having some puzzles literally just raise a platform in a game where any number of banal things can shoot you upward is bad design.
Those are few and far between tho, fortunately
I didn't use rocket shields much, but I did use my fair share of Recall Elevators and Bomb-Flower-Shields. It's just really rewarding to cheese yourself through a puzzle
Honestly every single hour with Totk I have spent so far has felt like i was cheating the game even if it's something as simple as fusing 2 strong weapons together to make something that even a lynel would fear or using reversal on a piece of metal i dropped from the air to give me height to jump and paraglide to the end of the shrine. However more often than not, I found myself being more proud of my efforts when they went against the designed structure of the game which is why it's really cool in my opinion that the devs have that "it's your game. Do something creative if you want" kind of attitude.
the game urges you to do that tho, hows that cheating? its like ppl like you assume that because you did something different, or saw a different solution its not "intended" but riddle me this, if it wasnt intended why is it allowed? cheating would be the dupe glitch, or hacking/modding the game, thats cheating, but thinking you cheated cuz the game allowed you to use a different solution to the puzzle is about the worst kind of gatekeeping ive seen gamers utter.
@@Aqsticgod "If it wasn't intended, why is it allowed?" That's not really how that works. In pretty much any game, even without glitches, there are ways to do things the game allows even though they aren't intended. It's a big part of why glitchless speedruns are just as entertaining as the glitch ones.
TOTK and BOTW were likely built with each puzzle having at least one solution, maybe even a few, in mind, but the game still wants you to be able to find solutions they didn't consider. Plenty of solutions absolutely can be described as "cheating the puzzle," but it's not a bad thing to cheat them. I don't think anyone is gatekeeping this except the people actively against the cheese.
I love how they fully embraced open puzzle design. Finding creative ways around a puzzle is often just as fun as solving it. Plus it means you’re basically never stuck in the game, if you think hard enough there’s always a way forward
yes, that's an issue I encountered in earlier zelda games, you miss a key item and then you're stuck till you find it.
When I cheese a puzzle that appears to have an intended solution, I don’t always feel clever. I don’t feel like I cheated the game to win, or like I cheated myself out of the satisfaction of solving it “right”, instead I feel like the game won against me because I’m too poopoo brain to figure out the solution so I had to activate rocket shield easy mode.
I think the puzzles are the easy way out actually. I imagine if there's an absolute uncreative person that only wants to play by the rules enters a puzzle room, they can certainly find all the tools to solve it, like in the older games. But I fell like that's more of a failsave. If you're not creative enough to "cheese" your way through, you can go the old-fashioned way.
Hah yeah. Kind of like when a kid draws a line all the way round a maze instead of solving it properly.
@@luka_8 Depends on the shrine. Bomb-shield-bouncing over the entire puzzle is unsatisfying.
Fusing the stupid ball to a random stick you have, throwing it, missing, recalling it to yourself, throwing it at the target again, only to realize that you now have to jump 2 stories to get to the exit door, probably using the mechanic you already couldn't figure out when trying to solve the puzzle correctly. So, you check your inventory and don't have any bomb shields but do have a board shield (a shield with a 4x8 sheet of wood attached), so you drop it, ultrahand it up where you need to be, tilt it so you can make it all the way, bring it back, and hop on and recall. (anyone who's done this shrine probably knows which this is)
That's satisfying.
I'm impressed that something so eloquently put includes the words "poopoo brain". Well done.
Lol that example of going around the maze is how I solved two of the sky labyrinths.
I remember talking with a friend about the shrine where you learn about stablizers. At the end of it there's a massive pit you need to get over somehow.
He has a clip of him managing to piece together a long chain of grates, use a stablizer to prop them upright at a 45° angle, then walk up it and glide the rest of the way across the pit.
And by pure chance that was actually one of the shrines I *_also_* had saved a clip of me completing it, and I used the stablizer to create a catapult to shoot me across the pit.
As always I'm super impressed with the Zelda team. For a game so open-ended. I'm surprised that there are no major issues or bugs with it. I remember reading about how Shigeru Miyamoto would have nightmares that people would find bugs or cheats in the games, and it's cool that now everyone is like "fuck it" and "the point is to BS and cheat". It feels like it's both liberating to both the player and the game devs.
Also, I used to be one of those people that needed everything to be done perfectly and to have collected everything when it comes to games. And now with big games like BOTW and TOTK, they've shown me that I don't need to have a perfect run through and I don't need to collect everything. It's shown me that I am more imaginative and creative than I thought I was and that it's okay to make mistakes and miss some things. That way, I always have something to look forward to no matter how many hours I've put into the game! If this is the start of a new era in Zelda games (and an already phenomenal start at that), can't wait to see what the future has in store!
The problem of those non-linear but open (sandbox-like) world games is sometimes the chaos which can unfold itself, especially with enemy spawns. Example from BotW as I am not too much into TOTK yet: Nighttime, kees swarm coming for you, Yiga Officer spawns and attacks, while stal-enemies spawn next to you to attack - everyone knows that situation if you've been to the late game. I am taking a great relief in knowing that I am always able to choose my fights - in linear games they are forced most of the times, especially in dungeons. If I had to drop into an enemy camp because I ran out of stamina while paragliding, it is good to know that you can always teleport yourself somewhere else, especially if there are really strong enemies presents. Same with your example: If you are low on weapons or most of your weapons are about to break, its good to have a hot air balloon at hand to just skip the fights you would have to do if you ascended the perceived intended way. In exchange you will miss out on loot and also some combat training. This is also part of the freedom which was advertised with Breath of the Wild and is even more prevalent with Tears of the Kingdom.
Sometimes when I solve a shrine it feels cheap for me too. Usually I will go back and look for the "intended" solution - thats also fun for me, to toss aside my "obvious" "cheaty" solution and go for an alternative.
Here's the biggest thing I've learned about how interestingly and *differently* this game is designed, in my time.
First, with the exception of shrines and the temples - and even half of those, honestly - fighting *constructs* is entirely optional.
That enemy you were looking at as you took what was very clearly a built-in bypass? A construct. This was actually taught to me in the tutorial of the game, that initial sky island. See, there's nothing stopping you from going to the snowy part of the island second, after doing that first shrine and getting the Ultrahand. It even puts a bunch of spicy berries and a cooking pot right by the entranceway to the area from where you meet Rauru. With the exception of maybe one or two enemies on the way to that Ultrahand shrine, though (and even them you could probably bypass if you bothered to sneak), every enemy on that island is optional. Going to the snowy shrine this way, you encounter zero enemies on the actual route, and while the set of wings and the building there that lets them lift off smoothly is probably mainly to get you back to the gate to talk to Rauru again, it's also the perfect height to let you circle around and land at the foot of the shrine even without attaching any fans.
Second, the game is very actively aware, if sometimes only vaguely, of how you can cheat. It doesn't particularly care, it just makes sure you always know.
Those shrine tricks? You entirely know it's cheating. Sure. Only because you can see that it's giving you tools, though, and you're refusing to use them. And it's largely fine with this. This game was very clearly meant to enable you to use your brain to deal with challenges - and specifically, threats - that you don't have the skill to deal with. That's why there's so many specifically combat-based Zonai devices. Hell, the monsters will even respond to them. There's an entire shrine, I think with the title The Great Hunt, that revolves around the fact that not only do they react to and even try to fight Zonai devices, but also the fact that if you just throw enough Zonai devices at the problem, they will in fact successfully kill everything. A couple of the devices will get flipped over, but you can in fact defeat every construct in there without picking up a weapon.
I felt that way at first,but the more I played this game,the more game tought me about different possibilities. It's like the game whispers to you, encouraging you to think outside the box. You play,have access to new devices, expanding your battery became stronger and SMARTER. Not only it's satisfying when you found the way to bypass your problems, it's also helps to associate yourself with Link even more. You both learning how to use your new powers and knowledge is also a weapon that you must to master. That is also why I try not to watch other people play throughs a lot, because you start to use others ideas,and less of your own
When I fought that squid shark thing above Zora’s domain, I had a lot of trouble clearing up the much and fighting it at the same time. So, I built a robot designed to follow the enemy and squirt water everywhere. As a bonus, it also hit it sometimes.
Also Prince Sidon’s water ghost thing was with me so I basically had 2 assistants in that boss battle.
That *almost* seemed like cheating, but then later I got Autobuild, and the part where you right just then learned to instantly build robots and/or vehicles is immediately followed by a boss battle with a guy who keeps summoning trucks.
If you weren’t supposed to use robots in boss battles, why was retrieving Autobuild immediately followed by a boss battle that emphisize autobuild?
What you call “cheating” I would call “trying to outsmart the enemy”. Zelda has always involved using your brain to solve riddles. BotW and TotK are simply letting you think you’re outsmarting them. Nintendo are actually smiling and saying “OK, you do that. In fact, here, have a thing that lets you do that.”
I remember my first big cheese in TOTK. On the great sky island, I was in the snowy portion. I didn’t see an obvious path up, it was probably super late at night and I had played a long time. So instead of looking for the “right” way. I went across the swift water, cut down a bunch of trees, fused like 6-8 of them together, fused a board to the bottom, and transported it back to the tall spot that was too slick to climb. Getting my construct across the river and up the waterfall was fun. Then I simply climbed my tall tree 😊
burning my wood weapon and using ultrahand on it and burning something instead of using a torch that's quite literally right infront of me feels like cheating
now what does feel like cheating to me is looking up solutions to puzzles. It doesnt feel like it, it just is. I originally wanted to play through the game without any online help, but i found myself not wanting to play the game because i couldnt find anything out. but now i enjoy the game but still feel guilty for looking up solutions.
at 16:45, I actually cheesed that shrine by putting the pole on top of the platform, then using recall, and climbing on the pole. I had no idea what the actual solution was but I knew that what I did was not intended.
I did so many shrines without the paraglider. It always was so rewarding to beat one or even get so close to fail. For example A bouncy device shrine i spent 30 minutes on to fail on the final jump.( I didn't know about the rocket shield thing) I left but didn't feel defeated but happy that I got past the first three jumps.
One huge difference between old Zelda games and BOTW/TOTK is that in the old games you'd be receive explicit guidance towards your end goal and you got to feel clever when you managed to figure out what it was that you were supposed to do (because that was the only way to do it, progressing means "congrats! You solved it, you figured out the puzzle, you win!"), whereas in BOTW/TOTK you find yourself questioning your own intelligence and wondering whether or not you solved a puzzle "correctly" because you're not sure if your solution, one of many possible ways to progress, was the intended way or overly complicated (possibly even straight up dumb)...
The problem is the player tendency to "optimize the fun out of games." Even though cheating is satisfying up to a point, when you can completely bypass huge portions of almost any puzzle it becomes a problem. Its a non-puzzle and non-game at that point. Imagine if Portal 2 had a rocket shield and you could just jump up to the end of the chamber without engaging with the puzzle mechanics.
Yeah, as just one example, I built an airbike pretty early, and then the game shrank massively as I flew over every interesting piece of design. Maybe it feels nice to subvert the game a few times, but it definitely made the game worse when I did it every time.
Oh, and add on that the subversion is often the same, so you dont even get the satisfaction of coming up with a new idea.
It is why I dislike Mario Odyessy, Mario's move set is literally this.
So you're never facing a challenge with your movement in mind, you're doing something dull or skipping the entire thing.
Reminds me of my feelings towards Fallout: New Vegas. It's my favorite game of all time, but I know it like the back of my hand. It makes it incredibly hard to roleplay it it anymore because I know every objectively optimized pattern and playstyle. Never put anything into charisma, beeline to the strip without dying, I know the results of every speech outcome, etc.
i used the airbike to get all the lightroots, shrines and korok seeds. the increased mobility options made it far far more enjoyable than the shrines and koroks were in BOTW. especially when i managed to find the sweet spot of putting the korok on the front of the bike in such a way that it didnt offset the balance. saved that to autobuild as soon as i did.
This video was great and taught me some cool tricks as I haven't found certain shrines yet. I love how the game is and enjoy cheezing things. But my main takeaway is just to say thank you for using some music from The World Ends With You. I hardly ever see anyone acknowledge that game and it's absolutely one of my favorites. Definitely gonna check out more of your work now. You have great taste!
All I do with the gems on the plane is disconnect it from the plane and drop it before I land
bomb arrows also work for the shrines btw also for the capsules just leave and drop the rockets out side to put them on shields (as i keep a few shields with rockets)
I solved the boat shrine without shooting through the bars. I didn't even know that was the intended solution lol. I think I landed on top of one of the "sticks" that go out of the boat (which gives you the necessary altitude) and ascended into the cage.
im one of those old school 3d zelda fans. I had all four 3d zeldas on gamecube and then mm and oot again on n64 and i played them endlessly throughout my childhood and teen years, those games mean more to me than i can say.
I wasn't one who got mad about botws lack of temples or anything like that, i loved the new direction, and i REALLY enjoyed finding cheese in that game lol. but totk did have a few moments where i felt like i was cheating myself out of the intended experience. at the start.
so i intentionally went out of my way to forego the solutions i had come up with, in order to figure out how the game "wanted" me to solve its puzzles. and those were easily the points where i was having the least fun. it wasnt until i came across that rocket shrine that i realized the game was encouraging my stupid, simple solutions, and everything from that point forward felt so much better. plus, the more you play the more you want to find new stupid solutions, and it's just a whole lot of fun to play with what the game gives you.
they even added cheese as a food item so like
edit: small thing, but i also rly like that im not forced to strap koroks to a contraption and launch then across the map, most of them i can tuck safely in a horse cart and walk to their destination lmao
Me and my GF were watching this video and said you and I quote “look like squid-wards house” 💀
As ex Beta tester/ex moderator (Tech help guy) and small serv admin from small steam indie dev team. and yeah been gaming since intel 8088/86 days. building PC since 90's. True I am no dev but have my eyes opened few years back when was helping them out. Have better understanding of development of games, At least on Pcs.
Since TOTK /switch has such limited amount of ram. (4 Gb where Steam deck has 16 GB) They have too have things de-spawn once it hits a certain range, This is to help with game performance, but there is way around this, so if you ever build something like a glider or some monster creation you don't want too lose.. Drop a dragon scale and attached it to the device and it will stay where it is, but there still a limit HOW far you can go before It will de-spawn. but the distance is a lot further then if you just walked away from something you made. Yeah give a try. attached single dragon scale to anything you build..
Good Video man :)
Btw Twilight Princess HD and Links to past are my two fav Zelda game. Wind Waker HD was good too, I even named my kitten and called her Zelda lol.
I absolutely do not agree with the people who think that building a vehicle to traverse the depths is cheap. In fact, it actually does feel like the intended solution. They give you little depots with parts to build vehicles all around the depths, and all of the Yiga hideouts have ready-made vehicles that you can steal and use to get around. All evidence points to vehicles being the intended means of traversal in the depths.
I was able to use ascend in the air ship shrine once I made it in there I saw the poll and went "OH! I was supposed to shoot that dang it"
Admittedly, Gem puzzles are really annoying when transporting them and failing somehow. Just having to restart when your flying machine and gem fall off the edge is very annoying, but at least they don't force you to do a shrine as well, just a blessing shrine. Honestly the only really annoying part of the game.
But I love the trick blessing shrine. It looks real, but why is there arrows on the ground and a fire fruit bush?
Outside of entering actual codes and buying devices to make games easier, there is NO cheating in video games. There is creativity and skill.
As a Navy Seal once told me, "If you're not cheating, you're not trying."
The key element of this is that the game is super ambitious but designed to run in a switch, a super underpowered device. It's a miracle it runs at all.
If it had 32gb of ram we wouldn't have problems like despawning items.
The shrines in this game are like 10× better than in BOTW since they're all just "hey, you know you can use this cheesy technique in the over world, right? No? Well now you do".
Conundrum here: You gain a guilty freedom, but lost the perenity of the saintess weapons... No more missile boomerang, slingshot and eternel bow. no more Unbreakable overpowered ( once you have full hearth) sword that may( or not) evolve with you ... Only Link, using the last durable weapon( or liability) that may help him revail : His brain.
5:25 I felt like _such_ an idiot with that rail puzzle. I tried about five different versions of a shape that would balance the weight carefully enough to make it through that turn before I realised I could just... make a centreboard... so it never fell off...
And yeah I do often wonder how the hell I was supposed to complete the puzzle. It's good to find other solutions but after a while 'recall' feels too much like an instant win rather than actually using my brain.
BUT I prefer the open-ended approach, because it means you're relying on your own problem solving rather than trying to bend your brain into the shape the devs intended. Often I just never 'understood' video game puzzle logic and always got stuck looking at a walkthrough. With Totk I feel like if I hammer away enough at it, I'll come up with something.
However sometimes I think it covers up lazy design. The wind temple was pretty good and I assume the fire temple had... some sort of logic to it, I just climbed everywhere when I felt my brain unable to conform to the intended solution. But _was_ there a way to get through the water temple without just climbing and jumping to different locations? It wasn't satisfying to solve at all.
Also that hoverbike: It's honestly hard to use if you haven't got a LOT of battery power, by which point you've done some decent grinding to 'earn' it I feel. I haven't got nearly enough battery to make it viable.
7:10 I like the mimic tear, all the perks of cooping minus the downside of having to be online or deal with people. Lmao
My belief is that true intelligence is not memorization of hard facts, but the effective, and sometimes unorthodox use of available resources and perhaps abnormal critical thinking and problem-solving. I say there’s nothing wrong with finding abnormal ways of solving problems. One could argue that sticking to the established ‘correct way’ of solving a problem is actually the complete opposite of intelligence, as you’re just following a formula with no deviation.
I haven't played Tears of The Kingdom yet but I'll get around to it at some point. Honestly the more I see about it the more I feel like it is similar to GMOD or a game like it where the idea isn't to have the traditional Zelda experience where there is only 1 solution but where they tell you the rules and let you decide how to interpret them. As is showed in the video devs know the game and trust me they know it better than anyone other than a speed-runner will. They know what you can make and the small little angles you need to be on to glitch through that wall to bypass half the level. Nintendo especially knows exactly how their game works and I can assure you if they don't want you to do something they know the 75 ways to get over the wall you will try before giving up and learning how they actually want you to proceed. I think it's purely because of how the series has been people think of these things as cheating not because the devs didn't want you to do it. I mean after all, to do anything in a videogame it has to be programmed in...unless it is a side effect of that very code.
I think it's okay to feel cheap and it could be instinct or like you said how we are used to these games playing out. But I also think it's the natural evolution of game design. We're seeing game design, customization, and other aspects being tailored to the players/community such as early access or these complex building/creative systems for players to figure out and even take it further than devs imagined. The balance of amount of content vs player freedom has to be right or you can get either overly long and linear experiences OR feel like you're in a massive sandbox without all that much to really do.
YOU CAN PUT A CART ON THE BOTTOM??? I just made myself a hover bike and put the gem on the bottom
I was tired of those big buttons that you had to hit, so i tried a bombflower and it worked lol
Rip to that one shrine crystal. I feel the pain. Great video!
I just wish the shrines in general in Totk had more complexity. 80% of them are far too simple imo
You have to put fins on the turbine in the wind temple? Lol I just attached a rocket to the side and spun up immediately 😂
Me: *Enters cave early in the game
Gloom Hands: "Allow us to introduce ourselves."
Me: "Alright, ima head out..." *Uses Ascend ability
Gloom Hands: "...Well shucks. Guess I'll wait here."
Me: *comes back later
Gloom Hands: "So, you finally ready to throw some ha-"
Me: *Nukes it with a million bomb flower arrows, including Shadow Ganon afterwards
Is anyone else kind of... alarmed by the idea that LoZ is moving on to a completely different type of gaming?
I've always been fond of the old style of LoZ where you only had one way to do things, and that was it. Open world games can sort of overwhelm me because there's too much to do.
I still love Tears of the Kingdom, I basically sped through it when it was released because I didn't want to lose interest before I finished and get spoiled (I can only like something for so long before I get bored of it). I liked the feeling of "cheesing" stages.
But I also like the feeling of solving dungeons. I like the feeling of figuring out the "proper" way of doing things.
I... I am honestly going to miss the old LoZ way. I am uncomfortable with the idea that we probably won't get anything like those again.
I'm... honestly hoping for some sort of mix. The shrines in TotK felt a lot more like the old dungeons than BOTW's divine beasts did, and I kind of hope they expand that. I dont mind the open world as much if there is a set path I can take if I want to.
I kind of hope that future LoZ games will have a mixture of an open ended experience like BOTW and TOTK, and dungeons where there is one set way of doing things like the old games.
I am. Genuinely sad and uncomfortable that we will not get another game from LoZ that follows the OoT formula. And I feel like I am the only one.
I enjoy TotK and BotW. But I still miss the "typical" Zelda formula. And I really feel like I am the only one who misses it.
in my opinion as long as i don't straight up cheat using external things, but i only use the elements the game gives me, then it's okay
I feel better about doing glitches, now
How many people pointed out that the rocket shield was in the trailer?
I think it's interesting that when I find an obviously unintended solution, I *always* have a moment where I question "...wait, am I sure that wasn't intended" no matter how farfetched it was
Yeah…. Almost any shrine with movable objects you can ascend through after time warping and get into broken places. Or attach rockets to your shield before entering, etc. like the shrines are really fun but it’s so easy to cheese so so many of them
the shrine for ascend it surrounded by ice and ice is unclimbable naturally, so the obvious thing to do is make a tree wall and climb it to the shrine, i did that the first time i played through but on a new playthrough i wondered 'was that not the intended way?' and so i continued to circle the mountain and you have a short drop down with your way back up covered in unclimbable ice which led to me having to make a 45 minute treck back to the temple of time and all the way past every other shrine a second time because the closed loop cannot be backtracked with no glider no bombs no zonai materials they *intend* for you to build things its kind of the point of the game not *cheese*. you might think something isn't intended but it is, if its not youll painfully know as you make an hour long walk back or get a game over screen
@@Spyziy Can confirm. I've completed shrines that were CLEARLY intended to be completed AFTER getting the glider. Without the glider. Hell, I've mapped sky islands without the glider. That's how damn broken this game is, and I love it.
It was a pain in the ass, but I did it lol.
@@thunderborn3231 My point isnt that they dont want you to build in creative ways to solve problems, it's that combining multiple abilties can completely bypass the entire shrine. By lifting up a plank you're supposed to put a ball on and fly across a massive ravine in a shrine in the right position, freezing it with time stop, then ascending through it, you can completely climb over the shrines walls and get straight to the blessing.
It's the TOTK variation of the Xanatos gambit.
Gamer: Hah, I beat it in a way the devs thought couldn't or shouldn't be done.
TOTK Devs: Yes, it's performing as designed. We won.
I always feel like I’m cheating when I walk korok’s to their friend instead of shooting them to the moon on a rocket
Where's the fun in walking? Why wouldn't you attach a korok to the bottom of your car's wheel so that it gets run over on every revolution, or glue them to the underside of your boat?
or nail them to a cross
You guys take the koroks to thier friends?
@@mckaygoodman6514 Eh, sometimes it's annoying and the whole point of the game is to have fun. If you want to challenge yourself by doing everything in your power to avoid the "preconceived" solution then all power to you. The video's point goes both ways, it's about how much challenge you want. If you want the most challenging experience in the game you disallow yourself to use builds and instead have to solve as many things as possible without them.
@@player_lv430 I just mark them and save it for later. Encountered well over 50 but did around 10
Since the beginning, I've felt like this game's shrines are intended as sparks of inspiration for the player.
In the shrines, they teach general concepts. I definitely figured out a few awesome tricks thanks to the foundation that they formed for me
That's why i like those proving grounds shrines so much, they make you rely on experimenting with the mechanics the game gives for you, like that shield rocket boost, and teach you a lot about the deeper mechanics in a controlled envrionment.
The shrines in this game are a lot better for experimentation in general tbh
I accidentally got the master sword early and thought that maybe I ruined the story experience a bit. In the end as I got the rest of the tears, it felt more like dramatic irony and honestly imo a better experience. So no one should feel bad about the way they play this game, I feel like its fully intended to be an individual experience. To tell a story with that ability is actually astounding.
accidentally? isnt that a complicated ass glitch?
@@eli9867 you assume there's only one way to glitch this game to do an action
@@eli9867you only need to do like 20 shrines to be able to get the sword, very early for most people. If someone did 20 shrines, went to go turn in 100 charges for a battery segment, and on their way out sees something eye-catching below them, it's reasonable they would get the master sword very early without glitches like 4 hours into the game.
@@ssgoko88 you don't even need the battery upgrade, I did it without just because I got a map marker telling me to go ride the dragon, so I went up to a tower that was really close to it and just jumped on it lol
The only weakness of the game's story imo was the dungeon end cutscenes becoming repetitive but given how much of the game you can do in any order, the fact that that's the only part that stood out to me is really impressive
I think giving Link a dedicated jump button in these games (vs the prior "run to ledge to auto jump") is a good indicator of what kind of approach Nintendo wants players to take.
Before you could only do actions at specific points in specific ways at specific times.
Now you can just kind of jump spam up odd slopes and crouch under weird half ledges and scam your way around little physics problems in tiny ways that can all add up to getting around problems the way you want, not just by the way the devs allow.
Ye old Skyrim horsing in action
again, if the game allows it, then it was intended, lot of people dont get that if something is wrong with the game, or if they didnt want you to do or use certain things, they would just remove it like they did the dupe glitch in totk ver 1.1.1
@@Aqsticgod I don't know about that. There are plenty of glitches and exploits in BOTW that are clearly not intended yet were never patched.
The specific instance I was thinking of when I made my comment was a shrine that had a switch in a large cube room that when struck it rotated the entire cube around you, moving the floor to the ceiling. It had holes in it to facilitate the puzzle.
My solution (which crucially for my point didn't feel like the solution intended) was to stand on the lip of one of the wall holes (after gliding to it while the cube was already rotating), shoot an arrow at the switch, and then as the cube rotated again, I just of just walked at the wall until I would slide down and started spamming jump so I could make it onto the flatter outside ceiling, and thus walk to the goal.
Not sure what specific shrine it was but the game wasn't buggy or anything and it was very easy, but it didn't feel like someone at nintendo said "then at this point the player needs to stand on this thin part of the hole, shoot the switch, and then jump at this odd angle to hopefully not slide off".
There are basically 3 solutions to problems in this game. Built in, oddball, and exploit. Oddball solutions are fine but they aren't intended.
@@samwoodley1653 Thing is, that's fine. The developers probably realized that there would be some solutions they didn't see coming. If they didn't want you to be rewarded for that type of extremely creative or exploitative solution, they would have patched it when testing the shrines, or when seeing how it's played afterward.
Yeah, but speaking of jumping, the very first 3D game, OoT also had the side jump and back flip, and they absolutely allowed you to get to places that were (probably) unintended like heart piece above Dodongo Fortress and the guy sitting on a roof in Kakariko Village.
There's an interview with the Divinity: Original Sin director, where someone asked him if he's aware of an exploit that lets players stack dozens of status effects onto themselves before a hard fight. His reply was that not only did they know, but they chose not to fix it because it's so much fun to do
Oh, cool, I figured it was on purpose.
this falls in line with fromsoftwares philosophy, otherwise why put the ashes in the game? if they wanted you to play a certain way they wouldnt have those objects in game.
there's also the ability to use telekinesis to maul enemies with an object that weighs an absolute ton, letting you one shot most enemies with a bit of setup
DOS is such a good game. Both games are entirely "heres a problem, figure it out we dont care how."
That trick of filling a crate and just chucking it at enemies in DOS is always funny.
Another thing about the rocket jump is that its literally shown in the TRAILER, using it to get to the very top of the monster camp in Eventide Island
If it's a feature, of course Nintendo knows of it and wants you to use it!
Great video as always!
My favorite TOTK hack is definitely "make a bigger bridge"
It's truly staggering how many puzzles can be solved by building an aggressively large bridge 😂
Bridges trump vehicles every time lol
have you heard of the (double) recallevator?
@@munchrai6396 Early game bridges are best until you have enough battery to make the hoverbike last longer.
Yes. I just did the shrine crystal puzzle today and landed it pretty well. However, I also brought out an extra fan, added two batteries nearby, a large battery and two rockets instead.
My go to "cheat" is rocket shields. Make them outside a shrine, and boom, anything not locked behind doors is done.
Also, Rewind is amazing for making your own floating platforms
I still remember clearing the Fire Temple by almost completely ignoring the minecarts and just climbing the place and using Ascend on the little available spots on ledges.
That is EXACTLY what I did. I looked at those minecarts and realized my half-baked monkey brain would never get it. It's like that math problem in high school you accept you're just never gonna understand and move on.
Bro same
yeah i saw the maze of tracks and i was like umm. i was scared to do them in the wrong order and have to backtrack. and then i came to an area where i couldn't figure out the intended strat so i put on my climbing gear and just scaled the outer wall lol
talking about ignoring the intended path for the path to the water temple I didn't realize the zora armor let you climb waterfalls by gliding into them (as opposed to starting at the bottom) in this game until the last one into the temple proper so the wind sage got a workout making sure I reached the side of those floating water dispensers to climb up them
Glad I'm not the only one who did this. I maxxed stamina really quickly and lucked into the climbing shirt early on, so I've just been spidering and gliding and ascending everywhere, which isn't too far off from what I did in BotW honestly.
That feeling of cheating of being 100% free to figure it out how you want is exactly what the game is about.
I will not ruin my loving marriage no matter what this game wants me to do
Aonuma wants you to learn the joy of polyamory
@@cleverman383 Hey, if all parties are consenting it ain't cheating
looking at your profile picture I am fearful as to what this loving marriage entails
@@Fabiocean2000 😏
but its fun :D
tears of the kingdom is a game that makes me feel dumb and clever at the same time. dumb because there were puzzles that i to this day have no clue how to solve "properly", but clever because i found a solution anyway.
It's been fascinating to see how other people solve the puzzles since I know I did most of them wrong lol
@@BaldorfBreakdowns i'm not in the stage where i'm watching other people play just yet, but i imagine it would be similar for me.
@@thegreatphantus1627 I've been having a lot of fun discussing the game with friends who are also playing and it is absolutely insane how different some of us are doing these shrines. I have a friend who didn't understand the shrine in Karikako Village was trying to teach you how stabilizers work so he managed to complete the shrine by making a huge tower and paragliding off of it
@@kacheek9101I also didn’t realize hitting them is what activates the stabilizers so instead I used ultra hand to pick up the item and rotated it quickly then dropped it and recalled it. Made a makeshift catapult lol
What's also funny is those puzzles you build an overly complicated solution that probably shouldn't work but just does.
there's one shrine that actually teaches you the recall trick. you have to lift up some torches, go press a button elsewhere, and recall them to their lifted up state. It teaches you that recall works reverting things to their ultrahand state, and that it works from much further away than ultrahand. I had never even considered using recall in that way before, but from then on I was cheesing puzzles and challenges constantly. And to me, it felt great! I had acquired knowledge and now I was using it to surpass challenges in unintended ways. But I didn't learn that from the internet- I learned it from the game telling me.
Omfg i know exactly the shrine you're talking about I had NO idea how to solve it i just put hydromelons on this button and then fire arrowed the burners, like i solved it but i was frustrated i didn't learn what the game was trying to teach me you know?
omg I cheese so many shrines with the recall trick but it didn't occur to me there so I just grabbed the torch and put it next to the button, stood on the button and grabbed a bow, lighting the arrors with the torch. I knew it wasn't the intended way but that honestly felt better
so that’s how it’s supposed to be done… recall didn’t occur to me there so i dropped all my weapons to make a long stick and light the torches from the button
Oh I put a heavy weapon on the button then used the torch to light up my arrows then fored them
That sounds a lot more pleasant than how I realized it, which was on attempt 20 of a shrine puzzle that it had no bearing on 😂
For the record, if you didn't know, rocket shield boosting was in the big trailer, the final huge one. They show link doing it for his advantage, we knew about this before we could even play the game; Nintendo was eager to show it off.
Plus, obviously it's a specific feature of the game, not some buggy exploit, if the devs didn't want it to be used they just wouldn't have implemented it/would have restricted it in shrines or any other specific locations, their whole thing is that you're always free to experiment with everything and solve problems in any way you can
@@GlitchDude yeah exactly and they gave it a separate animation and everything, they accounted for every possible fusion so i really don't get why some people call it a 'cheat' like the devs didn't explicitly add it as a feature
And one of the random hints even advises you to do it.
i think it feels a lot like its cheating, because if you try to take out a rocket (any of the gumball) out, the shrine won't let you. I had to get out of the shrine, put the rocket into the shield and go back. That's why it kind of is cheating. I'm sure they knew players could still do it anyways, at the end of the day they can only limit so much so they let it go for some of the shrines.
Of course I try not to do it this way, IF i could truly figure it out, cause I am curious what is the intended solution.
@@aj-sz8mu by that logic using any weapons from outside the shrine are cheating, and you should treat each shrine like the ones that strip you of your gear.
You're allowed to use what you have, there is tech to stop you and they don't implement it.
I remember feeling like I sequence broke the game when I did all the tears after doing only one temple.
The final tear basically tells you where Zelda is. You can go to her any time you want. Yet that "Find Princess Zelda" main quest kept sitting in my adventure log, taunting me. It was like the game was telling me "you did not experience this story the right way."
I did all the tears before any of the temples. The quest remaining active made me wonder if I missed a quest flag somehow!
The "Find Princess Zelda" quest never goes away. It's only complete once you beat the game.
I cant play the game without the Mastersword, so i flew up to Zelda and tickled her till she gave me the s w o r d.
I found the memory that played afterwards to be "Ya I got it already after seeing your evil buttcheeks"
I'm starting the game, and please don't spoil me the end, but I do know where Zelda is. SPOILERS AHEAD THAT COULD BE WRONG SO DON'T CORRECT ME:
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She's in that hell hole below the Hyrule castle, right? I mean, for me, it's kind of pretty obvious she went there, or will end there. And I even tried to go down that toilet, get to the end, but I wasn't able to bypass the army of moronic goblins because I ran out of resources when I got there... But I'm pretty sure I can find her there. I haven't been able to reach the castle, but I'm sure as hell the castle is empty and the big bad boss has Zelda trapped in there. I also know that Ganon is disguised as Zelda walking here and there, because they kind of spoil the fun in Hyrule. So I know she's not walking free.
And I also know that the imbecile of Zelda keeps speaking to your mind and instead of telling you where she is, she says "Find me."
The Zelda version of "Guess what I want to eat today."
@@robertoj.9509yeah uhuh sure yup yup sure
I always do a cheeky lil "heeheehee" anytime I ascend through a ceiling at JUST the right angle in a difficult spot. I feel like I'm outsmarting the game when I am, in fact, playing it exactly as intended.
I believe ascend literally was a cheat during the game's development, and then they just tweaked it and added it into the final game
@@Big_Man_From_Splatoon you are correct
it is satisfying to turn on ascend and it suddenly turns blue/green and goes ding on the edge of a cliff just slightly hanging above you lol. but then it turns to despair when you fall off the tiny piece of land you're standing on right when it happens.
Going from a cave near the bottom of a mountain all the way through to the top feels cheesy in all the best ways.
@@Majima_NowhereYep, skipping the climb is super rewarding lol
My biggest "cheat" moment was when I was in the fire temple and I couldn't figure out how to get where I wanted with the minecarts and accidentally discovered that I could climb every wall in the temple and I ended up just climbing up and paragliding to where I wanted to be
I somehow managed to get lost in Fire temple and I said fvck it, completed all of it by climbing 😭
The multitude of options for cheese also helps keep the open world more open. There are a lot of games where you can access more challenging areas early, but the expected response after getting eaten by a dinosaur or something is to backtrack and come back later. In BotW/TotK, you're encouraged to give it another try and think of something clever.
One of the best parts about totk in my opinion, is that if you find yourself losing you can quite literally just burn through materials to fuck up whatever you're fighting. Find yourself dying over and over again against an enemy camp? Welp, time to load that lynel bow with rubies to nuke the shit out of them
@@gabusdeux Or get good, like I had to do when I first played BotW and got trapped by the Zora's domain lynel, without knowing I could go back to an earlier save. Anyway, I died a few hundred times, but I managed to beat it!
@@idiotically-everythingI love the game gives you options tho!! I absolutely adore it, esp bc I’m not a gamer-gamer who’s got like, less than twenty game experiences under my belt. My brother (who I shit you not, has like 4 solid years by now of game time on Destiny/Destiny 2) was like “oh yeah all the bosses are super easy lol” and I’m like, thank god for that a little bit, bc it keeps me going through em…
Those are necessary experiences that are made accessible so everyone, from pros to little 10-year old Timmy (I do find it hilarious tho bc it’s intended that way but in Australia at least, BOTW and TOTK are both rated M) can enjoy and complete the game.
The optional enemies are what sell me though. Lynels, and I haven’t tried yet but Gleeoks? Genuinely difficult and skill requiring! Yes you could cheese them, but aside from duplicating (my game updated beyond it) it’ll drain your resources real quick I’d imagine. So esp if you wanna farm their parts for upgrades… it’s time to learn those mechanics a bit, cook some dishes that temporarily let you fight god, and nail your flurry time rushes in time with their attacks. I’ve done that for Lynels now, and breezed the Red variety so will be taking on blue and whites now. Hoping to fight a Gleeok soon once I restock on arrows LMAO. I should also give a big shoutout to the Fuse ability which MASSIVELY improves upon BOTW’s weapon system, just… literally game changing. Nothing beats the Hudson Shield! 😤
@@idiotically-everything lol, it sounds like you just got used to it's fighting patterns. That's fine and all, but you could have probably beaten it easier if you had a shit ton of materials y'know? Besides though, I was more referencing things like massive monster groups
@@gabusdeux Yeah, also known as "get good"
I was absolutely mind bogged when I first played the game and learned all the new abilities the game gives you and it instantly made me think Nintendo has incredible faith in their level design, and I felt respected as a player to be trusted with the absolute amount of freedom
At times I really felt like I was missing some intended experience by hovering in the air bike in the underworld... so I tried to do it the "honest" way and got tired of it 10 minutes later, the game's mechanics are there for a reason. The only intention after all is to let you shape your own experience however you like. That is truly genius.
Disagree. 'Our game's shit, here, just skip it.' Is the exact same thing we criticize games like WoW for.
Getting a horse in the underground its way broken, max stamina in a jump you can clear full camps and never touch the ground
@@TheDapperDragon It's not really skipping it since I´m still exploring a lot of areas and having fun.
@@TheDapperDragon and where did u get the implication that they’re skipping anything? There’s nothing wrong with exploring how they want, that was a stupid assumption and take.
@@TheDapperDragon WoW is indeed objectively a bad game. :)
There was one shrine where you had to like connect these orbs together to roll a certain way on an S shaped slope to hit a target with enough speed. After like 14 failed attempts, I just tried shooting a bomb arrow, and funny enough it worked.
I wrote a comment about this same shrine, but I ended up attaching the ball to a spear and threw it at the target and it worked. And the spear didn't fall in the abyss so I got to keep it. Nice
Yeah, I also resorted to bomb arrow for that. I could not for the life of me figure out a way to get to roll fast enough and curve to the right. It just did not seem to have enough distance to hit that target no matter what I tried.
Lmaooo I just did this one before I ended up stacking all the balls and then just let it tip over and hit it
wheres the shrine?
@@thunderbolt64_ Iun-orok shrine in the chasm beneath Tabantha Great Bridge. There's a cave in the little corner northwest of the bridge. "The Right Roll"
I’m so glad to see someone talk about this feeling! The game being made this way where solutions are vague or have so many solutions feels very difficult for me (my brain doesn’t work that way) and feeling like I’m not doing it RIGHT even if I did get it done robbed me of the satisfaction of beating it.
Edit: I personally don’t feel like I outsmart the game because the solutions aren’t particularly novel, if I was exploiting a glitch I’d discovered I may get that feeling but I wouldn’t return to the glitch solution cos I personally find it very upsetting lol.
Seriously, right? Many of the “unintended” solutions are so dumb and janky, there’s nothing smart about them at all. Just brute forcing the puzzle with any random method, rather than actually having to think
We were talking about this in my DnD group earlier, how it seemed cool that this game really tries to give you the easy way out of most things...and how always offering the easy way out has inspired so many people to complete tasks/puzzles in some mind-bogglingly complicated ways.
ah ttrpgs. the most open game where there can really only be 2 unintended solutions.
when the gm finds your proposal so absurd they don't know how to rule it
or when the dice simply says you fail.
yea but the dungeons suffered A LOT because of this "no frustration" philosophy
@@pabloguzman8472 I’d argue that all the shrines and dungeons are a massive step up from BOTW, both in scale and in difficulty
@@blurb9319 the dungeons are a downgrade from old zelda, which didnt allow cheesing
@@pabloguzman8472 what you call cheesing, I call player freedom. There’s no such thing as a wrong choice in ToTK, just choices that don’t work out.
As a person who tends to play more building games and fewer RPG/shooter games, I love how you can solve problems in this game in an unintended way. It sort of adds an adjustable difficulty where more complex creative builds and plans save you time exploring.
I think they have solved a problem even rpg games have had for a while and that’s the creative aspect even in rpgs there is 1-2 ways to solve a problem like in Skyrim there was stealth and all guns blazing but TOTK just says here’s a puzzle and some stuff figure it out or do what you want with it
It’s also more satisfying for me to do it with some wacky solution I build vs. what they clearly want you to do. Most of the time I see what I’m SUPPOSED to do but I’m like “okay but can I do it this way?” And continue building my little goofy contraption, even if it takes an additional 25 minutes to work. I love it.
@@Not_Ciel I love playing that way too I feel like I get more out of the game beating it “my way” and it gives the temples a level of replay-ability I’ve replayed a few just to see if I can beat it in another way or without using what’s provided
This is why I love this game so much. Also... that shrine with the bouncy boats... I had no arrows for it and the enemy that drops them died at an edge and they fell into the void. Even with that the shrine was beatable with the tools the game gives you. It really is a game that promotes thinking your way around a puzzle when the obvious solution isn't viable, and I love that.
Only with the tools they give you, you don't really have to think to avoid the intended solution.
For a second, I was convinced you were describing the shrine as a beat table because of the variety of options it gives you to solve it. It took a few tries before my brain stopped auto swapping the word out and I realised you meant beatable.
The amount of times I’ve done a puzzle in this game and felt as though I did it incorrect and outsmarted the game is immense. There was a shrine once where I had to find a way to get across a rail to the end and just couldn’t figure out the puzzle so I ended up just fusing the mine cart it gave me to my shield and just rode across the rail. I also cheated the entire fire temple I’m pretty sure cause I hated the mine cart system, so I just used a ton of hover platforms and ascend and I was pretty much able to do the whole dungeon that way. It’s incredible just how much this game lets you choose how you do things
I brute forced the Fire Temple with climbing and a crapton of endura shroom skewers
Hey I don't know if you know this but you can shield surf on rails without a fused cart and Link just locks right onto it. It's a lot of fun!
I’m a psychopath and I just climbed the entire temple. no stamina food, only had one and a half stamina wheels. i just really did not want to fuck with those minecarts
Hover bike completly solos fire temple
Bruh I just found high enough ledges and climbed what I couldn't paraglide to.
The best part of this imo is the fact that when I want to use a shortcut I end up spending more time trying to cheese it than I would’ve if I just did it their way. I feel like I’m not the only one who tries to come up with the funnest solution without caring how much time it’ll take.
I continued to blow myself up, reset saves, and stealth around a hinox to build a giant bomb that spells "die"... Fun is my only objective in this game
@Devious Chimp no way, I also reset many times trying to build a bomb at a certain hinox camp when I saw them it was the only way to kill it.
Ik! Just spent like 15-20 minutes and lots of resources making an army of freezing + fan auto robots that froze and pushed bokoblins to their death. It would've taken me less than 1 minute of killing them by hand, but that wouldn't be as enjoyable. In fact, the best thing about it was that i rescued a guy in a cage while every single Boko was still alive but freezing and colliding against spikes over and over again
Yes, but how much more fun did we have breaking the intended path than we would have had forcing ourselves to do something we disliked?!
@@TeaquestSagas let ppl play how they wanna play bruh. If they dislike it in the end they only have themselves to blame
I think a good way to view these "cheap" but intended solutions, is the way players view shortcuts in racing games. It gives you a massive advantage but it was placed there to reward players that explore routes thoroughly and remember the shortcuts.
I get that, but its not entirely accurate, you cant use a shortcut you found in the mute city course in the big blue course. in this game you can find one shortcut and apply it to like 300 puzzles.
The hidden skate park on Nintendo 64 Cruisin USA
Yeah but I was raised in a school system that stifled my creativity and taught me a fear of failure. If I'm not doing it "the right way" then I feel bad about it :(
@@secretlyditto7716 I can't help but remember Daryl talking about a puzzle in BotW where everyone found the non-intended solution and to me the intended solution was smacking me in the face... And the whole video was about how maybe the devs wanted creativity to shine and didn't have an intended solution...
Flipside whenever I find a cheesy strat in TotK I hate myself. I remember one where I had to build a contraption that would climb a rail... I couldn't figure it out so I just dragged the thing up by hand, then rewound time to bring it back up after it fell and I climbed.
@@LethalLuggageomg i couldn't figure that one out either! I wasn't even smart enough to use reverse. I used the metal bars to build a bridge and walk up, then grabbed the ball after. I felt like I was too dumb for the game.
The way I make these ridiculously simple shrines more fun is to identify what they want you to do, then work very hard to find any alternative way to do it. I love it.
I can absolutely relate and I am frustrated that he did the shield based shrine correctly.
You'll like TehCactusPlant's videos, he does this too.
@@carotclan148i unironically was surprised when he did it with the shield to get through the fire since if its the same one I'm thinking of I just grabbed the metal plate and put it over the holes the fires came out to bypass it lol, also the shrine with the big wheel that you use to move a ball up to the top I cheeses by just joined 3 big plates together to make a bridge from the bottom floor to the top where the latter is and ultra hand carried the ball up to the hole lol
Honestly I suspect that, equally so, the built-in cheese _also_ exists so that the game does not have to provide hints to make sure everyone can complete the puzzle "properly", since providing too many hints feels like handholding. It is like a hidden difficulty setting in that way: people can skip a puzzle they are too stumped by without the game having to provide an explicit "I give up, do it for me" button.
@@orngjce223 I would guess you're right. It's brilliant game design to put in an "escape hatch." I remember in Demon's Souls how every boss had at least one cheese way to win, so if you really sucked and were stuck, you could go online, learn how, then cheese it.
I genuinely think I saw this video at the perfect time. TOTK has been overwhelming me (outside of the factof how much there is to do) because I'm diagnosed with OCD, and one of my big problems is called "Just Right" OCD. I've been constantly getting anxious and worried if I'm doing things the "right" way even moreso than usual people, which has been making it difficult for me to fully enjoy the experience. It's been causing genuine distress.
Ironically, I watched this video to take a break from playing TOTK. I was on a massive mountain that would take forever to climb off from. Beside me was a bird glider, a cart, and a fan.
Now, it may seem obvious what I was supposed to do (it was), but my OCD was to preoccupied by the idea that this was all a misunderstanding, and I'm not *supposed* to do that.
After unsuccessfully trying to get the bird glider to take off by itself for 30 minutes, I got tired and decided to watch youtube. This is one of the first videos I see.
Long story short, I am now off the mountain and can rest assured that I'm (most likely) not doing anything "wrong" for the rest of the game.:)
I feel this. I also have ocd (not Just Right OCD; my themes are more rumination, counting, touretic, etc) so I can imagine how stressful totk could get for you. I'm also autistic, so that may play a part, but I also have had moments of "oh, I could solve it like this. WAIT -- what if that wasn't the 'answer?' What if I'm missing something important??" and in doing so have lessened my own fun at times because every time I think of a solution, my brain yells at me to think of more until I find one that feels like THE solution
This vid helps though
The only time you're ever outsmarting the puzzles in this game is when you get to the end of the shrine and don't hear the jingle. That's when you know you found an unintended solution
how would that happen?
Unless the jingle is tied to you physically being near the shrine
The jingle isnt tied to how you solve it, its just tied to you reaching the other side of the puzzle
@@dawntwilight The time I saw was when someone snaked a long stick under the ending of a shrine and just Ascended through it
@@iaxacs3801 Rauru: "...Fine. Here's your stupid light. Freaking kids these days..." XD
I love how many “teaching” shrines they have. I sometimes don’t use the first solution I find in case there’s some other mechanic it’s trying to teach me.
I just love the feeling of thinking like Link would, improvising, looking around, thinking, anticipating, planning, trying, failing, trying again.
It's everywhere, in combat in puzzles in exploration it's all so great.
Also when I fail it's funny, I can hear the Loony Tunes music and it's all in good fun. I think I enjoy failing even more than succeeding, especially when the failing surprises me.
It's such a delightful game I want more games like this.
I always love when games make you feel like you’re outsmarting the developers, even if it’s exactly how they designed it and TOTK takes that idea to a whole new level.
i went into the sky temple before heading to rito village, and it was such a surreal experience to go through that temple knowing it was intended for me to go through it, yet without the power needed to complete the temple, it felt... empty in a sense. of course, naturally, i got pissed off and looked up what to do, but still, those few moments where i was just trying to figure it out are so memorable
I did something very similar except I had already done most of the Tulin quest...I just somehow lost him because I went to the wrong sky island to start climbing up??? Fast forward to me reaching the Wind Temple, sans Tulin, and then being very disappointed when I couldn’t activated the wind turbines with zonai fans lmao. I eventually figured it out, went back for Tulin, and climbed all the way up again... Just a very funny moment for me as well!
I did the same thing with the water Temple and was slowly going insane trying to solve the puzzles. My only gripe with the game is that things like that aren't immediately obvious.
Same haha i was looking for that one item that would create wind strong enough.... Till i remembered, oh forgot to find Tulin haha
Later i lost him, went to the temple again and he wasn't there. After an hour of looking for him... Google where his spawn point was, it was simply looking right of a shrine 🤦
Same hat here, was going on along some sky islands thinking I was just doin some side stuff then found that I was heading right towards a big important story thing. I didnt have any context at that point that you needed companions to actually complete temples. Which with the fact that you don't get to activate the teleport at the temple *until* you bring tulin; it definitely felt like a kick in the butt that I came all this way but couldn't even attempt the temple.
Honestly I think the temples themselves are one of the few parts of the game where the open ended implementation falls a little flat. If you're going to let players access temple areas without doing main quests, why punish them for that?
Agreed, I did that for water temple, just exploring. So by the time sidon was up there, no enemies, just him and I.
I feel like the cheating feeling more-so comes from discovering the rocket shield trick online rather than discovering it yourself because that would’ve been a really cool “aha!” moment for anyone.
This is why I stringently avoided looking up anything online until very late in the game. I've got three temples and about 100 shrines under my belt now, and interestingly, rocket shield was one of the earlier shrines I remember getting. I always keep a rocket shield or two on me now for "emergencies".
It was literally in a trailer, so good luck.
@@centurosproductions8827 oh really lol i avoided all trailers
I have never done it but I think I read that in an in game tooltip lol
I definitely had one of those moments with a minecart shield, I fused it by mistake and just had it in my inventory for ages, and then at one point I was just like... "hmmm I wonder if I can use this as a skate board" and it actually worked. which was the first moment I had of "wait, what else can do weird things" which lead me down a few wacky rabbit holes.
This is %100 the kind of game that I dont wanna know anything about when i play it, heck, I even avoid looking at the map most of the time. It's such a fun game to unravel on your own.
I think if you find the 'cheat' on your own, it feels like a more of a creative solution
Its creative problem solving taken to the obvious comclusion they know most if not all the answers that you can use to get thrue a obstacle maybe block a few or force you to think about a creative idea or maybe even leaving a easier option open for people who know how to do that
Daryl don’t just talk games he talks facts
Fr
on glob
There was a shrine where when you press a button in front of the door you need to unlock, the game forces you to watch the ball you need to unlock the door get send off to the other side of the shrine, so you are supposed to go through the whole shrine, fight the enemies on the way and get back to the door with the ball. Yet, my very first thought when I saw this was "... Can't I just use Recall ?". And I did. And it worked. And I found this hilarious. Loved this shrine because I felt clever solving it with stupidly simple solutions, even though the fact the ball isn't already at the other side of the shrine implies that the developers did think about this solution.
Ya, I feel like it more or less rewards you for doing stuff like this simply because you thought of a solution that the majority of casual players won't think of.
I did the exact same thing and couldn't have been more gratified with the fact that it worked.
it was the sand sledding one? yeah same that was really enjoyable
@@1MaxVader1ironically, it seems that this is the first solution most people thought of the first time.
I built a ramped platform to catch the ball and roll it back towards me so it never even lands on the pusher, thus never being launched.
Just gotta say, this was a really good video. I greatly respect the way you delivered the message of "cheating" is trying.
i would literally find myself doing things in ways i would realize were cheese, then figure out how it was intended to be solved and then be like "oh that was cool"
I can say with certainty that one of the best feelings I've gotten while playing TotK was spending hours on the great sky island stubbornly refusing to enter the temple of time, and managing to explore the entire island without any powers. Was I supposed to get up a large suspended minecart track by chaining 30+ shield hops? Probably not, but I'll be damned if it wasn't the most satisfying feeling to actually do it.
Me too! It wasn’t until I beat the flux construct and wasn’t able to pick up its core that I finally thought “okay, I’m clearly missing out on some things”
Yeah the same happened to me, I went around and killed a ton of enemies and got a lot of stuff but it felt like I was missing something the entire time, then I realized I probably should've gone to the intented destination first
I believe you are what people call "obstinate"
Me too. I got sidetracked and then the next thing I know I find a bunch of useless rocks lying around, and there are minecart tracks that I can’t use. When it was to the point where I got stuck on the flux construct island, I just decided to start a new save file because I figured I wasn’t losing much. I used to have to walk across the minecart tracks.
I think it’s the difference between someone being good at problem solving, and good at passing a test. Or if you prefer to go Zelda-y, it’s the difference between wisdom and knowledge. There’s the person who has pride in getting A’s, likes feeling more knowledgeable and having a fixed tier system (at minimum for themselves and their improvement, and at worst that they like to judge others by); and there’s the person who is thinking how to make creative or efficient or unintended answers to problems, ‘it’s not stupid if it works’. And that’s actually what’s at the forefront of modern child education theory - in a world where you can look up the answers to single-answer ‘knowledge’ questions in three seconds, the educating is actually about learning how to think: basic jigsaw puzzle/learn-by-wrote tiering is useless, and the more creative you are in getting to an answer, the more you’ve probably learned anyway. Tl;dr: Link gets his wisdom Triforce when he realises ‘I could use a rocket to zoom through this shrine’.
Highly disagree that any education system, atleast public ones in America, are trying to teach children to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, and think outside the box. I'd say they're taught quite the opposite actually.
@@newjersey973yeah, they tell us to think outside the box, but then go "not THAT far outside the box!" And I could never figure out why. Seems they just wanted me to think inside a slightly bigger box
I found it interesting how portal and portal 2 don’t have much replayability since you already know all the puzzles solutions. But I have seen friends do the same temples/shrines in tears of the kingdom different ways and I realize that it definitely ups its replayability.
The biggest surprise with TOTK is that this game unironically feels like everything I've always wanted Portal 3 to be gameplay-wise if it ever came out. Solving shrines in TOTK feels like doing Portal test chambers, and I absolutely love it. I bought a Zelda game and unexpectedly got a new Portal game along with it!
Yes! I love a puzzle with a simple task (reach the shrine end, get past this monster group, take this gem to that spot), some basic limitations (walls, cliffs, lava) and a bunch of tools and says "aight, here's what you're working with, solve the puzzle". I come out feeling clever for having an idea, following through and succeeding.
The "puzzles" with only one possible solution and the only challenge is spotting the (usually very obvious) hints the Devs left and following the path. There's no figuring out, no "ah-ha" moment, if you try something else the game just says "no, I don't want it that way". My only gripe with both Portal games is how easy they are, my very first playthrough of the OG portal took literally 70 minutes. I never so much as paused to think about the "puzzle" because there was only one path forward and spotting it is simple - though the writing and story holds up the flimsy puzzles so well I still had fun.
@@helplmchoking Did you have a lot of puzzle game experience before playing Portal? 70 minutes is really short for Portal 1. I believe the "canonical" first playthrough time is considered to be around 4 hours. I remember getting stuck a lot on my first Portal playthrough and having to repeatedly put down the game and come back to it before I had the a-ha moment of what the puzzle solution was.
@@AaronRotenberg I guess so? I played Portal 2 first (I think) so that probably gave me a good primer. I think there was one spot in Portal 2 (that big lake bit underground?) where I wasn't sure of the way forward, but that was more that I didn't spot the portal surface the game wanted.
I didn't find either game challenging at all, though I don't play many puzzle games, I think 'cause they just match how my brain works - visualising spaces and spotting patterns - but I did find them great fun.
Portal Reloaded is a very different story. Partly 'cause the "correct" solutions don't always feel correct like the main games did and partly 'cause it's just really hard